Best of
Essays

1998

Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays


James Baldwin - 1998
    His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Stranger in the Village.”Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,” he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.” The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

SantaLand Diaries


David Sedaris - 1998
    'Santaland Diaries' contains six of David Sedaris' most profound Christmas stories, from Dinah, the Christmas Whore to Season's Greetings to our Friends and Family.

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader


Anne Fadiman - 1998
    For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony: Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners. Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.

The Boys of My Youth


Jo Ann Beard - 1998
    The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting Foundation Award in November 1997, & it continued as the hardcover edition of The Boys of My Youth sold out its first printing even before publication. The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life -- from childhood to marriage & beyond -- & memorably captures the collision of youthful longing & the hard intransigences of time & fate.

Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader


William S. Burroughs - 1998
    Beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac's never-before-seen collaborative novel), Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz's illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs's major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

The Angela Y. Davis Reader


Angela Y. Davis - 1998
    Davis has written on liberation theory and democratic praxis. Challenging the foundations of mainstream discourse, her analyses of culture, gender, capital, and race have profoundly influenced democratic theory, antiracist feminism, critical studies and political struggles. Even for readers who primarily know her as a revolutionary of the late 1960s and early 1970s (or as a political icon for militant activism) she has greatly expanded the scope and range of social philosophy and political theory. Expanding critical theory, contemporary progressive theorists - engaged in justice struggles - will find their thought influenced by the liberation praxis of Angela Y. Davis.The Angela Y. Davis Reader presents eighteen essays from her writings and interviews which have appeared in If They Come in the Morning, Women, Race, and Class, Women, Culture, and Politics, and Black Women and the Blues as well as articles published in women's, ethnic/black studies and communist journals, and cultural studies anthologies. In four parts - Prisons, Repression, and Resistance, Marxism, Anti-Racism, and Feminism, Aesthetics and Culture, and recent interviews - Davis examines revolutionary politics and intellectualism.Davis's discourse chronicles progressive political movements and social philosophy. It is essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary political philosophy, critical race theory, social theory, ethnic studies, American studies, African American studies, cultural theory, feminist philosophy, gender studies.

Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays, and Memoirs


Eudora Welty - 1998
    "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path, " "Powerhouse, " and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." "The Wide Net and Other Stories" (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. "The Golden Apples" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.

Meditations from a Movable Chair


Andre Dubus - 1998
    Since losing one leg and the use of the other in a 1986 accident, Dubus has experienced despair, learned acceptance, and, finally, found joy in the sacramental magic of even the most quotidian tasks.Whether he is writing of the relationship with his father, the rape of his beloved sister, his Catholic faith, the suicide of a gay naval officer, his admiration for fellow writers like Hemingway and Mailer, or the simple act of making sandwiches for his daughters' lunchboxes, Dubus cuts straight to the heart of things. Here we have a master at the height of his powers, an artist whose work "is suffused with grace, bathed in a kind of spiritual glow" (The New York Times Book Review).

Stigmata: Escaping Texts


Hélène Cixous - 1998
    Stigmata brings together her most recent essays for the first time.Acclaimed for her intricate and challenging writing style, Cixous presents a collection of texts that get away -- escaping the reader, the writers, the book. Cixous's writing pursues authors such as Stendhal, Joyce, Derrida, and Rembrandt, da Vinci, Picasso -- works that share an elusive movement in spite of striking differences. Along the way these essays explore a broad range of poetico-philosophical questions that have become characteristic of Cixous' work: * love's labours lost and found* feminine hours* autobiographies of writing* the prehistory of the work of artStigmata goes beyond theory, becoming an extraordinary writer's testimony to our lives and our times.

Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997


Louise Bourgeois - 1998
    Destruction of the Father; the title comes from the name of a sculpture she did following the death of her husband in1973;contains both formal texts and what the artist calls "pen-thoughts": drawing-texts often connected to her drawings and sculptures, with stories or poems inscribed alongside the images. Writing is a means of expression that has gained increasing importance for Bourgeois, particularly during periods of insomnia. The writing is compulsive, but it can also be perfectly controlled, informed by her intellectual background, knowledge of art history, and sense of literary form (she has frequently published articles on artists, exhibitions, and art events). Bourgeois, a private woman "without secrets," has given numerous interviews to journalists, artists, and writers, expressing her views on her oeuvre, revealing its hidden meanings, and relating the connection of certain works to the traumas of her childhood. This book collects both her writings and her spoken remarks on art, confirming the deep links between her work and her biography and offering new insights into her creative process.

You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You


Molly Ivins - 1998
    In her long-awaited new collection, the Colt Peacekeeper of American politicalhumor draws a bead on targets that range from the Libido-in-Chief to NewtGingrich, campaign funny-money to the legislative lunacy of her native Texas--andhits a bull's-eye every time.Whether she's writing about Bill Clinton ("The Rodney Dangerfield ofpresidents"), Bob Dole ("Dole contributed perhaps the funniest line of the yearwith his immortal observation that tobacco is not addictive but that too muchmilk might be bad for us.  The check from the dairy lobby must have been latethat week"), or cultural trends ("I saw a restaurant in Seattle that specializedin latte and barbecue.  Barbecue and latte.  I came home immediately"), Mollytakes on the issues of the day with her trademark good sense and inimitable wit.

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought


Marilynne Robinson - 1998
    Whether rescuing "Calvinism" and its creator Jean Cauvin from the repressive "puritan" stereotype, or considering how the McGuffey readers were inspired by Midwestern abolitionists, or the divide between the Bible and Darwinism, Marilynne Robinson repeatedly sends her reader back to the primary texts that are central to the development of American culture but little read or acknowledged today.A passionate and provocative celebration of ideas, the old arts of civilization, and life's mystery, The Death of Adam is, in the words of Robert D. Richardson, Jr., "a grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book."

About This Life


Barry Lopez - 1998
    Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar." This collection of essays stems directly from that philosophy. Here is far-flung travel (the beauty of remote Hokkaido Island, the over-explored Galápagos, enigmatic Bonaire); a naturalist's concerns (for endangered communities as well as their land) and pure adventure. Here, too, are seven exquisite memory pieces; beautiful, meditative recollections that will stand as classic examples of the personal essay.

Small Graces: The Quiet Gifts of Everyday Life


Kent Nerburn - 1998
    A companion piece to Kent Nerburn’s book Simple Truths, Small Graces is a journey into the sacred moments that illuminate our everyday lives. Through the exploration of simple acts, he reminds us to chart a course each day that nourishes the soul, honors the body, and engages the mind. Small Graces asks us to observe life’s quiet rhythms, the subtle shifts in perception and changes in light, the warm comfort of family voices; to feel the blessing of birdsong, the solitude of a falling leaf, the echo of footfall in snow-covered woods. By inviting us to recognize the hidden power of the ordinary, Small Graces reveals the mystical alchemy of the mundane made profound by the artistry of a well-lived life.

A Place in the Country


W.G. Sebald - 1998
    Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on the six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser and Jan Peter Tripp.Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place – as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration – Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice.A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer.

The End of Imagination


Arundhati Roy - 1998
    The End of Imagination also includes her nonfiction works Power Politics, War Talk, Public Power in the Age of Empire, and An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, which include her widely circulated and inspiring writings on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the need to confront corporate power, and the hollowing out of democratic institutions globally.

Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson


Rachel Carson - 1998
    This trove of previously uncollected writings is a priceless addition to our knowledge of Rachel Carson, her affinity with the natural world, and her life.

Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West


Wallace Stegner - 1998
    Henry Awards, the Commonwealth Gold Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Wallace Stegner was a literary giant. In Marking the Sparrow's Fall, the first collection of Stegner's work published since his death, Stegner's son Page has collected, annotated, and edited fifteen essays that have never before been published in any edition, as well as a little-known novella and several of Stegner's best-known essays on the American West. Seventy-five percent of the contents of this body of work is published here for the first time.

A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti


A. Bartlett Giamatti - 1998
    He spoke out against player trading. He banned Pete Rose from baseball for gambling. He even asked sports fans to clean up their acts. Bart Giamatti was baseball's Renaissance man and its commissioner. In A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME, a collection of spirited, incisive essays, Giamatti reflects on the meaning of the game. Baseball, for him, was a metaphor for life. He artfully argues that baseball is much more than an American "pastime." "Baseball is about going home," he wrote, "and how hard it is to get there and how driven is our need." And in his powerful 1989 decision to ban Pete Rose from baseball, Giamatti states that no individual is superior to the game itself, just as no individual is superior to our democracy. A GREAT AND GLORIOUS GAME is a thoughtful meditation on baseball, character, and values by one of the most eloquent men in the world of sport.

The Voice That Thunders


Alan Garner - 1998
    This collection, taken from the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

Another Beauty


Adam Zagajewski - 1998
    This brilliant memoir is Adam Zagajewski's recollection of 1960s and 1970s communist Poland, where he was a fledgling writer, student of philosophy, and vocal dissident at the university in Krakow, Poland's most beautiful and ancient city.

Writing New York: A Literary Anthology


Phillip Lopate - 1998
    Presents a literary portrait of the city of New York through the eyes of more than a hundred writers, from Washington Irving to Oscar Hijuelos.

Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms: Essays on Natural History


Stephen Jay Gould - 1998
    It is also the first of the final three such collections, since Dr. Gould has announced that the series will end with the turn of the millennium. In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. With his customary brilliance, Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order. In affecting short biographies, he depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy as he illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and wherefores of existence. "From the Hardcover edition."

Henry Mitchell on Gardening


Henry Mitchell - 1998
    Henry Mitchell is "beloved for his witty, smart, informed, philosophical, wide-ranging and often wickedly humorous columns" (Detroit Free Press).

A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces


Lawrence Weschler - 1998
    This is, in part, a collection of such launchings.” Indeed, the eight essays collected in A Wanderer in the Perfect City do soar into the realm of passion as Weschler profiles people who “were just moseying down the street one day, minding their own business, when suddenly and almost spontaneously, they caught fire, they became obsessed, they became intensely focused and intensely alive.” With keen observations and graceful prose, Weschler carries us along as a teacher  of rudimentary English from India decides that his destiny is to promote the paintings of an obscure American abstract expressionist; a gifted poker player invents a more exciting version of chess; an avant-garde Russian émigré conductor speaks Latin, exclusively, to his infant daughter; and Art Spiegelman composes Maus. But simple summaries can’t do these stories justice: like music, they derive their character from digressions and details, cadence and tone. And like the upwelling of passion Weschler’s characters feel, they are better experienced than explained.  “Weschler seems so hungry for life that the rest of us become hungry for him . . . a magician, a performer, and a scholar. All in one.”—from the Foreword by Pico Iyer “Weschler’s essays are exquisitely written—so perfectly and unobtrusively organized that one can’t imagine telling them a better way.” —New York Times Book Review“Weschler is the owner of a large dose of novelistic vision, and a particularly poetic set of ears, but . . . as important an endowment as a novelist’s eye or a poet’s ear is still the journalistic nose which led him down the proverbial alley.”—National Post (Canada) “Weschler is a thoughtful observer and a superb storyteller.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

A Way of Being Free


Ben Okri - 1998
    The ten pieces in this beautifully crafted collection range from the personal to the analytical, including a meditation on the role of the poet, a study of Picasso's Minotaur, a paean to human freedom in honour of Salman Rushdie, and an appraisal of fellow-Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Lyrical, imaginative and provocative, A Way Of Being Free confirms Ben Okri's status as one of the most inspiring of contempory writers.

The Ayn Rand Column


Ayn Rand - 1998
    The essays exemplify the radical ideas of her unique philosophy of objectivism: uncompromising rationality, egoism, and laissez-faire capitalism. With her characteristic intellectual consistency, she scrutinizes a breadth of topics ranging from the Cuban missile crisis to nationalism versus internationalism. This edition includes two out-of-print essays about the field of politics.

Wild Thoughts from Wild Places


David Quammen - 1998
    A collection of thoughts, essays, stories, and profiles from nature provides a look at such different places as the central Amazon, the South Pacific, and Cincinnati, detailing such adventures as kayaking on a Class V river in Chile and tracing the spread of the Ebola virus.

Affirmative Acts


June Jordan - 1998
    Continuing in the tradition of her classic collections Civil Wars and Technical Difficulties, Jordan acquaints readers with moments of American life threatened by social negligence and economic despair. With her characteristic insight, Jordan unveils how these too-frequent bouts of civil unrest bring out the weakest parts of the American spirit and challenges readers to remain inspired as society approaches the millennium.June Jordan's wisdom shines through in this brilliant collection of inspirational essays, which will be eagerly awaited by Jordan loyalists and enjoyed by her new readers.

The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde


Oscar Wilde - 1998
    He was an early advocate of criticism as an independent branch of literature and stressed its vital role in the creative process. Scholars continue to debate many of Wilde's critical positions.Included in Richard Ellmann's impressive collection of Wilde's criticism, The Artist as Critic, is a wide selection of Wilde's book reviews as well as such famous longer works as "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," "The Soul Man under Socialism," and the four essays which make up Intentions. The Artist as Critic will satisfy any Wilde fan's yearning for an essential reading of his critical work."Wilde . . . emerges now as not only brilliant but also revolutionary, one of the great thinkers of dangerous thoughts."—Walter Allen, New York Times Book Review"The best of Wilde's nonfictional prose can be found in The Artist as Critic."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World

The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom


Barbara Smith - 1998
    As one of the first writers in the United States to claim black feminism for black women, Barbara Smith has done groundbreaking work in defining black women’s literary traditions and in making connections between race, class, sexuality, and gender.Smith’s essay “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of black women’s literature. Pieces about racism in the women’s movement, black and Jewish relations, and homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries on the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; and police brutality against Rodney King and Abner Louima. It also includes a never-before-published personal essay on racial violence and the bonds between black women that make it possible to survive.

What the Twilight Says: Essays


Derek Walcott - 1998
    What the Twilight Says collects these pieces to form a volume of remarkable elegance, concision, and brilliance. It includes Walcott's moving and insightful examinations of the paradoxes of Caribbean culture, his Nobel lecture, and his reckoning of the work and significance of such poets as Robert Lowell, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Frost, Les Murray, and Ted Hughes, and of prose writers such as V. S. Naipaul and Patrick Chamoiseau. On every subject he takes up, Walcott the essayist brings to bear the lyric power and syncretic intelligence that have made him one of the major poetic voices of our time.

Inside the Sky: A Meditation on Flight


William Langewiesche - 1998
    William Langewiesche's life has been deeply intertwined with the idea and act of flying.  Fifty years ago his father, a test pilot, wrote Stick and Rudder, a text still considered by many to be the bible of aerial navigation.  Langewiesche himself learned to fly while still a child.  Now he shares his pilot's-eye view of flight with those of us who take flight for granted--exploring the inner world of a sky that remains as exotic and revealing as the most foreign destination.Langewiesche tells us how flight happens--what the pilot sees, thinks, and feels.  His description is not merely about speed and conquest.  It takes the form of a deliberate climb, leading at low altitude first over a new view of a home, and then higher, into the solitude of the cockpit, through violent storms and ocean nights, and on to unexpected places in the mind.In Langewiesche's hands it becomes clear, at the close of this first century of flight, how profoundly our vision has been altered by our liberation from the ground.  And we understand how, when we look around, we may find ourselves reflected in the grace and turbulence of a human sky.

The Best of Youngblood


Jorge Aruta - 1998
    Amid all the expectations and anticipation, they live their lives and now, through the groundbreaking Philippine Daily Inquirer column, speak in resounding tones. Listen to their joys, pains and most of all, their dreams.

Totally, Tenderly, Tragically


Phillip Lopate - 1998
    As an undergraduate at Columbia, he organized the school's first film society. Later, he even tried his own hand at filmmaking. But it was not until his ascent as a major essayist that Lopate found his truest and most lasting contribution to the medium. And, over the past twenty-five years, tackling subjects ranging from Visconti to Jerry Lewis, from the first New York Film Festival to the thirty-second, Phillip Lopate has made film his most cherished subject. Here, in one place, are the very best of these essays, a joy for anyone who loves movies.

Flight Discipline


Tony Kern - 1998
    Major Tony Kern analyses the causes of poor flight discipline, gives chilling case studies of the consequences, and lays out a plan for individual improvement. Key words are italicized and review questions included for each chapter. An unequalled guide to this mainspring of good piloting.

A Fragile Union: New and Selected Writings


Joan Nestle - 1998
    Nestle explores the “fragile unions” of contemporary lesbian life, both personal and historic.

Something to Declare


Julia Alvarez - 1998
    In the first section, "Customs," Alvarez relates how she and her family fled the Dominican Republic and its oppressive dictator, Rafael Trujillo, settling in New York City in the 1960s. Here Julia begins a love affair with the English language under the tutelage of the aptly named Sister Maria Generosa. Part Two--"Declarations"--celebrates Alvarez's enduring passion for the writing life. From the valentine to mythic storyteller Scheherazade that is "First Muse," to a description of Alvarez's itinerant life as a struggling poet, teacher, and writer in "Have Typewriter, Will Travel," to the sage and witty advice of "Ten of My Writing Commandments," Alvarez generously shares her influences and inspirations with aspiring writers everywhere.

Seeing a Color-Blind Future: The Paradox of Race


Patricia J. Williams - 1998
    Williams asks how we might achieve a world where color doesn't matter--where whiteness is not equated with normalcy and blackness with exoticism and danger. Drawing on her own experience, Williams delineates the great divide between the poles of other people's imagination and the nice calm center of oneself where dignity resides, and discusses how it might be bridged as a first step toward resolving racism. Williams offers us a new starting point--a sensible and sustained consideration--from which we might begin to deal honestly with the legacy and current realities of our prejudices.

Life in the Universe: Essays


Carl Sagan - 1998
    These unabridged essays by Carl Sagan were originally published in either popular science magazines or academic journals. This is the first time his essays have become available on audio.

Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp --In Resonance


Ann Temkin - 1998
    Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp...in resonance publishes for the first time the Duchamp Dossier (c. 1942-53) - a hitherto publicly unknown collection compiled by Cornell and discovered in the artist's estate following his death in 1972. The small objects, typed and handwritten notes, and ephemera found within the Duchamp Dossier provide an absorbing record of the interchange between these two artists, which included Cornell's assisting Duchamp on the assembly of his edition de ou par Marcel Duchamp ou Rrose Selavy (commonly referred to as the Boite-en-valise). Both artists were intrigued by the connection between art and the found object, and they shared a fascination with replicated images and the processes of reproduction. They had parallel interests in optical devices, ephemeral mediums (such as glass, dust, and paper), filmmaking, and graphic design. The book focuses in depth on Duchamp's box editions and Cornell's often neglected "explorations, " arranged files of printed matter, notes, and ephemera related to individuals or specific themes.

For This Land


Vine Deloria Jr. - 1998
    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

American Fictions


Elizabeth Hardwick - 1998
    "Just as Edwin Denby, Clement Greenburg, and Pauline Kael transformed the nature of criticism in the fields of dance, art, and film, respectively, Hardwick has redefined the possibilities of the literary essay."--The New YorkerA brilliant tour of a century American writers, from the novels of Melville, Wharton and James to the fictions of Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer.  Twenty-five years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick's now classic essay "Seduction and Betrayal" helped  pioneer the study of women in fiction, both as writers and as characters.  American Fictions gathers for the first time Hardwick's portraits of America's greatest writers.  Many of these pieces double as individual reminiscences about close friends, including Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Wilson.  Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant style.  Her essays are themselves a work of literature.

Inter Views


James Hillman - 1998
    The book is also a radical deconstruction of the interview form itself, even though one reads along as if in a coffee conversation with Hillman explaining his life and thought.

José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas


José Martí - 1998
    Martí transformed rebellion into revolution. . . . Like a master weaver, Martí pulled together all the separate threads of Cuban discontent—social, economic, political, racial, historical—and wove them into a radical movement of enormous force.”—Louis A. Pérez Jr, author of José Martí in the United States “Oh Cuba! . . . the blood of Martí was not yours alone; it belonged to an entire race, to an entire continent; it belonged to the powerful youth who have lost probably the best of teachers; he belonged to the future!”—Rubén Darío This new edition of an elegant anthology features bilingual poetry, a revised translation, and several new pieces. It presents the full breadth of José Martí’s work: his political essays and writings on culture, his letters, and his poetry. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on troubled US-Latin America relations.

Apologia


Barry Lopez - 1998
    It has long been a habit of writer Barry Lopez to remove dead animals from the road. At the conclusion of a journey from Oregon to Indiana in 1989, he wrote Apologia to explore the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced dealing with the dead every day. On the highway he encountered dozens of animals - raccoons, jackrabbits, porcupines, red foxes, sparrows, spotted skunks, owls, deer, gulls, badgers, field mice, garter snakes, barn swallows, pronghorn antelope, squirrels - all victims of vehicular destruction. Stopping for each body he saw, he gently removed each one from the road. Lopez's eloquent prose is accompanied by Robin Eschner's dramatic woodcuts. By turns violent, raw, and tender, they provide a stunning counterpoint to a reverent testimony.

The Circuit of Force: Occult Dynamics of the Etheric Vehicle


Dion Fortune - 1998
    Gareth Knight provides subject commentaries on various aspects of the etheric vehicle, filling in some of the practical details and implications that she left unsaid in the more secretive esoteric climate of the times in which she wrote.

A Kind of Compulsion: 1903-1936 (The Complete Works of George Orwell, Vol. 10)


George Orwell - 1998
    Cyprian's Preparatory School from the age of eight. Orwell illustrated many of these letters and the edition reproduces his simple but charming drawings. Whilst at Eton he contributed to several college publications and these, with several of his early stories, are printed here. It was also a time when he wrote poetry and all the poems of these years are included. Whilst in Burma he wrote sketches and draft that lead to Burmese Days; all are now published here.Reprinted for the first time since their publication in Paris in 1928 - 1929, and now with English translations, are the articles he wrote to expose the sufferings of the unemployed, tramps and beggars, the imperialist exploitation of other people, a literary essay and an essay on censorship, all of which would be centres of concern for Orwell throughout his life. In 1930 Orwell had published the first of his 379 reviews of some 700 books, plays and films. In 1931 'A Hanging', the first of his most important essays, was published. The volume includes the text of his school play, King Charles II, which features (as Charles 1) in A Clergyman's Daughter.

Kinship with Animals


Kate Solisti-Mattelon - 1998
    Our understanding of animals has increased greatly in just the last few years. This updated edition of Kinship with Animals contains new research findings and new contributors.

Pink Madness


James Hillman - 1998
    Do we live in a pornographic culture? Is our obsessive shopping the result of a soft porn hard sell in advertising? The answers are on this tape -- recorded live.

The Best of Flair


Fleur Cowles - 1998
    In 1950, Fleur Cowles established what would become one of the most important and talked about magazines ever created. Critically lauded for its sharp mix of clothes, literature, art, travel, decor, theater, and humor, Flair made publishing history with its combination of eclectic editorial content and lavish production quality. Recalled as "the first magazine that became an art form," The Best of Flair is a compilation of the magazine’s best content as chosen by the woman who created it. Along with its distinctive production values, Flair also features interviews and contributions from some of the most noted artists and celebrities of the past fifty years, including Lucian Freud, Jean Cocteau, Tallulah Bankhead, Saul Steinberg, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, Walker Evans, James Michener, Ogden Nash, Gypsy Rose Lee, Clare Boothe Luce, George Bernard Shaw, John O’Hara, Margaret Mead, and Tennessee Williams. Now, more than ten years after this book was first published by Rizzoli, and more than fifty years after the magazine ceased publication, this facsimile edition offers the same ingenious bookmaking of its predecessor, including multiple gatefolds with die-cuts, booklets, and accordion folder leaflets.

Chokecherry Places: Essays From The High Plains


Merrill Gilfillan - 1998
    Like few American writers, Gilfillan has a deep feeling for, and understanding of the western grasslands, which give both dignity and a deep historical sense to our sometimes forgotten heartland.Gilfillan's sense of the land encompasses the plants, wildflowers, and small creatures; the birds that he writes such wonderfully detailed descriptions about; the rivers, watering holes, and butteframed vistas; and, very importantly, the legacy of the Plains tribes of Native Americans who loved this land and fashioned myth and legend about it. By overlaying these myths onto the modern plains landscape, Gilfillan invokes a poignant sense of loss, yet we are also ennobled by the profound sense of the landscape that his vision imparts to us. Gilfillan is a tour guide like no other. His readers are given lovely, lingering descriptions of the overlooked and forgotten, the out-of-the-way and underfoot.

The Little Way of Saint Therese of Lisieux: Into the Arms of Love


John Nelson - 1998
    An inspiring work ideally suited to private reading and daily meditation that makes Therese's simple way available to all.Paperback

What I Did in My Holidays: Essays on Black Magic, Satanism, Devil Worship and Other Niceties


Ramsey Dukes - 1998
    Is it ok for a national government to negotiate with terrorists? Should we be prepared to make a pact with the demon Terrorism - or should we remain forever sworn to the demon No Compromise? Many old and new demons lurk on these pages: black magic, sexism, elitism, satanism, publishers, prejudice, suicide, liberalism, violence, slime, old age, bitterness, war and the New Age.Some reviewer comments: "Ramsey Dukes has a clarity, and creativity, of thought that means each of the many and varied chapters of this book leaves you with something to think about long after you've finished reading.""He should be required reading for anyone considering a move into the dark byways of occulture - he smashes preconceptions and enlightens with one fell swoop.""Remarkable, inspirational and thought provoking"

Fishing Lessons: Insights, Fun, and Philosophy from a Passionate Angler


Paul G. Quinnett - 1998
    In fact, you don't even have to like to fish to enjoy and appreciate the latest book from respected psychologist, fisherman, and essayist Paul Quinnett.Fishing Lessons is a rich mix of anecdotes, observations, essays, short stories, one-liners, and personal revelations from Quinnett's rich life and fishing journals. In his honest, straightforward style, the renowned psychologist/fisherman rounds out the trilogy that began with Pavlov's Trout and Darwin's Bass, the first books ever written on the psychology of fishing. This time he tackles the philosophy of fishing -- a philosophy of enjoying life. Over the course of its 240 pages. Fishing Lessons provides satisfying essays that won't so much teach you about fishing as they will teach you about yourself.

Just As I Thought


Grace Paley - 1998
    As close to an autobiography as anything we are likely to have from this quintessentially American writer, Just As I Thought gives us a chance to see Paley not only as a writer and "troublemaker" but also as a daughter, sister, mother, and grandmother. Through her descriptions of her childhood in the Bronx and her experiences as an antiwar activist to her lectures on writing and her recollections of other writers, these pieces are always alive with Paley's inimitable voice, humor, and wisdom.

Tales from the Edge of the Woods


Willem Lange - 1998
    A quiet quest for meaning in a rugged physical and psychic terrain.

Issey Miyake: Making Things


Issey Miyake - 1998
    From the 1970s to the present he has searched for different ways by which an article of clothing can be defined. Miyake is first and foremost the originator of an unparalleled design, which lies at the intersection of all media, practices and approaches. It has been almost thirty years since this forerunner to the clothing of today first ushered in a new era, and made available, in street-wear creations, what seemed destined to be for the pleasures of the imagination only. Issey Miyake explores this new approach to clothing, in which imagination and comfort go hand in hand, with the most innovative fashion technology. He calls himself a clothing designer, but his work celebrates a sensibility that perceives form, function and beauty as one.

Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies


Adalaide Morris - 1998
    The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poames, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements--statements held only partially in check by meaning. The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge


Mark Scroggins - 1998
    Raised to speak first Yiddish and then English, he was fascinated by language from an early age. This deep preoccupation with language—its musicality, complex constructions, and fluid meaning—later became a key component in the development of his poetry. Friend to William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound, mentor to Robert Creeley and influence on many of the Language Movement poets, Zukofsky and his work stand squarely at the center of American poetry's transition from modernism to postmodernism.   Mark Scroggins advances thoughtful readings of Zukofsky’s key critical essays, a wide variety of his shorter poems, and his “poem of a life,” “A”. He carefully situates Zukofsky within his literary and historical contexts, examining his relationship to Pound, his 1930s Marxist politics, and his sense of himself as a Jewish modernist poet. Scroggins also places Zukofsky within an ongoing tradition of American poetry, including the work of Wallace Stevens, Charles Bernstein, Ronald Johnson, Michael Palmer, and John Taggart.

Close Listening: Poetry & the Performed Word


Charles Bernstein - 1998
    While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been negligible. This collection opens many new avenues for the critical discussion of the sound and performance of poetry, with special attention to innovative work. More important, the essays collected here offer brilliant and wide-ranging elucidations of how twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performance art. The contributors--including Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe--cover topics that range from the performance styles of individual poets and types of poetry to the relation of sound to meaning, from historical and social approaches to poetry readings and to new imaginations of prosody. Such approaches are intended to encourage new forms of close listenings--not only to the printed text of poems, but also to tapes, performances, and other expressions of the sounded word. With readings and spoken word events gaining an increasing audience for poetry, Close Listening provides an indispensable critical groundwork for understanding the importance of language in--and as--performance.

Lovecraft Remembered


Peter H. Cannon - 1998
    Lovecraft's premature death in 1937, many of his friends and admirers were moved to write down their personal impressions of the man. These reminiscences appeared mainly in obscure amateur journals or in such early Arkham House volumes as Marginalia and Something About Cats. Peter Cannon, author of the critical and biographical study of H.P. Lovecraft (1989), has now gathered in one large volume, all the major shorter memoirs, as well as a selection of early criticism and some rare contemporary glimpses from the amateur press, before Lovecraft made his mark in Weird Tales. Here are such classic tributes as Winfield Townley Scott's "His Own Most Fantastic Creation" and W. Paul Cook's complete "In Memoriam, " together with more recent accounts such as Kenneth Sterling's "Caverns Measureless to Man" and Mara Kirk Hart's fascinating portrait of the Kalem Club as revealed through the letters of her father. Divided into seven sections -- "Neighbors, " "Amateurs, " "Kalems, " "Ladies, " "Professionals, " "Fans, " "Critics, " -- and illustrated throughout with vintage photographs, Lovecraft Remembered brings the master fantasist alive in the words of those who knew him best, from his former wife, Sonia Davis, to his closest friend, Frank Belknap Long.

The New Oxford Book of English Prose


John Gross - 1998
    Beginning with Sir Thomas Malory and ending with Kazuo Ishiguro, this anthology chronologically traces the evolution of prose. It shows how it gained confidence and extended its range in the late seventeenth century, and then how, in the eighteenth century, it dispensed with the ornate style of literary giants like Milton and Donne in favor of more concise and compact modern style. The material included in this anthology is literary, but literary, as the editor states in the introduction, is not the narrow term that it is often made to beit embraces an enormous range of experience and response. The New Oxford Book of English Prose pays tribute to literature's vibrant diversity by offering glimpses of master craftsmanship from around the globe. Included here are excerpts from writers of such varied backgrounds as Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, and Mulk Raj Anand. From the eloquent political treatises of Burke to the bold narrative strokes of Herman Melville, readers will find that the selections contained within this volume superbly illustrate the expressive powers of prose

Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dharma in the World Around Us


Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano - 1998
    With a lyricism and spiritual immediacy reminiscent of Thoreau and Emerson, in eighteen meditational essays Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano considers Buddhist themes through the prism of nature. The reflections captured in these satisfying literary explorations will appeal to all who appreciate contemplation of the natural world and our place in it.

Genealogy of Resistance


M. NourbeSe Philip - 1998
    These pieces are a pleasure to read-- at once sensual and thought-provoking."-- Robin C. Pacific "[Philip deploys] all thoughtful ways of making readers aware of how history is created. And how it is denied."-- "Canadian Materials"

Little Women and the Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays


Janice M. Alberghene - 1998
    Raising key questions about race, class, sexuality, age, material culture, intellectual history, pedagogy, and gender, this book explores the myriad relationships between feminist thinking and "Little Women".

Singers and the Song II


Gene, Lees - 1998
    Now this classic volume is available in an expanded edition that retains a number of famous pieces from the original volume, including his marvelous essay on lyric writing, his piece on the art of Edith Piaf, and his admiring look at the genius of songwriter Johnny Mercer. In addition, this edition offers seven new essays that are no less accomplished. Here readers will find a wonderful tribute to the sweetest voice in the world, Ella Fitzgerald; a moving interview with Jackie and Roy Kral; Lees's account of his involvement with Bossa Nova music and his collaboration with Antonio Carlos Jobim. We also read about Julius La Rosa, the lyrics of Yip Harburg, Harry Warren's unforgettable compositions, and the elegant Arthur Schwartz, writer of Dancing in the Dark and many other memorable songs.

Opening


William Segal - 1998
    Its aim is to prepare one for a more intelligent, to show a way toward fulfulling one's role as a true human being.

The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation


Ann Snitow - 1998
    These 32 writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in our time. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation.What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their rebellion? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such an unwomanly struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. These stories tell how the world we live in changed.With "The Feminist Memoir Project," these activists contribute to yet another movement project, the political work of memory.

Reluctantly


Hayden Carruth - 1998
    This collection of stunning autobiographical essays chronicles a lifetime of wrestling with demons and muses, chronic depression, a suicide attempt, a passionate love of jazz and blues, and unflinching honesty.

The George Grant Reader


George Parkin Grant - 1998
    The George Grant Reader is the first book to bring together in one volume a comprehensive selection of his work, allowing readers to sample the whole range of his interests.The reader includes selections from all phases of Grant's career, beginning with The Empire: Yes or No? (1945) and ending with an article on Heidegger, left unfinished at the time of his death in 1988. Forty-six essays, grouped into six sections, encompass his views on politics, morality, philosophy, education, technology, faith, and love. Also featured are Grant's writings on those who most influenced his thought, ranging from St Augustine to Karl Marx and Simone Weil. A number of his more disturbing essays are also included such as his controversial writings on abortion. The editors' substantial introduction places the articles in the wider context of Grant's life and thought.This long-overdue collection contains classic works, little-known masterpieces, and previously unpublished material. The volume is an ideal starting point for those who have never read Grant as well as an indispensable reference for Grant specialists.

Limited Views: Essays on Ideas and Letters


Qian Zhongshu - 1998
    Qian Zhongshu (b.1910) is arguably contemporary China's foremost man of letters, and Limited Views is recognized as the culmination of his study of literature in both the Chinese and the Western traditions.

Pass the Polenta: And Other Writings from the Kitchen, with Recipes


Teresa Lust - 1998
    Fisher and Laurie Colwin, Lust writes about the preparation of food and the breaking of bread with the exuberance of an impassioned cook and the clarity of a graceful writer. 14 recipes.

Linus Pauling on Peace: A Scientist Speaks Out on Humanism and World Survival


Linus Pauling - 1998
    In more than 50 essays, Nobel Prize-winning Linus Pauling's brilliance, conviction, and passion for saving humankind and the planet are eloquently expressed.

Yogi Bare: Naked Truth from America's Leading Yoga Teachers


Philip Self - 1998
    He received a Sociology degree from Louisiana Tech University and attended Candler School of Theology at Emory University. The avid yoga practitioner lives in Nashville with his wife and son.

For The Time Being: Collected Journalism


Dirk Bogarde - 1998
    A collection of Bogarde's writings from the last eight years, with pieces on fellow actors and directors, reminiscences of the French Riviera, a satirical piece on London dinner parties, reviews of books about the Holocaust and more.

Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works


Linda Dalrymple Henderson - 1998
    The work is over nine feet tall, and on its glass surface Duchamp used such unorthodox materials as lead wire, lead foil, mirror silver, and dust, in addition to more conventional oil paint and varnish. Duchamp's declared subject is the relation between the sexes, but his protagonists are biomechanical creatures: a Bride in the upper panel hovers over a Bachelor Apparatus in the panel below, stimulating the Bachelors with love gasoline for an electrical stripping.In preparation for the Large Glass, Duchamp wrote hundreds of notes, which he considered just as important as the work itself. He published 178 during his lifetime, but over 100 more notes relating to the Glass were discovered and published following his death. In this landmark book, Linda Henderson provides the first systematic study of the Large Glass in relation to the entire corpus of Duchamp's notes for the project. Since Duchamp declared his interest in creating a Playful Physics, she focuses on the scientific and technological themes that pervade the notes and the imagery of the Large Glass. In doing so, Henderson provides an unprecedented history of science as popularly known at the turn of the century, centered on late Victorian physics. In addition to electromagnetic waves, including X-rays and the Hertzian waves of wireless telegraphy, the areas of science to which Duchamp responded so creatively ranged from chemistry and classical mechanics to thermodynamics, Brownian movement, radioactivity, and atomic theory. Restored to its context and amplified by the information in the posthumously published notes, the Large Glass appears far richer and more multifaceted and witty than had ever been suspected.Henderson also includes a close examination of Duchamp's literary and artistic models for creative invention based on science, including Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, Frantisek Kupka, and Guillaume Apollinaire. The book will not only redefine scholarship on Duchamp and the Large Glass, but will be a crucial resource for historians of literature, science, and modernism.

Parables of a Country Parson: Heartwarming Stories of Christian Faith and Life


William Eleazar Barton - 1998
    A wise woman draws upon her knowledge of baking to teach an important lesson about life's empty places. A millionaire tumbles ingloriously down a flight of stairs because he is too haughty to take note of a scrublady and her bar of soap.Barton's winsome characters will charm you and his wry wit will entertain you--smoothing the way for his deft applications of timeless, biblically rooted wisdom. Assuming the voice of an ancient sage, but commenting on life in the early twentieth century, Barton captivated millions of readers with his extraordinary insight into everyday happenings. Half a century later, church historian Garth Rosell began reading these stories to delighted friends and students. Many who heard them at the dinner table, from the pulpit, and in the classroom wanted to share them with others. So Rosell, with the help of writer Stan Flewelling, sought out the now-rare original volumes in order to make the present collection available to a contemporary public that cherishes the power of a well-told story to speak truth straight to the heart.

Ms-Directing Shakespeare: Women Direct Shakespeare


Elizabeth Schafer - 1998
    She explores the works of such prestigious directors as Joan Littlewood, actress and director Dame Judi Dench, Gale Edwards, and Jude Kelley, and she looks at a variety of productions directed by women. In interviews with the author, the directors discuss their craft, their critics, and the innovative approaches they have brought to performances of Shakespeare's plays. These thoughtful reflections on the art of directing and the challenges facing women directors will be illuminating reading for anyone interested in the world of the theater and Shakespeare.

Bukowski Unleashed!: "Essays On A Dirty Old Man."


Charles Bukowski - 1998
    

The Best of Radio Free Bubba


Meg Barnhouse - 1998
    No subject is off-limits to these kinder and gentler Bubbas, who address everything from pizza delivery and permanent waves to tabloids and war toys. Bubbas writing about the protecting the planet? About foster parenthood, feeding the hungry and feminism? About love, tolerance and sharing what you find at the dumpster? Only in The Best of Radio Free Bubba!

Babies Celebrated


Béatrice Fontanel - 1998
    This work travels the globe to reveal how the babies live in a range of places and cultures. Photographs coupled with interviews with specialists in the various societies, reveal details of life in Sioux, Manchu, Patagonian and many other communities. In five sections covering bathing, clothing, carrying, sleeping and family, this work offers an introduction to child-rearing traditions around the world. The authors have also written Abrams' Babies: History, Art, and Folklore.

Bird's Eye Views: Historic Lithographs of North American Cities


John W. Reps - 1998
    Commissioned by land speculators, local businesses, civic organizations, and individual citizens, these renderings fostered both civic pride and local commerce. The use of color lithography, a recent invention popularized by such prominent publishers as Currier & Ives, allowed the inexpensive reproduction of the highest-quality drawings, so that a bird's eye view was within the financial budget of even the smallest towns. These extraordinarily detailed lithographs eventually numbered in the thousands and now serve as a rich pictorial record of North America as it stood a century ago. This sequel to our highly acclaimed title An Atlas of Rare City Maps collects over 100 views dating between 1835 and 1902, showing the streets, buildings, churches, bridges, waterways, and surrounding countryside of North American towns, ranging from burgeoning metropolitan centers to small logging towns and mining camps. Baltimore, Brooklyn, Denver, Indianapolis, Memphis, Montreal, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Syracuse, and Washington are just a few of the cities presented in this collection. The exquisite color and fine detail of these bird's eye views have been reproduced in all their original glory; also included is an introduction by John W. Reps providing a background on the artistic process and on urban development in the nineteenth century.

Don't


Jenny Diski - 1998
    These essays range from Jeffery Dahmer's domestic habits and madness, to her own burial plans and the day her ex-lover moved out.

Joyce's Book of Memory: The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses


John S. Rickard - 1998
    It represented both the central thread of identity and a looking glass into the past. It served as an avenue into other minds, an essential part of the process of literary composition and narration, and the connective tissue of cultural tradition. In Joyce’s Book of Memory John S. Rickard demonstrates how Joyce’s body of work—Ulysses in particular—operates as a “mnemotechnic,” a technique for preserving and remembering personal, social, and cultural pasts. Offering a detailed reading of Joyce and his methods of writing, Rickard investigates the uses of memory in Ulysses and analyzes its role in the formation of personal identity. The importance of forgetting and repression, and the deadliness of nostalgia and habit in Joyce’s paralyzed Dublin are also revealed. Noting the power of spontaneous, involuntary recollection, Rickard locates Joyce’s mnemotechnic within its historical and philosophical contexts. As he examines how Joyce responded to competing intellectual paradigms, Rickard explores Ulysses’ connection to medieval, modern, and (what would become) postmodern worldviews, as well as its display of tensions between notions of subjective and universal memory. Finally, Joyce’s Book of Memory illustrates how Joyce distilled subjectivity, history, and cultural identity into a text that offers a panoramic view of the modern period. This book will interest students and scholars of Joyce, as well as others engaged in the study of modern and postmodern literature.

Children of Silence: On Contemporary Fiction


Michael Wood - 1998
    Wood casts his net wide: a brilliant dissection of Beckett's prose comedy is followed by an absorbing sequence of essays on Kundera, Calvino and Garc�a M�rquez. Chapters on Toni Morrison and on Angela Carter lead us to chapters on Kazuo Ishiguro and Jeanette Winterson.

Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen


Charles Rosen - 1998
    It is a question he answers throughout this collection as he demonstrates and analyzes various critical approaches. In writing about the Romantic poets Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Cowper, and Friedrich Holderlin, he examines the kind of criticism which attempts to uncover concealed code. He investigates the relationship between Romantic aesthetic theory and artworks, and explores the way Romantic art criticism has been practiced by critics from Friedrich Schlegel to Walter Benjamin. In essays on Honore de Balzac, Robert Schumann, Gustave Flaubert, and others, he highlights the intersections between Romantic art and music; the artist's separation of life and artistic representations of it; and the significance of the established text.

Family Matters, Tribal Affairs


Carter Revard - 1998
    One of seven children, he completed his first eight grades in a one-room country school, working as a janitor, farmhand, and greyhound trainer through high school. He won a radio quiz scholarship to the University of Tulsa, was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and in 1952 was given his Osage name by his grandmother and the tribal elders. How his family coped with the dizzying extremes of the Great Depression and the Osage Oil Boom and with small-town life in the Osage hills is the subject of this book. It is about how Revard came to be a writer and a scholar, how his Osage roots have remained alive, about the alienation of being an Indian who "didn't look Indian," and about finding community, even far from home. It is also an exploration of how he and other American Indian writers are, with words, making places to live—in poems, novels, and essays, as well as on reservations and in cities. Above all, this is a book about identity, about an Osage son who grew up to find that the world is neither Indian nor white but many colors in between Told with grace and wit, Family Matters, Tribal Affairs is a moving memoir by one of our most accomplished Native American poets. Like N. Scott Momaday's The Names or Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, this is a story—told in a rich variety of vignettes and voices—about a family, about one man, about many people. "Like that mockingbird," Revard writes, "I have more than one song, but they are all our songs. It seems to me that no one else will sing them unless I do."

The Best American Sports Writing 1998


Bill Littlefield - 1998
    Chosen from more than 350 national, regional, and specialty publications, this eighth edition of The Best American Sports Writing once again brings together the finest writing on sports to appear in the last year.

Always in Pursuit: Fresh American Perspectives


Stanley Crouch - 1998
    Whether he is writing on the uniqueness of the American South, the death of Tupak Shakur, the O.J. Simpson verdict, or the damage done by the Oklahoma City bombing, Crouch's high-velocity exchange with American culture is conducted with scrupulous allegiance to the truth, even when it hurts—and it usually does. And on the subject of jazz—from Sidney Bechet to Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington to Miles Davis—there is no one more articulate, impassioned, and encyclopedic in his knowledge than Stanley Crouch.   Crouch approaches everything in his path with head-on energy, restless intelligence, and a refreshing faith in the collective experiment that is America—and he does so in a virtuosic prose style that is never less than thrilling.

Reading Otherways


Lissa Paul - 1998
    This accessible book will sharpen literary sensibilities and enhance our teaching.

On the Contrary: Critical Essays, 1987-1997


Paul M. Churchland - 1998
    and Patricia S. Churchland are towering figures in the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, and consciousness. This collection was prepared in the belief that the most useful and revealing of anyone's writings are often those shorter essays penned in conflict with or criticism of one's professional colleagues. The essays present the Churchlands' critical responses to a variety of philosophical positions advanced by some two dozen philosophical theorists. The book is divided into three parts: part I, Folk Psychology and Eliminative Materialism; part II, Meaning, Qualia, and Emotion: The Several Dimensions of Consciousness; and part III, the Philosophy of Science. V. S. Ramachandran and Rick Grush are coauthors on two of the essays.

Field Notes from the Northern Forest (Revised)


Curt Stager - 1998
    These twenty natural science essays take us down to ground level to explore the lives of animals, plants, and fungi commonly encountered in the conifer, hardwood, and mixed wood forests of northeastern North America.

Toward Another Shore: Russian Thinkers Between Necessity and Chance


Aileen M. Kelly - 1998
    Aileen Kelly sets the conflict between utopian and anti-utopian traditions in Russian thought within the context of the shift in European thought away from faith in universal systems and "grand narratives" of progress toward an acceptance of the role of chance and contingency in nature and history.In the current age, as we face the dilemma of how to prevent the erosion of faith in absolutes and final solutions from ending in moral nihilism, we have much to learn from the struggles, failures, and insights of Russian thinkers, Kelly says. Her essays—some of them tours de force that have appeared before as well as substantial new studies of Turgenev, Herzen, and the Signposts debate—illuminate the insights of Russian intellectuals into the social and political consequences of ideas of such seminal Western thinkers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Darwin. Russian Literature and Thought Series

Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology, and Culture


Eric Zencey - 1998
    “The ecological crisis is also a historical crisis,” he writes. “If we are out of place in nature, we are also out of place in time, and the two kinds of exile are related.”Zencey’s way home takes us many places: to a starlit mountaintop, where a nineteenth-century sect awaits the second coming; to the northern woods during hunting season; to the salt marshes of a Delaware childhood; to the softball games and abandoned mill ponds of his adopted Vermont. Always we are shown a world outside our preconceptions. In the essay “In Search of Virgin Forest” we see that virgin forest is not the pure escape from civilization that romantics make of it. Like the second-growth forest around it, virgin forest too is a human construct, one whose “different disturbance history” is not natural but is equally the product of human perception and appropriation.A nationally acclaimed novelist, Zencey has brought together autobiography and philosophy to produce a work at once accessible and intellectually rigorous. Perceptive, urgent, and lyrical, these essays are alive with warmth and wit and the occasional glint of melancholy. Virgin Forest is a passionate call for ecological health. It amply demonstrates (as the final essay has it) “Why History Is Sublime”: if we suffer a postmodern lack of grounding, only a rooted-in-place ecological sensibility can supply our need, and historical understanding is its inescapable prerequisite.

The Pushcart Prize XXIII: Best of the Small Presses 1999 Edition


Bill Henderson - 1998
    The short stories, essays, and poems are selected from literary magazines and small presses across the country, and represent the most exciting and innovative writing in America today. In the best Pushcart tradition, this fascinating volume combines the work of today's luminaries with a host of new talents, creating a wholly original amalgam of diverse voices -- "an anthology of literature to nourish the human spirit" (Milwaukee Journal).The most honored literary series in America, The Pushcart Prize has won the Carey-Thomas Award, has been selected several times as a notable book of the year by the New York Times Book Review, and has been chosen for many Book-of-the-Month Club and QPB selections. Recently, Pushcart Press and its Prize were named among "the most influential in the development of the American book business over the past 125 years" by Publishers Weekly.

AKLO


R.B. RussellMark Samuels - 1998
    400 copies printed. Illustrations from various sources. (Out of print).Aklo was a late twentieth-century small-press literary magazine that published the likes of Cabell, Stenbock, Gawsworth, Stanford, and others. This collection was its last flourish , for the first time in hardcover.Points: Published in association with Caermaen Books. Please note that the ISBN listed on front flap of the jacket is incorrect (it is the ISBN for The Hill of Dreams).

Henrik Ibsen


Harold Bloom - 1998
    Features a complex critical portrait of one of the most influential writers in the world, bibliographic information that directs readers to additional resources for further study, a useful chronology of the writer's life, and an introductory essay by Harold Bloom.

Of Home And Country: Journey Of A Native Son: An Anthology


S. Amjad Hussain - 1998
    It is his genious to record on paper the words that convey tha sounds of deafening winds on Mount Kailas or the melodies that emanate from the waves of the great Indus River in Pakistan. He has lived up to the challenge of being a superb story teller. I trust he is as good with the knife-he is a surgeon- as he is with his pen. He uses a vast canvass where he is equally at ease exploring the Indus River, hunting deer in Pennsylvania, narrating the dynamics of the Afghan war in the eightees and writing about the sacred icon of Judiasm.

The Jazz Cadence of American Culture


Robert G. O'Meally - 1998
    A comprehensive collection of essays, speeches, and interviews on the impact of jazz on other arts, on politics, and on the rhythm of everyday life, including an essay on poet and novelist James Weldon Johnson as a cultural critic, an interview with Wynton Marsalis, a speech on the heroic image in jazz, and a newspaper review of Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk.