I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

    Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.

    A rich collection of ten poems, two essays, and two dozen of Mary Oliver's classic works on flowers, trees, and plants of all sorts, elegantly illustrated, Blue Iris is the essential companion to Owls and Other Fantasies, one of the best-selling volumes of poetry of 2003 and a Book Sense 76 selection.

    Whether describing a goosefish stranded at low tide, the feeling of being baptized by the mist from a whale's blowhole, or the ‘connection between soul and landscape’, Oliver invites readers to find themselves and their experiences at the center of her world. In Long Life she also speaks of poets and writers: Wordsworth's ‘whirlwind’ of ‘beauty and strangeness’; Hawthorne's ‘sweet-tempered’ side; and Emerson's belief that ‘a man's inclination, once awakened to it, would be to turn all the heavy sails of his life to a moral purpose’. With consummate craftsmanship, Mary Oliver has created a breathtaking volume sure to add to her reputation as ‘one of our very best poets’ (New York Times Book Review).

    He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother’s wedding. He mops his sister’s floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn’t it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives — a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.--davidsedarisbooks.com

    “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolaño’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolaño also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.”

    I became a journalist because I did not want to rely on newspapers for information." Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays showcases America's leading polemicist's rejection of consensus and cliché whether he's reporting from abroad in Indonesia, Kurdistan, Iraq, North Korea, or Cuba, or when his pen is targeted mercilessly at the likes of William Clinton, Mother Theresa ("a fanatic, a fundamentalist and a fraud"), the Dalai Lama, Noam Chomsky, Mel Gibson and Michael Bloomberg. Hitchens began the nineties as a "darling of the left" but has become more of an "unaffiliated radical" whose targets include those on the "left," who he accuses of "fudging" the issue of military intervention in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, as Hitchens shows in his reportage, cultural and literary criticism, and opinion essays from the last decade, he has not jumped ship and joined the right but is faithful to the internationalist, contrarian and democratic ideals that have always informed his work.

    In THE IMPOSSIBLE WILL TAKE A LITTLE WHILE, a phrase borrowed from Billie Holliday, the editor of Soul of a Citizen brings together fifty stories and essays that range across nations, eras, wars, and political movements.Danusha Goska, an Indiana activist with a paralyzing physical disability, writes about overcoming political immobilization, drawing on her history with the Peace Corps and Mother Teresa. Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, finds value in seemingly doomed or futile actions taken by oppressed peoples.Rosemarie Freeney Harding recalls the music that sustained the civil rights movement, and Paxus Calta-Star recounts the powerful vignette of an 18-year-old who launched the overthrow of Bulgaria’s dictatorship.Many of the essays are new, others classic works that continue to inspire. Together, these writers explore a path of heartfelt community involvement that leads beyond despair to compassion and hope. The voices collected in THE IMPOSSIBLE WILL TAKE A LITTLE WHILE will help keep us all working for a better world despite the obstacles.

    She brings them vividly to life by showing how the Bible, history, literature, and modern science fit together to make religion not only possible but necessary in our time.So whether you are reading the great works of Western literature, thinking about your place in God's universe, or simply dealing with the thousand-and-one problems of daily living, this powerful book has words of both challenge and comfort for you.Excerpt:Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore--and this in the Name of One who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which He passed through this world like a flame.  Let us, in Heaven's name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.

    It was these concerns that prompted indie icon Michelle Tea--whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts--to collect these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can’t go home to the suburbs when their assignment is over. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from stealing and selling blood to make ends meet, to "jumping" class, how if time equals money then being poor means waiting, surviving and returning to the ghetto and how feminine identity is shaped by poverty. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Diane Di Prima, Terri Griffith, Daisy Hernández, Frances Varian, Tara Hardy, Shawna Kenney, Siobhan Brooks, Terri Ryan, and more.

    His literary achievement is a lasting legacy about what it means to be American.Vintage Baldwin includes the short story “Sonny’s Blues”; the galvanizing civil rights examination “My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation”; the essays “Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem,” “The Discovery of What It Means to Be an American,” and “Nobody Knows My Name: A Letter from the South”; and excerpts from the novel Another Country and the play The Amen Corner.

    A gifted storyteller with a sly sense of humor, Moore explores three separations brought to us by Enlightenment philosophers: the separation of human from nature, of things near and far away, and of the sacred from the mundane. Challenging each, such as Descartes' idea that humans have a discrete consciousness and can alter creation while remaining unaltered themselves, she reveals why such divisions don't tally with the values expressed daily in the way people live. Moore disguises her philosophical explorations in stories: about vacationing on a tiny island in Alaska, visiting her father in the hospital, watching grouse perform their mating dance in the desert. Throughout, she shows that, when properly observed, the world is full of opportunities to find hidden connections.

    Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, he then presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most. In this showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Dirda covers a remarkable range of literature, including popular genres such as the detective novel and ghost story, while never neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes overlooked classics. Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for criticism, Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

    Traversing past and present, Belonging charts a cyclical journey in which hooks moves from place to place, from country to city and back again, only to end where she began--her old Kentucky home. hooks has written provocatively about race, gender, and class; and in this book she turns her attention to focus on issues of land and land ownership. Reflecting on the fact that 90% of all black people lived in the agrarian South before mass migration to northern cities in the early 1900s, she writes about black farmers, about black folks who have been committed both in the past and in the present to local food production, to being organic, and to finding solace in nature. Naturally, it would be impossible to contemplate these issues without thinking about the politics of race and class. Reflecting on the racism that continues to find expression in the world of real estate, she writes about segregation in housing and economic racialized zoning. In these critical essays, hooks finds surprising connections that link the environment and sustainability to the politics of race and class that reach far beyond Kentucky.With characteristic insight and honesty, Belonging offers a remarkable vision of a world where all people--wherever they may call home--can live fully and well, where everyone can belong.

    Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we’re not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written, "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration."

    Sit back and roar as Brooker rips mercilessly into Simon Cowell, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah, Casualty, Davina McCall, Michael Parkinson...and almost everything else on television. This book will make practically anyone laugh out loud.

    Drawing on her decades of activism and a wide reading of environmental, cultural, and political history, Solnit argues that radicals have a long, neglected history of transformative victories, that the positive consequences of our acts are not always immediately seen, directly knowable, or even measurable, and that pessimism and despair rest on an unwarranted confidence about what is going to happen next.Originally published in 2004, now with a new foreword and afterword, Solnit’s influential book shines a light into the darkness of our time in an unforgettable new edition.

    Essential Deren: Collected Writings on Film contains all of Deren's essays on her own films as well as more general essays on film theory, the relation of film to dance, various technical aspects of film production, the distinction between amateur and professional filmmaking, and the famous 1946 chapbook titled "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film," which has been reset here for the first time. There are hard-to-find articles written for magazines and art journals, as well as lectures, Q&A sessions, program notes, and manifestoes. This book will be particularly welcomed by the large audience that saw Martina Kudlacek's documentary, "In the Mirror of Maya Deren," during its theatrical release in the U.S. and Europe in 2002. The importance of Maya Deren's films and writings is further evidenced by the American Film Institute having named its highest award for independent filmmaking the "Maya Deren."

    Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master. Witness the pieces in this splendidly disorienting collection, spanning twenty years of his career and the full range of his concerns–which is to say, practically everything.Only Lawrence Weschler could reveal the connections between the twentieth century’s Yugoslav wars and the equally violent Holland in which Vermeer created his luminously serene paintings. In his profile of Roman Polanski, Weschler traces the filmmaker’s symbolic negotiations with his nightmarish childhood during the Holocaust. Here, too, are meditations on artists Ed Kienholz and David Hockney, on the author’s grandfather and daughter, and on the light and earthquakes of his native Los Angeles. Haunting, elegant, and intoxicating, Vermeer in Bosnia awakens awe and wonder at the world around us.

    The essays span fifty years of critical reaction, from the first publication of The Fellowship of the Ring through the release of Peter Jackson's film trilogy, which inspired a new generation of readers to discover the classic work and prior generations to rediscover its power and beauty. Fans and scholars alike will appreciate these important, insightful, and timely pieces. Fourteen of the fifteen have been previously published but are gathered here for the first time. The final essay in the volume, "The Road Back to Middle-earth" by Tom Shippey, was commissioned especially for this collection. Shippey examines how Peter Jackson translated the text into film drama, shaping the story to fit the understanding of a modern audience without compromising its deep philosophical core.

    The book concludes with a portrait of Wiman’s diagnosis of a rare form of incurable and lethal cancer, and how mortality reignited his religious passions.When I was twenty years old I set out to be a poet. That sounds like I was a sort of frigate raising anchor, and in a way I guess I was, though susceptible to the lightest of winds. . . . When I read Samuel Johnson’s comment that any young man could compensate for his poor education by reading five hours a day for five years, that’s exactly what I tried to do, practically setting a timer every afternoon to let me know when the little egg of my brain was boiled. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t take to wearing a cape.Praise for Ambition and Survival"That calling, at once religious, ethical, and aesthetic, is one that only a genuine poet can hear—and very few poets can explain it as compellingly as Mr. Wiman does. That gift is what makes Ambition and Survival, not just one of the best books of poetry criticism in a generation, but a spiritual memoir of the first order."—New York Sun"This weighty first prose collection should inspire wide attention, partly because of Wiman's current job, partly because of his astute insights and partly because he mixes poetry criticism with sometimes shocking memoir...The collection's greatest strength comes in general ruminations on the writing, reading and judging poetry." —Publishers Weekly"[Wiman is] a terrific personal essayist, as this new collection illustrates, with the command and instincts of the popular memoirist ... This is a brave and bracing book." —Booklist"Christian Wiman's poems often spoke of a void, and then they stopped. In Ambition and Survival, Poetry magazine's editor rediscovers his spirituality and his voice."—Chicago Sun-TimesChristian Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine. His poems and essays appear regularly in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of several books of poetry, including The Long Home (isbn 9781556592690) and Hard Night (isbn 9781556592201).

    The answer came as a surprise. "I was at Secretariat's Derby, in '73. That was . . . just beauty, you know?" Sullivan didn't know, not really: the track had always been a place his father disappeared to once a year on business, a source of souvenir glasses and inscrutable passions in his Kentucky relatives. But in 2000, Sullivan, an editor and essayist for Harper's, decided to educate himself. He spent two years following the horse-both across the country, as he watched one season's juvenile crop prepare for the Triple Crown, and through time, as he tracked the animal's constant evolution in literature and art, from the ponies that appeared on the walls of European caves 30,000 years ago, to the mounts that carried the Indo-European language to the edges of the Old World, to the finely tuned but fragile yearlings that are auctioned off for millions of dollars apiece every spring and fall. The result is a witty, encyclopedic, and in the end profound meditation on what Edwin Muir called our "long-lost archaic companionship" with the horse. Incorporating elements of memoir and reportage, the Wunderkammer and the picture gallery, "Blood Horses "lets us see--as we have never seen before--the animal that, more than any other, made us who we are.

    Joan Didion's unblinking eye and razor-sharp perceptions of the American scene are exhibited in the essays Girl of the Golden West, In the Realm of the Fisher King, and Sentimental Journeys' from After Henry; excerpts from Salvador and Miami; and more.

    This audio CD contains an introductory speech by author Walter Mosley followed by Stephen King's acceptance speech.

    This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia OzickFollowing the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.

    Whether writing on religion or sexuality or notions of whiteness, on Martin Luther King, Jr. or Tupac Shakur, Dyson's keen insight and rhetorical flair continue to surprise and challenge. This collection gathers the best of Dyson's growing body of work: his most incisive commentary, his most stirring passages, and his sharpest, most probing and broadminded critical analyses. From Michael Jordan to Derrida, Ralph Ellison to the diplomacy of Colin Powell, the mastery and ease with which Dyson tackles just about any subject is without parallel.

    In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."

    In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they stake out.Bringing gravity and grace to his meditations on art, society, and history, Zagajewski wears his erudition lightly, with a disarming blend of modesty and humor. His topics range from autobiography (his first visit to a post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a dazzling thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry.Zagajewski gives an account of the place of art in the modern age that distinguishes his self-proclaimed liberal vision from the "right-wing radicalism" of such modernist precursors as Eliot or Yeats. The same mixture of ardor and compassion that marks Zagajewski's distinctive contribution to modern poetry runs throughout this eloquent, engaging collection.

    Just Enough Liebling gathers in one volume the vividest and most enjoyable of his pieces. Charles McGrath (in The New York Times Book Review) praised it as a judicious sampling-a useful window on Liebling's vast body of writing and a reminder, to those lucky enough to have read him the first time around, of why he was so beloved. Today Liebling is best known as a celebrant of the sweet science of boxing, and as a feeder who ravishes the reader with his descriptions of food and wine. But as David Remnick observes in his fond and insightful introduction, Liebling is boundlessly curious, a listener, a boulevardier, a man of appetites and sympathy-and a writer who, with his great friend and colleague Joseph Mitchell, deftly traversed the boundaries between reporting and storytelling, between news and art.

    Caroline Knapp's readers are known not just for their number, but for their intense connection to her work. Knapp connected so well in part because of the intense focus she brought to her subjects. Now, with 'The Merry Recluse: A Life in Essays', Knapp shows us that her vision through a wider lens is as brilliant as through a narrow one. These essays paint the fullest picture of this wonderful writer that we've yet seen, but they are also a full portrait of a writing life, showing how the same themes can engage -- and expand -- a writer over a lifetime. Knapp, who died in 2002, was considered one of the country's more intelligent and graceful voices in memoirs. This collection also shows her to be a witty, provocative observer of the world around her.

    In the tradition of the essay as complex humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle's definition of happiness, Epicurus's swerve into unpredictable possibility, Montaigne's essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage's redefinition of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein's favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance—all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a "complex realism."

    Too many people sit on the fence and ignore, or are unaware of, the fact that Christianity is an historical religion. As Laurence Peter once said "History repeats itself because nobody listens." The point of having a debate is not to have a debate and then agree to differ (sitting around in a mutually affirming love-fest) - the point of debate, as the Apostle Paul clearly demonstrates time and again in the book of Acts, is to establish which position is best.Carl Trueman's intends to provoke you with this collection of essays into thinking for yourself and to have an opinion on THINGS THAT MATTER! You can listen to the author as he speaks about this book here on "Pilgrim radio."

    Hitherto uncollected and all in English, the work in this anthology follows the changing notions of what a poem is, what a poet is, and why we read a poem, tracing the development of stylistic and ideological strategies that have spawned our current, conflicting understandings of verse.The book begins with Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads and proceeds through 150 years of English language tradition, including the European poetries which greatly influenced it. These prose works allow the reader to share one of the great extended conversations by poets about poetry during a dynamic period of literary experimentation.Includes work by Charles Baudelaire, Andr� Breton, Aim� C�saire, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Langston Hughes, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Mina Loy, St�phane Mallarm�, Marianne Moore, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Paul Val�ry, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, William Wordsworth and Louis Zukofsky.

    Winter Music, a collection of Adams's essays, journal entries, and other writings is poetic and inspirational and delves into the environmental and cultural awareness that creates his reflective, almost spiritual, approach to music. The accompanying audio CD includes two previously unrecorded works by Adams.Adams's music explores natural phenomena from the songs of birds, to the complex nature of chaos, fractal geometry, and elemental noise. Similarly, his writings explore "that region between place and culture, between environment and imagination," reflecting a philosophy of deep awareness that makes him one of the most original composers working today.

    His essays and short fiction have appeared everywhere from Outside to Harper’s and The Paris Review. He is the winner of a 1986 National Book Award for his bestselling Arctic Dreams. Vintage Lopez is divided into two parts, nonfiction and fiction. It includes “Landscape and Narrative” ; the prologue to Arctic Dreams; and such classic short stories “The Entreaty of the Wiideema” and “The Mappist.”Also included, for the first time in book form, the essay “The Naturalist.”

    Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

    Includes cover paintings from best selling books by Terry Goodkind, David Eddings and RA Salvatore, computer game art from Everquest and Diablo.

    Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) was one of the best-known intellectuals of the 19th century. He rose to national prominence through his gift for oratory, which he publicly displayed on numerous lecture circuit tours. For almost twenty years this dedicated popularizer of progressive thinking and staunch critic of superstition would regularly address huge audiences, opening their minds to ideas that often provoked guarded whispers in private. Ingersoll was a man far ahead of his time, who advocated agnosticism, birth control, voting rights for women, the advancement of science, and civil rights for all races. Though eloquent on a wide variety of topics, he became most famous, and notorious, for his provocative lectures questioning the traditional, Bible-based Christian worldview of the age.In this volume are collected his best-known lectures on religion, the Bible, and related subjects. Included are "Why I Am an Agnostic"; "The Truth"; "What Is Religion?"; "Superstition"; "What Infidels Have Done"; "What Should You Substitute for the Bible as a Moral Guide?"; "Crumbling Creeds"; "The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child"; and "Love."This outstanding collection is indispensable for freethinkers, humanists, and open-minded people of all persuasions.Note: This volume is available individually or as part of a two-volume set with On the Gods and Other Essays by Robert by Ingersoll: two-volume set (ISBN 1-59102-171-5): $50.

    With disciplined lyricism and entirely devoid of technical jargon, Bruce Adolphe's book probes into the heart of such matters as the role of memory and imagination in creative expression, the meaning of inspiration, spirituality in music, the challenge of arts education and how music communicates.

    Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.'In this new collection of essays, Kohn takes on some of the most important and controversial topics in education of the last few years. His central focus is on the real goals of education-a topic, he argues, that we systematically ignore while lavishing attention on misguided models of learning and counterproductive techniques of motivation.The shift to talking about goals yields radical conclusions and wonderfully pungent essays that only Alfie Kohn could have written. From the title essay's challenge to conventional, conservative definitions of a good education to essays on standards and testing and grades that tally the severe educational costs of overemphasizing a narrow conception of achievement, Kohn boldly builds on his earlier work and writes for a wide audience. Kohn's new book will be greeted with enthusiasm by his many readers and by any teacher or parent looking for a refreshing perspective on today's debates about schools.

    How did a quintessential California girl end up earning her living in the Pacific Northwest with a crosscut saw? In Now Go Home, Spagna reflects on the journey that took her from a childhood in the suburbs of LA to a trail crew in Washington's North Cascades, where she falls in love with a place and, unexpectedly, with a woman.

    Written by Spider Robinson, 'The Crazy Years' takes its name from Robert A Heinlein's designation of the last years of the 20th century and contains essays from Robinson's tenure as op-ed columnist for 'The Globe and Mail' and from 'Galaxy Online'. Environmentalists that place the survival of earth before the survival of humanity, the idiocy of computer designs, and the downsides of the Internet are among the subjects Robinson uses to take the world to task.

    The book is a glimpse into the life of Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein, and into the thoughts that have always vindicated her belief that the most treasured place on earth is home, and that the most beautiful and desirable aim for people is to spend a boring evening there with family.

    Ever subversive and happy to raise the issues that polite society works hard to suppress, Waters has helped to liberate us from social restrictions and norms. In that process, he has created hilarious and provocative filmed entertainment. And since he picked up a still camera more than ten years ago, he has reinvented himself as a visual artist." "Scrutinizing videotapes of over-the-top Hollywood movies and forgotten art films that had long obsessed, amused, and fascinated him, Waters started to photograph video stills off his television screen. The moments that he captured became the raw material for artworks that Waters began to call his "little movies." In these photographic sequences, Waters continues to skewer cultural symbols and stereotypes, and to elaborate on the cultural and subcultural themes that have been central to all his work: race, sex, sanctimony, glamour, class, family politics, celebrity, religion, the media, and the allure of crime." "John Waters : Change of Life, published on the occasion of Waters's first major exhibition, presents a survey of his still photographic works and stills from his earliest and seldom seen no-budget films: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, Roman Candles, and Eat Your Makeup. The book also includes images of objects from Water's personal collection that reflect his ongoing fascination with photographic imagery, the mass media, and some of the more outrageous expressions of American popular culture." Accompanying these artworks, film stills, and quirky images are contributions by cultural and art historians that zero in on Waters's cinematic mind and photographic eye, and on surprising artworks that speak for themselves in more subtle and complex ways than might ever be expec

    "PINK STEAM is not kitschy, it is a culturally astute document of the real written by a master at the height of her powers"--Jennifer Moxley. The intimate secrets of Dodie Bellamy's life--sex, shoplifting, voyeurism, and writing are illuminated in Bellamy's incredibly tailored latest work where true confession bleeds into high theory into trash cinema. PINK STEAM barges beyond the cliches of gendered experience; unafraid of the personal, unabashed by politics and sex, Bellamy makes confusion her OK Corral. Dodie Bellamy is the author of CUNT-UPS and FEMININE HIJINX, both available at SPD.

     Michael Kelly called himself a "colored lights" sort of person-a regular guy, not a member of the elite "white light" crowd-when it came to his holiday decorations, his writing, and his zest for life. His career reflected myriad colors: he wrote for a large variety of publications, covering a multitude of topics-political, international, and personal-with singular insight, passion, and wit. This collection of his most memorable magazine and newspaper stories and columns-drawn from the Washington Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and other publications-puts on full display the dazzling panoply of his gifts: for physical description and scene setting; for telling detail, brilliant simile, and satirical insight; for prose that is at once mathematically precise and lyrical. Here are the searing portraits of Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, H. Ross Perot, and other seminal political figures of our time that won Kelly national attention. Here are the stunning dispatches from the first Gulf War that earned him the National Magazine Award for reporting and burnished his journalistic legend. Here are the fierce columns and landmark cover stories that raised disturbing questions about Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the deeply incestuous relationship between Washington, D.C.'s political and media cultures. And here are the loving family portraits and hilarious social commentaries. Colored Lights represents the body of work of a journalist who demonstrated time and again a surpassing talent for penetrating to the heart of the matter, for advancing far beyond the headlines and surface appearances of people and events to find their true meanings, for getting the story other writers missed and telling it with a verve few other writers could match.

    This is the first collection of his letters and notes about music ever published—at another time, it is the book Shaw would have written himself.The letters are an invigorating mix of music history and analysis, philosophy, inspiration, and practical advice. Shaw examines technique, but only as a means to an end—he moves beyond that, delving into the essence of what music is and what it has to say to us. The heart of the book is composed of Shaw’s previously unpublished notes on fifteen major choral works, ranging from Bach’s B Minor Mass to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. Often inspiring and sometime hilarious, these writings reveal the full breadth of Shaw’s knowledge, intensity, and humor.

    In The Black Interior, she examines the vital roles of such heavyweight literary figures as Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Rita Dove, as well as lesser known, yet vibrant, new creative voices. She offers a reconsideration of "afro-outré" painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, the concept of "race-pride" in Jet magazine, and her take on Denzel Washington's career as a complex black male icon in a post-affirmative action era. Also available is Alexander's much heralded essay on Rodney King, Emmett Till, and the collective memory of racial violence.Alexander, who has been a professor at the University of Chicago and Smith College, and recently at Yale University, has taught and lectured on African American art and culture across the country and abroad for nearly two decades. In The Black Interior, she directs her scrupulous poet's eye to the urgent cultural issues of the day. This lively collection is a crucial volume for understanding current thinking on race, art, and culture in America.

    Selections made by Machen's biographer, who contributes an introduction, a bibliography, and "For Further Reading."

    His work was of such depth and such amazing resonance, that it was admired and studied by an entire generation of poets and readers, regardless of esthetic or cultural predispositions. Levis's poems crossed borders, broke down barriers, and invited a sharing of the strange, sweet loneliness of being that is the fundamental human lot. A Condition of the Spirit brings together reviews, essays, interviews, and mediations by more than forty American poets profoundly affected by Levis's life and work. But that's not all: the book also contains twelve previously uncollected essays by Levis himself, making it a handbook for the study of the poet's thinking on the craft of poetry and the craft of life. Contributors to the collection include Philip Levine, Charles Wright, Diane Wakoski, Stephen Dunn, David St. John, Peter Everwine, Dave Smith, Stephen Sandy, Nancy Eimers, Peter Stitt, David Wojahn, Paul Zimmer, Sandra Gilbert, David Young, and Gerald Stern.

    The Essential Mary Midgley collects for the first time the very best of this famous philosopher's work, described by the Financial Times as 'common sense philosophy of the highest order'.This unrivalled introduction to a great philosopher and brilliant writer incorporates carefully selected excerpts from Mary Midgley's bestselling books, including Wickedness, Beast and Man, Science and Poetry, and The Myths We Live By. With a specially written foreword by James Lovelock, this classic text presents a superb and eminently readable insight into questions she has returned to time and again in her renowned sharp prose. This anthology discusses major topics, such as the roots of human nature, reason and imagination, the myths of science and the importance of holism in thinking about science and the environment.

    Twenty-six stories illuminate the reality of growing up in fear, struggling to rebuild lives damaged by sexual, physical, and/or emotional abuse. The book explores how abuse turns queer survivors-male, female, and transgendered-into healers, heartbreakers, and homicidal maniacs, presenting brilliant stories that sear and soar. Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving addresses all forms of abuse head-on, representing a cross-section of queer survivors in terms of race, class, ethnicity, education, origin, sexuality, and gender. Contributors use their own life experiences to create a book that takes back control from well-meaning "outsiders," as they recount the daily struggle to overcome the damage done to their minds, bodies, and spirits in a world that denies their gender, sexual, and social identities. From the editor: "Dangerous Families consists entirely of writing by survivors of childhood abuse. That's right-no therapists analyzing our plight, no talk-show hosts exploiting us-just survivors, exploring our complicated, frightening, and fulfilling lives. These stories dispense with the usual technique of carefully massaging the reader's fragile worldview before plunging this unsuspecting innocent into a world of horror. They go right to the horror, the beauty, and the joy, often throwing the reader off-guard, revealing layers of meaning before the reader can step back." Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving is an anthology of 26 true stories of growing up queer in families that magnify the horrors of the outside world instead of offering protection. The book is an essential read for therapists, caseworkers, cultural studies specialists, and anyone struggling to survive childhood

    Arranged thematically, each section contains the choicest, most illuminating pieces from his body of work and begins with a new piece of writing that frames the subject at hand. A tour of the defining moments of American life from the mid-’60s to the mid- ’00s, Politics is at once the story of American life from LBJ to GWB and a testament to the power of the written word.

    Vollmann is one of our greatest living writers. Masterworks such as You Bright and Risen Angels, The Royal Family, and Rising Up and Rising Down—his latest work, a stunning 3,300-page tour-de-force—have launched him into the literary stratosphere. He stands today as one of America's leading contenders for a future Nobel Prize in literature. Here is his long-awaited "best-of" collection, intended both as an introduction for the curious reader, and as a necessary addition to the existing fan's collection. With excerpts from all of Vollmann's novels (including several not yet published), journalistic pieces, essays, correspondence, and poetry, Expelled from Eden creates a unique, kaleidoscopic portrait of one of America's most notorious, protean, devastating, and necessary writers.

    it was rather my way of screaming from my cage.'The 1960's saw Charles Bukowski struggle for recognition and slowly emerge as a unique, talented and prolific poet and writer, whilst holding down a day job at the Post Office. During the 1970's and 80's Bukowski writes about his own fame, his contemporaries and his good fortunes; at the end of the 70's we see him beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labour.These letters to various literary contacts, friends and lovers provide an intimate and fascinating look at Bukowski's mind, his emotions, his attitude towards his own creativity and the comings and goings of his daily life.

    And Booknotes, the flagship of its book programming, has become the premier place to see serious, thoughtful nonfiction get its television due. Over the past fifteen years, Brian Lamb, the CEO of C-SPAN and host of Booknotes, has interviewed 765 authors on the program, and these deep and wide-ranging interviews have been the basis for three bestselling Booknotes books. Now, in a new collection, Booknotes: On American Character, Lamb has selected seventy original pieces that reveal something about America: the nation's people, history, and character. Here are biographies of artists, businessmen, politicians, and inventors; stories of events famous, infamous, and less well-known in the nation's history; a look at how politics works in America and how the nation responds to conflict. Our leading historians, journalists, and public figures draw from a diverse set of sources to examine what kind of nation and people we are. The result is a valuable addition to the Booknotes legacy and a welcome read for any fan of the program.

    This collection gathers the best of Teachout’s writings from the past fifteen years. In each essay he offers lucid and balanced judgments that invariably illuminate, sometimes infuriate, and always spark a response—the mark of a critic whose thoughts, however controversial, cannot be ignored. In a thoughtful introduction to the book, Teachout considers how American culture of the twenty-first century differs from that of the last century and how the information age has altered popular culture. His selected essays chronicle America’s cultural journey over the past decade and a half, and they show us what has been lost—and gained—along the way. With highly informed opinions, an inimitable wit and style, and a genuine devotion to all things cultural, Teachout offers his readers much to delight in and much to ponder.

    . . so I've decided to take it a couple of steps . . . well, let's say sideways: one's reaction to horror movies and literature is a highly subjective and personal thing, emphasis on the latter term. Consider this to be a thinly-disguised autobiography by means of reflections about movies, books, and writing. It's not enough for someone to simply say, 'I liked it,' or 'I really hated it'; those are not opinions in and of themselves, they are prefaces to opinions. To qualify as actual opinions, they must be followed by reasons why, and in order for you to understand the reasons why, you have to understand something about the person giving the opinion." -- Gary A. Braunbeck

    T. Marinetti, Max Ernst, and others.How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine. Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These new egos are further contrasted with the bachelor machines proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober. Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.

    It embraces topics ranging from Walt Whitman’s interest in phrenology to the marginalization of African American experiential writing; from Kamau Brathwaite’s "calibanistic" language practices to García Lorca’s flamenco aesthetic of duende and its continuing repercussions; from H.D.’s desert measure and coastal way of knowing to the altered spatial disposition of Miles Davis’s trumpet sound; from Robert Duncan’s Vietnam War poetry to the emancipatory potential of collaborative practices; from serial poetics to diasporic syncretism; from the lyric poem’s present-day predicaments to gnosticism. Offering illuminating commentary on these and other artists including Amiri Baraka, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Wilson Harris, Jack Spicer, John Coltrane, Jay Wright, and Bob Kaufman, Paracritical Hinge also sheds light on Mackey’s own work as a poet, fiction writer, and editor.

    The 13 works of 7 continental authors span 3 centuries of philosophy from Montaigne to Schiller and literary criticism from Sainte-Beuve and Mazzini.

    New expanded edition of a classic anthropology title that examines ethnicity as a dynamic and shifting aspect of social relations.

    In its simplest sense, it describes a feeling of longing for something that is now gone, and may yet return, but in all likelihood can never be recaptured. In Saudade: The Possibilities of Place, traveller Anik See traces her attempts to reclaim this loss in a series of informal essays that take us from the salt plains of Wood Buffalo National Park and the mountains of British Columbia to the fishing ports of Sri Lanka and the rough roads of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.Whether at a fishfry in the Northwest Territories, at the post-9/11 Canada-US border, on the ultimate road trip through Australia or at a summer carnival in Santiago de Cuba, See is on a continual quest for simplicity, interrogating the perceived distance between privilege and want. Quietly, insistently, these thoughtful essays ask what we might accomplish if we said no to entitlement; if, instead, we used our privilege to help us better understand human nature. By examining a multitude of landscapes, and by uncovering characters whose most important possession is the landscape around them, these essays examine what it takes for us to feel alive in a time when we can have everything, when our needs seem limitless. Throughout this psychogeographic diary, crowded with rituals of faith, death and renewal, See asks, again and again, 'How much will be enough?'

    . . . Jeff loves Florida. It shows."--Randy Wayne White, author of Shark River and Everglades"Klinkenberg is a genius reporter and a wonderful writer. I read this book in one gulp, then went outside, looked at that magnificent Florida sky and made myself all sorts of promises."--William McKeen, author of Highway 61: A Father-and-Son Journey through the Middle of AmericaNo wonder Jeff Klinkenberg loves Florida. At any time of year he can find a place in the state that's ripe to enjoy or a person whose story has aged to perfection.Arranged by season, the book opens in the fall, which Klinkenberg says is like spring in the north--a time of celebration: "Having survived our harshest season, we feel renewed." Fair weather, good food, and the joys of nature lie ahead, described here in essays that are like time capsules of "old Florida values." Preserving the past, they reveal Klinkenberg's waggish appreciation of the state's history, folkways, and landscape, not to mention its barbequed ribs, smoked mullet, stone crab claws, and fresh lemonade.Many pieces focus off the beaten path and on modern rogues who seem to turn their backsides to the subdivisions and shopping malls that pave the state: Miss Ruby, whose fruit stand features rutabagas, boiled peanuts, and her own brightly colored plywood paintings; an 85-year-old resident of the remote island of Cayo Costa who hums Beethoven while she hunts for shells; the scientists who test mosquito repellent in Everglades National Park; and the unofficial caretaker of Lilly Spring on the Santa Fe River, who greets canoeists wearing glasses, a necklace, and on occasion a synthetic fur loincloth. Other pieces pay homage to Klinkenberg's literary heroes who've written in and about Florida, such as Pulitzer Prize-winner Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rawlings's companion and memoirist Idella Parker, Everglades crusader Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and novelist Ernest Hemingway. Klinkenberg also revisits an old St. Johns River campsite of 19th-century botanist William Bartram, whose encounters with alligators there were as alarming as Klinkenberg's with beer cans and soda bottles.For anyone who has a stake in the real Florida--resident, tourist, naturalist, or newcomer--this tour of the seasons will linger in memory like the aroma of orange blossoms on a clear winter night.Florida native Jeff Klinkenberg has been writing for the St. Petersburg Times since 1977. He is the only two-time winner of the Paul Hansell Distinguished Journalism Award, the highest honor given by the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors.

    Written as a series of heartfelt interlocking narratives, this collection of essays portrays the realities of farm life: haying, picking asparagus and cherries, the machinery of tractors and pickers; but each chapter also touches upon the more ethereal and rarely articulated: the stoic love that permeates a family, the farmer's struggle with identity, and the way land can shape a childhood. With its rich language and style, Pulling Down the Barn engrosses the reader in Oomen's memories-setting beauty and wonder against work and loss-and paints a poignant portrait of growing up in rural Michigan.

    Always beautifully written, one of these pieces (Vegetables) won the 2002 prize from The Queen's English Society for the best piece of prose writing of the year. These are not sentimental bucolic rambles. Scruton's prose is devoid of sentimentality and soggy nostalgia. Whatever he writes about, he always writes with serious purpose. He speaks up for the country dweller who sees his or her world eroded by the wishy-washy liberal commands of Blairite do-gooders who sit on their backsides in North West London pontificating about the needs of country people. Nature being red in tooth and claw is something that these people only know about from sitting in a classroom. Farming issues are equally important in this book. The devastations of the foot and mouth crisis showed graphically how great is the divide between town and country dwellers. And when the fate of people in the countryside is decided by bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg, their feeling of alienation is even greater. These are the causes that Professor Scruton espouses and he has become their most intelligent, articulate and clear-thinking advocate.

    Reading John Ashbery's Selected Prose is like listening to a brilliant talker who not only keeps us entertained and laughing, but who also has wise things to say about all sorts of interesting subjects."---Charles Simic"At last! Many of the fugitive pieces collected in this volume---on Gertude Stein, on Frank O'Hara, on Marianne Moore or Adrienne Rich---published as many of them were in out-of-the way places, have already become collectors' items, providing fascinating---and often startling--- assessments of their subjects as well as new insight into Ashbery himself. Now here they are between two covers, along with many hitherto unknown pieces on subjects ranging from Michel Butor to Mary Butts, Jane Freilicher to Mark Ford. For anyone who cares about the contemporary poetry/art scene, this is an indispensable collection."---Marjorie Perloff, Stanford UniversitySelected Prose contains a broad selection of texts by internationally acclaimed poet and critic John Ashbery. This third collection of Ashbery's critical writings dramatically expands the terrain covered by the first two, Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1987 and Other Traditions (first presented as the Norton Lectures at Harvard). These essays on writers, artists, filmmakers and the life of a poet provide insight into Ashbery's evolution as one of the major poets in English. Ashbery's criticism is as essential to the cultural history of the twentieth century as was that of T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden. His unique sensibility has had a profound impact on the literature and arts of our time, and his influence is certain to be felt for decades to come. Editor Eugene Richie's introduction provides a meaningful context for fifty years' worth of critical and creative prose by one of America's finest poets.

    And yet, in each of the four very different poets she considers here, Helen Vendler reveals a style of thinking in operation; although they may prefer different means, she argues, all poets of any value are thinkers.The four poets taken up in this volume--Alexander Pope, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Butler Yeats--come from three centuries and three nations, and their styles of thinking are characteristically idiosyncratic. Vendler shows us Pope performing as a satiric miniaturizer, remaking in verse the form of the essay, Whitman writing as a poet of repetitive insistence for whom thinking must be followed by rethinking, Dickinson experimenting with plot to characterize life's unfolding, and Yeats thinking in images, using montage in lieu of argument.With customary lucidity and spirit, Vendler traces through these poets' lines to find evidence of thought in lyric, the silent stylistic measures representing changes of mind, the condensed power of poetic thinking. Her work argues against the reduction of poetry to its (frequently well-worn) themes and demonstrates, instead, that there is always in admirable poetry a strenuous process of thinking, evident in an evolving style--however ancient the theme--that is powerful and original.

    Here, writers from all over the world explore, defy and embrace “the woman writer”: an indispensable muse to some, a troublesome burden to others; a defiant, even life-threatening identity to others still. Taking nothing as given, these writers explore the varied pleasures and dangers of writing as woman in the contemporary world.The choice to write is rarely considered free of consequences. For some of the writers in this collection, it has meant prison or exile; for others, it has required a defiance of traditions and expectations and a re-creation of identities and communities. For most, it demands a balancing act among family, practical needs and the undeniable will to create.In essays that are deeply personal and fiercely political, these writers topple all fixed ideas of “the woman writer,” revealing themselves as utterly individual and powerfully interconnected authors of the written word, of the human heart, of what we dare to imagine as possible.Contributors include: Diana Abu-Jaber, Isabel Allende, Meena Alexander, Dorothy Allison, Gioconda Bellí, Pat Califia, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Shashi Deshpande, Assia Djebar, Jessica Hagedorn, Joy Harjo, Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Taslima Nasrin, Erica Jong, Rita Dove, Alia Mamdouh, Toni Morrison, Daphne Patai, Nawal el Saadawi, Patti Smith, Wislawa Szymborska, Yvonne Vera, Alice Walker and Rebecca Walker.Jocelyn Burrell is an editor at the Feminist Press at CUNY, as well as a writer and performance poet.

    West was a poet, a pioneer advocate for civil rights, a preacher, a historian, a labor organizer, a folk-music revivalist, an essayist, and an organic farmer. He is perhaps best known as an educator, primarily as cofounder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee and founder of the Appalachian South Folklife Center in West Virginia. In his old age, West served as an elder statesman for his causes.  No Lonesome Road allows Don West to speak for himself. It provides the most comprehensive collection of his poetry ever published, spanning five decades of his literary career. It also includes the first comprehensive and annotated collection of West's nonfiction essays, articles, letters, speeches, and stories, covering his role at the forefront of Southern and Appalachian history, and as a pioneer researcher and writer on the South's little-known legacy of radical activism.   Drawing from both primary and secondary sources, including previously unknown documents, correspondence, interviews, FBI files, and newspaper clippings, the introduction by Jeff Biggers stands as the most thorough, insightful biographical sketch of Don West yet published in any form.   The afterword by George Brosi is a stirring personal tribute to the contributions of West and also serves as a thoughtful reflection on the interactions between the radicals of the 1930s and the 1960s.   The best possible introduction to his extraordinary life and work, this annotated selection of Don West's writings will be inspirational reading for anyone interested in Southern history, poetry, religion, or activism.

    The last one she would wish to surrender is the glory of the men who have served her in war. While such devotion lives the Commonwealth is secure. Whatever dangers may threaten from within or without she can view them calmly. Turning to her veterans she can say "These are our defenders. They are invincible. In them is our safety."War is the rule of force. Peace is the reign of law. When Massachusetts was settled the Pilgrims first dedicated themselves to a reign of law. When they set foot on Plymouth Rock they brought the Mayflower Compact, in which, calling on the Creator to witness, they agreed with each other to make just laws and render due submission and obedience. The date of that American document was written November 11, 1620.After more than five years of the bitterest war in human experience, the last great stronghold of force, surrendering to the demands of America and her allies, agreed to cast aside the sword and live under the law. The date of that world document was written November 11, 1918.Now, therefore, in grateful commemoration of the unsurpassed deeds of heroism performed by the service men of Massachusetts, of the sacrifice of her people, sometimes greater than life itself, of the service rendered by every war charity and organization, to honor those who bore arms, to recognize those who supported the government, in accordance with the law of the current yearDownload Have Faith In Massachusetts Now!

    It has been a vocation in the original sense of the word, that is a religious calling, one I was helpless to deny. For me writing has never been about self-expression. Writing has been about tending the spirit and making real the soul." So says Julius Lester in the introduction to this extraordinary book that combines memoir and social criticism. In strikingly honest, thought-provoking prose, he discusses the aspects of his life that have influenced his writing, including his relationships, political views, and religious beliefs; offers revealing anecdotes of the editorial process; and expresses the absolute importance of story. He also shares photographs he has taken through the years- photos that offer their own moving commentary on his text. This bold, insightful book could only have been written by Julius Lester, a revered author known for his strong voice and clear eye. He won a Newbery Honor for his groundbreaking To Be a Slave, has been a National Book Award finalist and the recipient of the Coretta Scott King Honor and Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, among many other honors, and is a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

    In this remarkable collection of essays, acclaimed writer Brian Doyle offers "resurrections, restorations, reconsiderations, appreciations, enthusiasms, headlong solos, laughing prayers, imaginary meetings with most unusual and most interesting men." Geographically and chronologically diverse--Plutarch of Greece; William Blake of England; Robert Louis Stevenson of Scotland; James Joyce and Van Morrison of Ireland; and others--Doyle sees them as men of "immense spiritual substance, prayerful fury, enormous grace," men concerned with "the moral grapple" and "the sinuous crucial puzzle of love." In telling the stories of these talented, troubled, and extraordinary men, Doyle discerns clues about how to be a good man, headlong in the pursuit of love and capable of greatness.

    Recognizing that there is no substitute for sincere and serious study of the scriptures themselves, the authors have worked to point Latter-days Saints toward the wealth of wisdom and inspired direction to be discovered in the Lord's word. These detailed discussions by deeply committed and believing LDS scholars have become a classic addition to many libraries. The new paperback editions make them easier to use and more accessible to everyone! Toward the end of his Gospel, the beloved apostle John explains why he wrote: "That ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name." The four Gospels--Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--all bear witness to the divine mission of the Savior. Thus, the key to eternal life is found in reading these sacred records, learning of the life and teachings of the Master, and incorporating those teachings into their lives. In this, the fifth volume of the Studies in Scripture series, twenty-four gospel scholars, all deeply committed and believing Latter-day Saints, focus on the life and ministry of Jesus Christ in thirty-one insightful essays. Background information is presented on the setting of the Gospels, with an overview of the style and purpose of each. This is followed by essays on Jesus' birth and childhood, his baptism and the beginning of his ministry, the calling of his apostles, the miracles he performed, the parables he taught, the testimony of witnesses to his work, and events leading to his crucifixion, culminating in his glorious resurrection.

    In this new set of interviews, MacDonald once again engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the network of interconnections within the community of filmmakers. A Critical Cinema 4 includes the most extensive interview with the late Stan Brakhage yet published; a conversation with P. Adams Sitney about his arrival on the New York independent film scene; a detailed discussion with Peter Kubelka about the experience of making Our African Journey; a conversation with Jill Godmilow and Harun Farocki on modern political documentary; Jim McBride's first extended published conversation in thirty years; a discussion with Abigail Child about her evolution from television documentarian to master editor; and the first extended interview with Chuck Workman. This volume also contains discussions with Chantal Akerman about her place trilogy; Lawrence Brose on his examination of Oscar Wilde's career; Hungarian Peter Forgács about his transformation of European home movies into video operas; Iranian-born Shirin Neshat on working between two cultures; and Ellen Spiro about exploring America with her video camera and her dog. Each interview is supplemented by an introductory overview of the filmmaker's contributions. A detailed filmography and a selected bibliography complete the volume.

    The essays included do not merely reflect his long-term political and moral concerns but are also a continuous intellectual challenge to us. In Bonfire of Creeds, as in his entire intellectual life, the two pivots of his work have remained the political psychology of violence and the cultural psychology of knowledge. Trained to explore the complexities of human subjectivity, Nandy has continued to explore the extremes of human destructiveness and human creativity and to use knowledge as a therapeutic intervention in society and politics. This collection, introduced by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu S. Prakash, gives the reader a comprehensive introduction to the democratic, post-secular sensitivities that shape Nandy's approach to transformative politics and his non-hierarchical, anti-technocratic ideas of people's knowledge.

    Divine Dynamite offers savvy guidance for a deeper life, a life of full-blooded awareness and integration, a life in which everything -- everything -- is permitted to awaken us. With an orientation at once both psychological and spiritual, Divine Dynamite provides stepping stones and fitting know-how for the inevitably slippery slopes of personal and transpersonal evolution. It invites us to enter the heart of our difficulties and guides us through them, providing not maps but well-seasoned company.

    The harvest, the imminent onset of cold and snow, the resumption of old routines, and the beginning of the school year all require preparation and planning. If summer has been something of a pause, autumn helps us to see the passage of time more clearly. Autumn is a season of fruition and reaping, of thanksgiving and celebration of abundance and goodness of the earth. But it is also a season that starkly and realistically encourages us to see our own limitations. Warm and stirring pieces by E. B. White, Anne Lamott, P. D. James, Julian of Norwich, May Sarton, Kimiko Hahn, and many others in this beautiful book rejoice in autumn as a time of preparation and reflection, when the results of hard labor are ripe for harvest.

    For millennia this is all there was: sticks and stones, dirt and trees, animals and people, the sky by day and night. The Lord spoke through burning bushes, through lightning and oaks. Trees and rocks and water were holy. They are commodities today and that is part of our disquiet.Howard Mansfield explores the loss of cultural memory, asking: What is the past? How do we construct that past? Is it possible to preserve the past as a vital force for the future? He writes eloquently on the land and time, on how to be a tourist of the near-at-hand, and on the forces that try to topple us. From the author of In the Memory House, which The New York Times Book Review called "wise and beautiful," and The Same Ax, Twice comes The Bones of The Earth, a stunning call for reinventing our view of the future.

    Simultaneous.

    We ask a stranger for directions, or for a ride. We live among people whose language, culture, and motivations we don't understand. Trust binds us to another with an intoxicating energy; it is brave, giddy, joyous, and lustful. A sudden attraction careens into sexual surrender, and trust becomes unconditional. Trust laughs at danger and leaps into the unknown.The author of Abuses and Foreign Bodies, Alphonso Lingis has traveled the globe for many years, and in Trust he reflects on journeys from Latin America to Asia to Antarctica. Whether feeding chocolate sauce and tuna to the baboons who visit his campsite in Ethiopia, celebrating the millennial New Year in Mongolia, or indulging in a passionate love affair in Vietnam, Lingis evaluates what happens around him and how it affects him and others. From these experiences he gains new understandings about spirituality, masculinity, love, death, ecstasy, and change.In the tradition of such international travelers as Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, and Ryszard Kapuscinski, and with insight reminiscent of John Berger and Joan Didion, Lingis shares both the private revelations and the universal connections he acquires on his exotic journeys. "Travel far enough," he concludes, "and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world"-where trust is ultimate.Alphonso Lingis is author of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Dangerous Emotions, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.

    Besides his authoritative early essay on "The Literature of Rome" (1918), other works condemn free verse and simple spelling, and devote attention to neglected poets. Discovering weird fiction as his chosen field, he produced such scintillating essays as "Lord Dunsany and His Work" (1922) and "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), along with essays on Frank Belknap Long and Clark Ashton Smith. Late in life Lovecraft codified his grasp of weird literature by writing such trenchant pieces as "Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" (1933) and "Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction" (1934). One of his last writings, "Suggestions for a Reading Guide" (1936), is a comprehensive discussion of world literature. H. P. Lovecraft has belatedly received world renown as the twentieth century's premier author of supernatural fiction; but during his lifetime he wrote far more essays than stories. This edition gathers Lovecraft's complete nonfictional output for the first time, arranged in broad thematic groupings. S. T. Joshi, the world's leading authority on Lovecraft, exhaustively annotates all texts, also providing critical and bibliographical notes.

    Since the early sixties Schumann and his puppeteers have been pouring out work after work on every scale: political works, mysterious works, grand works, modest works, works on the street and works in fields, works to be played in every size theater on four continents, books, prints, posters, and banners which live as show-and-tell in so many homes.Now Ron Simon and Marc Estrin, a remarkable photographer, and a long-time puppeteer, who have each in his own way contributed to the shows, recorded events, and reflected on them. Out of their experiences they have created Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater.Far more than history or documentation, they identify eight archetypes engaged repeatedly by Peter Schumann and his crew. Their book consists of parallel meditations--the texts not commenting on the photos, the photos not illustrating the texts--unified and intertwined by the chapter themes of Death, Fiend, Beast, Human, World, Gift, Bread, and Hope.Altogether, it's a collaboration that reflects their sixty-odd man-years of personal experience in, hidden narratives of, and speculative reflections on Peter Schumann's projects, ever-more relevant to our times. This is a book that will engage both fans and newcomers--an inside-view of Peter Schumann's political-artistic world.

    Figures such as Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, and Levinas all draw deeply on his novels and writings on literature and philosophy. In The Dark Gaze, Kevin Hart argues that Blanchot has given us the most persuasive account of what we must give up—whether it be continuity, selfhood, absolute truth, totality, or unity—if God is, indeed, dead. Looking at Blanchot’s oeuvre as a whole, Hart shows that this erstwhile atheist paradoxically had an abiding fascination with mystical experiences and the notion of the sacred.The result is not a mere introduction to Blanchot but rather a profound reconsideration of how his work figures theologically in some of the major currents of twentieth-century thought. Hart reveals Blanchot to be a thinker devoted to the possibilities of a spiritual life; an atheist who knew both the Old and New Testaments, especially the Hebrew Bible; and a philosopher keenly interested in the relation between art and religion, the nature of mystical experience, the link between writing and the sacred, and the possibilities of leading an ethical life in the absence of God.

    . . right? But who actually won the Florida vote recount? What, exactly, did the Supreme Court decide? Was there truly no dissent? What role did the mass media play? Melville House offers three hard-hitting books that take a close look at those very questions, based on three pieces of investigative journalism originally filed at the time, by three of the country's top journalists. • In IRREPARABLE HARM, Renata Adler, the long-time star of the New Yorker magazine who is also an attorney and a life-long Republican, takes a blistering look at the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision, and uncovers numerous problems, including instances where the judges mis-cited their own previous decisions, or reversed them. • In THE ROAD TO ILLEGITIMACY, Mark Danner, a staffer for both The New Yorker and New York Review of Books, goes to Florida to report on the final, tense counting and recounting of the actual ballots mandated after the Supreme Court decision. • And in THE BIG CHILL, Dennis Loy Johnson provides a gripping first person account of the enormous protest on inauguration day, which included scenes of violence and the most massive police and military presence ever in the capital—and yet went largely unreported. These three insightful books are riveting history. But more importantly, as the next presidential race intensifies, they may help troubled Americans with one of the most pressing questions we face: Can it happen again?

    A reporter and columnist for The New York Times for thirty years, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for his account of the murder of thirteen people by a deranged war veteran in Camden, New Jersey.Berger is best known for his About New York column, which appeared regularly in the Times from 1939 to 1940 and from 1953 until his death in 1959. Through lovingly detailed snapshots of ordinary New Yorkers and far corners of the city, Berger's writing deeply influenced the next generation of writers, including Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe.Originally published in 1960 and long out of print, Meyer Berger's New York is a rich collection of extraordinary journalism, selected by Berger himself, which captures the buzz, bravado, and heartbreak of New York in the fifties in the words of the best-loved reporter of his time.Mike Berger was one of the great reporters of our day . . . he was a master of the color story, the descriptive narrative of sights and sounds-of a parade, an eclipse, a homicidal maniac running amok . . . or just a thunderstorm that broke a summer heat wave . . . .-The New York Times, obituary, February 6, 1959Dip into Meyer Berger's New York, at any point, and you will find things you never knew or dreamed of knowing. . . . It has a heart, a soul, and a beauty all its own.-Phillip Hamburger, The New York Times Book Review

    

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning;prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing.

    Since the 1970s Gary Watson has published a series of brilliant and highly influential essays on human action, examining such questions as: in what ways are we free and not free, rational and irrational, responsible or not for what we do? Moral philosophers and philosophers of action will welcome this collection, representing one of the most important bodies of work in the field.

    The second volume, I Am, focused on two crucial aspects of the escape from being a mere organism: selfhood and agency. This, the final volume in the trilogy, argues that knowledge is unique to human beings and sufficiently important to call man 'the knowing animal'.Raymond Tallis examines the profound difference between knowledge 'That things are the case' and mere sentience. He criticises both accounts of knowledge that marginalise the consciousness of the knower and naturalistic accounts that assimilate knowledge to sense experience and, ultimately, neural activity. He argues that knowledge arises because humans are embodied subjects and not just organisms: knowing subjects know both about events in the material world which they can perceive as well as non-material 'facts'. It is because knowledge is relatively 'uncoupled' from the material world that active inquiry, reason-directed behaviour and deliberate manipulation of nature are possible. A critique of evolutionary psychology examines these phenomena and looks at the replacement of animal 'appetites' with propositional 'attitudes', at carnal knowledge and at explicit awareness of death. The various ways humans have dealt with the 'wound' opened in consciousness by knowledge - religion, art and philosophy - are also discussed. The Knowing Animal completes a trilogy that aims to revolutionise our understanding of what it is to be a human being without recourse to theology and supernatural explanations on the one hand or scientism and naturalistic explanations on the other. Features: *The question of humankind's unique ability to know things is covered in this volume and follows on from Ray Tallis' inquiry into humankind's unique 'handedness' (The Hand) and ability to reflect on itself (I Am) - he has explore our ability to know, to hold

    To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough." With this concise and broadly informative essay, renowned poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of writing and a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning. Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times. The first four sections of the essay describe the earliest creation of scripts, their movement across the globe and the typographic developments within and across languages. In the fifth and final section of the essay, Bringhurst introduces his system of classifying scripts. Placing four established categories of written language – semographic, syllabic, alphabetic and prosodic – on a wheel adjacent to one another, he uses the location, size and shape of points on the wheel to show the degree to which individual world languages incorporate these aspects of recorded meaning. Bringhurst’s system is based on an appreciation that indeed no one’s hands are fast enough and that no single script adheres to or can be understood within the confines of a single method of transcription. Readers will find this combination of anthropology, typography, literature, mathematics, music and linguistics surprisingly accessible and thought provoking. The text is accompanied by diagrams and typographic examples that make for an experiential study of the relationship between writing and meaning. This book is a Smyth-sewn paperback with a letterpress printed jacket. The book was designed by Robert Bringhurst and Andrew Steeves, and printed on Zephyr Laid paper. The cover was hand-printed letterpress on St. Armand handmade paper.

    A towering figure among early twentieth-century modern artists, his achievement in refining figurative elements into near-abstract archetypal forms had a huge influence on the development of modern sculpture.

    Whether he’s praising Nabokov’s sensuality, or critiquing Elton John’s walk (“as though he’s a wind-up doll that’s been overwound and sent heading for the top of the stairs”), or describing serendipitous moments in his seven-year-long research into the life of Genet, White is unfailingly observant, erudite, and entertaining.

    Tolkien, author of the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, annually each spring.

    The word "experiment" was a keyword for the artist, who conceived of his multimedia oeuvre as one huge experiment. Referred to by his friends and contemporaries as "a scout of the future." Rodchenko sought new paths in graphic design and painting, sculpture and architecture, poster design and cinema, photography and book design, and furniture and theatre design. The first chapter in this volume covers the early life of Rodchenko and relates to the time of his studies in the Kazan art school. His diaries from 1911-15 relate the vivid atmosphere of the school, explain the artist's early tastes for theatrical, oriental and medieval motifs, and recall the moments when he first met Varvara Stepanova, his lifetime partner and fellow artist. The second chapter covers the most active years of the Russian avant-garde movement: 1916-21. Here Rodchenko is linked to Vladimir Tatlin and his evolution as a non-objective painter comes about. His writings from this period explore his interest in the artistic process, in the way ideas are born, and often make comparisons with other artistic trends of the time: suprematism, cubism, and impressionism. The third chapter runs through the 20th and the height of the constructivist movement, when Rodchenko became one of the leading designers of the time. This chapter is the most comprehensive, featuring writings dedicated to industrial design education, graphic design, advertising, photomontage and photography. The fourth chapter reveals the artist's mood and the general Soviet culture situation of the 30s, a time of politicalchange, accusations of formalism, and great success in photography. The last chapter is dedicated to the war and postwar period and contains only diary texts in which the artist recounts his family's evacuation to the country, his subsequent hard living and working conditions, as well as his musings on the cultural politics of the time and life in general. Originally published in 1996 in Moscow by Rodchenko's family, "Experiments for the Future appears here in its first English edition. This new edition contains additional material and features a different design and images, but the content remains essentially unchanged.

    

    Earl Conee and Richard Feldman present the definitive exposition and defence of this much-contested theory. They argue that evidentialism is an asset virtually everywhere in epistemology, from getting started legitimately to refuting skepticism. The volume collects the authors' renowned work on the topic and adds substantial new material, making it the prime resource in evidentialism for all epistemologists.

    John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for over fifty years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, The Music of the Republic, Un-Willing, Then and Now, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).