In collections such as Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver wrote with unflinching exactness about men and women enduring lives on the knife-edge of poverty and other deprivations. Beneath his pared-down surfaces run disturbing, violent undercurrents. Suggestive rather than explicit, and seeming all the more powerful for what is left unsaid, Carver’s stories were held up as exemplars of a new school in American fiction known as minimalism or “dirty realism,” a movement whose wide influence continues to this day. Carver’s stories were brilliant in their detachment and use of the oblique, ambiguous gesture, yet there were signs of a different sort of sensibility at work. In books such as Cathedral and the later tales included in the collected stories volume Where I’m Calling From, Carver revealed himself to be a more expansive writer than in the earlier published books, displaying Chekhovian sympathies toward his characters and relying less on elliptical effects.In gathering all of Carver’s stories, including early sketches and posthumously discovered works, The Library of America’s Collected Stories provides a comprehensive overview of Carver’s career as we have come to know it: the promise of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and the breakthrough of What We Talk About, on through the departures taken in Cathedral and the pathos of the late stories. But it also prompts a fresh consideration of Carver by presenting Beginners, an edition of the manuscript of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that Carver submitted to Gordon Lish, his editor and a crucial influence on his development. Lish’s editing was so extensive that at one point Carver wrote him an anguished letter asking him not to publish the book; now, for the first time, readers can read both the manuscript and published versions of the collection that established Carver as a major American writer. Offering a fascinating window into the complex, fraught relationship between writer and editor, Beginners expands our sense of Carver and is essential reading for anyone who cares about his achievement.Contents--What We Talk About When We Talk About LoveWhy Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderMr. Coffee and Mr. FixitGazeboI Could See the Smallest ThingsSacksThe BathTell the Women We’re GoingAfter the DenimSo Much Water So Close to HomeThe Third Thing That Killed My Father OffA Serious TalkThe CalmPopular MechanicsEverything Stuck to HimWhat We Talk About When We Talk About LoveOne More ThingStories from FiresThe LieThe CabinHarry’s DeathThe PheasantCathedralFeathersChef’s HousePreservationThe CompartmentA Small, Good ThingVitaminsCarefulWhere I’m Calling FromThe TrainFeverThe BridleCathedralFrom Where I’m Calling FromBoxesWhoever Was Using This BedIntimacyMenudoElephantBlackbird PieErrandOther FictionThe HairThe AficionadosPoseidon and CompanyBright Red ApplesFrom The Augustine NotebooksKindlingWhat Would You Like to See?DreamsVandalsCall If You Need MeSelected EssaysMy Father’s LifeOn WritingFiresAuthor’s Note to Where I’m Calling FromBeginners (The Manuscript Version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love)Why Don’t You Dance?ViewfinderWhere Is Everyone?GazeboWant to See Something?The FlingA Small, Good ThingTell the Women We’re GoingIf It Please YouSo Much Water So Close to HomeDummyPieThe CalmMineDistanceBeginnersOne More Thing--loa.org

    In her Selected Stories, Alice Munro makes lives that seem small unfold until they are revealed to be as spacious as prairies and locates the moments of love and betrayal, desire and forgiveness, that change those lives forever. To read these stories--about a traveling salesman and his children on an impromptu journey; an abandoned woman choosing between seduction and solitude--is to succumb to the spell of a writer who enchants her readers utterly even as she restores them to their truest selves.Walker brothers cowboy --Dance of the happy shades --Postcard --Images --Something I've been meaning to tell you --The Ottawa Valley --Material --Royal beatings --Wild swans --The beggar maid --Simon's luck --Chaddeleys and Flemings --Dulse --The turkey season --Labor Day dinner --The moons of Jupiter --The progress of love --Lichen --Miles City, Montana --White dump --Fits --Friend of my youth --Meneseteung --Differently --Carried away --The Albanian virgin --A wilderness station --Vandals.

    Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.

    Cloud's, Maine, Homer Wells has become the protege of Dr. Wilbur Larch, its physician and director. There Dr. Larch cares for the troubled mothers who seek his help, either by delivering and taking in their unwanted babies or by performing illegal abortions. Meticulously trained by Dr. Larch, Homer assists in the former, but draws the line at the latter. Then a young man brings his beautiful fiancee to Dr. Larch for an abortion, and everything about the couple beckons Homer to the wide world outside the orphanage ...

    Science fiction, detective story and post-modern manifesto all rolled into one rip-roaring novel, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is the tour de force that expanded Haruki Murakami's international following. Tracking one man's descent into the Kafkaesque underworld of contemporary Tokyo, Murakami unites East and West, tragedy and farce, compassion and detachment, slang and philosophy.'

    The four novels in this Library of America collection display an astonishing range of characters and treatments in his Depression-era fiction.As I Lay Dying (1930) is a combination of comedy, horror, and compassion, a narrative woven from the inarticulate desires of a peasant family in conflict. It presents the conscious, unconscious, and sometimes hallucinatory impressions of the husband, daughter, and four sons of Addie Bundren, the long-suffering matriarch of her rural Mississippi clan, as the family marches her body through fire and flood to its grave in town.Sanctuary (1931) is a novel of sex and social class, of collapsed gentility and amoral justice, that moves from the back roads of Mississippi and the fleshpots of Memphis to the courthouse of Jefferson and the appalling spectacle of popular vengeance. With its fascinating portraits of Popeye, a sadistic gangster and rapist, and Temple Drake, a debutante with an affinity for evil, it offers a horrific and sometimes comically macabre vision of modern life.Light in August (1932) incorporates Faulkner’s religious vision of the hopeful stubbornness of ordinary life. The guileless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; the disgraced minister Gail Hightower, who dreams of Confederate cavalry charges; Byron Bunch, who thought working Saturdays would keep a man out of trouble, and the desperate, enigmatic Joe Christmas, consumed by his mixed ancestry—all find their lives entangled in the inexorable succession of love, birth, and death.Pylon (1935), a tale of barnstorming aviators in the carnival atmosphere of an air show in a southern city, examines the bonds of desire and loyalty among three men and a woman, all characters without a past. Dramatizing what, in accepting his Nobel Prize, Faulkner called “the human heart in conflict with itself,” it illustrates how he became one of the great humanists of twentieth-century literature.The Library of America edition of Faulkner’s work publishes, for the first time, new, corrected texts of these four works. Manuscripts, typescripts, galleys, and published editions have been collated to produce versions that are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and that are faithful to Faulkner’s intentions.

    Traditional resources—home, parents, lovers, friends, even willpower—are not dependable. And so the characters in these short, compelling stories have learned to depend on small triumphs of wit, irony, and spirit.A widow, surrounded by a small menagerie, comes to terms with her veterinarian husband's death; a young woman entertains her dying friend with trivia and reaffirms her own life; in the aftermath of an abortion, a woman compulsively knits a complete wardrobe for a friend's baby. Buffeted by rude shocks, thwarted by misconnections, the characters recognize that anything can finally become a reason to live.

    It tells of the life and opinions of Reger, a 'musical philosopher', through the voice of his acquaintance Atzbacher, a 'private academic'.The book is set in Vienna on one day around the year of its publication, 1985. Reger is an 82-year-old music critic who writes pieces for The Times. For over thirty years he has sat on the same bench in front of Tintoretto's White-bearded Man in the Bordone Room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum for four or five hours of the morning of every second day. He finds this environment the one in which he can do his best thinking. He is aided in this habit by the gallery attendant Irrsigler, who prevents other visitors from using the bench when Reger requires it.

    Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat. “At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk. . . . Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and the tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”

    Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

    The complete comic saga of Nathan Zuckerman, his ordeals of conscience, from Manhattan, to Miami Beach, to Czechoslovakia!"Roth has transcended himself . . . . A comic genius . . . Certainly Philip Roth's finest achievement to date, eclipsing even his best single fictions . . . ZUCKERMAN BOUND binds together THE GHOST WRITER, ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, and THE ANATOMY LESSON, adding to them as epilogue a wild short novel, THE PRAGUE ORGY, which is at once the bleakest and the funniest writing Roth has done."-- The New York Times Book Review"ZUCKERMAN BOUND proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth." -- Time"ZUCKERMAN BOUND shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated." -- The New Yorker

    These 22 stories show Holmes at his brilliant best.A scandal in bohemia --The Red-Headed League --The Boscombe Valley mystery --The five orange pips --The adventure of the blue carbuncle --The adventure of the speckled band --The adventure of the copper beeches --The crooked man --The resident patient --The Greek interpreter --The naval treaty --The final problem --The adventure of the empty house --The adventure of the Norwood builder --The adventure of the dancing men --The adventure of the solitary cyclist --The adventure of the six Napoleons --The adventure of the priory school --The Musgrave ritual --The man with the twisted lip --The adventure of the second stain --The adventure of the Abbey Grange.

    It demonstrates a commitment to surrealistic aesthetics, and has a clear lack of an obvious plot, minimal development of character, variations of time sequence, and experiments with vocabulary and punctuation.

    As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris, and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects such as brass doorknobs and fresh-cut wood. Then one day he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume"—the scent of a beautiful young virgin. Told with dazzling narrative brilliance, Perfume is a hauntingly powerful tale of murder and sensual depravity.

    The text also contains 11 complete works such as Oroonoko, Jane Eyre, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Awakening and Caryl Churchill's play, Top Girls.

    They focus on the internal conflict of individuals, the power of the dead over the living, and psychological explorations of darker human emotion.An American writer of fantastical, bizarre and sometimes disturbing short stories, Poe wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century. Preoccupied with delving into the darker reaches of the human psyche, Poe is inventor of the detective story and master of the macabre.

    In achieving for himself the opulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself to be a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbingly sympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. As Highsmith navigates the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley's deadly and sinister games, she turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into the mind of a man utterly indifferent to evil.The Talented Mr. RipleyIn a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmith introduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young American back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself very fond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him--exactly like him. Suave, agreeable, and utterly amoral, Ripley stops at nothing--certainly not only one murder--to accomplish his goal. Turning the mystery form inside out, Highsmith shows the terrifying abilities afforded to a man unhindered by the concept of evil.Ripley Under GroundIn this harrowing illumination of the psychotic mind, the enviable Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But such a gracious life has not come easily. One inopportune inquiry, one inconvenient friend, and Ripley's world will come tumbling down--unless he takes decisive steps. In a mesmerizing novel that coolly subverts all traditional notions of literary justice, Ripley enthralls us even as we watch him perform acts of pure and unspeakable evil.Ripley's GameConnoisseur of art, harpsichord aficionado, gardener extraordinaire, and genius of improvisational murder, the inimitable Tom Ripley finds his complacency shaken when he is scorned at a posh gala. While an ordinary psychopath might repay the insult with some mild act of retribution, what Ripley has in mind is far more subtle, and infinitely more sinister. A social slight doesn't warrant murder of course-- just a chain of events that may lead to it.

    Contains the stories in Dago Red, first published in 1940, together with seven new stories, including "A Nun No More" and "My Father’s God."

    Anne's romantic soul, her idealism, and her adventurous spirit often lead her into mishaps, but she always survives, learning from her experience, and the read does too, while enjoying her marvelous adventures. Fiercely independent and outspoken, Anne is not afraid of conflicts with her elders - this, in an age (the early 1900's) when childeren were "seen and not heard." But Anne's bright intelligence, honesty, and resourcefulness are impossible to defeat, and she carries the day. Her story spoke to the readers of the time, as it does still, to the young, and the young at heart, today. Anne of Green Gables, the first novel, introduces our lively heroine at age eleven, fresh from an orphanage, when she must win the right to stay at Green Gables with the taciturn Matthew Cuthbert and his reserved sister, Marilla, and takes her into her teens. In Anne of Avonlea, she is the village schoolteacher and the story takes her up to her preparations to enter college. Finally, Anne's House of Dreams, the most romantic, and, many believe, the best of the Anne books, finds Anne, now a lovely young woman, on the verge of her marriage to a young doctor whom she has known and loved for years, and describes the fulfillment of her dreams of romance and career, in a village peopled with memorable characters. This volume is uniquely illustrated with period drawings that evoke the era in which Anne was created and were taken from books and magazines of the day. One can do no better than to quote an editorial from one of those magazines, The Housewife, in describing Anne: "Droll one minute, pathetic the next; staid and wise as a grandmother one minute, bubbling over with impish mischief the next," but always "lovable." Contemporary readers will find her just as engaging, as they follow her from lonely waif to fulfilled young woman.

    With its showcase homes, elegant lawns, and other trappings of wealth, Linden Hills is not unlike other affluent black communities. But residence in this community is indisputable evidence of "making it." Although no one knows what the precise qualifications are, everyone knows that only certain people get to live there—and that they want to be among them.Once people get to Linden Hills, the quest continues, more subtle, but equally fierce: the goal is a house on Tupelo Drive, the epitome of achievement and visible success. No one notices that the property on Tupelo Drive goes back on sale quickly; no one questions why there are always vacancies at Linden Hills.In a resonant novel that takes as its model Dante's Inferno, Gloria Naylor reveals the truth about the American dream—that the price of success may very well be a journey down to the lowest circle of hell.

    Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

    Her loving parents, both fervent radicals, fill her with the fiercely bright hope of a new and better world. But as the deprivations of war and depression take a ruthless toll, Davita unexpectedly turns to the Jewish faith that her mother had long ago abandoned, finding there both a solace for her questioning inner pain and a test of her budding spirit of independence.From the Paperback edition.

    In Little Bear, our diminutive hero decides what to wear on a cold day, prepares for his birthday, visits the moon, and makes a wish. In Father Bear Comes Home, he practices being a good fisherman and learns about mermaids. And in A Kiss for Little Bear, he finds out how Grandmother's kiss gets passed down the line. Ages 4-8.

    These narrow strips of paper (many of them written during his hospitalization in the Waldau sanatorium) covered with tiny ant-like markings only a millimeter or two high, came to light only after the author’s death in 1956. At first considered a secret code, the microscripts were eventually discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of a German script: a whole story could fit on the back of a business card.Selected from the six-volume German transcriptions from the original microscripts, these 25 short pieces are gathered in this gorgeously illustrated co-publication with the Christine Burgin Gallery.  Each microscript is reproduced in full color in its original form: the detached cover of a trashy crime novel, a disappointing letter, a receipt of payment. Sometimes Walser used the pages of small tear-off calendars (but only after cutting them lengthwise and filling up each half with text). Schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, the radio, pigs (and how none of us can deny being one), jealousy, Van Gogh and marriage proposals are some of Walser’s subjects.  These texts take strength from Walser’s motto: “To be small and to stay small.”

    To Tobias Wolff's characters, Back in the World is where lives that have veered out of control just might become normal again. Unfortunately, the men and women in these gripping, pungent, and wonderfully skewed stories have only the vaguest notion of what normal is. A gentle priest finds himself in a Vegas hotel with a hysterical, sun-burned stranger. A show-biz hopeful undergoes a dubious audition in a hearse speeding across the California desert. An aging soldier is distracted from a night of philandering by a gun-toting neighbor and a suicidal enlisted man. As he moves among these unfortunates, Wolff observes the disparity between their realities and their dreams, in ten stories of exhilarating lucidity and grace.Stories included are: "The Missing Person," "Say Yes," "The Poor Are Always With Us," "Sister," "Soldier's Joy," "Desert Breakdown," "Our Story Begins," "Leviathan," and "The Rich Brother." "Terrific...The magic of his fiction cannot be explained. It is the ancient art of the master storyteller."--Tim O'Brien

    Burroughs has produced a body of work unique in our time. In these scintillating essays, he writes wittily and wisely about himself, his interests, his influences, his friends and foes. He offers candid and not always flattering assessments of such diverse writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, and Marcel Proust. He ruminates on science and the often dubious paths into which it seems intent on leading us, whether into outer or inner space. He reviews his reviewers, explains his famous “cut-up” method, and discusses the role coincidence has played in his life and work. As a satirist and parodist, William Burroughs has no peer, as these varied works, written over three decades, amply reveal.

    Christopher Hampton has made a masterful adaptation for the stage of the conspiracy to corrupt a young girl barely out of her convent.

    The book covers the full range of his work, including verse, essays and reflective prose as well as fiction. Celia Hawkesworth also provides an account of Andric's life, and the cultural history of his native Bosnia.>The story of the vizier's elephant --The bridge on the Žepa --In the guest-house --Death in Sinan's tekke --The climbers --A letter from 1920 --The house on its own : introduction --Alipasha --A story --The damned yard

    The title story won several awards when it was published in 1925.

    Footsteps is a wonderful exploration of the ties between biographers and their subjects, filled with passion and revelation.

    The latter novella opens with virtuoso description: "His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and startling craftsman of the building trade-a left-handed bricklayer. Like my father, Frank came from Torcella Peligna, a cliff-hugging town in the Abruzzi. Lean as a spider, he wore a leather cap and puttees the year around, and he was so bowlegged a dog could lope between his knees without touching them."

    With the publication of this Library of America volume, the third of three volumes, all Melville's fiction has now been restored to print for the first time.Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of early New York City. Its hero, a young American patrician trying to redeem the secret sins of his father, elopes to the city, discovers Bohemian life, attempts a literary epic, and struggles his way through incest, murder, and madness. Long a controversial work, it is Melville's darkest satire of American life and letters and one of his most powerful books.A pivotal work, both for Melville's career and for American literature, Pierre was followed by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution, victim of a thousand mischances, and a long-suffering exile in England. Along the way are memorable episodes of war and intrigue, with personal portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. In the exploits of this touchingly optimistic soldier, Melville offers a scathing image of the collapse of revolutionary hopes.The Piazza Tales demonstrates Melville's dazzling mastery of many styles, including "The Encantadas," about nature's two faces--enchanting and horrific; the famous "Bartleby the Scrivener," about a Wall Street copyist who "would prefer not to"; and the enigmatic "Benito Cereno," about a credulous Yankee sea captain who stumbles into an intricately plotted mutiny aboard a disabled slave ship.The Confidence-Man, Melville's last published novel, is in many ways a forerunner of modernist American fiction. An extended meditation on faith, hope, and charity as these are manifested on board a Mississippi riverboat one April Fools' Day, it presents a menagerie of Americans buying and selling, borrowing and lending, believing and mistrusting, as they are carried toward the auction blocks of New Orleans.Many pieces never before collected are also included: the "Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack" (burlesque sketches of Zachary Taylor's Mexican campaign), "Fragments from a Writing-Desk" (Melville's earliest surviving prose), reviews of Hawthorne, Parkman, and Cooper, and all the tales Melville published in magazines during the 1850s.Finally, there is the posthumously published masterpiece Billy Budd, Sailor, the haunting story of a beautiful, innocent sailor who is pressed into naval service, slandered, provoked to murder, and sacrificed to military justice. While encouraging questions for which there are no answers, it invites us to meditate on the conflicts central to all Melville's work: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilized corruption.

    The themes are familiar: friendship, commitment, responsibility, love, political idealism and activism, children, the nuclear shadow.

    Re-publication of the essays by the author whose criticism of Taiwan¡'s political culture became the seed of an essay wild fire for motivating the people of Taiwan.

    He’s on his way to drop off a press release about the trip to the papers when he runs into Ángel Leto, a relative newcomer to Santa Fe who does some accounting, but who this morning has decided to wander the town rather than go to work. One day soon, The Mathematician will disappear into exile after his wife’s assassination, and Leto will vanish into the guerrilla underground, clutching his suicide pill like a talisman. But for now, they settle into a long conversation about the events of Washington Noriega’s sixty-fifth birthday—a party neither of them attended.Saer’s The Sixty-Five Years of Washington is simultaneously a brilliant comedy about memory, narrative, time, and death and a moving narrative about the lost generations of an Argentina that was perpetually on the verge of collapse.Translated from the Spanish by Steve Dolph

    In 1985, under the editorship of Margaret Drabble, the text was thoroughly and sensitively revised to bring it up to date.The sixth edition, published in 2000, was extensively revised, expanded, and updated. Almost 600 new entries covered new writers, genres, and issues, and existing entries were reworked to incorporate the latest scholarship. In addition to the extensive coverage of writers, works, literary theory, allusions, and characters, there are sixteen featured entries on key topics including black British literature, fantasy fiction, and modernism. The Companion remains an unrivaled work that places English literature in its widest context: no other book offers such extensive exploration of the classical roots of English literature, and the European and non-European works and writers that have influenced its development.The sixth edition has now been revised to ensure that it remains absolutely up to date: the invaluable appendices - the chronology, and lists of winners of major literary awards - have been updated, as have many of the entries. Informed by the latest scholarly thinking, and comprehensively cross-referenced to guide the reader to topics of related interest, the Companion retains its position as the best guide to English literature available.

    Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most influential texts in gender studies, men's studies and gay studies," this book uncovers the homosocial desire between men, from Restoration comedies to Tennyson's Princess.

    A teenager who wants to be a journalist in a suppressed society describes to his diary his daily life in his hometown of Damascus, Syria.

    THE MOTHS AND OTHER STORIES, Helena Maria Viramontes' stories exploring women's struggles to overcome the dictates of family, culture, and church, is in a new edition. Prejudice and the social and economic status of Chicanos often form the backdrop for these haunting stories, but their central, unifying theme deals with the social and cultural values which shape women's lives and which they struggle against with varying degrees of success.

    

    For when Booker Prize-winning author John Berger writes about Cubism, he writes not only of Braque, Leger, Picasso, and Gris, but of that incredible moment early in this century when the world converged around a marvelous sense of promise. When he looks at the Modigliani, he sees a man's infinite love revealed in the elongated lines of the painted figure.Ranging from the Renaissance to the conflagration of Hiroshima; from the Bosphorus to Manhattan; from the woodcarvers of a French village to Goya, Durer, and Van Gogh; and from private experiences of love and of loss, to the major political upheavals of our time, The Sense of Sight encourages us to see with the same breadth, courage, and moral engagement that its author does.

    Continuing his explorations of the art of the Bible, Robert Alter provides an interpretation of the poetry of the Old Testament and an account of how biblical poetry works.

    Today in our computer age, a fine, beautiful, and legible handwriting brings a warm personal touch to our correspondence. These books may be used to introduce cursive writing to second or third graders or to improve the handwriting of older students or adults. They may also be used to teach calligraphy or as part of an art class. Individual Spencerian Copybooks 1-5 are also available.

    When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is heartbroken, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

    Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations is the stunning, now classic dream-spec of our precarious age -- by turns beautiful and obsessed, haunted and hallucinated, in which lives erotically collide, the past ambushes the future, and forbidden secrets intercut with each other like the frames of a film.

    These collected interviews, like a visit with Percy at his home on the Bogue Falaya River, provide refreshing close-up encounters with one of America's most celebrated writers.These twenty-seven interviews cover a period of twenty-two years, from the time of the publication of Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer, in 1961, until 1983, when he was interviewed about his friendship with Thomas Merton.These unabridged interviews, collected from a variety of sources, will give reading pleasure to general readers who wish to know Percy and his works more closely, and they will be of great use to Percy scholars.

    This format will delight both those who know the great dramatist's works and those who are new to them. Michael Foreman's dramatic color illustrations and varied black-and-white line drawings are the perfect complement to this celebration of Shakespeare's genius.

    The seven stories of In the Penny Arcade blend both the real and the fantastic in a seductive mix that illuminates the full range of Steven Millhauser's gifts, from 'August Eschenburg', the story of a clockmaker's son whose extraordinary talent for creating animated figures is lost on a world whose taste for the perverse and crude supersedes that of the refined and beautiful, to 'Cathay', a kingdom whose wonders include landscape paintings executed on the bodies of court ladies.

    The first, Cosmos, a metaphysical thriller, revolves around an absurd investigation. It is set in provincial Poland and narrated by a seedy, pathetic, and witty student, who is charming and appalling by turns, and whose voice is dense with the richly palpable description that characterizes Gombrowicz's writing. The second, Pornografia, explores the sinister effect the young can have on the old. To serve their own secret eroticism, two aging intellectuals encourage a young couple to commit murder. Although the adolescents are the weapons used to commit the crime, the four become conspirators before the deed is done.

    It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam.

    The author's use of 'rotten English'—a mixture of Nigerian pidgin English, broken English and idiomatic English—makes this a unique and powerful novel.

    This edition of his selected poems includes classics like: - " The Lady of Shalott" - " Charge of the Light Brigade" - " Maud" - " Morte d'Arthur" - " Ulysses" - " The Lotus Eaters" Elegantly packaged with a ribbon marker, this volume is the perfect addition to any poetry library.

    Borges’ favorite concepts such as time and dreaming are touched upon, but these dialogues are not a true memoir, they are unrestricted conversations about life at present.  The Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, contributed immensely to twentieth-century literature, and more specifically to the genres of magical realism and fantasy. As he progressively lost his sight—he became completely blind by the age of fifty-five—the darkness behind his eyelids held enchanting imagery that translated into rich symbolism in his work.  The inner workings of his curious mind are seen vividly in his conversations with Ferrari, and there’s not a subject on which he doesn’t cast surprising new light. As in his tale “The Other,” where two Borgeses meet up on a bench beside the River Charles, this is a dialogue between a young poet and the elder teller of tales where all experience floats in a miracle that defies linear time.

    Here some of Japan’s best and most representative writers chronicle and re-create the impact of this tragedy on the daily lives of peasants, city professionals, artists, children, and families. From the “crazy” iris that grows out of season to the artist who no longer paints in color, the simple details described in these superbly crafted stories testify to the enormity of change in Japanese life, as well as in the future of our civilization. Included are “The Crazy Iris” by Masuji Ibuse, “Summer Flower” by Tamiki Hara, “The Land of Heart’s Desire” by Tamiki Hara, “Human Ashes” by Katsuzo Oda, “Fireflies” by Yoka Ota, “The Colorless Paintings” by Ineko Sata, “The Empty Can” by Kyoko Hayashi, “The House of Hands” by Mitsuharu Inoue, and “The Rite” by Hiroko Takenishi.

    Angela Carter takes real people and literary legends - most often women - who have been mythologized or marginalized and recasts them in a new light. In a style that is sensual, cerebral, almost hypnotic, "The Fall River Axe-Murders" portrays the last hours before Lizzie Borden's infamous act: the sweltering heat, the weight of flannel and corsets, the clanging of the factory bells, the food reheated and reserved despite the lack of adequate refrigeration, the house "full of locked doors that open only into other rooms with other locked doors." In "Our Lady of the Massacre" the no-nonsense voice of an eighteenth-century prostitute/runaway slave questions who is civilized - the Indians or the white men? "Black Venus" gives voice to Charles Baudelaire's Creole mistress, Jeanne Duval: "you could say, not so much that Jeanne did not understand the lapidary, troubled serenity of her lover's poetry but, that it was a perpetual affront to her. He recited it to her by the hour and she ached, raged and chafed under it because his eloquence denied her language." "The Kiss" takes the traditional story of Tamburlaine's wife and gives it a new and refreshing ending. Sometimes disquieting, sometimes funny, always thought-provoking, Angela Carter's stories offer a feminist revision of images that lie deep in the public psyche.

    Set in Victorian England, the three sensitive romances -- a Quiet Neighborhood, The Seaboard Parish, and The Vicar's Daughter -- are among MacDonald's best-loved works.

    Then Gertrude conceives the child which has long eluded her, and the spell breaks into foreboding, menace and madness.

    In spite of its title, it is not simply a tutor for the flute, but a fully-fledged programme for training musicians of all types, with detailed information on intonation, ornamentation, dynamics, the 'duties' of the various accompanying performers, including the leader of the orchestra, and the principal forms and styles (French, Italian and German) of the time. Although Quantz is most often identified as the teacher of Frederick the Great, his musical roots were in Dresden, the most brilliant musical establishment in Germany; and his travels and studies in Italy, France and England gave him direct experience of most phases of European musical life in the 1720s and 30s. This reissue of the second edition provides a wonderfully complete and detailed picture of musical taste and performance practice in the 18th century, and includes a new introduction by Professor Reilly, drawing attention to recent research on Quantz. Whether you want to learn to play the flute and be taught by the teacher of Frederick the Great, or just to gain a first-hand insight into the history of classical music, On Playing the Flute is an essential and entertaining read.

    A book compiled of anecdotes from other collections, arranged under the name of the person they're about.

    Many of the stories in Rough Translations have been anthologized and adapted for radio performance.A master of the complexities of language, Molly Giles writes of the missed connections in life and of the rough translations that we employ when we try to convey, through words and gestures, what we are thinking and what we want from our loved ones.

    He is grounded by loneliness and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts when he meets Muriel, a deliciously peculiar dog-obedience trainer who up-ends Macon’s insular world and thrusts him headlong into a remarkable engagement with life.

    Set on a mysterious island, Bioy's novella is a story of suspense and exploration, as well as a wonderfully unlikely romance, in which every detail is at once crystal clear and deeply mysterious.Inspired by Bioy Casares's fascination with the movie star Louise Brooks, The Invention of Morel has gone on to live a secret life of its own. Greatly admired by Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Octavio Paz, the novella helped to usher in Latin American fiction's now famous postwar boom. As the model for Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's Last Year in Marienbad, it also changed the history of film.

    Now a shell of a man, he lives in a cheap Hong Kong hotel, scrounging for food and the occasional bar girl. The locals call him "Hiroshima Joe" with a mixture of pity and contempt. But Joe—haunted by the sounds and voices of his past, debilitated by illness, and shattered by his wartime ordeal—is a man whose compassion and will to survive define a clear-eyed and unexpected heroism. One of the most powerful novels about the experience of war, first published in 1985.

    Kjetsaa vividly recreates Dostoyevsky's last-minute rescue from a firing squad and explores how his long imprisonment in Siberia profoundly shaped his vision as a novelist.

    At age twelve Mellie goes to the dying town of Oât, where she enters premature adulthood and assembles a photographic and written record of her life. Enchanting, realistic, comic, tragic—all these words describe this spellbinding novel that, like all genuine fables, takes us to a world that is utterly strange and very much our own. Rose Mellie Rose is one of three novels that are the first works to appear in English by Marie Redonnet, one of France's most original new authors (the other novels are Hôtel Splendid and Forever Valley, both also available from the University of Nebraska Press). Translator Jordan Stump notes that these books "unmistakably fit together, although they have neither characters nor setting in common." In all three novels, Redonnet has said, "it is the women who fight, who seek, who create."

    The reader is drawn as if by magnetic force into a world rendered in breathtaking, painterly detail. These stories are marvelous entertainments, rich with amusement, yet Taylor renders his characters truly and understands them in a profoundly meaningful way.

    

    first published in The New Yorker, January 21, 1985

    

    AdlerLike a professor whose enthusiasm inspires his students, Charles Van Doren explains what's wonderful in the classic and contemporary books you've missed, and awakens your desire to reopen the works you've loved. This engaging love letter to reading explores the work of the authors who transformed the world from Aristotle and Herodotus in ancient Greece to Salinger and Vonnegut in 20th century America. Divided chronologically by the eras in which these books were written, each work is put in historical context and brought to life by Van Doren's sometimes surpising and always insightful comments. The Joy of Reading delves into a wide range of genres: fiction, poetry, drama, children's books, philosophy, history, and science. Also offered is a unique ten-year reading plan, made up of a grand variety of the world's greatest books.Charles Van Doren is the coauthor of the classic How to Read a Book with philosopher Mortimer J. Adler; the author of A History of Knowledge (which sold 30,000 copies in hardcover and 150,000 in paperback); and the author or editor of The Idea of Progress, Great Treasury of Western Thought, The Annals of America, Second Chance: An American Story, as well as several novels for young people and Webster's American biographies.He is an adjunct professor at the University of Connecticut, Torrington Campus. His father was Mark Van Doren, a Pulitzer Prizewinning poet and professor at Columbia University.

    This "stunning," "magnificent" first book by "the great man of Nabokov studies," which "provides not only the best commentary on Ada, but also a brilliant overview of Nabokov's metaphysics," has now been updated with a new preface, four additional chapters and two comprehensive new indexes.

    Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

    This novel, named after a real-life, gritty little coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, offers a sometimes shocking, often outrageous, always irreverent look at this young man’s attempt to escape his home.In Crum, the boys fight, swear, chase - and sometimes catch girls, and have unflattering things to say about their neighbors across the river in Kentucky. The adults are cramped and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains that loom over this tiny suffocating town. And to boys flush with the hormones of youth, this situation is full of wonder, dejection, and even possibility.Lee Maynard, a native of Crum in Wayne County, West Virginia, spins this tale of a young man whose rebellion against the people and the place of his childhood allows him to reject the comfort and familiarity of his home in search of his place in a larger world.This novel stirred deep feelings in West Virginia, as readers reacted in different ways to the poetry and reality of Maynard's creation. Since its highly successful first publication, this novel has become an underground classic, with used copies now scarce and costly. Maynard adds a brief epilogue to this new edition, and West Virginia writer Meredith Sue Willis provides an introduction. Crum shot to number eight on the Doubleday Best Seller list within its first month of publication, despite its ban in West Virginia. He has since published a sequel to Crum entitled Screaming with the Cannibals.

    Rebbe Nachman practiced this ancient method to perfection. More elaborate than any of his previous teachings, the stories are fast-moving, richly structured and filled with penetrating insights -- while spellbinding and entertaining. Rabbi Kaplan's translation is accompanied by a masterful commentary drawn from the works of Rebbe Nachman's pupils. For the first time the English-speaking reader has access to authentic interpretations of the stories.

    Smiles on Washington Square is a charming and complex novel. With the masterful ease of a tightrope walker, Federman plays with our sense of time and space as he creates, with extraordinary compassion, a tale that makes us see our own vulnerability and worthiness. Stylistically, his links to Beckett are evident in the stripped down prose, the remarkable symbolism and word games, and in his focus on the downtrodden and inarticulate cast-aways of an industrialized world. Ultimately, Smiles on Washington Square is a book that teaches us there is no easy story, no safe entrance, no line of action not fraught with obstacles and humiliation; but finally, in the face of the inevitable disappointment of the human condition, Federman shows us how sweet possibility is.

    

    It had been rightly conjectured that they would delight me by bringing to mind the memory of days when, under the shelter of obscurity, I enjoyed the greatest freedom my life has ever known.

    

    He was famous for encouraging interruptions of the solitary task of writing. These twenty-four welcomed interruptions are representative of the many he allowed over a twenty-five-year period. Included here are his conversations with such interviewers as Irving Howe, Laurie Colwin, Richard Burgin, and Herbert R. Lottman. In these talks Singer discusses the nature of his writing, its ethnic roots, his demonology, the importance of free will, and the place of storytelling in human life. The interviews with Singer reveal both his impish sense of humor and a determination that sustained him through many years of limited acclaim and comparative neglect by critics. Yiddishists often faulted him for refusing to use his talent as a force for change in the world, Jewish readers often deplored his use of pre-Enlightenment folk material, and academics could not take too seriously a writer who insisted on telling stories that emphasized plot and character. Yet he was not deterred from his astonishing and beloved work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

    Scott Fitzgerald's life and times. She explores the intricate patterns of the novel, its chronology, locations, imagery and use of colour, and how these contribute to a seamless interplay of social comedy and symbolic landscape. She devotes a perceptive chapter to F. Scott Fitzgerald's controversial portrayal of women and goes on to discuss how the central characters, Gatsby and Nick Carraway, embody and confront the dualism inherent in the American Dream.

    They know how to beat it and how to endure. Quarantined in a Leningrad maternity ward after giving birth, ten women from all walks of Soviet life amuse themselves by telling stories—stories that provide an astonishingly intimate and dramatic insight into the lives of Russia today.The women recount one hundred stories—one story told each day by each of the ten women for ten days—on such themes as love, jealousy, infidelity, seduction, farcical sex, money, revenge, and finally, happiness. Beneath their gossip runs the stark reality of a society torn apart by suicide, divorce, and alcoholism; by the difficulties of finding food and a place to live; by the threat of harrowing imprisonment. Voznesenskaya writes vividly about everyday Soviet life as well as politics, and her revealing book conveys a passionate belief in the spiritual strength of the Russian woman, to which readers everywhere will respond with sympathy and shocks of recognition.

    An indispensable companion for armchair travellers.

    Gillett, Ph.D.• The Efficiency Expert by W. R. Thompson• Second Helpings by George R. R. Martin• Random Sample by Heidi Heyer• On Gaming by Dana Lombardy• Siblings by Larry Powell• Diabetes and Rockets by G. Harry Stine• Béisbol by Ben Bova• The Darkling Plain by P. M. Fergusson• Biolog: P. M. Fergusson by Jay Kay Klein• The Reference Library by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Artifact by Gregory Benford by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Cuckoo's Egg by C. J. Cherryh by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Skinner by Richard S. McEnroe by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Blood Music by Greg Bear by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: A Coming of Age by Timothy Zahn by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Trumps of Doom by Roger Zelazny by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Fall of Winter by Jack C. Haldeman, II by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Time Travelers; A Science Fiction Quartet by Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Silverberg by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Hugo Winners, 1976-1979 by Isaac Asimov by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Young Extraterrestrials by Isaac Asimov and Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Year's Best Science Fiction, Second Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: The Future of Flight by Dean Ing and Leik Myrabo by Thomas A. Easton •   Review: Out of the Cradle: Exploring the Frontiers Beyond Earth by William K. Hartmann and Pamela Lee and Ron Miller by Thomas A. Easton • Brass Tacks by Stanley Schmidt• Analog: A Calendar of Upcoming Events by Anthony R. Lewis

    Updike, when asked to described his method of reading aloud, said "I try to picture the things describes, and to speak the words distinctly, and to let the emotion come through on its own."The method works beautifully.

    With more figures and worked out problems than any other text on the market, this text also provides the background information needed to support study in later design-oriented courses or in professional practice.

    Poems

    Written in the 1940s but left unpublished until 1990, it anticipated the fictional inventiveness of the writers who were to come along - Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Sorrentino, and Gaddis. Chromos is the American immigration novel par excellence. Its opening line is: "The moment one learns English, complications set in." Or, as the novel illustrates, the moment one comes to America, the complications set in. The cast of characters in this book are immigrants from Spain who have one leg in Spanish culture and the other in the confusing, warped, unfriendly New World of New York City, attempting to meld two worlds that just won't fit together. Wildly comic, Chromos is also strangely apocalyptic, moving towards point zero and utter darkness.

    But the talented and eccentric Aubrey family rarely enjoys a moment of harmony, as its members struggle to overcome the effects of their patriarch’s spendthrift ways. Now they must move so that their father can find stable employment. Despite the daunting odds, the Aubreys hope that art will save them from the cacophony of a life sliding toward poverty.   In The Real Night, a talented musician and her kin ponder what being young women on their own will entail. Abandoned by their feckless father, Rose and her family must move beyond their comfortable drawing room to discover a world of kind patrons, music teachers, and concert hall acclaim, but also domestic strife, anti-Semitism, and social pressure to marry. Set before World War I, Rebecca West’s intimate, eloquent family portrait brings to life a time when women recognized their own voices and the joys of living off one’s own talents.   In Cousin Rosamund, Mary and Rose Aubrey have found success as accomplished pianists in the years after the war. But despite their travels and material rewards, they remain apart from society. When their cherished cousin Rosamund surprises them by marrying a man they feel is beneath her, the sisters must reconsider what love means to them and how they can find a sense of spiritual wellbeing on their own, without the guidance of their family.

    y no se lo trago la tierra. Rivera's memorable book was awarded the first national award for Chicano literature in 1970 and has since become the standard text in U.S. Hispanic literature courses throughout the country. Three years after Rivera's death, his friend and fellow novelist Rolando Hinojosa captured the spirit and poetry of Rivera's original for an English-language audience.

    Blending the historical with the supernatural, the comic with the grotesque, the lyrical with the brutal, Sylvie Germain tells the story of humanity's strivings and vanity, of the profound injustices that govern our relations, and of the fundamental strength that allows us ultimately to triumph over carnage and degradation.

    The Vermilion Bird attempts to recover the actual character of the monsoon realms of T'ang-a scattering of palisaded garrisons, isolated monasteries, and commercial towns, all surrounded by dark, haunted woods. Professor Schafer examines the thoughts, emotions, imaginations, and daily lives of the men of that era, through the medium of their literature, for evidence of the changes inspired by this new environment, and especially for signs of the transformation of the ancient symbol of the South, the sacred vermilion bird. The Journal of Asian Studies called this book: A work of immense and devoted scholarship, a mine of fascinating information, a delight to read, and an indispensable work of reference on Medieval China.

    The story centres around the heroine's traumatic search for her real mother. All the intracacies of family life and relationships are woven into the story, and Liza finds both her mother and a partner.

    guide to 20th century literature

    Catullus' own social background, the circumstances of the literary life of his time, the true extent of his works and the variety of audiences he addressed - these and other questions are explored by Professor Wiseman with new and startling results. Contemporary high society and politics are illustrated through Clodia and Caelius Rufus, considered not as mere adjuncts to Catullus' story but as significant historical personalities in their own right. A final chapter on nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations of Catullus' world shows how anachronistic preconceptions have prevented a proper understanding of it, and made this radical reappraisal necessary. Anyone with a serious interest in Latin literature or Roman history will want to read this book. Students in the upper levels of school or at university will find it essential background reading to their work on Catullus and Cicero's Pro Caelio.

    Not content simply with dissolution into a transcendental, other-worldly God-consciousness, nor with concentration on the outer life and its powers to the exclusion of anything other or higher, Sri Aurobindo has created the teachings of a Divine Life on Earth.The poetry of the future will be unlike that of the past in one very important circumstance, that in whatever languages it may be written, it will be more and more moved by the common mind and motives of all the human peoples.

    He graduated from Oxford University in 1878 with a reputation as a brilliant scholar and quickly dazzled London society with his wit and his flamboyant dress. His first literary successes came in the 1880s with his lecture tour of America and the publication of his fairy tales. These were followed by five highly polished plays and The Picture of Dorian Gray, all completed during the first half of the 1890s. After losing a slander suit over accusations of his homosexual behavior, Wilde was prosecuted and spent two years in prison. Following his release in 1897, estranged from his wife and children, Wilde moved to Paris, where he died in 1900.

    Marx.” S. S. Prawer’s highly influential work explores how the world of imaginative literature—poems, novels, plays—infused and shaped Marx’s writings, from his unpublished correspondence, to his pamphlets and major works. In exploring Marx’s use of literary texts, from Aeschylus to Balzac, and the central role of art and literature in the development of his critical vision, Karl Marx and World Literature is a forensic masterpiece of critical analysis.

    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

    In the introduction, Cowan sets forth her theory of genres, and the following ten essays apply aspects of the theory to major works of the West, from Homer to Faulkner. 259 pages, indexed. Paper

    . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal