Isabelle Allende said his works “invade the reader’s mind, to persuade him or her to surrender to the charm of his writing and power of his idealism.”Mirrors, Galeano’s most ambitious project since Memory of Fire, is an unofficial history of the world seen through history’s unseen, unheard, and forgotten. As Galeano notes: “Official history has it that Vasco Núñez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, the two oceans at once. Were the people who lived there blind??”Recalling the lives of artists, writers, gods, and visionaries, from the Garden of Eden to twenty-first-century New York, of the black slaves who built the White House and the women erased by men’s fears, and told in hundreds of kaleidoscopic vignettes, Mirrors is a magic mosaic of our humanity.

    Tolkien's On Fairy-stories is his most-studied and most-quoted essay, an exemplary personal statement of his own views on the role of imagination in literature, and an intellectual tour de force vital for understanding Tolkien's achievement in writing The Lord of the Rings .Contained within is an introduction to Tolkien's original 1939 lecture and the history of the writing of On Fairy-stories, with previously unseen material. Here, at last, Flieger and Anderson reveal the extraordinary genesis of this seminal work and discuss how the conclusions that Tolkien reached during the composition of the essay would shape his writing for the rest of his life.

    Their / infallible sense of what their lives / are meant to be."In The Truro Bear and Other Adventures, Mary Oliver brings together ten new poems, thirty-five of her classic poems, and two essays, all about mammals, insects, and reptiles. The award-winning poet considers beasts of all kinds: bears, snakes, spiders, porcupines, humpback whales, hermit crabs, and, of course, her beloved and disobedient little dog, Percy, who appears and even speaks in thirteen poems, the closing section of this volume.As Renée Loth has observed in the Boston Globe, "Mary Oliver, who won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1983, is my choice for her joyous, accessible, intimate observations of the natural world . . . She teaches us the profound act of paying attention."

    Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the 20th century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as "North & South," "A Cold Spring," "Questions of Travel," and "Geography III." In addition it contains an extensive selection of un_published poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. "Poems, Prose, and Letters" brings together as well most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

    . . a sort of David Sedaris-like take on knitting-laugh-out-loud funny most of the time and poignantly reflective when it's not cracking you up." --Library Journal on Yarn HarlotStephanie Pearl-McPhee returns to pen another hilarious and poignant collection of essays surrounding her favorite topics: knitting, knitters, and what happens when you get those two things anywhere near ordinary people.For the 60 million knitters in America, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (a.k.a. the Yarn Harlot) shares stories of knitting horrors and triumphs, knitting successes and defeats, but, mostly, stories about the human condition that ring true for everyone-especially if you happen to have a rather large amount of yarn in your house.Pearl-McPhee maintains a popular blog at www.yarnharlot.ca. Divided into sections relating to each essay's content, such as women, politics, family, and overcoming boredom, Free-Range Knitter will entertain yarnsmiths who enjoy sharing in the collective experiences of the woolen and silky skein.

    . . brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.”—Charles SimicFans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.From “The Dart and the Drill”:I do not believe that when my brother pierced my skull with a succession of darts thrown from across our paneled rec room on the night of November 18th in my sixth year on earth, he was trying to transcend the notions of time and space as contained and protected by the human skull. But who can fathom the complexities of the human brain? Ten years later—this would have been in 1967—the New York Times reported a twenty-four year old man, who held an honor degree in law, died in the process of using a dentist’s drill on his own skull, positioned an inch above his right ear, in an attempt to prove that time and space could be conquered . . .Mary Ruefle’s poems and prose have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Best American Poetry, and The Next American Essay. Her many awards include NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a frequent visiting professor at the University of Iowa, and she lives and teaches in Vermont.

    The twentieth century has become "history" at an unprecedented rate. The world of 2007 is so utterly unlike that of even 1987, much less any earlier time, that we have lost touch with our immediate past even before we have begun to make sense of it. In less than a generation, the headlong advance of globalization, with the geographical shifts of emphasis and influence it brings in its wake, has altered the structures of thought that had been essentially unchanged since the European industrial revolution. Quite literally, we don't know where we came from. The results have proved calamitous thus far, with the prospect of far worse. We have lost touch with a century of social thought and socially motivated social activism. We no longer know how to discuss such concepts and have forgotten the role once played by intellectuals in debating, transmitting, and defending the ideas that shaped their time. In Reappraisals, Tony Judt resurrects the key aspects of the world we have lost in order to remind us how important they still are to us now and to our hopes for the future. Reappraisals draws provocative connections between a dazzling range of subjects, from the history of the neglect and recovery of the Holocaust and the challenge of "evil" in the understanding of the European past to the rise and fall of the "state" in public affairs and the displacement of history by "heritage." With his trademark acuity and Žlan, Tony Judt takes us beyond what we think we know to show us how we came to know it and reveals how many aspects of our history have been sacrificed in the triumph of mythmaking over understanding, collective identity over truth, and denial over memory. His book is a road map back to the historical sense we so vitally need.

    Two straight-A students head off to school, and when only one of them returns home Chesney Yelverton is coaxed from retirement and assigned to what proves to be the most difficult and deadly - case of his career. From the shining notorious East Side, When You Are Engulfed in Flames confirms once again that David Sedaris is a master of mystery and suspense.Or how about...when set on fire, most of us either fumble for our wallets or waste valuable time feeling sorry for ourselves. David Sedaris has studied this phenomenon, and his resulting insights may very well save your life. Author of the national bestsellers Should You Be Attacked By Snakes and If You Are Surrounded by Mean Ghosts, David Sedaris, with When You Are Engulfed in Flames, is clearly at the top of his game.Oh, all right...David Sedaris has written yet another book of essays (his sixth). Subjects include a parasitic worm that once lived in his mother-in-law's leg, an encounter with a dingo, and the recreational use of an external catheter. Also recounted is the buying of a human skeleton and the author's attempt to quit smoking In Tokyo.Master of nothing, at the dead center of his game, Sedaris proves that when you play with matches, you sometimes light the whole pack on fire.(front flap)

    Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America’s greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature” join ecologists’ memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

    File Under:Life,Death,Vertigo.Sparrows,Saints,and Morphine.

    In the searching of our souls demanded by this challenge . . . kindred spirits across the nation must confront the most fundamental liberal failure of the current era: the failure to embrace a moral vision of America based on the transcendent faith that human beings are more than the sum of their material appetites, our country is more than an economic machine, and freedom is not license but responsibility—the gift we have received and the legacy we must bequeath. “Although our sojourn in life is brief, we are on a great journey. For those who came before us and for those who follow, our moral, political, and religious duty to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are equal under the law, is in good hands on our watch.” —from “For America’s Sake”People know Bill Moyers mostly from his many years of path-breaking journalism on television. But he is also one of America’s most sought-after public speakers. His appearances draw sell-out crowds across the country and are among the most reproduced on the Web. “And one reason,” writes noted journalist Bill McKibben, “is that Moyers pulls no punches. His understanding of America’s history is at least as deep as his understanding of Christian tradition, which is an integral part of his background . . . With his feet firmly planted in the deepest American traditions, Bill Moyers is helping to keep alive an oratorical tradition that is fading after two centuries. Trained by his career in broadcasting, he writes for the ear, his cadences and his repetitions timed to bring an audience to full realization of its role and its power.” And that is the message of this book. Moyers on Democracy collects many of Bill Moyers’s most moving statements to connect the dots on what is happening to our country—the twinned growth of private wealth and public squalor, the assault on our Constitution, the undermining of the electoral process, the accelerating class war against ordinary (and vulnerable) Americans inherent in the growth of economic inequality, the dangers of an imperial executive, the attack on the independence of the press, the despoiling of the earth we share as our common gift—and to rekindle the reader’s conviction that “the gravediggers of democracy will not have the last word.” Richly insightful and alive with a fierce, abiding love for our country, Moyers on Democracy is essential reading in this fateful presidential year.

    The Essential Chomsky brings together selections from his most important writings since 1959-from his groundbreaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his bestselling works Hegermony or Survival and Failed States-concerning subjects ranging from critiques of corporate media and U.S. interventionism to intellectual freedom and the political economy of human rights. With a foreword by Anthony Arnove, The Essential Chomsky is an unprecedented, comprehensive overview of Chomsky's thought.

    The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.The first section of the book, -Family and History, - includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, -Writers and Writing, - offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, -Politics and Society, - includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture.Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

    Its groundbreaking stylistic and thematic devices, boldness and wit earned it an intensely devoted fan base-and as it approached its zenith, attention from media watchdog groups and the Federal Communications Commission. The grim and provocative evolution of the show over its final two seasons polarized its audience, while also breaking new ground for critical and philosophical analysis. The thirteen essays in this collection, divided into the perspectives of feminist, cultural, auteur and fan studies, explore the popular series' conclusion, providing a multifaceted examination of Buffy's most controversial two seasons.

    Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. By remixing stories from novels and films to zoom in on the black presences within them, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE ruminates on the sublime power of history to shape culture in the subconscious of both the artist and the reader/viewer. Moving from interrogations of Fran�ois Ozon's 8 Femmes and Virginia Woolf's Orlando to the machinations of the Regency House Party reality TV show, UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE weaves threads of myth, fact and fiction into previously unexplored narratives lurking in our collective imagination.This is truly a bold book, one that combines scenes of rich technicolor with the light of truth, at once invoking and dissolving cultural myths and faux histories.--Brenda CoultasInvestigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE takes up 'black presences in European literature, visual art, and film.' Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.--San Francisco Bay Guardian

    Now, in What I'd Say to the Martians, Handey regales readers with his incredible wit and wacky musings.

    But Brecher writes about war, too. War Nerd collects his most opinionated, enraging, enlightening, and entertaining pieces. Part war commentator, part angry humorist àla Bill Hicks, Brecher inveighs against pieties of all stripes — Liberian generals, Dick Cheney, U.N. peacekeepers, the neo-cons — and the massive incompetence of military powers. A provocative free thinker, he finds much to admire in the most unlikely places, and not always for the most pacifistic reasons: the Tamil Tigers, the Lebanese Hezbollah, the Danes of 1,000 years ago, and so on, across the globe and through the centuries. Crude, scatological, un-P.C., yet deeply informed, Brecher provides a radically different, completely unvarnished perspective on the nature of warfare.

    It's been downhill ever since. For all this talk of our dazzling modern age, the two biggest advances of the past decade are Wi-Fi and Nando's. That's the best we can do.'In his latest laugh-out-loud collection of misanthropic scribblings, hideous Q-list celebrity failure Charlie Brooker tackles everything from the misery of nightclubs to the death of Michael Jackson, making room for Sir Alan Sugar, potato crisps, global financial meltdown, conspiracy theories and Hole in the Wall along the way. The collapse of civilisation has never felt this funny (unless you're a sociopath, in which case it's been an uninterrupted laugh riot since the days of the Somme).This book is guaranteed to brighten your life, put a spring in your step, and lie to you on its back cover.

    A paper written for "Intimate Revolt: Recognizing Liberatory Forms of Documentary and Life Writing," curated by Kass Fleisher and presented at the Modern Language Association Convention, Chicago, December 28, 2007.

    No social critic today is more adept and incisive in exploring the state of our culture and the ideas that are changing our ways of life. In Not with a Bang But a Whimper, he takes the measure of our cultural decline, with special attention to Britain-its bureaucratic muddle, oppressive welfare mentality, and aimless youth-all pursued in the name of democracy and freedom. He shows how terrorism and the growing numbers of Muslim minorities have changed our public life. Also here are Mr. Dalrymple's trenchant observations on artists and ideologues, and on the questionable treatment of criminals and the mentally disturbed, his area of medical interest.

    Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh’s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens.With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur’an; Plato’s Academy and Epicurus’s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt—all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power.Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison’s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility—and its enduring importance to humanity.

    Le Guin assembles interviews with the renowned science-fiction and fantasy author of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Earthsea sequence of novels and stories. For nearly five decades, Le Guin (b. 1929) has enjoyed immense success--both critical and popular--in science fiction and fantasy. But she has also published well-received works in such genres as realistic fiction, poetry, children's literature, criticism, and translation. In the pieces collected here, Le Guin takes every interview not as an opportunity to recapitulate long-held views but as an occasion for in-depth intellectual discourse.In interviews spanning over twenty-five years of her literary career, including a previously unpublished piece conducted by the volume's editor, Le Guin talks about such diverse subjects as U.S. foreign policy, the history of architecture, the place of women and feminist consciousness in American literature, and the differences between science fiction and fantasy.Carl Freedman is professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction; The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture; and George Orwell: A Study in Ideology and Literary Form.

    But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim—as well as the devotion of readers worldwide. Though the 1976 collection A River Runs Through It and Other Stories was the only book Maclean published in his lifetime, it was an unexpected success, and the moving family tragedy of the title novella—based largely on Maclean’s memories of his childhood home in Montana—has proved to be one of the most enduring American stories ever written.The Norman Maclean Reader is a wonderful addition to Maclean’s celebrated oeuvre. Bringing together previously unpublished materials with incidental writings and selections from his more famous works, the Reader will serve as the perfect introduction for readers new to Maclean, while offering longtime fans new insight into his life and career. In this evocative collection, Maclean as both a writer and a man becomes evident. Perceptive, intimate essays deal with his career as a teacher and a literary scholar, as well as the wealth of family stories for which Maclean is famous. Complete with a generous selection of letters, as well as excerpts from a 1986 interview, The Norman Maclean Reader provides a fully fleshed-out portrait of this much admired author, showing us a writer fully aware of the nuances of his craft, and a man as at home in the academic environment of the University of Chicago as in the quiet mountains of his beloved Montana.Multifarious and moving, the works collected in The Norman Maclean Reader serve as both a summation and a celebration, giving readers a chance once again to hear one of American literature’s most distinctive voices.

    Now How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken reveals all at once the enormous stature of Mendelsohn's achievement and demonstrates why he is considered one of our greatest critics. Writing with a lively intelligence and arresting originality, he brings his distinctive combination of scholarly rigor and conversational ease to bear across eras, cultures, and genres, from Roman games to video games.His interpretations of our most talked-about films—from the work of Pedro Almodóvar to Brokeback Mountain, from United 93 and World Trade Center to 300, Marie Antoinette, and The Hours—have sparked debate and changed the way we watch movies. Just as stunning and influential are his dispatches on theater and literature, from The Producers to Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, from The Lovely Bones to the works of Harold Pinter. Together these thirty brilliant and engaging essays passionately articulate the themes that have made Daniel Mendelsohn a crucial voice in today's cultural conversation: the aesthetic and indeed political dangers of imposing contemporary attitudes on the great classics; the ruinous effect of sentimentality on the national consciousness in the post-9/11 world; the vital importance of the great literature of the past for a meaningful life in the present.How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken makes it clear that no other contemporary thinker is as engaged with as many aspects of our culture and its influences as Mendelsohn is, and no one practices the vanishing art of popular criticism with more acuity, humor, and feeling.

    In six new essays on politics and culture in Israel today, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. This collection includes an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman’s twenty-year-old son, Uri.Moving, humane, clear-sighted, and courageous, touching on literature and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy, these writings are a cri de coeur from a heroic voice of reason at a time of uncertainty and despair.

    . . they go to the cemetery and stay all night, praying, singing, drinking, wailing. They tell the sad stories and the noble ones; they eat cookies shaped like skeletons. They celebrate and mourn at once.” Striking that balance, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead presents snapshot portraits of The Jeweler, The Driving Instructor, The Bad Influence, The Queen of New Jersey—and roughly fifty others who have touched Winik’s life, from her son’s second grade teacher to Keith Haring. Tied together by the inimitable, poignant voice of Winik, these losses form not only an autobiography but a story of our time, delivering a lyrical journey that ultimately raises the spirits.

    It explores the use of art to survive abuse, incest, madness and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark a path for survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman's silent rage, through the power inherent in struggles with destruction, and the ensuing possibilities of transforming that burning force into the external release of art. With contributions by Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Patricia Smith, Cristy C. Road, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Carolyn Gage, Eileen Myles, Fly, Diane DiMassa, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, Nicole Blackman, Silas Howard, Daphne Gottleib, and Stephanie Howell.

    From "Accuracy" to "Wound," "Adam" to "Void," "Babel" to "Silence," these cross-referential, highly associative entries comprise an utterly singular work of art. A Whaler’s Dictionary is the mesmerizing product of a total immersion into one of the greatest novels in the English language.

    He highlights major problems confronted by the region and suggests alternative perspectives and ways in which its people might reorganize to relate effectively to the changing world.Hau'ofa's essays criss-cross Oceania, creating a navigator's star chart of discussion and debate. Spurning the arcana of the intellectual establishments where he was schooled, Hau'ofa has crafted a distinctive--often lyrical, at times angry--voice that speaks directly to the people of the region and the general reader. He conveys his thoughts from diverse standpoints: university-based analyst, essayist, satirist and humorist, and practical catalyst for creativity. According to Hau'ofa, only through creative originality in all fields of endeavor can the people of Oceania hope to strengthen their capacity to engage the forces of globalization."Our Sea of Islands," "The Ocean in Us," "Pasts to Remember," and "Our Place Within," all of which are included in this collection, outline some of Hau'ofa's ideas for the emergence of a stronger and freer Oceania. Throughout he expresses his concern with the environment and suggests that the most important role that the "people of the sea" can assume is as custodians of the Pacific, the vast area of the world's largest body of water.

    Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited features ten pieces never previously republished outside Christopher Street, as well as a new introduction keenly describing and evaluating a historical moment that still informs and defines today’s world-particularly its community of homosexuals, which, arguably, is still recovering from the devastation of AIDS.

    Newspapers, dust, books, money, empty bottles, and the things on top of refrigerators all figure in series of pictures that bring viewers into a state of increased sensitivity to their everyday lives. Long Life Cool White features forty-five of the artist’s photographs from the past two decades. Davey’s relationship to such traditions as street and conceptual photography and French surrealism can be seen throughout these pages. Noted scholar Helen Molesworth examines the domestic content of Davey’s work as well as Davey’s burgeoning career as a writer. The book also includes Davey’s insightful essay “Notes on Photography and Accident,” in which she discusses the themes of chance, death, and the poetic that occur in the writings of three major theorists of photography: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Susan Sontag.

    This is not to say that the pieces gathered here are not serious in their arguments; quite the contrary. . . . I mean only that, in these articles, I have given my natural inclinations towards satire and towards wantonly profligate turns of phrase far freer rein than academic writing permits. . . . I have, at any rate, attempted to include only pieces that strike me as having some intrinsic interest, both in form and in content.”-- from the introduction

    M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes a telling detail? When is a metaphor successful? Is Realism realistic? Why do some literary conventions become dated while others stay fresh?James Wood ranges widely, from Homer to Make Way for Ducklings, from the Bible to John le Carré, and his book is both a study of the techniques of fiction-making and an alternative history of the novel. Playful and profound, How Fiction Works will be enlightening to writers, readers, and anyone else interested in what happens on the page.

    You are in a snowy landscape, but this is not the pleasant kind of snow of a Thomas Kincade painting, where hot cocoa and biscuits beckon from a thatched cottage. This is the frigid, relentless white of a tundra, and you have been plying it for miles....' --excerpt from We Shall Have Spring Again

    IN THE THIRD VOLUME:Thomas Naylor on "Cipherspace," Annie Le Brun on "Catastrophe Pending," Pentti Linkola on "Survival Theory," Michael O'Meara on "The Primordial and the Perennial," Alain de Benoist on "Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power," Nigel Pennick on "The Web of Wyrd," Thierry Jolif on "The Abode of the Gods and the Great Beyond," Stephen Flowers on "The Spear of Destiny," Joscelyn Godwin on Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" trilogy, Ian Read on "Humour in the Icelandic Sagas," Geza von Neményi on the "Hávamál," Gordon Kennedy on the "Children of the Sonne," Michael Moynihan on "Carl Larsson's Greatest Sacrifice," Christopher McIntosh on "Iceland's Pagan Renaissance," Jónína Berg on Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, "Selected Poems" by Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson, Vilius Rudra Dundzila on "Baltic Lithuanian Religion," James Reagan on "The End Times," interviews with the stalwart folk singer Andrew King and the modern minnesinger Roland Kroell, Collin Cleary on "Paganism Without Gods," Róbert Hórvath on Mark Sedgwick's "Against the Modern World," and extensive book and music review sections.

    Here is a substantial selection of these wide-ranging works, most of which have been unavailable since their original appearance in underground newspapers, literary journals, even porn magazines. Among the highlights are his first published short story, his last short story, his first and last essays, and the first installment of his famous "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column. This landmark collection also contains meditations on his familiar themes, as well as singular discussions of such figures as Artaud, Pound, and Hemingway, and several discussions of his aesthetics, revealing an unexpectedly learned mind behind his seemingly offhand productions.

    The essays included in this collection span the last ten years of Wise’s writing and cover all the hottest racial topics of the past decade: affirmative action, Hurricane Katrina, racial tension in the wake of the Duke lacrosse scandal, white school shootings, racial profiling, phony racial unity in the wake of 9/11, and the political rise of Barack Obama. Wise’s commentaries make forceful yet accessible arguments that serve to counter both white denial and complacency—two of the main obstacles to creating a more racially equitable and just society. Speaking Treason Fluently is a superbly crafted collection of Wise’s best work, which reveals the ongoing salience of race in America today and demonstrates that racial privilege is not only a real and persistent problem, but one that ultimately threatens the health and well-being of the entire society.

    Her keen eye and vivid writing have reinforced to readers how important architecture is and why it continues to be both controversial and fascinating.In her new book--which gathers together the best of her writing, from one of her first pieces in the New York Times in 1962 on le Corbusier's Carpenter Center at Harvard, to essays in the New York Review of Books, to more recent writing in the Wall Street Journal--Huxtable bears witness to some of the twentieth century's best--and worst--architectural masters and projects.With a perspective of more than four decades, Huxtable examines the century's modernist beginnings and then turns her critic's eye to the seismic shift in style, function, and fashion that occurred midcentury--all leading to a dramatic new architecture of the twenty-first century. Much of the writing in On Architecture has never appeared in book form before, and Huxtable's many admirers will be delighted to once again have access to her elegant, impassioned opinions, insights, and wisdom."Looking back, I realize that my career covered an extraordinary period of change, that I was writing at a time in which architecture was changing slowly but radically--a time when everything about modernism was being incrementally questioned and rejected as we moved into a new kind of thinking and building." And while it was a quiet, nearly stealth revolution, it was a absolutely a revolution in which the past was reaccepted and reincorporated, periods and styles ignored by modernism were reexamined and reevaluated. History and theory, once considered irrelevant, became central to the practice of architecture again."

    They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, "many are unsurpassed in modern fiction," and when gathered in one volume in 1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter's long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography.THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTERGo Little BookFlowering Judas and Other StoriesMaría ConcepciónVirgin VioletaThe MartyrMagicRopeHeTheftThat TreeThe Jilting of Granny WeatherallFlowering JudasThe Cracked Looking-GlassHaciendaPale Horse, Pale RiderOld MortalityNoon WinePale Horse, Pale RiderThe Leaning Tower and Other StoriesThe Old OrderThe SourceThe JourneyThe WitnessThe CircusThe Last LeafThe Fig TreeThe GraveThe Downward Path to WisdomA Day’s WorkHolidayThe Leaning TowerESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND OTHER WRITINGS“I needed both . . .”CriticalThe Days BeforeReflections on Willa CatherA Note on The Troll GardenGertrude Stein: Three Views“Everybody Is a Real One”Second WindThe Wooden Umbrella“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”Eudora Welty and A Curtain of GreenThe Wingèd SkullOn a Criticism of Thomas HardyE. M. ForsterVirginia WoolfD. H. LawrenceQuetzalcoatlA Wreath for the Gamekeeper“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”The Art of Katherine MansfieldThe Hundredth RoleDylan Thomas“A death of days . . .”“A fever chart . . .”“In the morning of the poet . . .”A Most Lively GeniusOrpheus in PurgatoryIn MemoriamFord Madox Ford (1873–1939)James Joyce (1882–1941)Sylvia Beach (1887–1962)Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)Personal and ParticularOn WritingMy First Speech“I must write from memory . . .”No Plot, My Dear, No Story“Writing cannot be taught . . .”The Situation of the WriterThe Situation in American WritingTransplanted WritersThe International Exchange of WritersThe Author on Her WorkNo Masters or TeachersOn “Flowering Judas”“The only reality . . .”“Noon Wine”: The SourcesNotes on the Texas I RememberPortrait: Old SouthA Christmas StoryAudubon’s Happy LandThe Flower of FlowersA Note on Pierre-Joseph RedoutéA House of My OwnThe Necessary Enemy“Marriage Is Belonging”A Defense of CirceSt. Augustine and the BullfightAct of Faith: 4 July 1942The Future Is NowThe Never-Ending WrongMexicanWhy I Write About MexicoReports from Mexico City, 1920–1922The New Man and the New OrderThe Fiesta of GuadalupeThe Funeral of General Benjamín HillChildren of XochitlThe Mexican TrinityWhere Presidents Have No FriendsIn a Mexican PatioLeaving the PetateThe Charmed LifeCorridosSor Juana: A Portrait of the PoetNotes on the Life and Death of a HeroA Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”Paternalism and the Mexican ProblemLa Conquistadora¡Ay, Que Chamaco!Old Gods and New MessiahsDiego RiveraThese Pictures Must Be SeenRivera’s Personal RevolutionParvenu . . .History on the WingThirty Long Years of RevolutionAutobiographicalAbout the AuthorThe Land That Is Nowhere- See more at: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?Request...

    She writes: We train our eyes on the horizon and look for Elijah s fist-sized cloud. Normal Kingdom Business is the follow-up book to Andree Seu's bestselling book, Won't Let You Go Unless You Bless Me, and collects 30 essays.

    These highly personal yet often universal stories offer windows into those influential mother-daughter moments that have forever shaped the lives And perspectives of the writers, powerful women–authors, spokespeople, scholars, teachers, and some mothers themselves.Jonis Agee's mother haunts her daughter's plumbing. Tai Coleman's mother struggled to raise five children on her own wits and a single paycheck. Heid Erdrich's mother showed her daughter both the falsity and the truth in the cliche of the "Indian Princess." Sheila O'Connor's mother, who ran a road construction company, was not like other mothers. Ka Vang's mother dodged the hand grenades that her husband's first wife threw on her wedding day. Morgan Grayce Willow's mother drove home late at night after selling cosmetics to farm wives as her daughter rode shotgun.In true tales of startling candor and rich insight, these and many other talented writers reflect on the women who raised them, revealing hard work and hardship, successes and failures, love and anger–mothers and daughters.Kathryn Kysar, the author of Dark Lake, teaches writing in Minneapolis. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Norcroft, the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts.

    . . draw the reader more tightly into the web of the world. They forge links in unexpected ways. They connect us to nature and to each other, and those connections nourish the intellect and uplift the spirit.”—Jerome Groopman, M.D., editorThis year’s Best American Science and Nature Writing offers another rich assortment of “fascinating science and impressive journalism” (New Scientist) culled from an array of periodicals, such as The New Yorker, Scientific American, and National Geographic. The twenty-four provocative and often visionary stories chosen by guest editor Jerome Groopman form an outstanding sampling of the very best in a field of writing that stays ahead of the curve, bringing important topics to the forefront of American discussion. In “The Universe’s Invisible Hand,” Christopher Conselice takes us into the recent spectacular discovery of the crucial role of dark energy, which is making our universe expand faster and faster. Florence Williams tells the story of a more down-to-earth form of energy in “A Mighty Wind,” which describes how a small Danish island community is making great leaps in energy conservation by using innovative wind farms. John Cohen explores the marvelous world of ligers, zorses, wholphins, and other hybridized creatures in “Zonkeys Are Pretty Much My Favorite Animal.” And Robin Marantz Henig delves into the possibly hazardous ramifications of the rapidly expanding science of nanotechnology. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2008 packs a wallop of intriguing, informative, and wondrous stories, each one bringing with it, as Jerome Groopman writes, “a sense of excitement [to be] shared with others.”

    In his highly anticipated second book, Vermonter Dan Snow once again proves that he is not just one of America's premier artisans, but also one of our most articulate voices on the natural world and our relationship to it. Snow's medium is stone: He is the nation's premier drystone wall builder. Schooled in this ancient craft, he painstakingly creates structures as breathtaking as sculpture with nothing but gravity as their glue. In Listening to Stone, Peter Mauss's tactile photographs of Snow's artistry are matched by the artisan's quietly compelling prose. In a voice as expressive as Annie Dillard's and as informed as John McPhee's, Snow demonstrates astonishing range as he touches on such subjects as geology, philosophy, and community. We learn that stone's grace comes from its unique characteristics—its capacity to give, its surprising fluidity, its ability to demand respect, and its role as a steadying force in nature. In these fast-paced times, Snow’s life's work offers an antidote: the luxury of patience, the bounty and quietude of nature, the satisfaction of sweat. "I work with stone," he ultimately tells us, "because stone is so much work."

    These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings."---James LongenbachA highly acute writer, scholar, editor, and critic, Reginald Shepherd brings to his work the sensibilities of a classicist and a contemporary theorist, an inheritor of the American high modernist canon, and a poet drawing and playing on popular culture, while simultaneously venturing into formal experimentation.In the essays collected here, Shepherd offers probing meditations unified by a "resolute defense of poetry's autonomy, and a celebration of the liberatory and utopian possibilities such autonomy offers." Among the pieces included are an eloquent autobiographical essay setting out in the frankest terms the vicissitudes of a Bronx ghetto childhood; the escape offered by books and "gifted" status preserved by maternal determination; early loss and the equivalent of exile; and the formation of the writer's vocation. With the same frankness that he brings to autobiography, Shepherd also sets out his reasons for rejecting "identity politics" in poetry as an unnecessary trammeling of literary imagination. His study of the "urban pastoral," from Baudelaire through Eliot, Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to Shepherd's own work, provides a fresh view of the place of urban landscape in American poetry.Throughout his essays---as in his poetry---Shepherd juxtaposes unabashed lyricism, historical awareness, and in-your-face contemporaneity, bristling with intelligence.A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.

    Lessing has combined personal recollections and vivid imagery with an exploration of key challenges faced by contemporary modern society, such as poverty, inequality and a fragmenting culture. The result is a deeply moving testament to the permanent importance of literature."The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2007 is awarded to the English writer Doris Lessing, that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny." Professor Horace Engdahl, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy

    In her three lectures, Hirshfield examines the roles of hiddenness, uncertainty and surprise as they appear in poetry and other works of literature, in the life and psyche of the writer, and in the broader life of the culture as a whole.

    Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don’t have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced—directly or indirectly—by the women who preceded them.The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women’s poetry.Includes:Jenny Factor on Marilyn HackerBeth Ann Fennelly on Denise DuhamelMiranda Field on Fanny HoweKatie Ford on Jorie GrahamJoy Katz on Sharon OldsValerie Martínez on Joy HarjoErika Meitner on Rita DoveAimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab NyeEleni Sikelianos on Alice NotleyTracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-BroidoCrystal Williams on Lucille CliftonRebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock

    Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

    Eva Saulitis writes with great honesty about her vulnerability and fears, about her excitement and discoveries, and about her passionate love for the wild. She inspires us with her boldness, she invites us to eagerly accept challenges, she opens us to the willing embrace of adventure, and she takes us into the hidden glories of Alaska as few other writers have done.These gentle, richly perceptive, beautifully rendered stories take readers straight to the heart of Alaska. And like all fine writing, it leaves you aching for more. Eva Saulitis writes deeply from the spirit of Margaret Murie, and she shows us that the soul of wildness is still very much alive in the north country.The wild country of Alaska has always attracted women of extraordinary strength and character, women with a keen eye for the land's beauty and a heart strong enough for its challenges, women equal to the measure of the Alaskan land itself. Eva Saulitis and Leaving Resurrection are wonderful reminders that the tradition lives on.

    These poets challenge the hierarchies and pitfalls endemic to the mentoring process, and ask some of the day’s toughest, most vital questions concerning race, class, and gender. Spanning a range of not only generations but cultural, aesthetic, and economic backgrounds, these diverse pairings both challenge and support each other artistically and politically. The result is in turns dramatic, enlightening, and entertaining.

    One of America's most beloved mystics of the 20th century, Merton's voice was prophetic in the troubled era of the 1960s. In this new collection of thoughts and meditations selected from his most inspiring books and letters, Merton's radiant wisdom and foresight serve as a beacon of light for all of us searching to find true meaning and solace in today's difficult times."Father Louis," as he was known at the Abbey of Gethsemani, fully embraced the contemplative life of a monk, yet he never held the world at arm's length: "We and our world interpenetrate. It is only in assuming full responsibility for our world, for our lives and for ourselves, that we can be said to live really for God."Sharply honest in his words but balanced by his poet's heart, Merton explores themes that include the inner ground of love, living in wisdom, and dialoguing with silence. He teaches that contemplation is possible for everyone and that the fundamental context for seeking God's presence is always our everyday lives. "In the deep silence, wisdom begins to sing her unending, sunlit, inexpressible song: the private song she speaks to the solitary soul." In Choosing to Love the World, Thomas Merton inspires us to look deep within ourselves and, in the peaceful silence of contemplation, to find and sing our own song.Edited by Jonathan Montaldo, associate director of The Merton Institute for Contemplative Living, and director of Bethany Spring, the Merton Institute retreat center in Trappist, Kentucky.

    They proceeded to stone and beat her to death, a supposed "honor" killing for allegedly falling in love with a man of a different faith. Several camera phones recorded the entire incident from the front row, and videos later surfaced online.One month later, popular filmmaker Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) expressed his despair and outrage at the misogyny in all cultures on a fan-run blog. "Because it's no longer enough to be a decent person," he wrote. "It's no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself. I've always had a bent towards apocalypitic fiction, and I'm beginning to understand why. I look and I see the earth in flames."Her face was nothing but red."The arts anthology Nothing But Red was conceived as a way to raise both awareness of the issues he spoke of, as well as money for the charity Equality Now. Poetry, prose, and visual art comprise this unique collection.Edited by:Skyla Dawn CameronFull list of contributors:Ann AguirreMechele ArmstrongJudy BagshawDavid BakerAnne BarringerKimberly BeaHanne BlankCL BledsoeMelinda BlountJill BolandKerry BuddElaine CorvidaeKevin CraigMaggie DoughertyLeigh DragoonCatherine EganSasha ElliottDana EvansElizabeth FrankStephanie GayleValentina GnupGila GreenLiza HamiltonReina HardyJanna HastingsStacey HillJody HouserTom HulleyBarbara HuntAbha IyengarDale JacobsonLee KendallJulie KlumbLaure LackeyGuy LancasterNora LandryRae LindleyVirginia LoreBobbi LurieJennifer MacaireMehrin Masud-EliasEllen McCordVirginia McRaeMGm. julesNick MonteleoneScott NeighGill O'HalloranMK ProiettaWJ RayAlex RemyJ.E. RemyClare RoachSonia RupcicLilith SaintcrowJasmine SantosWayne ScheerLisa SchleipferLeah SchnelbachEllen SheeleyLynn TaitAngela ToddJessica TudorRuth WalkerJoss WhedonLise WhiddenPeter WongAndrena Zawinski

    It captures the stunning diversity of the cultural and historical legacy of African American preaching more than three hundred years in the making. Each sermon, as editors Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas reveal, is a work of art and a lesson in unmatched rhetoric. The journey through this anthology—which includes selections from Jarena Lee, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner C. Taylor, Vashti McKenzie, and many others—offers a rare view of the unheralded role of the African American preacher in American history.The collection provides new insights into the underpinnings of the black fight for emancipation and the rise and growth of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. Sermons from the first decade of the twenty-first century point toward the future of African American preaching. Biographies of the preachers put their work in the cultural and homiletic context of their periods.The preachers of these sermons are men and women from a range of faiths, ancestries, and educational backgrounds. They draw on a vast and luminous landscape of poetic language, using metaphor, rhythm, and imagery to communicate with their congregations. What they all have in common is hope, resilience, and sacred fire. “Even during the most difficult and oppressive times,” Simmons and Thomas write in the preface, “the delivery, creativity, charisma, expressivity, fervor, forcefulness, passion, persuasiveness, poise, power, rhetoric, spirit, style, and vision of black preaching gave and gives hope to a community under siege.”This magnificent work beautifully renders the complexity, spiritual richness, and strength of African American life.

    This title sets the context for analysis that examines the obstacles each manager faced and the fortune they had along the way. Which manager did the best job? What situation - and what players - did each inherit?

    Representing more than 25 years of writing, THE PAINTER, THE CREATURE, AND THE FATHER OF LIES contains: •All the introductions he’s written for his own works (prefaces in fiction and non-fiction books, liner notes on CDs/laserdiscs/DVDs, introductions in graphic novel adaptations, text of theatre playbills, and more); •All the forewords and afterwords he’s written on other people’s works (books, graphic novels, etc.); and •Essays and articles written for magazines on the horror genre and other topics. These have never been collected together and many are nearly impossible to track down. Furthermore, from Barker’s personal archives: a couple of unpublished pieces, including an unused self-penned introduction to Volume 1 of the BOOKS OF BLOOD from 1983 written from the point of view of a demon interviewing Clive Barker. The editors, Phil and Sarah Stokes, who operate the official Clive Barker website at www.clivebarker.info, have spent the past several years compiling these 100 separate pieces to produce a truly definitive work. This collection features a new foreword by Barker, an introduction by the Stokes, and new illustrations by Barker. The numbered and lettered edition will contain bonus material: cover images for the majority of publications in which the nonfiction pieces were first published. If you haven’t read any of Barker’s nonfiction, you’ll find that it’s just as compelling, enjoyable, and well-written as his fiction. These pieces cover the inspirations for his works, insights into the creative process, and musings on art and the horror genre. Not currently scheduled to be published anywhere else, don’t miss this landmark collection from a modern master of horror and dark fantasy.

    They mingle a generosity of spirit and the childlike pleasure of discovery with a grown-up sense of a time and a place, if not lost, then in danger of disappearing altogether---things to treasure and preserve for today and tomorrow.

    Cool has ancient roots in Nigeria, is still evident in "shared traits" of West African dance, and came to the Americas with slaves who wove it into a rich and dynamic creole civilization. No one is better able to uncover and recount this extraordinary story of change and survival than Thompson, a polymath with a gift for insights into the interconnectedness of cultures. He shows us the cool's reinvention in terminologies galore; clothing, gesture, and body language; sports, especially basketball; music and dance; religious practices; and art in various guises, yardshows and quilts, paintings and gallery installations. Cool is "the mask of mind itself," Thompson concludes, the means for attaining the calm and balance of transcendence when facing difficulty, whether playing bebop and/or confronting racist brutality.This book brings together all Thompson's writings on the cool, some hitherto unpublished, many in out-of-print and hard-to-find publications.Together they form an incomparable record of encounters and recognitions that began when the U.S. was still segregated and unwilling to acknowledge the existence, let alone the powers, of Black Atlantic culture. Thompson has played a leading role in gaining recognition for the Black Atlantic and making African American experiences into a subject of study at schools and universities. Aesthetic of the Cool is one of his monumental achievements.

    His groundbreaking book on climate change, The End of Nature, is considered "as important as Rachel Carson's classic Silent Spring"* and Deep Economy, his "deeply thoughtful and mind-expanding"** exploration of globalization, helped awaken and fuel a movement to restore local economies.Now, for the first time, the best of McKibben's essays—fiery, magical, and infused with his uniquely soulful investigations of modern life—are collected in a single volume. Whether meditating on today's golden age in radio, the natural place of biting black flies in our lives, or the patriotism of a grandmother fighting to get corporate money out of politics, McKibben inspires us to become better caretakers of the Earth—and of one another.*The Plain Dealer (Cleveland )**Michael Pollan

    Scott Fitzgerald, Geoffrey Chaucer, Donald Barthelme.

    Now an architectural professional and educator, Mitnick finds himself thinking and writing theoretically about moments like these, when architecture makes itself felt, immediately and palpably. Balanced precariously betweenpractice and theory, Mitnick refuses to put contemplation over experiencearchitectural thinking over making. Unconvinced by those who proclaim the death of theory, Mitnick maintains that architectural discourse need not disappear entirely; it need only change shape and break free from the tired, post-structuralist narratives with which it has become associated in the past couple of decades.Artificial Light suggests an alternative type of critical theory consisting of personal and fictitious anecdotes, real and fake photographs, and mini-essays that addresses prevalent themes in architecture such as immediacy, affect, abstraction, atmosphere, realness, and banality. With a narrative style reminiscent of other unconventional writers on design such as Paul Shepheard, Roger Connah, and Rebecca Solnit, Artificial Light is the beautifully written and visually engaging debut of a dynamic new voice in the world of architectural criticism.

    It will serve as the canonical volume of criticism by Hill, the pre-eminent poet-critic whom A. N. Wilson has called "probably the best writer alive, in verse or in prose." In his criticism Hill ranges widely, investigating both poets (including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins, Whitman, Eliot, and Yeats ) and prose writers (such as Tyndale, Clarendon, Hobbes, Burton, Emerson, and F. H. Bradley). He is also steeped in the historical context - political, poetic, and religious - of the writers he studies. Most importantly, he brings texts and contexts into new and telling relations, neither reducing texts to the circumstances of their utterance nor imagining that they can float free of them. A number of the essays have already established themselves as essential reading on particular subjects, such as his analysis of Vaughan's "The Night", his discussion of Gurney's poetry, and his critical account of The Oxford English Dictionary. Others confront the problems of language and the nature of value directly, as in "Our Word is Our Bond", "Language, Suffering, and Value", and "Poetry and Value". In all his criticism, Hill reveals literature to be an essential arena of civic intelligence.

    Bush, Julia Ward Howe, W.H. Auden, George Patton.

    For the first time in one volume, Hamill presents five great books that demonstrate Liebling's extraordinary vitality, humor, and versatility as a writer.

    In this compilation, drawn in part from his award-winning columns, Klinkenberg celebrates some of the Sunshine State's most distinctive personalities, including the original Coppertone girl and the actor who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Along the way, he travels to swamps, rickety piers, and Florida's only cook-your-own pancake restaurant.   Ranging from light and comical to wistful and nostalgic, Klinkenberg roams the state from panhandle to the keys, looking to answer the question, "What makes Florida Florida?" Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of longtime fans or readers new to his work.

    The French adopted the term nature morte, dead nature, around 1750. The painter de Chirico was said to have preferred the Italian term vita silente. The Japanese, however, call still life, calm things. Calm Things is the title essay of this collection of meditations on what it is like to live with still life, and to live poetically. Both an insider's glimpse into the precarious world of artist and poet, and a long gaze at objects and the calm and silence they hold, these essays prize the ordinary, radiant gift of common things.

    With articles about legendary creators Shelly Mayer, Gardner Fox, Julius Schwarts, Ross Andru, and others, plus all-new interviews of Harry Lampert, Carmine Infantino, Alex Saviuk, Marv Wolfman, Mike Baron, Mark Waid, and Scott Kolins, among others, The Flash Companion recounts the scarlet speedster's evolution from the Golden Age to the 21st century.

    Prose. Fiction. THE OPEN FACE SANDWICH is a journal of uncommon prose. It serves you several literary morsels including some debuts from Uppsala, Amsterdam, New York, and Atlanta. This volume presents the latest from Deb Olin Unferth. It provides vital hilarity from the most cynical second-grader we've ever known. It offers cutting new work from 80-year-old former member of The Living Theater, and of the Paul Bowles expat circle, Mel Clay. Within it, award-winning poet Ariana Reines dips prose in tears and cummy vomit. It reproduces novel excerpts stolen from reclusive expatriate Hortense Caruthers. All this notwithstanding delicious full-color fold-outs of animals brutally murdered by automobiles and photographed.

    Forests, oceans, and deserts are all touched by the human footprint when the urban jungle meets the natural world.Among the contributors: Charles Darwin, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, William Wordsworth, Jack London, John Muir, Jamaica Kincaid, Jules Verne, Theodore Roosevelt, Bill McKibben, Simon Winchester, Al Gore, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    . . Willard possesses a delightfully wry voice, but she also has an ear for whimsy."---Los Angeles Times"Imagine Marc Chagall as a novelist---creating works entirely of gorgeous, sunlit water and magical, poignant creatures---and you'll have an idea what it's like to read Sister Water."---Chicago TribuneIn The Left-Handed Story, award-winning poet, novelist, and children's author Nancy Willard presents an eclectic collection of essays.Expounding on topics as diverse as the many muses of writers, fairy tales, the origins and meaning of inspiration, and the astonishing and mysterious powers of the litany form in poetry, The Left-Handed Story will appeal to writers, avid readers, and established fans of Willard's work. Also included here is an interview with Harry Roseman, an assistant to the artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell.Nancy Willard is the author of two novels, Things Invisible to See (Knopf 1984) and Sister Water (Knopf 1993), and eleven books of poetry, including Swimming Lessons: New and Selected Poems (Knopf 1998). She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in both fiction and poetry, and her book A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers (Harcourt 1981) was awarded the Newbery Medal. She teaches in the English department at Vassar College.

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

    The publication of the First Edition was a signal event in 1990. While the preparation of educators was then - and continues to be - the topic of substantial discussion, there did not exist a codification of the best that was known at the time about teacher education. Reflecting the needs of educators today, the Third Edition takes a new approach to achieving the same purpose. Beyond simply conceptualizing the broad landscape of teacher education and providing comprehensive reviews of the latest research for major domains of practice, this edition:stimulates a broad conversation about foundational issuesbrings multiple perspectives to bearprovides new specificity to topics that have been undifferentiated in the pastincludes diverse voices in the conversation.The Editors, with an Advisory Board, identified nine foundational issues and translated them into a set of focal questions:What's the Point?: The Purposes of Teacher EducationWhat Should Teachers Know? Teacher Capacities: Knowledge, Beliefs, Skills, and CommitmentsWhere Should Teachers Be Taught? Settings and Roles in Teacher EducationWho Teaches? Who Should Teach? Teacher Recruitment, Selection, and RetentionDoes Difference Make a Difference? Diversity and Teacher EducationHow Do People Learn to Teach?Who's in Charge? Authority in Teacher Education How Do We Know What We Know? Research and Teacher EducationWhat Good is Teacher Education? The Place of Teacher Education in Teachers' Education.The Association of Teacher Educators (ATE) is an individual membership organization devoted solely to the improvement of teacher education both for school-based and post secondary teacher educators. For more information on our organization and publications, please visit: www.ate1.org

    Focusing closely on language, these scholars of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, cultural studies, and critical pedagogies offer linguistic insights to the growing scholarship on Hip Hop Culture, while reorienting their respective fields by paying closer attention to processes of globalization and localization.The book engages complex processes such as transnationalism, (im)migration, cultural flow, and diaspora in an effort to expand current theoretical approaches to language choice and agency, speech style and stylization, codeswitching and language mixing, crossing and sociolinguistic variation, and language use and globalization. Moving throughout the Global Hip Hop Nation, through scenes as diverse as Hong Kong's urban center, Germany's Mannheim inner-city district of Weststadt, the Brazilian favelas, the streets of Lagos and Dar es Salaam, and the hoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, this global intellectual cipha breaks new ground in the ethnographic study of language and popular culture.

    Helens captured the attention of the region, nation, and the world, and it continues to fascinate us today a constant reminder that we live in a volcanic landscape. In lucid prose and poetry by some of Americas leading writers and ecologists, In the Blast Zone explores this story of destruction and renewal in all its human, geological, and ecological dimensions. Most popular accounts of the momentous eruption have focused on the devastation it caused. More recent scientific work on Mount St. Helens tells a story of unexpectedly rapid and varied ecological and geological change. In the Blast Zone is the first book to present a cross-pollination of literary and scientific perspectives on the mountains history of cataclysm and renewal. Most of the contributors to this volume camped together on Mount St. Helens for four days in 2005the 25th anniversary of the eruption hiking, learning the ecology, and sharing ideas. They asked the question: What can this radically altered landscape tell us about nature and how to live our lives? In the Blast Zone collects some of their answers. While introducing fascinating ecological and geological insights, it also tells compelling stories about how science informs our lives and our relationship to nature. These writings will startle readers with new recognition of the matchless gift Mount St. Helens makes to our region and the world: the gifts of beauty, of scientific illumination, of hope.

    A lifetime engagement with poetry radiates from every page of this distinguished collection of essays and talks that span forty years of a poet's life. Active Boundaries by Michael Palmer offers readers an intimate glimpse into the poetry behind the poetry that, as Robert Creeley once noted, makes possible a place where words initially engage their meanings--as if missing the edge of all 'creations, ' of all 'worlds'. With philosophical grace and conversational ease, Palmer unearths a vanguardist tradition in poetry that permeates languages and cultures, centuries and histories. He investigates an active boundary as it relates to a sense of form as well as, Palmer writes, to a more social sense of poetic activity as it exists in the margins, along the borders and, so to speak, 'underground.' Meditations on poets such as George Oppen, Paul Celan, Octavio Paz, Shelley, and Dante rise to the forefront among a multitude of other voices, like those of Trinh Minh-ha, Anna Akhmatova, Toru Takemitsu, and Susan Howe. Diaristic entries about his mother on her death bed are interspersed with epiphanic fragments; Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought confronts poetry's relation to memory, war, the War on Terror, contingency, and experience. Pulsing through the heart-lines of Active Boundaries is poetry's renewal.

    It includes studies of historical events, historians, and reviews of history books. It includes ideas for classroom implementation of Christian worldview thinking. It especially emphasizes classical Christian education and Reformed theology. Such thinkers as Augustine, Eusebius, Christopher Dawson, R.J. Rushdoony, Gregg Singer, and Otto Scott are examined in this work. The Christian impact on Western Civilization and the influence of Christianity on American history are both amply discussed. It also shows connections between history and literature and history and theology.

    Through his efforts, he helped achieve dignity, fair wages, benefits, and humane working conditions for hundreds of thousands of farm workers. This extensive collection of Chavez's speeches and writings chronicles his progression and development as a leader, and includes previously unpublished material. From speeches to spread the word of the Delano Grape Strike to testimony before the House of Representatives about the hazards of pesticides, Chavez communicated in clear, direct language and motivated people everywhere with an unflagging commitment to his ideals.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    A pioneering noise musician and countercultural maven, from the late 1970s to the present Rice has worked in an array of capacities, playing the roles of: musician, performer, artist, photographer, essayist, interviewer, editor, occult researcher, filmmaker, actor, orator, deejay, gallery curator and tiki bar designer, among others. First coming to prominence as an avant-garde audio experimentalist (recording under the moniker NON), Rice was a seminal founder of the first wave of industrial music in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, through collaborations with Re/Search Publications, Rice further established his position in underground with recountings of his uproarious pranks and the promotion of "incredibly strange" cult films and "industrial" culture. Rice's influence on subculture was further exerted through his vanguard exhibition of found photographs and readymade thrift store art, as well as his adamant endorsements of outsider music, tiki culture and bygone pop culture in general. Rice is also notorious for his public associations with nefarious figures both infamous and obscure, including friendships and ideological collusions with the likes of cult leader Charles Manson and Church Of Satan founder Anton LaVey, among others. His work continues to profoundly affect the countercultural underground at large, inspiring and enraging in equal measure. STANDING IN TWO CIRCLES contains: Essays 1986-2007 / Lyrics 1988-2007 / Art & Photography (38 plates) STANDING IN TWO CIRCLES also includes an extensive biography of Boyd Rice from the 1970s to the present, by the book's editor, Brian M Clark.

    Influenced by post-Bauhaus internationalism, sympathetic to the radical urban architectural vision of Team X, and a participant in the avant-garde movement Metabolism, Maki has been at the forefront of his profession for decades. This collection of essays documents the evolution of architectural modernism and Maki's own fifty-year intellectual journey during a critical period of architectural and urban history.Maki's treatment of his two overarching themes -- the contemporary city and modernist architecture -- demonstrates strong (and sometimes unexpected) linkages between urban theory and architectural practice. Images and commentary on three of Maki's own works demonstrate the connection between his writing and his designs. Moving through the successive waves of modernism, postmodernism, neomodernism, and other isms, these essays reflect how several generations of architectural thought and expression have been resolved within one career.

    He rejects his father's course in managing the family chocolate factory, and goes on to college, becoming a writer and teacher. When Henry marries, and becomes a father himself, he is impacted by the social revolutions of the 1970s, and struggles to avoid his father's flaws. He leads a literary life in Boston, founds the literary magazine Ploughshares, and befriends novelist Richard Yates. During the 1980s, Henry suffers the deaths of his parents, infertility, rejections of his work, and setbacks in his teaching career. In the 1990s, while his daughter and adopted son are swept up into trials of adolescence and young adulthood, and as his wife grieves the deaths of friends and family, Henry confronts a spiritual abyss similar to his father's, and learns to surrender to life, to love, to aging and mortality.By turns lyrical, quirky, confessional, and experimental in form, Henry's essays build into an affirming and generous vision. While addiction, the uses of imagination, a passion for literature, and issues of heart and soul are key motifs, a bungee jump becomes Henry's central metaphor: "isn't this life? isn't this art? We live and trust in our safe suicides."

    Arbucks deftly captures quiet, personal human moments in one of the least likely of placesa bustling coffee shop. R.G. Ryans observations and vignettes remind us that there are stories unfolding in front of us constantly and that perhaps all we need to do is sit still for a minute to hear and see them.

    Each essay dissects an aspect of Olding’s life experience—from her vexed relationship with her father to her tricky dealings with her female peers; from her work as a counsellor and teacher to her persistent desire, despite struggles with infertility, to have children of her own. In a suite of essays forming the emotional climax of the book, Olding bravely recounts the adoption of her daughter, Maia, from an orphanage in China, and tells us the story of Maia’s difficult adaptation to the unfamiliar state of being loved.Written with as much lyricism, detail, and artfulness as the best short stories, the essays in Pathologies provide all the pleasures of fiction combined with the enrichment derived from the careful presentation of fact. Susan Olding is indisputably one of Canada’s finest new writers, one who has taken the challenging, much-underused form of the literary essay and made it her own.

    As an emblematic figure of the enslaved woman in the Atlantic world, Venus makes plain the convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery and, as well, the intimacy of history with the scandal and excess of literature. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, the essay mimes the violence of the archive and attempts to redress it by describing as fully as possible the conditions that determine the appearance of Venus and that dictate her silence.

    Though devoted to William, Otto's too-painful love for his schizophrenic sister embitters him to the very idea of family.

    ADORNO'S NOISE takes a stunning plunge into a kaleidoscopic world of globalization, female sexuality, the place of art and artist, and the looming power of the state. Phrases from Theodor Adorno's aphoristic philosophical text, Minima Moralia, serve as catalysts for an explosion of thought and language that quickly breaks Adorno's orbit. As Rob Halpern puts it: "ADORNO'S NOISE reinvents the 'essay as form, ' but it doesn't stop short of reinventing thinking." Other Carla Harryman titles available from SPD include OPEN BOX (IMPROVISATIONS), BABY, and ANIMAL INSTINCTS

    The three longest pieces deal with Aaron Shurin’s coming into poetry and gay identity via a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his deep relationships with poets Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, and his personal history of venturing into San Francisco gay bars, starting in 1965 and ending just before Stonewall.Aaron Shurin is the author of fifteen books, including Involuntary Lyrics and The Paradise of Forms, named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.

    www.forgottenbooks.orgForgotten Books is about sharing knowledge, not about making money. Our books are priced at wholesale prices. We print in large sans-serif font, which is proven to make the text easier to read and put less strain on your eyes. Happy reading!

    Eerie, Anglin Brothers, A Hawk and a Hacksaw, the Spiritualaires, Cooper Moore, and more. Also: Awesome travel journals from the Western Sahara by Sublime Frequencies co-founder Hisham Mayet; Erik Davis on P.G. Six; Mike McGonigal going off about Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground"; Scott Seward on "the marriage made in hell between folk music, dead cultures, myth & highly technical modern extreme metal"; drawings by German Surrealist Unica Zürn; an excerpt from Meredith Brosnan's new novel; an interview with Nicola Bowery about iconoclastic '80s fashion icon Leigh Bowery; fiction by Kevin Sampsell; dirty AIM conversations courtesy of BloodNinja; visual art from the likes of Saul Chernick, Kevin Arrow and Kyle Field (from Little Wings).

    The cash flow of the emperors of Rome and Wall Street remind us that whether we like it or not, money makes the world go round.Among the contributors Karl Marx, Edith Wharton, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Jane Austen, Thomas More, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Nikolai Gogol, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand, Tom Wolfe, Lorenzo de’ Medici

    But in the years leading up to her leap into the fray, Meinhof was known throughout Europe as a respected journalist, who informed and entertained her loyal readers with monthly magazine columns.What impels someone to abandon middle-class privilege for the sake of revolution? In the 1960s, Meinhof began to see the world in increasingly stark terms: the United States was emerging as an unstoppable superpower, massacring a tiny country overseas despite increasingly popular dissent at home; and Germany appeared to be run by former Nazis. Never before translated into English, Meinhof's writings show a woman increasingly engaged in the major political events and social currents of her time. In her introduction, Karin Bauer tells Meinhof's mesmerizing life story and her political coming-of-age; Nobel Prize–winning author Elfriede Jelinek provides a thoughtful reflection on Meinhof's tragic failure to be heard; and Meinhof ’s daughter—a relentless critic of her mother and of the Left—contributes an afterword that shows how Meinhof's ghost still haunts us today.

    His most important manuscripts have gradually filtered through to the public over the course of the last hundred and twenty-five years, save one: the final product of what he himself considered to be the "chief task of his life." Here for the first time in print are the last lectures of Emerson's career, a cycle of seventeen that he delivered at Harvard University in 1871. In his last lectures, Emerson set out to gather and structure the best thoughts of a project that spanned thirty-three years and ran as a constant, though largely hidden, thread throughout his active career. The result is a vibrant fabric of thought, image, and word as startling for the boldness of its pattern as for its immediacy and relevance to the modern reader. The powers of the mind and states of consciousness, the transcendency of physical into spiritual laws, the governing influence of Ideas in the history of humankind, and the ethical duty laid upon those who recognize the Good Cause as their own-all serve as themes and elements of Emerson's portrait of a practical understanding of the -spiritual foundations of human experience and self-development.

    Strawson focuses on five main areas of enquiry: [1] the nature of the physical, consciousness, the mind-body problem, and the prospects for panpsychism; [2] the self, the subject of experience, self-consciousness, and the 'narrative' self; [3] free will and moral responsibility; [4] the nature of thought and intentionality and their connection with consciousness; [5] the problem of causation with particular reference to the philosophy of David Hume.

    Goss writes that she chose to focus on these poets because ''of all the poets I could have included they are the most talented among those whose talents have gone largely unrecognized.'' Coleridge, Mew, and Warner, Goss argues, ''are only three examples of what I consider a broader phenomenon, the rest of the ice that must be present, underwater, when we see icebergs floating on a northern sea. That underwater ice is the tradition of women writing fantastical poetry.'' Goss's essays explore important themes of that writing, and her poems are written in conversation with Coleridge, Mew, and Warner's poems.

    Alistair Cooke was the greatest, and most humane, of all modern reporters and interpreters of America, his adopted country, to his native Britain and to the world. Starting with his first broadcast 'Letter from America' on embarking in 1946 for America on a ship filled with tearful GI brides, here are the stories of a nation: Korea, the McCarthy witch hunts, Civil Rights, JFK, the moon landings, the moving eye-witness account of Robert Kennedy's assassination, Nixon's resignation and Clinton's scandals, right up to the attacks of September 11th and the war in Iraq. Also containing Cook's observations on the great, good and downright bad, and on the views of the ordinary people he met, as well as his daughter Susan's memories of her father, Reporting America is a tribute to an extraordinary man and the country he loved. 'The voice of America ... Here was a man who made intelligent, honest sense of decades of assassinations, scandals, elections, boom times and broken dreams ... an indispensable record of twentieth-century American culture'  Peter Kimpton, Observer 'Vintage Cooke'  David Dimbleby 'A rich picture of America, so vivid ... the fresh first pressing of history'  James Naughtie, Sunday Telegraph Alistair Cooke (1908-2004) enjoyed an extraordinary life in print, radio and television. The Guardian's Senior Correspondent in New York for twenty-five years and the host of groundbreaking cultural programmes on American television and of the BBC series America, Cooke was, however, best known both at home and abroad for his weekly BBC broadcast Letter from America, which reported on fifty-eight years of US life, was heard over five continents and totalled 2,869 broadcasts before his retirement in February 2004, far and away the longest-running radio series in broadcasting history.

    . . unsentimental and sometimes unpredictable.”—Journal of the American Medical AssociationFounded just six years ago, Bellevue Literary Review is already widely recognized as a rare forum for emerging and celebrated writers—among them Julia Alvarez, Raphael Campo, Rick Moody, and Abraham Verghese—on issues of health and healing. Gathered here are poignant and prizewinning stories, essays, and poems, the voices of patients and those who care for them, which form the journal’s remarkable dialogue on “humanity and the human experience.”Danielle Ofri, MD, author of Incidental Findings and Singular Intimacies, is the editor in chief of Bellevue Literary Review. She lives in New York City.

    Goats. Dry shrubs. Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree.” Such were the sights that greeted David Shulman on his arrival in the South Indian state of Andhra Pradesh in the spring of 2006. An expert on South Indian languages and cultures, Shulman knew the region well, but from the moment he arrived for this seven-month sojourn he actively soaked up such simple aspects of his surroundings, determined to attend to the rich texture of daily life—choosing to be at the same time scholar and tourist, wanderer and wonderer. Lyrical, sensual, and introspective, Spring, Heat, Rains is Shulman’s diary of that experience. Evocative reflections on daily events—from explorations of crumbling temples to battles with ineradicable bugs to joyous dinners with friends—are organically interwoven with considerations of the ancient poetry and myths that remain such an inextricable part of life in contemporary India. With Shulman as our guide, we meet singers and poets, washermen and betel-nut vendors, modern literati and ancient gods and goddesses. We marvel at the “golden electrocution” that is the taste of a mango fresh from the tree. And we plunge into the searing heat of an Indian summer, so oppressive and inescapable that when the monsoon arrives to banish the heat with sheets of rain, we understand why, year after year, it is celebrated as a miracle. An unabashedly personal account from a scholar whose deep knowledge has never obscured his joy in discovery, Spring, Heat, Rains is a passionate act of sharing, an unforgettable gift for anyone who has ever dreamed of India.

    Each informs and illuminates the other in this loving celebration of nature's gifts and neighbourly friendship. Literature, poetry, spirituality and memory all merge to create an exquisite series of stories of our times. For all the changes in the contemporary countryside, timeless qualities remain and both are captured here with a poet's understanding and imagination.

    In this invaluable book Michael Peppiatt, a major art critic and close friend of Bacon’s, offers an entertaining and uniquely well-informed portrait of this complex artist. Peppiatt’s collection of interviews and essays spans more than forty years—from 1963, when the two men met, to 2007, when Peppiatt wrote an essay explaining Bacon’s passionate involvement with Van Gogh. The pieces in between include discussions of Bacon’s working methods and techniques, his unlikely relationship with his London dealer, his attitude toward Christian belief and classical myth, and his defining friendship with the eminent French writer Michel Leiris. Peppiatt also provides fascinating anecdotes about the artist’s early life, his intimate relationships, and his connections with the artists who were his contemporaries and friends. In addition, among the interviews reproduced for the book are new transcripts of two interviews presenting previously omitted material that brings out many little-known aspects of Bacon’s presence and personality.

    Rather than simply focusing on the ways in which disabled persons are portrayed, Michael Davidson explores how the experience of disability shapes the work of artists and why disability serves as a vital lens through which to interpret modern culture. Covering an eclectic range of topics---from the phantom missing limb in film noir to the poetry of American Sign Language---this collection delivers a unique and engaging assessment of the interplay between disability and aesthetics.Written in a fluid, accessible style, Concerto for the Left Hand will appeal to both specialists and general audiences. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book should appeal not only to scholars of disability studies but to all those working in minority art, deaf studies, visual culture, and modernism.Michael Davidson is Professor of American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His other books include Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics and Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material World.

    Everyone, and especially young people, should be familiar with it. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism taught that if we want to be happy and productive, we must strengthen and train our willful and wayward minds. There are echoes of the Buddha's Dhammapada. The passages selected are both beautiful and moving.

    A lecture delivered by the short-story writer Gary Lutz to the students of Columbia University’s writing program in New York on September 25, 2008.