Best of
Literature

1994

The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Novels (5 Volumes)


Patrick O'Brian - 1994
    These five omnibus volumes, beautifully produced and boxed, contain 7,000 pages of what has often been described as a single, continuous narrative. They are a perfect tribute for such a literary achievement, and a perfect gift for the O’Brian enthusiast.

The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of the Plain


Cormac McCarthy - 1994
    Hauntingly beautiful, filled with sorrow and humor, The Border Trilogy is a masterful elegy for the American frontier.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle


Haruki Murakami - 1994
    Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.Three books in one volume: The Thieving Magpie, Bird as Prophet, The Birdcatcher. This translation by Jay Rubin is in collaboration with the author.

Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels


John Updike - 1994
    Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels—the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end of each of the following decades in the second half of this American century; and in each of the subsequent novels, as Rabbit, his wife, Janice, his son, Nelson, and the people around them grow, these characters take on the lineaments of our common existence. In prose that is one of the glories of contemporary literature, Updike has chronicled the frustrations and ambiguous triumphs, the longuers, the loves and frenzies, the betrayals and reconciliations of our era. He has given us our representative American story. This Rabbit Angstrom volume is composed of the following novels: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.

Brothers and Sisters


Bebe Moore Campbell - 1994
    Living and working in Los Angeles, a young African-American woman finds herself torn between loyalty to her race and her commitment to a cause.

Northern Borders


Howard Frank Mosher - 1994
    In 1948 six-year-old Austen Kittredge III leaves his widowed father to live with his paternal grandparents on their farm in the township of Lost Nation. Escapades at the county fair, doings at the annual family reunion and Shakespeare performance, and conflicts at the one-room schoolhouse are all recounted lovingly in this enchanting coming-of-age story filled with luminous memories and the deepest of childhood secrets, as a boy is molded into a man.

The Tunnel: Selected Poems


Russell Edson - 1994
    This is the book of choice for both new and committed fans of this imaginative poet.

The Collected Stories


Grace Paley - 1994
    Whether writing about the love (and conflict) between parents and children or between husband and wife, or about the struggles of aging single mothers or disheartened political organizers to make sense of the world, she brings the same unerring ear for the rhythm of life as it is actually lived.The Collected Stories is a 1994 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

What a Carve Up!


Jonathan Coe - 1994
    A tour de force of menace, malicious comedy, and torrential social bile, this book marks the American debut of an extraordinary writer.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods


Umberto Eco - 1994
    We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993


Toni Morrison - 1994
    Toni Morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, reads the speech she delivered in Stockholm, Sweden, at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.

A Handful of Sovereigns


Anna King - 1994
    But there might be a way out… When fifteen-year-old Maggie, her sister Liz and young brother Charlie find themselves tragically orphaned they know their young lives can never be the same again. And when Liz is taken ill, Maggie has to tend to her, and loses what little work she had. In desperation, she ventures onto the streets, risking her safety and her innocence. A mysterious stranger appears to offer hope, but does he have only her best interests at heart? Will tragedy strike again or can Maggie save the family from poverty, and find the happiness she truly deserves? Set in London’s Bethnal Green shortly after the Ripper murders, A Handful of Sovereigns is a classic East End family saga, perfect for fans of Jennie Felton, Maggie Ford or Dilly Court.

Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works


Virginia Woolf - 1994
    Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) The Waves (1931) The Years (1937) Between the Acts (1941) THE 'BIOGRAPHIES' Orlando: a biography (1928) Flush: a biography (1933) Roger Fry: a biography (1940) THE STORIES Two Stories (1917) Kew Gardens (1919) Monday or Tuesday (1921) A Haunted House, and other short stories (1944) Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble (1966) Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973) The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985) THE ESSAYS Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) The Common Reader I (1925) A Room of One's Own (1929) On Being Ill (1930) The London Scene (1931) A Letter to a Young Poet (1932) The Common Reader II (1932) Walter Sickert: a conversation (1934) Three Guineas (1938) Reviewing (1939) The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1942) The Moment, and other essays (1947) The Captain's Death Bed, and other essays (1950) Granite and Rainbow (1958) Books and Portraits (1978) Women And Writing (1979) 383 Essays from newspapers and magazines AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING A Writer's Diary (1953) Moments of Being (1976) The Diary Vols. 1–5 (1977-84) The Letters Vols. 1–6 (1975-80) The Letters of V.W. and Lytton Strachey (1956)  A Passionate Apprentice. The Early Journals 1887-1909 (1990)  THE PLAY Freshwater: A Comedy (both versions) (1976)

Watch With Me


Wendell Berry - 1994
    Rich with humor and wisdom, this collection describes the depth of affection and tolerance for eccentricity that these neighbors bear toward one another, and highlights the comic and often poignant ways they cope with the intrusions of the 20th century into their idyllic, agrarian world.

Comédias da Vida Privada: 101 Crônicas Escolhidas


Luis Fernando Verissimo - 1994
    the number of reprints of his works). Selection reveals characteristic humor, stylistic grace, and engaging approaches. Focuses on middle-class life in bars, family situations, courtship, and other aspects of male-female relationships"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Novels and Stories 1932–1937: The Pastures of Heaven / To a God Unknown / Tortilla Flat / In Dubious Battle / Of Mice and Men


John Steinbeck - 1994
    The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck’s early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community, social justice, and the elemental connection between nature and human society. In prose that blends the vernacular and the incantatory, the local and the mythic, these five works chart Steinbeck’s evolution into one of the greatest and most enduring popular of American novelists.The Pastures of Heaven (1932), a collection of interrelated stories, delineates the troubled inner lives and sometimes disastrous fates of families living in a seemingly tranquil California valley. The surface realism of Steinbeck’s first mature work is enriched by hints of uncanny forces at work beneath.“Deep down it’s mine, right to the center of the world,” says Salinas Valley farmer Joseph Wayne about his land in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown (1933). A sense of primeval magic dominates the novel as the farmer reverts to pagan nature worship and begins a tortuous journey toward catastrophe and ultimate understanding.Steinbeck’s sympathetic depiction of the raffish paisons of Tortilla Flat (1935), a ramshackle district above Monterey, first won him popular attention. The Flat’s tenderhearted, resourceful, mildly corrupt, over-optimistic characters are a triumph of life-affirming humor.In Dubious Battle (1936) plunges into the political struggle of the 1930s and paints a vigorous fresco of a migrant fruit-pickers’ strike. Anticipating the collective portraiture of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck poignantly traces the surges and shifts of group behavior.With Of Mice and Men (1937), Steinbeck secured his status as one of the most influential American writers. Lennie and George, itinerant farmhands held together in the face of deprivation only by the frailest of dreams, have long since passed into American mythology. This novel, which Steinbeck called “such a simple little thing,” is now recognized as a masterpiece of concentrated emotional power.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories


Tobias Wolff - 1994
    As selected and introduced by Tobias Wolff, they also make up an alternate map of the United States that represents not just geography but narrative traditions, cultural heritage, and divergent approaches.

Emerson: The Ultimate Collection


Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1994
    He was seen as a champion of individualism. The transcendentalists believe in the inherent goodness of both people and nature. They further believe that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—corrupt the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. The collection: • Nature • The American Scholar • The Conduct of Life • English Traits Essays - First Series • History • Self-Reliance • Compensation • Spiritual Laws • Love • Friendship • Prudence • Heroism • The Over-Soul • Circles • Intellect • Art Essays - Second Series • The Poet • Experience • Character • Manners • Gifts • Nature • Politics • Nonimalist and Realist • New England Reformers Representative Men • Plato; or, the Philosopher • Plato; New Readings • Swedenborg; or, the Mystic • Montaigne; or, the Skeptic • Shakspeare; or, the Poet • Napoleon; or, the Man of the World • Goethe; or, the Writer Poems • May-Day And Other Pieces • Elements And Mottoes • Quatrains And Translations

Kafka


David Zane Mairowitz - 1994
    Crumb's Kafka is a vibrant biography that examines this Czech writer and his works in a way that a bland texbook never could! R. Crumb's Kafka goes far beyond being explication or popularization or survey. It's a work of art in its own right, a very rare example of what happens when one very idiosyncratic artist absorbs another into his worldview without obliterating the individuality of the absorbed one. Crumb's art is filled with Kafka's insurmountable neuroses. They are all there: Gregor Samsa's sister, the luscious Milena Jesenska, the Advacate's "nurse" Leni, Olda and Frieda, and the ravishing Dora Diamant-drawn in that mixture of self-commandtantalizing knowingness, and sly sexuality, that amazonian randines and thick-limbed physicality that is Crumb.Crumb's idiosyncratic illustrations add a new dimension to the already idiosyncratic world of Kafka. Includes adaptations of "The Judgment," "The Trial," "The Castle," "A Hunger Artist," and "The Metamorphosis."

T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land


Gareth Reeves - 1994
    

Crime And Punishment; The Gambler; Notes From The Underground


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1994
    

Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle


Michael Andre-Driussi - 1994
    The first edition was nominated for a World Fantasy Award. This second edition, available for the first time in paperback, includes 300 new entries. When the first edition was published, Science Fiction Age said: "Lexicon Urthus makes a perfect gift for any fan of [Wolfe's] work, and from the way his words sell, it appears that there are many deserving readers out there waiting." Gary K. Wolfe, in Locus, said: "A convenient and well researched glossary of names and terms. . . . It provides enough of a gloss on the novels that it almost evokes Wolfe's distant future all by itself. . . . It can provide both a useful reference and a good deal of fun." Donald Keller said, in the New York Review of Science Fiction: "A fruitful product of obsession, this is a thorough . . . dictionary of the Urth Cycle. . . . Andre-Driussi's research has been exhaustive, and he has discovered many fascinating things . . . [it is] head-spinning to confront a myriad of small and large details, some merely interesting, others jawdropping."

Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927-1984


Henri Michaux - 1994
    Critics have compared his work to such diverse artists as Kafka, Goya, Swift, Klee, and Beckett. Allen Ginsberg called Michaux “genius,” and Jorge Luis Borges wrote that Michaux’s work “is without equal in the literature of our time.” This anthology contains substantial selections from almost all of Michaux’s major works, most never before published in English, and allows readers to explore the haunting verbal and pictorial landscape of a twentieth-century visionary.

Historical Romances: The Prince and the Pauper / A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court / Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc


Mark Twain - 1994
    This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic 19th-century America—engaged Twain’s imagination, inspiring a children’s classic, and astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography.Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII’s England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children’s favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society.A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528—and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the 19th-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood's romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee “ingenuity” as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology.“Taking into account … her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life, she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known.” So Twain wrote of the heroine of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant, Joan of Arc opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America’s greatest comic writer.

Four Meals


Meir Shalev - 1994
    During the four meals, which take place over several decades, Zayde slowly comes to understand why these three men consider him their son and why all three participate in raising him. A virtuoso performance of spellbinding storytelling, this is a deeply satisfying read—sensuous, hilarious, compassionate, and profound.

Of Love and Other Demons


Gabriel García Márquez - 1994
    Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love, and it isn't long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man.

Missing Kissinger


Etgar Keret - 1994
    many of the characters in these stories are waiting for something to change their lives, many of them can't quite reach ultimate happiness, some of them are sick, some are abandoned, and most have trouble communicating. The unexpected can, and usual does, happen.Etgar Keret's stories are very short - and every word counts. They are quick, brief and precise, and they move us without hesitation. They are hilarious and off-the-wall, yet also dark, sometimes violent, and often intensely poignant. They are, in short, brilliant.

Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life


Lyndall Gordon - 1994
    Drawing on Brontë's unpublished letters, journals, early stories, and the manuscript of Villette, her last, unfinished novel, Gordon takes readers into the unseen space in which Brontë was able to live and create.

Crystallography


Christian Bök - 1994
    It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.

Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me


Javier Marías - 1994
    When her two-year-old son finally falls asleep, Marta and Victor retreat to the bedroom. Undressing, she suddenly feels ill; and in his arms, inexplicably, she dies.What should Victor do? Remove the compromising tape from the phone machine? Leave food for the child, for breakfast? These are just his first steps, but he soon takes matters further; unable to bear the shadows and the unknowing, Victor plunges into dark waters. And Javier Marías, Europe's master of secrets, of what lies reveal and truth may conceal, is on sure ground in this profound, quirky, and marvelous novel.

Pilgrim's Progress


Gary D. Schmidt - 1994
    Gary Schmidt has now recaptured this story of everyman's quest for life in contemporary language for a new generation of readers. This volume offers a superb original retelling of Bunyan's beloved classic, masterfully illustrated with fifty dramatic watercolors by Barry Moser. Here again is the tale of Christian's spiritual journey from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly Palaces, including the pitfalls and graces that threaten and fortify his epic pilgrimage. Matching Bunyan's flare for storytelling and vivid imagery, Gary Schmidt's new narrative also echoes the best of writers like Dante, Sir Thomas Browne, E. M. Forster, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Barry Moser's illustrations bring Bunyan's unforgettable characters and landscapes to life in fresh ways. While Christian himself is interpreted as a contemporary figure, Moser portrays the story's characters within different historical eras, powerfully enhancing their symbolic meanings for today's readers while also showing their common tie to humankind throughout the ages. Even after three centuries, this odyssey of faith and human perseverance still appeals to a wide audience. This new retelling of Pilgrim's Progress will stand repeated readings as it speaks to the experiences and stirs the imaginations of both young and old.

Gal: A True Life


Ruthie Bolton - 1994
    Then she met a man who offered her something she'd never known, something she thought was a dirty word: love. The only challenge left was to accept it.

Wine of the Mystic: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A Spiritual Interpretation


Omar Khayyám - 1994
    In this text, Yogananda re-interprets the spiritual message of the beloved Rubaiyat.

Over Nine Waves


Marie Heaney - 1994
    Journalist Marie Heaney skillfully revives the glory of ancient Irish storytelling in this comprehensive volume from the great pre-Christian sequences to the more recent tales of the three patron saints Patrick, Brigid, and Colmcille.

Conversations with Toni Morrison


Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie - 1994
    These collected interviews reveal her to be much more. She has shared space in her creative life for her career in publishing, in teaching, and in being a single parent. Writing, however, is one thing she "refuses to live without." These interviews beginning in 1974 reveal an artist whose creativity is intimately linked with her African American experience and is fueled by cultural and societal concerns. For twenty years she has created unforgettable characters in her acclaimed novels--The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, and Jazz. Morrison tells her interviewers that her goal as a writer is to present African American life not as sociology but in the full range of its depth, magic, and humanity. "I want my work to capture the vast imagination of black people," she says. "That is, I want my books to reflect the imaginative combination of the real world, the very practical, shrewd, day-to-day functioning that black people do, while at the same time they encompass some great supernatural element." Though the scope and the magnitude of her art have brought her international acclaim, even some of her most ardent admirers have viewed her fiction mainly with a focus on class, race, and gender. In these interviews, however, she addresses the artist's concern with moral vision and with a resistance to critical attitudes that categorize black writing largely as sociology. From these interviews comes a greater understanding of Toni Morrison's purpose and the theme of love that streams through her fiction.

The Beloved: Reflections on the Path of the Heart


Kahlil Gibran - 1994
    Exquisite writings on love, marriage, and the spiritual union of souls add a fresh dimension to our understanding of the philosophy of love and the transformation of one's life through its all-encompassing power.

The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader


David Levering Lewis - 1994
    This magnificent volume features a wealth of fiction and nonfiction works by 45 writers from that exuberant era.

Beside the Ocean of Time


George Mackay Brown - 1994
    He travels back in time to Viking adventures at the court of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. Part of the 1995 Scottish Book Fortnight promotion.

The First Man


Albert Camus - 1994
    Although it was not published for over thirty years, it was an instant bestseller when it finally appeared in 1994. The 'first man' is Jacques Cormery, whose poverty-stricken childhood in Algiers is made bearable by his love for his silent and illiterate mother, and by the teacher who transforms his view of the world. The most autobiographical of Camus's novels, it gives profound insights into his life, and the powerful themes underlying his work.

Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949


Doris Lessing - 1994
    Or they were scrubbed off me by...robust and efficient hands."The experiences absorbed through these "skins too few" are evoked in this memoir of Doris Lessing's childhood and youth as the daughter of a British colonial family in Persia and Southern Rhodesia Honestly and with overwhelming immediacy, Lessing maps the growth of her consciousness, her sexuality, and her politics, offering a rare opportunity to get under her skin and discover the forces that made her one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

In Youth is Pleasure & I Left My Grandfather's House


Denton Welch - 1994
    Painfully sensitive and sad Orville Pym is 15 years old, and this novel recounts the summer holiday after his first miserable year at public school--but as in all of Welch's work, what is most important are the details of his characters' surroundings. Welch is a Proustian writer of uncanny powers of observation who, as William S. Burroughs wrote, "makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes." Film director John Waters includes this novel as one of his "Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life If Something Is Basically the Matter with You," and writes: "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's "In Youth Is Pleasure." Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." Also included in this edition is the first U.S. publication of "I Left My Grandfather's House." This first-person account of an idyllic walking tour in the British countryside undertaken when Welch was 18 makes a fascinating companion piece to the fictionalized, though no less autobiographical, "In Youth Is Pleasure."

The Complete Novels of George Eliot


George Eliot - 1994
    Every one of George Eliot's classic novels is now available in one edition! Each with a fully functioning table of contents, this collection includes:Adam Bede, 1859The Mill on the Floss, 1860Silas Marner, 1861Romola, 1863Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866Middlemarch, 1871-72Daniel Deronda, 1876

A Sudden Liberating Thought


Kjell Askildsen - 1994
    Askildsen (b. 1929) first came to prominence in Norwegian literature in the 1950s with his Kafkaesque accounts of alienated individuals in a hostile environment. His reputation has grown since and he is now recognized as a major author. A recent translation of Askildsen's writing into French invited comparison with Beckett.

Knowledge of Angels


Jill Paton Walsh - 1994
    It is, perhaps, the fifteenth century and the ordered tranquillity of a Mediterranean island is about to be shattered by the appearance of two outsiders: one, a castaway, plucked from the sea by fishermen, whose beliefs represent a challenge to the established order; the other, a child abandoned by her mother and suckled by wolves, who knows nothing of the precarious relationship between Church and State but whose innocence will become the subject of a dangerous experiment.But the arrival of the Inquisition on the island creates a darker, more threatening force which will transform what has been a philosophical game of chess into a matter of life and death...

A World of Poetry for CXC


Mark McWatt - 1994
    This edition meets the requirements of the latest CSEC syllabuses A and B in English. It includes all the prescribed poems to help students prepare effectively for the CSEC examination. - Stimulate an interest in and enjoyment of Poetry with a selection of poems across a wide range of themes and subjects, a balance of well-known poems from the past as well as more recent works, and a selection from the Caribbean and the rest of the world - Provoke discussion and help student's analysis with notes on each poem, questions and a useful checklist - Includes practical guidance for students on how to tackle examination questions, with examples of model answers for reference.

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye


GRIN Publishing - 1994
    Toni Morrison uses modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, multiple perspectives, and deliberate fragmentation. Two different narrators tell the story. The first is Claudia MacTeer, who narrates in a mixture of a child’s and an adult’s perspectives, and the second is an omniscient narrator. Claudia’s and Pecola’s points of view are dominant, but the reader also sees things from other character’s points of view.The subtext of the first part of the novel ('Autumn' and 'Winter') suggests various topics. In my presentation, I mainly focus on the “Dick and Jane narrative” by means of which the novel opens. Furthermore, I will explore the themes “whiteness as the standard of beauty” and “seeing versus being seen” which are sometimes closely connected.'The Bluest Eye' provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere, including the white baby doll given to Claudia, the idealization of Shirley Temple, the consensus that light-skinned Maureen is cuter than the other black girls, and the idealization of white beauty in the movies. Pecola eventually desires blue eyes in order to conform with these white beauty standards imposed on her.However, by wishing for blue eyes, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently.

On Fire


Larry Brown - 1994
    . . If you are among the tens of millions who have never read Brown, this is a perfect introduction.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times On January 6, 1990, after seventeen years on the job, Larry Brown quit the Oxford, Mississippi, fire department to try writing full-time. In On Fire, he looks back on his life as a firefighter. His unflinching accounts of daily trauma—from the blistering heat of burning trailer homes to the crunch of broken glass at crash scenes—catapult readers into the hard reality that drove this award-winning novelist. As a firefighter and fireman-turned-author, as husband and hunter, and as father and son, Brown offers insights into the choices men face pursuing their life’s work. And, in the forthright style we expect from Larry Brown, his narrative builds to the explanation of how one man who regularly confronted death began to burn with the desire to write about life.

Lytton Strachey: The New Biography


Michael Holroyd - 1994
    . . the best literary biography to appear for many years."—John Rothenstein, New York Times "Written with vivacity and scrupulousness. . . . [Michael Holroyd] has a great novelist's sense of the obstinate mystery of the human person."—George Steiner, The New Yorker

All I See is Part of Me


Chara M. Curtis - 1994
    A little boy discovers that all of creation is a part of him and he is a part of all creation.

William Shakespeare's: The Tempest


Bruce Coville - 1994
    Set on an enchanted island where humans, monsters, and fairies meet, William Shakespeare's most magical play will delight young readers in this spirited retelling, illustrated in rich detail.

The Return of Simple


Langston Hughes - 1994
    Simple, Simple to his fans, made weekly appearances beginning in 1943 in Langston Hughes' column in the Chicago Defender. Simple may have shared his readers feelings of loss and dispossession, but he also cheered them on with his wonderful wit and passion for life.

The Grass Dancer


Susan Power - 1994
    Set on a North Dakota reservation, this book weaves the stories of the old and the young, broken families, romantic rivals, and men and women in love and at war.

Complete Poems


Basil Bunting - 1994
    The poet himself called his great epic poem “old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom,” but for many writers “Briggflatts” is one of the dozen great poems of the 20th century: as Cyril Connolly put it, “the finest long poem to have been published in England since T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets.”As well as “Briggflatts” (long out of print in the US, and now only available in this edition), this new Complete Poems includes Bunting's other great sonatas, most notably Villon (1925) and The Spoils (1951), along with his two books of Odes, his vividly realized “Overdrafts” (as he called his free translations of Horace, Rudaki, and others), and his brilliantly condensed Japanese adaptation, Chomei at Toyama (1932). It also includes his posthumous Uncollected Poems. This centenary edition has an introduction by Richard Caddel, Director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Center at Durham University.

The Instant of My Death / Demeure: Fiction and Testimony


Maurice Blanchot - 1994
    More than a literary text with critical commentary, it constitutes an event of central significance for contemporary philosophical, literary, and political concerns.The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical—from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life—but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses. The text raises the question of what it means to write about a (non)experience one cannot claim as one's own, and as such is a text of testimony or witness.Derrida's reading of Blanchot links the problem of testimony to the problem of the secret and to the notion of the instant. It thereby provides the elements of a more expansive reassessment of literature, testimony, and truth. In addressing the complex relation between writing and history, Derrida also implicitly reflects on questions concerning the relation between European intellectuals and World War II.

Selected Poems


Francis Ponge - 1994
    Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry —Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil—as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.

The Celtic Heroic Age


John T. Koch - 1994
    The selections are divided into three sections: the first is classical authors on the ancient celts - a huge selection including both the well known Herodotos, Plato, Aristotle, Livy, Diogenes Laertius, and Cicero - and the obscure-Pseudo-Scymnus, Lampridius, Vopsicus, Clement of Alexandria and Ptolemy I. The second is early Irish and Hiberno-Latin sources including early Irish dynastic poetry and numerous tales from the Ulster cycle and the third consists of Brittonic sources, mostly Welsh. This edition includes three new early Irish tales, translated by Mairin Ni Dhonnchadha: The Birth of Aed Slaine; Fingal Ronain, and the Story of Mis and Dubh Rois.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea / The Mysterious Island / Journey to the Centre of the Earth / Around the World in Eighty Days


Jules Verne - 1994
    Filled with wondrous voyages, marvelous semi-scientific equipment, and warnings not to tamper too much with the natural order, his novels are not only universally popular, but have proved to be uncannily prophetic. Here are four of Verne's most enthralling stories: 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, The Mysterious Island, Journey To The Center Of The Earth, and Around The World In 80 Days. Each one explores different themes, but all share one in common: man's exploration of the dark unknown.

Novels 1942–1954: Go Down, Moses / Intruder in the Dust / Requiem for a Nun / A Fable


William Faulkner - 1994
    But, despite his success, he was plagued by depression and alcohol and haunted by a sense that he had more to achieve—and a finite amount of time and energy to achieve it.This Library of America volume collects the novels written during this crucial period; defying the odds, Faulkner continued to break new ground in American fiction. He delved deeper into themes of race and religion and furthered his experiments with fictional structure and narrative voice. These newly restored texts, based on Faulkner’s manuscripts, typescripts, and proof sheets, are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and are faithful to the author’s intentions.Go Down, Moses (1942) is a haunting novel made up of seven related stories that explore the intertwined lives of black, white, and Indian inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. It includes “The Bear,” one of the most famous works in all American fiction, with its evocation of “the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document.”Characters from Go Down, Moses reappear in Intruder in the Dust (1948). Part detective novel, part morality tale, it is a compassionate story of a black man on trial and the growing moral awareness of a southern white boy.Requiem for a Nun (1951) is a sequel to Sanctuary. With an unusual structure combining novel and play, it tells the fate of the passionate, haunted Temple Drake and the murder case through which she achieves a tortured redemption. Prose interludes condense millennia of local history into a swirling counterpoint.In A Fable (1954), a recasting of the Christ story set during World War I, Faulkner wanted to “try to tell what I had found in my lifetime of truth in some important way before I had to put the pen down and die.” The novel, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, is both an anguished spiritual parable and a drama of mutiny, betrayal, and violence in the barracks and on the battlefields.

Middlemarch/Silas Marner/Amos Barton


George Eliot - 1994
    Middlemarch, Eliot’s most famous work, paints a rich and complex portrait of English society. In Silas Marner, an embittered man retreats from the outside world, thinking only of work and money. Then his wealth is stolen, and a young foundling comes into his life and changes everything. Also included: the short story “Amos Barton.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Great Illustrated Classics)


Malvina G. Vogel - 1994
    The world's best-loved children's stories set in large type for easy reading.-- Over 100 illustrations in each book

The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology


A.K. Ramanujan - 1994
    Ramanujan (who died in 1993) has rendered two services: he has introduced Indian and Western readers to an unfamiliar and fascinating literary tradition, and he has provided access to some examples of a mature classical poetry. In them, as the translator notes, passion is balanced by courtesy, transparency by ironies and nuances of design, impersonality by vivid detail, spareness by richness of implication. The poems come from one of the earliest surviving texts of Tamil poetry, the Kuruntokai, an anthology of love lyrics probably recorded during the first three centuries A.D. Seventy-six of these classical poems have here been given a modern language and form. In an effort at fidelity to the effect of the images and their placement in the original, Ramanujan has given a visual shape to the poems by typographic devices. This classic anthology of translations has long been out of print. It should interest all those who read poetry, as well as those who value Ramanujan's gift as a translator.

A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew


Stephen Mitchell - 1994
    From the author of The Gospel According to Jesus comes a new adaptation of the psalms Leading biblical scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell translates fifty of the most powerful and popular bible psalms to create poems that recreate the music of the original Hebrew verse.

The Holy Vedas: Rig Veda,Yajur Veda Sama Veda and Atharva Veda


Bibek Debroy - 1994
    The world veda literally means Knowledge. The root is vid, ‘to Know’ The Vedas are thus texts that provide Knowledge.There are four Vedas, known as the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda. Many years ago, the Vedas were referred to as trayi or three. There must have been some point of time when there were only three Vedas. These are acknowledged to have been the Rig Vedas, the yajur Veda and the Sama Veda. The Atharva Veda is believed to have a later addition to the sacred canon.The world trayi is also interpreted in a different sense. Although the interpretation does seem to be slightly artificial, it is following. The three paths to salvation are believed to be those of jnana (Knowledge), bhakti (devotion) and karma (action). Since the Vedas teach these three paths to salvation, they are referred to as trayi. The Rig Veda is identified with the path of knowledge, the yajur Veda with the path of action, and the Sama Veda with the path of devotion.Each of the Vedas has two parts, a samhita and the brahmanas. The samhita part consists of mantras or incantations. These were hymns that were used in sacrifies. But these mantras are difficult to interpret without commentaries. This is what the brahmanas set out to do. They explain the hymns and indicate how these are to be used in sacrifices. The brahmanas also have detailed descriptions of sacrifices and how they are to be conducted. The samhita and the brahmanas are often known as karma kanda, that is, the part of the Vedas that deals with rituals.In addition Vedic literature also includes jnana kanda. This is the part that deals with supreme knowledge. Included in jnana kanda are the aranyakas and the Upanishads. These are identified with various Vedas.We can therefore have a narrow definition of a Veda as well as a broad one. The narrow definition would take the word Veda to mean the samhita alone. The broad definition would include, in addition associated brahmanas, aranyakas and Upanishads. By the word Veda, we will mean the samhita alone.When were the Vedas composed and who composed them? Strictly speaking, there is no answer to these questions. The Vedas were revealed; they were shrutis. They were not written down or composed. They were communicated by the supreme godhead or the divine essence (brahman) to the ancient seers (rishis). These rishis did not compose the Vedas; they merely obtained this divine knowledge through their extraordinary powers. In this sense, the Vedas are apourusheya, that is, not the handiwork of men. Their authorship cannot be ascribed to any human author.In the Hindu conception of time, time is divided into four eras. These are known as satya yuga, treat yuga, dvapara yuga and kali yuga. As one moves from satya yuga towards kali yuga, the power of righteousness diminishes and evil starts to rear its ugly head. To bring men back to the righteous path, the sacred knowledge that is in the Vedas must be disseminated amongst them. But the Vedas are abstract and esoteric, often difficult for ordinary mortals to comprehend. To make the dissemination and assimilation easier, the Vedas must be conveniently partitioned and divided into various groups. A person who thus divides (vyasa) the Vedas has the title of Vedavyasa or Vyasadeva conferred on him.In every dvapara yuga, such a Vedavyasa is born to perform this sacred task, The Vedavyasa born in the dvapara yuga tha immediately preceded the present kali, yuga, was Krishna Dvaipayana Vedavyasa. It is he who is credited with having divided the original unified Vedas into the four segments of the Rig Veda, the yajur Veda, the Sama Veda and the Atharva Veda. Krishna Dvaipayana Vedavyasa did not compose the Vedas, he merely recapitulated what was already known. Incidentally, Krishna Dvaipayana Vedavyasa is also credited with the composition of the great epic, the Mahabharata.Just as it is impossible to determine who composed the Vedas, it is also impossible to determine when they were composed. Widely different dates have been suggested by scholars. Tilak suggested a date of around 6000 B.C., while Jacobi’s date was around 4500 B.C. Most scholars would agree that the Vedas were compiled some time between 4000 B.C. and 1000 B. C. and that it is impossible to narrow down the range further. The earliest of the Vedas is clearly the Rig Veda. This reached a stage of final compilation between 1000 B. C. and 900 B. C.

Sewer, Gas and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy


Matt Ruff - 1994
    In the festering sewers below a darker game is afoot: a Wall Street takeover artist has been murdered, and Gant’s crusading ex-wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out why. The year is 2023, and Ayn Rand has been resurrected and bottled in a hurricane lamp to serve as Joan's assistant; an eco-terrorist named Philo Dufrense travels in a pink-and-green submarine designed by Howard Hughes; a Volkswagen Beetle is possessed by the spirit of Abbey Hoffman; Meisterbrau, a mutant great white shark, is running loose in the sewers beneath Times Square; and a one-armed 181-year-old Civil War veteran joins Joan and Ayn in their quest for the truth. All of whom, and many more besides, are caught up in a vast conspiracy involving Walt Disney, J. Edgar Hoover, and a mob of homicidal robots.

Fresno Stories


William Saroyan - 1994
    Selected from New Directions' collections of Saroyan's early stories (The Man With the Heart In the Highlands) and his later work (Madness In the Family), Fresno Stories spans his whole remarkable career.

Usfs 1919: Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky


Norman Maclean - 1994
    

Novels and Stories: Deephaven / A Country Doctor / The Country of the Pointed Firs / Dunnet Landing Stories / Selected Stories and Sketches


Sarah Orne Jewett - 1994
    Set against the background of long Maine winters, hardscrabble farms, and the sea, her stories of independent, capable women struggling to find fulfillment in their lives and work have a surprisingly modern resonance. Here is the first collection to include all her best fiction, and it reveals the full stature of the writer Willa Cather ranked with Mark Twain, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jewett struck her characteristic note in her first collection, Deephaven (1877), stories whose exploration of Maine life moved and delighted readers when they were first published in the Atlantic Monthly, and opened a new vein of regional fiction in American literature. Of the distinctly local quality of her writings Willa Cather later said: "The language her people speak to each other is a native tongue. No writer can invent it. It is made in the hard school of experience, in communities where language has been undisturbed long enough to take on color and character from the nature and experiences of the people." The novel A Country Doctor (1884), inspired by both her own life and that of her doctor father, is often read as a veiled autobiography. Her focus here is on a woman who must choose between marriage and her commitment to a medical career, a decision she defends passionately against the narrowness of those around her: "God would not give us the same talents if what were right for men were wrong for women." Jewett's masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), brings to imaginative life the faded trading port of Dunnet Landing, Maine, re-creating in spare, impressionistic prose the rhythms and textures of a communal society of poor fishermen and farmers, with its traditional country rituals and its stoically endured tragedies. In these linked stories we meet some of Jewett's most unforgettable c

Chief Truths of the Faith


John Joseph Laux - 1994
    John Laux's deeply penetrating and concise book, Chief Truths of the Faith, presents readers with a mature and thorough understanding of the Catholic Faith. Concepts covered include the nature and attributes of God, the nature and origin of humanity, the Immaculate Conception, hypostatic union, sanctifying and actual grace, the resurrection of the dead, and more. Although originally written as a high school study guide, college students and adults alike will have a thorough grounding on all major points of faith in order to achieve salvation for self and others. Recommended for 9th-grade students enrolled in TAN Academy.

The Thought Gang


Tibor Fischer - 1994
    Unexpected and volatile, The Thought Gang is the hilarious and thought-provoking story of their travails.In his eagerly awaited follow-up to Under the Frog, Tibor Fischer offers another hilarious chronicle of an unusual dynamic duo in The Thought Gang-this time chasing after something quite different-and the London papers are even more enthusiastic.

The American Woman in the Chinese Hat


Carole Maso - 1994
    Set into motion by a single act of abandonment-Catherine's lover of ten years has left her-she falls deeper and deeper into an irretrievable madness. With passionate abandon and detachment Catherine pursues her own destruction. Forcing the boundaries of identity and the limits of her eroticism, she enters a series of blinding sexual encounters with a poet, a fascist, a young Arlesian woman, a fireman, and three thieves. Eerily she splits herself in two so that she is both the one who watches and the one who is watched, creator and creation, author and character, as she observes herself from afar "And I would like to help her, " the one who watches says, "but I can't." Finally she meets Lucien, the solitary, cynical, beautiful man with long hair who looks as though he has "stepped out of an unmade film by the dead Truffaut, " and through this mysterious, doomed, bittersweet liaison Catherine makes one last attempt to halt her decline through the redemptive act of story-telling. She begins to invent the story of their lives, telling it to him half in English, half in French, joining their solitudes for a moment before losing forever her belief that the shapely, hopeful prospects of narrative make sense of expenence. "She notices how everything is given up or taken away" as she loses the power of the imagination or memory or the body to console, and finally of language to convey meaning. This mesmerizing drama of sex, betrayal, and dissolution with its shattering inevitable conclusion is played out against the dazzling backdrop of the beautiful, indifferent Cote d'Azur in summer. Written in a dwindling lexicon with a simple, warped musicality, The American Woman in the Chinese Hat is a dark, uncompromising, seductive work of art.

Last Love in Constantinople: A Tarot Novel for Divination


Milorad Pavić - 1994
    Internationally prominent Serbian writer whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text.--New York Times

The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography


Philip Levine - 1994
    In this memoir, Philip Levine celebrates the poets who were his teachers--particularly John Berryman and Yvor Winters, writers whose lives and work, he believes, have been misunderstood and misinterpreted. In the process of writing this account of his childhood and young manhood in Detroit and of his middle and later years in California and Spain, Levine came to realize that he was also engaged in a quest, striving to discover "how I am." The resulting work provides a double-edged revelation of the way writers grow. Witty and elegantly rendered in a prose that is as characteristically Levine's as his verse, this is superb--and essential--reading for anyone interested in contemporary poetry and poets. Philip Levine has received many awards for his books of poems, most recently the National Book Award for What Work Is in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for The Simple Truth in 1995. Levine recently retired from the University of California, Fresno.

The Husbands: An Account of Books III and IV of Homer's Iliad


Christopher Logue - 1994
    Carrying the Homeric world into our own, Logue's language is at once musical, profoundly tender, and frighteningly graphic. With cinematic speed, disarming confidence, and lyrical care, Logue gives us a reading of classic literature that makes unquestionably clear its relevance to our own time.

Platte River


Rick Bass - 1994
    Platte River is a collection of three novellas, each a singular exploration of the human heart set against the backdrop of God's creation.  Filled with arresting images—chinook winds flying through a valley, couples skating in the dark on thin ice, tools made from animal bones, a delicate shape frozen in a river—“Mahatma Joe” is about an evangelist who settles in Grass Valley, Montana, and the woman who becomes obsessed with his vision of the world. In “Field Events” a woman falls in love with a man even larger than her discus-tossing brothers. And the title novella, “Platte River,” portrays one man's lyric meditation on loneliness, the nature of peace, and the quest for love.

Saint-Exupéry


Stacy Schiff - 1994
    At the time he was best known for a career of daring flights over the Sahara, the Pyrenees, and Patagonia and for his contributions to the science of aviation. But the solitary hours he spent above the earth in open cockpit airplanes gave birth to a more famous legacy, a series of enchanting, autobiographical novels and the classic story The Little Prince, still the most translated book in the French language.An impoverished aristocrat from one of France's oldest families, Saint-Exupéry moved at age twenty-seven to the western Sahara Desert, to live alone in a plank shack and manage the way station for the Aéropostale, the French mail service. His careers as a novelist and an aviator were born here, and his life once he returned to Europe was defined—with brilliant and catastrophic results—by the sense of isolated fascination and curiosity he developed in the desert.In this definitive biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Stacy Schiff reveals an intrepid and unconventional life that rivals the best adventure stories."A remarkable biography; indeed, it is impossible to imagine the job better done. It is balanced, perceptive, thoroughly researched, and exceptionally well-written." —The New Yorker

Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994


Bill Viola - 1994
    This book brings together a selection of essays, notebook entries, drawings, and descriptions of projects that map Viola's personal course through the readings, observations, experiments, and associations that form the groundwork for his art. Each work illustrated is accompanied by a description by the artist, as well as comments on the work's origins from the artist's notebooks.For the last 25 years, Viola has used innovative multimedia technologies to explore the phenomena of sense perception as a language of the body and avenue to self-knowledge, integrating many disciplines and philosophies to reveal contemporary art's relevance to the modern world. His views have deep roots in mysticism, poetry, philosophy, Eastern art, shamanism, Chinese Taoism, Sufism, and Zen Buddhism. Viola's chief concerns today are to draw attention to the upset ecological balance of nature by focusing on the connection between our inner and outer lives, on the conception of the self as part of the whole.Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London.

The Mad Man


Samuel R. Delany - 1994
    Marr encounters numerous obstacles, as other researchers turn up evidence of Hassler's personal life that is deemed simply too unpleasant and disillusioning for the rarified air of academe. On another front, Marr finds himself increasingly drawn toward more shocking, depraved sexual entanglements with the homeless men of his neighborhood, until it begins to seem that Hassler's death might hold some key to his own life as a gay man in the age of AIDS. As John Marr learns more about the enigma that was Timothy Hassler, his own increasing sexual debasement leads him to a point where his and the philosopher's lives collide violently.…Surely Samuel R. Delany's most graphic and unsettling novel, The Mad Man is a provocative look at contemporary social and sexual outsiders.

Absent in the Spring and Other Novels (Mary Westmacott Omnibus, #1--Absent in the Spring, Giant's Bread, The Rose and the Yew Tree)


Mary Westmacott - 1994
    What they share with her other fiction is Christie's gift for sharp observations about people, the ambitions that drive them, their relationships, and the conflicts that erupt between them. This omnibus edition brings together three of Westmacott novels:Absent in the Spring: Stranded between trains, Joan Scudamore finds herself reflecting upon her life, her family, and finally coming to grips with the uncomfortable truths about her life.Giant's Bread: The story of Vernon Deyre, a composer and pianist whose obsession with art wreaks havoc with the two very different women in his life.The Rose and the Yew Tree: In one of the finest explorations of the human heart, the compelling story of a deep and abiding love, the conflicts it encompasses, and the price that must be paid.

Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights


Susan Straight - 1994
    In Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, she fulfills the promise of the earlier book, and reintroduces readers to the inhabitants of fictional Rio Seco, California. This is the story of Darnell Tucker, and black firefighter and workingman trying to work the toughest turf of all: the straight and narrow. As his friends disappear around him - victims of the streets, of police dogs, of drugs, of an addiction to cheap thrills and guns - Darnell struggles to establish his own business, facing a thousand midnights before he's home free, with a job that supports his young family. Yet even as he gains a tentative sense of self, Darnell Tucker is drawn to the destructive beauty of fires, and to the wilder, untamed forces beyond the structure of domesticity. This search for balance in a dangerous world propels the quiet heroism of a beautifully evoked and very moving story.

Jasmine Nights


S.P. Somtow - 1994
    His adventure is a joyous testament to the resiliency and implicit goodness of the human spirit.

God's Country


Percival Everett - 1994
    It's 1871, and he's lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba.

Three Plays: Naga-Mandala; Hayavadana; Tughlaq


Girish Karnad - 1994
    The first play, Tughlaq, is a historical play in the manner of nineteenth-century Parsee theater. The second, Hayavadana was one of the first modern Indian plays to employ traditional theatrical techniques. In Naga-Mandala, the third play, Karnad turns to oral tales, usually narrated by women. This selected work of one of India's best known playwrights should attract the attention of students and scholars of comparative literature, or any reader interested in South Asian literature.

Walking Stars: Stories of Magic and Power


Victor Villaseñor - 1994
    Magical, yet true, they are fables of endurance, defeat and triumph, spirituality, and, always, of love. Handed down through the generations, the Villase-or's have been telling these family tales for years. Now, Victor shares them with his unmistakable storyteller style, complete with beautiful imagery and timeless significance.Set against the backdrop of the Mexican revolution and his family's migration to the United States, these stories feature a cast of unforgettable characters who have in common their perseverance and courage. They encounter the supernatural, escape persecution by rebel soldiers, endure hunger, thirst and physical stress, and ultimately, transcend their circumstances to achieve their dreams. They are indeed walking stars.Victor Villaseñor works his magic once again with these extraordinary stories.

The Stories of Stephen Dixon


Stephen Dixon - 1994
    Dixon has gathered into one volume what he considers to be the very best of his short fiction: an enduring work that showcases the depth and range of his creative gift for dialogue, narrative technique, for humor and surreal implausibility, accurately capturing the absurdity and sadness of our urban scene.

Great Sonnets


Paul NegriJohn Keats - 1994
    Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?", Milton's "On His Blindness," Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us," many more by Spenser, Sidney, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Longfellow, Yeats, Frost, Poe, etc. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Poovan Banana and the Other Stories


Vaikom Muhammad Basheer - 1994
    He has enshrined in them every kind of experience from the pangs of hunger and sex to the rapture of mystic vision. Its range includes stark realistic pictures of the material world as well as the realm of fantasy haunted by ghosts and spirits. Basheer has written on love and hate, on politicians and pickpockets, on the fancies of childhood and on the disillusionments of adult life with an intense sense of the tragedy of life and at the same time an irrepressible sense of humour.

The Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Wordsworth Poetry Library)


Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1994
    

Once and Forever


Kenji Miyazawa - 1994
    Are his fables, in which acorns quarrel and flowers fret about losing their looks, written for children or adults? They are for both: for adventurous young minds, but also for older readers in whom the spark of curiosity, combined with a taste for fantasy and a love of language, is still alight.This collection, appearing for the first time in paperback, brings together the best of his stories. They range from cautionary tales to small prose poems, from social satire to unmistakable tragedy. All share an intense delight in the natural world -- a sense of oneness with other living creatures and with the vast universe around us.Miyazawa is entirely original. No other Japanese writer, before or since, has told stories as fresh in detail but universal in scope as this man who lived and died, still young, in Japan's far north.

Good Bones and Simple Murders


Margaret Atwood - 1994
    Among the jewels gathered here are Gertrude offering Hamlet a piece of her mind, the real truth about the Little Red Hen, a reincarnated bat explaining how Bram Stoker got "Dracula" all wrong, and the five methods of making a man (such as the "Traditional Method": "Take some dust off the ground. Form. Breathe into the nostrils the breath of life. Simple, but effective!") There are parables, monologues, prose poems, condensed science fiction, reconfigured fairy tales, and other miniature masterpieces--punctuated with charming illustrations by the author. A must for her fans, and a wonderful gift for all who savor the art of exquisite prose, "Good Bones And Simple Murders" marks the first time these writings have been available in a trade edition in the United States."[Atwood] proves she is an accomplished miniaturist...She can pack more wallop into less space than any other writer in her weight class".-- "Toronto Globe And Mail"

Great Poets of the Romantic Age


Michael Sheen - 1994
    One of the most popular areas of audiobooks -- spoken poetic form -- evokes emotions and sensations by bringing the voice of the poet to life in an appropriately intimate way, directly to the ear and mind of the listener.This anthology contains the works of some of the greatest poets of the Romantic Age, including Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge, Keats, Byron and Clare.

The Republic of Nothing: Reader's Guide Edition


Lesley Choyce - 1994
    A god-like ocean deposits many a thing, yet it also takes away. The 1960s blaze off shore and draw the island’s inhabitants into politics, the Vietnam War, and the peace movement. Sound impossible? Not on Whalebone Island, AKA the Republic of Nothing. Where else can a dead circus elephant, a long-dead Viking, the discovery of uranium, a raven-haired castaway who may be psychic, an anarchist turned politician, and refugees fleeing from the United States all be part of everyday life? Where else is eccentricity embraced with such open arms? In this new readers’ guide edition, complete with an afterword by Neil Peart, Lesley Choyce’s novel about resilience, independence, and anarchy comes alive, leading readers to discover once again that everything is nothing and nothing is everything.

Collected Novellas: Collected Early Fiction, 1949-1964


Arno Schmidt - 1994
    Bursting with intellectual and sexual energies, resuscitating the German language after two decades of Nazi subjugation, these novellas revolutionized German literature in the 1950s and retain their power to shock and delight forty years later.Schmidt has been called a "giant of the modernist tradition, an enormously important talent in the fictional line of cruel comedy that runs from Rabelais through Swift and Joyce" (New York Review of Books). This edition of his collected fiction should restore Schmidt to his rightful place at the forefront of 20th-century writing.

Crockett of Tennessee: A Novel Based on the Life and Times of David Crockett


Cameron Judd - 1994
    Even during his lifetime, tales of the sharpshooting, skilled woodsman were—to his delight—told, retold, and elaborated on. As a US congressman, the former Creek War militiaman steadfastly opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act. As a soldier, he made the ultimate sacrifice fighting for an independent Texas. Nearly two centuries after his untimely demise, he remains a legendary figure in American lore.   In this fictional account of Crockett’s life, author Cameron Judd offers a nuanced portrait of the man behind the myth. He depicts Crockett’s triumphs as a hunter, cattle drover, warrior, and legislator in riveting detail and poignantly illustrates his subject’s hardscrabble youth and complicated relationship with his father. Meticulously researched and rich in vibrant action, Crockett of Tennessee captures the charisma, ambition, and bravery of the man known as the “King of the Wild Frontier.”

Found Treasures: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers


Frieda Forman - 1994
    A book of voices from an almost forgotten female heritage, it features eighteen writers who speak powerfully of the events that shaped their lives; the daily fabric of life in Europe, the struggle from which new lives in North America, Palestine and then Israel were forged, the terror and challenge of survival during the Holocaust and its aftermath.

Death of a River Guide


Richard Flanagan - 1994
    An ordinary man with many regrets, Aljaz rises to an uncharacteristic heroism, and offers his own life in trade. Trapped under a rapid and drowning, Aljaz is beset with visions both horrible and fabulous. He sees Couta Ho, the beautiful, spirited woman he loved, and witnesses his uncle Reg having his teeth pulled and sold to pay for a ripple-iron house. He sees cities grow from the wild rain forest and a tree burst into flower in midwinter over his grandfather's forest grave. As the entirety of Tasmanian life—flora and fauna—sings him home, Aljaz arrives at a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where his family tree branches into stories of all human families, stories that ground him in the land and reveal the soul history of his country.

Finding Peggy: A Glasgow Childhood


Meg Henderson - 1994
    It is also a portrait of the author’s mother and aunt, idealistic and emotional women both.

Conversations with Henry Miller


Henry Miller - 1994
    In this enticing collection, he argues convincingly for the things that have mattered in his full and exhilarating life. He and his interviewers cover the range of his engrossing works that stirred obscenity charges, as well as his life as an expatriate, his loves and conquests, his goals, his beliefs, and his probing insights into the culture that produced him and repulsed him.These conversations serve as a retrospective visit with one of America's most distinctively opinionated, most singularly identifiable, and most invigorating authors.

The History of the Ginger Man


J.P. Donleavy - 1994
    Donleavy's personal struggle to create and publish a book that became a 20th-century classic--The Ginger Man, written over a period of four years on two continents, and resulting in 25 years of bitter litigation between writer and publisher.

Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems


Gaspara Stampa - 1994
    A highly skilled musician, Stampa produced some of the most musical poetry in the Italian language. Her sonnets of unrequited love speak in a language of honest passion and profound loss. They look forward to the women writers of the nineteenth century and are a milestone in women's literature. This dual-language edition of selected poems presents, along with the Italian original, the first English translation of Stampa's work. It includes an introduction to the poet and her work, a note on the translation, and provides the reader with notes to the poems, a bibliography, and a first-line index. DUAL-LANGUAGE POETRY Introduction, bibliography, first-line index.

Gay Soul: Finding the Heart of Gay Spirit and Nature


Mark Thompson - 1994
    ONE OF THE MOST PROVOCATIVE BOOKS TO APPEAR IN GAY LITERATURE IN YEARSFrom longtime 'Advocate' editor Mark Thompson - black-and-white photographs and searching, provocative interviews with sixteen renowned gay elders whose vision and leade