Best of
Essays

1995

Glass, Irony and God


Anne Carson - 1995
    This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism


bell hooks - 1995
    But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race.Killing Rage speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. They address a spectrum of topics having to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; and internalized racism in movies and the media. And in the title essay, hooks writes about the "killing rage"—the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism—finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength and a catalyst for positive change.bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. She is the author of the memoir Bone Black as well as eleven other books. She lives in New York City.

Plainwater: Essays and Poetry


Anne Carson - 1995
    Carson envisions a present-day interview with a seventh-century BC poet, and offers miniature lectures on topics as varied as orchids and Ovid. She imagines the muse of a fifteenth-century painter attending a phenomenology conference in Italy. She constructs verbal photographs of a series of mysterious towns, and takes us on a pilgrimage in pursuit of the elusive and intimate anthropology of water. Blending the rhythm and vivid metaphor of poetry with the discursive nature of the essay, the writings in Plainwater dazzle us with their invention and enlighten us with their erudition.

Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World


Linda Hogan - 1995
    16 line drawings.

Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote


Truman Capote - 1995
    Whether he was profiling the rich and famous or creating indelible word-pictures of events and places near and far, Capote's eye for detail and dazzling style made his reportage and commentary undeniable triumphs of the form. "Portraits and Observations" is the first volume devoted solely to all the essays ever published by this most beloved of writers. From his travel sketches of Brooklyn, New Orleans, and Hollywood, written when he was twenty-two, to meditations about fame, fortune, and the writer's art at the peak of his career, to the brief works penned during the isolated denouement of his life, these essays provide an essential window into mid-twentieth-century America as offered by one of its canniest observers. Included are such celebrated masterpieces of narrative nonfiction as "The Muses Are Heard" and the short nonfiction novel "Handcarved Coffins," as well as many long-out-of-print essays, including portraits of Isak Dinesen, Mae West, Marcel Duchamp, Humphrey Bogart, and Marilyn Monroe. Among the highlights are "Ghosts in Sunlight: The Filming of In Cold Blood, "Preface to Music for Chameleons, in which Capote candidly recounts the highs and lows of his long career, and a playful self-portrait in the form of an imaginary self-interview. The book concludes with the author's last written words, composed the day before his death in 1984, the recently discovered"Remembering Willa Cather," Capote's touching recollection of his encounter with the author when he was a young man at the dawn of his career. "Portraits and Observations" puts on display the full spectrum of Truman Capote's brilliance. Certainly, Capote was, as Somerset Maugham famously called him, "a stylist of the first quality." But as the pieces gathered here remind us, he was also an artist of remarkable substance.

Blue Pastures


Mary Oliver - 1995
    She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude. Nature speaks to her and she speaks to nature. "This book is biased, opinionated; also it is also joyful, and probably there is despair here too...But the reader will find the pleasures more certain, and more constant, than the rills of despond. Thus it has turned out in my life thus far, influenced by the sustaining passions: love of the wild world, love of literature, love for and from another person."??—??Mary Oliver"This transcendent collection is Oliver's joyful sharing of her love of her craft."??—??*Library Journal

Dinosaur in a Haystack


Stephen Jay Gould - 1995
    With black and white illustrations. "Here is a new collection of Gould's unexpected connections between evolution and all manner of subjects, literature high among them. Gathered from his monthly column in "Natural History" magazine, these articles should delight, surprise, and inform his vast readership, as have his six prior volumes of essays. Somehow the light bulb pops on every month as his deadline approaches, some glowing fact pulled out of memory--often a line from Shakespeare or Tennyson--that illumines a generality Gould wishes to discuss. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" (Lord Alfred's line) induces dilations on the extent science can inform moral matters (not much, Gould believes); a remembrance of the infamous Wansee protocol prompts Gould's denunciation of the genocidal looting of evolutionary theory and, by extension, its vulnerability to ignoramuses in general. These two examples of the Gouldian essay method, fortunately, don't foreshadow a gloomy parade of topics: Gould can as easily alight at the fun house where mass culture absorbs ideas about evolution through movies of monsters run amok from Frankenstein to Jurassic Park. In other essays, he plunges directly into matters of evolutionary interpretation but customarily employs a literary twist: who else but Gould could link Edgar Allan Poe with his own area of professional eminence, the paleontology of snails? A discovery awaits in every essay--in every haystack--which solidifies Gould as one of the most eloquent science popularizers writing today."--"Booklist"

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics


bell hooks - 1995
    Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

High Tide in Tucson


Barbara Kingsolver - 1995
    Defiant, funny and courageously honest, High Tide in Tucson is an engaging and immensely readable collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.'Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent and concise humour. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart, and the soul.' New York Times Book Review

The Collected Essays


Ralph Ellison - 1995
    Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions that focus on race,” and Going to the Territory (1986), an exploration of literature and folklore, jazz and culture, and the nature and quality of lives that black Americans lead. “Ralph Ellison,” wrote Stanley Crouch, “reached across race, religion, class and sex to make us all Americans.”

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery


Jeanette Winterson - 1995
    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick


Philip K. Dick - 1995
    Non-fiction.

The Florence King Reader


Florence King - 1995
    Reprint.

The Redress of Poetry


Seamus Heaney - 1995
    The Nobel laureate shares his thoughts on poetry's special ability to rectify spiritual balance as a counterweight to hostile and oppressive forces, in a collection of ten lectures on the work of such diverse poets as Christopher Marlowe, John Clare, Oscar Wilde, and Elizabeth Bishop.

Twisted


Jessica Zafra - 1995
    Generation X icon Zafra continues her quest for world domination as she rants, complains, reminisces, and comments on anything and everything under the sun with her usual acerbic humor.

I Fish; Therefore, I Am: And Other Observations; Three Bestselling Works Complete in One Volume; A Fine and Pleasant Misery, Never Sniff a Gift Fish, They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?


Patrick F. McManus - 1995
    Containing over 80 slice-of-life stories by a bestselling outdoor humorist, this collection brings together for the first time three works by McManus: A Fine and Pleasant Misery, Never Sniff a Gift Fish, and They Shoot Canoes, Don't They?.

Another Turn of the Crank


Wendell Berry - 1995
    Provocative, intimate, and thoughtful, Another Turn of the Crank reaches to the heart of Wendell Berry's concern for our nation, its communities, and their future.

River Teeth


David James Duncan - 1995
    Salinger, to name just a few. Now Duncan distills his remarkable powers of observation into this unique collection of short stories and essays. At the heart of Duncan's tales are characters undergoing the complex and violent process of transformation, with results both painful and wondrous. Equally affecting are his nonfiction reminiscences, the "river teeth" of the title. He likens his memories to the remains of old-growth trees that fall into Northwestern rivers and are sculpted by time and water. These experiences—shaped by his own river of time—are related with the art and grace of a master storyteller. In River Teeth, a uniquely gifted American writer blends two forms, taking us into the rivers of truth and make-believe, and all that lies in between.

All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned In Loehmann's Dressing Room


Erma Bombeck - 1995
    Identifying the likenesses between animals in the wild and human beings, a humorous reflection on the ridiculous side of life pokes fun at nutrition, talk shows, childbirth, and more.

Womenagerie and Other Tales from the Front


Jessica Zafra - 1995
    A collection of Zafra's early columns in Woman Today magazine.

In Light of India


Octavio Paz - 1995
    Translated by Eliot Weinberger.

Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water


Kathleen Dean Moore - 1995
    “A smart, compassionate, and wise meditation on living in place” (Terry Tempest Williams).

Confronting Silence: Selected Writings


Toru Takemitsu - 1995
    In these writings, available here in English for the first time, the distinguished Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu reflects on his contemporaries, including John Cage, Olivier Messiaen, and Merce Cunningham; on nature, which has profoundly influenced his composition; on film and painting; on relationships between East and West; on traditional Japanese music; and on his own compositions.

Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness: Essays, a Play, Two Poems, and a Prayer


Tony Kushner - 1995
    In this first collection of writings by Tony Kushner, including his latest play Slavs!, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright grapples with the timeless issues of bigotry, war, faith, love, as well as tackling the contemporary topics as AIDS, gay rights and the moral horrors of the Gulf War.

The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs


Charles Simic - 1995
    Provides glimpses into the origins of Charles Simic's poetry

Complete Works of H. Emilie Cady


H. Emilie Cady - 1995
    Cady's complete works are a clear, concise representation of New Thought philosophy and metaphsical Christianity. NOTE: The original manuscripts of all three books have been carefully studied and restored wherever possible. God a Present Help, in particular, contains much material that has not appeared in recent editions.Contains Lessons in Truth, How I Used Truth and God a Present Help.

Shadows of Tender Fury


Subcomandante Marcos - 1995
    Here are the words of Marcos, words that recast Mexican politics and revived rebel imaginations everywhere. They look back to the traditions of Indian resistance and the dormant ideals of the Mexican revolution; they look forward to political strategies, styles, and theories that challenge the dominance of capitalism. The Introduction by John Ross situates the Zapatistas in the context of Mexican history and the Afterword by Frank Bardacke discusses their language and politics, as well as their meaning for the U.S. left. This edition also includes an "exclusive" prologue by Subcomandante Marcos and his speech to the Zapatista's August 1994 national convention.

All God's Critters Got a Place in the Choir


Emma Lou Warner Thayne - 1995
    The authors celebrate the variety and complexity in the lives of modern women: from giving birth and facing death, to the whys of listening to teenagers and the wherefores of being good neighbors. Whether writing at the hearth of family concerns or in the arena of public issues, the two authors embrace honest differences as they bridge distances, seek harmony in the midst of change, and hold fast to faith.

Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison


A.S. Byatt - 1995
    The results are nothing less than an education in the ways literature grips its readers and, at times, transforms their lives. Imagining Characters is indispensable, a work of criticism that returns us to the books it discusses with renewed respect and wonder.

From Beginning to End


Robert Fulghum - 1995
    They wanted words to use at graduations, funerals, and the welcoming of children. They inquired about grace at family meals, the reaffirmation of wedding vows, and ways to heal wounds suffered in personal conflict. People requested help with the rituals of solitude, such as meditation, prayer, and contemplation. . . .Rituals do not always involve words, occasions, officials, or an audience. Rituals are often silent, solitary, and self-contained. The most powerful rites of passage are reflective--when you look back on your life again and again, paying attention to the rivers you have crossed and the gates you have opened and walked on through, the thresholds you have passed over.I see ritual when people sit together silently by an open fire.Remembering.As human beings have remembered for thousands and thousands of years.FULGHUMFrom the Paperback edition.

Bread Out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics


Dionne Brand - 1995
    Personal and poetic, these essays speak of matters close to the heart of a black writer. This evocative and insightful collection has been fully updated and includes four previously unpublished essays. She turns her clear, unflinching eye to issues of sex and sexism; male violence toward women; how Black women learn the erotic; the stereotypes of Black females in popular culture and the centrality of Whiteness in definitions of Canadian culture. And she examines her personal history.

Overstory: Zero: Real Life in Timber Country


Robert Leo Heilman - 1995
    In honest, gritty prose, Heilman writes about the complex relationships between work, nature, family and community at a time when community itself is as endangered as any job or tree.

A Second Mencken Chrestomathy


H.L. Mencken - 1995
    L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.Publishers WeeklyThis book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.)Library JournalSelected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Gilbert TaylorFollowing My Life as Author and Editor" (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography , the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set" and American Mercury", are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment.

To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction


Joanna Russ - 1995
    An excellent book for any writer or reader." --Feminist Bookstore News"In her new book of essays... Russ continues to debunk and demand, edify and entertain.... Appreciative of surface aesthetics, she continually delves deeper than most critics, yet in terms so simple and accessible that her essays read like lively, angry, humorous dialogues conducted face-to-face with the author. Russ is the antithesis of the distant critic in her ivory tower." --Paul Di Filippo, The Washington Post Book World..". 20 years of the author's feisty reports from the front lines of literature." --The San Francisco Review of Books"This is a book of imaginative and provoking essays, but you should read it for the sheer fun of it." --The Women's Review of Books"Collects more than two decades of criticism by Joanna Russ, one of the most perceptive, forthright and eloquent feminist commentators around." --Feminist Bookstore News..". a super book....This is a book that, for once, really will appeal to readers of all kinds." --Utopian Studies"If you enjoy science fiction, this is definitely a book that you'll want to talk about. I found myself sneaking a few pages at times when I really didn't have time to read." --Jan Catano, AtlantisClassic essays on science fiction and feminism by Nebula and Hugo award-winning Joanna Russ. Here she ranges from a consideration of the aesthetic of science fiction to a reading of the lesbian identity of Willa Cather. To Write Like a Woman includes essays on horror stories and the supernatural, feminist utopias, popular literature for women (the "modern gothic"), and the feminist education of graduate students in English.

A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds


Gary Snyder - 1995
    Displaying Snyders playful and subtle intellect, these pieces challenge commonly held attitudes toward the environment and local communities, and call for action to give moral standing to all beings.

Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance


Richard Taruskin - 1995
    Text and Act collects for the first time the most important of Taruskin's essays and reviews from this period, many of which now classics in the field. Taking awide-ranging cultural view of the phenomenon, he shows that the movement, far from reviving ancient traditions, in fact represents the only truly modern style of performance being offered today. He goes on to contend that the movement is therefore far more valuable and even authentic than thehistorical verisimilitude for which it ostensibly strives could ever be. These essays cast fresh light on many aspects of contemporary music-making and music-thinking, mixing lighthearted debunking with impassioned argumentation. Taruskin ranges from theoretical speculation to practical criticism, and covers a repertory spanning from Bach to Stravinsky. Including a newly written introduction, Text and Act collects the very best of one of our most incisive musical thinkers.

The Richer, the Poorer


Dorothy West - 1995
    Traversing the  universal themes and conflicts between poverty and  prosperity, men and women, and young and old, and  compiling writing that spans almost seventy years,  The Richer, The Poorer not only  affords an unparalleled window into the  African-American middle class, but also delves into the  richness of experience of "one of the finest writers  produced in this country during the Roaring  Twenties"(Book Page).

It Rains Fishes: Legends, Traditions, and the Joys of Thai Cooking


Kasma Loha-Unchit - 1995
    Ingredients are thoroughly described (good news: coconut milk is not necessarily a no-no for cholesterol watchers; chili peppers are great for you). Recipes include lot

Essays and Sketches of Mark Twain


Mark Twain - 1995
    Twain speaks his mind on a variety of public issues and is especially passionate in his anti-imperialist stance. According to Twain's views on the human condition, the best to be hoped for is that we can be persuaded to rise above our selfish nature and work for the betterment of the community at large.

Rapid Eye 3


Simon Dwyer - 1995
    Hacking into the new virtual geography, where time and space do not exist, but where thought survives, as in art. In this age of transition and sensory overload, new ideas and organisations of perception form. To be marginalised, misunderstood, ignored, reviled. But melancholy can fuel creation. Imagination can replace fantasy. Hope can overcome fear. Different interpretations of the past and fresh approaches to art and technology can ensure the evolution and refinement of the perception of everyday life. In the virtual universe, there is no death.

This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class


C.L. Dews - 1995
    Describing conflict and frustration, this book exposes a divisive middle-class bias in the university setting.

Mountains in the Mist


F.W. Boreham - 1995
    Whether the subject is a historical event or an everyday occurrence, Boreham's thoughts on the subject are always rich in spiritual significance and application.

Writing from the Center


Scott Russell Sanders - 1995
    essays of substance and beauty, and they belong beside the work of Annie Dillard, Samuel Pickering, and Wendell Berry." --Library Journal"[Sanders] eloquently expresses his love of the land and the responsibility he feels for preventing further erosion of our natural resources... " --Publishers Weekly"Skillfully written in a clear, unmannered style refreshingly devoid of irony and hollow cleverness, the author starts with everyday experiences and gleans from them larger truths." --The Christian Science Monitor"[These] essays are so good one is tempted to stand up and applaud after reading them.... Sanders is a modern day prospector who finds gems of spiritual meaning in both familiar and unusual places." --Body Mind SpiritWriting from the Center is about one very fine writer's quest for a meaningful and moral life. Lannan Literary Award winner Scott Sanders ( Secrets of the Universe, Staying Put, A Paradise of Bombs) seeks and describes a center that is geographical, emotional, artistic, and spiritual--and is rooted in place. The geography is midwestern, the impulses are universal."The earth needs fewer tourists and more inhabitants, it seems to me--fewer people who float about in bubbles of money and more people committed to knowing and tending their home ground." --Scott Russell Sanders, from the book

Bonifacio's Bolo


Ambeth R. Ocampo - 1995
    In Bonifacio's Bolo, Ambeth Ocampo adds even more interesting bits to another scrapbook of history.

Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions


Denise Levertov - 1995
    And, as in any good mosaic, every piece reflects light at different angles, giving this self-portrait its living complexity. Tesserae differs for the first time the unique memoirs or "a poet who may just be the finest writing in English today" (Kirkus Reviews).

Grass Roots: The Universe of Home


Paul Gruchow - 1995
    The essays include personal reflections about growing up in rural Minnesota and opinions about the state of neglected rural towns and people. The author grew up during the 1950s on an 80-acre farm that his family rented in Rosewood Township, Minnesota. His father supplied the tools, the labor, and the seeds and kept two-thirds of the crop. His family lived off of the land--every summer his mother canned vegetables, fruits, jams, sauces, and meats for the winter. The book suggests that the industrialization of farming has marginalized rural culture and led to the impoverishment of rural towns and communities. Bread baking provides an example of how industrialization changed everyday life. When store-bought bread replaced home baking, the family abandoned more than a habit of living--they lost a piece of rural culture that influenced various aspects of their quality of life. Since 1910, industrialization has reduced the farm workforce from about 50 percent of the U.S. population to less than 2 percent and led to the development of a handful of huge, agribusiness corporations that dominate the American agricultural economy. The book suggests that individuals should oppose any economy that sees people as an expendable resource, that does not consider the health of communities, and that defines reductions in human labor as efficient regardless of non-pecuniary consequences. It questions what kind of values rural people are teaching their children when they sell themselves, in the name of economic development, as ideally suited to the least attractive kinds of factory work, or when they allow the rest of society to dump its toxic trash on rural land for the sake of a few jobs. Recommendations are offered for education, agriculture, and economic development that will reinvigorate rural communities and a rural way of life.

King Of The Roadkills


Bucky Sinister - 1995
    Twisted stories, bone-chilling poems, and harrowing yet humorous comix that deal with failed relationships, religious cults, loneliness, and drugs, penned with razor-sharp precision.

The Essential Mcluhan


Marshall McLuhan - 1995
    A whole new generation is turning to his work to understand a global village made real by the information superhighway and the overwhelming challenge of electronic transformation. “Before anyone could perceive the electric form of the information revolution, McLuhan was publishing brilliant explanations of the perceptual changes being experienced by the users of mass media. He seemed futuristic to some and an enemy of print and literacy to others. He was, in reality, a deeply literate man of astonishing prescience. Tom Wolfe suggested aloud that McLuhan’s work was as important culturally as that of Darwin or Freud. Agreement and scoffing ensued. Increasingly Wolfe’s wonder seems justified.” From the Introduction Here in one volume, are McLuhan’s key ideas, drawn from his books, articles, correspondence, and published speeches. This book is the essential archive of his constantly surprising vision.

The Golden Age is in Us: Journeys and Encounters


Alexander Cockburn - 1995
    His own reflections are interspersed with letters from Graham Greene, personal friends and irate readers. There are discussions with Noam Chomsky, and pieces on criticism, Colette, transvestism, sexual manners and hate mail. Cockburn subverts some left totems along the way—satanic abuse, a JFK conspiracy, a Democratic White House—and demonstrates that there are few uncomplicated victims, the Bad Wolf lurks with Red Riding Hood. In his writing on the environment, the three-hour day and other topics, Cockburn also suggests that an age of uncertainty invites new ideas and new allegiances. The left must be utopian or it is nothing. From the Los Angeles riots to Ireland, from Gorbachev to Clinton—this is a history of an age of uncertainty.

Brotherman


Herb Boyd - 1995
    A distinguished addition to black studies."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)The purpose of this extraordinary anthology is made abundantly clear by the editors' stated intention: "to create a living mosaic of essays and stories in which Black men can view themselves, and be viewed without distortion." In this, they have succeeded brilliantly. Brotherman contains more than one hundred and fifty selections, some never before published--from slave narratives, memoirs, social histories, novels, poems, short stories, biographies, autobiographies, position papers, and essays.Brotherman books us passage to the world that Black men experience as adolescents, lovers, husbands, fathers, workers, warriors, and elders. On this journey they encounter pain, confusion, anger, and love while confronting the life-threatening issues of race, sex, and politics--often as strangers in a strange land. The first collection of its kind, Brotherman gathers together a multitude of voices that add a new, unforgettable chapter to American cultural identity.

Poetry's Old Air


Marianne Boruch - 1995
    Weaving together close readings, biographical detail, and personal reflections, Boruch meditates on a universal fascination: how a poem comes to exist.A variety of imaginative approaches sets the essays apart from strictly academic poetry criticism. Boruch's ear for metaphor and attention to everyday experience enrich her readings of others' work. The unique connections she draws to the world beyond the literary one- including comparisons to painting and ceramics, the habits of bees, and the basic elements of musical composition- bring other ways of seeing and thinking to bear on the writing process itself. Instead of building her arguments and observations around a single thesis, Boruch borrows freely from other areas of human knowledge and experience, allowing essays to develop gradually and "waywardly," as a poem is made.Poets, teachers of literature, and students of writing and literature, as well as the general reader, will appreciate the insights of Poetry's Old Air, as will the general reader, for whom these essays are entirely accessible.Marianne Boruch is the author of three acclaimed volumes of poetry: Moss Burning, Descendant, and View from the Gazebo. She is Associate Professor of English, Purdue University.

The Gender of Sound


Anne Carson - 1995
    Copyright © 1994 by Anne Carson. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

In Good Company: The Church as Polis


Stanley Hauerwas - 1995
    By exposing a different account of politics—the church as polis and "counterstory" to the world's politics—Stanley Hauerwas helps Christians to recognize the unifying beliefs and practices that make them a political entity apart from the rest of the world.

The Trouble with Wilderness


William Cronon - 1995
    This version comes from the New York Times (1995); another version appears as the introduction to a book Cronon edited, "Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature" (1995), a collection of essays on the environment. Cronon, Wiliam. "The Trouble with Wilderness." 1995. The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Nonfiction. Ed. Melissa A. Goldthwaite et al. 14th ed. New York: Norton, 2016. 550-53. Print.

With My Trousers Rolled: Familiar Essays


Joseph Epstein - 1995
    Taken together, these essays constitute a continuing autobiography. Although the tone in this collection, his fifth - which owes its title to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - is still highly amused, these new essays also strike a chord that's slightly elegiac. Offering reflections on his increased maturity both as a writer and as a man, Epstein admits to feeling more and more on the periphery of contemporary life - "Nicely Out of It," and not at all minding this. "Decline and Blumenthal" is his take on the endemic slippage of standards in all realms of life. In "Here to Buy Mink," he conveys his love and admiration for the remarkable woman who was his mother. Other essays deal with the pleasures of middle age, of music and cats and telling anecdotes, of the psychological and social complexities of car ownership, of the oddities and ambiguities of male hair. Urbane yet regularly amazed, ironic yet happily candid, Epstein's essays have long been compared to the conversation of an intelligent friend whose wit takes surprising turns of seriousness. Epstein is one of those writers whose humor, at bottom, is serious.

Rock She Wrote: Women Write about Rock, Pop, and Rap


Evelyn McDonnellEllen Willis - 1995
    Pioneers such as 1960s New Yorker columnist Ellen Willis and Jazz & Pop editor Patricia Kennealy-Morrison (better known, tellingly, for her marriage to rock icon Jim) are grouped with younger counterparts, from novelist Mary Gaitskill to cultural critic bell hooks in sections broken down loosely by topic. In "I Am the Band," female performers such as Sonic Youth bassist Kim Gordon, offer touring testimony; critic Jaan Uhelszki, meanwhile, finds herself onstage with Kiss, makeup and all, for a 1975 Creem magazine assignment. The latter instance points up one of the book's most fascinating aspects: in a rock-and-roll world where boys wear lipstick and girls increasingly get to make lots of noise, the effects of gender on both performer and listener are far from straightforward. Many of Rock She Wrote's strongest pieces? Joan Morgan's story on her love/hate relationship with Ice Cube's misogynist rap; Lori Twersky's musings on familiar images of the "female teenage audience" as screechy and sex-crazed?find their writers at the intersection of conflicting reactions to the subjects at hand. A remarkable collection, Rock She Wrote makes clear both the difference women writers have brought to music writing and the impossibility of any attempt to nail that difference down once and for all.

Wings of Art: Joseph Campbell on James Joyce


Joseph Campbell - 1995
    In this six-part series, renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell introduces and explores the unifying themes and mythological symbolism in James Joyce's three greatest literary works--A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake--arguing that these three major works were the precursors to a fourth, even greater novel that Joyce never got to write.

English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas


Coco Fusco - 1995
    Known for using performance to explore the boundaries of ethnicity in art, Coco Fusco has now brought her talents to bear in a volume of cultural criticism and theory, English is Broken Here. Infused with a unique cultural sensibility, English is Broken Here examines cross-cultural art issues in America at a crucial moment. Coco Fusco adds an original and eloquent voice to a growing debate over cultural identity and visual politics.

Zos Kia: An Introductory Essay On The Art And Sorcery Of Austin Osman Spare


Gavin W. Semple - 1995
    

Circus Americanus


Ralph Rugoff - 1995
    Exploring its remote corners and bizarre byways, Ralph Rugoff takes us on a tour of theme park slums and mystical police cars, futurist war and the “aesthetics of safe chaos.” With an idiosyncratic eye for detail, he maps a culture in which “reality” has become just another theme, revealing an America much stranger than the glamorous kitsch of its surfaces. Whether he is writing about Las Vegas casinos, forensic cartoons, the enigma of Napoleon’s preserved penis or the aesthetics of sewage treatment, Rugoff considers everyday marvels with a concern for how we live together in a world beyond belief.

The Year of the Angler and the Year of the Trout: Tales of Fly Fishing, Rivers, the Environment, and Life


Steve Raymond - 1995
    Now they're back in print, under one cover. Arnold Gingrich, the fly-fishing maven and editor of" Esquire," ranked Steve Raymond with the great fishing writers, and Gingrich knew writers and good writing. So great is its reputation, that a copy of "The Year of the Angler" was presented to the White House by the American Booksellers Association. Raymond fishes Western waters, particularly the Northwest. Here are accounts of adventures on the Hoh, the Duwamish, the North Fork of the Stillaguamish, the Hanford Reach of the Columbia, Pass Lake, and Columbia Basin Pond. Here, too, are affectionate portraits of the great fish of those waters, the sea-run cutthroat, salmon, steelhead, rainbow, and brown trout.And solid advice on catching them. Raymond tells stories, too, of men like John Huelsdonk, the Iron Man of the Hoh, who killed one hundred cougars. As much as it is a book about fish and rivers, it is also a book about life, about the passage of time, the seasons, man and his place in the environment, family, pain and pleasure. Truly a classic, The Year of the Angler and the Year of the Trout will find a place on every serious angler's shelf, if only to replace one imprudently loaned to a friend. The Year of the Angler and The Year of the Trout have long been underground classics, the kind of books used-book sellers can't keep in stock, the ones its owners won't loan out. Now they're back in print, under one cover.Raymond fishes Western waters, particularly in the Northwest. The pages of this book are filled with accounts of his adventures on various bodies of water in this region, including the Duwamish, the Stillaguamish, the Columbia, and Pass Lake. Here, too, are affectionate portraits of the great fish of those waters, and solid advice on catching them. Raymond also tells stories of men like John Huelsdonk, the "Iron Man" of the Hoh, who killed one hundred cougars.Arnold Gingrich, the fly-fishing maven and editor of Esquire, ranked Steve Raymond with the great fishing writers, and Gingrich knew writers and good writing. So great is its reputation that a copy of The Year of the Angler was presented to the White House by the American Booksellers Association.As much as this is a book about fish and rivers, it is also a book about life, about the passage of time, the seasons, man's place in the environment, and family. Truly a classic, The Year of the Angler and the Year of the Trout will find a place on every serious angler's shelf, if only to replace one imprudently loaned to a friend.

Great Topics of the World: Essays


Albert Goldbarth - 1995
    A collection of personal essays explores everyday traumas and triumphs and draws on memories and events from the author's life and that of his family.

Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose


Ted Hughes - 1995
    Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Sylvia Plath. Hughes also expresses concerns about education, the environment, and the arts in general.

A Different Angle: Fly Fishing Stories by Women


Holly Morris - 1995
    But once the River speaks, the man becomes a superfluous distraction and a woman finds herself standing alone, in living water, defying and wowing the self. This is the moment the fly fisher is born. This beautiful birth is the heartbeat of these stories." -David James Duncan, author of "The River Why" and "The Brothers K" Includes stories by Pulitzer-Prize-winner E. Anne Proulx, "Cowboys Are My Weakness" author Pam Houston, fly casting champion Joan Slavato Wulff, Lorian Hemingway, LeAnne Schreiber, and more Since the success of "Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis" and "A River Runs Through It," fly fishing has been growing in popularity among both sexes Both men and women will enjoy these sometimes poignant, more often humorous tales of uniformly high literary quality.

Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews


Charles Wright - 1995
    Wright uses creative variations on the form of the linear essay including interviews with himself as interviewee, correspondence (with Charles Simic), and experimentation with what he calls Improvisations "non- linear associational storylines". The book's short, staccato-like bursts add up to much more than the sum of their parts. This satisfying collection includes reminiscences and meditations on the details of memory and what it means to visit the past; the vices of titleism and the hydrosyllabic foot in poetry; a comparison of poems and journeys; appreciation of poets Donald Justice and John Crow Ransom; an attempt to define "image"; discussions of the current state of poetry; and various highlights from the Charles Wright Literary Festival. Charles Wright's books of poetry include The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Country Music: Selected Early Poems. He received the 1993 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the 1992 Award of Merit Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is Souder Family Professor of English, University of Virginia.

Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of One Hundred Years of Cinema


Gilbert Adair - 1995
    His aim has been to encompass the many facets of film without reducing the book to an academic inventory of highlights.

The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society


Susan Griffin - 1995
    In The Eros of Everyday Life, she once again takes readers on a startling journey, showing the profound connections between religion and philosophy, science and nature, Western thought and the role of women, and the supremacy of abstract thought over the forces of life. Featuring the brilliant original title essay that is nothing less than an intellectual and emotional exploration of the nature of Western society itself, as well as Susan Griffin's best previously published essays of the past decade, The Eros of Everyday Life combines the beautiful lyricism and sensibility of a poet with the intellectual rigor of one of the finest and most original minds writing today.

Selected Essays


Hayden Carruth - 1995
    Essays on poetry by an acclaimed poet-critic.

No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1995


George Steiner - 1995
    In this remarkable book he concerns himself with language and the relation of language to literature and to religion. Written during a period when the art of reading and the status of a text have been threatened by literary movements that question their validity and by computer technology, Steiner's essays affirm the primacy of reading in the classical sense.Steiner covers a wide range of subjects, from the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare to Kafka, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil, Husserl, and Freud. The theme of Judaism's tragic destiny winds through his thinking, in particular as he muses about whether Jewish scripture and the Talmud are the Jew's true homeland, the parallels between the "last supper" of Socrates and the Last Supper of Jesus, and the necessity for Christians to hold themselves accountable for their invective and impotence during the Holocaust.

Dark Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer


Peter Hames - 1995
    As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the normalization years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his contemporaries--including playwright president Vaclav Havel, and, in exile, novelist Milan Kundera and filmmaker Milos Forman--Svankmajer's dominant life experiences have been the realities of the Stalinist system, both the explicit state terror of the 1950s and the Brezhnevist neo-Stalinism of the 1970s and the 1980s.After training in puppetry and working in the Prague theatre, he made his first film in 1964. He directed a number of important films in the 1960s, including the live-action and Kafkaesque "Byt" ("The Flat," 1968) and "Zahrada" ("The Garden," 1968) and consolidated his international reputation with "Moznosti dialogu" ("Dimensions of Dialogue") in 1982. Since then, he has continued his highly visual and poetic approach in two feature-length films, "Neco z Alenky" ("Alice," 1987) and "Lekce Faust" ("Faust," 1994). As a filmmaker, Svankmajer is constantly exploring and analyzing his concern with power, fear and anxiety, confrontation and destruction, magic, the irrational and the absurd, and displays a bleak outlook on the possibilities for dialogue. In challenging accepted narrative, the bourgeoisie of realism (nezval), and the thematic and formal conventions of the mainstream media, Svankmajer's work is startlingly dynamic, subversive, and confrontational.

East of Lo Monthang


Peter Matthiessen - 1995
    By the 18th century, Lo had lost control over this trade and had been incorporated into the modern Kingdom of Nepal. Isolated deep in the Himalayas, Lo's hereditary Rajas retained most of their feudal powers and the area remained closed to the outside world until 1991. In the spring of 1992, author Peter Matthiessen and photographer Tom Laird travelled deep in the secret valley of Sao Kohla, tucked high in the northernmost reaches of the Himalayas. They were the first Westerners to venture there in 30 years. From the central city of Lo Monthang, known as "Mustang", Matthiessen and Laird, with an entourage of attendants and horsemen, began an expedition across arid plateaux and through narrow river chasms to reach precariously perched monasteries. They camped among nomad herdsmen who spent nights guarding their goats from predatory snow leopards. This book reveals an unknown land where peaks five miles high cast their shadows over the deepest canyon in the world and where mountain nomads spend their lives herding their flocks across desolate slopes and through desert valleys.

A Selected Prose


Robert Duncan - 1995
    Bertholf has taken three core essays from Fictive Certainties (1985), an earlier prose collection that was limited to works written after 1955; to these have been added a variety of Duncan's writings on contemporary artists and such fellow poets as Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Jack Spicer. Included as well are "Rites of Participation, " an excerpt from the still unpublished "H.D. Book"; a long meditation on Edmond Jabes' The Book of Questions, and a revised version of Duncan's controversial and provocative essay of 1944, "The Homosexual in Society."

A New Model of Health and Disease


George Vithoulkas - 1995
    It strongly underscores the need to focus on an 'energy' medicine to correct the deficiencies of our present 'chemical' medicine.In this long-awaited ground-breaking treatise, theorist and homeopathic teacher George Vithoulkas presents a new paradigm for modern medicine. Established medicine has failed in its mission to prevent or cure many diseases, Vithoulkas asserts, because of the excessive and often needless use of powerful drugs. Western medicine has a limited view of the total organism and the true sources of disease.Vithoulkas relates the increasing incidence of AIDS, cancer, asthma, epilepsy, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and other difficult-to-control illnesses to the weakening of the immune system from over-prescribing of drugs. Only when we fully integrate the role of the psyche, spirit and emotions into our explanations of illness, he says, well we be able to generate a fuller difinition of health, and change our conception and methods of treatment.

The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994


Andrew Kopkind - 1995
    A chronicle of political and cultural life from 1965 until Andrew Kopkind‘s death in October of 1994, it tracks the black civil rights movement, the New Left, Prague in the wake of Soviet invasion and Moscow during the Soviet collapse, Woodstock, drug wars, blue-collar attitudes, Christian soldiers and gay soldiers. As a gay man, Kopkind understood that there is no pure realm of the personal, and his writing captures history as it happened.

Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays


Amos Oz - 1995
    As a founding member of the Peace Now movement, Oz has spent over thirty-five years speaking out on this issue, and these powerful essays and speeches span an important and formative period for understanding today’s tension and crises. Whether he is discoursing on the role of writers in society or recalling his grandmother’s death in the context of the language’s veracity; examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragicomedy or questioning the Zionist dream, Oz remains trenchant and unflinching in this moving portrait of a divided land. “[Oz is] the modern prophet of Israel.” —Sunday Telegraph (UK)

The Art and Science of Analog Circuit Design


Jim Williams - 1995
    By presenting divergent methods and views of people who have achieved some measure of success in their field, the book encourages readers to develop their own approach to design. In addition, the essays and anecdotes give some constructive guidance in areas not usually covered in engineering courses, such as marketing and career development.

The Farallon Islands: Sentinels of the Golden Gate


Peter White - 1995
    

Benchley At The Theatre: Dramatic Criticism, 1920 1940


Robert Benchley - 1995
    

Gender and Genre in Medieval French Literature


Simon Gaunt - 1995
    Simon Gaunt offers new readings of canonical Old French and medieval Occitan texts such as the Chanson de Roland, Chretien de Troyes' Chevalier de la charrete, and lyrics by Bernart de Ventadorn. In addition, he considers many less well-known works and less familiar genres such as hagiography and the fabliaux. Drawing on contemporary feminist theory, he examines how masculinity, as well as femininity, is constructed in medieval French and Occitan texts, and he shows that gender is a crucial element in the formation of the ideologies that underpin medieval literary genres.

The War of American Independence 1775-1783


Stephen Conway - 1995
    Localized at first, the trouble spread and eventually took on the character of a world war. By 1783, Britain had been forced to acknowledge the loss of these colonies and a new polity--the United Statesof America--was born. Conway examines the causes of the conflict and develops an understanding of the war itself that is both global and contemporary. He places the Anglo-American struggle in its broadest possible context by taking account of its Caribbean, European, Indian, and even Africandimensions.

Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them: How to Keep Your Tractors Happy and Your Family Running


Roger Welsch - 1995
    Now you can enjoy Welschs fun-filled essays in this witty collection of stories that poke fun at his favorite past-time. Filled with light-hearted tips for saving your marriage from ruin while cleaning your tractor parts in the dishwasher, and other clever restoration techniques. Down-home humor every tractor enthusiast can relate to!

Women, Family, And Society In Medieval Europe: Historical Essays, 1978 1991


David Herlihy - 1995
    Author of books on the history of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, Herlihy published, in 1978, his best-known work in collaboration with Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles (Translated into English in 1985, and Italian in 1988). For the last dozen or so years of his life, Herlihy launched a series of ambitious projects, on the history ofwomen and the family, and on the collective behavior of social groups in medieval Europe. While he completed two important books - on the family (1985) and on women's work (1991) - he did not find the time to bring these other major projects to a conclusion.This volume contains essays he wrote after 1978. They convey a sense of the enormous intellectual energy and great erudition that characterized David Herlihy's scholarly career. They also chart a remarkable historian's intellectual trajectory, as he searched for new and better ways of asking a set of simple and basic questions about the history of the family, the institution within which the vast majority of Europeans spent so much of their lives. Because of his qualities as a scholar and a teacher, during his relatively brief career Herlihy was honored with Presidencies of the four major scholarly associations with which he was affiliated: the Catholic Historical Association, the Medieval Academy of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and the American Historical Association.

Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation


Barbara Findlen - 1995
    Exploring and revealing the lives of today's young feminists--the Third Wave--a collection of essays by thirty diverse members of the twenty-something generation covers a wide range of topics including racism, sex, identity, AIDS, revolution, and abortion.

Tales from Sawyerton Springs


Andy Andrews - 1995
    The simple, magical town of Sawyerton Springs does exist in the hearts of those who long to take a deep breath, relax and take the time to find the humor and meaning in everyday life..

How I Read Gertrude Stein


Lew Welch - 1995
    Lew Welch's early take on his great mentor's primary works is testament to his own exceptional authority, as reader and writer alike. His insights are fundamental to our recognition of Stein as the bedrock genius she always was for him. He says it all here with such clarity".

From the Boer War to the Cold War


A.J.P. Taylor - 1995
    One of Britain's greatest historians combines his own and others' essays from earlier collections with pieces previously unpublished in volume form.

Mabini's Ghost


Ambeth R. Ocampo - 1995
    Mabini’s Ghost is one of the many historical and creative non-fiction works by Ambeth Ocampo and considered part of the Philippine historical heritage that chronicles the life of Apolinario Mabini in creative fashion.

Eyes Right!: Challenging the Right Wing Backlash


Chip Berlet - 1995
    With chapters covering attacks on immigrants, gay men and lesbians, people of color, environmentalists, artists, and educators, this anthology shows how disparate groups are linked by the over-arching anti-democratic objectives of the right-wing offensive.

Cato's Letters, Or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects: Volume One


John Trenchard - 1995
    The Englishmen were John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Their prototype was Cato the Younger (95-46 B.C.), the implacable foe of Julius Caesar and a champion of liberty and republican principles. Trenchard and Gordon's 144 essays were published from 1720 to 1723, originally in the London Journal, later in the British Journal. Subsequently collected as Cato's Letters, these "Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious" became, as Clinton Rossiter has remarked, "the most popular, quotable, esteemed source of political ideas in the colonial period."This new two-volume edition offers minimally modernized versions of the letters from the four-volume sixth edition printed in London in 1755.

From Cult to Culture: Fragments Toward a Critique of Historical Reason


Jacob Taubes - 1995
    During his American years, he also gathered together a number of prominent thinkers at his weekly seminars on Jewish intellectual history. In the mid-60s, Taubes joined the faculty of the Free University in West Berlin, initially as the city's first Jewish Studies professor of the postwar period. But his work and interest expanded beyond the boundaries of the field of Jewish Studies to broader philosophical questions, particularly in the philosophy of religion. A charismatic speaker and a great polemicist, Taubes had a phenomenal ability to create interdisciplinary conversations in the humanities, engaging scholars from philosophy, literature, theology, and intellectual history. The essays presented here represent the fruit of conversations, conferences, and workshops that he organized over the course of his career.

The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism


Roger Scruton - 1995
    The essays, from the perspective of 'the classical vernacular', explore the nature and meaning of architecture, defending architecture without architects, and the 'vernacular tradition', that 'vulgar tongue' which is the natural language of space, proportion and light. He provides a comprehensive critique of modernism (not only the heartless modernism of architecture) from a serious intellectual perspective, based on a philosophical aesthetics which he has propounded in earlier books including The Politics of Culture (1981), The Aesthetic Understanding (1983) and The Philosopher on Dover Beach (1990). Scruton, Anthony Quinton declared, 'writes with great force and freshness. He is humblingly intelligent. Above all, he is consistently interesting.' In these essays written over the last decade and a half, he proves Quinton right time after time. He looks at and through the work of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architects and appraises not only their achievement but the values that inform or distort their work in relation to those of us who live in or beside their structures.

Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century


Hilton Kramer - 1995
    Since its founding in 1982, The New Criterion has emerged as the foremost voice of critical dissent in the culture wars now raging throughout American society. Against the Grain brings together more than forty of the magazine's most incisive essays, challenging radical orthodoxies on a wide range of controversial subjects, from the philosophy of Michel Foucault to the art of Anselm Kiefer to the rationale of multiculturalism. Samuel Lipman writes on the future of classical music, Hilton Kramer on the plight of today's art museum, Joseph Epstein on the poet C. P Cavafy, and Roger Kimball on the treason of the intellectuals, as well as John Simon on Vladimir Nabokov and Donald Lyons on Angels in America. The collection contains thoughtful reevaluations of Henry James, Jean Genet, Harold Laski, A. E. Housman, Willem de Kooning, and Frederick Douglass. Written with wit, clarity, and fierce independence, Against the Grain is a major contribution to sanity and common sense on the most contentious cultural issues of the day.

The Craft of Adventure


Graham Nelson - 1995
    On the creation of Interactive Fiction

Spring Snow: The Seasons of New England from the Old Farmer's Almanac


Castle Freeman Jr. - 1995
    Freeman delights in Vermont through every season of the year, observing and participating in what happens inside the countryman's mind and outside it. He has something to say about all aspects of modern country life, from rototillers and chain saws to rabbits and raccoons, from day lilies to maple sugar, from snow on the roof to mice in the woodpile. He finds much in nature on which to draw a moral: "Woodpeckers make other birds look like triflers. Their lives have a complexity and purpose that reminds us of ourselves." Writing in the parallel traditions of Gilbert White and Benjamin Franklin, Freeman evokes a way of life sufficiently challenging to be exciting, sufficiently quiet to be philosophical, sufficiently varied to be fun. This book is for pleasure, to roll over in the mind in city and country alike, a book to keep by

Freelancing: Adventures of a Poet


Hugo Williams - 1995
    Part-time teaching jobs, literary festivals and writing courses have kept him both busy and bemused, but he has also found time to get a taste of roistering, cross-dressing, tight-rope walking, drug-scoring, fashion modelling and archaeology. Memories of his apprenticeship at the London Magazine and of Soho in the '70s, encounters with the likes of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Gioconda Belli and the station master at Gospel Oak, news of a bogus 'Ted Hughes', evocations of the theatrical world of his parents and of his wife's French childhood - these are among the things that have occupied his constantly questing mind. The despatches collected in Freelancing amount to a piecemeal autobiography, in the course of which the author's Selected Poems are published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. Always elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, at times surprisingly poignant, Hugo Williams's column has earned him a devoted following among readers of the TLS - one due to be enlarged by the publication of this book.

Sing Your Heart Out, Country Boy: Classic Country Songs and Their Inside Stories by the Men and Women Who Wrote Them


Dorothy Horstman - 1995
    -- Harold Woodell South Carolina Review

Three Essays on Style


Erwin Panofsky - 1995
    These three essays place Panofsky's genius in a different perspective: What Is Baroque?, Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures and The Ideological Antecedents of the Rolls-Royce Radiator. The essays are framed by an introduction by Irving Lavin, discussing the context of the essays' composition and their significance within Panofsky's oeuvre and an insightful memoir by Panofsky's former student, close friend and fellow emigre, William Heckscher.

Twice Blessed


Kathryn Tucker Windham - 1995
    By the close of the Civil Rights era, her hometown Selma, Alabama, newspaper had been taken over by corporate owners, and she sensed it was time to move on. She launched a new career as part social worker, part roving documentarian--photographing and writing about the people and places that fascinated her. When the national storytelling phenomenon took hold in the 1970s, she became a significant part of it. Then came a stint as essayist on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. She also wrote and performed a one-woman play, and served as consultant to public broadcasting. She is one of Alabama's best-known citizens, widely honored--yet she still keeps a busy schedule of public appearances, continuing to write, photograph, and tell stories. Seeking to put her worldly house in order, the nine autobiographical essays in this volume help tidy up the facts and folklore in her professional attic. In sum, Twice Blessed is an intimate visit with a generous spirit.

The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry


Susan M. Schultz - 1995
    This concentration on Ashbery's influence on contemporary American poetry provides new methods for interpreting and understanding his poetic achievement.

Secret Of The Sangraal: A Collection Of Writings


Arthur Machen - 1995