Best of
Essays

1990

Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black


Cookie Mueller - 1990
    The echoes of her passionate commitments will ring in your ears. It is a tragedy to have lost her. Fortunately, along with the memories, she left us this marvellous testament to her intrepid zest for living.

Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color


Gloria E. Anzaldúa - 1990
    New thought and new dialogue: a book that will teach in the most multiple sense of that word: a book that will be of lasting value to many diverse communities of women as well as to students from those communities. The authors explore a full spectrum of present concerns in over seventy pieces that vary from writing by new talents to published pieces by Audre Lorde, Joy Harjo, Norma Alarcón and Trinh T. Minh-ha."At one level or another, all the work in the collection seeks to find ways to understand and articulate our multiple identities and senses of place….Making Face/Making Soul is an exciting collection of dynamic, important writings that all women of color and white feminists will learn from, enjoy, and return to again and again and again."—Sojourner"...the pieces are stunning in what they risk and reveal..."—The San Francisco Chronicle

What Are People For?


Wendell Berry - 1990
    Berry talks to the reader as one would talk to a next-door neighbor: never preachy, he comes across as someone offering sound advice. He speaks with sadness of the greedy consumption of this country's natural resources and the grim consequences Americans must face if current economic practices do not change drastically. In the end, these essays offer rays of hope in an otherwise bleak forecast of America's future. Berry's program presents convincing steps for America's agricultural and cultural survival.

Practice of the Wild


Gary Snyder - 1990
    These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder’s work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture. As the Library Journal affirmed, “This is an important book for anyone interested in the ethical interrelationships of things, places, and people, and it is a book that is not just read but taken in.”

Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation


Josef Pieper - 1990
    Pieper expresses succinctly that the foundation of the human person in society is leisure, free time in which one can contemplate, be receptive to being and its beauty."Joy is more profound than sadness, and our capacity to delight in what is mostly determines what we are. Josef Pieper's welcome guidance on leisure, festivity, and contemplation is the most secure and most exciting way to arrive at, and to delight in, the truth in things. Pieper teaches us through music, sculpture, and poetry to see the luminous beauty that reflects an origin deeper than themselves." - James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown UniversityTable of Contents: Preface Work, Spare Time, and Leisure Learning How to See Again Thoughts about Music Music and Silence Three Talks in a Sculptor's Studio    Remembrance: Mother of the Muses    Those "Guests at the Festival"    Vita Contemplativa - the Comtemplative Life

The Journals of John Cheever


John Cheever - 1990
    The work provides peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories, as well the man himself.

Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven / River Notes: The Dance of Herons


Barry Lopez - 1990
    From the thundering power of the river's swift current, to the stillness of clear freshwater pools; to desert springs, birds and wind, and rattlesnakes . . . and the terrible intrusion of man, Lopez allows us to share moments of intense personal experience as man tries to come to terms with the Earth's landscape, and with his own existence.

Looking Back


Ambeth R. Ocampo - 1990
    His wit, humor, keen observations and insights on Philippine history never fail to keep us entertained and informed.-Benedicto "Bencab" Cabrera, National Artist for the Visual ArtsHindsight is the lowest form of intelligence - except for historians. History is the collective memory of a nation but it has to be constantly rewritten. It is the historian's interpretation of,more often than not, questionable facts. A true historian must first get his facts from primary sources;second, be objectives; third, be interesting. Ambeth Ocampo's historical writings meet these three criteria. He is the historian to watch. -Alejandro R. Roces, National Artist for Literature

The Limits of Interpretation


Umberto Eco - 1990
    Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"--that is, the belief that many interpreters have gone too far in their domination of texts, thereby destroying meaning and the basis for communication.

The Harlan Ellison Hornbook


Harlan Ellison - 1990
    This volume also includes Harlan Ellison's Movie, the script commissioned by a 20th Century-Fox producer who asked the fatal question, "If you could make any movie, with complete carte blanche, what would you do?"

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas


Isaiah Berlin - 1990
    In The Crooked Timber of Humanity, he argues passionately, eloquently, and subtly, that what he calls 'the Great Goods' of human aspiration - liberty, justice, equality - do not cohere and never can. Pluralism and variety of thought are not avoidable compromises, but the glory of civilisation. In an age of increasing ideological fundamentalism and intolerance we need to listen to Isaiah Berlin more carefully than ever before.

The Female Body


Margaret Atwood - 1990
    29: p. 490-493.Discussion of how both women and men perceive the female body, through their own eyes.

Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men and Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage and the Family


G.K. Chesterton - 1990
    K. Chesterton's provocative writings on a subject close to his heart—the family, and the corresponding themes of men and women, children, sex, marriage and divorce. The family was a central element in Chesterton's vision, a unifying theme of his literary work. His eloquent defense of the sacredness of the home is even more applicable in our times because of the tremendous moral problems in our society that threaten the modern family. Chesterton's insights will be a deep inspiration to married couples, those preparing for marriage, priests, teachers, and anyone else interested in marriage and the family. An ideal gift book.

Writings from The New Yorker 1927-1976


E.B. White - 1990
    B. White. Written for the New Yorker over a span of forty-nine years, they show White’s changing concerns and development as a writer. In matchless style White writes about everything from cicadas to Khrushchev, from Thoreau to hyphens, from academic freedom to lipstick, from New York garbagemen to the sparrow, from Maine to the space age, from the Constitution to Harold Ross and even the common cold.White has been described by one critic as “our finest essayist,” and these short pieces and essays are classics to be read, savored, and read again. Also included are an Introduction and Selective Bibliography by Rebecca M. Dale.

On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays


Iris Marion Young - 1990
    Drawing on the ideas of several twentieth century continental philosophers--including Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty--Young constructs rigorous analytic categories for interpreting embodied subjectivity. The essays combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on their freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women.The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of "gender" for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residences as well as essays that analyze aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory--such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman's life story. Young describes the phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing.While academically rigorous, the essays are also written with engaging style, incorporating vivid imagery and autobiographical narrative. On Female Body Experience raises issues and takes positions that speak to scholars and students in philosophy, sociology, geography, medicine, nursing, and education.

Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists


Robert Hughes - 1990
    From Holbein to Hockney, from Norman Rockwell to Pablo Picasso, from sixteenth-century Rome to 1980s SoHo, Robert Hughes looks with love, loathing, warmth, wit and authority at a wide range of art and artists, good, bad, past and present.   As art critic for Time magazine, internationally acclaimed for his study of modern art, The Shock of the New, he is perhaps America’s most widely read and admired writer on art.  In this book:  nearly a hundred of his finest essays on the subject.   For the realism of Thomas Eakins to the Soviet satirists Komar and Melamid, from Watteau to Willem de Kooning to Susan Rothenberg, here is Hughes—astute, vivid and uninhibited—on dozens of famous and not-so-famous artists.  He observes that Caravaggio was “one of the hinges of art history; there was art before him and art after him, and they were not the same”; he remarks that Julian Schnabel’s “work is to painting what Stallone’s is to acting”; he calls John Constable’s Wivenhoe Park “almost the last word on Eden-as-Property”; he notes how “distorted traces of [Jackson] Pollock lie like genes in art-world careers that, one might have thought, had nothing to do with his.”  He knows how Norman Rockwell made a chicken stand still long enough to be painted, and what Degas said about success (some kinds are indistinguishable from panic).   Phrasemaker par excellence, Hughes is at the same time an incisive and profound critic, not only of particular artists, but also of the social context in which art exists and is traded.  His fresh perceptions of such figures as Andy Warhol and the French writer Jean Baudrillard are matched in brilliance by his pungent discussions of the art market—its inflated prices and reputations, its damage to the public domain of culture.  There is a superb essay on Bernard Berenson, and another on the strange, tangled case of the Mark Rothko estate.  And as a finale, Hughes gives us “The SoHoiad,” the mock-epic satire that so amused and annoyed the art world in the mid-1980s.   A meteor of a book that enlightens, startles, stimulates and entertains.

A Neutral Corner: Boxing Essays


A.J. Liebling - 1990
    Liebling's abiding passion for the "sweet science" of boxing, A Neutral Corner brings together fifteen previously unpublished pieces written between 1952 and 1963. Antic, clear-eyed, and wildly entertaining, these essays showcase a The New Yorker journalist at the top of his form. Here one relives the high drama of the classic Patterson-Johansson championship bout of 1959, and Liebling's early prescient portrayal of Cassius Clay's style as a boxer and a poet is not to be missed.Liebling always finds the human story that makes these essays appealing to aficionados of boxing and prose alike. Alive with a true fan's reverence for the sport, yet balanced by a true skeptic's disdain for sentiment, A Neutral Corner is an American treasure.

The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race In America


Shelby Steele - 1990
    With candor and persuasive argument, he shows us how both black and white Americans have become trapped into seeing color before character, and how social policies designed to lessen racial inequities have instead increased them. The Content of Our Character is neither "liberal" nor "conservative," but an honest, courageous look at America's most enduring and wrenching social dilemma.

The Objectivist, 1966-1971, Vols. 5-10


Ayn Rand - 1990
    

Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting


Norman Bryson - 1990
    The first essay is devoted to Roman wall-painting while in the second the author surveys a major segment in the history of still life, from seventeenth-century Spanish painting to Cubism. The third essay tackles the controversial field of seventeenth-century Dutch still life. Bryson concludes in the final essay that the persisting tendency to downgrade the genre of still life is profoundly rooted in the historical oppression of women. In Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson is at his most brilliant. These superbly written essays will stimulate us to look at the entire tradition of still life with new and critical eyes.

Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature


Martha C. Nussbaum - 1990
    The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, deal with such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements.

Coming Home Crazy: An Alphabet of China Essays


Bill Holm - 1990
    Writing about traditions that endure in rural areas as well as the bureaucratic absurdities an American teacher and traveler experiences in the 1980s, Holm covers such topics as dumpling making, bound feet, Chinglish, night soil, and banking. In a new afterword to the second edition, Holm reacts to recent changes. "Holm's view is entertaining, thought-provoking and touching. After reading his book, you won't look at the United States or China the same way." - Philadelphia Inquirer

From the Kingdom of Memory: Reminiscences


Elie Wiesel - 1990
    Included are Wiesel's landmark speeches, among them his powerful testimony at the trial of Klaus Barbie and his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry


Octavio Paz - 1990
    Translated by Helen Lane.

Collected Prose


Paul Celan - 1990
    This collection of Paul Celan's writings and aphorisms on poetry and art illuminates the sources of his language his exploration of the condition of being a stranger in the world, the necessity and limitation of discourse, and the understanding of the poet and his vocation.

Here at Eagle Pond


Donald Hall - 1990
    In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the ancestral New Hampshire place formerly worked as a dairy farm by his grandparents; of the comforts and discomforts of a world in which the year has four seasons -- maple sugar, blackfly, Red Sox, and winter. These essays are also Donald Hall's letters to friends, answers to such life-altering questions as: "What would our lives be like, living here at Eagle Pond, in solitude among relics and memories, in a countryside of birches and GMC pickups?" And they are ghost stories as well: vivid descriptions of Hall's intimate connection with the land and with his family past. Most importantly, HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's coming home to language.

Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990


Allan Bloom - 1990
    In this book, current liberal theories of justice are criticized, the shortcomings of the modern university are analyzed and the works of Shakespeare, Swift and Plato are examined.

What the Bee Knows: Reflections on Myth, Symbol, and Story


P.L. Travers - 1990
    Here is one woman's quest, unceasing, to live a life in which "there is nothing to expect, nothing to be gained, nobody to blame; only a purpose to be served".

Journal I, 1945-1955


Mircea Eliade - 1990
    Eliade came to Paris virtually empty-handed, following the death of his first wife and the Soviet takeover of Romania, which made him a persona non grata there. He had left half a lifetime in Romania: his parents, whom he never saw again; his library; unpublished and unfinished manuscripts, including the journal notebooks prior to 1940; an academic career; and Zalmoxis, the journal of religious studies he founded. During the lean years in Paris Eliade lived and worked in small, cold rooms; prepared meals on a Primus stove; pawned his valuables; and asked friends for loans. Eventually he secured a research stipend from the Bollingen Foundation. His ten years in Paris were among his most productive; the books he wrote during this period brought him worldwide acclaim as a historian of religions. He records his first meetings with Carl Jung, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gershom Scholem, Georges Bataille, André Breton, Raffaele Pettazzoni, and many other scholars and writers. Eliade also continued to write literary works. Numerous entries describe his five-year struggle with his novel The Forbidden Forest. Spanning the twelve fateful years from 1936 to 1948, it expresses within a fictional framework the central themes of Eliade's work on religions. Writing the novel was a Herculean task in which Eliade summarized and memorialized his old Romanian life.

Wonderful Words, Silent Truth: Essays on Poetry and a Memoir


Charles Simic - 1990
    Included in this collection of essays is an autobiographical sketch of the poet's early years in Yugoslavia during World War II

Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature


Octavio Paz - 1990
    Topics range from the religious rites of the Aztecs to modern american painting, from Eastern art and religion to love and eroticism. Translated by Helen Lane.

Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses


Robert Musil - 1990
    Offering a perspective on modern society and intellectual life, they are concerned with the crisis of modern culture as it manifests itself in science and mathematics, capitalism and nationalism, the changing roles of women and writers, and more. Writing to find his way in a world where moral systems everywhere were seemingly in decay, Musil strives to reconcile the ongoing conflict between functional relativism and the passionate search for ethical values. Robert Musil was born in 1880 and died in 1942. His first novel, Young Törless, is available in English. A new two-volume translation by Burton Pike and Sophie Wilkins of The Man without Qualities is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf."Now we have these thirty-one invaluable and entertaining pieces, from an article on 'The Obscene and Pathological in Art' to the equally provocative talk 'On Stupidity,' which, with a new translation of The Man without Qualities forthcoming . . . amount to a literary event for the reader of English comparable to Constance Garnett's massive translation of Chekhov's stories."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune"Musil is one of the few great moderns, one of the handful who ventured to confront the issues that shape and define our time. . . . He has a range and a striking capacity every bit as great as that of Mann, Joyce, or Beckett."—Boston Review"These essays are crucial in understanding a writer and critic whose lifelong task was an attempt to resolve the dichotomy between the precision of scientific form and the soul—the matter of life and art."—Choice

Glasgow Dreamer


Ivor Cutler - 1990
    Cutler's offbeat childhood anecdotes from the years of the great depression. Anyone who has forgotten how to see the world through a child's eyes, or use their imagination, really needs to buy this book and return to it again and again.

The Dimension of the Present Moment and Other Essays


Miroslav Holub - 1990
    In one essay, the wanton assassination of a musk rat provokes a meticulous meditation on the nature of survival that manages to be both a lucid scientific exposition and a concealed allegory on Central European politics.

Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Capek Reader


Karel Čapek - 1990
    The Reader includes a new and, at last, complete English translation of R.U.R., the play that introduced the literary robot.

One Good Road is Enough: Essays


Robert James Waller - 1990
    Press) continues his personal quest, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary of animals, places, people, as well as politics, economics and ecology. Some of the essays have been previously published.

The Other California: The Great Central Valley In Life And Letters


Gerald W. Haslam - 1990
    A vast, flat patchwork of fields and orchards about the size of England, the Valley has become the richest farming region in the history of the world. It also has a rich literary tradition: William Saroyan, Joan Didion, William Everson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, and Richard Rodriguez were all raised in this agricultural heartland.

Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989


Stanley Crouch - 1990
    In Notes of a Hanging Judge, he explores it from all sides--from its epochal triumphs and the forces that have nearly destroyed it, through its great artistic and political success stories, to the crime culture it has been powerless to prevent or control--and traces its complex and ambivalent interactions with the feminist and gay dissent that followed its example. Balancing the passionate involvement of an insider with a reporter's open-minded rigor, and using his virtuosic prose style, Crouch offers uniquely insightful accounts of familiar public issues--black middle-class life, the Bernhard Goetz case, black homosexuals, the career of Louis Farrakhan--that throw fresh light on the position of Afro-Americans in the contemporary world. Even more revealing are Crouch's accounts of his travels, focusing on his perceptions as a black man, that put places as diverse as Atlanta and Africa, or Mississippi and Italy, in unique new perspectives. Perhaps most powerful of all are Crouch's profiles of black leaders ranging from Maynard, to Michael, to Jesse Jackson. Crouch's stern evaluations have been controversial, especially his vision of the Civil Rights Movement as a noble cause gone loco, mired in self-defeating ethnic nationalism and condescending self-regard, and conspicuously lacking in the spiritual majesty that ensured its great political victories. His discussions of artistic figures, including extended critiques of Toni Morrison and Spike Lee, have also incited much debate. Taken together, these essays represent a major reinterpretation of black, and therefore American, culture in our time.

The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader


Deborah Cameron - 1990
    It serves both as a guide to the current debates and directions and as a digest of the history of twentieth-century feminist ideas about language.This edition includes extracts from Felly Nkweto Simmonds, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Luce Irigaray, Sara Mills, Margaret Doyle, Debbie Cameron, Susan Ehrlich, Ruth King, Kate Clark, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Deborah Tannen, Aki Uchida, Jennifer Coates and Kira Hall.

Sympathy of Souls


Albert Goldbarth - 1990
    Goldbarth splices together Jewish history, the history of physics, art history, mythology, and layman's anthropology with a writing style that combines elements of the literary memoir, the short story, the research essay, and the prose poem. What results is a heady, expansive mix which fuses the ideas and figures of this age and past ages with one man's life. In these essays, images of the shtetl, Marie Curie's laboratory, 1950s toy stores, and Leonardo da Vinci's studio seamlessly merge, demonstrating that the lives and ideas of "souls in sympathy" resonate one off of the other.

Africanisms in American Culture


Joseph E. Holloway - 1990
    Herskovits, the father of New World African studies. Since its original publication, the field has changed considerably. Africanism has been explored in its broader dimensions, particularly in the area of white Africanisms. Thus, the new edition has been revised and expanded. Joseph E. Holloway has written three essays for the new volume. The first uses a transnational framework to examine how African cultural survivals have changed over time and readapted to diasporic conditions while experiencing slavery, forced labor, and racial discrimination. The second essay is "Africanisms in African American Names in the United States." The third reconstructs Gullah history, citing numerous Africanisms not previously identified by others. In addition, "The African Heritage of White America" by John Phillips has been revised to take note of many more instances of African cultural survivals in white America and to present a new synthesis of approaches.

Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory


Michele Wallace - 1990
    In this new book, Michele Wallace poses the historical and conceptual questions which an emergent black feminist theory address.The author begins with a consideration of the work of her mother, the artist Faith Ringgold, and moves on to recollections of her own early life in Harlem, and an account of her development as a writer in the 1970s. She examines the collective legacy with which black artists—from Zora Neale Hurston and Ntozake Shange, to Spike Lee and Michael Jackson—must contend in carving out a distinctive cultural practice.Wallace’s book marks a new departure in contemporary criticism, as she combines the flair of a popular journalist with the rigor of a committed scholar. Invisibility Blues is certain to become a landmark in cultural studies and a fundamental document in the history of black feminism.

The Norton Book of Modern War


Paul Fussell - 1990
    Divided into the First World War, the Wars in Asia, and includes prose and poetry from literary figures such as Rupert Brooke, Ernest Hemingway, and James Jones.

More Christmas Crackers: Being Ten Commonplace Selections 1980-89


John Julius Norwich - 1990
    What began as a personal choice of literary odds and ends has now become a substantial collection. Assembled here are the crackers from the second decade, featuring subjects as varied as pig-sticking and the Papacy, from contributors as diverse as Nelson and Freya Stark.

Lessons from the Damned: Class Struggle in the Black Community


the Damned - 1990
    This book may be the first time that poor and petit-bourgeois black people have described the full reality of our oppression and our struggle." quote from the introduction.

Shapinsky's Karma, Boggs's Bill, and Other True-Life Tales


Lawrence Weschler - 1990
    Lawrence Weschler has created six remarkable stories of people who suddenly seem to catch fire, becoming utterly obsessed and ending up somewhere entirely different from where they thought they were headed.

Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination


Rosalind Williams - 1990
    The late nineteenth century saw a new fascination with the underground as Western societies tried to cope with the pervasive changes of a new social and technological order. In Notes on the Underground, Rosalind Williams takes us inside that critical historical moment, giving equal coverage to actual and imaginary undergrounds. She looks at the real-life invasions of the underground that occurred as modern urban infrastructures of sewers and subways were laid, and at the simultaneous archaeological excavations that were unearthing both human history and the planet's deep past. She also examines the subterranean stories of Verne, Wells, Forster, Hugo, Bulwer-Lytton, and other writers who proposed alternative visions of the coming technological civilization.Williams argues that these imagined and real underground environments provide models of human life in a world dominated by human presence and offer a prophetic look at today's technology-dominated society. In a new essay written for this edition, Williams points out that her book traces the emergence in the nineteenth century of what we would now call an environmental consciousness--an awareness that there will be consequences when humans live in a sealed, finite environment. Today we are more aware than ever of our limited biosphere and how vulnerable it is. Notes on the Underground, now even more than when it first appeared, offers a guide to the human, cultural, and technical consequences of what Williams calls "the human empire on earth."

The Significance of Theory (The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory 2)


Terry Eagleton - 1990
    This book reflects the breadth of his interests. It offers a view of his career to date, raising a number of central issues in literature, culture and politics.

The Boy Who Felt No Pain


Robert Marion - 1990
    Robert Marion writes movingly of the reare disorders that face his patients, their families, and the medical staff who treats them, in this collection of spellbinding stories linked by a common theme: the triumph of courage and compassion over illness.

Essays Ancient and Modern


Bernard Knox - 1990
    With a masterful eye for the telling detail, KNox continually reminds us that we share the present with antiquity's living past. A soldier in Itlay find a battered book in the rubble of a bombed-out firehouse--and opens it to read Virgil's denunciation of war. AN illiterate Greek bard composes a garbled Homeric song to celebrate the recent heroism of local partisans. A traveler heading north from modern Athens must choose between the Sacred way--or the NATO Road.Whether the subject is the role of women in ancient Athens of the novelists of modern Italy, the wit and erudition of Bernard Knox never fail to instruct and delight. Now in paperback, Essays Ancient and Modern takes its place alongside the distinguished essay's of Knox's Word and Action, a book whose title brings together, in the words of Anthony Hecht, the double strand of his admirable career.

A Story-teller's World: Essays, Sketches, Stories


R.K. Narayan - 1990
    Narayan. Forty essays, travel pieces, character sketches and short stories from India's greatest living novelist, the majority collected here for the first time. The three sections of the book: 'The Fiction-Writer', 'Short Essays' and 'Malgudi Sketches and Stories' provide a rare glimpse into R.K. Narayan's beginnings as a writer and his evolution into a world-renowned novelist. More importantly, each essay and story is in itself a triumph of Narayan's genius as a close and perceptive observer of the small and ordinary things of life. Finally, taken together, the pieces in this collection (on crowds, films, restaurants, clothes, cats, the English language and school-children among others) give the reader fresh insights into the distinctive aspects of the Indian South which finally achieved immortality in the fictional world of Malgudi. With an Introduction by Syd Harrex

Is Nothing Sacred? (Herbert Read Memorial Lecture Feb 6 1990)


Salman Rushdie - 1990
    

The Construction of the Tower of Babel


Juan Benet - 1990
    The titular essay is a meditation on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1563 painting, The Tower of Babel, which Benet calls "the first painting in European art history to feature a building as a protagonist." An engineer by trade, Benet brings his knowledge of building construction to bear on Bruegel’s creation, examining the archways, pillars, windows, and the painter’s meticulously depicted chaos at the heart of the edifice’s centuries-long execution. An unusual analysis of architectural hubris and the linguistic myth that gave rise to it, Benet’s essay builds its own linguistic telescoping structure that could be described as an architextual discourse on the madness of the unending project.Also included is “On the Necessity of Treason” (a theme of particular interest to Benet, whose father was shot by Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, and whose brother was forced to escape to France, exiled for his Republican sympathies). Benet considers the essentially dual nature of the spy and the curious World War II cases of Julius Norke and William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) to conclude, in a spark of lucid reflection, that within the order of the State, the traitor is not only necessary, but welcome.A civil engineer by profession, Juan Benet (1927–1993) began writing to pass the long nights of solitude he spent on construction sites in León and Asturias. His self-published first novel, You Will Never Amount to Anything, in 1961. In 1967, he won the Biblioteca Breve Prize for his novel A Meditation.

The Best of Plimpton


George Plimpton - 1990
    Photographs.

World of Propensities


Karl Popper - 1990
    The first introduces a new view of causality, based on Popper's interpretation of quantum theory. The second lecture gives a glimpse of human knowledge as it evolves from animal knowledge.

The Selected Letters


Rachel Blau DuPlessis - 1990
    In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection Of Being Numerous received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.

Back Where I Came From


A.J. Liebling - 1990
    With wry wit and knowing affection, Liebling describes a host of colorful metropolitan characters, including the mayor of Mulberry Street, a professional faster who weighs 260 pounds, and more.

Maps to Anywhere


Bernard Cooper - 1990
    Writing on subjects ranging from his family to the origin of the barbershop pole, Bernard Cooper digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life. From the fragments, he discovers landmarks by which he attempts to make sense of contemporary America.

Divine Madness


John R. Haule - 1990
    A series of psychological meditations on the nature of romantic love and human relationship, this Fisher King Press publication takes the perspective that human love is a species of divine love and that our experience of romantic love both conceals and reveals the ultimate Lover and Beloved. John Haule draws on depth psychology, the mystical traditions of the world, and literature from Virgil to Milan Kundera to lead the reader inside the mind and heart of the lover.Each chapter explores a characteristic aspect of relationship, such as seduction and love-play, the rapture of union, the agony of separation, madness, woundedness, and transcendence. Focusing on the soulful and spiritual meaning of these experiences, Divine Madness sheds light on our elations, obsessions, and broken hearts, but it also reconnects us with the wisdom of time immemorial. As a practicing Jungian analyst and former professor of religious studies, John Haule masterfully guides his readers through the labyrinth of everyday experience, and the often hidden layers of archetypal realities, sketching a philosophy of romantic love through the stories of the world's literature and mythology.

Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts


Alfred Brendel - 1990
    A scholar and lover of literature as well as world-class pianist, Brendel offers in these essays a rare glimpse into the mind of an exceptional performer, wrestling with the duties and pleasures that come with making music.

The Penguin Book of First World War Prose


Jonathan Glover - 1990
    

Haydn And The Valve Trumpet


Craig Raine - 1990
    It addresses in detail, the work of Dickens, Donne, T.S.Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Coleridge, Dr Johnson, Betjeman, Elizabeth Bishop, Andrew Marvell, Saul Bellow, and James Joyce.

Existential Monday: Philosophical Essays


Benjamin Fondane - 1990
     Existential Monday is the first selection of his philosophical work to appear in English. Here Fondane, until now little-known except to specialists, emerges as one of the great French philosophers of the twentieth century.

Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye


Florence King - 1990
    Nothing escapes her withering gaze, from our greatest national institution ("Democrazy"), to the cult of Helpism ("Does Your Child Taste Salty?"), to the rules of historical romance writing ("Sex and the Saxon Churl"). If caring 'n' compassion are getting you down, open this book for a refreshing whiff of vitriol.

Carnal Acts: Essays


Nancy Mairs - 1990
    Acclaimed personal writing from one of our most out-spoken essayists, on disability, on family, on being an impolite woman, and on the opporunities and "gifts" of a difficult life.

Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism


Martin Coyle - 1990
    In ninety essays by leading international critics and scholars, the volume covers both traditional topics such as literature and history, poetry, drama and the novel, and also newer topics such as the production and reception of literature. Current critical ideas are clearly and provocatively discussed, while the volume's arrangement reflects in a dynamic way the rich diversity of contemporary thinking about literature.Each essay seeks to provide the reader with a clear sense of the full significance of its subject as well as guidance on further reading.An essential work of reference, The Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism is a stimulating guide to the central preoccupations of contemporary critical thinking about literature.Special Features* Clearly written by scholars and critics of international standing for readers at all levels in many disciplines* In-depth essays covering all aspects, traditional and new, of literary studies past and present* Useful cross-references within the text, with full bibliographical references and suggestions for further reading* Single index of authors, terms, topics

The Name and Nature of Poetry and Other Selected Prose


A.E. Housman - 1990
    Here, in addition to these, is a selection of Housman's writings, both scholarly and general, gathered from periodicals and other out-of-the-way sources, which decisively confirms his reputation as a prose stylist. The prefaces, the adversaria, and the reviews, in particular, give even the layman an idea of the precision and the penetration of exact scholarship. Housman's comments and judgments on other men illuminate his own nature: withdrawn, austere, even crusty, yet gentle with the unassuming; ruthless in exposure of arrogance and pretension.

Selected Writings: 1950-1990


Irving Howe - 1990
    An invaluable record of a stunningly original and consistently idealistic American mind. Foreword by Michael Walzer.

A William Appleman Williams Reader: Selections from His Major Historical Writings


William Appleman Williams - 1990
    His revisionist writings, especially in American diplomatic history, forced historians and others to abandon old clich�s and confront disturbing questions about America's behavior in the world. Williams defined America's social, moral, constitutional, and economic development in uncompromising, iconoclastic, and original terms. He saw history as "a way of learning;" and applied the principle brilliantly in books and essays which have altered our vision of the American past and present. In this rich collection, Henry Berger has drawn from Williams's most important writings--including "The Tragedy of American Diplomacy," "The Contours of American History," and "The Roots of the Modern American Empire" to present his key arguments. There are twenty-one selections in all, from books, essays, and articles, including two never before published. Mr. Berger has added notes to the selections and an enlightening introduction which explores Williams's career and ideas. This is an exceptionally valuable book.

Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology


Henry Louis Gates Jr. - 1990
    Here, leading literary critics--both male and female, black and white--look at fiction, nonfiction, poetry, slave narratives, and autobiographies in a totally new way. In essence, they reconstruct a literary history that documents black women as artists, intellectuals, symbol makers, teachers, and survivors. Important writers whose work and lives are explored include Toni Morrison, Gloria Gaynor, Maya Angelou, and Alice Walker, and the fascinating list of essays range from Nellie Y. McKay's "The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois" to Jewelle L Gomez's very personal tribute to Lorraine Hansberry as a dramatist and crusader for social justice. Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editor of this anthology and a noted authority on African-American literature, has provided a thought-provoking introduction that celebrates the experience of "reading black, reading feminist." A penetrating look at women's writing from a unique perspective, this superb collection brings to light the rich heritage of literary creativity among African-American women."Why is the fugitive slave, the fiery orator, the political activist, the abolitionist always represented as a black man? How does the heroic voice and heroic image of the black woman get suppressed in a culture that depended on her heroism for survival?"--Mary Helen Washington, from her essay in Reading Black, Reading Feminist

Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline & Critical Writings


Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - 1990
    German Library

Lincoln tentang Demokrasi


Mario Cuomo - 1990
    Selected by leading historians, the writings include such standards as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, but also such little-seen writings as a letter assuring a general that the President felt safe-drafted just three days before Lincoln's assassination. In this richly annotated anthology, the writings are grouped thematically into seven sections that cover politics, slavery, the union, democracy, liberty, the nation divided, and the American Dream. The introductions are by well-known historians: Gabor Borritt, William E. Gienapp, Charles B. Strozier, Richard Nelson Current, James M. McPherson, Mark E. Neely, Jr., and Hans L. Trefousse. In addition, each section's title page displays a photograph of Lincoln from the time period covered in that section, with a paragraph describing the source and the occasion for which the photograph was made.

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews


Barnett Newman - 1990
    To understand Newman's unique place in the culture of the twentieth century, we must know both his paintings and his words—a knowledge made possible by this long-awaited volume."Barnett Newman [1905-1970] was a thinker who chose to develop his ideas both in painting and in writing. He was also a citizen who made his acts of painting and writing political. And he was an artist."—Richard Schiff, from the Introduction

Essays In Disguise


Wilfrid Sheed - 1990
    One of America's leading men of letters offers a new collection of essays on subjects ranging from the Mafia to Ronald Reagan to the nature of American fatherhood.

Red Oaks and Black Birches: The Science and Lore of Trees


Rebecca Rupp - 1990
    Tight spine, clear pages, no spine creases, light cornerwear, back corner crease, price on first page otherwise no writing, no tears, smokefree.

The Best of Robert Benchley


Robert Benchley - 1990
    Great and unorthodox social commentary, heavy on the humor. More than 100 humorous b&w line drawings.

In Transition: A Paris Anthology: Writing And Art From Transition Magazine 1927-30


Noël Riley Fitch - 1990
    For its time, ‘Transition’ was a mouthpiece of high modernism unmatched by any other journal in Europe; featured here are most of the great avant-garde writers of that era, such as Gide, Joyce, Jung, Kafka, Miro, Rilke, Picasso and Gertrude Stein.

Lift Every Voice: Constructing Christian Theologies from the Underside (Revised and Expanded)


Susan B. Thistlethwaite - 1990
    Global in its outlook, Lift Every Voice incorporates the voices of men and women, Native Americans, Anglos, Hispanics, Blacks, Africans, and Asians. The careful organization and choice of essays makes Lift Every Voice a valuable book for a wide variety of courses. Its breadth and timeliness makes it possible to show the liberationist implications of the classic theological curriculum.

Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East


Evelyne Accad - 1990
    --Robin Morgan, Ms..Rarely have sexuality and war been treated with such poignancy and historical concreteness .... The force of these often intertwined phenomena endemic to the human condition are considered with incisive and wrenching specificity from within one of the most baneful convergences of sexuality and war in recent history. --Djelal Kadir, editor, World Literature Today.Personal, powerful, passionate, uncensored.--Fedwa Malti-Douglas, The Journal of Women's History.A welcome departure from stereotypical nationalist conceptions from which no solutions to the current impasse can possibly emerge.--Joel Benin, The Middle East Report.Accad's extraordinary pacifism is deeply compelling to women as it is deeply challenging to men. --Andrea Dworkin.A splendid book. Drawing on interviews with Lebanon's village women and her close readings of Lebanon's contemporary novelists, Accad manages to pull back the veil that has shrouded so many conventional nationalisms, revealing their roots in men's effort to control women's sexuality.--Cynthia Enloe, author of Does Khaki Become You?Extraordinary in weaving together literature, feminist theory, and theories of war and violence. Her analysis of the relationships between sexuality, war, and nationalism is stunning in its frankness and importance. --Berenice A. Carroll, Purdue University.It is in the women's writings on the Lebanese civil war that Accad discerns alternative visions that could shape a non- violent reality. --Miriam Cooke, The Middle East Studies.This book should remind us how patriarchies can operate similarly in societies we most often define through difference .... [Accad's] forthright, critically respectful, caring treatment of Lebanese lives and worlds resonates as we engage with the longterm repercussions of the Gulf War.--Marilyn Booth, Women's Review of Books.This compelling book offers an exploration of the indissoluble link between war and sexuality based on over twelve years of interviews by the well-known Lebanese expatriate teacher, critic, and writer.Evelyne Accad explores what she calls the indissoluble link between war and sexualtiy. She refers to sexuality as the physical and psychological relations of men and women, and examines Middle Eastern customs involved in defining such relationships. She argues that many of the problems faced by societies at war stem from the way male sexuality is viewed and imposed and from the oppression of women within cultural parameters. For twelve years Professor Accad interviewed women throughout the Middle East about their sexuality and relationships with men. On the basis of these interviews and a close study of six novels written by both men and women on the subject of the Lebanese war, she explores the connection between sexualtity and war and contrasts the reactions of male authors with those of their female counterparts. Each author views war as having roots in sexuality.Evelyne Accad concludes that there is a need for a new rapport between men and women, women and women, and men and men: there is a ned for relationshops based on trust, recognition of the other, tenderness, equal sharing, and love devoid of jealousy and possession. Since the personal is the political, changes in relationshops traditionally based on domination, oppression, and power games will inevitably rebound in other spheres of life.

The Irish: Photographs by Andrew M. Greeley Along with Poems, Proverbs, and Blessings


Andrew M. Greeley - 1990
    

In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine


John Stone - 1990
    Stone remains firmly attached to the humanness of its endeavors....[He] has used his senses well." --"New York Times""This book should be required reading for every person who aspires to be a physician--it makes me proud that I am a doctor." -- Ferrol SamsIn this text, the author, a cardiologist and poet, examines the relationship between the physical heart and the metaphorical heart of literature. He looks at the emotions felt by doctors and by those who seek their help.

Historical Fictions


Hugh Kenner - 1990
    A variety of literary topics are addressed in forty-three lively, often humorous, and wonderfully informative essays.With his trenchant, famously entertaining touch, Kenner explores the role of counting in literature (Joyce and St. Augustine shared a preference for the number eleven); the extravagant efforts through the ages to preserve the Iliad and the Odyssey (focusing on Ezra Pound's contributions); and Tom Wolfe's prose through the purple decades (Kenner calls him "the nonchalant master of the neon-piped sentence"). Other writers who fall under Kenner's appraising gaze include Flann O'Brien, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Dante, Leslie Fiedler, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, and Vladimir Nabokov.

The Erasmus Reader


Erasmus - 1990
    thoughtfully designed to include major statements of Erasmus on civility in individual morals, humanistic study and education, the Christian life, reform of the church, and the peaceful constraint of political force. It is to my mind the most comprehensive and penetrating anthology of Erasmus' writing, forcefully revealing his central values.' - Charles Trinkaus, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Michigan 'Rummel's collection makes available readable translations of Erasmus' most original and influential works - the books that made him the intellectual conscience of his generation of scholars and the inspiration of many Reformers who took positions he did not accept. They reveal the biblical scholar, the humanist and literary theorist, and the social critic that Erasmus was, far more fully and vividly than any previous anthology.' - Anthony Grafton, Program in History of Science, Princeton University 'The high quality of the Toronto edition of the "Collected Works of Erasmus" has earned it a central place in the libraries of scholars around the world. "The Erasmus Reader" extends this impact to the carrels and desks of beginning and advanced students of Renaissance and Reformation history.' - Heiko A. Oberman, Director, Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, University of Arizona