Best of
Essays

1980

The Cancer Journals


Audre Lorde - 1980
    Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992."Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." —Adrienne Rich"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." —Alice Walker"The forthrightness and ferocity with which Audre Lorde greeted every social injustice is in full force in this courageous exploration." —Amazon.com

Lectures on Literature


Vladimir Nabokov - 1980
    Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.

The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History


Stephen Jay Gould - 1980
    The Panda's Thumb will introduce a new generation of readers to this unique writer, who has taken the art of the scientific essay to new heights.Were dinosaurs really dumber than lizards? Why, after all, are roughly the same number of men and women born into the world? What led the famous Dr. Down to his theory of mongolism, and its racist residue? What do the panda's magical "thumb" and the sea turtle's perilous migration tell us about imperfections that prove the evolutionary rule? The wonders and mysteries of evolutionary biology are elegantly explored in these and other essays by the celebrated natural history writer Stephen Jay Gould.

Wilderness Essays


John Muir - 1980
    Part of Muir's attractiveness to modern readers is the fact that he was an activist. He not only explored the West and wrote about its beauties-- he fought for their preservation. His successes dot the landscape in all the natural features that bear his name: forests, lakes, trails, glaciers. Here collected are some of his finest wilderness essays, ranging from Alaska to Yellowstone, from Oregon to the Range of Light-- the High Sierra. This series celebrates the tradition of literary naturalists-- writers who embrace the natural world as the setting for some of our most euphoric and serious experiences. Their literary terrain maps the intimate connections between the human and natural worlds, a subject defined by Mary Austin in 1920 as "a third thing... the sum of what passed between me and the Land." Literary naturalists transcend political boundaries, social concerns, and historical milieus; they speak for what Henry Beston called the "other nations" of the planet. Their message acquires more weight and urgency as wild places become increasingly scarce. This series, then, celebrates both a wonderful body of work and a fundamental truth: that nature counts as a model, a guide to how we can live in the world.

Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection


Julia Kristeva - 1980
    . . Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on paraphilosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest." -Paul de Man

String Too Short to Be Saved: Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm


Donald Hall - 1980
    Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture.

The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964-79


Gary Snyder - 1980
    Where his earlier Earth House Hold(1969) heralded the tribalism of the "coming revolution," the interviews in The Real Work focus on the living out of that process in a particular place and time––the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California in the 1970s. The talks and interviews collected here range over fifteen years (1964-79) and encompass styles as different as those of the Berkeley Barb and The New York Quarterly. A "poetics of process" characterizes these exchanges, but in the words of editor Mclean, their chief attraction is "good, plain talk with a man who has a lively and very subtle mind and a wide range of experience and knowledge."

The Uses of Literature


Italo Calvino - 1980
    His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.

Classic American Literature: Works of Jack London, 43 books in a single file with active table of contents, improved 2/4/2011


Jack London - 1980
    According to Wikipedia: "Jack London (12 January, 1876 – 22 November, 1916) was an American author who wrote The Call of the Wild and other books. A pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction, he was one of the first Americans to make a lucrative career exclusively from writing."

Under the Sign of Saturn: Essays


Susan Sontag - 1980
    One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. In "Fascinating Fascism", Sontag eviscerates Leni Riefenstahl's attempts to rehabilitate her image after working for Adolf Hitler on propaganda films during World War II. "Approaching Artaud" reflects on the work and influence of French actor, director, and writer Antonin Artaud. The title essay is a study of the life and temperament of Walter Benjamin, who Sontag describes as a sad and lonesome man. The book also includes the essays "On Paul Goodman", "Syberberg's Hitler", "Remembering Barthes", and "Mind as Passion". Susan Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful. Under the Sign of Saturn manages to touch on all of these notes and more.

The White Lantern


Evan S. Connell - 1980
    With his customary droll humor, Connell brings to life in these seven essays advances made in cartography, anthropology, astronomy, linguistics, and archaeology by showing the enormous lengths to which outstanding individuals have driven themselves in passionate pursuit of knowledge.

Second Person Rural


Noel Perrin - 1980
    Perrin, a transplanted New Yorker and now a "real" Vermonter, candidly admits his early mistakes while giving concrete advice on matters such as what to do with maple syrup (other than put it on your pancakes), how to use a peavey, and how to replace your rototiller with a garden animal.

The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics


J.B. Jackson - 1980
    Discussion relates the importance of space to relativism throughout time.

Galapagos: Islands Born Of Fire


Tui De Roy Moore - 1980
    This book captures the ethereal - even haunting - quality of these islands, in words and pictures, like none other before it. For author Tui De Roy it is the culmination of a life's work: thirty-five years of exploring and recording the secrets of Galapagos.As well as visiting the coastlines, with their cold seas and burning rocks, sea lions and marine iguanas, the reader is taken into active volcanic calderas, where life hangs in the balance each time the volcano remakes itself; follows the seasons of the giant tortoise; dives into the twilight world of sperm whales and hammerhead sharks; and treads on still-steaming volcanic ground so new it has never felt a human footfall. Ten photo essays showcase the special birds and animals that make the Galapagos their home.The text flows from an intimate knowledge of, and deep love for, the Galapagos and the quality of the imagery reflects the author's recently awarded place as one of the world's top twenty wildlife photographers.As the 21st century looms, the Galapagos Islands are reaching a critical crossroads from which they will emerge with difficulty. This book celebrates their vibrant essence.About the Author:Tui De Roy moved with her family to the Galapagos when she was two years old. Her early photographic ambitions turned into a career, quite by chance, at the age of 19. That year she met the editor of Audubon magazine who was visiting the Galapagos and took an interest in her images resulting in the publication of her photo essay, including the magazine cover. This event redefined the focus of her life. She and her partner of several years have recently moved their home base to New Zealand. She is on the editorial masthead of "International Wildlife" and "Ocean Realm" magazines.

Life Sentences: Literary Essays


Joseph Epstein - 1980
    Those covered by this volume include: Michel de Montaigne; F. Scott Fitzgerald; Jospeh Conrad; Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Robert Lowell; Edmund Wilson; Elizabeth Bishop; Ambrose Bierce; and Philip Larkin.

A Browser's Dictionary(common Reader Editions)


John Ciardi - 1980
    His three compendiums of curious expressions and intriguing facts are enlivened by a reader's inquisitiveness and a writer's ingenuity. In these pages you'll discover the bitter herb at the root of sardonic, the Biblical fly in the ointment, what provides the pleasure in happy as a clam, and hundreds of other insights into our linguistic heritage. Also available in Common Reader Editions : A Second Browser's Dictionary and A Third Browser's Dictionary.

An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport


Thomas McGuane - 1980
    Thomas McGuane takes readers from the Florida Keys to the plains of Montana and to the streams of Michigan, introducing his family, bird dog, rodeo friends, and his own sporting ethic. First published in 1980, this enlarged edition includes five new essays.

Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings


Frank Chodorov - 1980
    These essays have been assembled for the first time from Chodorov's writings in magazines, newspapers, books, and pamphlets. They sparkle with his individualistic perspective on politics, human rights, socialism, capitalism, education, and foreign affairs.

Selected Shorter Writings


Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield - 1980
    Warfield's shorter and more popular-level writings failed to make it into the previously published 5-volume or 10-volume Sets. Selected Shorter Writings brings together 100 of these articles. Many selections in this collection are less weighty and more practical than those in the larger sets.

Collected Papers, Volume 2: 1929-1968


Gilbert Ryle - 1980
    Long unavailable, Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers Volume 2 stands as testament to the astonishing breadth of Ryle's philosophical concerns.This volume showcases Ryle's deep interest in the notion of thinking and contains many of his major pieces, including his classic essays 'Knowing How and Knowing That', 'Philosophical Arguments', 'Systematically Misleading Expressions', and 'A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking'. He ranges over an astonishing number of topics, including feelings, pleasure, sensation, forgetting and concepts and in so doing hones his own philosophical stance, steering a careful path between behaviourism and Cartesianism.Together with the Collected Papers Volume 1 and the new edition of The Concept of Mind, these outstanding essays represent the very best of Ryle's work. Each volume contains a substantial preface by Julia Tanney, and both are essential reading for any student of twentieth-century philosophies of mind and language.Gilbert Ryle (1900 -1976) was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics and Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, an editor of Mind, and a president of the Aristotelian Society.Julia Tanney is Senior Lectuer at the University of Kent, and has held visiting positions at the University of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne.

The Crow Journals


Robert Kroetsch - 1980
    

Private Lives in the Imperial City


John D. Leonard - 1980
    

Christmas Crackers: Being Ten Commonplace Selections, 1970-1979


John Julius Norwich - 1980
    What had started off for him as a haphazard choice of literary odds and ends has now become a collection, something to be nurtured and cultivated. Here for the first time are all the Crackers in one volume, making a wholly delightful, amusing, and wide-ranging anthology.There is something here for every taste – from palindromes to epitaphs, from Pepys and Gibbon to Dorothy Parker. This is a book which no bedside table should be without.

Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings


Theresa Hak Kyung ChaJean-Marie Straub - 1980
    The intention is to identify the individual components and complete film apparatus, the interdependent operations comprising the "film, the author of the film, the spectator."The selection of works was made to approach the subject from theoretical directions synchronously with work of filmmakers who address and incorporate the apparatus—the function of film, the film's author, the effects produced on the viewer while viewing film—as an integral part of their work, and to turn backwards and call upon the machinery that creates the impression of reality whose function, inherent in its very medium, is to conceal from its spectator the relationship of the viewer/subject to the work being viewed.

Encounters with Einstein and Other Essays on People, Places and Particles


Werner Heisenberg - 1980
    Are the problems we define and pursue freely chosen according to our conscious interests? Or does the historical process itself determine which phenomena merit examination at any one time? Heisenberg discusses these issues in the most far-ranging philosophical terms, while illustrating them with specific examples.

Jack Smith's L.A.


Jack Clifford Smith - 1980
    

The Nazi Connection (Singles Classic)


Gloria Steinem - 1980
    The Nazi Connection was originally published in Ms., October and November 1980. Cover design by Adil Dara.

Spur of Fame, The


John A. Schutz - 1980
    American Founding and Constitution

The Woman Question


Karl Marx - 1980
    

Metamorphoses Of The Body


José Gil - 1980
    Laying the foundation for an "anthropology of forces", it is crucial reading for anyone interested in how bodies and power circulate in a range of human contexts and cultures.For Jose Gil the body, with its capacity to translate forces into signs, is the source of power. Analyzing the language of mime and gestures, comparing magical cures to psychiatric ones, contrasting the flayed body of Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" with the anatomical body in Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica, he develops a typology of metamorphoses of the body as they correspond to systems of signs.A major intervention that marks the first appearance of Gil's work in English, Metamorphoses of the Body gives us an entirely new way of looking at relationships between bodies, forces, politics, and people.

Men, Women, and Other Anticlimaxes


Anatole Broyard - 1980
    

Christianity: A Religion for Sheep


Ralph Perier - 1980
    

The Two Tasks


Charles Malik - 1980
    

Kipling, Auden and Company


Randall Jarrell - 1980
    The fourth and final volume of Jarrell's criticism contains three essays on Kipling, his Princeton lectures on Auden, a survey of nearly one hundred contemporary poets, and pieces on Kafka, Frost, Yeats, and Eliot

New Critical Essays


Roland Barthes - 1980
    New Critical Essays serves to remind us what a book can be--elegant and simple in production, serious and delightful in content, a binding-together of reflections we have learned to call 'ludic, ' a demonstration of the mind's play and a reexcitation of our joy in the world.' --John Updike, The New Yorker

Earth Poetry: Selected Essays and Interviews, 1950-1977


William Everson - 1980
    

The Francis Book: 800 Years with the Saint from Assisi


Roy Gasnick - 1980
    

Deep Song And Other Prose


Federico García Lorca - 1980
    Presents a collection of lectures, poetry readings, and talks given by the Spanish poet and playwright during the 1920s and 1930s.