With truth and insight, these personal, prophetic works speak to the heart of the experience of race and identity in the United States. Here are the full texts of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, The Fire Next Time, No Name in the Street and The Devil Finds Work, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of Raintree Country to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of social interaction between the races. In a way, The Price of the Ticket is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century American experience; in another, it is autobiography of the highest order.

    The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward. This book challenges the notion of a "closed economy" predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

    . . . [He] is a leading theorist on large-scale patterns in evolution . . . [and] one of the sharpest and most humane thinkers in the sciences." --David Quammen, New York Times Book Review

    In an upbeat and original way of thinking Quammen writes about beetles, bats, crows, snakes and other interesting animals.

    This collection collects what he wrote under those conditions. He writes in a conversational voice, but he is impassioned, persuasive, abusive and hilarious by turns.

    Line" the author introduces his friend John McPhee, a bush-pilot fish-and-game warden in northern Maine, who is also a writer. The two men met after the flying warden wrote to The New Yorker complaining that someone was using his name. Maine also is the milieu of "Heirs of General Practice," McPhee's highly acclaimed report—virtually a book in itself—on the new medical specialty called family practice. Much of it takes place in the examining rooms of a dozen young physicans in various rural communities, where they are seen in the context of their work with a great many patients of all ages.Two relatively short pieces revisit the subjects of earlier McPhee books. "Ice Pond" demonstrates anew the innovative genius of the physicist Theodore B. Taylor, who developed a way of making and using with impressive results in the conservation of the electrical energy. "Open Man" describes a summer day in New Jersey in the company of Senator Bill Bradley.In "Minihydro," various small-scale entrepreneurs in New York State set up turbines at nineteenth-century mill sites and sell electricity to power companies. A nice little country waterfall can earn as much as two hundred dollars a year for someone with such a turbine. And, "Under the Snow," McPhee Goes back into black bear's dens in Pensylvania in winter, where he becomes intoxicated with affection for some five-pound cubs. They remind him of his daughters.

    Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous “cut-up” method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As a satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

    Ranging through the stars and the myths humans have told about them for millennia, Raymo delves into "a pilgrimage in quest of the soul of the night." Chet Raymo's elegant essays link the mysterious phenomena of the night sky with the human mind and spirit, as he ranges through the realms of mythology, literature, religion, history, and anthropology. Originally published two decades ago, The Soul of the Night is a classic work that is a must for those interested in the relationship between science and faith.

    This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

    For when Booker Prize-winning author John Berger writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, Leger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelous sense of promise. When he looks at the Modigliani, he sees a man's infinite love revealed in the elongated lines of the painted figure.Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the woodcarvers of a French village to Goya, Durer, and Van Gogh; and from private experiences of love and of loss, to the major political upheavals of our time, The Sense of Sight encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement that its author does.

    Krauss uses the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism, and poststructuralism to reveal new meanings in the visual arts and to critique the way other prominent practitioners of art and literary history write about art. In two sections, "Modernist Myths" and "Toward Postmodernism," her essays range from the problem of the grid in painting and the unity of Giacometti's sculpture to the works of Jackson Pollock, Sol Lewitt, and Richard Serra, and observations about major trends in contemporary literary criticism.

    Originally published in 1985 by H. Holt.

    Using Freudian concepts, he compares the art of writing to the art of becoming civilized: writing parallels the transformation of raw instinct into shared expression. . . . Gass writes with impassioned concern."--Publishers Weekly "[These] essays [are] meant to enliven the form as Montaigne, Emerson, and Woolf enlivened it. This is an ambitious task, but no contemporary American has better credentials than Gass. . . . He announces a topic, then descants with impressive erudition and unbuttoned ardor for the surprising phrase. The results often dazzle, and they're unfailingly original, in the root sense of the word--they work back toward some point of origin, generally a point where literature departs from the external world to invent a world of its own."--Sam Tanenhaus, Village Voice "William H. Gass is not alone among . . . American fiction writers in giving some of his time and talent to nonfiction, but nobody does it more energetically."--Frank Kermode, New York Times Book Review

    

    Throughout the book there are glimpses of long lost childhood summers, his grandparents, adolescence and, most importantly, his writing. The book, which is near to autobiographical of Levi's post-Auschwitz years, conveys his conviction that though "we are living in an epoch rife with problems and perils, it is not boring".

    

    Twelve distinguished actors were asked to write about the preparation and performance of a Shakespeare role they had played in a production with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

    AdlerLike a professor whose enthusiasm inspires his students, Charles Van Doren explains what's wonderful in the classic and contemporary books you've missed, and awakens your desire to reopen the works you've loved. This engaging love letter to reading explores the work of the authors who transformed the world from Aristotle and Herodotus in ancient Greece to Salinger and Vonnegut in 20th century America. Divided chronologically by the eras in which these books were written, each work is put in historical context and brought to life by Van Doren's sometimes surpising and always insightful comments. The Joy of Reading delves into a wide range of genres: fiction, poetry, drama, children's books, philosophy, history, and science. Also offered is a unique ten-year reading plan, made up of a grand variety of the world's greatest books.Charles Van Doren is the coauthor of the classic How to Read a Book with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler; the author of A History of Knowledge (which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover and 150,000 in paperback); and the author or editor of The Idea of Progress, Great Treasury of Western Thought, The Annals of America, Second Chance: An American Story, as well as several novels for young people and Webster's American biographies.He is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut, Torrington Campus. His father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and professor at Columbia University.

    Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

    

    2 cassettes.

    Ed McClanahan's hilarious classic introduces us to writers and revolutionaries, hippies and honkies, gurus and go-go girls, barkeeps and barflies, as well as Carlos Toadvine, aka Little Enis, the All-American Left-Handed Upside-down Guitar Player, among the characters he has encountered in thirty peripatetic years of wandering the fringes of the academic and literary worlds from his native Kentucky to the West Coast (where his compatriots included Ken Kesey and Tom Wolfe) and back again.

    Taking to the highways, he has met the little-known and the famous, and shared them with the rest of us. This heartwarming book reminds us again of some of the extraordinary people he has met over the years in words and photographs, and provides the exact words of the interviews, so that we can permanently enjoy his visits with people we have come to know and care for, again and again.

    

    Includes essays on A. A. Milne, Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew, Doris Lessing, Nancy Reagan, and Maureen Reagan.

    This volume gathers together pieces on British and European history from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries, ending with the Thirty Years War, which Trevor-Roper views as the great historical and intellectual watershed that marked the end of the Renaissance. Covering a wide range of topics, these writings reflect the many facets of Trevor-Roper's interest in intellectual and cultural history. Included are discussions of Renaissance Venice; the arts as patronized by that "universal man," the Emperor Maximilian I; the court of Henry VIII and the ideas of Sir Thomas More; the Lisle Letters and the formidable Cromwellian revolution; the historiography and the historical philosophy of the Elizabethans John Stow and William Camden; religion and the "judicious Hooker," the great doctor of the Anglican Church; medicine and medical philosophy, shaken out of its orthodoxy by Paracelsus and his disciples; literature and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy; and the ideology of the Renaissance courts. Trevor-Roper sets his intellectual and cultural history in a context of society and politics: in realization of ideas, the patronage of the arts, the interpretation of history, the social challenge of science, the social application of religion. This volume of essays confirms his reputation as a spectacular writer of history and master essayist.

    

    The book moves from such general themes as Keeping Theological Ethics Theological and Keeping Theological Ethics Imaginative to the application of these themes to such diverse topics as the Holocaust, Jonestown, the reality of the Kingdom, the reality of the Church, the democratic state, nuclear war, and disarmament.

    Simmel attacks such questions as What do we see in a work of Art? and What do Rembrandt's portraits tell us about human nature? This is a major work by a major thinker concerning one of the world's most important painters.

    The volume features: prose, poetry, one play and a large section of fiction.

    To be sure, our store of accurate facts is more plentiful now than it has ever been, and the minutest details of history are being thoroughly recorded. Scientists, - men and scholars vie with each other in publishing excruciatingly definitive accounts of all that happens on the natural, political and historical scenes. Unfortunately, telling the truth is not quite the same thing as reciting a rosary of facts. Jos6 Ortega y Gasset, in an adm- able lesson summarized by Antonio Machado's three-line poem, prophetically warned us that the reason people so often lie is that they lack imagination: they don't realize that the truth, too, is a matter of invention. Sometime, in a future that is knocking at our door, we shall have to retrain ourselves or our children to properly tell the truth. The exercise will be particularly painful in mathematics. The enrapturing discoveries of our field systematically conceal, like footprints erased in the sand, the analogical train of thought that is the authentic life of mathematics. Shocking as it may be to a conservative logician, the day will come when currently MATHEMATICS, IN vague concepts such as motivation and purpose will be made formal and accepted as constituents of a revamped logic, where they will at last be allotted the equal status they deserve, si- by-side with axioms and theorems.

    Includes fifty-five essays by women with physical, emotional, and learning disabilities, relating their experiences with their disabilities and society, and their feelings about themselves.

    Craft is considered as a "sort of ark" for the transmission of real knowledge about being, and about our deep creative aspirations. The book includes contributions from D. M. Dooling, Joseph Cary, Paul Jordan-Smith, Michael Donner, Harry Remde, Jean Kinkead Martine, Jean Sulzberger, Chanit Roston, and P. L. Travers. This group of authors write not as individuals but as members of a community — a guild effort. As one chapter heading put it: the alchemy of craft.

    Thirteen of Abbey's friends and contemporaries offer literary responses to the man and his works, filling a gap made by his untimely death in 1989.

    

    As with the first edition, it explores the interaction between psychology and epistemology and addresses empirical questions about how we should arrive at our beliefs, and whether the processes by which we arrive at our beliefs are the ones by which we "ought "to arrive at our beliefs.The new material includes a critical examination of Quine's views on epistemology by Jaegwon Kim and an interesting psychological approach to our understanding of natural kinds by Ellen Markman. In other new chapters Jerry Fodor places the notion of observation in a naturalistic perspective, Christopher Cherniak shows how work in the theory of computational complexity bears on the form of an epistemological theory, and Alvin Goldman looks at the relationship between our ordinary epistemological concepts and those of a scientific epistemol-ogy.The prospects for improving our inductive inferences are examined by John Holland, Keith Holyoak, Richard Nisbett, and Paul Thagard, and Stephen Stich suggests a way in which normative concepts may be integrated into a naturalistic epistemology. The book retains articles by W. V. 0. Quine, Alvin I. Goldman, Hilary Kornblith, Philip Kircher, Michael Friedman, Fred Dretske, Richard Nisbett and Lee Ross, Gilbert Harman, and Stephen P. Stich.Hilary Kornblith is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vermont.

    

    These posthumous essays by Joan Kelly, a founder of women's studies, represent a profound synthesis of feminist theory and historical analysis and require a realignment of perspectives on women in society from the Middle Ages to the present.