Here is Erma's first column, "Children Cornering the Coin Market," which ran in January 1965, as well as her last one, "Let's Face It," from April 1996. I88 other columns are also collected here, on her favorite subjects, organized by topic.

    In her unique, spellbinding way, she re-creates intimate personal experiences and gives us her wisdom on a wide variety of subjects. She tells us how a house can both hurt its occupants and heal them. She talks about Africa. She gives us a profile of Oprah. She enlightens us about age and sexuality. She confesses to the problems fame brings and shares with us the indelible lessons she has learned about rage and violence. And she sings the praises of sensuality.

    Wilson has scrutinized animals in their natural settings, tweezing out the dynamics of their social organization, their relationship with their environments, and their behavior, not only for what it tells us about the animals themselves, but for what it can tell us about human nature and our own behavior. He has brought the fascinating and sometimes surprising results of these studies to general readers through a remarkable collection of books, including The Diversity of Life, The Ants, On Human Nature, and Sociobiology. The grace and precision with which he writes of seemingly complex topics has earned him two Pulitzer prizes, and the admiration of scientists and general readers around the world.In Search of Nature presents for the first time a collection of the seminal short writings of Edward O. Wilson, addressing in brief and eminently readable form the themes that have actively engaged this remarkable intellect throughout his career.""The central theme of the essays is that wild nature and human nature are closely interwoven. I argue that the only way to make complete sense of either is by examining both closely and together as products of evolution.... Human behavior is seen not just as the product of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of thousands of years. We need this longer view, I believe, not only to understand our species, but more firmly to secure its future.The book is composed of three sections. ""Animal Nature, Human Nature"" ranges from serpents to sharks to sociality in ants. It asks how and why the universal aversion to snakes might have evolved in humans and primates, marvels at the diversity of the world's 350 species of shark and how their adaptive success has affected our conception of the world, and admonishes us to ""be careful of little lives""-to see in the construction of insect social systems ""another grand experiment in evolution for our delectation.""The Patterns of Nature"" probes at the foundation of sociobiology, asking what is the underlying genetic basis of social behavior, and what that means for the future of the human species. Beginning with altruism and aggression, the two poles of behavior, these essays describe how science, like art, adds new information to the accumulated wisdom, establishing new patterns of explanation and inquiry. In ""The Bird of Paradise: The Hunter and the Poet,"" the analytic and synthetic impulses-exemplified in the sciences and the humanities-are called upon to give full definition to the human prospect.""Nature's Abundance"" celebrates biodiversity, explaining its fundamental importance to the continued existence of humanity. From ""The Little Things That Run the World""-invertebrate species that make life possible for everyone and everything else-to the emergent belief of many scientists in the human species' possible innate affinity for other living things, known as biophilia, Wilson sets forth clear and compelling reasons why humans should concern themselves with species loss. ""Is Humanity Suicidal?"" compares the environmentalist's view with that of the exemptionalist, who holds that since humankind is transcendent in intelligence and spirit, our species must have been released from the iron laws of ecology that bind all other species. Not without optimism, Wilson concludes that we are smart enough and have time enough to avoid an environmental catastrophe of civilization-threatening dimensions-if we are willing both to redirect our science and technology and to reconsider our self-image as a species.In Search of Nature is a lively and accessible introduction to the writings of one of the most brilliant scientists of the 20th century. Imaginatively illustrated by noted artist Laura Southworth, it is a book all readers will treasure."

    Harvard University Press is now undertaking to publish a significant portion of his work in definitive translation, under the general editorship of Michael W. Jennings. This volume, the first of three, will at last give readers of English a sense of the man and the many facets of his thought.

    In addition to a new introduction by Jack Flam, The Collected Writings includes previously unpublished essays by Smithson and gathers hard-to-find articles, interviews, and photographs. Together these provide a full picture of his wide-ranging views on art and culture.

    The comic persona he invented, a modern citydweller whose zaniest flights of free association are tinged with anxiety, is as hilarious now as when he first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker—and his troubled side is even more striking. Here, The Library of America presents the best and most extensive Thurber collection ever assembled.Only a book of this scope can do justice to Thurber’s extraordinary career and to the many unexpected turns of his comic genius. Here are the acknowledged masterpieces: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Catbird Seat,” the anti-war parable The Last Flower, the brilliantly satirical Fables for Our Time, the children’s classic The 13 Clocks, and My Life and Hard Times, which Russell Baker calls “possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written.” Here too are the best pieces from The Owl in the Attic, Let Your Mind Alone!, My World—And Welcome To It, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals. From his other famous collections are included such favorites as “The Pet Department,” “The Black Magic of Barney Haller,” "Nine Needles,’ “the Macbeth Murder Mystery,” and “File and Forget,” revealing an astonishingly diverse mix of literary parodies, eccentric portraits, stories of domestic warfare and inner terror, reminiscences both tender and farcical, extravagant feats of wordplay, freewheeling burlesques of popular culture (from detective novels to self-help fads), and exasperated protests against the mechanized impersonality of the modern world.Thurber’s wonderful drawings—spontaneous creations of which he once said, “I don’t think any drawing ever took me more than three minutes”—are here in profusion, with their population of husbands, wives, dogs, seals, and various species of Thurber’s own invention. His first great cartoon collection, The Seal in the Bedroom, is presented complete, along with such celebrated sequences like “The Masculine Approach” and “The War Between Men and Women,” and his devastatingly straightforward illustrated versions of once-canonical poems such as “Barbara Frietchie” and “Excelsior.”Rounding out this volume is a selection from The Years with Ross, his memoir of New Yorker publisher Harold Ross, and a number of pieces, previously uncollected by Thurber, including some early work never before reprinted.

    Mueller captures the glamour and grittiness of Cookie Mueller?s life and times. Here are previously unpublished stories - wacky as they are enlightening - along with favorites from Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black and other publications. Also the best of Cookie?s art columns from Details magazine, and the funniest of her advice columns from the East Village Eye, on everything from homeopathic medicine to how to cut your cocaine with a healthy substance. This collection is as much an autobiography as it is a map of downtown New York in the early ?80s - that moment before Bright Lights, Big City, before the art world exploded, before New York changed into a yuppie metropolis, while it still had a glimmer of bohemian life.

    On the occasion of her acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters on the sixth of November, 1996, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison speaks with brevity and passion to the pleasures, the difficulties, the necessities, of the reading/writing life in our time.From the Hardcover edition.

    There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to it, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. How wild is wilderness and how wild are our experiences in it, asks Jack Turner in the pages of The Abstract Wild. His answer: not very wild. National parks and even so-called wilderness areas fall far short of offering the primal, mystic connection possible in wild places. And this is so, Turner avows, because any managed land, never mind what it's called, ceases to be wild. Moreover, what little wildness we have left is fast being destroyed by the very systems designed to preserve it. Natural resource managers, conservation biologists, environmental economists, park rangers, zoo directors, and environmental activists: Turner's new book takes aim at these and all others who labor in the name of preservation. He argues for a new conservation ethic that focuses less on preserving things and more on preserving process and "leaving things be." He takes off after zoos and wilderness tourism with a vengeance, and he cautions us to resist language that calls a tree "a resource" and wilderness "a management unit." Eloquent and fast-paced, The Abstract Wild takes a long view to ask whether ecosystem management isn't "a bit of a sham" and the control of grizzlies and wolves "at best a travesty." Next, the author might bring his readers up-close for a look at pelicans, mountain lions, or Shamu the whale. From whatever angle, Turner stirs into his arguments the words of dozens of other American writers including Thoreau, Hemingway, Faulkner, and environmentalist Doug Peacock. We hunger for a kind of experience deep enough to change our selves, our form of life, writes Turner. Readers who take his words to heart will find, if not their selves, their perspectives on the natural world recast in ways that are hard to ignore and harder to forget.

    

    A hefty compilation of essays (both pictorial and prose), notes, concept sketches and interviews by (and with) Hayao Miyazaki. Arguably the most respected animation director in the world, Miyazaki is the genius behind "Howl's Moving Castle," Princess Mononoke" and the Academy Award-winning film, "Spirited Away."

    For almost seven years, Lispector showed Brazilian readers just how vast and passionate her interests were. This beautifully translated collection of selected columns, or crônicas, is just as immediately stimulating today and ably reinforces her reputation as one of Brazil's greatest writers. Indeed, these columns should establish her as being among the era's most brilliant essayists. She is masterful, even reminiscent of Montaigne, in her ability to spin the mundane events of life into moments of clarity that reveal greater truths."—Publishers Weekly

    Harlan Ellison's stories and essays have been on the cutting edge of contemporary American Literature for over 40 years, but he stubbornly refuses to abandon the use of a manual typewriter. He's involved in every medium from television drama to comic books, and his works have been translated into 26 languages. Although he's won more awards for his writing than any living fantasist, Harlan still refuses to eat lima beans. In May 1996, White Wolf announced what is still its most ambitious publishing program for a single author: the first 20 volumes of the collected fiction, essays, teleplays and columns of the writer whom The Washington Post calls ""one of the great living American short story writers"." The first volume of this series, containing An Edge in My Voice and Over the Edge, is now available in trade paperback. Both books have been completely revised, updated and expanded for the hardcover publication, and this trade edition has been re-edited as well".

    Instead she travels the world at an observant pace, talking to strangers and introducing readers to an endearing assemblage of eccentric neighbors, Filipina faith healers, dry-cleaning proprietors, and other quirky characters.A Palestinian-American who lives in a Mexican-American neighborhood, Nye speaks for the mix of people and places that can be called the American Experience. From St. Louis, the symbolic Gateway to the West, she embarks on a westward migration to examine America, past and present, and to glimpse into the lives of its latest outsiders--illegal immigrants from Mexico and troubled inner-city children.In other essays Nye ventures beyond North America's bounds, telling of a year in her childhood spent in Palestine and of an adulthood filled with cross-cultural quests. Whether recounting the purchase of a car on the island of Oahu or a camel-back ride through India's Thar Desert, Nye writes in wry, refreshing tones about themes that transcend borders and about the journey that remains the greatest of all--the journey from outside to in as the world enters each one of us, as we learn to see.

    A New York Times Notable Book of the Year   When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads.  For starters, she was straight and he was gay.  But Marion and Tony's impossible love turned out to be true enough to produce a marriage and two beautiful sons, true enough to weather drug addiction, sexual betrayal, and the AIDS that would kill Tony at the age of thirty-seven, twelve years after they met.    In a memoir heartbreaking and hilarious by turns, Marion Winik tells a story that is all more powerful for the way in which it defies easy judgments.  As it charts the trajectory of a marriage so impossible that it became inevitable, First Comes Love reminds us—poignantly indelibly—that every story is a special case.

    With dazzling intelligence and wit, Gass sifts through cultural issues of our time and contemplates how written language, whether a sentence or an entire book, is a container of consciousness, the gateway to another's mind that we enter for a while and make our own.

    From art and cinema, through politics, bodybuilding, science fiction and the city, they both reflect and challenge these times of radical change and puzzlement. Matching guts to theory, anger with compassion, Acker offers original views on the likes of Peter Greenaway, Samuel Delaney, Burroughs, de Sade, and Cronenberg's Crash. Collectively, these essays offer the reader a journey into strangeness, provocation and delight.

    Coming almost entirely from Davies? own files of unpublished material, these twenty-four essays and lectures range over themes from "The Novelist and Magic" to "Literature and Technology," from "Painting, Fiction, and Faking," to "Can a Doctor Be a Humanist?" and "Creativity in Old Age." For devotees of Davies and all lovers of literature and language, here is the "urbanity, wit, and high seriousness mixed by a master chef" (Cleveland Plain Dealer)?vintage delights from an exquisite literary menu. Davies himself says merely: "Lucky writers. . .like wine, die rich in fruitiness and delicious aftertaste, so that their works survive them." Viking will publish Robertson Davies? Happy Alchemy in July 1998Many fine works by Robertson Davies are available from Penguin including The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, and The Salterton Trilogy

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    A new and avidly awaited collection, The Secondary Colors is an exposition of marvels that follows his witty, encyclopedic, and endlessly fascinating book on the primary colors. In the perfection of its language, looping the factual to the fabulous, this dazzling work, at once a meditation and a mythic celebration, madly delights in the information on which it also depends, like a duck drinking the water on which it also floats. Theroux is scholar and showman both, uncannily able to teach and to please in a prose so striking and of such measureless intensity and wayward poetic enchantment that every page, transfigured with a singing grace, reflects the bounty of riches gathered from a thousand fronts to make each color live, in the very same way, according to the proverb born of an old belief: It takes an entire village to raise a child.

    Here are the stars (Truman Capote on Marilyn Monroe, Joan Didion on John Wayne, Tom Wolfe on Cary Grant, Lauren Bacall on herself), the directors (John Houseman on Orson Welles, Kenneth Tynan on Mel Brooks, John Huston on himself), the makers and shakers (producer Julia Phillips, mogul Daryll F. Zanuck, stuntman Joe Bonomo), and the critics and theorists (Pauline Kael, Graham Greene, Andrew Sarris, Susan Sontag). Here as well are the novelists who have indelibly captured the experience of moviegoing in our lives (Walker Percy, James Agee, Larry McMurtry) and the culture of the movie business (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Budd Schulberg, Nathanael West). Here is a book to get lost in and return to time and time againat once a history, an anatomy, and a loving appreciation of the central art form of our time.

    In this collection of short essays and personal vignettes, which take on everything from spirituality and religion to capitalism and the prison-industrial complex, Mumia examines the deeper dimensions of existence.Mumia’s ability to celebrate life and advocate for revolutionary change while being held, at the state’s convenience, at death’s door, imbues his thoughts and words with power and passion. "Many people say it is insane to resist the system, but actually, it is insane not to," he writes in "Politics." In "God-Talk on Phase II" he writes, "On death’s brink, men begin to see things they’ve perhaps never seen before. Like those around them, and especially those who share their fate…men whose death warrants have been signed, men with a date to die—live each day with a clarity and a vibrancy they might have lacked in less pressured times."Mumia turns this clarity towards his quest for spiritual and social fulfillment drawing connections between religion and race politics. He embraces spirituality while exploring the true nature of the institutions that have sentenced him to die."Crucial reading for all opponents of the death penalty—and for those who support it, too."—Katha Pollitt, The Nation"A brilliant, lucid meditation on the moral obligation of political commitment by a deeply ethical—and deeply wronged—human being. Mumia should be freed, now."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr."If Mumia Abu-Jamal has nothing important to say, why are so many powerful people trying to kill him and shut him up? Read him."—John Edgar WidemanMumia Abu-Jamal, an award-winning journalist and former Black Panther Party member, has been living on death row in a Pennsylvania prison since 1982.

    Reel To Real collects hooks' classic essays on films such as Paris Is Burning or the infamous "Whose Pussy Is It" essay about Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, as well as newer work on Pulp Fiction, Crooklyn and Waiting To Exhale. hooks also examines the world of independent cinema. Conversations with filmmakers Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, and Arthur Jaffa are linked with critical essays, including a piece on Larry Clark's Kids, to show that cinema can function subversively as well as maintain the status quo.

    In Ornament and Silence we see Virginia Woolf, haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's theatrically importunate mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and--on every page--delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose."A wonderfully idiosyncratic set of essays on women famous and unknown whose public and private lives Fraser examines with great feeling and exactitude...insight, intelligence, and grace."--Newsday"Subtlety, fluency, candor, an agile sensate intellect--Kennedy Fraser brings all these gifts to bear on a subject that is not always contemplated so untendentiously, with such independence of mind, and from such a generous and worldly point of view."--Phillip Roth

    An eclectic stylist who crafts sentences like no one else, Davenport will fascinate "people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things".

    Through essays on memory and metaphor, pacing, and the intricacies of voice and tone, and thoughtful appreciations of Chekhov, Ritsos, Mandelstam, and Rilke, Dobyns guides readers and writers through poetry's mysterious twilight communiques. For this new second edition, Dobyns has added two new essays, one dealing with the idea of "beauty" in poetry and another dealing with the almost mystical way poets connect seemingly disparate elements in a single work.

    Finding pleasure in the customs and characters of small-town life, in The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth he writes with affection about the town elders, seen by those in the outside world as misfits and losers. “They taught me what to value, what to ignore, what to embrace, and what to resist.” In his trek through the heartland, Holm covers a satisfyingly wide emotional terrain, from scandalous affairs in the 1950s to his aunt’s touching attempts to transcend poverty with perfume and movie-star airs.

    Delving into an immense range of topics, from philosophy and literature to social criticism to mathematics and science, with essays that date from 1930s to the 1990s, Martin Gardner has astounded readers with his insight and erudition. The Night Is Large is the crowning achievement of his extraordinary career.

    These intelligent, searching essays are a passionate meditation on food, character, and place.

    Also collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again and originally published in Harper's, this is another travelogue turned existential rumination that shows unabashedly and hilariously the horrors of society (this time via a cruise ship) and really says more about the author himself.

    Her nonfiction, with its many voices, is always passionate and compelling. True Stories is an extraordinary book, spanning twenty-five years of work, by one of Australia's great writers.

    Included are tales of mothers and daughters, rebels and seeresses, community activists and aging gangbangers, as well as essays on film and literature, politics and race, and on the difficulties and necessities of forging an identity as an artist, activist, and black woman. It is a treasure trove not only for those familiar with Bambara's work, but for a new generation of readers who will recognize her contribution to contemporary American letters.

    Edited by Samuel S. Vaughan.

    Both The Cancer Journals and A Burst of Light give an insight over a ten year period of her life with cancer. Sister Outsider continues her writing and documents her essays and speeches.

    Delany, a Nebula and Hugo award-winning author and a major commentator on American literature and culture. In this collection of six extended essays, Delany challenges what he calls "the hard-edged boundaries of meaning" by going beyond the customary limits of the genre in which he's writing. By radically reworking the essay form, Delany can explore and express the many layers of his thinking about the nature of art, the workings of language, and the injustices and ironies of social, political, and sexual marginalization. Thus Delany connects, in sometimes unexpected ways, topics as diverse as the origins of modern theater, the context of lesbian and gay scholarship, the theories of cyborgs, how metaphors mean, and the narrative structures in the Star Wars trilogy."Over the course of his career," Kenneth James writes in his extensive introduction, "Delany has again and again thrown into question the world-models that all too many of us unknowingly live by." Indeed, Delany challenges an impressive list of world-models here, including High and Low Art, sanity and madness, mathematical logic and the mechanics of mythmaking, the distribution of wealth in our society, and the limitations of our sexual vocabulary. Also included are two essays that illustrate Delany's unique chrestomathic technique, the grouping of textual fragments whose associative interrelationships a reader must actively trace to read them as a resonant argument. Whether writing about Wagner or Hart Crane, Foucault or Robert Mapplethorpe, Delany combines a fierce and often piercing vision with a powerful honesty that beckons us to share in the perspective of these Longer Views.

    In this collection, Remnick's gift for character is sharper than ever, whether he writes about Gary Hart stumbling through life after Donna Rice or Mario Cuomo, who now presides over a Saturday morning radio talk show, fielding questions from crackpots, or about Michael Jordan's awesome return to the Chicago Bulls -- or Reggie Jackson's last times at bat.Remnick's portraits of such disparate characters as Alger Hiss and Ralph Ellison, Richard Nixon and Elaine Pagels, Gerry Adams and Marion Barry are unified by this extraordinary ability to create a living character, so that the pieces in this book, taken together, constitute a splendid pageant of the representative characters of our time.

    Veteran journalist Pete Hamill never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

    Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years. Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context.

    This anthology from his work, which Shepard himself assembled not long before his death, addresses themes touched on in many of his books. Many of these themes deal in one way or another with the disastrous consequences of humankind’s increasing detachment from the natural world as a by-product of “the ecological insolence of the last century.” In Shepard’s view, the natural world—and particularly the world of animals—is the source of human intelligence and the wellspring of the imagination. He examines, for instance, the antiquity of the human eye, an organ essential to the cognitive revolution that distinguishes us from other primates; the origins of language and literature in the imitation of birdsong; and the lessons animals of many species can teach us about ourselves. Shepard delves into environmental psychology, anatomy, history, linguistics, and a host of other topics to make his strikingly original arguments, which have helped shape modern environmental thinking and influenced the writings of such successors as Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams.

    This book is a collection of prose pieces, the line between fact and fancy, between actuality and invention is constantly blurred.

    As a word, it not only recalls the place that we grew up in and that had much to do with the people we eventually became, but also points ahead to the home that, in faith, we believe awaits us at life's end. Writing at the approach of his seventieth birthday, he describes, both in prose and in a group of poems, the one particular house that was most precious to him as a child, the books he read there, and the people he loved there. He speaks also of the lifelong search we are all engaged in to make a new home for ourselves and for our families, which is at the same time a search to find something like the wholeness and comfort of home with ourselves. As he turns his attention to our dreams of the heavenly home still to come, he sees it as both hallowing and fulfilling the charity and the peach of our original home.Writing with warmth, wisdom, and compelling eloquence, Frederick Buechner once again enables us to see more deeply into the secret places of our hearts. The Longing for Home will help to bring clarity and guidance to anyone who searches for meaning in a world that all too often seems meaningless.

    Self-taught, his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--formed the basis of his insight to human nature. The Temper of Our Time examines the influence of the juvenile mentality, the rise of automation, the black revolution, the regression of the back-to-nature movement, the intellectual vs. learning, and other relevent issues.

    Nock (1870-1945) explores some of his most cherished themes.

    (see p. S2, S5, S6) E.B. White and his way with words has become legendary.Read and personally introduced by E.B. White's son, Joel White (1931-1997), this unique recording includes Letter to the IRS, Once More to the Lake, The Ring of Time, The Sea and the Wind, excerpts from best-loved essays in One Man's Meat, and more. 2 hours.

    Alice Walker Banned explores just what it is that various groups have found so threatening in Walker's work, bringing together the short stories "Roselily" and "Am I Blue?," an excerpt from the novel The Color Purple, as well as testimonies, letters, and essays about attempts to censor Walker's work by the California State Board of Education. The introduction by San Francisco Chronicle Book Review editor Patricia Holt offers insightful and ironic commentary on the efforts of the Traditional Values Coalition to pressure the State Board of Education into withdrawing Walker's stories from a statewide exam, while excerpts from a Board of Education hearing offer views from across the political spectrum on these efforts to censor Walker's work.…a fascinating, frightening book…—Mirabella…an invaluable contribution to the literature of censorship…—Booklist…this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.—Library Journal

    Book by Broderick, Carlfred

    Reassuring proof that two people who love each other according to God's teaching can keep everything pasted together (almost) no matter what.

    The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdieand Henry James.

    But changing their behavior may be in our power. In this provocative, visionary book, Carol Bly examines some of this century's most far-ranging concepts about how to nurture ethical human beings and presents them through the lens of excellent contemporary literature. Changing the Bully Who Rules the World is a book of hopeful, practical ideas that can hasten ethical change both in our thinking and in our behavior. Through an anthology of exceptional literature, Bly's book asks the reader to contemplate anew the voices she presents - including works by Charles Baxter, Donald Hall, Jim Harrison, Mark Helprin, Denise Levertov, Thomas McGrath, Joyce Carol Oates, Mary Oliver, Katha Pollitt, Alice Walker, Tobias Wolff, and many others - and to consider them in terms of the ideas of important thinkers in human behavior and our own experiences.

    Du Bois Reader encompasses the whole of Du Bois's long and multifaceted writing career, from the 1890s through the early 1960s. The volume selects key essays and longer works that portray the range of Du Bois's thought on such subjects as African American culture, thepolitics and sociology of American race relations, art and music, black leadership, gender and women's rights, Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, and Communism in the U.S. and abroad. Chronologically, the volume stretches from definitive early essays such as The Conservation of Races to later works such as Africa and World Peace and Gandhi and the American Negro. Du Bois's most famous book, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and his landmark work on colonialism, Darkwater(1920), which contains many of his best-known shorter essays, such as The African Roots of the War, On Being Black, and The Burden of Black Women, are both printed in their entirety. Key chapters drawn from full-length studies, including The Philadelphia Negro, The Gift of Black Folk, BlackReconstruction, Dusk of Dawn, The World and Africa, In Battle for Peace, and Du Bois's posthumous autobiography are supplemented by dozens of shorter essays covering topics in literature, education, African politics, urban studies, and American foreign policy. Individual essays and selections fromlonger works also illustrate Du Bois's skillful biographical studies of historical figures such as Toussaint L'Ouverture, Phillis Wheatley, Abraham Lincoln, and John Brown, as well as contemporaries like Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, Paul Robeson, and Joseph Stalin.Supplemented by an extensive critical introduction and headnotes to major works and topics, theOxford Reader offers the most extensive compilation of Du Bois's writings now available.

    Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, Calamities of Exile combines three gripping narratives that afford a sort of double CAT scan into the natures of both modern totalitarianism and timeless exile.

    Whether highlighting the synaesthesis of the word in its isolation or in the plain phrase as it operates in daily life to convey our most banal thoughts, this collection of long out-of-print chapbooks -- none of these poems have appeared in ally of Bernstein's many breakthrough volumes, such as Islets/Irritations (1983) or Dark City (1994) -- provides a unique overview of his career, and adds to the range of his impressive canon of major and minor works. The first poem from the 1976 volume Parsing titled "Sentences", will surprise anyone expecting text-over-speech, as it is practically a litany of anxieties, attitudes and stuttering intensities. This attention to spoken language makes such dense works as "Poem" (from 1978's Shade) both welcoming and discomforting, expressionistically cinematic but not without its moments of eye-wink satiric narrative. In the short poems collected in The Absent Father in "Dumbo" and Residual Rubbernecking, Bernstein takes the project far from the austere fragments of the early works and deep into a purposely "purple" and unbeautiful lyricism: "Such mortal slurp to strain this sprawl went droopy/Gadzooks it seems would bend these slopes in girth/None trailing failed to hear the ship looks loopey/Who's seen it nailed uptight right at its berth". Bernstein always manages to find the furthest reaches of any norms of "good taste" (be it mainstream or avant-garde), creating a poetics that reveals the social codes hidingbehind all of poetry's tropes and forms. Though many of the later poems here seem unfocused and minor compared to the fabulous and ambitious early chapbooks, the volume as a whole presents as many promises as it does relevant problems, as many beauties as it does strange new imaginings.

    ‘Islands and Images’ describes the Aran Islands themselves; ‘Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara’, the title-essay, elevates the map-maker’s craft into art; ‘The View from Errisbeg’ integrates the landscapes of Galway Bay, the Burren and Connemara by way of topography, botany and geology; ‘Space, Time and Connemara’, centrepiece to the collection, surveys the archaeology and human geography of the West, its settlement patterns, families, dispersals and privations, its missioners and the modern tide of tourism and mariculture; ‘A Connemara Fractal’ is a fascinating autobiographical digression through Cambridge and the convergences of mathematics, geometry and geology, towards landscape-theory and the Book of Connemara as yet unwritten; ‘Place/Person/Book’ introduces Synge’s masterwork, The Aran Islands; ‘Listening to the Landscape’ takes for its theme the Irish language and placenames as an emanation of the land; ‘Four Threads’ connects four archetypal figures – smuggler, rebel priest, land-agent and wandering rhymer – to their histories in nineteenth century Connemara. Other texts rehearse the potencies of discovery, botanical (Erica mackaiana in Roundstone), archaeological (a Bronze Age quartz alignment in Gleninagh) and personal. Some are anecdotal, some meditative; each is individually conceived as a work of literature. Tim Robinson has been stepping into spacetime since 1972, mapping the unknown by way of the known. With Setting Foot on the Shore of Connemara he captures the numinous in a net of words and images, and creates his own illuminated manual of memory.

    Writers of fantasy, says Cooper, deal in "myth, legend, folktale, the mystery of dream and the greater mystery of Time. With all that haunting our minds, it isn't surprising that we write stories about an ordinary world in which extraordinary things happen." This fascinating collection of essays, compelling reading for any parent, teacher, librarian, or booklover, contains 20 years of an author's reflections on the nature of craft, imagination, and her young audience. Some of the topics are focused on fantasy; others range from the theater to literacy, from poetry to war. Although Susan Cooper is also a gifted playwright and television screenwriter (Foxfire, The Dollmaker, To Dance with the White Dog), her novels for young adults contain her best work. Her concern for children's literature permeates Dreams and Wishes, making it a book that is both entertaining and disturbing. At the heart of Cooper's work is a passionate plea for the recognition, in an image-oriented world, of the all-encompassing power and value of the written word.

    An introduction places The Master and Margarita and Bulgakov within Russian history and literature, and essays by scholars offer opinion and analysis of the novel's structure, its place in current criticism, its connection to Goethe, and its symbolism and motifs. There is also an abundance of primary source material, including an excerpt from an earlier version of the novel, and related correspondence and diary entries.Northwestern University Press and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) are pleased to announce the establishment of a new series of critical companions to Russian literature. Under the direction of the AATSEEL Publications Committee, leading scholars will edit volumes intended to introduce classics of Russian literature to both teachers and students at the high school and undergraduate levels. Each volume will open with the volume editor's general introduction discussing the work in the context of the writer's oeuvre as well as its place within the literary tradition. The introductory section will also include considerations of existing translations and of textual problems in the original Russian. The following sections will contain several informative and wide-ranging articles by other scholars; primary sources and other background material - letters, memoirs, early reviews, maps; and annotated bibliographies. Combining the highest order of scholarship with accessibility, these critical companions will illuminate the great works of Russian literature and enhance their appreciation by both teachers and students.

    50 photos.

    It would be a darkly humorous understatement to say that this collection is not intended for the squeamish. Peter Sotos is the world's foremost practitioner of verbal brutality. His words achieve a nearly inconceivable level of intensity while offering the most cohesive, insightful commentary on pornography currently available. And he serves it up without detached, hypocritical hand-wringing or the sticky postmodern safety net of camp humor. Devotees of blandly moralistic “true crime” writing and pockmarked collectors of “horror” fiction won't find much to suit their tastes here. Total Abuse features nearly all of Sotos's written output since 1984... PURE. The world's first self-published true-crime fanzine, PURE was so convincingly written that it led to police surveillance of the author and his subsequent arrest. The first two issues of PURE have been endlessly photocopied on the bootleg circuit; their complete text is reprinted herein. The text to both volumes of PURE III, written in 1985, is being published here for the first time anywhere. Included are the author's essays on child pornography; anal rape; Nazi fetishes; Prostitutes' crushed skulls; homosexual slaughter; and a close-up lens on the bawling faces of victims' family members. TOOL. A brief collection of fictionalized psycho sexual narratives, the first chapter of which caused seismic levels of uneasiness when printed in ANSWER Me! #4. Sotos regales the reader with thoughts on his arrest; child abuse; gay-bashing; race-baiting; project-dwelling crack whores; peep-show dancers; murdered male hookers; and the inexorable pain of surviving friends 'n' family. PARASITE. Pornography examined, prodded, deconstructed, and understood as never before. Originally published as twenty issues of a monthly newsletter, PARASITE is literary criticism seamlessly woven with personal psychodrama. Sotos scrutinizes gay glory-hole porn; true-crime untruths; gang-bang videos; and his favorite philosophical ghetto, radical feminism. He delivers surprisingly witty one-liners regarding the current glut of empowerment-theory, sexual-healing, self-help gibberish. He ruminates about the “money shot” and its degrading potential. More abused kids. More crying mothers. More bad feelings on all sides. Total Abuse contains a brief introduction by Jim Goad and an extensive interview with Peter Sotos. WARNING: TOTAL ABUSE is not for the squeamish!!!

    It is related to two kinds of lively American writing: the revisionist mythmaking feminists are engaged in, especially but not exclusively in poetry.

    Out of Order, Out of Sight is an artistic and intellectual autobiography and an (occasionally scathing) commentary on mainstream art, art criticism, and American culture of the last twenty-five years.Piper is an internationally recognized conceptual artist and the only African American in the early conceptual art movement of the 1960s. The writings in Out of Order, Out of Sight trace the development of her thinking about her artwork and the art world, and her evolving awareness of herself as a creative, racial, and gendered subject situated in an often limiting and always absurd cultural and social context.

    Bernard tells the tale of his life, loves and failures over forty years.

    While straight plays struggle to survive on Broadway, musicals play to near capacity houses. They are also a favorite of school and community groups. In this smart and practical guide, New Line Theatre artistic director Scott Miller looks at twenty musicals from a director's point of view, with solid suggestions for anyone thinking of embarking on such a production. Includes discussions of Gypsy, Assassins, Into the Woods, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story, as well as many others.Visit Scott's website at http: //www.geocities.com/Broadway/3164/

    Portrait Inside My Head was listed in The New Yorker’s “Books to Watch Out For” and praised by The New York Times Book Review as “riveting [and] arresting,” with “sculptured scenes worthy of fiction.” Hailed as “America’s Montaigne” by the Baltimore City Paper and compared to “Henry Roth and early Saul Bellow” by the Christian Science Monitor, Lopate has an easy, conversational style that pushes his piercing insights to new depths, celebrating the life of the mind and illuminating memories and feelings both distant and immediate. The result is a charming and spirited new book from the undisputed master of the form.

    Read it and you'll hear the desert call."--Commonweal"Rich in the unique metaphor that the desert inspires, enhanced by the author's exquisite line drawings, this book is a delightful and endlessly informing piece of work."--Smithsonian"For anyone who loves the American Southwest, Ann Zwinger's books are essential reading. The Mysterious Lands continues her authoritative natural history of this most beautiful and most interesting region of the entire planet."--(Edward Abbey)

    From a Native Son collects his most important and unflinching essays, which explore the themes of

    The Journal is an account of events and reflections that offer the occasion for this great writer to continue rethinking and reimagining the human condition. These remarkable selections from Gustaw Herling's Journal, written from 1970 to the present, include such astonishing fictional tales, based on historical sources, as "Rubble," "The Duke of Milan," "The Miracle," and "A Venetian Portrait," a love story that takes place at the end of World War II. But the heart of the Journal is brilliant critical pieces on Soviet Communism and literary gems on such writers as Ignazio Silone, Stendhal, Melville, Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Camus.

    Essays by 13 contributors who interpret the North Cascades from the different perspectives of their disciplines and daily

    While retaining the key elements of the first edition, including surveys of major figures such as Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, and Sam Shepard, Bigsby also explores recent works by established dramatists.

    Erudite, witty and often controversial, The London Review of Books informs and entertains its readers with a fortnightly dose of the best and liveliest of all things cultural.This anthology brings together some of the most memorable pieces from recent years, includes Alan Bennett’s Diary, Christopher Hitchens on Bill Clinton’s presidency, Terry Castle’s hotly-debated reading of Jane Austen’s letters, Jerry Fodor taking issue with Richard Dawkins on evolution, Victor Kiernan on treason, Jenny Diski musing on death, Stephen Frears’ adventures in Hollywood, Linda Colley on Nancy Reagan, Frank Kermode on Paul de Man and much much more.

    The 34 contributors—who include David Ehrenfeld, Lynn R. Miller, Wendell Berry, Deborah Tall, David W. Orr, Robert Swann, and Susan Witt, as well as other philosophers, scientists, activists, economists, historians, farmers and ranchers, sociologists, theologians, and political scientists—offer an array of social and ecological perspectives on the nature of "community." The editors, William Vitek and Wes Jackson, contend that a deeper understanding of communities is critical for the health of the planet and the human spirit. They offer a compelling collection of new and classic writings—many in the form of personal narrative—that extend E. F. Schumacher's ideas about the importance of human scale and Aldo Leopold's concept of biotic citizenship. Proposing eloquent defenses of community life and practical suggestions for becoming connected to others and native to a place, the writers explore the loss of community, the philosophical foundations of communities, and the current renewal of community life.

    A fabulous queen, a fan of prurience and pornography, a great admirer of the male body, he was well known as such to the gay audiences who enjoyed his films, the police who censored them, the gallery owners who refused to show his male nudes, and the artists who shied from his swishiness, not to mention all the characters who populated the Factory. Yet even though Warhol became the star of postmodernism, avant-garde, and pop culture, this collection of essays is the first to explore, analyze, appreciate, and celebrate the role of Warhol’s queerness in the making and reception of his film and art. Ranging widely in approach and discipline, Pop Out demonstrates that to ignore Warhol’s queerness is to miss what is most valuable, interesting, sexy, and political about his life and work.Written from the perspectives of art history, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, cinema studies, and social and literary theory, these essays consider Warhol in various contexts and within the history of the communities in which he figured. The homoerotic subjects, gay audiences, and queer contexts that fuel a certain fascination with Warhol are discussed, as well as Batman, Basquiat, and Valerie Solanas. Taken together, the essays in this collection depict Warhol’s career as a practical social reflection on a wide range of institutions and discourses, including those, from the art world to mass culture, that have almost succeeded in sanitizing his work and his image. Contributors. Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, Marcie Frank, David E. James, Mandy Merck, Michael Moon, José Esteban Muñoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Brian Selsky, Sasha Torres, Simon Watney, Thomas Waugh

    Some of the best of the writings from one of the most courageous priests of conscience in the Cold War, murdered in 1990.

    This new translation synthesizes the results of modern study, presenting the work in its historical context. The first book to render original Chinese rhymes into rhymed English.

    His work appeared indefatigably in The Nation, The New Republic, The London Observer, The New York Times, Harper's, Esquire, New York Magazine, and more. The Collected Works of Harold Clurman captures over six hundred of Clurman's encounters with the most significant events in American theatre - as well as his regular passionate embraces of dance, music, art and film. This chronological epic offers the most comprehensive view of American theatre seen through the eyes of our most extraordinary critic. 1102 pages, hardcover.

    Contents Overture Another VoicePiecmeal SheltersPiecemeal Shelters Art of Pariahs Language and Shame Alphabets of Flesh Passion Skin Song Whose House is This? House of a thousand Doors Hotel Alexandria Sidi Syed's Architecture Tangled Roots Poem by the Wellside Bobating Her Garden Erupting Words Aunt Chinna Coda from Night-SceneTranslating ViolenceBordering Ourselves Her Mother's Words Ashtamudi Lake Translating Violence Desert Rose Estrangement Becomes the Mark of the Eagle Accidental Markings Great Brown River The Storm: A Poem in Five PartsMaking Up MemoryThat Other Body 'A garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse...' New World Aria No Nation Woman White Horseman Blues Migrant Music A Durable Past Performing the Word For Safdar Hashmi Beaten to death Just Outside Delhi Moloyashree Making Up Memory Brief Chronicle by Candlelight San Andreas Fault The Shock of Arrival Paper Filled with LightSkins with Fire Inside: Indian Women WritersFracturing the Iconic Feminine In Search of Sarojini NaiduCodaTheater of Sense Aftermath: Title Search Well Jumped Women

    However, much of the River Road is hidden; with few signs or explanations readily available, it is easy to miss some of the most memorable sites. Along the River Road, like the first edition, is a portable reference and companion. It includes historical background, why and how the area has developed as it has - including information about the river and river control, the sugar industry, and the Catholic Church - and the road's physical appearance - such as land development, architectural forms, and natural history.

    A bilingual edition (Spanish/English) of Caja de herramientas, a series of imaginative stories or fantastic reflections on the nature of things that help us to organize our lives, such as the hammer, the screwdriver, the piece of string, by a promising Mexican writer.

    Lansdale is something of an icon, or a writer's writer, if you will. I began reading him in 1981, with novels like "Act of Love" and in publications like Mike Shayne and Twilight Zone. Here was a bold new purveyor of the macabre—cutting-edge and razor-sharp, with a creepy neo-Gothic style unlike anything I'd read previously—a writer daring to be different. Lansdale was just starting out back then, and his work was outstanding. I shuddered to think how good he'd be in, say, 15 years, and I'm still shuddering. Since those early days, he has written more than a dozen novels and hundreds of short stories, commentaries, and articles, and he has even done comic and television work. Let's call him...a "speculative" author, because speculative fiction, at least to me, has always been the stuff of real literature and true art—fiction that breathes more than whatever genre it might be placed in, work that resonates with something beyond the priority to entertain, work that tells us something about ourselves, our times, and our systems of belief. Lansdale isn't a horror writer, nor a suspense writer, nor a sci-fi/fantasy writer, and on the same hand, he's all of those things amalgamated, a writer whose creativity defies category. There's a certain voice to Lansdale that can't be duplicated or even effectively defined, and it's that voice that gives anything he does a thrilling and uncanny power that gets its claws right into your soul. Any given Lansdale book provides a grab bag full of surprises. You never quite know what you're going to get, but you do know youwon't be disappointed. This is a versatility most writers couldn't manage in three careers, and I suppose it's this same element that can help explain the fury his name now generates to collectors and specialty publishers, for Lansdale (in spite of a considerable profile in the mass market) has enjoyed about as positive a cult following as any author could ask. Hard-core fans simply can't get enough of this man's work (we're talking a lot of hard-core fans), and that incontestable fact clarifies this pair of classy, first-rate hardback collections. It's the rabid interest in the Lansdale muse and the man behind it. "In The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent," Lansdale nearly apologizes for some of the stories, citing that "some are, well, mediocre, and a few are just plain bad," and amusingly, he refers to "A Fist Full of Stories" as a "garage-sale collection." Not much of an endorsement from the author himself, but who cares? Lansdale needs no endorsement from anyone. It's true, a few of the stories aren't very good, but even these early clunkers reveal some delectable slivers of the Lansdale magic. Conversely, many of the pieces in both collections are not only great stories ("The Junkyard," "Master of Misery," "Night Drive," and "Drive-In Date" to name a few) but they serve to shed light on Lansdale as the young, evolving author or, more abstractly, the entity behind the superior fund of work that now trails behind him in 1997. What's particularly fascinating are the author's keenly biographical introductions (which you then catch glimpses of in the work) and the personal miniforewords to each piece. Of 'Fist Full', Lansdale writes: "This collection contains some odds and ends of my career that I don't mind seeing reprinted for followers of my work to examine." However modest that may sound, this is exactly the point of both collections—they're vehicles that enable the Lansdale reader to track the maturation and progress of the author's creative being. Not only do you get Lansdale's fiction, you get his attitude, his perceptions and opinions, his creative influences, and the things he loves and the things he hates (not to mention some utterly intriguing tales about his growing up). And there's more than just fiction in 'Fist Full:' "Drive-In Date" is written as a play, and his "Trash Theater" movie reviews (cowritten with David Webb) will have you laughing so hard, you'll be banging your head against the wall. Both volumes share impressive production standards (a must for collectors and Lansdale connoisseurs)—these are quality first editions, to be sure. For Lansdale zealots specifically, these aren't just great, they're essential books. But even to an incidental reader who's never heard of Joe R. Lansdale: Read these books and you'll be buying everything else you can put your hands on by the guy. All in all, both of these volumes present an assemblage of fine work from an author who keeps making waves and just keeps getting better.—Edward Lee

    

    Selected from more than 350 American and Canadian newspaper and magazines, the 1996 collection features a wide variety of sports and sports figures in 30 delightfully intriguing pieces.The 13th round / David Davis --The savior / Tom Junod --Polite, feminine, can bench press Dennis Conner / Karen Karbo --The ultimate prize / Rick Reilly --The high price of hard living / Tom Verducci --An utter disaster / Michael Goodman --The end of the world / Kenny Moore --Down and out / Joel Reese --Hard-core hoops / Tom Farrey --Living with a lie / Michael Bamberger --Called strike / Roger Angell --The game's the thing / Roger Angell --Back in play / David Remnick --Jimmy Thompson's fallen house of cards / Mark Coomes and Pat Forde --Small colleges, big game / Larry Dorman. A 90's kind of rivalry / Peter De Jonce --A shot that resounds in Hoosier hearts / William Gildea --A team's true colors / David Aldridge --Belittled big men / Pat Jordan --Trouble on the court / Frank Deford --Big / Jan Reid --Man of the century / Bill Fields --What might have been / Greg Couch --Cal on the verge / Mat Edelson --A native son's thoughts / Richard Ben Cramer --He told it like it was, like only he could / Tony Kornheiser

    Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances of the novel’s production. By way of a long overdue return to the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and correspondence of Bram Stoker, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals reconstructs the cultural and political world that gave birth to Dracula. To bring Stoker’s life into productive relationship with his writing, Glover offers a reading that locates the author within the changing commercial contours of the late-Victorian public sphere and in which the methods of critical biography are displaced by those of cultural studies. Glover’s efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition’s contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker’s writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences—from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology—that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker’s writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure. Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.

    In this sequel to his popular and critically acclaimed Real Florida, Klinkenberg, a native of Miami and a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times, takes us to the winter preserve of the sandhill crane, in search of the rare ghost orchid and the Okeechobee gourd, which was believed to be extinct. We get to attend a conch reunion and a sponge-o-rama and to visit the last wild man of the Everglades, the Highwaymen who painted glorious Florida landscapes and sold them by the side of the road, gandy dancers and a man who stalks lightning.

    Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siècle examines the ways in which perceptions of loss were cast into archetypal stories that sought to account for the culture's troubles and assuage its anxieties. By examining the work of a wide range of writers - from Kipling to Wilde, from Stevenson to Stoker - Stephen Arata shows how the twin obsessions with decadence and imperialism became intertwined in the thought of the period.

    "Against Identity" is a collection of 74 poetic aphorisms confronting the question of identity, subject formation and consequences of decentering subjectivity.

    He has all the essayists's gifts: a clear, strong prose, a fascination with everyday affairs and their significance sub specie aeternitatis, a readiness to generalize, the ability to digress without wondering from the point, to inform without pedantry and enlighten without condescension, to give us pleasure simply by sharing his thoughts. I have touched only on the provocative riches contained in this excellent book. It will be treasured by those who possess it.' - Hugh Bredin, Fortnight'I soon realized I had stumbled on an Irish talent of European stature.' - Chris Agee, The Linen Hall Review'Opening the contents page, one has an impression of disparateness; closing the book, of having discovered an ouvre ... Butler has the Anglo-Irish antennae for place; his unadorned style expresses atmosphere with extraordinary clarity.' - Roy Foster, The Times Literary Supplement'This is not a book to borrow. It is a book to keep. It is not only intelligent, urbane and scholarly. It is most entertaining.' - Liam Robinson, New Hibernia'Hubert Butler's great figt is his ability to comprehend the workings of the mind of Catholic Ireland.' - Ulick O'Connor, Sunday Independent

    What does the Jew stand for in modern culture? The conscious or unconscious, often hysterical repetition of myths and exaggerations, and the repertory of cliches, fantasies and phobias surrounding the stereotypes of the Jew and the Jewess, have meant that they are figures frequently represented both in the world of literature and art and in the industries of popular culture.

    Her Washington literary salon, the Round Table, was frequented by such artists and intellectuals as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Countee Cullen, and Angelina Weld Grimke. This volume collects some of Johnson's most important work: four volumes of poetry (including The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems); four short stories (one never before published); eight plays (two never before published); and previously unpublished poems from her private papers. In addition, Claudia Tate's revealing introduction offers newly discovered information on Johnson's life and work.

    Contains career biographies of personalities including the Allman Brothers, James Brown, R.E.M., Millie Jackson

    Now Stern, a recognized Alcott scholar, has selected four thrillers that illuminate Alcott's feminist convictions. These engaging potboilers feature the power struggle between the sexes and colorful, passionate heroines who, ranging from thwarted and abused victims to triumphant conquerors, will beguile a new audience of modern readers.

    The author draws on years of research, personal interviews, documents and rare recordings to recover the stories of one-hit wonders, overnight successes and riches-to-rags tragedies from half a century of country and early rock music.

    He recounts the schoolboy crushes, the family strife, and the ebb and flow of youthful desire, all with a "humor that animates just about every sentence" (New York Times Book Review).

    The writings included in Theory of the Derive, many published here in English for the first time, are predominantly critical texts, revealing Situationism's aims, focus, breadth of vision, and development. Begun in 1957 by various artists and writers representing avant-garde organizations, the Situationist International was, from its inception, a revolutionary cultural organization. Seeing its project as one of merging art and life in practice, it developed over the next decade, implementing incisive critiques of post-war consumer culture and proposing radical projects of urban utopian design. Against the oppressive, stifling conditions imposed in technocratic city planning, the Situationist International sought to develop new forms of collective action and agitation that would promote free use and transformation of the urban environment. Its tactics, slogans, and visions of an alternative OEnitary urbanism' were especially influential in the events of the May 1968 uprising in France and have since been important influences on radical currents in many countries.

    Translated and with an introduction by Robert Greene. In 1984, French film producer Gerard Lebovici was found dead in his car, the victim of an apparent assassination. An immediate media frenzy ensued, with much of it surrounding Lebovici's close friendship with Guy Debord, one of the founders of the Situationist International, and a highly controversial public figure. In this book, Debord offers his in-depth analysis on the still unsolved crime, as well as a scathing critique of the mass news media. "A...nice touch is where he mentions that he actually has no higher opinion of the consumers of the media that he does of the disseminators of it"-Richard Hell. It is "a fascinating document...passionate Dubord, sometimes self-aggrandizing, sometimes reflective, and always illuminating"-Sadie Plant.

    The recurring themes that have influenced Young's minimalist music and Zazeela's ongoing engagement with the use of light in art are explored.

    But most of all it is about freedom -- and how the tension between personal fulfillment and family life may be resolved. Lifeways originated amongst groups of women -- and some men -- who were seeking a renewing spirit for family life. They sought to create a new vision of the tasks of mothers and fathers, a new "eye" for the meaning of "home" as a place that supports all those involved, children and adults, in the "lifeways."This book will be a valuable resource for parents, those involved in kindergartens and playgroups, and for women's support groups.

    Limited in their public roles throughout much of history, women have been compelled to turn inward, developing rich interior lives in uniquely feminine ways. This anthology brings together women's writing from classic religious literature—Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, and Hindu—as well as many passages of fiction and poetry that are truly undiscovered treasures of women's spirituality. With writers ranging from Helen Keller to Aung San Suu Kyi, from Agatha Christie and Ursula K. Le Guin to Rabi'a the Mystic and Hildegard of Bingen. Sarah Anderson's collection proves beyond a doubt that "the exploration of 'the hidden seas within' is a journey on which we can all embark."

    

    This overview of the painter's work and philosophies demonstrates that his genius lay in his perpetual questioning of visual representation.

    Three of our generation's greatest poets explore the misconceptions and mythologies that surround Robert Frost.

    Perhaps no other theologian of the second half of this century has shaped theology so profoundly as has Jürgen Moltmann. He appeared on the world theological scene with his Theology of Hope (1964) and took most of its capitals by storm. His subsequent works have kept him at the forefront of the modern theological enterprise, and the power of his vision and the originality of his method have inspired a host of new theologians. In terms of fecundity, Moltmann's opus remains unmatched among his generation of theologians. More than 130 dissertations written so far on his thought — most of them in the past decade — testify eloquently to its continued attractiveness. In honor of Moltmann's 70th birthday, twenty-six of the world's leading theologians — his friends, colleagues, interlocutors, and former students — have contributed to this volume on the future of theology. Moltmann himself has always sought to be both contemporary and future-oriented: his theology can be viewed as an exercise not only from the perspective of God's future but also toward a new human future. Thus, a book on the future of theology takes up an aspect of "his" theme and "his" concern. Yet this volume also makes a significant contribution to theology in its own right, seeking as it does to address the present crisis of theology. As Miroslav Volf writes in his introduction, "On the threshold of the third millennium, the presumed queen of sciences has grown old and feeble, unable to see that what she thinks is her throne is just an ordinary chair, uncertain about what her territories are, and confused about how to rule in the realms she thinks are hers, seeking advice from a quarrelsome chorus of counselors each of whom thinks himself the king, and ending up with a divided, even schizophrenic, mind." The essays in this volume attempt to revitalize theology as it confronts a difficult future. Despite the formidable obstacles that threaten the very survival of theology in the next century — religious and cultural plurality; the marginalization of theology in public discourse; increasing abstraction in the practice of theology; pressing issues of gender, race, poverty, and ecology; the seemingly archaic voice of theology in post- Christian societies — the contributors to this volume all believe in the future of theology as a vibrant discipline.The Future of Theology is organized in three parts. "Challenges" deals with the external or internal problems that theology is facing. "Perspectives" offers proposals on how to meet the challenges. "Themes" concentrates on various issues that need special attention today. Together, these essays succeed in setting the theological agenda for the future of theology, and thereby serve as a fitting tribute to this volume's esteemed honoree.Contributors: Stanley Hauerwas Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel John B. Cobb Jr. James H. Cone D. Lyle Dabney Ingolf U. Dalferth Gustavo Gutiérrez Douglas John Hall Ellen T. Charry M. Douglas Meeks Johann Baptist Metz Konrad Raiser Wolfhart Pannenberg Paul Ricoeur John Howard Yoder Dietrich Ritschl Dorothée Sölle Jon Sobrino Elsa Tamez Geoffrey Wainwright Rosemary Radford Ruether Miroslav Volf Michael Welker Nicholas Wolterstorff Catherine Keller Huns Küng

    Coetzee presents a coherent, unorthodox analysis of censorship from the perspective of one who has lived and worked under its shadow. The essays collected here attempt to understand the passion that plays itself out in acts of silencing and censoring. He argues that a destructive dynamic of belligerence and escalation tends to overtake the rivals in any field ruled by censorship. From Osip Mandelstam commanded to compose an ode in praise of Stalin, to Breyten Breytenbach writing poems under and for the eyes of his prison guards, to Aleksander Solzhenitsyn engaging in a trial of wits with the organs of the Soviet state, Giving Offense focuses on the ways authors have historically responded to censorship. It also analyzes the arguments of Catharine MacKinnon for the suppression of pornography and traces the operations of the old South African censorship system.