This unique anthology, with fourteen superb examples of her fiction, journalism, folklore, and autobiography, rightfully establishes her as the intellectual and spiritual leader of the next generation of black writers. The original commentary by Alice Walker and Mary Helen Washington, two African-American writers in the forefront of the Hurston revival, provide illuminating insights into Hurston—the writer, and the person—as well as into American social and cultural history.

    It traces the development of one individual consciousness, "playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language". A. Rich has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. "I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here".

    Written with a commanding sureness of tone and linguistic precision, The White Album is a central text of American reportage and a classic of American autobiography.

    A Nebula and Hugo Award-winning writer of science fiction presents a collection of essays that explores the various issues, concepts, challenges, and paradoxes that confront the science fiction writer.

    Thompson’s bestselling Gonzo Papers offers brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in his signature style.Originally published in 1979, the first volume of the bestselling “Gonzo Papers” is now back in print. The Great Shark Hunt is Dr. Hunter S. Thompson’s largest and, arguably, most important work, covering Nixon to napalm, Las Vegas to Watergate, Carter to cocaine. These essays offer brilliant commentary and outrageous humor, in signature Thompson style.Ranging in date from the National Observer days to the era of Rolling Stone, The Great Shark Hunt offers myriad, highly charged entries, including the first Hunter S. Thompson piece to be dubbed “gonzo”—“The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” which appeared in Scanlan's Monthly in 1970. From this essay a new journalistic movement sprang which would change the shape of American letters. Thompson's razor-sharp insight and crystal clarity capture the crazy, hypocritical, degenerate, and redeeming aspects of the explosive and colorful ‘60s and ‘70s.

    Not the sort of excitement that makes morning headlines or the nightly news. Instead it is the excitement that comes from experiencing the natural world as it always has been and should be, and seeing human beings living in tune with its subtlest rhythms. In Australian cattle country and in the primitive outback. On a desert island off Mexico and in the Sierra Madres. On the Rio Grande and in the great Southwest. On Lake Powell in Utah and in the living American desert. It is adventure. It is enlightenment. It is vintage Abbey.

    

    With his unusual powers of imaginative re-creation, Berlin brings to life original minds that swam against the current of their times.

    A collection of stories by the author who describes things that happened to him while living in the southern United States

    A superb collection of nonfiction from Harry Crews--a profile of Charles Bronson, an encounter with hillbillies along the Appalachian Trail, life inside a traveling carnival and more.

    Leaving England for America, she pursued a career as an investigative reporter and unrepentant gadfly, publicizing not only the misdeeds of, most famously, the funeral business (The American Way of Death, a bestseller) and the prison business (Kind and Usual Punishment), but also of writing schools and weight-loss programs. Mitford’s diligence, unfailing skepticism, and acid pen made her one of the great chroniclers of the mischief people get up to in the pursuit of profit and the name of good. Poison Penmanship collects seventeen of Mitford’s finest pieces—about everything from crummy spas to network-TV censorship—and fills them out with the story of how she got the scoop and, no less fascinating, how the story developed after publication. The book is a delight to read: few journalists have ever been as funny as Mitford, or as gifted at getting around in those dark, cobwebbed corners where modern America fashions its shiny promises. It’s also an unequaled and necessary manual of the fine art of investigative reporting.

    Always grasping at the stars just out of reach, chasing the rainbow for that pot of gold, looking for that lost city that must be just over the next hill.

    Twenty-four essays by the modern master of literary criticism, ranging from discussion of Gertrude Stein and Jorge Luis Borges to Henry James and "The Evil Demiurge."

    Here are 53 classic hunting and fishing stories, some from sporting magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, including unpublished works from the author's literary estate. Available in individual volumes or collected in a slip-cased three-volume set.

    Whether you're a nature-lover, weather freak, eco-hippie, it does'nt matter; Borland sums up a typical day from a naturalist's point of view. A good companion book to Edwin Way Teale's "A Walk Through The Year". Great for bedside reading every night.

    The editor has selected Jefferson's most important published texts--A Summary View of the Rights of British America, the Declaration of Independence, and Notes on the State of Virginia--along with An Appendix to the Notes on Virginia Relative to the Murder of Logan's Family and his Message to Congress on the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In addition, more than one hundred of Jefferson's letters (1760-1826) have been judiciously selected from his rich body of correspondence, allowing readers to see Jefferson as a person as well as a public figure. All texts are accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. "Contexts" reprints contemporary documents that place Jefferson and his writings within the early American Republic, including works by Thomas Paine, John Adams, Fran�ois-Jean de Beauvoir, and Luther Martin. Also included are diverse and early responses to Jefferson and his writings by, among others, John Quincy Adams, William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Criticism provides representative works of modern interpretation and analysis that confirm Jefferson's continuing relevance. Included are twelve thought-provoking assessments from several disciplinary perspectives by, among others, Annette Gordon Reed, Peter Onuf, and Douglas L. Wilson. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

    Highly readable, "Reflections" contains no arguments that depend on calculus, examining the relation between heat and work in terms of heat in steam engines, air-engines, and an internal combustion machine. Translation of 1890 edition.

    We are victorious because the gospel always triumphs! VOM founder, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, shares the faith that sustained him in Romania’s communist prison through stories, anecdotes and insights.

    Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

    This collection, first published in 1979, utilizes the physical body as a means to explore the human mind and soul. Never hesitant to admit his own frailties, Selzer draws on his experiences as a surgeon with integrity and wit, allowing readers a first-hand glimpse into the medical world.

    Krauss tried to clarify what these art practices were, what they were not, and what they could become if logically combined. The essay soon assumed a canonical status and affected subsequent developments in all three fields.

    E. Bradford defines the Old Whig political tradition in American thought, showing that the inheritance of the prescriptive anti-federalists still lives. For Bradford, important elements in our heritage from the American Revolution have been systematically hidden from our view by anachronistic and partisan scholarship. He believes that other, more ideological components have been emphasized at the expense of the rest. Here he attempts to return us to our heritage.A Better Guide than Reason is a unique book due to its unusual focus on the Declaration of Independence. Bradford shows that neither equality of condition nor full equality of individual rights for every inhabitant is foreseen by that document, only constitutional equality. For this reason, many scholars have seen a contradiction between the Declaration of 1776 and the Constitution of 1787. Bradford believes that the American Revolution was fought against concentrated power, and asserts that the Declaration is violated whenever such powers are granted in its name.Russell Kirk, in a poignant new introduction, depicts Bradford as "a formidable and learned champion of the permanent things in our patrimony of culture and politics." He discusses Bradford's view that Patrick Henry and John Dickinson were the real heroes of the American Revolutionary period. This volume is of continuing interest to historians, political scientists, and American studies scholars. Professor Jeffrey Hart has called the book "a masterful phenomenology of the American and Western Spirit."

    

    Fifty-two essays record the author's observations of plants and animals encountered on walks in different seasons of the year.

    

    

    Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge-history, science, mankind-formed the basis of his insight to human nature. Before the Sabbath, his final written work, includes reflections on history, democracy, love, and aging.

    

    These provacative and illuminating essays by a major figure in American letters range widely in tone and theme, but they are all distinguished by Wilder's penetrating and experienced intelligence and his marvelous intellectual audacity.

    The book rests in part upon Arnold Schoenberg's concept of Grundgestalt, or Basic Shape, as the singular germinal source from which all aspects of a musical work arise. Though Schoeberg based his philosophy of composition upon this idea, he discussed it explicitly in his writings only minimally. Beyond Orpheus clarifies and illuminates the concept, drawing from the writings of Stoenberg and those of his circle. It traces the development of the concept from the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms, and others, through the ultimate extension of certain of its systematic principles in twelve-tone music and total serialism. In the light of this continuous line of thought from the Viennese classics through the present, the question is asked whether aspects of total serialism are themselves found in classical music. In other words, do works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries arise from basic shapes that influence their structure not only with regard to thematic unities of pitch and rhythm, but also with regard to harmonies, tonal plans, and secondary qualities of phrasing, inflection, articulations, dynamics, timbres--in short, in their total compositional and structural character? The author concludes that they do, to a much greater degree than is generally recognized. He marshals extensive examples and analyses literature to demonstrate the point. The question of norms arises in this discussion, particularly those standard norms of harmony, tonal plan, metric and rhythmic placement, and conventional formal procedures that largely mold classic-romantic music. The author shows that shapes intrinsic to individual works provide a structural rationale for the seeming anomalies at times found in the musical behavior of these works, for their departure, that is, from the norms of convention, create their own norms and extend them to many parameters: it is these intrinsic norms that provide the unique character of the works, and special bases for their coherence and unity. The author's conclusions are illustrated and illuminated by the numerous excerpts from scores by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Schoenberg, and other composers.