In considering the connections between literature and lived experience, this book contemplates four key questions at the heart of Indigenous kinship traditions: How do we learn to be human? How do we become good relatives? How do we become good ancestors? How do we learn to live together? Blending personal narrative and broader historical and cultural analysis with close readings of key creative and critical texts, Justice argues that Indigenous writers engage with these questions in part to challenge settler-colonial policies and practices that have targeted Indigenous connections to land, history, family, and self. More importantly, Indigenous writers imaginatively engage the many ways that communities and individuals have sought to nurture these relationships and project them into the future. This provocative volume challenges readers to critically consider and rethink their assumptions about Indigenous literature, history, and politics while never forgetting the emotional connections of our shared humanity and the power of story to effect personal and social change. Written with a generalist reader firmly in mind, but addressing issues of interest to specialists in the field, this book welcomes new audiences to Indigenous literary studies while offering more seasoned readers a renewed appreciation for these transformative literary traditions.

    Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.

    The Penguin Classics Book is a reader's companion to the largest library of classic literature in the world.Spanning 4,000 years from the legends of Ancient Mesopotamia to the poetry of the First World War, with Greek tragedies, Icelandic sagas, Japanese epics and much more in between, it encompasses 500 authors and 1,200 books, bringing these to life with lively descriptions, literary connections and beautiful cover designs.

    In his native Chile, across Latin America, and in many other parts of the world, his name and legacy have become almost synonymous with liberation movements, and with the language of erotic love.Neruda: The Biography of a Poet (The Poet’s Calling) is the product of fifteen years of research by Mark Eisner, writer, translator, and documentary filmmaker. The book vividly depicts Neruda’s monumental life, potent verse, and ardent belief in the “poet’s obligation” to use poetry for social good. It braids together three major strands of Neruda’s life—his world-revered poetry; his political engagement; and his tumultuous, even controversial, personal life—forming a single cohesive narrative of intimacy and breadth.The fascinating events of Neruda’s life are interspersed with Eisner’s thoughtful examinations of the poems, both as works of art in their own right and as mirrors of Neruda’s life and times. The result is a book that animates Neruda’s riveting story in a new way—one that offers a compelling narrative version of Neruda’s life and work, undergirded by exhaustive research, yet designed to bring this colossal literary figure to a broader audience.

    The journal includes nonfiction, literary horror fiction, poetry, artwork and non-classifiable hybrid pieces.Vol. 1, Issue 1 Contents:• Foreword to Teatro Grottesco essay by Thomas Ligotti•The Nightmare of His Art: The Horrific Power of the Imagination in "The Troubles of Dr. Thoss and "Gas Station Carnivals" essay by W. Silverwood•The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking short fiction by Kurt Fawver• Affirmation of the Spirit: Consciousness, Transformation, and the Fourth World in Film short fiction by Christopher Slatsky•Try the Veal poem by Robert Beveridge•How to Construct a Gun from Your Own Flesh short fiction by Michael Uhall•Notes on a Horror essay by Dr. Raymond Thoss•"Eccentric to the Healthy Social Order" : Inversions of Family, Community, and Religion in Thomas Ligotti's "The Last Feast of Harlequin" essau by Michael J. Abolafia•Wraiths poem by Wade German•Eraserhead as Antinatalist Allegoryessay by Colby Smith•The Alienation of the Self: Marx, Polanyi, and Ligottian Horroressay by S. L. Edwards•The Theatre of Ovid short fiction by Aaron Worth•Infinite Light, Infinite Darkness short fiction by Martin Rose•Night Walks: The Films of Val Lewton essay by Michael Penkas• Solar Flare short fiction by Paul L. Bates•Strange Bird poem by Ian Mullins•Nervous Wares & Abnormal Staresshort fiction by Devin Goff•My Time at the Drake Clinic short fiction by Jordan Krall•Singing the Song of My Unmaking short fiction by Christopher Ropes•"They say I should kill myself and not try to spoil their enjoyment in being alive": An Interview with Thomas Ligottiinterview by Wojciech Gunia

    . . and at those whose work he explores and embraces (Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy; Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End; Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain; Stendhal's The Red and the Black). He writes (from A Temple of Texts) on the nature and value of writing ("The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words"). Here is a rich experience of Gass's short fiction: from Eyes, his masterfully crafted novella, "In Camera," about collecting, hording; about suspicions run amok . . . from Cartesian Sonata . . . and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a mythical reimagining of America's heartland. And from his nimble, daredevil novels: Middle C (2013), the chronicle of an Austrian-born man who, as a child with his mother, relocates to America's Midwest (Woodbine, Ohio), grows up a low-skilled amateur piano player to become a music professor at a small Bible college; his only hobby a fantasy life as the curator of his Inhumanity Museum . . . and from The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime" --Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times).

    His oeuvre, offering a “mimetic theory” of cultural origins and human behavior, inspired such writers as Milan Kundera and J. M. Coetzee, and earned him a place among the forty “immortals” of the Académie Française. Too often, however, his work is considered only within various academic specializations. This first-ever biographical study takes a wider view. Cynthia L. Haven traces the evolution of Girard’s thought in parallel with his life and times. She recounts his formative years in France and his arrival in a country torn by racial division, and reveals his insights into the collective delusions of our technological world and the changing nature of warfare. Drawing on interviews with Girard and his colleagues, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard provides an essential introduction to one of the twentieth century’s most controversial and original minds.

      In these masterpieces of razor-sharp reportage, the National Book Award–winning and New York Times–bestselling author proves herself one of the premier essayists of the twentieth century, “an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time” (Joyce Carol Oates,  The New York Times Book Review).  Slouching Towards Bethlehem: America in the 1960s—a pivotal era of social change and generational divide. Here is Joan Didion on the “misplaced children” of Haight-Ashbury as well as John Wayne in Hollywood; folk singer Joan Baez and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes; the extremes of both Death Valley and Las Vegas. Named to Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books, this is “a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country” (The New York Times Book Review).  The White Album: A New York Times bestseller, this landmark essay collection confronts the dark aftermath of the 1960s. From a jailhouse visit to Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, to a recording session with The Doors, from the culture of shopping malls to the contradictions of the women’s movement, Joan Didion captures the paranoia and absurdity of the era with irony and insight. And in the iconic title essay, she documents her uneasy state of mind during the years leading up to and following the Manson murders—a terrifying crime that, in her memory, surprised no one.  After Henry: Whether reporting on a Hollywood murder or the “sideshows” of foreign wars, Joan Didion crystalizes her reputation as a brilliant essayist. Highlights include a portrait of the White House under the Reagans, two “actors on location”; an unexpected meditation on the Patty Hearst case; and an exposé on the racial divisions and class fault lines of New York City following the rape of the Central Park jogger. An indispensable collection from a writer on whom we can rely “to get the story straight” (Los Angeles Times).

    Epstein is penetrating. He is witty. He has a magic touch with words, that hard to define but immediately recognizable quality called style. Above all, he is impossible to put down.The Ideal of Culture contains 63 essays on a wide variety of subjects, each a pure pleasure to read.

    At a time when literature is threatened by ceaseless electronic bombardment, Giraldi argues that literature “must do what literature has always done: facilitate those silent spaces, remain steadfastly itself in its employment of slowness, interiority, grace, and in its marshaling of aesthetic sophistication and complexity.”American Audacity is ultimately an assertion of intelligence and discernment from a maker of “perfectly paced prose” (The New Yorker), a book that reaffirms the pleasure and wisdom of the deepest literary values.

    This No Fear Shakespeare ebook gives you the complete text of Much Ado About Nothingand an easy-to-understand translation.Each No Fear Shakespeare contains The complete text of the original play A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into everyday language A complete list of characters with descriptions Plenty of helpful commentary

    They met again in the fall of 1957, and their correspondence begins with Kenner's letter of March 7, 1958. In the next forty-four years, they exchanged over one thousand letters. Their correspondence about shared enthusiasm is a quarry for those interested in unique perspectives on Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Beckett, Basil Bunting, Charles Tomlinson, R. Buckminster Fuller, Stan Brakhage, Jonathan Williams, and the American modernists, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Louis Zukofsky. The correspondence ends with Kenner's letter of August 9, 2002 lamenting how they had drifted apart.With his mentor, Marshall McLuhan, Kenner visited Pound at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, in June 1948. Later he visited Pound in Venice and Rapallo. Davenport also was a visitor to St. Elizabeths, and, like Kenner, visited Pound in Italy. These letters record their fascination with Pound's intellectual journey and explore how he translated the "brutality of fact" into The Cantos.The extensive notes and cross-referencing of archival sources in Questioning Minds are a major contribution to the study of literary modernism. The letters contained within explore how new works were conceived and developed by both writers. They record faithfully, and with candor, the urgency that each brought to his intellectual and creative pursuits. Here is singular opportunity to follow the development of their unique fictions and essays.

    Sayers tackles faith, doubt, human nature, and the most dramatic story ever told.For almost a century, a series of labyrinthine murder mysteries have kept fans turning pages hungrily as Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane discover whodunit, again and again.Detective novel enthusiasts may not know that for almost as many years, Christian thinkers have appreciated the same Dorothy L. Sayers for her acumen as an essayist, playwright, apologist, and preeminent translator of Dante's Divine Comedy.Now, for the first time, an anthology brings together the best of both worlds. The selections uncover the gospel themes woven throughout Sayers's popular fiction as well as her religious plays, correspondence, talks, and essays. Clues dropped throughout her detective stories reveal an attention to matters of faith that underlies all her work.Those who know Sayers from her nonfiction writings may wonder how she could also write popular genre fiction. Sayers, like her friend G. K. Chesterton, found murder mysteries a vehicle to explore the choices characters make between good and evil. Along with C. S. Lewis and the other Inklings, with whom she maintained a lively correspondence, Sayers used her popular fiction to probe deeper questions. She addressed not only matters of guilt and innocence, sin and redemption, but also the cost of war, the role of the conscience, and the place of women in society.None of these themes proved any hindrance to spinning a captivating yarn. Her murder mysteries are more reminiscent of Jane Austen than Arthur Conan Doyle, with all the tense interpersonal exploration of the modern novel.

    A must for any Heyer fan!

    Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is often regarded as having heralded the beginning of the Romantic era in British literature. The poem narrates the story of a sailor who has returned home from a long voyage having suffered great loss, yet survived. In this Studies in Theology and the Arts volume, poet and theologian Malcolm Guite leads readers on a journey with Coleridge, whose own life paralleled the experience of the mariner. On this theological voyage, Guite draws out the continuing relevance of this work and the ability of poetry to communicate the truths of humanity's fallenness, our need for grace, and the possibility of redemption.

    

    This book offers a survey of the genre from 19th-century pioneers to contemporary authors, introducing the plural versions of early SF across the world, before examining the emergence of the "scientific romance" in the 1880s and 1890s. The "Golden Age" of writers' expansive SF pulp was concentrated in the 1930s, consolidated by best-selling writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The contributors to this volume also track the increasingly diverse forms SF took from the 1950s onwards. Leading international scholars, writing in an accessible style, consider SF as a world literature, referencing works from diverse traditions in Latin America, Europe, Russia and the Far East. This book combines discussion of central figures of the tradition with a new global reach.

    Yet even though generations of Japanese high school students have been expected to memorize passages from his novels and he is routinely voted the most important Japanese writer in national polls, he remains less familiar to Western readers than authors such as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and Mishima.In this biography, John Nathan provides a lucid and vivid account of a great writer laboring to create a remarkably original oeuvre in spite of the physical and mental illness that plagued him all his life. He traces Sōseki's complex and contradictory character, offering rigorous close readings of Sōseki's groundbreaking experiments with narrative strategies, irony, and multiple points of view as well as recounting excruciating hospital stays and recurrent attacks of paranoid delusion. Drawing on previously untranslated letters and diaries, published reminiscences, and passages from Sōseki's fiction, Nathan renders intimate scenes of the writer's life and distills a portrait of a tormented yet unflaggingly original author. The first full-length study of Sōseki in fifty years, Nathan's biography elevates Sōseki to his rightful place as a great synthesizer of literary traditions and a brilliant chronicler of universal experience who, no less than his Western contemporaries, anticipated the modernism of the twentieth century.

    Ecopoetics, a multidisciplinary approach that includes thinking and writing on poetics, science, and theory as well as emphasizing innovative approaches common to conceptual poetry, rose out of the late 20th-century awareness of ecology and concerns of environmental disaster.Collected from contributors including Brenda Hillman, Eileen Tabios, and Christopher Cokinos, and together a monument to human responsiveness and invention, Counter-Desecration is a book of ecopoetics that compiles terms--borrowed, invented, recast--that help configure or elaborate human engagement with place. There are no analogous volumes in the field of ecocriticism and ecopoetics. The individual entries, each a sketch or a notion, through some ecopoetic lens--anti-colonialism, bioregionalism, ecological (im)balance, indigeneity, resource extraction, extinction, habitat loss, environmental justice, queerness, attentiveness, sustainability--focus and configure the emerging relations and effects of the Anthropocene. Each entry is a work of art concerned with contemporary poetics and environmental justice backed with sound observation and scholarship.

    Zaborowska employs Baldwin’s home space as a lens through which to expand his biography and explore the politics and poetics of blackness, queerness, and domesticity in his complex and underappreciated later works. Zaborowska shows how the themes of dwelling and black queer male sexuality in The Welcome Table, Just above My Head, and If Beale Street Could Talk directly stem from Chez Baldwin's influence on the writer. The house was partially torn down in 2014. Accessible, heavily illustrated, and drawing on interviews with Baldwin's friends and lovers, unpublished letters, and manuscripts, Me and My House offers new insights into Baldwin's life, writing, and relationships, making it essential reading for all students, scholars, and fans of Baldwin.

    As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. “Far from dragging politics into art,” he wrote in 1953, “art has dragged me into politics.” He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017.Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger’s development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s—when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic—to Berger’s reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left.Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.

    Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the Arabic eleventh-century, scholars were intensely preoccupied with the way that language generated truth and beauty. Their work in poetics, logic, theology, and lexicography defined the intellectual space between God and the poets. In Language Between God and the Poets, Alexander Key argues that ar-Raghib al-Isfahani, Ibn Furak, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani shared a conceptual vocabulary based around the words ma‘na and haqiqah. They used this vocabulary to build theories of language, mind, and reality that answered perennial questions: how to structure language and reference, how to describe God, how to construct logical arguments, and how to explain poetic affect.

    Like the biblical creation account, it begins mysteriously with one great Divinity, but from there goes down a far different path. Whereas the biblical story involves speaking creation into being, Tolkien's vision involves the creation of lesser gods who then create a great music that brings Middle-earth into reality.In Tolkien's Overture , John conducts a close reading of the text of "Ainulindal�", and then goes on to explore the role of music in Middle-earth's history, from the creation of Elves, Dwarves, and Men in the First Age to the great events of the late Third Age as recounted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Furthermore, it delves into the mystery of evil, as embodied in the mighty Melkor, the great villain of the First Age and the master of Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor.From the mystical song of the seas to the powerful voice of L�thien Tin�viel to the strangely musical ways of Tom Bombadil, the reader will come away with a far deeper understanding of Tolkien's imaginary world, and see clearly how music is truly the mysterious fabric from which Middle-earth is made.

    The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing some of his greatest fiction (Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in volume 1. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel.Bellow's relations with women were often fraught. In the 1960s he was compulsively promiscuous (even as he inveighed against sexual liberation). The women he pursued, the ones he married and those with whom he had affairs, were intelligent, attractive and strong-willed. At eighty-five he fathered his fourth child, a daughter, with his fifth wife. His three sons, whom he loved, could be as volatile as he was, and their relations with their father were often troubled.Although an early and engaged supporter of civil rights, in the second half of his life Bellow was angered by the excesses of Black Power. An opponent of cultural relativism, he exercised great influence in literary and intellectual circles, advising a host of institutes and foundations, helping those he approved of, hindering those of whom he disapproved. In making his case, he could be cutting and rude; he could also be charming, loyal, and funny. Bellow's heroic energy and will are clear to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, are also clear.

    Yet how do we make sense of them today? And where might we see miracles in our own lives? In this installment of the Hansen Lectureship series, historian and theologian Timothy Larsen considers the legacy of George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish author and minister who is best known for his pioneering fantasy literature, which influenced authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesteron, and Madeleine L'Engle. Larsen explores how, throughout his life and writings, MacDonald sought to counteract skepticism, unbelief, naturalism, and materialism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous, the supernatural, the wondrous, and the realm of the spirit. The Hansen Lectureship series offers accessible and insightful reflections by Wheaton College faculty members on the transformative work of the Wade Center authors.

    If Not Critical brings together ten lectures, published here for the first time, that offer a representative selection of Dr Griffiths' original, fully-argued, and richly exemplified contributions to literary criticism and literary history.Crammed into his writing are decades of reading in several languages and across most genres and literary periods. In these lectures, he pursues the blind spots not only of other people's arguments, but of the whole business of criticism in general, with what he calls its 'over-concentration on a narrow range of examples . . . such over-concentration warps our thinking'. Implicit and explicit throughout his work is the argument that 'an appropriately wide range of instances is essential to making progress in conceptualisation'; that what we need, in order to do better thinking, is 'a keener attention to a greater variety of examples'. Such examples include, in these lectures, the works of Shakespeare, Dante, Kafka, Beckett, Racine, Rabelais, T. S. Eliot, and Jonathan Swift.

    One of the root causes of Islamophobia is ignorance, often fueled by stereotyped and negative portrayals of Muslims in media and popular culture. Muslims in Story is a timely and proactive approach to tackling this issue, by engendering friendships and empathy through quality children's and young adult literature. Exposing children in their formative years to positive stories about Muslims can go a long way to creating a multicultural understanding by cementing ideas of tolerance, respect, and acceptance. This resource- recommends books that will act as windows and mirrors for PreK–12 readers by showcasing diverse foods, dress, and traditions;- spotlights curated titles that feature Muslim kids as heroes, Islamic contributions throughout history, inspiring Muslim leaders, and folktales from Islamic traditions;- includes helpful information such as an overview of Muslims in America, author interviews that lend insights into the stories, and hands-on programming activities and discussion tools; and- provides a list of additional resources for gaining a better understanding of Islam.This book will equip public and school library staff, including educators and collection development librarians, to make real change in their communities by validating lived experiences of Muslim kids and building a stronger sense of empathy, respect, and understanding towards Muslims.

    From a single, stifling room in a small sagebrush town in central Texas, hunched over a manual typewriter, Robert E. Howard created memorable characters, exotic worlds, and glorious pulp adventures. In this new biography, Howard is firmly established as an important figure in American literature.Before taking his own life at the age of 30, the precocious Howard was one of the most popular writers of the pulp magazine era of the Jazz Age and the Great Depression. Recognized today as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian and the originator of the sword-and-sorcery genre, he was also a gifted poet and the author of now-classic horror stories, historical dramas, and comical tall tales.But the gifted and brilliant Howard saw himself as an outsider in the small Texas town where he lived with his father, a physician, and his mother, who battled ill health for much of her life. Constrained by circumstance, Howard put into his fiction the excitement of far horizons that he himself was denied.David C. Smith, himself a recognized author of fantasy and adventure fiction, here presents the unique story of a young man who defied the odds of his time and place to become a writer whose work is still enjoyed by millions. Smith shows us how Howard fulfilled his readers’ expectations for page-turning excitement while writing with poetic precision and creating archetypal characters that are now part of mainstream American popular culture.

    R. JAMESThe celebrated writer M. R. James (1862-1936) is the most significant author of ghost stories in the world. His macabre work has terrified and fascinated readers for over 100 years. Now collected in one volume, 29 essays on his ghostly tales and themes by editor and James scholar Rosemary PardoePlus a further eight essays on other authors, including Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, E. G. Swain and Many Wade Wellman and a fascinating miscellany of nine additional pieces on a variety of topics.Rosemary Pardoe is the esteemed essayist and editor of the famed M. R. James related Ghosts & Scholars magazine, which she has edited since 1979. She is the co-editor (with Richard Dalby) of Ghosts And Scholars: Stories in the Tradition of M. R. James (1987), and three volumes of The Ghosts & Scholars Book of Shadows (Sarob Press). She is the co-editor and has contributed to Warnings to the Curious: A Sheaf of Criticism on M. R. James, edited with S. T. Joshi.

    Essay. Reading Joan Didion's iconic memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Jacob Bacharach's thoughts are never far from his brother, Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a a cool customer like Didion, he finds Nate's story breaking through the text, stirring memories of their tight-knit childhood and defying his attempts to find the truth about a tragic death. In A COOL CUSTOMER, Bacharach turns The Year of Magical Thinking into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery that anyone can follow. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords.Bacharach smartly weaves his family story with a literate discussion of Didion's narratives and cultural position to make a snappy and inviting book you could easily read in one sitting.--Rebecca Foster

    Provocative, crisp and written from a practitioner’s perspective, the series starts a fresh conversation between past and present, and writer and reader. It sheds light on the craft of writing, and introduces some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

    Howard by Michael Fantina• Patrick McGrath Reanimates the Gothic by James Goho• We Used Swords in the '70s by Laird Barron• Amazing by Moonlight by Joseph Wrzos• The Shaman's Smile by Jonathan Thomas• Wild, Wild Vampires: Robert E. Howard on Breaking with Convention in the Western Genre by Todd Vick• The Forgetful Idealist, interview of Lord Dunsany by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr.• Withering Winds by K. A. Opperman• The Pecking Order by Clint Smith• Midwestern Horror: An Interview with Clint Smith by Adam Golaski• The Howling House by Darrell Schweitzer• The Girl in the Window by James Ulmer• Unmasqued by Sandy Robertson• A Gnome There Was: The Gnome Press Story by Stefan Dziemianowicz• Scylla and Charybdis by Wade German• The Horrific History of H. R. Giger's Alien Toys! by Chad Hensley• Collector Profile: Steve Dwyer by Chad Hensley• The Outlier by Ann K. Schwader• Daddy by Victor LaValle• The Darkest Part of the Midnight Sun: Arthur Machen and the Fiction of Ramsey Campbell by John Llewellyn Probert• The Accident by Marjorie Bowen• "An Enchanting Brewer of Dread": Marjorie Bowen and Her Ghosts by John C. Tibbetts• Hello Sharkness, My Old Friend by Dave Roberts• Fertility Rite by Ryan Page• Virginia Story by Caitlín R. Kiernan• WFR Interview: David Mitchell by Danel Olson• Forgotten Masters of the Weird Tale: Paul Ernst by John Pelan

    The Poem is a treatise on the art of poetry in three sections - one on lyric, the music of poetic speech; one on sign, and how poetry makes its unique kind of sense; and one on metre, the rhythm of the poetic line.

    Calling it a major crisis in African literary criticism, Mukoma Wa Ngugi considers key questions around the misreading of African literature: Why did Chinua Achebe’s generation privilege African literature in English despite the early South African example? What are the costs of locating the start of Africa’s literary tradition in the wrong literary and historical period? What does it mean for the current generation of writers and scholars of African literature not to have an imaginative consciousness of their literary past?  While acknowledging the importance of Achebe’s generation in the African literary tradition, Mukoma Wa Ngugi challenges that narrowing of the identities and languages of the African novel and writer. In restoring the missing foundational literary period to the African literary tradition, he shows how early South African literature, in both aesthetics and politics, is in conversation with the literature of the African independence era and contemporary rooted transnational literatures. This book will become a foundational text in African literary studies, as it raises questions about the very nature of African literature and criticism. It will be essential reading for scholars of African literary studies as well as general readers seeking a greater understanding of African literary history and the ways in which critical consensus can be manufactured and rewarded at the expense of a larger and historical literary tradition.

    Divided into sections that explore the origins and evolution of horror fiction, the recurrent themes that can be seen in horror, and ways of understanding horror through literary and cultural theory, the text analyses why horror is so compelling, and how we should interpret its presence in literature. Chapters explore historical horror aspects including ancient mythology, medieval writing, drama, chapbooks, the Gothic novel, and literary Modernism and trace themes such as vampires, children and animals in horror, deep dark forests, labyrinths, disability, and imperialism. Considering horror via postmodern theory, evolutionary psychology, postcolonial theory, and New Materialism, this handbook investigates issues of gender and sexuality, race, censorship and morality, environmental studies, and literary versus popular fiction.

    

    John Whittier Treat takes up both canonical and forgotten works, the non-literary as well as the literary, and pays special attention to the Japanese state’s hand in shaping literature throughout the country’s nineteenth-century industrialization, a half-century of empire and war, its post-1945 reconstruction, and the challenges of the twenty-first century to modern nationhood.   Beginning with journalistic accounts of female criminals in the aftermath of the Meiji civil war, Treat moves on to explore how woman novelist Higuchi Ichiyo’s stories engaged with modern liberal economics, sex work, and marriage; credits Natsume Soseki’s satire I Am a Cat with the triumph of print over orality in the early twentieth century; and links narcissism in the visual arts with that of the Japanese I-novel on the eve of the country’s turn to militarism in the 1930s. From imperialism to Americanization and the new media of television and manga, from boogie-woogie music to Yoshimoto Banana and Murakami Haruki, Treat traces the stories Japanese audiences expected literature to tell and those they did not. The book concludes with a classic of Japanese science fiction a description of present-day crises writers face in a Japan hobbled by a changing economy and unprecedented natural and manmade catastrophes. The Rise and Fall of Japanese Literature reinterprets the “end of literature”—a phrase heard often in Japan—as a clarion call to understand how literary culture worldwide now teeters on a historic precipice, one at which Japan’s writers may have arrived just a moment before the rest of us.

    As a black woman and a comics geek, Stacie Williams identified strongly with one aspect of The Fortress of Solitude--its portrayal of gentrification. For Jonathan Lethem's characters, and for Williams in her own life, gentrification is a stand-in for racism--the "Big Bad" that affects education, policing, and housing policy. Tracing her experience of living in Chicago, Boston, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Lexington, Kentucky, Williams tests the limits of how far Lethem's superhero narrative frames the most American of experiences. This is part of Fiction Advocate's Afterwords series.

    It investigates the careers and fiction of a range of the British writers who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, such as Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, and John Buchan, to shed light on the tensions between ‘literary’ and ‘genre’ fiction that continue to this day. Weird Fiction in Britain 1880–1939 focuses on the key literary and cultural contexts of weird fiction of the period, including Decadence, paganism, and the occult, and discusses how these later impacted on the seminal American pulp magazine Weird Tales. This ground-breaking book will appeal to scholars of weird, horror and Gothic fiction, genre studies, Decadence, popular fiction, the occult, and Fin-de-Siècle cultural history.

    Yet, in spite of our distance from medieval theology, the Florentine poet's allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and paradise remains one of the essential books of mankind. At least fifty English language versions of the 'Inferno' – the first part of Dante's epic – appeared in the twentieth century alone. If Dante's Comedy speaks to our present condition, it is because Dante wrote the epic of Everyman who sets out in search of salvation in this world. And he wrote his great poem in the ordinary Italian of his time. He wrote about suffering bodies and human weakness, and about divine ecstasy, in words that have resonated with readers and writers for the last 700 years.

    They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism.While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.

    Like them, Stevens shaped a new language, fashioning an instrument adequate to describing a completely changed environment of fact, extending perception through his poems to align what Emerson called our “axis of vision” with the universe as it came to be understood during his lifetime, 1879–1955, a span shared with Albert Einstein. Projecting his own imagination into spacetime as “a priest of the invisible,” persistently cultivating his cosmic consciousness through reading, keeping abreast of the latest discoveries of Einstein, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, and others, Stevens pushed the boundaries of language into the exotic territories of relativity and quantum mechanics while at the same time honoring the continuing human need for belief in some larger order. His work records how to live, what to do in this strange new world of experience, seeing what was always seen but never seen before. Joan Richardson, author of the standard two-volume critical biography of Stevens and coeditor with Frank Kermode of the Library of America edition of the Collected Poetry and Prose, offers concise, lucid captures of Stevens’s development and achievement. Over the ten years of researching her Stevens biography, Richardson read all that he read, as well as his complete correspondence, journals, and notebooks. She weaves the details drawn from this deep involvement into the background of American cultural history of the period. This fabric is further enlivened by her preparation in philosophy and the sciences, creating in these thirteen panels a contemporary version of a medieval tapestry sequence, with Stevens in the place of the unicorn, as it were, holding our attention and eliciting, as necessary angel, individual solutions to the riddles of our existence on this planet spinning and hissing around its cooling star at 18.5 miles per second.

    The detailed analysis of biblical books and passages as written texts has benefited from the study of literature in classical philology, ancient rhetoric, and modern literary criticism. This volume of the Lexham Methods Series introduces the various ways the study of literature has been used in biblical studies. Most literary approaches emphasize the study of the text alone-its structure, its message, and its use of literary devices-rather than its social or historical background. The methods described in Literary Approaches to the Bible are focused on different ways of analyzing the text within its literary context. Some of the techniques have been around for centuries, but the theories of literary critics from the early 20th century to today had a profound impact on biblical interpretation. In this book, you will learn about those literary approaches, how they were adapted for biblical studies, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

    Yi-Ping Ong shows that for Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Beauvoir, the form of the novel in its classic phase yields the conditions for reconceptualizing the nature of self-knowledge, freedom, and the world. Their discovery gives rise to a radically new poetics of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century realist novel.For the existentialists, a paradox lies at the heart of the novel. As a work of art, the novel exists as a given totality. At the same time, the capacity of the novel to compel belief in the free and independent existence of its characters depends on the absence of any perspective from which their lives may be viewed as a consummated whole. At stake in the poetics of the novel are the conditions under which knowledge of existence is possible. Ong's reframing of foundational debates in novel theory takes us beyond old dichotomies of mind and world, interiority and totality, and form and mimesis. It illuminates existential dimensions of novelistic realism overlooked by empirical and sociological approaches.Bringing together philosophy, novel theory, and intellectual history with groundbreaking readings of Tolstoy, Eliot, Austen, James, Flaubert, and Zola, The Art of Being reveals how the novel engages in its very form with philosophically rich notions of self-knowledge, freedom, authority, world, and the unfinished character of human life.

    In Queer Expectations, Zohar Weiman-Kelman shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing queer expectancy as a conceptual tool for understanding how literary texts can both invoke and resist what came before. Bringing together Jewish women's poetry from the late nineteenth century, the interwar period, and the 1970s and 1980s, Weiman-Kelman takes readers on a boundary-crossing journey through works in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew, setting up encounters between writers of different generations, locations, and languages. Queer Expectations highlights genealogical lines of continuity drawn by authors as diverse as Emma Lazarus, Kadya Molodowsky, Leah Goldberg, Anna Margolin, Irena Klepfisz, and Adrienne Rich. These poets push back against heteronormative imperatives of biological reproduction and inheritance, opting instead for connections that twist traditional models of gender and history. Looking backward in queer ways enables new histories to emerge, intervenes in a troubled present, and gives hope for unexpected futures.

    Presenting twelve new essays intended for students, scholars, and other readers of Mary Shelley's novel, the volume explores classical receptions in some of Frankenstein's most important scenes, sources, and adaptations. Not limited to literature, the chapters discuss a wide range of modern materials-including recent films like Alex Garland's Ex Machina and comics like Matt Fraction's and Christian Ward's Ody-C-in relation to ancient works including Hesiod's Theogony, Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and Apuleius's The Golden Ass. All together, these studies show how Frankenstein, a foundational work of science fiction, brings ancient thought to bear on some of today's most pressing issues, from bioengineering and the creation of artificial intelligence to the struggles of marginalized communities and political revolution. This addition to the comparative study of classics and science fiction reveals deep similarities between ancient and modern ways of imagining the world-and emphasizes the prescience and ongoing importance of Mary Shelley's immortal novel. As Frankenstein turns 200, its complex engagement with classical traditions is more significant than ever.

    In this critical biography, Seth Whidden argues that what makes Rimbaud’s poetry important is part of what makes his life so compelling: rebellion, audacity, creativity, and exploration. Almost all of Rimbaud’s poems were written between the ages of fifteen and twenty. Against the backdrop of the crumbling Second Empire and the tumultuous Paris Commune, he took centuries-old traditions of French versification and picked them apart with an unmatched knowledge of how they fitted together. Combining sensuality with the pastoral, parody, political satire, fable, eroticism, and mystery, his poems range from traditional verse forms to prose-poetry to the first two free-verse poems written in French. By situating Rimbaud’s later writing in Africa as part of a continuum that spanned his entire life, Whidden offers a corrective to the traditional split between Rimbaud’s life as a poet and his life afterwards. A remarkable portrait of the original damned poet, Arthur Rimbaud reinvents a figure who continues to captivate readers, artists, and writers across the world.

      Sofia Vergara became the highest paid woman and Latina on TV for her starring role on Modern Family. In the first successful dramedy starring a Latina since ABC’s Ugly Betty, Gina Rodriguez gained critical acclaim for her role on the CW’s Jane the Virgin. And the first Latina leading lady of TV, America Ferrera (Ugly Betty), returned to TV stardom in NBC’s Superstore.   This period of diversity brought U.S. Latina and Latino lives to the screen, yet a careful look at TV comedic content and production reveals a more troubling terrain for Latinas/os producers, writers, actors, and audiences.   Interweaving discussions about the ethnic, racial, and linguistic representations of Latinas/os within network television comedies, Isabel Molina-Guzmán probes published interviews with producers and textual examples from hit programs like Modern Family, The Office, and Scrubs to understand how these primetime sitcoms communicate difference in the United States.   Understanding the complex ways that audiences interpret these programs, Molina-Guzmán situates her analysis within the Obama era, a period when ethnicity and race became increasingly grounded in “hipster racism,” and argues that despite increased inclusion, the feel-good imperative of TV comedies still inevitably leaves racism, sexism, and homophobia uncontested.

    S. Eliot's early poetry are paralyzed by the gap between mind and body, thought and action. The need to address this impasse is part of what drew Eliot to philosophy, and the failure of philosophy to appease his disquiet is the reason he gave for abandoning it. In T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination, Jewel Spears Brooker argues that two of the principles that Eliot absorbed as a PhD student at Harvard and Oxford were to become permanent features of his mind, grounding his lifelong quest for wholeness and underpinning most of his subsequent poetry.The first principle is that contradictions are best understood dialectically, by moving to perspectives that both include and transcend them. The second is that all truths exist in relation to other truths. Together or in tandem, these two principles--dialectic and relativism--constitute the basis of a continual reshaping of Eliot's imagination. The dialectic serves as a kinetic principle, undergirding his impulse to move forward by looping back, and the relativism supports his ingrained ambivalence.Brooker considers Eliot's poetry in three blocks, each represented by a signature masterpiece: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. She correlates these works with stages in the poet's intellectual and spiritual life: disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence. Using a methodology that is both inductive--moving from texts to theories--and comparative--juxtaposing the evolution of Eliot's mind as reflected in his philosophical prose and the evolution of style as seen in his poetry--Brooker integrates cultural and biographical contexts. The first book to read Eliot's poems alongside all of his prose and letters, T. S. Eliot's Dialectical Imagination will revise received readings of his mind and art, as well as of literary modernism.

    It offers a clear, detailed, and expansive overview of contemporary themes and issues throughout the intersections of the fields of fairy-tale studies, media studies, and cultural studies, addressing, among others, issues of reception, audience cultures, ideology, remediation, and adaptation. Examples and case studies are drawn from a wide range of pertinent disciplines and settings, providing thorough, accessible treatment of central topics and specific media from around the globe.

    Hailing "the birth of the reader," Barthes posits a new abstract notion of the reader as the conceptual space containing all the text's possible meanings. The essay has become one of the most cited works in literary criticism and is a key text for any reader approaching reader response theory.

    The selection is made by Boyd Tonkin, who is uniquely placed to choose these 100 titles. Not only was he Literary Editor of The Independent newspaper but he started the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize which ran from 1990 until 2015 before becoming part of the Man Booker awards. He has made an extraordinary selection of classics ranging from the well known authors such as Proust, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Cervantes, Nabokov, Marquez, Kundera etc, to name just a handful, to lesser known, but no less deserving, authors writing in languages from every corner of the earth. For each selection he has written a commentary on the plot and theme of the work concerned, as well as writing about the merits of the particular translation(s) into the English language. The works are arranged in date order of publication, and are not ranked in any other way. The result is a rich tapestry of the best fiction from around the world that will surely accelerate the recent trend towards a more outward looking approach to what we read. It is both a work of reference but as importantly a book that can read from cover to cover with huge enjoyment.

    The novelist, most famous for his 1957 book On the Road, admired the sounds of bebop and attempted to bring something of their original energy to his own writing, a torrent of semi-autobiographical stories he published between 1950 and his early death in 1969. Yet he was also drawn to American popular music of all kinds – from the blues to Broadway ballads – and when he came to record albums under his own name, he married his unique spoken word style with some of the most talented musicians on the scene. Kerouac's musical legacy goes well beyond the studio recordings he made himself: his influence infused generations of music makers who followed in his work – from singer-songwriters to rock bands. Some of the greatest transatlantic names – Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Van Morrison and David Bowie, Janis Joplin and Tom Waits, Sonic Youth and Death Cab for Cutie, and many more – credited Kerouac's impact on their output. In Kerouac on Record, we consider how the writer brought his passion for jazz to his prose and poetry, his own record releases, the ways his legacy has been sustained by numerous more recent talents, those rock tributes that have kept his memory alive and some of the scores that have featured in Hollywood adaptations of the adventures he brought to the printed page.

    The Lost Letters of William Shakespeare: The Undiscovered Diary of his Strange Eventful Life and Loves reveal vibrant details from Shakespeare's arrival in London to the premiere of Titus Andronicus, his first play to be staged, along with political commentary on Elizabethan England (and surprising insight into how it affects us today); and a magnificent, but tragic, love story.In 1989, I performed a one-man play about the life of William Shakespeare in London. "Miss B," an elderly woman was apparently sufficiently impressed by my impersonation of the Bard that she offered to show me some old, never-published letters that she believed were written by William Shakespeare. Although I was initially skeptical, it was an offer too good to pass up. What I discovered in these letters began to unravel almost everything I thought I knew about the great poet and playwright. My Prologue to The Lost Letters describes our meetings, more about my mysterious benefactor, and how - throughout my subsequent careers in business and public service - I spent over two decades decoding and researching what these letters had to say, in order to adapt this true story for the modern reader.Through the letters, we learn that Shakespeare left home in 1586 as a jack-of-all-trades for a troupe of traveling players. His goal was to reach London and then sail to America in the hope of restoring his family's honor and finances. He wrote letters addressed to his friend John Combe, intending them as a record of his journey and his thoughts and feelings, so that his son, Hamnet (two years old in 1586) would know his father, in the event Shakespeare was unable to return to England. Because Shakespeare wanted to "report his cause aright," his letters are remarkably detailed and intimate. The Lost Letters uncover the truth about the earliest pilgrims to America and reveal that Shakespeare was kept closer to home, in part to fight in a pivotal battle for England against Spain. The Lost Letters also reveal his epic and tragic love affair with the young, beautiful Rosalind.Although Shakespeare's son Hamnet never apparently saw these letters (and Shakespeare did return home without ever setting foot in North America), we are the beneficiaries of his observations of life in Elizabethan England. The Lost Letters reveal first-hand secrets about the rulers of the land (and those who sought to rule); secrets about Shakespeare's participation in the war with Spain (a war that changed history); bitter truths about Shakespeare's father, his wife Anne, and his patrons; and a heroic lady loved and lost.Overall, these remarkable letters represent a wealth of as-yet-undiscovered knowledge about Shakespeare's relationships, personality, and career as he carved out his place in the chaotic world of 16th-century London. Whether you are a Shakespeare scholar, merely a fan, or even if you have never read any of his works, the stories of the The Lost Letters will enthrall you with their fascinating and true tale.Terry Tamminen

    Raechel Dumas examines the role of female monsters in selected works of fiction, manga, film, and video games, offering a trans-genre, trans-media analysis of this enduring trope. The book focuses on several iterations of the monstrous-feminine in contemporary Japan: the self-replicating shōjo in horror, monstrous mothers in science fiction, female ghosts and suburban hauntings in cinema, female monsters and public violence in survival horror games, and the rebellious female body in mytho-fiction. Situating the titles examined here amid discourses of crisis that have materialized in contemporary Japan, Dumas illuminates the ambivalent pleasure of the monstrous-feminine as a trope that both articulates anxieties centered on shifting configurations of subjectivity and nationhood, and elaborates novel possibilities for identity negotiation and social formation in a period marked by dramatic change.

    How is the schoolgirl made legible through violence in graphic texts of girlhood? What knowledge about girlhood and violence are under erasure within mainstream images and scripts about the schoolgirl? In what ways has the schoolgirl been pictured in graphic narratives to communicate feminist knowledge, represent trauma, and/or testify about social violence? Graphic Girlhoods focuses on these questions to make visible and ultimately question how sexism, racism and other forms of structural violence inform education and girlhood. From picture books about mean girls like The Recess Queen or graphic novels like Jane, The Fox and Me to Ronald Searle's ghastly pupils in the St. Trinian's cartoons to graphic memoirs about schooling by adult women, such as Ruby Bridges's Through My Eyes and Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons texts for and about the schoolgirl stake a claim in ongoing debates about gender and education.

    This collection gives these characters their due as powerful early modern women and agents of change, bringing together new perspectives from scholars of literature, history, theater, and the fine arts. Essays span Shakespeare’s career and cover a range of famous and lesser-known queens, from the furious Margaret of Anjou in the Henry VI plays to the quietly powerful Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; from vengeful Tamora in Titus Andronicus to Lady Macbeth. Early chapters situate readers in the critical concerns underpinning any discussion of Shakespeare and queenship: the ambiguous figure of Elizabeth I, and the knotty issue of gender presentation. The focus then moves to analysis of issues such as motherhood, intertextuality, and contemporary political contexts; close readings of individual plays; and investigations of rhetoric and theatricality. Featuring twenty-five chapters with a rich variety of themes and methodologies, this handbook is an invaluable reference for students and scholars, and a unique addition to the fields of Shakespeare and queenship studies.