Best of
Essays

1986

A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches


Martin Luther King Jr. - 1986
    on non-violence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.

Eros the Bittersweet


Anne Carson - 1986
    Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction


Ursula K. Le Guin - 1986
    Le Guin retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination.Hacking the linear, progressive mode of the Techno-Heroic, the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution proposes: 'before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home.' Prior to the preeminence of sticks, swords and the Hero's long, hard, killing tools, our ancestors' greatest invention was the container: the basket of wild oats, the medicine bundle, the net made of your own hair, the home, the shrine, the place that contains whatever is sacred. The recipient, the holder, the story. The bag of stars.This influential essay opens a portal to terra ignota: unknown lands where the possibilities of human experience and knowledge can be discovered anew.With a new introduction by Donna Haraway, the eminent cyberfeminist, author of the revolutionary A Cyborg Manifesto and most recently, Staying with the Trouble and Manifestly Haraway. With images by Lee Bul, a leading South Korean feminist artist who had a retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery in 2018.

Less Than One: Selected Essays


Joseph Brodsky - 1986
    His insights into the works of Dostoyevsky, Mandelstam, Platonov, as well as non-Russian poets Auden, Cavafy and Montale are brilliant. While the Western popularity of many other Third Wavers has been stunted by their inability to write in English, Brodsky consumed the language to attain a "closer proximity" to poets such as Auden. The book, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, opens and closes with revealing autobiographical essay.

Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters


John Waters - 1986
    This hilarious collection of essays by the offbeat writer and director is a treat for fans of the "Pope of Trash" and the perfect introduction for those who have not yet discovered his eccentric charms.

Simone Weil: An Anthology


Simone Weil - 1986
    Best known in this country for her theological writing, Weil wrote on a great variety of subjects ranging from classical philosophy and poetry, to modern labor, to the language of political discourse. The present anthology offers a generous collection of her work, including essays never before translated into English and many that have long been out of print. It amply confirms Elizabeth Hardwick's words that Simone Weil was "one of the most brilliant and original minds of twentieth-century France" and "a woman of transcendent intellectual gifts and the widest learning." A longtime Weil scholar, Sian Miles has selected essays representative of the wide sweep of Weil's work and provides a superb introduction that places Weil's work in context of her life and times.

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985


Adrienne Rich - 1986
    citizen, both at this time of her life and through the lens of her past.

Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles


W.E.B. Du Bois - 1986
    This Library of America volume presents his essential writings, covering the full span of a restless life dedicated to the struggle for racial justice.The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States 1638–1870 (1896), his first book, renders a dispassionate account of how, despite ethical and political opposition, Americans tolerated the traffic in human beings until a bloody civil war taught them the disastrous consequences of moral cowardice.The Souls of Black Folk (1903), a collection of beautifully written essays, narrates the cruelties of racism and celebrates the strength and pride of black America. By turns lyrical, historical, and autobiographical, Du Bois pays tribute to black music and religion, explores the remarkable history of the Reconstruction Freedman’s Bureau, assesses the career of Booker T. Washington, and remembers the death of his infant son.Dusk of Dawn (1940) was described by Du Bois as an attempt to elucidate the “race problem” in terms of his own experience. It describes his boyhood in western Massachusetts, his years at Fisk and Harvard universities, his study and travel abroad, his role in founding the NAACP and his long association with it, and his emerging Pan-African consciousness. He called this autobiography his response to an “environing world” that “guided, embittered, illuminated and enshrouded my life.”Du Bois’s influential essays and speeches span the period from 1890 to 1958. They record his evolving positions on the issues that dominated his long, active life: education in a segregated society; black history, art, literature, and culture; the controversial career of Marcus Garvey; the fate of black soldiers in the First World War; the appeal of communism to frustrated black Americans; his trial and acquittal during the McCarthy era; and the elusive promise of an African homeland.The editorials and articles from The Crisis (1910–1934) belong to the period of Du Bois’s greatest influence. During his editorship of the NAACP magazine that he founded, Du Bois wrote pieces on virtually every aspect of American political, cultural, and economic life. Witty and sardonic, angry and satiric, proud and mournful, these writings show Du Bois at his freshest and most trenchant.

The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton Volume 01: Heretics, Orthodoxy, the Blatchford Controversies


G.K. Chesterton - 1986
    In Heretics, Chesterton sets forth one of the most telling critiques of contemporary religious notions ever. The Blatchford Controversies are the spirited public debate which led to the writing of Heretics. Then in Orthodoxy, Chesterton accepts the challenge of his opponents and sets forth his own reasons for accepting the Christian Faith.

Vaclav Havel: Or Living in Truth


Václav Havel - 1986
    1. Six texts by Václav Havel --Letter to Dr Gustáv Husák --The power of the powerless --Six asides about culture --Politics and conscience --Thriller --An anatomy of reticence --pt. 2. Sixteen texts for Václav Havel --Catastrophe / Samuel Beckett --Courtesy towards God / Heinrich Böll --Prague : a poem, not disappearing / Timothy Garton Ash --Ex-prophets and storysellers / Jiří Gruša --From Variations and reflections on topics in Václav Havel's prison letters / Ladislav Hejdánek --Citizen versus state / Harry Järv --The chaste centaur / Pavel Kohout --Conversations 36 / Iva Kotralá --Candide had to be destroyed / Milan Kundera --I think about you a great deal / Arthur Miller --When I was still living in Prague / Zdena Salivarová --The sorrowful satisfaction of the powerless / Milan Šimečka --I saw Václav Havel for the last time / Josef Škvorecký --Introduction to The memorandum / Tom Stoppard --Letter to a prisoner / Zdeněk Urbǎnek --On the house / Lukvík Vaculík.

Guide for the Film Fanatic: A Critical Checklist of Over 1,500 Movies


Danny Peary - 1986
    Book by Peary, Danny

The Music of Failure


Bill Holm - 1986
    From his ruminations on life in Minneota, family history, and the "horizontal grandeur" of the Midwestern prairie to a poetry-reading tour of Minnesota nursing homes and an account of a naked man eating lilacs out of his garden, "The Music of Failure" is a lyrical and surprising compilation that finds Holm mining the stories and places that captivated him and continue to enthrall his many readers. This 25th anniversary edition includes poignant portraits of Holm and the history of "The Music of Failure" by Jim Heynen and David Pichaske, along with an essay Holm requested be added to this new edition, "Is Minnesota in America Yet?" With beautiful black-and-white photographs by Tom Guttormsson, "The Music of Failure" is Bill Holm at both his early and quintessential best, an inimitable and much-missed writer who illuminates our private and common lives through both our quiet victories and our sublime failures.

Blue Desert


Charles Bowden - 1986
    Can the land remain unchanged? In Blue Desert, Charles Bowden presents a view of the Southwest that seeks to measure how rapid growth has taken its toll on the land. Writing with a reporter's objectivity and a desert rat's passion, Bowden takes us into the streets as well as the desert to depict not a fragile environment but the unavoidable reality of abuse, exploitation, and human cruelty. Blue Desert shows us the Sunbelt's darker side as it has developed in recent times—where “the land always makes promises of aching beauty and the people always fail the land”—and defies us to ignore it.Blue Desert has no boundaries, no terrain, no topographical coordinates; it is a state of mind inescapable to one who sees change and knows that nothing can be done to stop it.

The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet's Autobiography


Richard Hugo - 1986
    Now many of his essays have been assembled and arranged by Ripley Hugo, the poet's widow and a writer and teacher, and Lois and James Welch, writers and close friends of the poet. Together the essays constitute a compelling autobiographical narrative that takes Hugo from his lonely childhood through the war years and his working and creative life to an interview just before his death in 1982. William Matthews, also a friend of Hugo's, has written an introduction.

A Crucified Christ in Holy Week: Essays on the Four Gospel Passion Narratives


Raymond E. Brown - 1986
    In it, Father Brown treats the Gospels, written thirty to sixty years after the life of Christ, as reflecting considerate theological and dramatic development and not simply as literal accounts of a historical event.

Works on Paper


Eliot Weinberger - 1986
    Works on Paper is the first collection of his writings, twenty-one pieces that juxtapose the world as it is and the world as it is imagined-by artists, poets, historical figures, and ordinary people.“Inventions of Asia”, the first section, deals primarily with how the West reinvents the East (and how the East invents itself): images of India circa 1492 (where Columbus thought he was going); Christian missionaries in sixteenth-century China; Bombay prostitutes as seen by a New York photojournalist; Tibetan theocracy transplanted to the Rockies; a Confucian bureaucrat’s address to crocodiles; the shifting iconography of the “tiger”; looking for an answer to an ancient Chinese poem of questions; how the children of Mao have reinvented Imagism; Kampuchea under Pol Pot.“Extensions of Poetry” explores the ways in which the world affects the imaginations of individual poets (George Oppen, Langston Hughes, Charles Reznikoff, Octavio Paz, Clayton Eshleman) and indeed entire movements, leading at times to unexpected incarnations and transformations. Weinberger ponders such strange conjunctions as Whittaker Chambers and Objectivism, anti-Semitism among American Modernists, bourgeois poets –present-day wards of the academy and the state– confronting the issues of peace, American foreign policy, and The Bomb.An essayist and translator, Eliot Weinberger, founded and edited the literary magazine Montemora (1975-82). His published books include translations of the work of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, and Homero Aridjis.

Night Light: A Book of Nighttime Meditations


Amy E. Dean - 1986
    These nightly readings can help us learn to trust the spiritual light within us for strength, comfort, and guidance.

Content's Dream: Essays 1975-1984


Charles Bernstein - 1986
    First published in 1986 and now a classic study of poetry and poetics in late twentieth-century America, this collection offers thirty-seven of Bernstein's essays, including the influential works "Thought's Measure" and "Semblance." Bernstein ranges over poets and visual artists as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukovsky, Charles Olsen, and Robert Creeley. At once irreverent and deeply serious, as indebted to Groucho Marx as it is to Karl Marx, Content's Dream stakes out a clear cultural and aesthetic position for one extraordinary poet, for language poetry, and for our time.

The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry


Charles Simic - 1986
    Provides a critical and autobiographical context for viewing Simic's poetry

The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses


Reinhold Niebuhr - 1986
    Now newly repackaged, this important book gathers the best of Niebuhr’s essays together in a single volume. Selected, edited, and introduced by Robert McAfee Brown—a student and friend of Niebuhr’s and himself a distinguished theologian—the works included here testify to the brilliant polemics, incisive analysis, and deep faith that characterized the whole of Niebuhr’s life.“This fine anthology makes available to a new generation the thought of one of the most penetrating and rewarding of twentieth-century minds. Reinhold Niebuhr remains the great illuminator of the dark conundrums of human nature, history and public policy.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.“Sparkling gems. . . brought from the shadows of history into contemporary light. Beautifully selected and edited, they show that Niebuhr’s fiery polemics and gracious assurances still speak with power to us today.”—Roger L. Shinn“An extremely useful volume.”—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books“This collection, which brings together Niebuhr’s most penetrating and enduring essays on theology and politics, should demonstrate for a new generation that his best thought transcends the immediate historical setting in which he wrote. . . . [Brown’s] introduction succinctly presents the central features of Niebuhr’s life and thought.”—Library Journal

The Essays, Vol. 1: 1904-1912


Virginia Woolf - 1986
    "These are polished works of literary journalism-shrewd, deft, inquisitive, graceful, and often sparkling" (Library Journal). Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.

Separate Lifetimes


Irving Townsend - 1986
    Now in its third printing, this collection of essays about living with animals, and coping with their loss, is "a joy for any nature or animal lover." (Roger Caras, President, ASPCA).

Going to the Territory


Ralph Ellison - 1986
    In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America's national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.

Having Everything Right: Essays of Place


Kim Stafford - 1986
    Kim Stafford writes poetic and evocative prose as he reflects on such subjects as Indian place names, bears, and local eccentrics. An essay titled "Pine, Fir, Cedar, Yew," begins with Stafford describing his workbench, which he fashioned from scavenged boards, and slowly turns into a beautifully rendered meditation on wood. "Any table of virgin fir, any maple chair, any oak floor is a bundle of stories," Stafford writes, artfully pointing out what most of us would never take time to notice.

Home Life One


Alice Thomas Ellis - 1986
    She discusses the behaviour of children and animals, horticulture and neighbours to the ability of the domestic appliance to do its own thing

Only The Little Bone


David Huddle - 1986
    Set in rural Virginia in the 1950s, this collection of six stories and a novella focuses on the life of Reed Bryant through various stages of bewilderment and resolve from early childhood to middle age and his relationships with family members.

A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry


Tess Gallagher - 1986
    Gallagher writes of contemporary poets and of the influences on her poetry

The Armenian Genocide in Perspective


Richard G. Hovannisian - 1986
    Scholarly investigation of the Armenian genocide is just beginning, made more difficult by the tendency of many establishment figures to rationalize the past and the attempt of perpetrator governments and their successors to deny the past.This volume is a pioneering collective attempt to assess and analyze the Armenian genocide from differing perspectives, including history, political science, ethics, religion, literature, and psychiatry. Focusing on the general implications of denial, rationalization, and responsibility, it is particularly important as a precursor to the study of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Home Is Where We Start from


D.W. Winnicott - 1986
    But his reach extends far beyond professional circles: his talks to general audiences over the years won him enormous numbers of followers among parents and teachers who have found his observations rich in penetrating insight.This collection brings together many of Winnicott's most important pieces, including previously unpublished talks and several essays from books and journals now difficult to obtain. They range widely in topic—from "The Concept of a Healthy Individual" and "The Value of Depression" to "Delinquency as a Sign of Hope"—and elucidate some of Winnicott's seminal ideas, such as the "transitional object" and the concept of false self. All convey Winnicott's vision of the ways in which the developing self interacts with the family and the larger society.

Why the Church Is As True As the Gospel


Eugene England - 1986
    Originally published: Salt Lake City, Utah: Bookcraft, c1986.

On Poets and Others


Octavio Paz - 1986
    The philosopher-man of letters brilliantly reflects on some 16 fellow poets and writers, including Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and William Carols Williams.

Romanticism Comes of Age


Owen Barfield - 1986
    In the latter his speciality has been the province of speech and words, and the history and philosophy of meaning. His works on these subjects have long won enthusiastic recognition in university circles, but are now reaching a wider public. He has been described by C. S. Lewis as 'the wisest of my unofficial advisers' and T. S. Eliot wrote of his Saving the Appearances that it was 'one of the few books which made me proud to be director of the firm which published them.' He has always been interested in the relation between poetry, philosophy, science and religion, and at the Goethe Centenary he gave a Broadcast talk on the BBC on the third programme on Goethe's scientific writings. He has recently returned from the USA, where he has spent two years as a visiting professor of Philosophy and Letters at Drew University and of English Literature at Brandeis. He early encountered the work of Rudolf Steiiner and soon recognized the immense contribution that Steiner had made towards a true understanding of the world and of man. The essays in this volume are at once the fruit of his study of Steiner's work and a new approach to that work from the angle of English literature. They form perhaps the best introduction to Steiner's work for the English literary mind. Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech


Elie Wiesel - 1986
    Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech delivered by 1986 awardee, Elie Wiesel.

The Trouble With Rich Women (Singles Classic)


Gloria Steinem - 1986
    Intimacy and access make rebellion very dangerous.”In The Problem With Rich Women, Gloria Steinem explores how and why feminism failed to reach women in powerful families, and provides an urgent and persuasive argument for rebellion among upper-class women.The Problem With Rich Women was originally published in Ms., June 1986. Cover design by Adil Dara.

Classics Revisited


Kenneth Rexroth - 1986
    The brief, radiant essays of Classics Revisited discuss sixty key books that are, for Rexroth, “basic documents in the history of the imagination.” Ranging from The Epic of Gilgamesh to Huckleberry Finn, these pieces (each about five pages long) originally appeared in the Saturday Review. Distinguished by Rexroth’s plain, wide-awake style, Classics Revisited presents complex ideas in simple language, energized by the author’s air of talking eye-to-eye with his reader. Elastic, at home in several languages, Rexroth is not bound by East or West; he leaps nimbly from Homer to The Mahabharata, from Lady Murasaki to Stendhal. It is only when we pause for breath that we notice his special affinities: for Casanova, lzaak Walton, Macbeth, Icelandic sagas, classical Japanese poetry. He has read everything. In Sterne, he sees traces of the Buddha; in Fielding, hints of Confucius. “Life may not be optimistic,” Rexroth maintains in his introduction, “but it certainly is comic, and the greatest literature presents man wearing the two conventional masks; the grinning and the weeping faces that decorate theatre prosceniums. What is the face behind the mask? Just a human face––yours or mine. That is the irony of it all––the irony that distinguishes great literature––it is all so ordinary.”

Remembrances: The Experience of Past in Classical Chinese Literature


Stephen Owen - 1986
    Remembrances takes up the strongest claims we can make for literature: that it can sustain life in the present and the life of the past. The past has always played a particularly powerful role in Chinese civilization. Both private memories and cultural artifacts were an inescapable part of the present, offering models for present behavior and recalling what had been lost.Owen shows how the fascination with the past came into being in Chinese literature, some of the forms it took, and the ways readers have responded to such literature. He reflects on a series of moments in Chinese writing from the seventh century B.C. to the early nineteenth century. Through poems, anecdotes, exegeses, and one long story of an ardent collector and his wife, Owen treats a theme basic to Chinese civilization not as something exotic but as a motif fundamental to our civilization, even though its expression differs from our own.

Letters From Prison and Other Essays


Adam Michnik - 1986
     Michnik now sits in a jail belonging to the totalitarian regime, yet his first concern--and herein lies one of the keys to his thinking, and one should add, to his character--is with the quality of his own conduct, which, together with teh conduct of other victims of the present situation, will, he is sure, one day set the tone for whatever political system follows the totalitarian debacle. His essays are the most valuable guide we have to the origins of the revolution, and, more particularly, to its innovative practices.

A Foot in Each World: Essays and Articles


Leanita McClain - 1986
    The topics are race, politics, crime and punishment, home and family, and schools; the unifying theme is America’s two societies—Black and white, separate and unequal.

Plaintext: Essays


Nancy Mairs - 1986
    The provocative collection includes the widely anthologized essays “On Being a Cripple” and “On Not Liking Sex.”

The Art of the Novel


Milan Kundera - 1986
    He is especially penetrating on Hermann Broch, and his exploration of the world of Kafka's novels vividly reveals the comic terror of Kafka's bureaucratized universe.Kundera's discussion of his own work includes his views on the role of historical events in fiction, the meaning of action, and the creation of character in the post-psychological novel.

Essential Papers on Object Relations (Essential Papers in Psychoanalysis (Paperback))


Peter F. Buckley - 1986
    These primary texts introduce the reader to a broad spectrum of works by primarily women theorists writing within a number of different psychoanalytic traditions.Psychoanalysis and Woman makes available a number of fundamental, yet obscure and inaccessible early psychoanalytic documents by women and places them within the context of later women psychoanalytic theorists. Editor Shelley Saguaro provides a concise contextual introduction addressing some of the sexual political issues raised by psychoanalysis, while each section of the volume is prefaced with more specific biographical and cultural introductory material. Topics addressed include new reproductive and sexual technologies, cybernetics, androgyny, the "third sex," pornography, and psychoanalysis and contemporary media/film theory.Contributors include Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, Jeanne Lampl-de Groot, Joan Riviere, Maria Torok, Melanie Klein, Nancy Chodorow, Juliet Mitchell, Noreen O'Connor and Joanna Ryan, Carl G. Jung, Esther Harding, Maria von Franz, Marion Woodman, Jacques Lacan, H l ne Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva, Mary Jane Sherfey, Monique Wittig, Jacqeline Rose, Camille Paglia, Judith Butler, and Jane Flax.

But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?: Homage to Qwert Yuiop and Other Writings


Anthony Burgess - 1986
    

The Romantic School and Other Essays: Heinrich Heine


Heinrich Heine - 1986
    The volumes have forewords by internationally known writers and introductions by prominent scholars. Here the English-speaking reader can find the broadest possible collection of poetic and intellectual achievements in new as well as great classic translations. Convenient and accessible in format, the volumes of The German Library will form the core of any growing library of European literature for years to come.

Novels and Essays: Vandover and the Brute / McTeague / The Octopus / Essays


Frank Norris - 1986
    Inspired by the “new novel” developed by Zola and Flaubert, Norris adapted its methods to American settings, adding his own taste for exciting action and a fascination with the emergent sciences of economics and psychology.Born in Chicago in 1870, Norris moved with his family to San Francisco in 1885. After studying art in Paris and literature at Berkeley and Harvard, he worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, was expelled from South Africa in 1896, and reported on the Spanish-American War from Cuba in 1898, where he met Stephen Crane. Joining the publishing firm of Doubleday & McClure in 1898, he met William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, and Theodore Dreiser, and published six novels between 1898 and 1902. He died following an attack of appendicitis in October of 1902.Vandover and the Brute (1914) was published posthumously but written in 1895 during Norris’s year at Harvard. Drunkenness, sensuality, gambling, and debauchery reduce young Vandover, once a fashionable playboy and aspiring artist, to virtual bestiality. His dissipation is described with shocking realism, as Norris paints each level of San Francisco society he encounters in his descent.The novel McTeague (1899) represented a radical departure for American fiction of its era in its frank treatment of sex, domestic violence, and obsession. McTeague is a huge, simple dentist who dreams of having a giant tooth to hang outside his office and who carries his pet canary wherever he goes; Trina is his gentle, diminutive wife, who wins a lottery and compulsively hoards her money. They live on Polk Street in San Francisco, where the new middle class struggles with its pathological underside. Erich von Stroheim based his classic film Greed (1924) on this immensely powerful and grimly realistic novel.The Octopus (1901), the first work in Norris’s unfinished trilogy “The Epic of the Wheat,” is a novel about the ranchers and wheat producers of California. Pitted against the railroad monopoly and political machine, the members of the ranching community are forced to take up arms against the state. Inspired by the Mussel Slough Massacre of 1880, it depicts a band of strong ruthless Westerners who are crushed by inexorable forces of nature and capital they had sought to control.The twenty-two essays in this volume cover the years 1896–1902. They include book reviews, articles, literary columns, and parodies of popular authors in the hilarious “Perverted Tales.” They address theories of literature, the state of American fiction, and the social responsibilities of the artist.

The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics


Simon Leys - 1986
    

On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics


Stephen E. Lammers - 1986
    '

Truth and Lies in Literature: Essays and Reviews


Stephen Vizinczey - 1986
    . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek "Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader

The Fifties


Edmund Wilson - 1986
    This is the highly acclaimed fourth volume in the series that began with The Twenties and it is complimented with photographs and journal excerpts of some of the most interesting characters of the decade.

On Being a Cripple


Nancy Mairs - 1986
    

The Narrow Bridge of Art


Virginia Woolf - 1986
    Essay

The Writer in the Catastrophe of Our Time


Ernesto Sábato - 1986
    

The Truth Shall Make You Free: Confrontations


Gustavo Gutiérrez - 1986
    Essays by the renowned Peruvian theologian on theology and method, christology and ecclesiology, and religion and the social sciences.

North of Intention: Critical Writings 1973-1986


Steve McCaffery - 1986
    Second Edition. Co-published with Nightwood Editions, Toronto, NORTH OF INTENTION is thedefinitive collection of Steve McCaffery's critical writing, spanning theyears in which he solidified his reputation as English Canada's mostaccomplished experimental writer. It is a must for any serious student ofcontemporary poetry and poetics and a testament to McCaffery's persistentrefusal to barter with NAFTA-like terms of traditional exegesis. NORTH OF INTENTION is a panoramic, erotic, anti-accumulative collectionof essays centering on the formally investigative North American poetryof the 1970s and 1980s. McCaffery's high-theoretical performances reclaimliterary theory for engaged literary practices--Charles Bernstein.

Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching


Peter Elbow - 1986
    Now Elbow has drawn together twelve of his essays on the nature of learning and teaching to suggest a comprehensive philosophy of education. At once theoretical and down-to-earth, this collection will appeal not only to teachers, adminitrators and students, but to anyone with a love of learning.Elbow explores the contraries in the educational process, in particular his theory that clear thinking can be enhanced by inviting indecision, incoherence, and paradoxical thinking. The essays, written over a period of twenty-five years, are engaged in a single enterprise: to arrive at insights or conclusions about learning and teaching while still doing justice to the rich messiness of intellectual inquiry. Drawing his conclusions from his own perplexities as a student and as a teacher, Elbow discusses the value of interdisciplinary teaching, his theory of cooking (an interaction of conflicting ideas), the authority relationship in teaching and the value of specifying learning objectives. A full section is devoted to evaluation and feedback, both of students and faculty. Finally, Elbow focuses on the need to move beyond the skepticism of critical thinking to what he calls methodological belief--an ability to embrace more than one point of view.

American Musicians: 56 Portraits in Jazz


Whitney Balliett - 1986
    He gives us, in this spectacular volume, his famous early portraits of Pee Wee Russell, Red Allen, Earl Hines, and MaryLou Williams, written in their brilliant twilight years; his reconstructions of the lives of such legends as Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Jack Teagarden, Zoot Sims, and Sidney Catlett; his brief but indelible glimpses into the daily (or nocturnal) lives of Duke Ellington and Charles Mingus; andhis vivid depictions of such on-the-scene masters as Jim Hall, Ornette Coleman, St�phane Grappelli, Elvin Jones, Art Farmer, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Tommy Flanagan. He also includes his thoughts on such lesser known but invaluable players as Art Hodes, Jabbo Smith, Joe Wilder, Warne Marsh, Gene Bertoncini, and Joe Bushkin. American Musicians is at once a history of jazz, a biographical encyclopedia of many of its most important performers, and a model of American prose.

The Book of Marmalade


C. Anne Wilson - 1986
    C. Anne Wilson, Britain's foremost historian of food, traces the history of this most British of preserves from its Roman and medieval antecedents, through its adoption in Tudor England, its development in Stuart and Georgian Britain, and its fortunes up to the present day. She tells how the Portuguese learned from the Moors to eat quince marmalade, and how its characteristic Arab flavorings enhanced its appeal to the Europeans. Marmalade's varied roles--as a gift, as a sweetmeat, as a medicine, and as an aphrodisiac-are all discussed in The Book of Marmalade. The book concludes with dozens of recipes, new and traditional, in which marmalade is the star ingredient.

Looking for Hogeye


Roy Reed - 1986
    “I have grown attached to cities over the years, but I am still, somewhere near my heart, a hillbilly. I have gone to a lot of trouble to remember that.”This book is a special admission into those hills, to Vacation Bible School, tent meetings, sale barns, back roads and pool halls, to dog days in Hogeye.To read Looking for Hogeye is to sit with Roy Reed on his wide front porch as he tells by the life he lives why, after Washington, London, and New York, he made his home in the north Arkansas hills, where he felt—as he puts it—”like Brer Rabbit reentering the briar patch.”It is a visit not to be missed, and not to be forgotten.

Spillville: A Collaboration


Patricia Hampl - 1986
    Dvorak's stay in Spillville is the point of departure for this collaboration between writer Patricia Hampl and artist Steven Sorman.

Robert Lowell: Essays on the Poetry


Steven Gould Axelrod - 1986
    The book includes pieces on major works such as Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Skunk Hour, Notebook, the sonnets of 1969-73 as well as four essays devoted to Lowell's last complete and often neglected work, Day by Day. Essential reading for those interested in the writer who dominated post World War II poetry, the book will appeal to students of American literature and to more general readers as well. The divergent and controversial voices in these essays testify to radical disparities among Lowell's endless experiments and to the complexity and endurance of his work.