This is Maya Angelou talking from the heart, down to earth and real, but also inspiring. This is a book to treasured, a book about being in all ways a woman, about living well, about the power of the word, and about the power do spirituality to move and shape your life. Passionate, lively, and lyrical, Maya Angelou's latest unforgettable work offers a gem of truth on every page. "From the Paperback edition."

    In this delightful mix of recipes, advice, and anecdotes, she writes about often overlooked food items such as beets, pears, black beans, and chutney. With down-to-earth charm and wit, Colwin also discusses the many pleasures and problems of cooking at home in essays such as "Desserts That Quiver," "Turkey Angst," and "Catering on One Dollar a Head." As informative as it is entertaining, More Home Cooking is a delicious treat for anyone who loves to spend time in the kitchen.

    It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.

    With wisdom and clear, ringing prose, he tackles head-on some of the most difficult problems confronting us near the end of the twentieth century––problems we still face today. Berry elucidates connections between sexual brutality and economic brutality, and the role of art and free speech. He forcefully addresses America's unabashed pursuit of self-liberation, which he says is "still the strongest force now operating in our society." As individuals turn away from their community, they conform to a "rootless and placeless monoculture of commercial expectations and products," buying into the very economic system that is destroying the earth, our communities, and all they represent.

    These topics are all timely yet timeless in that they represent the continuing struggle to include African Americans in mainstream American political, economic & social life without destroying their unique culture. The essays have the feel of a fine sermon, with thought-provoking ideas & new ways of looking at the same old problems. They can be quickly read yet take a long time to digest because of West's unique slant on life. Already well known in scholarly circles, he's increasingly becoming more visible to the general public. This book should make his essays more accessible to a greater number of people.--Library JournalPrefaceIntroduction: Race mattersNihilism in Black America The pitfalls of racial reasoningThe crisis of Black leadership Demystifying the new Black conservatismBeyond affirmative action: equality and identityOn Black-Jewish relations Black sexuality: the taboo subjectMalcolm X and Black rage Epilogue to the Vintage edition

    This expanded edition includes a new preface by the author as well as her post-9/11 "Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture."

    Rich in scope, The Double Flame examines everything from taboo to repression, Carnival to Lent, Sade to Freud, original sin to artificial intelligence. “Brimming with insight, thoughtfulness, and sincerity” (Kirkus Reviews). Translated by Helen Lane.

    Whether the subject is barbershop mythology or a meditation on the circumstances of one's own conception, Fulghum makes us a little more aware of the richness, fullness, and joyousness of life.

    Her emotive style draws heavily on the writers she most admires: the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, the Austrian novelists Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, Dostoyevsky, and, most of all, Kafka.

    These sixteen essays reveal Hervert's discriminating artistic eye and poetic sensibility, one that revels in irony, humor, and a satirist's appreciation of the absurd. An inveterate museum-goer, he focuses on the art of the Dutch masters, using it as a stepping-off point for a thoroughly individual and entertaining examination of the foibles, genius, and character of the Dutch people as a whole. The result is an unorthodox and revealing glimpse into the past that gives us a keener understanding not only of a distant people, but of ourselves as well.

    Many of the poems in this expanded collection are from Rich's five recent volumes--The Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991). Prose selections include When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, Rich's canonical statement on feminism; Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, on being a lesbian in a heterosexual world; Rich's interview for American Poetry Review, which presents a full and frank discussion of her work; and her previously unpublished commentary on the genesis of the poem Yom Kippur 1984. The editors have also taken into account the many essays on Rich and reviews of her work that have been published since 1975. Some earlier biographical selections have been replaced with works that focus on the quality of Rich's writing and her place in twentieth-century American literature--not just as a poet, but as a woman, a lesbian, and a mother. Criticism includes thirteen reviews and interpretations of Rich's work by W. H. Auden, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Helen Vendler, Judith McDaniel, Adrian Oktenberg, Charles Altieri, and Joanna Feit Diehl, among others. A second recent study by Albert Gelpi traces the events in Rich's life from which her work evolves. An updated Chronology and Selected Bibliography, as well as an expanded Index, are included.

    In this beautiful revised edition, Nerburn refines his advice and expands his thoughts.

    Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, and others, along with philosophers Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Taken together, these 18 essays--all newly revised or published here for the first time--present a profoundly new approach to literature .

    Included are dramatic confrontations from Virginia, where Patrick Henry pitted his legendary oratorical skills against the persuasive logic of Madison, and from New York, where Alexander Hamilton faced the brilliant Antifederalist Melancton Smith.In addition to useful notes, there are biographical profiles of all writers, speakers, and recipients, and a detailed chronology of relevant events from 1774 to 1804 provide fascinating background. A general index allows readers to follow specific topics, and an appendix includes the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution (with all amendments).

    Screech in Penguin Classics.To overcome a crisis of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne withdrew to his country estates and began to write, and in the highly original essays that resulted he discussed themes such as fathers and children, conscience and cowardice, coaches and cannibals, and, above all, himself. On Some Lines of Virgil opens out into a frank discussion of sexuality and makes a revolutionary case for the equality of the sexes. In On Experience he superbly propounds his thoughts on the right way to live, while other essays touch on issues of an age struggling with religious and intellectual strife, with France torn apart by civil war. These diverse subjects are united by Montaigne's distinctive voice - that of a tolerant man, sceptical, humane, often humorous and utterly honest in his pursuit of the truth.M.A. Screech's distinguished translation fully retains the light-hearted and inquiring nature of the essays. In his introduction, he examines Montaigne's life and times, and the remarkable self-portrait that emerges from his works.Michel de Montaigne (1533-1586) studied law and spent a number of years working as a counsellor before devoting his life to reading, writing and reflection.If you enjoyed The Essays: A Selection, you might like Francis Bacon's The Essays, also available in Penguin Classics.Alternate cover edition here.

    They explore the passions and concerns of a classic American writer: ice fishing and bar pool, nouvelle cuisine and night walks.

    Now in a new volume of collected essays—his sixth since Ever Since Darwin—Gould speaks of the importance of unbroken connections within our own lives and to our ancestralgenerations. Along with way, he opens to us the mysteries of fish tails, frog calls, and other matters, and shows once and for all why we must take notice when a seemingly insignificant creature is threatened, like the land snail Partula from Moorea, whose extinction he movingly relates.—from the back cover

    She's back.  Molly Ivins, our most perceptive, outrageously funny political commentator, has given us an uproarious new book.In Nothin' But Good Times Ahead, Ivins proved that no one has a steadier gaze or a quicker trigger finger, as she hits the bull's-eye in such targets as George Bush, Bill Clinton, Camille Paglia, the Clarence Thomas hearings, and the ethics-twisting, English-slaughtering pols of her beloved Texas.  Here's Molly on: The 1992 Republican Convention: "Many people did not care for Pat Buchanan's speech; it probably sounded better in the original German."Texas politics: "Better than the zoo, better than the circus, rougher than football, and even more aesthetically satisfying than baseball."Gibber Lewis, former House Speaker of the Texas State Legislature: "He once announced, 'This is unparalyzed in the state's history." Another Gibberism: "It could have bad ramifistations in the hilterlands."

    Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing.The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

    Sowell challenges all the assumptions of contemporary liberalism on issues ranging from the economy to race to education in this collection of controversial essays, and captures his thoughts on politics, race, and common sense with a section at the end for thought-provoking quotes.

    Kundera is a passionate defender of the moral rights of the artist and the respect due a work of art and its creator’s wishes. The betrayal of both—often by their most passionate proponents—is one of the key ideas that informs this strikingly original and elegant book.

    Babitz prowls California, telling tales of a changing world. She writes about the Rodeo Gardens, about AIDS, about learning to tango, about the Hollywood Cemetery, about the self-enchanted city, and, most important, about the envy and jealousy underneath it all. Babitz’s inimitable voice propels these stories forward, corralling everything that gets in their way: sex, rage, the Château Marmont, youth, beauty, Jim Morrison, men, women, and black swans. This exciting reissue further celebrates the phenomenon of Eve Babitz, cementing her reputation as the voice of a generation.

    His sustained inquiry into the paradoxical relationship of art to life and into the nature of meaning itself is brought into focus in this newly expanded collection of his most significant writings. A new preface and two new additional essays published in the 1990s bring this valuable collection up to date.

    It will remain with me always."—Louis Begley, The New York Times"A sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness. . . . Life Work reads most of all like a first-person psychological novel with a poet named Donald Hall as its protagonist. . . . Hall's particular talents ultimately [are] for the memoir, a genre in which he has few living equals. In his hands the memoir is only partially an autobiographical genre. He pours both his full critical intelligence and poetic sensibility into the form."—Dana Gioia, Los Angeles Times"Hall . . . here offers a meditative look at his life as a writer in a spare and beautifully crafted memoir. Devoted to his art, Hall can barely wait for the sun to rise each morning so that he can begin the task of shaping words."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)"I [am] delighted and moved by Donald Hall's Life Work, his autobiographical tribute to sheer work--as distinguished from labor--as the most satisfying and ennobling of activities, whether one is writing, canning vegetables or playing a dung fork on a New Hampshire farm."—Paul Fussell, The Boston Globe“Donald Hall’s Life Work has been strangely gripping, what with his daily to do lists, his ruminations on the sublimating power of work. Hall has written so much about that house in New Hampshire where he lives that I’m beginning to think of it less as a place than a state of mind. I find it odd that a creative mind can work with such Spartan organization (he describes waiting for the alarm to go off at 4:45 AM, so eager is he to get to his desk) at such a mysterious activity (making a poem work) without getting in the way of itself.”—John Freeman’s blog (National Book Critics Circle Board President)

    More manifesto than polite discussion, more call to action than criticism, The Invisible Dragon aims squarely at the hyper-institutionalism that, in Hickey’s view, denies the real pleasures that draw us to art in the first place. Deploying the artworks of Warhol, Raphael, Caravaggio, and Mapplethorpe and the writings of Ruskin, Shakespeare, Deleuze, and Foucault, Hickey takes on museum culture, arid academicism, sclerotic politics, and more—all in the service of making readers rethink the nature of art. A new introduction provides a context for earlier essays—what Hickey calls his "intellectual temper tantrums." A new essay, "American Beauty," concludes the volume with a historical argument that is a rousing paean to the inherently democratic nature of attention to beauty.Written with a verve that is all too rare in serious criticism, this expanded and refurbished edition of The Invisible Dragon will be sure to captivate a new generation of readers, provoking the passionate reactions that are the hallmark of great criticism.

    His dazzling fiction established him as one of the most artful and eloquent authors of postwar Europe. In this first collection of his non-fiction, Kis displays the dynamic, sensitive, and insistently questioning approach to the dilemmas of the modern world that distinguishes his novels and stories and confirms his reputation as one of the most important voices of our time.

    W. Norton in 1993, now out of print. In Walking Light, Dunn discusses the relationship between art and sport, the role of imagination in writing poetry, and the necessity for surprise and discovery when writing a poem. Humorous, intelligent and accessible, Walking Light is a book that will appeal to writers, readers, and teachers of poetry.Stephen Dunn is the author of eleven collection of poetry. He teaches writing and literature at the Richard Stockton College in Pomona, New Jersey, and lives in Port Republic, New Jersey.

    It puts forward the view that our future depends on design. In a series of insightful essays on such ordinary "things" as wheels, carpets, pots, umbrellas and tents, Flusser emphasizes the interrelationships between art and science, theology and technology, and archaeology and architecture. Just as formal creativity has produced both weapons of destruction and great works of art, Flusser believed that the shape of things (and the designs behind them) represents both a threat and an opportunity for designers of the future.

    Few have written with such insight as Christopher Hitchens about the large events — or with such discernment and wit about the small tell-tale signs of a disordered culture.For the Sake of Argument ranges from the political squalor of Washington, as a beleaguered Bush administration seeks desperately to stave off disaster and Clinton prepares for power; to the twilight of Stalinism in Prague; from the Jewish quarter of Damascus in the aftermath of the Gulf War to the embattled barrios of Central America and the imperishable resistance of Sarajevo, as a difficult peace is negotiated with ruthless foes. Hitchens’s unsparing account of Western realpolitik in the end shows it to rest on delusion as well as deception.The reader will find in these pages outstanding essays on political assassination in America as well as a scathing review of the evisceration of politics by pollsters and spin-doctors. Hitchens’s knowledge of the tortuous history of revolutions in the twentieth century helps him explain both the New York intelligentsia's flirtation with Trotskyism and the frailty of Communist power structures in Eastern Europe.Hitchens's pointed reassessments of Graham Greene, P. G. Wodehouse and C. L. R. James, or his riotous celebration of drinking and smoking, display an engaging enthusiasm and an acerbic wit. Equally entertaining is his unsparing rogues’ gallery, which gives us unforgettable portraits of the lugubrious “Dr.” Kissinger, the comprehensively reactionary “Mother” Teresa, the preposterous Paul Johnson and the predictable P. J. O’Rourke.

    Within nations the move should be away from all minority class establishments to the real creative centre among working people in conditions of racial, religious and gender equality.Kenya: EAEP

    Although they are seemingly disparate, these writers are united by their experimentation with style and form. Mackey, an important contemporary poet and critic, focuses on the experimental aspects of their work rather than on its subject matter or authorship to show that they all share an implied critique of conventional poetic practices.Mackey analyzes the work of Black Mountain poets Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, African American poets Amiri Baraka and Clarence Major, and Caribbean writers Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. He frequently brings the work of these authors into dialogue and juxtaposition, noting the parallels and counterpoint that exist among writers normally separated by ethnic, temporal, or regional boundaries. By insisting that their experimentation unites these writers rather than marginalizes them, Mackey questions traditional notions that underlie conventional perceptions and practice.In his epilogue and bibliographic essay, volume editor Michael Conniff suggests new directions for further research and offers a comprehensive survey of the evolution of major writings, theories, and methodologies in the field.

    Allan Bloom explores the language of love from the Bible to Freud, shedding penetrating light on the true nature of our most basic human connections. "(A) rich mine of a book".--New York Daily News.

    Written against the background of war at the turn of this century, this millennium--the Gulf War, the Lebanese civil war and the military occupations of that country, the author's country of origin--these letters, OF CITIES AND WOMEN, are in their turn now letters to cities and women--that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, 'find the right geography for our revelations.'--Barbara Harlow

    This collection of his eloquent speeches, published on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of RFK's death, are offered by the co-editors of the bestselling RFK: In His Own Words. Photos.

    There is considerable variety in the subjects she addresses....Compelling."THE CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALERThinking out loud is what Anna Quindlen does best. A syndicated columnist with her finger on the pulse of women's lives, and her heart in a place we all share, she writes about the passions, politics, and peculiarities of Americans everywhere. From gays in the military, to the race for First Lady, to the trials of modern motherhood and the right to choose, Anna Quindlen's views always fascinate.More of her views can be found in LIVING OUT LOUD, and OBJECT LESSONS.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    For a deeper understanding of those passages, the reader should go to the texts themselves. These Biblical references are a working tool for catechesis. This Companion to the Catechism of the Catholic Church Book of References contains all the passages of Sacred Scripture referred to in the Catechism arranged according to the paragraphs in which the references are made. But that is only a beginning. The Catechism also refers to conciliar texts, papal documents, writings of the Fathers and of the Saints. There are more than 3,600 of these references extending from the earliest credal formulations of the ancient Church to the documents of Vatican II and beyond to the magisterial teaching of Pope John Paul II. The Book of References includes all the texts referred to arranged, along with the Scripture passages, according to the paragraphs of the Catechism in which they are referred. This Book of References is a valuable instrument in teaching, understanding, and implementing the Catechism. It is a handy one-volume reference library for use with the Catechism.

    It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked." In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Val�ry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.

    

    Kennedy, these remastered recordings of his original speeches include all the key public addresses by a passionate advocate of true democracy.

    The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-London flight, and by the time they've reached the luggage carousel, he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair and pale nape and watery green eyes, the way she drives a car and eats Chinese food, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, her views on Heidegger's Being and Time - although he hates her taste in shoes. On Love plots the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through the (Groucho) "Marxist" stage of coming to terms with being loved by the unattainable beloved, through a fit of anhedonia, defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness, and finally through the nausea induced and terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably, to drift away. Alain de Botton is simultaneously hilarious and intellectually astute, shifting with ease among such seminal romantic texts as The Divine Comedy, Madame Bovary, and The Bleeding Heart, a self-help book for those who love too much. He is schematically flawless, funny, funky, and totally engaging. Filled with profound observations and useful diagrams, On Love displays and examines for all of us the pain and exhilaration of love, asking, "Can we not be forgiven if we believe ourselves fated to stumble one day upon the man or woman of our dreams? Can we not be excused a certain superstitious faith in a creature who will prove the solution to our relentless yearnings?"

    A little more than a generation ago Flannery O'Connor made a startling observation about herself and her fellow southerners: "By and large," she said, "people in the South still conceive of humanity in theological terms. While the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner who isn't convinced of it is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God." Guided by O'Connor's perceptive commentary about southerners in general, Susan Ketchin has created a deeply revealing collection that mirrors the pervasive role of religion in the literature by the recent generation of notable southern writers. Ketchin confirms that "old-time religion" remains a potent force in the literature of the contemporary South. Susan Ketchin, a writer, editor, and musician, lives in Orange County, North Carolina.

    Ranging in style from Audre Lorde's classic polemic on eroticism to Miriam DeCosta Willis's deeply moving essay on her husband's last years, "every single one of these essays is terrific." -- The Washington Post

    She shares honestly her own emotions as she grapples with the harsh realities of the world, while delighting in the humor and joy found in everyday living.Crafton compassionately recounts the unique stories of the men, women, and children she worked with during her service as a port chaplain in New York and New Jersey and as a minister at Trinity Church on Wall Street. In doing so, she weaves together threads of the mundane and the traumatic, the lovely and the ugly, and the down to earth and the holy, creating an original tapestry of the richness of life.

    As Shelley observes in his dialogue "A Refutation of Deism," there can be no middle ground between accepting revealed religion and disbelieving in the existence of a diety - another way of stating the necessity of atheism.In all, these essays provide an important statement of the poet and freethinker's enlightened views on skepticism, faith, and the corruption of organized Christianity

    Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the Soviet occupation of Hungary following World War II, Kertész likens the ideological machinery of National Socialism to the oppressive routines of life under communism. He also discusses the complex publication history of Fateless, his acclaimed novel about the experiences of a Hungarian child deported to Auschwitz, and the lack of interest with which it was initially met in Hungary due to its failure to conform to the communist government’s simplistic history of the relationship between Nazi occupiers and communist liberators. The underlying theme in the dialogue between Kertész and Cooper is the difficulty of mediating the past and creating models for interpreting history, and how this challenges ideas of self.  The title The Holocaust as Culture is taken from that of a talk Kertész gave in Vienna for a symposium on the life and works of Jean Améry. That essay is included here, and it reflects on Améry’s fear that history would all too quickly forget the fates of the victims of the concentration camps. Combined with an introduction by Thomas Cooper, the thoughts gathered here reveal Kertész’s views on the lengthening shadow of the Holocaust as an ever-present part of the world’s cultural memory and his idea of the crucial functions of literature and art as the vessels of this memory.

    "Her personality leaps off the page in all its quirky intensity."--Wilson Library Bulletin

    BEAGLEILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE BARR "Although the wombat is real and the dragon is not, nobody knows what a wombat looks like and everyone knows what a dragon looks like." Not a novel, not a book of short stories, Adventures in Unhistory is a book of the fantastic--a compendium of magisterial examinations of Mermaids, Mandrakes, and Mammoths; Dragons, Werewolves, and Unicorns; the Phoenix and the Roc; about places such as Sicily, Siberia, and the Moon; about heroic, sinister, and legendary persons such as Sindbad, and Aleister Crowley, and Prester John; and--revealed at last--the Secret of Hyperborea. The facts are here, the foundations behind rumors, legends, and the imaginations of generations of tale-spinners. But far from being dry recitals, these meditations, or lectures, or deadpan prose performances are as lively, as crazily inventive, as witty as the best fiction of the author, a writer praised by Gardner Dozois as "one of the great short story writers of our times." Who, on the subject of Dragons, could write coldly, dispassionately, guided only by logic?  Certainly not Avram Davidson. Certain facts, these facts, deserve more than recitation; they deserve flourish, verve, gusto, style--the late, great Avram Davidson's unique voice.  That prose which, in the words of Peter S. Beagle's Preface to this volume, "cries out to be read aloud."

    Her tales evoke a rural America populated by folks like Uncle Jimbuddy, a cabinetmaker with an unfortunate proclivity for chopping off his fingers; Aunt Belle, who teaches an alligator to roar on command; and White's ferocious, arthritic mother, Rose, who keeps worms in her kitchen for amusement.

    and to understand that when we throw away that rule book we are not alone."--Ms.¶"A wonderful trove of experimentation and possibility."--The Women's Review of Books¶"This book is a homecoming!"--Philadelphia Daily News

    ASIN: B000X5JEFYAmazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Like-Fire-...

    Each of these languages represents a unique way of understanding the world and expressing that understanding.Flutes of Fire examines many different aspects of Indian languages: languages, such as Yana, in which men and women have markedly different ways of speaking; ingenious ways used in each language for counting. Hinton discusses how language can retain evidence of ancient migrations, and addresses what different groups are doing to keep languages alive and pass them down to the younger generations.

    Lilly--quite a cast of influential characters to put it mildly. This book opens the door to a world of vitally new ideas for transforming the future.Mushrooms, elves & magic / Terence McKenna Raising the chalice / Riane Eisler & David LoyeReplicating genes / Robert TriversFaster than faster than light / Nick Hebert Chaos & erodynamics / Ralph Abraham Firing the cosmic trigger / Robert Anton Wilson Cybernetics & neuro-antics / Timothy Leary In the practice of the past / Rupert Sheldrake Singing songs of ecstacy / Carolyn Mary KleefeldOutside the outsider / Colin Wilson Psychiatric alchemy / Oscar Janiger From here to alternity & beyond / John C. Lilly Stepping into the future / Nina Graboi Bridging heaven & earth / Laura HuxleyPolitics, poetry & inspiration / Allen GinsbergWaking the dreamer / Stephen LaBerge.

    This is our Big Grey Book of Radio -- from the avant garde to the prescriptive, radio as subversive instrument, political cudgel, and prank. Includes work by: Leon Trotsky, Tetsuo Kogawa, Ezra Pound, Abbie Hoffman, Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, Weill, Negativland, Marinetti, George Orwell, and many more.

    --from Rivers of Memory

    An invaluable book for those who participate in the writing process, as well as those who enjoy the end result. "Willard's perspective on the relationship between writing and personal experience is uniquely enlightening and affirmative" (Robert Pack, Director, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference).

    Press, 1991), Joseph A. Galdon said: "...this collection is a good example of the versatility of the essay form and the writer's voice, honed to perfection by intellectual insight, literary imagination and skill." And Julie Daza wrote: "As a notebook, Five Years is not far from a history book. Ten, twenty years from now the people of Burma will be thankful that once upon a troubled time, a Filipino soulmate was in their midst, sharing their sunlight and starlight and recording her experiences that would soon become part of their history."With Skyscrapers, Celadon and Kimchi, Hidalgo does it again, this time focusing on South Korea, where she lived for three-and-a-half years with her husband, then Representative of UNICEF to the country. Her own work with media and the academe, and the trips she took with her husband to different parts of the country, enabled her to experience the country as not many foreigners have. And this book tells that story.

    

    These essays, each one magnificent in itself, are, when taken together, even more important. The wisdom they impart is forever." --Guido Calabresi, Dean and Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University"Robert Cover drew his sources for the authority of law--for its violence, but also for its paideic potential--from the structuring stories that spark our communal imaginations. Literally until the day of his untimely death, his irreplaceably restless spirit was binding itself with the pages of the Midrash, of The Brothers Karamazov, of Billy Budd, Sailor. It is for us now to work also with these--Bob Cover's stories."--Richard Weisberg, Benjamin N. Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University"The writings of Robert Cover were usually provocative, sometimes exasperating, but always relevant. In his last years, he concentrated on Jewish sources as well as mystical and Messianic thought. This collection of his articles is a thesaurus of some of his finest writings."--Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Georgetown University Law CenterThe late Robert Cover was Professor of Law, Yale Law School. Martha Minow is Professor of Law, Harvard Law School. Michael Ryan is Professor of English, Northeastern University. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Chair of the Program in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

    The award-winning group perform nearly 100 concerts every year, for African American churches, the progressive Christian community, the anti-racism movement, and many others. Photos. Magazine features.

    Part of the proceeds goes to the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Fund, which rewards individuals who have accomplished themselves in the area of human rights. Authorized by the Kennedy family.

    Motherwell's writing was invaluable in articulating the intent of the New York School of American artists—Pollock, de Kooning, Gottlieb, Kline, Baziotes, Still, Gorky—during a period when their work was often reviled for its departure from traditional representation. Motherwell was not only the primary theorist of abstract expressionism but also one of its major exponents. As founder of the Documents of Modern Art series (later renamed The Documents of Twentieth-Century Art), he gathered the writings of modern artists to give them a voice at a time when very few people understood their theories or work.

    A spectacular art book--and a magnificent gift for fans and fellow travelers. 100 full-color photos.

    The author has coined the term "Surfiction" for this New Fiction. Written in an informal, provocative style, by an internationally known practitioner, these essays examine the cultural, social, and political conditions that forced serious writers to reflect (often within the work itself) on the act of writing fiction in the modern world. The entire book can be read as a manifesto for the present and future of the new fiction. This book is the first in the SUNY series in Postmodern Culture, edited by Joseph Natoli.

    Taking Freud's idea of the Uncanny as a starting point, artist Mike Kelley plays Sunday curator and presents work by Jasper Johns, Paul McCarthy, Jeff Koons, Tony Oursler, and others (reprinted from a 1993 catalogue), plus photos of chewing gum wrappers, postcards, record covers, and toys, all connected to ideas of youth and the Uncanny.

    The selections, all written between the years 1981 and 1991, were authored, either in whole or in part, by Armenian national hero, Monte Melkonian. Selections include discussions of organizational questions and strategies, interpretations of Armenian history, and observations about the Armenian diaspora. The final chapter consists of three short selections about the conflict in Mountainous Karabagh.

    Eliot, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Saul Bellow, Edith Wharton, J.M. Coetzee, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Truman Capote, Theodore Dreiser, William Gaddis, I.B. Singer, Gershom Scholem, Bruno Schulz, Gertrude Kolmar and S.Y. Agnon

    

    

    The editors are excellent, well-known scholars, and activists in the academy." --Darlene Clark Hine"After looking carefully at Traps' selections, I have to confess that I'm both excited and satisfied by what Rudolph Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall have assembled here from the 19th century to the present. Educators genuinely need a text like this for opening their classroom to critical discussions on the well-worn subjects of race and gender."--Charles JohnsonTraps is the first anthology of writings by 19th- and 20th-century African American men on the overlapping categories of race, gender, and sexuality. The selections on gender in Sections I and II reveal what some may view as the unexpected commitment of African American men to feminism. Included here are critiques of the subordinate social, economic, and political position of black women. Sections III and IV analyze the taboos and myths in which black sexuality is enmeshed. These essays also stress the importance of rejecting homophobia and the need to contest the predominance of a heterosexual paradigm. Monolithic constructions of gender and sexuality, reinforced by sexism and historically sanctioned homophobia, are the "traps" that give this book its focus and its title.

    Bold and impassioned, sharp and defiant, Leslie Marmon Silko's essays evoke the spirit and voice of Native Americans. Whether she is exploring the vital importance literature and language play in Native American heritage, illuminating the inseparability of the land and the Native American people, enlivening the ways and wisdom of the old-time people, or exploding in outrage over the government's long-standing, racist treatment of Native Americans, Silko does so with eloquence and power, born from her profound devotion to all that is Native American. Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit is written with the fire of necessity. Silko's call to be heard is unmistakable—there are stories to remember, injustices to redress, ways of life to preserve. It is a work of major importance, filled with indispensable truths—a work by an author with an original voice and a unique access to both worlds.

    . . a displaced writer of displaced fiction, who has made of displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own." In Beyond Despair, the first collection of essays by the celebrated Israeli novelist, Appelfeld locates the roots of his displacement. "Who and what is a Jew?" asks Appelfeld, who belongs to the generation whose youth was lost in the Holocaust. In search of an answer, he examines the emotional and psychic aftereffects of the Holocaust. For his generation, assimilation was no longer a goal - it had become a heritage and a way of life. As a consequence, through the Holocaust the Jews were confronted with the disintegration of their belief systems; the near-extinction of the Jewish people inflicted not only physical and emotional pain but also spiritual suffering. The inability to express the horrors of the Holocaust, combined with guilt feelings of the survivors, led to silence. Appelfeld explores the role of art in redeeming pain from darkness, and the conflicting desires to speak out and to keep silent. He forcefully argues that the Jewish people need a spiritual vision. In his conversation with Philip Roth, Appelfeld sheds light on his work and talks with candor about his life, influences, and concerns.

    In his view, our lives are permeated with sometimes merely uncomfortable, sometimes hair-raising rituals of shame and humiliation. Take the unwanted dinner invitation, the exchange of valentines in grade school, or the "diabolically ingenious invention of the bridal registry." Readers will have no trouble recognizing the social situations he finds indicative of our often perilous dealings with each other.Educated as a literary critic and philologist, by profession a historian of medieval Iceland, by employment a law professor, Miller ranges comfortably beyond his areas of formal expertise to talk about emotions across time and culture. His scenarios are based on incidents from his own college town and from the Iceland of the sagas. He also makes incursions into the emotional worlds represented in the Middle English poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and in some of the works of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and others. Indeed, one theme that gradually becomes specific is how meaning travels from one culture to another. Ancient codes of honor, he insists, still function in contemporary American life.Some of Miller's narratives are unsettling, and he acknowledges that a certain ironical misanthropy may run through his discussions. But he succeeds in cutting through a mountain of pretensions to entertain and enlighten us.

    books

    Revised Edition. This is a new edition of this popular book which was chosen by a SF Chronicle's readers' poll as one the top non-fiction books of the 20th Century. COMING OF AGE IN CALFORNIA consists of seventeen personal essays by a fifth-generation Californian about growing up in the Golden State, experiencing both the uniqueness of place and the universals of family, friends, love, and aging. These essays explore actual people and places as they influenced this popular California writer.

    In this major reinterpretation of epic poetry beginning with Virgil, David Quint explores the political context and meanings of key works in Western literature. He divides the history of the genre into two political traditions: the Virgilian epics of conquest and empire that take the victors' side (the Aeneid itself, Camoes's Lus�adas, Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata) and the countervailing epic of the defeated and of republican liberty (Lucan's Pharsalia, Ercilla's Araucana, and d'Aubign�'s Les tragiques). These traditions produce opposing ideas of historical narrative: a linear, teleological narrative that belongs to the imperial conquerors, and an episodic and open-ended narrative identified with "romance," the story told of and by the defeated.Quint situates Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained within these rival traditions. He extends his political analysis to the scholarly revival of medieval epic in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to Sergei Eisenstein's epic film, Alexander Nevsky. Attending both to the topical contexts of individual poems and to the larger historical development of the epic genre, Epic and Empire provides new models for exploring the relationship between ideology and literary form.

    From Simon & Schuster, Moving Beyond Words is a collection of essays by influential feminist Gloria Steinem.In the book, Steinem examines the state of the women's movement in the 1990s and offers possibilities for the future, focusing on such issues as economic empowerment, women politicians, and life affirmations that affect women today.

    

    “To read [this collection] is to join a passionate guide for a journey through a new world, the world of the beginning” (Los Angeles Times). Sixteen pages of full-color photographs. Translated by Helen Lane.

    Arnold and Dianne C. Luce Cormac McCarthy is securely established as one of the masters of American literature. His first four novels, his screenplay "The Gardener's Son," and his drama The Stonemason are all set in the south. Starting with Blood Meridian (1985), he moved west, to the border country of Texas and Old and New Mexico, to create masterpieces of the western genre, including All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. Few writers have so completely and successfully described such different locales, customs, and people. Yet McCarthy is no regionalist. His work centers on the essential themes of self-determination, faith, courage, and the quest for meaning in an often violent and tragic world. For readers wishing to know McCarthy's works this collection is both an introduction and an overview. With the exception of the drama The Stonemason (1994), all his major publications are covered. This handbook is an essential resource for McCarthy scholars, students, or serious readers. Edwin T. Arnold is a professor of English at Appalachian State University. Dianne C. Luce is chair of the English department at Midlands Technical College.

    But there is another truth: the longing for oblivion. With pain, wit, and humor, the art of Samuel Beckett variously embodies this truth, this ancient enduring belief that it is better to be dead than alive, best of all never to have been born. Beckett is the supreme writer of an age which has created new possibilities and impossibilities even in the matter of death and its definition--an age of transplants and life-support. But how does a writer give life to dismay at life itself, to the not unwelcome encroachments of death, when it is for the life, the vitality of their language that we value writers? Beckett became himself as a writer when he realized in his very words a principle of death: in clich�s, which are dead but won't lie down; in a dead language and its memento mori; in words which mean their own opposites, like cleaving; and in what Beckett called a syntax of weakness. This artful study explores the relation between deep convictions about life or death and the incarnations which these take in the exact turns of a great writer, the realizations of an Irishman who wrote in English and in French, two languages with different apprehensions of life and of death.

    A study of their writings is one of the most expeditious ways to explore the core of political science; comparing and contrasting the positions both theorists have taken in assessing that core provides a comprehensive appreciation of the main options of the Western tradition.In fifty-three recently discovered letters, Strauss and Voegelin explore the nature of their similarities and differences, offering trenchant observations about one another's work, about the state of the discipline, and about the influences working on them. The correspondence fleshes out many assumptions made in their published writings, often with a frankness and directness that removes all vestiges of ambiguity. Included with the correspondence are four pivotal re-published essays "Jerusalem and Athens: Some Preliminary Reflections" (Strauss), "The Gospel and Culture" (Voegelin), "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" (Voegelin), and "The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy" (Strauss) and commentaries by James L. Wiser, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Stanley Rosen, Thomas J. J. Altizer, Timothy Fuller, Ellis Sandoz, Thomas L. Pangle, and David Walsh."

    s/t: Reviews, Essays, Interviews & Film StoriesAn anthology of reviews, essays, interviews and film stories by this legendary writer.

    Includes articles on:- Jack Kervorkian- Al Sharpton- NAMBLA- The Kids of Widney High- Boyd Rice- Underdog Lady- 100 Reasons to Commit Suicide

    Alchemist D. Gold reveals the inner world of marijuana and hashish, uncovering secrets and modern techniques to enhance potency. First published in 1974, the original edition of Cannabis Alchemy sold over 100,000 copies, making this one of the all-time best sellers of the counterculture.

    Referring to the biblical prophets, he says they were not the holy fortunetellers that the word prophet has come to signify....The business of prophecy is not simply foretelling the future; rather it is describing thepresent with exceptional truthfulness and accuracy. Once this is done, then it can be seen that broad aspects of the future have suddenly become apparent. The twentieth century is drawing to a chaotic close amidst portents of unprecedented change and upheaval. The unravelling of societies and civilizations and the destruction of nature march together--linked--a fact whose enormous significance is often lost. In Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld hasundertaken the difficult task of describing the present clearly enough to reveal the future. Out of his broad vision emerges a glimpse of a new millennium: a vision at once frightening and comforting, a scene of great devastation and great rebuilding. Ehrenfeld ranges far and wide to present a coherent vision of our relationship with Nature--its many aspects and implications--as our century opens into the next millennium. Whether he is writing about the problem of loyalty to organizations, rights versus obligations, our over-managed society, the vanishing of established knowledge, the failure of experts, the triumph of dandelions, Dr. Seuss, Edward Teller, or the future of farming, he is always concerned with the intricate interaction between technology and nature. As in his classic book, The Arrogance of Humanism, Ehrenfeld never losessight of our fatal love affair with the fantasy of control. We now have no choice, he argues, but to transform the dream of control, of progress, from one of overweening hubris, love of consumption, and the idiot's goal of perpetual growth, to one based on the inventive imitation of nature, withits honesty, beauty, resilience, and durability. Few American writers and even fewer scientists can describe these timeless, transcendent qualities of nature so well. In Places, the opening chapter, David Ehrenfeld tells about nightly vigils he spent alone on the moonlit beach of Tortuguero, watching giant sea turtles emerging from the seato lay their eggs in the black sand where they were born. I could watch the perfect white spheres falling, he writes. Falling as they have fallen for a hundred million years, with the same slow cadence, always shielded from the rain or stars by the same massive bulk with the beaked head and thesame large, myopic eyes rimmed with crusts of sand washed out by tears. Minutes and hours, days and months dissolve into eons. I am on an Oligocene beach, an Eocene beach, a Cretaceous beach--the scene is the same. It is night, the turtles are coming back, always back; I hear a deep hiss of breathand catch a glint of wet shell as the continents slide and crash, the oceans form and grow

    

    This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making, that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.

    

    Klinkenberg has spent much of his adulthood traveling about the state that he calls home searching out what remains of the real Florida and real Floridians, preserving them in words for all time. In this delightful and loving book, Floridians and visitors alike will find a Florida far removed from Disney World, dangerous cities and crowded beaches.

    Also includes beautiful color photographs.

    Universally regarded as an important, even brilliant, work, its complexity and dense presentation made it difficult to plumb. This collection of essays serves both as an introduction to that much discussed volume and as an extension and application of Millikan's central and controversial themes, especially in the philosophy of psychology. The title essay, referring to the White Queen's practice of exercising her mind by believing impossible things, discusses meaning rationalism and argues that rationality is not in the head, indeed, that there is no legitimate interpretation under which logical possibility and necessity are known a priori. Nor are there any laws of rational psychology. Rationality is not a lawful occurrence but a biological norm that is effected in an integrated head-world system under biologically ideal conditions.In other essays, Millikan clarifies her views on the nature of mental representation, explores whether human thought is a product of natural selection, examines the nature of behavior as studied by the behavioral sciences, and discusses the issues of individualism in psychology, psychological explanation, indexicality in thought, what knowledge is, and the realism/antirealism debate.

    -- The NoseThis brand new collection contains more than 40 of the best and most imaginative pieces Loom panics has ever published, including work by Bob Black, Jim Hogshire, Michael Newton, James B. DeKorne, and many others. Loompanics' Golden Records also features artwork by some of America's most talented artists, such as Mark Zingarelli, Nick Bougas, and Ace Backwords.

    Leslie Scalapino's meticulous commitment to understanding certain writings has resulted in this wonderful book. It proposes that such an understanding does not fix ideas or limit the attention. Rather 'to understand' gives one access to perpetually gliding present--an enormous guided moment of mobile thought. This moment--or what she calls 'reality'--is the realm of understanding, and it is also the only grounds for it. OBJECTS IN THE TERRIFYING TENSE/LONGING FROM TAKING PLACE is a moment of reading, spectacular, in place and with momentum--Lyn Hejinian.

    Full-color illustrations.

    In this second edition, El-Kati adds several key essays addressing ideas that are often confusing to many such as nationality, culture and ways to address "man's most dangerous myth"-race. His critical analysis of race, racism and the doctrine of white supremacy provide profound insight into the destruction caused to human dignity and the impact on society's growth.

    In a series of essays by noted art critics, Dial's work is presented emphasizing such highlighs as: - The dissolution of traditional "high art" restrictions- The phenomenon of the African-American self-taught artist- Dial's cultural tradition- Vivid, lyrical interpretations of the artist's imagery

    Robinson is known throughout the world for some of the most original and stimulating work on Old English literature and language published in recent times. This book collects twenty three of his essays, including three substantial new articles on the literary interpretation of Beowulf, the background and value of Ezra Pound's translation of The Seafarer, and an account of the use of Old English in twentieth-century literary compositions.The essays vary widely in terms of subject and approach. They include literary interpretation and criticism of the best-known Old English poems (The Battle of Maldon and Exodus for example), an account of the historical, religious, and cultural background to the writing of Beowulf, articles on women in Old English literature and on the significance of names and naming.The book as a whole is informed by the author's preoccupation with meaning, context, and language, and their subtle interactions. Its contents are equally characterized by readability and scholarship, and by learning and wit.

    Book by