Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions–on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and “compassionate conservatism,” among others–show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream.

    Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets, and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience, and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West, and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensable book for all writers and readers.

    Zinn addresses America's current political/ethical crisis using lessons learned from our nation’s history. Zinn brings a profoundly human, yet uniquely American perspective to each subject he writes about, whether it’s the abolition of war, terrorism, the Founding Fathers, the Holocaust, defending the rights of immigrants, or personal liberties. Written in an accessible, personal tone, Zinn approaches the telling of U.S. history from an active, engaged point of view. "America's future is linked to how we understand our past,” writes Zinn; "For this reason, writing about history, for me, is never a neutral act."Zinn frames the book with an opening essay titled "If History is to be Creative," a reflection on the role and responsibility of the historian. "To think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past," writes Zinn, "is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat." "If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."Buzzing with stories and ideas, Zinn draws upon fascinating, little-known historical anecdotes spanning from the Declaration of Independence to the USA PATRIOT Act to comment on the most controversial issues facing us today: government dishonesty, how to respond to terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the loss of our liberties, immigration, and the responsibility of the citizen to confront power for the common good.Considered a "modern-day Thoreau" by Jonathon Kozol, Zinn's inspired writings address the reader as an active participant in history making. "We live in a beautiful country,” writes Zinn, in the book’s opening chapter. “But people who have no respect for human life, freedom, or justice have taken it over. It is now up to all of us to take it back."Featuring essays penned over an eight-year period, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress is Howard Zinn’s first writerly work in several years, an invaluable post-9/11-era addition to the themes that run through his bestselling classic, A People’s History Of the United States.Howard Zinn is a veteran of World War II and author of many books and plays, including the million-selling classic, A People’s History of the United States. "Thank you, Howard Zinn. Thank you for telling us what none of our leaders are willing to: The truth. And you tell it with such brilliance, such humanity. It is a personal honor to be able to say I am a better citizen because of you."--Michael Moore, director of the film Fahrenheit 9/11, and author of the New York Times bestseller, Stupid White Men ...and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!"Find here the voice of the well-educated and honorable and capable and human United States of America, which might have existed if only absolute power had not corrupted its third-rate leaders so absolutely."-- Kurt Vonnegut, author of A Man Without a Country

    Brum’s reporting takes her into Brazil’s most marginalized communities: she visits the Amazon to understand the practice of indigenous midwives, stays in São Paulo’s favelas to witness the joy of a marriage and the tragedy of young men dying due to drugs and guns, and wades through the mud to capture the boom and bust of modern-day gold rushes. Brum is an enormously sensitive and perceptive interlocutor, and as she visits these places she provides intimate glimpses into both everyday and extraordinary lives: a poor father on the way to bury his son, a street performer who eats glass, a woman living out her final 115 days, and a hoarder rescuing the “leftover souls” of the city.The Collector of Leftover Souls showcases the best of Brum’s work from two books, combining short profiles with longer reported pieces. These vibrant missives range across current issues such as the human cost of exploiting natural resources, the Belo Monté Dam’s eradication of a way of life for those on the banks of the Xingu River, and the contrast between urban centers and remote villages. Told in the vibrant and idiomatic language of the people Brum writes about, The Collector of Leftover Souls is a vital work of investigative journalism from an internationally acclaimed author.

    In 'How to Write About Africa', Wainaina dissects the cliché of Africa and the preconceptions dear to western writers and readers with ruthless precision. In the same fashion, ‘My Clan KC’ undresses the layers of meaning shrouding the identity of the infamous Kenya Cowboy, while ‘Power of Love’ bemusedly recollects the advent of the celebrities-for-Africa phenomenon, heralded by the mid-eighties hit song ‘We Are The World’. It also scrutinizes the international NGO circuit and the transactions between ‘dollar-a-day people’ and $5000-a-month United Nations consultants whose started off as ‘$5-dollar-a-day’, 25-year-old backpackers full of ‘love and compassion’ for the continent.

    From "gun control myths" to "mealy mouth media" to "free lunch medicine," Sowell gets to the heart of the matters we all care about with his characteristically unsparing candor.

    The paintings used here, of scenes from her beloved home in southern Ohio, illuminate well-crafted essays based on her daily walks and observations. Wild turkeys, coyotes, box turtles, and a bird-eating bullfrog flap, lope, and leap through her prose. She excels at describing and exploring interactions between people and animals, bringing her subjects to life in just a few lines. Her husband and children make appearances, presenting their own challenges and pleasures. The essays are arranged by season, starting with winter, providing a sense of movement through the year.

    Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are novels structured? How do writers establish serious literary reputations today?), Delany also examines the condition of the contemporary creative writer and how it differs from that of the writer in the years of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and the high Modernists. Like a private writing tutorial, About Writing treats each topic with clarity and insight. Here is an indispensable companion for serious writers everywhere.

    And during those four decades, his wide knowledge, keen judgment, prodigious energy, and sharp sense of humor have made him America’s most celebrated film critic. He was the first such critic to win a Pulitzer Prize—one of just three film critics ever to receive that honor—and the only one to have a star dedicated to him on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. His groundbreaking hit TV show, At the Movies, meanwhile, has made “two thumbs up” one of the most coveted hallmarks in the entire industry. No critic alive has reviewed more movies than Roger Ebert, and yet his essential writings have never been collected in a single volume—until now. With Awake in the Dark, both fans and film buffs can finally bask in the best of Ebert’s work. The reviews, interviews, and essays collected here present a picture of this indispensable critic’s numerous contributions to the cinema and cinephilia. From The Godfather to GoodFellas, from Cries and Whispers to Crash, the reviews in Awake in the Dark span some of the most exceptional periods in film history, from the dramatic rise of rebel Hollywood and the heyday of the auteur, to the triumph of blockbuster films such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to the indie revolution that is still with us today. The extraordinary interviews gathered in Awake in the Dark capture Ebert engaging not only some of the most influential directors of our time—Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Werner Herzog, and Ingmar Bergman—but also some of the silver screen’s most respected and dynamic personalities, including actors as diverse as Robert Mitchum, James Stewart, Warren Beatty, and Meryl Streep. Ebert’s remarkable essays play a significant part in Awake in the Dark as well. The book contains some of Ebert’s most admired pieces, among them a moving appreciation of John Cassavetes and a loving tribute to the virtues of black-and-white films. If Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris were godmother and godfather to the movie generation, then Ebert is its voice from within—a writer whose exceptional intelligence and daily bursts of insight and enthusiasm have shaped the way we think about the movies. Awake in the Dark, therefore, will be a treasure trove not just for fans of this seminal critic, but for anyone desiring a fascinating and compulsively readable chronicle of film since the late 1960s.

    Svenonius’s cult-classic debut essay collection, including brand-new writing in this expanded edition.A new, expanded collection of essays and articles from one of the mainstays of the Washington, DC, underground rock and roll scene, The Psychic Soviet is Ian F. Svenonius’s groundbreaking first book of writings. The selections are written in a lettered yet engaging style, filled with parody and biting humor that subvert capitalist culture, and cover such topics as the ascent of the DJ as a star, the “cosmic depression” that followed the defeat of the USSR, how Seinfeld caused the bankruptcy of modern pop culture, and the status of rock and roll as a religion. The pocket-sized book is bound with a durable bright-pink plastic cover, recalling the aesthetics of Mao’s Little Red Book, and perfect for carrying into the fray of street battle, classroom, or lunch-counter argument.

    Magazine, Bitch was launched in the mid-nineties as a Xerox-and-staple zine covering the landscape of popular culture from a feminist perspective. Both unabashed in its love for the guilty pleasures of consumer culture and deeply thoughtful about the way the pop landscape reflects and impacts women's lives, Bitch grew to be a popular, full-scale magazine with a readership that stretched worldwide. Today it stands as a touchstone of hip, young feminist thought, looking with both wit and irreverence at the way pop culture informs feminism--and vice versa--and encouraging readers to think critically about the messages lurking behind our favorite television shows, movies, music, books, blogs, and the like. BITCHFest offers an assortment of the most provocative essays, reporting, rants, and raves from the magazine's first ten years, along with new pieces written especially for the collection. Smart, nuanced, cranky, outrageous, and clear-eyed, the anthology covers everything from a 1996 celebration of pre-scandal Martha Stewart to a more recent critical look at the "gayby boom"; from a time line of black women on sitcoms to an analysis of fat suits as the new blackface; from an attempt to fashion a feminist vulgarity to a reclamation of female virginity. It's a recent history of feminist pop-culture critique and an arrow toward feminism's future.

    Why? Because the willingness to be offensive sets free the ruthless observer in all of us, the spiteful perceptive angel who sees and tells, unimpeded by nicety or second thoughts. There is truth-telling, and more, in meanness. —from "Negative Capability: How to Talk Mean and Influence People"Tony Hoagland has won The Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Award, recognizing a poet's contribution to humor in American poetry, and also the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, the only major award that honors a poet's excellence in teaching. Real Sofistikashun, from the title onward, uses Hoagland's signature abilities to entertain and instruct as he forages through central questions about how poems behave and how they are made.In these taut, illuminating essays, Hoagland explores aspects of poetic craft—metaphor, tone, rhetorical and compositional strategies—with the vigorous, conversational style less of the scholar than of the serious enthusiast and practitioner. Real Sofistikashun is an exciting, humorous, and provocative collection of essays, as pleasurable a book as it is useful.

    All aspects of human life related to Islam in Indonesia; collected articles of Abdurrahman Wahid, former Indonesian President.

    In many ways, this is the story of a generation's passage through the 1960s--from innocence to experience, from euphoria to disillusionment. But Sanders has found a language that captures the transcendence of ordinary lives while never reducing them to formula. In his hands, the pattern of American boyhood that was made classic by writers from Mark Twain to Tobias Wolff is given a powerful new charge.

    Whether it’s the decline and fall of Mike Tyson, Al Gore’s struggle to move forward after his loss in the 2000 election, or Vladimir Putin dealing with Gorbachev’s legacy, Remnick brings his subjects to life with extraordinary clarity and depth. In Reporting, he gives us his best writing from the past fifteen years, ranging from American politics and culture to post-Soviet Russia to the Middle East conflict; from Tony Blair grappling with Iraq, to Philip Roth making sense of America’s past, to the rise of Hamas in Palestine. Both intimate and deeply informed by history, Reporting is an exciting and panoramic portrait of our times.

    A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth “Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.”—Sven Birkerts Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: "I like the silent church before the sermon begins." In "Autopsy Report," Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the "dripping fruits" of organs and the spine in its "wet, red earth." A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in "On Form," where she notes that "in order to see their particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction." Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual.  Above all, Purpura's essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror.  As she says: "By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare." This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book.Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Agni, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.

    Cultural Writing. Essays. A series of essays, ACADEMONIA is also an epic narrative of survival against institutional deadening and the proscriptiveness that shoots the young writer like poison darts from all sides. Here Bellamy, "explores the prickly intersection among these [institutional] spaces as it moves through institutions such as the academy, the experimental writing communities of the Bay Area, feminist and sexual identities, and group therapy. Continuing the work that she began in The Letters of Mina Harker pushing memoir and confession out of its safety zones and into its difficulties, this book provokes as it critiques and it critiques and yet at the same time manages to delight with its hope"-Juliana Spahr.

    In the tradition of Anna Quindlen, Molly Ivins, and Erma Bombeck, but with a distinctive voice and sensibility all her own, Connie Schultz comes out of the heartland of America to get you seeing, feeling, and thinking more deeply about the lives we lead today.“You might spot someone you know in the stories here,” writes Connie. “Maybe you’ll even find a glimpse of yourself. Yes, each of us is unique, but life happens in ways that bind us like Gorilla Glue.” In Life Happens, Connie shares sharp, passionate observations, winning our hearts with personal thoughts on a wide range of topics, from finding love in middle age to the meaning behind her father’s lunch pail, from single motherhood, to who really gets the tips you leave and why as the war in Iraq, race relations, gay marriage, and wwhy women don’t vote. In a more humorous vein, Connie shares her mother’s advice on men (“Don’t marry him until you see how he treats the waitress”) and warns men everywhere against using the dreaded f-word (it’s not the one you think). Along the way, Connie introduces us to the heroic people who populate our world and shows us how just one person can make a difference.Charming, provocative, funny, and perceptive, Life Happens gives us, for the first time, Connie Schultz’s celebrated commentary in one irresistible volume. Life Happens challenges us to be more open and alive to others and to the world around us.From the Hardcover edition.

    The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge — at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

    The book winds through the streets of New Orleans toward a deeper understanding of just what this great, wounded city means to the United States. Many of the essays in this collection were composed by writers trying to piece their lives together in the aftermath of the hurricane. Written in places like Baton Rouge, Houston, and Lafayette, these stories create a bridge back to the old New Orleans. And as the battle for this city rages on, this book becomes a razor-sharp weapon in the fight against corporate and governmental attempts to neuter a unique American city. The structure of the book parallels a New Orleans jazz funeral, mournful on the approach and celebratory on the return. Woven throughout the book is a series of interviews with New Orleans residents from all walks of life-jazz pianists, grain traders, tour guides, and others who make up this city. Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? takes intimate looks at old New Orleans staples such as Cajun food and Zydeco music as well as some unexpected views on race, economics and living in exile.Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? is the second book from Chin Music Press. Chin Music released Kuhaku & Other Accounts from Japan in the spring of 2005 and immediately established itself as a publisher focused on meticulous design and collaboration among artists and writers.

    By examining the perilous intersections of identity, categorization, and community, contributors challenge societal mores and countercultural norms. Nobody Passes explores and critiques the various systems of power seen (or not seen) in the act of “passing.” In a pass-fail situation, standards for acceptance may vary, but somebody always gets trampled on. This anthology seeks to eliminate the pressure to pass and thereby unearth the delicious and devastating opportunities for transformation that might create.Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore, has a history of editing anthologies based on brazen nonconformity and gender defiance. Mattilda sets out to ask the question, “What lies are people forced to tell in order to gain acceptance as 'real'.” The answers are as varied as the life experiences of the writers who tackle this urgent and essential topic.

    It was a messenger from God, she writes. Andrée Seu writes with insight and humility about everyday grace as she seeks and anticipates daily blessings. Won't Let You Go Unless You Bless Me collects 30 essays.

    Inside you'll find Steyn's take on Ronald Reagan, Idi Amin, the Princess of Wales, Bob Hope, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Artie Shaw and Pope John Paul II - plus Zimbabwe's Reverend Canaan Banana, Scotty from Star Trek, Nixon's secretary and Gershwin's girlfriend. It's the passing parade of our times, from presidents and prime ministers to the guy who invented Cool Whip.

    These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of “healthy dissidents,” among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez. In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“A lightning bolt,” Gass writes. “Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.”) . . . Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (“A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much.”) . . . Gustave Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gass writes “I began to eat books like an alien worm.”In the concluding essay, “Evil,” Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best.As Gass writes, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.”A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical.

    history, championing the inherent divinity of each individual, as well as the value of collective social action. In the mid-nineteenth century, the movement took off, changing how Americans thought about religion, literature, the natural world, class distinctions, the role of women, and the existence of slavery.Edited by the eminent scholar Lawrence Buell, this comprehensive anthology contains the essential writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and their fellow visionaries. There are also reflections on the movement by Charles Dickens, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. This remarkable volume introduces the radical innovations of a brilliant group of thinkers whose impact on religious thought, social reform, philosophy, and literature continues to reverberate in the twenty-first century.

    Natalie Angier probes the origins of language, Paul Raffaele describes a remote Amazonian tribe untouched by the modern world, and Frans B. M. de Waal explains what a new breed of economists is learning from monkeys. Drake Bennett profiles the creator of Ecstasy and more than two hundred other psychedelic compounds -- a man hailed by some as one of the twentieth century's most important scientists.Some of the selections reflect the news of the past year. Daniel C. Dennett questions the debate over intelligent design -- is evolution just a theory? --while Chris Mooney reports on how this debate almost tore one small town apart. John Hockenberry examines how blogs are transforming the twenty-first-century battlefield, Larry Cahill probes the new science uncovering male and female brain differences, Daniel Roth explains why the programmer who made it easy to pirate movies over the Internet is now being courted by Hollywood, and Charles C. Mann looks at the dark side of increased human life expectancy.Reaching out beyond our own planet, Juan Maldacena questions whether we actually live in a three-dimensional world and whether gravity truly exists. Dennis Overbye surveys the continuing scientific mystery of time travel, and Robert Kunzig describes new x-ray images of the heavens, including black holes, exploding stars, colliding galaxies, and other wonders the eye can't see.

    Her profound meditation on the nature of violence provides a remarkably vivid and accessible testament of the Greek epic's continuing relevance to our lives. This celebrated work appears here for the first time in a bilingual version, based on the text of the authoritative edition of the author's complete writings. An introduction discusses the significance of the essay both in the evolution of Weil's thought and as a distinctively iconoclastic contribution to Homeric studies. The commentary draws on recent interpretations of the Iliad and examines the parallels between Weil's vision of Homer's warriors and the experiences of modern soldiers.

    We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For takes on some of the greatest challenges of our times and in it Walker encourages readers to take faith in the fact that, despite the daunting predicaments we find ourselves in, we are uniquely prepared to create positive change.The hardcover edition of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For included a national tour that saw standing-room–only crowds and standing ovations. Walker’s clear vision and calm meditative voice—truly "a light in darkness"—has struck a deep chord among a large and devoted readership.

    Together these twenty-one articles on a wide range of today's most leading topics in science, from Dennis Overbye, Jonathan Weiner, and Richard Preston, among others, represent the full spectrum of scientific inquiry, proving once again that "good science writing is evidently plentiful" (American Scientist).

    At the same time, she was contributing essays, reviews, and editorials to numerous publications and participating in recorded conversations, interviews, and public discussions. Now, for the first time, these various shorter texts—all of them published within her lifetime—are gathered together in a single volume that makes clear the remarkable range of her preoccupations and passions. EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JEROME KOHN

    His teaching and writings have inspired a generation’s thinking about humankind’s place in the Earth Community and the universe, engendering widespread critical acclaim and a documentary film on his life and work. This new collection of essays, from various years and occasions, expands and deepens ideas articulated in his earlier writings and also breaks new ground. Berry opens our eyes to the full dimensions of the ecological crisis, framing it as a crisis of spiritual vision. Applying his formidable erudition in cultural history, science, and comparative religions, he forges a compelling narrative of creation and communion that reconciles modern evolutionary thinking and traditional religious insights concerning our integral role in Earth’s society.While sounding an urgent alarm at our current dilemma, Berry inspires us to reclaim our role as the consciousness of the universe and thereby begin to create a true partnership with the Earth Community. With Evening Thoughts, this wise elder has lit another beacon to lead us home.

    Fifteen years later, five years, no matter how "old" her review, no matter how dated the topic of an essay, readers of this hearty collection will find that Miss Florence King's sharp, crafted prose still dazzles, sizzles, and edures, which is why she finds herself in the exclusive company of great American writers and humorists, such as Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, and Westbrook Pegler, renowned for not suffering fools gladly.Deja Reviews is a compilation of the book reviews and essays Miss King wrote between 1991 and 2002 for National Review and The American Spectator.  It is a joy—a duty! a service!—to republish these treasured pieces...

    From the moment she hears, "It's a boy!" a special love blossoms in the

    His successful career has been distinguished by multi-million dollar verdicts and precedent-setting case law. Among many of his landmark cases are the $152 million awarded to a State Farm agent in Bellott v. State Farm, $84 million awarded to a disabled doctor in Ceimo v. Paul Revere, and $16.5 million awarded to a disabled worker in Ace v. Aetna Life Insurance Company. His verdicts to date total over $300 million. Friedman is a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, an invitation-only group that limits its membership to 100 of the leading trial lawyers in the country.Patrick Malone is one of the leading attorneys in the eastern United States who represents victims of serious personal injuries against drug manufacturers, hospitals, and others in the medical industry.  He frequently teaches lawyer groups about cutting edge techniques in trial advocacy.  His verdict in Benedi v. McNeil PPC remains one of the largest collected judgments against a pharmaceutical company.  Malone was an award-winning investigative journalist before attending Yale Law School.  Like Rick Friedman, he is a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates and is listed in The Best Lawyers in America. Now, they share their secrets of trying complex cases to a jury, including bad faith cases.  Friedman and Malone help you consider your theme and strategy for trial using his "Rules of the Road" technique, and then takes you from the pleading through discovery and trial."Rules of the Road does not belong on your bookshelf or your desk; it belongs in your mind. Get it there before you even think about your next trial. It contains two special joys: It teaches something usable on almost every page, and what it teaches is dead-on right." - David Ball, Ph.D., author of David Ball on Damages"

    Fiction. The Encyclopedia Project is a groundbreaking literary and visual experience in five volumes. Like the traditional encyclopedia, The Encyclopedia Project spans A-Z, but the contents combine the creative possibilities of a literary journal with the stunning four-color imagery of an artist's portfolio. The Encyclopedists' editorial process does not determine future content in advance, but is instead a chance operation between editors and contributors. However, they will ensure that 50% of each volume's contributors are people of color, representative of a full spectrum of creative work, regardless of age, scene, geographic location, level of education, or number of tattoos. This volume features over 150 entries by 114 talented folk, including a rebus on Kathy Acker by Anna Joy Springer, Aspects of the Novel by Rebecca Brown, Babble by Robert Gluck, Eileen Myles' Butch, Epic by Samuel R. Delany, Diary by The Quails' Julianna Bright, K'vetsch founder Sara Seinberg's Ephemera, Essentialism by kari edwards, and much more! Other contributors to Volume I include Brian Evenson, Thalia Field, Susan Bernstein, Joanna Howard and Michael Gizzi.

    A collection of essays from the frontline from a war correspondent, this title includes real stories from a near-abandoned hospital in Chechnya to bombed-out Tora Bora in Afghanistan, from Saddam Hussein's derelict palace in Baghdad to the inner-city barrios of Kingston, Jamaica.

    White explores his neighborhood ? “queens: 6 percent; cranky 70-year-old Russians who give you the evil eye when you walk past: 2 percent; blonde girls with big, round, hard fakeys who think Jennifer Anniston just got lucky: 10 percent; miscellaneous cool kids, hustlers, and actual crazy people: 5 percent.” White gets gigs as a freelance writer, goes to the grocery store where his Russian neighbors ask him questions because they think he’s from the old country; and encounters Sara Gilbert at the Laundromat, Leonard Maltin at the movies, and Ben Affleck driving a Rolls-Royce so ridiculously conspicuous he might as well be driving Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang. What began as weekly diaries emailed to out-of-state family and friends evolved into a blog called “Dave White Knows” and in 2003 became a monthly column in Instinct called “Exile in Guyville.” Alyson Books now presents White’s blogs in expanded form with loads of new material that will be even more irritating to the Instinct readers who didn’t like his column. “They requested more fashion and skin-care features in its place, which makes me kind of proud.” Dave White is a freelance journalist specializing in music. His reviews and features have been seen in E! Online, IFILM, LA Weekly, Dallas Observer, Instinct, The Advocate, Glue, Cybersocket, Total Movie, Unzipped, and Frontiers. White lives in West Hollywood with his boyfriend, the Morocco Mole, and is locally esteemed as the “King of Pancakes.”

    But as this collection demonstrates, Kirk was perhaps at his best as an essayist. This volume also confirms that Kirk’s was principally a literary and historical conservatism that refused to fit the irreducible complexity of human experience to the requirements of any ideological straitjacket.With The Essential Russell Kirk, literary critic George A. Panichas captures the breadth and depth of Kirk’s intellectual project by gathering together forty-four of the most masterful of Kirk’s essays, along with a unique chronology told in Kirk’s own words and a substantial introduction that articulates the deep humanism that animated Kirk’s philosophy. The result is a carefully assembled volume that gives us a fuller picture of an extraordinary man and writer, one whose labors had, and continue to have, remarkable repercussions on the American literary and political landscape.

    Essays on learning in a home without school, on living respectfully with children and of creating a nest in which learning flourishes.

    Like no other author, Jim Steinmeyer gives us insight into the timeless appeal of magic. His human subjects include such characters as Steele MacKaye, Maskelyne, David Devant, P.T. Selbit, Horace Goldin, and Charles Morritt. Illusions he discusses include: The Mascot Moth, Sawing a Lady in Halves, and Morritt's Disappearing Donkey.

    He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria and personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, a library of books never written.

    One of the articles directly questioned Chinese president Hu Jintao and inspired heated debate among Chinese intellectuals. In Traditional Chinese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books, Inc.

    Dick robot, which Mr. Ellis confesses to swiping off the back of a plane.) Take a look at the world of graphic storytelling through its hazy android eyes, a rattling ghost-train ride through the history of comics. David Bowie, the CIA, mad architects, Will Eisner, Frank Zappa, Tintin, the designer of Skylab, a train station in Paris, Arthur C. Clarke, the circus, the Black Panther Party, and William S. Burroughs: all of these things are connected by Jack Kirby, all part of the secret history of comics, and all illustrating the special nature of this exciting medium as the place where you can do anything.

    In this elegant series of essays, inflected with a radical Catholic philosophy, David Griffith contends that society's shift from language to image has changed the way people think about violence and cruelty, and that a disconnect exists between images and reality. Griffith meditates on images and literature, finding potent insight into what went wrong at the prison in the works of Susan Sontag, Anthony Burgess, and especially Flannery Oâ��Connor, who often explored the gulf between proclamations of faith and the capacity for evil. Accompanying the essays are illustrated facts about torture, lists of torture methods and their long-term effects, and graphics such as the schematics of the �pain pathwaysâ�� in the human body. Together, the images and essays endow the human being with the complexity images alone deny.

    From nicotine gum addiction to lesbian personal ads to incontinent dogs, Possible Side Effects mines Burroughs's life in a series of uproariously funny essays. These are stories that are uniquely Augusten, with all the over-the-top hilarity of Running with Scissors, the erudition of Dry, and the breadth of Magical Thinking. A collection that is universal in its appeal and unabashedly intimate, Possible Side Effects continues to explore that which is most personal, mirthful, disturbing, and cherished, with unmatched audacity. A cautionary tale in essay form. Be forewarned--hilarious, troubling, and shocking results might occur.

    This year''s edition emphasizes daily magic and features a dazzling array of articles (over fifty in all) on air magic, banishing rituals, Beltane recipes, color magic, earth magic, fire magic, household rituals, kitchen witchery, magical gardening, signs and sigils, water magic, and more! Look for the Moon''s sign and phase, along with incense and color correspondences, to help you maximize the potential of your workings. There''s also a handy list of Pagan holidays and festivals around the world-allowing you to celebrate a new tradition nearly every day of the year.

    Ericson, Jr., and Daniel J. Mahoney in collaboration with the Solzhenitsyn family, provides in one volume a rich and representative selection of Solzhenitsyn's voluminous works. Reproduced in their entirety are early poems, early and late short stories, early and late "miniatures" (or prose poems), and many of Solzhenitsyn’s famous—and not-so-famous—essays and speeches. The volume also includes excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's great novels, memoirs, books of political analysis and historical scholarship, and the literary and historical masterpieces The Gulag Archipelago and The Red Wheel. More than one-quarter of the material has never before appeared in English (the author’s sons prepared many of the new translations themselves). The Solzhenitsyn Reader reveals a writer of genius, an intransigent opponent of ideological tyranny and moral relativism, and a thinker and moral witness who is acutely sensitive to the great drama of good and evil that takes place within every human soul. It will be for many years the definitive Solzhenitsyn collection.

    Blending history, memoir, digressive literariness, and polemic, Kauffman provides fresh portaiture of such American originals as Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, regionalist painter Grant Wood, farmer-writer Wendell Berry, publisher Henry Regnery, maverick U.S. senators Eugene McCarthy and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and other Americans who can’t—or shouldn’t—be filed away in the usual boxes labeled �liberal” and �conservative.” Ranging from Millard Fillmore to Easy Rider, from Robert Frost to Mother Jones, Kauffman limns an alternative America that draws its breath from local cultures, traditional liberties, small-scale institutions, and neighborliness. There is an America left that is worth saving: these are its paragons, its poets, its pantheon.

    In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them.Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being.Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.

    Even today, centuries later, this simple saint draws people around the world to his story of living in humility, love, and joy.Here in Following Francis, Susan Pitchford tells her own story of the Franciscan life, as a member of the Third Order, founded by Francis himself so that people from all walks of life can follow the saint's ideal, without leaving their homes or occupations. Pitchford learned that the Franciscan tradition isn't the exclusive possession of monks cloistered in a monastery, but a spiritual path for ordinary people living in the twenty-first century.Organized around the Rule of St. Francis, this book - a wonderful resource for private devotion or group study - shows readers what it means to live out the Christian life with a Franciscan accent.

    

    For the next forty years he spent half his time teaching, half writing, and half farming. "That this adds up to three halves I am all too aware," he said, sounding a characteristic, self-deprecating note of bittersweet amusement at the chalk on his coat, the sweat on his brow, and the mud (and worse) on his boots. "I love this farm," he wrote shortly before his death in 2004, "every acre of it. The maples, the apple trees, the cattle, the wild turkeys. I love the brick farmhouse, which I believe to be about 190 years old ... and the two barns. I love the view from the kitchen window ... and the grander view to be had if you climb Bill Hill, the farm's in-house mini-mountain. The thing that delights me most, though, is that the farm really is a farm. It produces a little food every year, and most years a little fuel as well." It also produced four volumes of essays, beginning with First Person Rural (1978). Some of Perrin's pieces are practical (how to build a stone wall), others philosophical (why to build a stone wall). One pretends to be about amateur sugar making, but it is really a metaphor for reality and illusion. Another pretends to be about the country as a retreat, but is really about the country as a place to meet the world head-on. One is a dangerous character sketch of a sow - dangerous, because as Roy Blount said after reading it, "It almost made me decide to go ahead and get pigs." In short, these essays are as good as the literature of farming gets. Best Person Rural is a harvest feast, bringing together twenty of Perrin's best-loved pieces and five previously uncollected items, including his moving "Farewell to a Thetford Farm."

    In the 12 essays and introduction that constitute Blue Studios, DuPlessis continues that task, examining the work of experimental poets and the innovative forms they have fashioned to challenge commonplace assumptions about gender and cultural authority. The essays in “Attitudes and Practices” deal with two questions: what a feminist reading of cultural texts involves, and the nature of the essay itself as a mode of knowing: how poetry can be discursive and how the essay can be poetic. The goal of “Marble Paper,” with its studies of William Wordsworth, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson is to suggest terms for a “feminist history of poetry.” “Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world,” Theodore Adorno wrote, and in the section "Urrealism" DuPlessis examines the work of poets from several schools (the Objectivists, the New York School, the surrealists) whose work embodies that displacement, among them George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, H.D., and Barbara Guest. These writers’ radical deployment of line, sound, and structure, DuPlessis argues, demonstrate poetry’s power not as a purely literary, artistic, or aesthetic force but as a rhetorical form intricately tied to issues of power and ethics. And in "Migrated Into,” the author probes the ways these issues have informed her, as a poet and a critic; how the political has “migrated into” and suffused her own work; and how the practice of poetry can be an arousal to a deeper understanding of what we stand for.

    Separating spirituality from dogma, and fusing contemporary and archaic traditions, Minneapolis poet Sarah Fox explores the nature of creation, healing, and human connection, illuminating both rituals of community and communication in her accomplished debut.

    Essays from contemporary nonfiction writers such as Henry Louis Gates, Norma Elia Cant�, Pico Iyer, Joan Didion, and others are integrated directly into the text to illustrate concepts. KEY TOPICS: Individual chapters are devoted to detail and description, characterization and scene, distinctive voice, intimate point-of-view, and the various ways in which writers discover the significance or universality of their work. MARKET: For writers wanting to explore creative nonfiction.

    Also, it is funny and of a pleasing form and light but increasing heft, perfect for spiriting away in one’s back pocket for an evening of street stenciling or shopdropping.This Questionably Diagrammed Edition features updated texts, an introduction and a postface by radical literarists Liz Mason and Mikki Halpin, and several medical illustrations of little sense and less value, by the author. Written and illustrated by Anne Elizabeth Moore.

    Many rarely seen works are also featured and illustrate Monet's enduring ties to the Norman region. It was in Normandy that Monet began his painting career, and it was there that he met his first great mentor, Eugène Boudin. Monet developed a deep affection for the region. He would return time after time to depict its dramatic coastline, picturesque villages, and seaside resorts. Normandy has been a source of inspiration for artists over the centuries, and the catalogue puts Monet's work in context with those who came before—Corot, Millet, Courbet, Whistler, and Boudin—and his fellow revolutionaries—Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir, Degas.Featuring more than sixty master works, Monet in Normandy marks one of the largest Impressionist exhibitions to be on view in the United States. Illuminating the essays are works by other great contemporaries such as Pissarro, Morisot, and Degas.

    Yet it clings to a central belief in the dignity of the human person, the cornerstone of the doctrine of universal human rights to which even secular Westerners still cling. At the same time, the process of dehumanization so evident in the ideologies and totalitarianism of the twentieth century remains at work. Delsol charges that it is not enough to proclaim human rights as a sort of incantation but that, rather, one must understand what sort of being the human person is if humans are to be genuinely respected. In other words, if the philosophy of human rights is to form the basis of Western culture, it must rest on a truer understanding of the human person than that which is taught—both explicitly and implicitly—in the contemporary West.

    Part observation, part confession, this book takes us on a journey of philosophical musings, cultural history, and personal memoir.

    All of the essays in this new collection by Thomas Schelling convey his unique perspective on individuals and society.

    Ndebele's essays on South African literature and culture initially appeared in various publications in the 1980s. They encompass a period of trauma, defiance, and change - the decade of the collapse of apartheid and the challenge of reconstructing a future. In 1991, the essays were collected under the current title of Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African Literature and Culture. Here, this collection is reprinted without revision, together with an interview provoked by Albie Sachs' paper Preparing Ourselves for Freedom. That it is possible to republish the essays without revision so many years after their first appearance is a tribute to Ndebele's prescience. The issues that he raises and the questions that he poses remain key to a people who, after apartheid, have started to rediscover the complex ordinariness of living in a civil society.

    He sought out 20 other African Americans with deep connections to nature and asked them about their personal experiences, how they came to value nature and why African Americans seem under-represented in our parks and conservation efforts. The result is a compelling look at the issues that are so important to the future of our public lands. These personal profiles are not only interesting but provide insight into the past, present and future practices for our environment.

    So I want to witness to the power of the Incarnation alive and aloose in the ordinariness of the world for us and through us and among us. And I offer these little sketches of remembered grace to invite you to notice your own soul's companions and the thin places in your life through which grace, well, springs.With a light touch and warm voice, and just a hint of a Southern accent, Martha Sterne tells the stories of her encounters with Christ - in the supermarket and the beauty parlor, in the garden, the kitchen, and sometimes even church.Sterne shares her gift for storytelling, showing readers that the Incarnation is alive and loose everywhere they look, in the listening ears, kind voices, and loving hearts of people they bump into everywhere. Each essay is followed by reflection questions, making this a lovely volume for group study.

    In 2002, one of anthropology’s—and indeed today’s—most distinctive writers, Michael Taussig, visited Benjamin’s grave in Port Bou. The result is “Walter Benjamin’s Grave,” a moving essay about the cemetery, eyewitness accounts of Benjamin’s border travails, and the circumstances of his demise. It is the most recent of eight revelatory essays collected in this volume of the same name.“Looking over these essays written over the past decade,” writes Taussig, “I think what they share is a love of muted and defective storytelling as a form of analysis. Strange love indeed; love of the wound, love of the last gasp.” Although thematically these essays run the gamut—covering the monument and graveyard at Port Bou, discussions of peasant poetry in Colombia, a pact with the devil, the peculiarities of a shaman’s body, transgression, the disappearance of the sea, New York City cops, and the relationship between flowers and violence—each shares Taussig’s highly individual brand of storytelling, one that depends on a deep appreciation of objects and things as a way to retrieve even deeper philosophical and anthropological meanings. Whether he finds himself in Australia, Colombia, Manhattan, or Spain, in the midst of a book or a beach, whether talking to friends or staring at a monument, Taussig makes clear through these marvelous essays that materialist knowledge offers a crucial alternative to the increasingly abstract, globalized, homogenized, and digitized world we inhabit.Pursuing an adventure that is part ethnography, part autobiography, and part cultural criticism refracted through the object that is Walter Benjamin’s grave, Taussig, with this collection, provides his own literary memorial to the twentieth century’s greatest cultural critic.

    Wojnarowicz was then at the peak of his notoriety as the fiercest antagonist of morals crusader Senator Jesse Helms--a notoriety that Wojnarowicz alternately embraced and rejected. Already suffering the last stages of AIDS, David saw his dialogue with Lotringer as a chance to set the record straight on his aspirations, his personal history, and his political views. The two arranged to have this three-hour dialogue video-recorded by a mutual friend, the artist Marion Scemama. Lotringer held on to the tape for a long time. After Wojnarowicz's death the following year, he found the transcript enormously moving, yet somehow incomplete. David was trying, often with heartbreaking eloquence, to define not just his career but its position in time. The subject was huge, and transcended the actual dialogue. Lotringer then spent the next several years gathering additional commentary on Wojnarowicz's life and work from those who knew him best--the friends with whom he collaborated. Lotringer solicited personal testimony from Wojnarowicz's friends and other artists, including Mike Bildo, Steve Brown, Julia Scher, Richard Kern, Carlo McCormick, Ben Neill, Kiki Smith, Nan Goldin, Marguerite van Cook, and others. What emerges from these masterfully-conducted interviews is a surprising insight into something art history knows, but systematically hides: the collaborative nature of the work of any "great artist." All these respondents had, at one time, made performances, movies, sculptures, photographs, and other collaborative works with Wojnarowicz. In this sense, Wojnarowicz appears not only as a great originator, but as a great synthesizer.

    J. D. Scrimgeour contrasts his Ivy League education to the experiences of his students at a small public college in a faded, gritty New England city. What little Scrimgeour knows of the burdens his students bring to class--family crises, dead-end jobs, overdue bills--leaves him humbled. Fighting disenchantment with the ideals of higher education, Scrimgeour writes, "How much I owe these students, how much I have learned. They know the score; they know they are losing by a lot before the game even begins, and they shrug, as if to say, 'What am I supposed to do, cry?'"Scrimgeour's obligations to his students and his hopes for them glance off each other and sometimes collide with the realities of the classroom: the unread assignments and the empty desks. Is there too great a student-teacher divide? Can Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, or any other writer Scrimgeour teaches have something to say to a single mother with a full course load, two jobs, a sick kid, and a broken car? Yes, it turns out, and it is magic when it happens.The pupil inside the teacher emerges when Scrimgeour finds unexpected occasions for his own ongoing education. Pickup basketball games at a local park become exercises in improvisation, in finding new strengths to compensate for age and injury. His collaboration on a word-and-movement performance piece with a colleague, a dancer mourning the death of a beloved niece, leads him into unfamiliar creative terrain.A routine catch on a baseball field long ago, a challenged student in a grade school writing workshop, a yellowed statue of education pioneer Horace Mann: each memory, each encounter, forces revisions to a life's lesson plan. Scrimgeour's achingly honest, intimate essays offer clear-eyed yet compassionate accounts of the trials of learning.

    

    The insights in the chapter on the Jonah complex are surely alone worth the price of the book!" ~ David L. Miller Watson-Ledden Professor of Religion Emeritus, Syracuse University Core Faculty Person (retired), Pacifica Graduate Institute.

    Sam Harris responds to the Danish cartoons controversy.

    This series of essays and reviews from around the globe, representing decades of study, is being presented for the first time in collected form. A must-have for collectors, students, imitators, and stalkers alike. "Satire has no effect-a mirror holds no fear for those with no shame." Contributors include Steve Aylett, Eileen Welsome, Arkhipov Halt, Daniel Guyal, Chris Diana, Alfred Bork, Michael H. Hersh, George Cane, Dennis Ofstein, and Jean-Marie Guerin.

    Encourage them to make a better world." -- Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut's desire to save the planet from environmental and military destruction, to enact change by telling stories that both critique and embrace humanity, sets him apart from many of the postmodern authors who rose to prominence during the 1960s and 1970s. This new look at Vonnegut's oeuvre examines his insistence that writing is an "act of good citizenship or an attempt, at any rate, to be a good citizen." By exploring the moral and philosophical underpinnings of Vonnegut's work, Todd F. Davis demonstrates that, over the course of his long career, Vonnegut has created a new kind of humanism that not only bridges the modern and postmodern, but also offers hope for the power and possibilities of story. Davis highlights the ways Vonnegut deconstructs and demystifies the "grand narratives" of American culture while offering provisional narratives--petites histoires--that may serve as tools for daily living.

    focus on consumption (coffee, cartoons, literature); second section, politics of language, literature. excellent on literary canon. by a leading Tamil scholar.

    Now Writing Life, promises to be the most successful volume yet. In Writing Life, fifty celebrated authors reveal surprising truths about what it means to be a writer, and about the sparks that can result when writing and life intersect — and sometimes collide. Provocative, candid, often very funny, personal, and passionately engaged, this inspired collection will take readers deep into the heart of the writing life.Margaret Atwood revisits how she came to write five of her novels; Russell Banks reveals why he doesn’t do research; John Berger and Michael Ondaatje discuss gate-crashing characters and the magical instant when a work begins; Joseph Boyden takes time out from promoting his first novel to go moose-hunting; Margaret Drabble considers the “wickedness” of stealing material from real life; Howard Engel describes the stroke that took away his ability to read, and where that left him as a writer; Yann Martel reflects on the impossible, necessary challenge of writing about the Holocaust; Lisa Moore shows how crucial the mess and vitality of family life are to her writing; Alice Munro shares why she might “give up” writing; Rosemary Sullivan negotiates the risks and responsibilities that come with telling the story of a life; Susan Swan wrestles with historical fact, fiction, and Casanova. Proceeds from this volume will go to PEN Canada in support of its vital work on behalf of writers in prison around the world and in defence of freedom of expression both in Canada and abroad.Writing Life Contributors ListAndré Alexis Margaret Atwood Russell Banks David BergenJohn Berger George Bowering Marilyn Bowering Joseph Boyden Di Brandt Barry Callaghan Lynn Coady Susan Coyne Michael Crummey Margaret DrabbleBernice Eisenstein Howard EngelDamon Galgut Jonathan Garfinkel Greg Gatenby Camilla Gibb Charlotte Gray Elizabeth Hay Michael Helm Sheila Heti Annabel Lyon David Macfarlane Alistair MacLeod Margaret MacMillan Alberto Manguel Yann Martel Anne Michaels Rohinton Mistry Lisa Moore Shani MootooAlice Munro Susan Musgrave Michael Ondaatje Anna Porter Eden Robinson Marilynne RobinsonPeter RobinsonJohn Ralston Saul Shyam Selvadurai Russell Smith Rosemary Sullivan Susan Swan Madeleine Thien Jane Urquhart Michael WinterPatricia Young

    E. W. Clayborn, Valet, Theo Angell. Inside the book: Indepth, archival interview with scifi author Octavia Butler, brutally honest tour diary by Okkervil River's Will Sheff, Drew Daniel of Matmos tell us "How To Sing Along to 'Sweet Home Alabama', Crime writer/historian Peter Doyle unearths archival crime-scene photos from Australia, Dan Bejar of Destroyer is interviewed by his eight-year-old mini-me, the legacy of street-corner gospel-blues great Rev. Louis Overstreet, psychedelic painter Fred Tomaselli talks in-depth about his art and his punk/fanzine beginnings, Meredith Brosnan goes off about the ABC No Rio open-mic scene in NYC in the mid-'80s. Interviews with Sam Lipsyte, Todd Barry, Souled American, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and the Blow. Fiction by Stacey Levine, Vanessa Vaselka, and Jana Martin.

    We watch for signs of it. A sudden newness arrives, which speaks to hearts that have held out through the winter. Along with the rebirth, there is a solid recognition of age, for spring is an ancient renewal. Spring: A Spiritual Biography of the Season explores this delicate balance between the new and the ancient, evoking our sense that springtime is a time of poignant renewal, of youth merged with age, of giddy joy tempered by wisdom.

    Considering the questions we often share when pursuing or choosing our beliefs allows us to deepen our understanding and empathy for others-even as we travel along disparate sacred paths. In ILLUMINATIONS, Mark L. Tompkins and Jennifer McMahon have compiled a profound and visually stunning collection of original artworks, photographs, short prose pieces, poems, and interview excerpts contributed by more than 180 artists and writers from 43 countries. Instead of attempting to provide answers or explain doctrine, ILLUMINATIONS gives voice to a worldwide collective of truth seekers, including Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu, peace activist Fatima Gailani, bestselling authors Julia Cameron and Marianne Williamson, Reverend Tamara Siuda, and spiritual leader ShantiMayi. Representing a diverse range of cultures, traditions, and faiths, Illuminations is a provocative celebration of the personal spiritual experience.Reviews"This celebration of curiosity and questioning will appeal to those who are on a spiritual journey and find individual exploration to be more fulfilling than institutional religious experience." -Publishers Weekly"A refreshing counterpoint to the one-answer religious tract. . . The collection is beautiful visually and intellectually. The works are spiritual without being sentimental, no easy task. . . This book is a blessing."-Dallas Morning News and The Oklahoman "Mark Tompkins and Jennifer McMahon have undertaken an important task, mining the spiritual diversity that lies at the heart of humanity. Understanding each other'¬?s spiritual quest will lead to deeper healing for us all." -Marianne Williamson, author of A Return to Love and Everyday Grace"Illuminations merges art and spirituality into an elegant and moving collection of profound beauty. This book is a physical blessing to all who are fortunate enough to view it." -Arielle Ford, founding partner of The Spiritual Cinema Circle "Illuminations helps the reader move past understanding to empathy, which is the way to peace." -Jody Williams, 1997 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate "An important book, Illuminations allows all of us to deepen our connections with one another through the profound questions that live in every faith, every culture, and every heart. This is a book that affirms the inner dependence and interdependence of out time." -Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money "Sometimes religious systems expand life, introducing us to our spiritual natures; sometimes they diminish life, surrounding our fears with the mirage of certainty. In this book, Mark Tompkins and Jennifer McMahon open our spirituality in wondrous new ways, challenging and deepening all religious systems." -John Selby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey "Illuminations portrays an ecumenical inquiry in to the questions that lead the reader to uncover and remember the essences of living. Its symphony of stories and images lifts the spirit and invites conversations designed to end the separation of humanity from life and to reconnect us to that ineffable light that guides our journey." -Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, authors of The World Caf?© and founders of the World Caf?© Community Foundation

    This book is out of print.

    On publication Arundhati Roy's first novel The God of Small Things (1997) rapidly became an international bestseller, winning the Booker Prize and creating a new space for Indian literature and culture within the arts, even as it courted controversy and divided critical opinion.This guide to Roy's ground-breaking novel offers:an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of The God of Small Things a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new essays and reprinted critical essays by Padmini Mongia, Aijaz Ahmad, Brinda Bose, Anna Clarke, �milienne Baneth-Nouailhetas and Alex Tickell on The God of Small Things, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading.Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of The God of Small Things and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds Roy's text.

    Kennedy, whose presidential campaign was the subject of Mailer’s first foray into political journalism.First published in Esquire’s November 1960 issue, the essay, which is widely considered a key turning point in the dawn of New Journalism, is on the magazine’s list of its 7 greatest stories ever published and is forever enshrined in journalism history. This book revisits the seminal text with a broad selection of photographs and memorabilia. Fans of both Mailer and JFK will rejoice in this book, whose release coincides with the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination.

    Mayor David Miller is leaving office, and leaving behind a nagging worry that it might be harder than we ever anticipated to get anything substantial accomplished from within City Hall. Maybe, just maybe, we can get more done from without.Shifting from the ‘what’ of the previous uTOpia books to ‘how,’ Local Motion presents an in-depth analysis of civic engagement in Canada’s largest city. Decisions about the things that matter to us most on a daily basis – our schools and roads and houses – happen at the city level. So, how do we influence these decisions? What motivates ordinary citizens to take action and improve their community? How do neighbours organize together? Does City Hall help facilitate engagement, or stand in the way? Local Motion explores how we, as citizens, can make a positive change in our city.Essays by politicians and senior journalists explain what makes one city, Toronto, tick and stall. They explore electoral reform, civic organizations, ethnicity and racism, the press gallery and grassroots activism, offering up ways in which the people who live there might help to make their city a better, more humane one. Former Winnipeg mayor and current Toronto Centre MPP Glen Murray asks why we’re ‘consumers’ and ‘taxpayer’ rather than ‘citizens.’ Journalist Bert Archer looks at Torontonians' success at stopping things and asks why there isn’t more activism that starts things. Mike Smith considers the ‘creative city,’ John Lorinc looks at community responses to crime and Catherine Porter studies neighbourhood action. Denise Balkissoon explores how culture and ethnicity factors into the vote, Jennifer Lewington tells us about the role the media plays in city-building and how you might exploit it, while Hamutal Dotan rethinks zoning. Kelly Grant asks if there's room for us in city budgeting. Edward Keenan looks at how our elections could become more engaging, Hannah Sung depicts the lives of a few activists and Jason McBride studies how the private sector manages to get so much done.Taken together, these twelve in-depth essays paint a citizen-focused portrait of a city in transition, offering up myriad ways in which the people who live there might help to make their city a better, more humane one.

    In 1958 Yona Friedman published his first manifesto on "mobile architecture" and founded GEAM (Groupe d'Etude d'Architecture Mobile), which proposed different strategies and actions geared to the adaptation of architectural creation to modern user requirements concerning social and physical mobility. In this initial manifesto, Friedman points out that architectural knowledge cannot be the exclusive property of professionals and specialists, and suggests writing guides ("manuals"), which explain topics related to architecture and urban planning in clear and simple terms. Following some recent publications that have reasserted the importance of Friedman's work, Pro Domo is "a collection of fragments of scattered topics," a set of "milestones" selected by the author himself. In his words, these highlights are not meant as a testament nor do they, form a coherent whole." Instead, they form a personal selection chosen according to their sentimental value and span fifty-year period of production dating from the foundation of GEAM. The book includes building structure studies, urban design theories, observations on regional development, as well as design manuals for self-construction and competition projects.

    Essays. For some 25 years, Harold Jaffe's name has been synonymous with confrontational innovative fiction with a subversive edge. BEYOND THE TECHNO-CAVE collects the author's recent "creative nonfiction," including insights on art, writing, technology, global politics, travel, and intersections of all of these. Many of Jaffe's texts read like formally innovative narratives, others function like conceptual art, remaining in the mind long after. Everywhere evident is Jaffe's broad erudition, social commitment, and energized, elegant writing. "One of our finest literary terrorists/freedom fighters"--Paradoxa. Collection includes Jaffe's moral call on writers to return from their "inner emigrations" and re-includethemselves in our world and politics, "The Writer During Wartime."

    Charged with exploring every facet of cutting-edge music coming out of New York City in the 1980s and '90s, Gann writes about a wide array of timely issues that few critics have addressed, including computer music, multiculturalism and its thorny relation to music, music for the AIDS crisis, the brand-new art of electronic sampling and its legal implications, symphonies for electric guitars, operas based on talk shows, the death of twelve-tone music, and the various streams of music that flowed forth from minimalism. In these articles—including interviews with Yoko Ono, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, and other leading musical figures—Gann paints a portrait of a bristling era in music history and defines the scruffy, vernacular field of Downtown music from which so much of the most fertile recent American music has come.

    This volume contains detailed commentaries on all the items on display, as well as thirty-two essays by leading authors from Europe and America. Varese's life and music are discussed under the following headings: Influences - Points of Orientation; Conductor and Initiator in New York; Probing Uncharted Territory; Impact and Reception. Many previously unknown documents from the composer's estate, recently acquired by the Paul Sacher Foundation, form the basis of a nuanced picture of Varese's life, musical thought, and compositional output. The book is lavishly illustrated with facsimiles of manuscripts, letters, and other documents from the composer's collection, as well as reproductions of paintings, drawings and sculpture documenting Varese's close ties to the visual arts. Contributors: Jonathan W. Bernard, Gianmario Borio, Diane Bouchard, Austin Clarkson, Hermann Danuser, Michael Duchesneau, Sabine Feisst, Kyle Gann, Fritz Gerber, Theo Hirsbrunner, Anne Jostkleigrewe, Matthais Kassel, Sylvia Kahan, Klaus Kropfinger, Ernst Lichtenhahn, Malcolm Macdonald, Guido Magnaguagno, Olivia Mattis, Ulrich Mosch, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Felix Meyer, Dieter Nanz, Robert Piencikowski, Wolfgang Rathert, David Schiff, Anne C. Shreffler, Heinz Stahlhut, Jurg Stenzl, Denise von Glahn, Chou Wen-Chung, Heidy Zimmermann. Published in cooperation with the Paul Sacher Foundation.

    Stan Rowe prompts us to think in revolutionary terms about developing a new world-view. Edited and with a preface by Don Kerr, and an afterword by Ted Mosquin.

    For nearly five decades, Cash captivated audiences with his unique voice and candid portrayal of the gritty life of a working man, and his songs continue to strike a chord with listeners today. But it is the stories behind the music that remain with audiences and provide the inspiration for the work in this thoughtful compilation of fiction and non-fiction from contributors such as Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Don Cusic, Gretchen Moran Laskas, Amanda Nowlin, and Russell Rowland.

    Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. In this excellent collection, Robert Hullot-Kentor, widely regarded as the most distinguished American translator and commentator on Adorno, gathers together sixteen essays he has written about the philosopher over the past twenty years.The opening essay, "Origin Is the Goal," pursues Adorno's thesis of the dialectic of enlightenment to better understand the urgent social and political situation of the United States. "Back to Adorno" examines Adorno's idea that sacrifice is the primordial form of human domination; "Second Salvage" reconstructs Adorno's unfinished study of the transformation of music in radio transmission; and "What Is Mechanical Reproduction" revisits Adorno's criticism of Walter Benjamin. Further essays cover a broad range of topics: Adorno's affinities with Wallace Stevens and Nabokov, his complex relationship with Kierkegaard and psychoanalysis, and his critical study of popular music.Many of these essays have been revised, with new material added that emphasizes the relevance of Adorno's thought to the United States today. Things Beyond Resemblance is a timely and richly analytical collection crucial to the study of critical theory, aesthetics, continental philosophy, and Adorno.

    Ricketts (1897–1948) has reached legendary status in the California mythos. A true polymath and a thinker ahead of his time, Ricketts was a scientist who worked in passionate collaboration with many of his friends—artists, writers, and influential intellectual figures—including, perhaps most famously, John Steinbeck, who once said that Ricketts's mind “had no horizons.” This unprecedented collection, featuring previously unpublished pieces as well as others available for the first time in their original form, reflects the wide scope of Ricketts’s scientific, philosophical, and literary interests during the years he lived and worked on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. These writings, which together illuminate the evolution of Ricketts’s unique, holistic approach to science, include “Verbatim transcription of notes on the Gulf of California trip,” the basic manuscript for Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s Log from the Sea of Cortez; the essays “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry;” several shorter pieces on topics including collecting invertebrates and the impact of modernization on Mexican village life; and more. An engaging critical biography and a number of rare photographs offer a new and richly detailed view of Ricketts’s life.

    Includes: Purity of Heart, Faith in Awakening, Untangling the Present, Pushing the Limits, All About Change, The Roots of Buddhist Romanticism, Right & Wrong Reconciliation, Getting the Message, Educating Compassion, Jhana Not by the Numbers, The Integrity of Emptiness, A Verb for Nirvana, The Practice in a Word.

    The work redefines the terms of power, seduction, and morality, and the resulting conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment and romanticism.The Don Giovanni Moment is the first book to examine the aesthetic and moral legacy of Mozart's opera in the literature, philosophy, and culture of the nineteenth century. The prominent scholars in this collection address the opera's impact on the philosophical visions of Kierkegaard, Goethe, and Williams and its influence on the literary and dramatic works of Pushkin, Hoffmann, M�rike, Byron, Wagner, Strauss, and Shaw. Through a close and careful analysis of Don Giovanni's literary and philosophical reception and its many appropriations, rewritings, and retellings, these contributors treat the opera as a vantage point from which theory and philosophy can reconsider romanticism's central themes.As lively and passionate as the opera itself, these essays continue the spirited debate over the meaning and character of Don Giovanni and its powerful legacy. Together they prove that Mozart's brilliant artistic achievement is as potent and relevant today as when it was first performed two centuries ago.

    Burke's interpretations of Shakespeare have influenced important lines of contemporary scholarship; playwrights and directors have been stirred by his dramaturgical investigations; and many readers outside academia have enjoyed his ingenious dissections of what makes a play function. Burke's intellectual project continually engaged with Shakespeare's works, and Burke's writings on Shakespeare, in turn, have had an immense impact on generations of readers. Carefully edited and annotated, with helpful cross-references, Burke's fascinating interpretations of Shakespeare remain challenging, provocative, and accessible. Read together, these pieces form an evolving argument about the nature of Shakespeare's artistry. Included are thirteen analyses of individual plays and poems, an introductory lecture explaining his approach to reading Shakespeare, and a comprehensive appendix of scores of Burke's other references to Shakespeare. The editor, Scott L. Newstok, also provides a historical introduction and an account of Burke's legacy. This edition fulfils Burke's own vision of collecting in one volume his Shakespeare criticism, portions of which had appeared in the many books he had published throughout his lengthy career. Here, Burke examines Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Julius Caesar, Venus and Adonis, Othello, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, Falstaff, the Sonnets, and Shakespeare's imagery. KENNETH BURKE (1897-1993) was the author of many books, including the landmark Motivorum trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955 (2007). He has been hailed as one of the most original American thinkers of the twentieth century and possibly the greatest rhetorician since Cicero. Burke's enduring familiarity with Shakespeare helped shape his own theory of dramatism, an ambitious elaboration of the "all the world's a stage" conceit. Burke is renowned for his far-reaching 1951 essay on Othello, which wrestles with concerns still relevant to scholars more than half a century later; his imaginative ventriloquism of Mark Antony's address over Caesar's body has likewise found a number of appreciative readers, as have his many other essays on the playwright. SCOTT L. NEWSTOK is Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College and Andrew W. Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at Yale University.

    But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille's most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for understanding the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy. Established voices and younger scholars cover a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance so readers can think with and through Bataille. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation.Contributors are Alison Leigh Brown, Andrew Cutrofello, Zeynep Direk, Jesse Goldhammer, Dorothy Holland, Pierre Lamarche, Richard A. Lee, Jr., Alphonso Lingis, Ladelle McWhorter, Lucio A. Privitello, Allan Stoekl, Amy Wendling, and Shannon Winnubst.

    The Great Plains of the North American continent have dramatic seasons, intense colors, otherworldly thunderstorms, and epic winters. Denise Low has emerged as one of the most trusted writers of this region. With a balance of drama and finesse, she describes the juncture between the natural world and the human realm of literature.

    Here, with great heart, supple wit, and a dash of anger, Garrison Keillor describes the simple democratic values-the Golden Rule, the obligation to defend the weak against the powerful, and others- that define his hard-working Midwestern neighbors and that today's Republicans seem determined to subvert. A reminiscence, a political tract, and a humorous meditation, Homegrown Democrat is an entertaining, refreshing addition to today's rancorous political debate. * A New York Times bestseller * Updated and revised with a new introduction for the 2006 midterm elections * A Featured Alternate Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

    Indeed, he comments that writing it "led me to formulate thoughts that might otherwise have remained concealed in the folds of my work." He explores themes such as transcription and translation, poetics and analysis, "open work," and music theater. The reader will also find here numerous insights on the work of other composers, past and present, and much more. A figure of formidable intellect, Berio ranges easily among topics such as Schenkerian analysis, the criticism of Carl Dahlhaus and Theodor Adorno, the works of his friends and sometime collaborators Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. But Berio carries his learning lightly--his tone is conversational, often playful, punctuated by arresting aphorisms: "The best possible commentary on a symphony is another symphony."

    The collection includes three essays on the Bible, as well as pieces devoted to Twelfth Night, Rembrandt's self-portraits, Tristram Shandy, Kafka's stories and aphorisms, Borges, Kierkegaard, and painter Andrez Jackowski. The title essay examines the relationship of the artists' works and their ideas, and the book concludes with personal meditations on memory, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and being a writer-teacher.

    His awards include an Emmy Award, an NAACP Image Award for his work in the Spike Lee film "Do the Right Thing, " a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild, and a Kennedy Center Honor. The last two honors, like so many of his accomplishments, were shared with his wife and partner (in life and in work), Ruby Dee.Ossie Davis is also revered for his lifelong commitment to those social and political causes about which he was so passionate. Of all the gifts he possessed, perhaps none was greater than his ability to articulate the important issues of the day. He used his brilliant mind and his oratory skills to give voice to his concerns as a black man, an American, and a human being in the world, as well as to the individuals and communities whose concerns he made his own. This monumental book brings together many of the moving speeches, essays, and other writings as an ultimate gift to posterity."Life Lit by Some Large Vision" includes some humor, some history, and some surprises: moving tributes to such luminaries as Malcolm X and Louis Armstrong; thought-provoking speeches on the treachery of the English language and the challenge of breaking through the "niggerization" process; letters to friends and fellow thinkers; essays that span decades of social thought and revolutionary positions; and the closing monologue from his groundbreaking 1961 play, "Purlie Victorious."The unforgettable sound of Ossie Davis's voice is well documented in his work on film and television, but the words on these pages offer his heart and mind, and will be the next best thing to witnessing him speak in person. Ruby Dee contributes a foreword to the collection and introductory notes to the individual pieces, many of which were written and delivered with her at his side. The result is a comprehensive celebration of one man's extraordinary wisdom and generosity. This is a book that will enrich countless readers -- as a gift, an educational resource, a volume to be read aloud on special occasions, and much more.

    Giant Lizards from Another Star is an anthology containing poems, short stories, convention reports, and essays, as well as the novellas "The Human Front" and "Cydonia".

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Plus an excerpt from Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest.