Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

    "For 23 years now I've been floating rivers. Always downstream, the easy and natural way. The way Huck Finn and Jim did it, LaSalle and Marquette, the mountain men, and Major Powell."

    But for women especially, bras, panties, bathing suits, and other stereotypical gear are visual reminders of a commercial, idealized feminine image that our real and diverse female bodies can’t possibly fit. Without those visual references, however, each individual woman’s body can be accepted on its own terms. We stop being comparatives. We begin to be unique.After spending a few days at a spa in the company of 90 or so women, Gloria Steinem wrote In Praise of Women’s Bodies, a short but powerful essay that’s part ode and part treatise and fully in awe of the female form, in all its unique variety. In Praise of Women’s Bodies was originally published in Ms., April 1982. Cover design by Adil Dara.

    Alternate cover edition for ISBN 0671425676Incisive, personal reporting that covers the five most recent baseball seasons and such events as Reggie Jackson's three World Series home runs, the triumph of the Phillies, and the bitter ordeal of the 1981 players' strike.

    (1957)The 3 Most Important Things in Life (Scenes from the Real World #1) (1978) • essayVisionary (1959) / Harlan Ellison and Joe L. HensleyDjinn, No Chaser (1982)Invasion Footnote (1957)Saturn, November 11th (Scenes from the Real World #2) (1981) • essayNight of Black Glass (1981)Final Trophy (1957)!!!The!!Teddy!Crazy!!Show!!! (1968)The Cheese Stands Alone (1982)Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto (Scenes from the Real World #3) (1974) • essayTranscending Destiny (1957)The Hour That Stretches (1982)The Day I Died (1973) • essayTracking Level (1956)Tiny Ally (1957)The Goddess in the Ice (1967)Gopher in the Gilly (Scenes from the Real World #4) (1982) • essay

    Without skipping a beat, one of America's favorite humorists, the late Lewis Grizzard, tells of the early stirrings of his wayward heart in the backseat of a '57 Chevy and the ominous murmurings that led him at age thirty-five to major surgery and the real answer to his question, "How much is this going to hurt?" In the process he discovers all the ways a heart can break. Young love. Three marriages. His father's death. And why his entire future suddenly depended on a little pig. He tells the truth -- the whole truth -- the kind that has readers laughing through their tears. United Press International said, "It makes you feel good to know a person can face the tubes, wires, knives and needles of major heart surgery and make you laugh about it -- hilarious!"

    It's about memory of the past, hope and fear for the future, and how they color, for better and for worse, one's experience of the present. Ultimately, it's a book about freedom--freedom from despair of the clock, of the aging body, of the seeming waste of one's daily routine, the freedom that comes with acceptance and appreciation of the human dimensions of time and of the place of each passing moment on life's bounteous continuum. For Robert Grudin, living is an art, and cultivating a creative partnership with time is one of the keys to mastering it. In a series of wise, witty, and playful meditations, he suggests that happiness lies not in the effort to conquer time but rather in learning "to bend to its curve," in hearing its music and learning to dance to it. Grudin offers practical advice and mental exercises designed to help the reader use time more effectively, but this is no ordinary self-help book. It is instead a kind of wisdom literature, a guide to life, a feast for the mind and for the spirit.

    The first book from the Washington Post's great baseball writer.

    More than a decade's worth of essays by the Pulitzer Prize winning syndicated columnist capture the essence of big city American life, from neighborhood taverns to backroom politics.

    From the essay, Standing by Words, Berry writes, “Two epidemic illnesses of our time—upon both of which virtual industries of cures have been founded—are the disintegration of communities and the disintegration of persons. That these two are related (that private loneliness, for example, will necessarily accompany public confusion) is clear enough. What seems not so well understood, because not so much examined, is the relation between these disintegrations and the disintegration of language. My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities.” Out-of-print for more than fifteen years, Standing by Words offers a masterfully written argument for the literary tradition.

    She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident in A Susan Sontag Reader than in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing.  A Susan Sontag Reader is arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit,  and from her collections of short stories, I, etcetera. The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Satury. A part of Sontag's best-selling On Photography is also included.  It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which, in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.

    Essays include: "On Three Ways of Writing for Children", "On Science Fiction", "The Hobbit", "Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings", and "George Orwell" He also comments on the novels of Charles Williams, Ryder Haggard and Dorothy L Sayers.

    

    What emerges from his explorations is a revivified version of pragmatism that offers new hope for the future of philosophy.“Rorty’s dazzling tour through the history of modern philosophy, and his critical account of its present state (the best general introduction in print), is actually an argument that what we consider perennial problems--mind and body, consciousness and objects, the foundations of knowledge, the fact/value distinction--are merely the dead-ends this picture leads us into.” Los Angeles Times Book Review“It can immediately be said that Consequences of Pragmatism must be read by both those who believe that they agree and those who believe that they disagree with Richard Rorty. [He] is far and away the most provocative philosophical writer working in North America today, and Consequences of Pragmatism should make this claim even stronger.”The Review of Metaphysics“Philosophy, for Rorty, is a form of writing, a literary genre, closer to literary criticism than anything else, a criticism which takes for one of its major concerns the texts of the past recognized as philosophical: it interprets interpretations. If anyone doubts the continued vigor and continuing relevance of American pragmatism, the doubts can be laid to rest by reading this book.” Religious Studies Review

    This volume of fiction and essays includes three short stories, articles on the craft of poetry focusing on the musical function of the line, and a discussion of the relation of poets to politics.

    

    A memorable account of one man's journey through terra incognita - secret places that still exist in the American West.

    Undeterred by grief and hardship, Elliot lived a productive life as a mother, missionary, author, and Christian intellectual.The themes of this collection touch on her both her life experiences and the overarching Christian values of overcoming difficulties, taking responsibility, exercising discipline, and the redeeming grace of God which, in spite of trouble, gives us our life, calls us to labor, and grants us our salvation.

    Susan Sontag's prefatory essay is one of her finest acts of criticism, informed by intellectual sympathy and a sure sense of the contours of the mind she is describing.

    

    A champion of the French symbolists, he was influential to both Yeats and Pound.

    A collection of essays by Paul Fussell.

    Rasa, is the first gathering in English translation of essays and review articles on Hindu aesthetics and translations from the Sanskrit by the French writer Rene Daumal (1908-44).

    And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations." --Thom GunnThom Gunn is well-known as a poet, and increasingly as a literary critic. The Occasions of Poetry includes insightful critical pieces on writers ranging from William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder to Thomas Hardy and Robert Duncan. "The occasion in all cases," writes Gunn, "is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true." The first loyalty of a writer who is "true to his occasions," he writes, must be to the facts of experience. The book includes five autobiographical essays, which combine to form an engaging account of the author's development as a poet and to chronicle some of the most significant literary currents of recent decades, both in England and America.Thom Gunn, born in England in 1929, has lived in America since 1954. His books include Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview; The Man with Night Sweats; Collected Poems; and The Passages of Joy. The Occasions of Poetry was originally published by Faber and Faber.

    This man is the seeker rather than the sage; he records the turmoil, struggle, and questioning that preceded the serene and confident affirmations of the essays. He is honest, earthy, tough-minded, self-critical ("I am a lover of indolence, & of the belly"), warm in his enthusiasms, a witty and sharp observer of people and events. Everything is grist for his mill: personal experiences, his omnivorous reading, ruminations on matters large and small, his doubts and perplexities, public issues and local gossip. There are abrupt shifts in subject and tone, reflecting the variousness of his moods and the restless energy of his mind.Drawing from Harvard's sixteen-volume scholarly edition of the journals--but omitting the textual apparatus that makes it hard to read--Joel Porte presents a sympathetic selection that brings us close to Emerson the man.

    A timeless collection by the “best of the writing surgeons” (Chicago Tribune). With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

    This is a paperback edition of a volume first published by Jonathan Cape in 1983. Clive James' earlier volumes of TV criticism include Visions Before Midnight (1977 & 1981) and The Crystal Bucket (1983). They have been published in a single volume with a new introduction and index as Clive James on Television (1991).

    

    

    Upon each subject Robert Nisbet offers piercing and often unexpected insights.Joining the colorful company of Montaigne, Voltaire, Burke, and Mencken, Nisbet writes for his own age and with his own prejudices. He ranges from the historical to the contemporary, from great men to lesser ones, from pieties and wisdoms to fads and effronteries. The work, in other words, is neither philosophy nor a dictionary (except that the subject matter is arranged in alphabetical order), but the distillation of Nisbet's wisdom, learning, and profound moral conviction. He argues for liberty over equality, for authority against permissiveness, for religion but also for science, for the individual and his rights but against individualism and entitlements. The center of his thinking is the fervent wish for a community linked by history, religion, and ritual, in which children are raised by families rather than by the state, but in which blind custom and belief are questioned and creativity emerges. Determinism of any kind he finds untrue to human nature and history. Man is free to improve himself or destroy himself.

    Memoir. A scrapbook-style homage to the one of the great American poets of the 20th century, including poems, tributes and reminiscences by many of those who knew O'Hara best, including Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Kenward Elmslie, Ted Berrigan, Elaine de Kooning, Philip Guston, Joe Brainard and many others. Includes a rich array of black and white photographs. Edited by Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur, two of O'Hara's most intimate friends.

    In the twentieth century, Pater's theories of art and literature exerted a strong inluence on the work of Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stevens.

    A collection of essays by contemporary American poets on the subject of their art.

    This marvelous collection of autobiographical essays by the celebrated, much-adored Fisher covers her life, family, food and adventures.

    Some of the essays touch on themes to which little attention has been paid, such as Bentham's identification of the forms of mystification protecting the law from criticism; his relation to Beccaria; and his conversion to democratic radicalism and a passionate admiration for the United States.

    Contents - Part 1: Blok as ManPart 2: Blok as Poet- The First Book of Verse- The Second Book of Verse- The Third Book of Verse- "The Twelve"AppendixNotes

    Beat Not the Poor Desk helps students develop elemental skills, not by drill, but by the incremental repetition of integrated writing assignments.1

    

    . . a clutch of examples of semiotics usefully and intelligently applied, which Schole’s patient, cheerful tone and his resolutely concrete vocabulary manage to combine into a breezily informative American confection.”—Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement “This critique demonstrates once more that Scholes . . . is one of the most authoritative scholars in the field of semiotics.”—The Antioch Review “[Scholes] applies the range of semiotic theory to a series of other texts—poems, stories, films, a scene from a play, bumper stickers, even a part of the human anatomy. . . . When we finish this text (which includes a useful glossary and descriptive bibliography), we feel that we have learned the basic principles of semiotics and can apply them in our teaching and criticism; as a bonus, we gain many new insights into familiar texts.”—Richard Pearce, Novel “[Scholes] is among our best interpreters of literary theory. . . . He provides not only an argument for semiotics but an informed criticism of it as well.”—Martin Green, The Literary Review

    underground, covering Abbie--in disguise--interviewing people, touring the FBI building, and organizing a campaign to save the St. Lawrence River. The articles are creative, funny, nervy, and political.

    Using the idiom of drama, Joyce McDougall here describes how we play out compulsive scripts in our lives, inner worlds, symptoms and in the therapeutic transference.

    

    In short, certain actions are considered wrong to such a degree that it is considered appropriate to use the sanctions of violence (since law is the social embodiment of violence) to combat, defend against, and punish the transgressors.There are many actions against which it is not considered appropriate to use violence, individual or organized. Mere lying (that is, where contracts to transfer property titles are not broken), treachery, base ingratitude, being nasty to one’s friends or associates, or not showing up for appointments, are generally considered wrong, but few think of using violence to enjoin or combat them. Other sanctions, such as refusing to see the person or have dealings with him, putting him in Coventry, and so on, may be used by individuals or groups, but using the violence of the law to prohibit such actions is considered excessive and inappropriate.If ethics is a normative discipline that identifies and classifies certain sets of actions as good or evil, right or wrong, then tort or criminal law is a subset of ethics identifying certain actions as appropriate for using violence against them. The law says that action X should be illegal, and therefore should be combated by the violence of the law. The law is a set of “ought” or normative propositions.