Now for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume, brilliantly translated by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

    His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Stranger in the Village.”Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,” he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.” The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

    Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters.

    

    This is not the novel The Handmaid's Tale. The Handmaid's Tale (1985), by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, revisits the Anglo-American utopian/dystopian tradition. Appealing to imaginative fiction and the novel of ideas, the construction of perfect - or nightmarish - worlds rouses the reader's socio-political awareness of the present and invites questions on the shape of the near furure. The Handmaid's Tale deconstructs the utopian narrative by breaking the chronological order of the female protagonist's experience into a time-shifting testimony, a quest for meaning and an exploration of self versus the other. The intricate play on word and symbol can be read against the historical background of seventeenth-century New England Puritanism, as well as the twentieth-century New Right and women's rights movements, while inviting reference to the postmodernist outlook. This volume includes a bibliography, a study of the book's context, as well as essays and commentaries; the approach has been adapted to the needs of Capes and Agregation students.

    Now, in a thrilling twist on the conventional solution, Pierre Bayard's Who Killed Roger Arkroyd? reopens the Ackroyd file with unexpected results: Is the killer still at large? Bayard's in-depth investigation of this well-loved classic will change forever the way mysteries are read. This book is not a spoof. it is a humorous entirely new analysis of the famous 1926 mystery. It challenges the reader to challenge the author in the apparent possible, plausible solution of the mystery.

    

    Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run.The explosive first long work by “the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time” (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), The Savage Detectives follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances.A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. The Savage Detectives is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.

    Included are the familiar masterpieces--"The Kiss," "The Darling," and "The Lady with the Dog"--as well as several brilliant lesser-known tales such as "A Blunder," "Hush!," and "Champagne." These stories, ordered from 1886 to 1899, are drawn from Chekhov's most fruitful years as a short-story writer. A truly balanced selection, they exhibit the qualities that make Chekhov one of the greatest fiction writers of all time: his gift for detail, dialogue, and humor; his emotional perception and compassion; and his understanding that life's most important moments are often the most overlooked."The reason we like Chekhov so much, now at our century's end," writes Ford in his perceptive introduction, "is because his stories from the last century's end feel so modern to us, are so much of our own time and mind." Exquisitely translated by the renowned Constance Garnett, these stories present a wonderful opportunity to introduce yourself--or become reaquainted with--an artist whose genius and influence only increase with every passing generation.

    Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth.Our young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when he is transfixed by a new teacher --an elegant "older woman" (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart.In a sequence of marvelously funny but sobering maneuvers, he learns much more than he expected to--about politics, Poland, the Spanish Civil War, and his own passion for theater and art--all while his loved one continues to elude him. Yet without his realizing it, his efforts--largely bookish and literary--to close in on Madame are his first steps to liberation as an artist. Later, during a stint as a teacher-in-training in his old school, he discovers that he himself has become a legendary figure to a new generation of students, and he begins to understand the deceits and blessings of myth, and its redemptive power.A winning portrait of an artist as a young man, Madame is at the same time a moving, engaging novel about strength and weakness, first love, and the efforts we make to reconcile, in art, the opposing forces of reason and passion.

    His historical importance is indisputable.” Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin’s reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence.His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin’s own experience, of a preacher’s son coming of age in 1930’s Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as “an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us.”Giovanni’s Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America’s racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin’s most ambitious novel.Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin’s short fiction, including the masterful “Sonny’s Blues,” the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”

    "The Depressed Person" was published in Harper's Magazine, January 1998.

    They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

    Martin Luther King, Jr.-many never before published-along with introductions an documentary of the world's leading ministers & theologians.

    When the narrator moves into the area, she discovers everyone--and everything--has a story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the its founding to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the man who causes international tension when he dies straddling the border between Poland and Czechoslovakia.Each of the stories represents a brick and they interlock to reveal the immense monument that is the town. What emerges is the message that the history of any place--no matter how humble--is limitless, that by describing or digging at the roots of a life, a house, or a neighborhood, one can see all the connections, not only with one's self and one's dreams but also with all of the universe.Richly imagined, weaving anecdote with recipes and gossip, Tokarczuk's novel is an epic of a small place. Since its publication in 1998 it has remained a bestseller in Poland. House of Day, House of Night is the English-language debut of one of Europe's best young writers.

    Beginning with his very early writing (including a chapter from his and Jack Kerouac's never-before-seen collaborative novel), Word Virus follows the arc of Burroughs's remarkable career, from his darkly hilarious "routines" to the experimental cut-up novels to Cities of the Red Night and The Cat Inside. Beautifully edited and complemented by James Grauerholz's illuminating biographical essays, Word Virus charts Burroughs's major themes and places the work in the context of the life. It is an excellent tool for the scholar and a delight for the general reader. Throughout a career that spanned half of the twentieth century, William S. Burroughs managed continually to be a visionary among writers. When he died in 1997, the world of letters lost its most elegant outsider.

    Jake Gittes is a successful 'bedroom dick': a private eye specialising in cases of marital infidelity. Paradoxically he might also be the last truly ethical man in a corrupt town. Lured into an investigation of the death-by-drowning of City Water Commissioner Hollis Mulwray, Gittes gets more than usually entwined with his new client, Mulwray's enigmatic widow Evelyn. He then finds himself crossing swords with Evelyn's redoubtable father, the aging business magnate Noah Cross, who has professional and personal reasons of his own for wanting both Hollis and Evelyn silenced.Academy Award-winner for Best Original Screenplay of 1974, Robert Towne's Chinatown is widely regarded as the finest American movie script of the post-war years. Complex in narrative design, infused with the sordid real-life history of Los Angeles' economic growth and unmistakably adult in its updating of the trademark violence and sexual intrigue of film noir, on the page Chinatown still shines - and cuts - like a blade.

    In this brilliant new collection she takes mainly the lives of women - unruly, ungovernable, unpredictable, unexpected, funny, sexy and completely recognisable - and brings their hidden desires bubbling to the surface. The love of a good woman is not as pure and virtuous as it seems: as in her title story it can be needy and murderous. Here are women behaving badly, leaving husbands and children, running off with unsuitable lovers, pushing everyday life to the limits, and if they don't behave badly, they think surprising and disturbing thoughts.

    "A Curtain of Green and Other Stories" (1941), her first book, includes many of her most popular stories, such as "A Worn Path, " "Powerhouse, " and the farcical "Why I Live at the P.O." "The Wide Net and Other Stories" (1943), in which historical figures such as Aaron Burr ("First Love") and John James Audubon ("A Still Moment") appear as characters, shows her evolving mastery as a regional chronicler. "The Golden Apples" (1949) is a series of interrelated stories about the inhabitants of the fictional town of Morgana, Mississippi. It was Welty's favorite among her books. The stories of "The Bride of the Innisfallen and Other Stories" (1955) are set both in the South and in Europe. Also included are two stories from the 1960s, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," based on the shooting of Medgar Evers, and "The Demonstrators." A selection of nine literary and personal essays includes evocations of the Jackson of her youth that is essential to her work and cogent discussions of literary form.

    A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition-Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships: that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.

    Now, in this elegantly written and passionate book, Vigen Guroian provides the perfect complement to books such as Bennett's, offering parents and teachers a much-needed roadmap to some of our finest children's stories. Guroian illuminates the complex ways in which fairy tales and fantasies educate the moral imagination from earliest childhood. Examining a wide range of stories--from Pinocchio and The Little Mermaid to Charlotte's Web, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, and the Chronicles of Narnia--he argues that these tales capture the meaning of morality through vivid depictions of the struggle between good and evil, in which characters must make difficult choices between right and wrong, or heroes and villains contest the very fate of imaginary worlds. Character and the virtues are depicted compellingly in these stories; the virtues glimmer as if in a looking glass, and wickedness and deception are unmasked of their pretensions to goodness and truth. We are made to face the unvarnished truth about ourselves, and what kind of people we want to be. Throughout, Guroian highlights the classical moral virtues such as courage, goodness, and honesty, especially as they are understood in traditional Christianity. At the same time, he so persuasively evokes the enduring charm of these familiar works that many readers will be inspired to reread their favorites and explore those they may have missed.

    Stories include at-a-glance flowcharts that show how Holmes reaches his conclusions through deductive reasoning, and character guides provide handy reference for readers and an invaluable resource for fans of the Sherlock Holmes films and TV series.The Sherlock Holmes Book holds a magnifying glass to the world of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary detective.

    An extraordinarily gripping novel about the blackest period of Argentinian history

    Sebald travelled to Manchester in 1966, he packed in his bags certain literary favourites which would remain central to him throughout the rest of his life and during the years when he was settled in England. In A Place in the Country, he reflects on the six of the figures who shaped him as a person and as a writer, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Walser and Jan Peter Tripp.Fusing biography and essay, and finding, as ever, inspiration in place – as when he journeys to the Ile St. Pierre, the tiny, lonely Swiss island where Jean-Jacques Rousseau found solace and inspiration – Sebald lovingly brings his subjects to life in his distinctive, inimitable voice.A Place in the Country is a window into the mind of this much loved and much missed writer.

    From Simon & Schuster, Conversations with Joseph Brodsky is Solomon Volkov's exploration of a poet's journey through the 20th century.A portrait of Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodskey is painted through fifteen years of interviews with the author, depicting his childhood years in war-torn Leningrad, his time in Kruschev's Russia, and his love of the work of fellow poets Auden and Frost.

    This title collects selected works of Woolf, including: To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, Jacob's Room, A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas and Between the Acts

    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

    S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life.

    A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.

    "Complete Novels" gathers all of Welty's longer fiction, from "The Robber Bridegroom" (1942) to her Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Optimist's Daughter" (1972).

    S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, many other notables.

    Clips, quips, vignettes and hallucinations, tragic news reports and hilarious short plays, conversations with both the quick and the dead, all shine their combined lights to reveal the way we experience life today in this ambitious novel.

    Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings took first place in a nationwide British poll to find the greatest book of the century! He may be the most popular writer of our age, but Tolkien is often misunderstood. This major new study of his life, his character and his work reveals the facts and confronts the myths. It explores the background to the man and the culture in which he wrote.Tolkien: Man and Myth observes the relationships that the master writer had with his closest literary colleagues. It reveals his unique relationship with C.S. Lewis, the writer of the Narnia books, and the roots of their estrangement. In this original book about a leading literary life, Joseph Pearce enters the world created by Tolkien in the seven books published during his lifetime. He explores the significance of Middle Earth and what it represented in Tolkien's thinking. Myth, to him, was not a leap from reality but a leap into reality."

    Full color and engaging, this book is a gateway to the fulfilling pursuit of understanding our culture by exploring its most enduring writings. "These sparkling essays remind us of the deep pleasures of literature and its power to instruct and delight."--Publishers Weekly "A magnificent resource, an urgently needed publication in an era when politically correct higher education is trying to deconstruct Western civilization. Wonderful!"--Charles Colson "This important publication should be in every library and out on the table in every Christian home."--Dallas Willard "Immerses us in the wisdom of the ages, those noble thoughts that enrich society's values and guide our youth along positive paths toward fruitful lives."--President Jimmy Carter

    This collection, taken from the work of more that twenty years, explores an enviable range of scholarly interests: archaeology, myth, language, education, philosophy, the spiritual quest, mental health, literature, music and film.The book also serves as a poetic autobiography of one of England's best-loved but least public writers. He hears himself declared dead at the age of six; he draws on the deep vein of a rural working-class childhood in a family of craftsmen who instilled the passion for excellence and for innovation and humour. The disciplines he learnt as a Classicist give a shape and clarity to that passion in this richly various book that would have fascinated his forebears, whose work and lives are also celebrated here.This most unusual, most candid, most vivid picture of an English family and its home, its country's history, is also a devastating revelation of a writer's own life. Alan Garner's account of his mental illness will become a classic, and each strand of the book will be a source of fascination to anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of an Alan Garner story, as also to all who concern themselves with the craft of writing.

    Presents a literary portrait of the city of New York through the eyes of more than a hundred writers, from Washington Irving to Oscar Hijuelos.

    For over four decades now, by way of innumerable short stories, essays, poems and novels, Ruskin Bond has championed simplicity and quietude in life and in art. This collection of essays and episodes from his journals is, in his own words, "a celebration of my survival as a freelance'. The author's early forays into the literary magazines of the 1950s and '60s are described in the first part of the book, along with some examples of his work at the time. The sections that follow contain extracts from an unpublished travel journal he kept during the '60s, episodes from the highways on which he was a frequent traveller, and vignettes of life in Mussoorie, past and present. With understated humour and compassion, Ruskin Bond records the charming eccentricities of friends and acquaintances (a former princess cheerfully obsessed with death and disaster); the silent miracles of nature ("New moon in a purple sky'); life's little joys (the smell of onions frying) and its fleeting regrets. Nostalgic and heart-warming, full of wisdom and charm, The Lamp is Lit provides a fascinating glimpse into the life of "our very own resident Wordsworth in prose.

    Raymond Carver, Edna St. Vincent Millay, william Shakespeare, Jill Ker Conway, Judith Guest, Dominick Dunne, Anne Morrow Linbergh, and Albert Camus are among the writers whose works explore the shock, the grief, and the search for meaning that come with the death of a child. Seasoned with wisdom and experience, their words offer rare comfort and insight to thoses who need it most.

    A Vietnam Vet swims alone across the English Channel to maintain the 'edge' that kept him alive in wartime. A young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows boxing shields him from the even crueller world beyond the ring. An unemployed man performs gruesome experiments on mice. No one writes better or more vividly than Jones about private apocalypses, about lives that swing between pain and sensual gratification, confusion and visionary clarity.

    World Poetry encompasses the many worlds of poetry, poetry of all styles, of all eras, of all tongues: from the ancient epic of Gilgamesh and the Pharaoh Akhnaten's "Hymn to the Sun" to the haiku of Basho and the dazzling imagery of Li Po; from Vedic hymns to Icelandic sagas to the "Carmina Burana"; from the magnificence of Homer and Dante to the lyricism of Goethe and Verlaine; from the piercing insights of Rilke and Yeats to the revelatory verse of Emily Dickinson, Garcia Lorca, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and many more.While World Poetry includes a generous selection of the best English-language verse from Chaucer to the present, it is designed to lay before the reader the best that all the world's cultures have to offer—more than eighty percent of the book is poetry originally written in languages other than English and translated by some of the finest talents working today, many of them brilliant poets in their own right.This is no mere sampler: In choosing only works of the highest intrinsic quality the editors have created a book that will surprise knowledgeable readers and lead newcomers to an understanding of the glories of world poetry that is our common heritage.

    His later poetry, produced after Charles II's Restoration led to the defeat of his hopes, reflects his understanding of politics and power. In this edition of Milton's poetry, John Leonard has modernized spelling, capitalization and any punctuation likely to cause confusion. He calls particular attention to words invented by Milton and provides full notes to elucidate biblical, classical and historical allusions, many of which complicate or even conflict with the plain sense or moral implications of the text.

    Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Robert Frost and working in the poet's archives at Dartmouth, Amherst, and elsewhere to produce this definitive and insightful biography of both the public and private man. While he depicts the various stages of Frost's colorful life, Parini also sensitively explores the poet's psyche, showing how he dealt with adversity, family tragedy, and depression. By taking the reader into the poetry itself, which he reads closely and brilliantly, Parini offers an insightful road map to Frost's remarkable world.

    The splendour of imperial Delhi flares one last time. The young daughter of a craftsman in the city elopes with an officer of the East India Company. And so we are drawn into the story of Wazir Khanam: a dazzlingly beautiful and fiercely independent woman who takes a series of lovers, including a Navab and a Mughal prince--and whom history remembers as the mother of the famous poet Dagh. But it is not just one life that this novel sets out to capture: it paints in rapturous detail an entire civilization.Beginning with the story of an enigmatic and gifted painter in a village near Kishangarh, The Mirror of Beauty embarks on an epic journey that sweeps through the death-giving deserts of Rajputana, the verdant valley of Kashmir and the glorious cosmopolis of Delhi, the craft of miniature painting and the art of carpet designing, scintillating musical performances and recurring paintings of mysterious, alluring women. Its scope breathtaking, its language beguiling, and its style sumptuous, this is a work of profound beauty, depth and power.

    Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.

    With a balanced and appreciative introduction and useful annotations, this volume presents some of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet's best work in which she weaves intellect, emotion, and irony.

    Also included are incisive reader's questions--useful for educators and book clubs--in a volume that makes an essential contribution to a wider understanding of the Vietnam War.An indispensable and provocative read for anyone who wants to know more about the war that changed the face of late-twentieth-century America.

    The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted diseases, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of popular discussion then as now.The Decadent Reader is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-siecle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, the decadent writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived to be the chief enemy of art. Barbey d'Aurevilly, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendes, Rachilde, Jean Moreas, Octave Mirbeau, Josephin Peladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. In an age of medicine, they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. From its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. The Decadent Reader, which includes critical essays on all of the authors, many novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, and familiar works set in a new context, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-siecle France.

    Although Charlotte Brontë's heroine is outwardly plain, she possesses an indomitable spirit, and great courage. Forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order which circumscribes her life when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious, sardonic Mr Rochester.Villette is based on Charlotte Brontë's personal experience as a teacher in Brussels. It is a moving tale of repressed feelings and cruel circumstances borne with heroic fortitude. Rising above the confinement of a rigid social order, it is also a story of a woman's right to love and be loved.Wuthering Heights is Emily Brontë's wild, passionate tale of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and, wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, he leaves Wuthering heights. When he returns years later as a wealthy man, he proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.Agnes Grey, Ann Brontë's deeply personal novel, is a trenchant expose of the frequently isolated, intellectually stagnant and emotionally starved conditions under which many governesses worked in the mid-nineteenth century.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall shows Ann Brontë's bold, naturalistic and passionate style. It is a powerful and sometimes violent novel of expectation, love, oppression, sin and betrayal. It portrays the disintegration of the marriage of Helen Huntingdon, the mysterious 'tenant' of the title, and her dissolute, alcoholic husband.

    In addition, Perfect Works describes an enormous backstory of Xenogears, including world building and canonical character details that never made it to the game's script.Perfect Works also contains a timeline which corresponds similarly to the Xenosaga series. However, like other games in the Xeno- series, it is a separate universe from Xenosaga.Perfect Works has been unofficially translated to English by fans.

    This comprehensive and engaging anthology gathers his polymathic achievement, from the extraordinary humanity of The Post Officer to memoirs, letters, essays and conversations, short stories, extracts from the celebrated novel The Home and the World, poems, songs, epigrams, and paintings. This inspired collection of works by one of this century's most profound writers in an essential guide for readers seeking to understand Indian literature, culture, and wisdom, and the perfect reintroduction of Tagore's magnificence to American readers.

    Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes. The scandal intensified when she moved in with Lewes after he separated from his wife. Eliot re-entered London's social life years later, when her literary success made it impossible for respectable society to dismiss her (even Queen Victoria enjoyed her books). She counted among her friends and supporters Dickens, Trollope, and several other Victorian literati. In this intimate biography, author Hughes provides insight into Eliot's life and work, weighing Eliot's motivations for her controversial actions, and examining the paradoxical Victorian society which she documented to perfection in her novels.

    Indeed, few artistic or social movements can boast as many women forebears, founders, and participants-perhaps only feminism itself. Yet outside the movement, women's contributions to surrealism have been largely ignored or simply unknown. This anthology, the first of its kind in any language, displays the range and significance of women's contributions to surrealism. Letting surrealist women speak for themselves, Penelope Rosemont has assembled nearly three hundred texts by ninety-six women from twenty-eight countries. She opens the book with a succinct summary of surrealism's basic aims and principles, followed by a discussion of the place of gender in the movement's origins. She then organizes the book into historical periods ranging from the 1920s to the present, with introductions that describe trends in the movement during each period. Rosemont also prefaces each surrealist's work with a brief biographical statement.

    Charles Bowden, who first brought attention to the story of the Juarez photographers in Harper's (December 1996), has written an uncompromising, piercing work that combines insightful and informed reporting with a poetic and wry style. His text, integrated with brutal and revealing images by a group of unknown Mexican street photographers, takes on issues of NAFTA, immigration, gangs, corruption, drug trafficking, and poverty, uncovering a very different Mexico than generally depicted in the press, and by the United States and Mexican governments. While Charles Bowden presents a riveting investigation of Juarez, its inhabitants, and its visual chroniclers, the renowned activist and writer Noam Chomsky offers in his introduction a bitingly critical account of NAFTA, suggesting its nullifying effect on democracy and the rights of both workers and consumers, and its underlying strategy for protecting the rich and powerful, and keeping everyone else in his or her place. In his afterword, the Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano poses the question: Should the Third World really aspire to be like the First World? His insider's look at contemporary North/South American relations reveals how the relationship between Juarez and El Paso can serve as a metaphor for U.S. - Latin American relations, and demonstrates the devastating toll United States policy and attitude knowingly take on human rights and the environment south of our border.

    Driven to explore th origins of the kaddish, from the ancient legend of a wayeard ghost to a 17th-century Ukranian pogrom, he offers as well a mourner's response to the questions of fate, freedom, and faith stirred up in death's wake. Lyric, learned, and deeply moving, Kaddish is suffused with love: a son's embracing of the traditon bequethed to him by his father, a scholar's savoring of its beauty, and a writer's revealing it, proudly unadorned, to the reader.

    This volume, collected by award-winning author Michael Rosen, presents a glorious selection of classic poetry, chronologically arranged from the seventeenth century to modern day—poems by such celebrated poets as William Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes— complete with biographical sketches of the poets, information on individual poems, and notes on poetic forms. Paul Howard's full-color illustrations illuminate some of the most brilliant poems of the English-speaking world with stunning breadth and beauty. A book to be treasured, Classic Poetry belongs on every shelf—every child should know these poems and keep this book with them as they grow.

    Full of hearty rancour, they form a scathing chronicle of the upper echelons of postwar English society, and this omnibus edition contains the first four volumes of the celebrated series: FIELDING GRAY, FRIENDS IN LOW PLACES, THE SABRE SQUADRON and THE RICH PAY LATE.

    Here, in a fresh and vibrant voice, Meyers recounts the wake of his father's death when he was sixteen and reflects on families, farms, and rural life in the Midwest.Meyers tells the story of his life on the farm, from the joys of playing in the hayloft as a boy to the steady pattern of chores. He describes the power of winter prairie winds, the excitement of building a fort in the woods, and the self-respect that comes from canning 120 quarts of tomatoes grown on your own land.Meyers's father is the central figure that these memories revolve around. After his father's death, Meyers fills his shoes out of necessity, practicality, and respect. In doing so, he discovers that his father was a great teacher and that he is no longer a boy but a man. Perhaps the most moving passages in The Witness of Combines are filled with the simultaneous sadness and pride of growing up in response to death. Meyers recalls planting and harvesting the last crop, selling the family farm, and other stirring moments in a testament to his father, the family bond, and the value of hard work.

    - Comprehensive reading and study guides for the world's most important literary masterpieces- A selection of critical excerpts provide a scholarly overview of each work- "The Story Behind the Story" places the work in a historical perspective and discusses it legacy- Each book includes a biographical sketch of the author, a descriptive list of characters, an extensive summary and analysis, and an annotated bibliography

    A SECRET LOCATION ON THE LOWER EAST SIDE, based on an acclaimed 1998 exhibition at The New York Public Library, documents a period of intense exploration and experimentation in American writing and literary publishing. The various strains of poetry identified by Donald Allen in his watershed anthology "The New American Poetry," 1945-1960 (Grove, 1960) -Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, San Francisco Renaissance, and others - extended into and evolved throughout the 60s and 70s, finding expression in "underground" magazines and presses. Focusing on the small press publishing scene in San Francisco and in downtown New York City, this book offers a glimpse into that Mimeo Revolution, through descriptions and checklists for over 80 magazines and presses. With a Pre-Face by Jerome Rothenberg, contributions from many of the original editors and publishers, a chronological timeline of the literary underground, and over 200 black and white images, this volume is a useful guide to one of the richest periods of American writing and publishing, and an essential point of departure for students, collectors, literary historians, and librarians alike.

    

    Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon.A comprehensive guided tour that is lively and always accessible, Lives of the Poets illuminates our most transcendent literary tradition.

    Jed Rasula and Steve McCaffery take these and other examples of twentieth-century avant-garde writing as the starting point for a collection of writings that demonstrates a continuum of creative conjecture on language from antiquity to the present. The anthology, which spans three millennia, generally bypasses chronology in order to illuminate unexpected congruities between seemingly discordant materials. Together, the writings celebrate the scope and prodigality of linguistic speculation in the West going back to the pre-Socratics.

    For more than thirty years, Simon's wry and astute observations on life, love, and the human condition have been making audiences laugh uproariously even as his beautifully realized characters touch their hearts. These five plays, including the Pulitzer- and Tony-award-winning Lost in Yonkers, show Simon at the pinnacle of his extraordinary career. Rumors Lost in Yonkers Jake's Women Laughter on the 23rd Floor London Suite Including the author's introduction: "How to Stop Writing and Other Impossibilities"

    Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, Cloudsplitter is dazzling in its re-creation of the political and social landscape of our history during the years before the Civil War, when slavery was tearing the country apart. But within this broader scope, Russell Banks has given us a riveting, suspenseful, heartbreaking narrative filled with intimate scenes of domestic life, of violence and action in battle, of romance and familial life and death that make the reader feel in astonishing ways what it is like to be alive in that time.

    Here are its people, their lives driven by love, faith, and duty, surviving in a culture that blends tradition with transformation.

    It traces the centuries-long emergence of this distinct literary tradition from its earliest roots in African proverbs, folktales, and chants to its latest flowering in the works of such writers as Rita Dove, August Wilson, and Terry McMillan. Here, in 2,000 pages and 550 selections, is (in the words of Richard Wright) the "long black song" of African American life, sung in a great choir of voices, from the slaves of the 1600s to the rap artists, orators, novelists, and poets of today. Among the works included are Frederick Douglass's Life and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye--both presented complete and unabridged. Here too are hundreds of spirituals and work songs, jazz and blues lyrics, poems, plays, stories, and speeches. An audio CD, produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution, features many of the texts as spoken or sung by their creators.

    Myth meets history and characters come to life through the stories of women's lives and prayers, their secrets, and the intimate details of everyday life. When they were young, four friends were known as the vilda bayas, the wild creatures. But their adult lives have taken them in different directions, and they've grown apart. One woman, Misha, is now the local midwife. In a world where strict rules govern most activities, Misha, an unmarried, independent spirit becomes the wayward heart of Blaszka and the keeper of town secrets. But when Misha becomes pregnant and refuses to divulge the identity of her baby's father, hers becomes the biggest secret of all, and the village must decide how they will react to Misha's scandalous ways. Nattel's magical novel explores the tension between men and women, and celebrates the wordless and kinetic bond of friendship.

    With her fresh, irreverent approach to syntax and meaning itself, she proposed nothing less than a reinvention of language from the ground up. From her home in Paris she conducted the most famous salon of modern times, tirelessly promoting modernism in all the arts and holding court for an audience that included the foremost creative figures of her day.This second volume includes works written between 1932 and her death in 1946, years in which she gained a wider readership and made a triumphant return to the United States as a lecturer, but chose ultimately to remain in France during World War II. It opens with the poetic sequence Stanzas in Meditation (complete text published posthumously in 1946), perhaps Stein’s most austere and rigorous experiment in linguistic abstraction. In Lectures in America (1935) and The Geographical History of America (1936), she made the most of her newfound status as a public figure, exploring with brilliance and humor the philosophical implications of her writings, the difference between English and American literature, the importance of space in American culture, and much else. Picasso (1938) is a book-length study of the painter who was one of her closest associates, and whose work was a lifelong inspiration for her.Stein’s playfulness is given full scope in the children’s book The World is Round (1939) and in Ida (1941), an enchanting exercise in pure verbal invention. The plays Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (written 1938, published 1949) and The Mother of Us All (1947), inspired by the life of women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony, give new twists to legendary and historical figures, while “Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters” (1946) pays tribute to the melodramas that delighted Stein in her childhood. In her last major work, Brewsie and Willie (1946), a striking stylistic departure, she pays homage to the American soldiers she came to know after the liberation of France with a remarkable evocation of their speech and aspirations.

    Ranked with Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce in the pantheon of European modernists, Musil attempted to apply the precision of his scientific training to the utmost bounds of the imagination. In a series of notebooks kept through most of his literary career, Musil reflected, often through stunning epigrams, on his childhood, his erotic life, his methods of creative thought and his fellow writers. An indispensable guide to his fiction, essays and plays, the pages of the diaries provide a skeleton key for his complex unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities. Known for extreme personal reticence among his contemporaries, Musil in the diaries (which were never intended for publication), speaks nakedly of himself and the chaotic events he lived through.This selection from the diaries is based on the exhaustive 1976 German edition prepared by Adolf Frisé. Most of its sketches, anecdotes and personal reflections have been translated into English. An acute political and cultural observer, Musil recorded in these pages his experiences of Berlin at the outbreak of World War I and service in the Austrian army on the Italian Front. The last notebooks chronicle Hitler's rise to power and Musil's exile in Switzerland. The diaries are valuable in a number of ways: as a first-hand historical document of life in twentieth century central Europe, as a kind of unwitting autobiography of a great novelist, and as a writer's workbook that details the moods of artistic adventure.In the diaries Robert Musil challenged himself to think about a reality beyond the world that could be apprehended by logic, to entertain the possibilities of forbidden eroticism, to imagine the hidden mystical life of Fascist Europe, and to turn the question of sexual gender into the puzzle of identity.

    Full of hearty rancour, they form a scathing chronicle of the upper echelons of postwar English society.

    Opening with a chapter on how Emily BrontA's masterpiece was received in the nineteenth century, the "Guide" links together a selection of extracts that demonstrate the major critical developments of the twentieth century -- from humanism through formalism to deconstruction. Within this general framework, subsequent chapters focus on psychoanalytic readings, source studies, readings using discourse theory, work on dissemination, and political readings from Marxist, postcolonialist, and feminist points of view.

    Described by "Publishers Weekly" as "easily Gilchrist's best book in years, " this collection of stories gives readers a taste of her gifted sense of the language and the humor of human foibles.

    Keeping vigil at the old man's bedside is his spiritual son, Khalil, who nurses Yunes, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Khalil relates the story of Palestinian exile while also recalling Yunes's own extraordinary life and his love for his wife, whom he meets secretly over the years at Bab al-Shams, the Gate of the Sun.A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the YearOne of Kansas City Star's 100 Noteworthy Books of the YearA Boldtype Notable Book of the YearA Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the YearA San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

    The result: a highly-effective way to teach anything to anybody!Available as an illustrated how-to book that bridges the gap between theory and practice and that covers today's hottest topics, like multiple intelligences, this book provides specific, easy-to-follow guidelines for creating more-effective learning environments, better ways to design curricula, and more interesting ways to deliver content and facilitate the learning process. Designed and written as an interactive tool, Quantum Teaching includes lesson planning guidelines to help teachers cover all the bases, without having to culminate different theories or refer to different source materials. A reproducible lesson planning guide makes it easy to start implementing new strategies immediately.

    In response to readers' requests, the editors of the "Heath Anthology continue to develop and reinforce its greatest strengths: diverse reading selections and strong ancillaries. With the assistance of more than 200 contributing editors, the editors have updated biographical and critical information and added new works of interest to both instructors and students.The Fourth Edition features writers and selections that highlight the divergent communities and diverse voices constituting the United States, both past and present. Volume 2 (which can be packaged with a free supplement of Whitman and Dickinson works) opens with African American folk tales and regional writers, and includes sections on the Beat Movement and the Vietnam Conflict.

    It is a gorgeous patchwork of memory lovingly sewn together by Red Greetaltruistic petty thief and guileless grifter-who has spent many days of his eighty-seven years behind bars in Las Almas, New Mexico. Twice married-the second time, while in jail, to his lifelong love Recita Holguin-Red has sampled pleasures available only to those capable of embracing life and its temptations without shame or fear. But his sins have been as memorable as his adventures-transgressions he shares freely with Bishop Francisco Velasco, Red's lifelong best friend and confessor, and his one-time rival for the affections of his first wife, Cecilia. In telling how he has loved and been loved, in confessing how he has sinned and inspired others to sin, Red Greet seeks hyssop, the substance that might wash his soul clean.

    This Library of America volume, along with its companion, surveys a literary trajectory that from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of World War II marked her as a fearless and uncompromising experimenter. She was also a master of anecdote and aphorism, many of whose phrases—from “rose is a rose is a rose” to “there is no there there” and “when this you see remember me”—have passed into the language.This first volume, containing works written between 1903 and 1932, takes Stein from her first, more traditional fictional works to the exuberant and astonishing experiments of the early Paris years. She was a devoted student of William James, with whom she studied psychology at Radcliffe in the 1890s, and took an early interest in memory and the function of repetition in human character. In her early works, she sought a new kind of realism exemplified here by Q.E.D. (written 1903, published posthumously), a novel about lesbian entanglements at college, and the modern classic Three Lives (1909), a set of novellas about the lives of three ordinary women, described in the simplest and most direct of prose.In her brilliant abstract “portraits” Stein uses an extraordinary array of verbal techniques to evoke those friends and collaborators—Matisse, Picasso, Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Satie, Mabel Dodge, Carl Van Vechten, Sherwood Anderson, Virgil Thomson—with whom she shared decades of revolutionary ferment in the arts. Her play Four Saints in Three Acts (1927), which became the basis for an opera by Virgil Thomson, is written for a freewheeling theater of the mind where everything becomes possible. In “Lifting Belly” and other works she joyously celebrates her lifelong relationship with Alice B. Toklas, one of the most famous domestic partnerships of that century. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), Stein’s oblique and playful memoir, became an immediate bestseller and sealed Stein’s international celebrity.

    Despite attempts to halt the vote amidst allegations and accusations of corruption, the show went on. As How They Stole The Game, David Yallop's classic expose of the dark heart behind the beautiful game showed when it was first published, Football was rotten from the top down. In the book Yallop reveals the story of Jo?o Havelenge, Fifa President from 1974 to 1998, the Godfather of football, and how he turned a religion to millions of fans into a multi-billion dollar business, riven with suspicious deals and unexpected payments.

    The author explores the key ideas behind Lewis's thoughts on everything from enchantment, reason, imagination, and joy to democratic education, myth, and the masculine and feminine. A concise "What's What" guide explains the significance of places and things, from Kiln's, Lewis's home in Oxford to his many references to The Book of Common Prayer. In addition, a definitive "Who's Who" listing includes Lewis's many teachers, mentors, and friends, including Dorothy L. Sayers and J.R.R. Tolkien.

    Classic stories and poems of American literature are found in the pages of Franklin, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Twain, Whitman, Faulkner, James, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Morrison, and many others. As Professor Arnold Weinstein reminds us: "American classics are wonderfully rich fare. America is a mythic land, a place with a sense of its own destiny and promise, a place that has experienced bloody wars to achieve that destiny. The events of American history shine forth in our classics." When was the last time you read them? Possibly not as recently as you'd like. Why? Not because you wouldn't love it. But perhaps the demands of your daily life or some other reason have prevented this pleasure. Now, here is the opportunity to gain an extraordinary familiarity with each of these authors within a manageable amount of time, as well as review the great works you may already know. What Explains Greatness? These works are both American and classics. The course has been crafted to explain why some works become classics while others do not, why some "immortal" works fade from our attention completely, and even why some contemporary works now being ignored or snubbed by critics may be considered immortal one day. One memorable work at a time, you'll see how each of these masterpieces shares the uncompromising uniqueness that invariably marks the entire American literary canon. From Sleepy Hollow to The Great Gatsby, Professor Weinstein contends that the literary canon lives, grows, and changes. What links these writers to each other—and to us readers today—is the awareness that the past lives and changes as generations of writers and readers step forward to interpret it anew. The course was born from Professor Weinstein's conviction that American literature is our "great estate," and that claiming this rightful inheritance—the living past and the lessons we can take from it—should be nothing less than a unique and joyous learning experience. Experience Two Centuries of America's Greatest Works Professor Weinstein explains that America's classic works should be savored as part of our inner landscape: part of how we see both America and ourselves. He leads you through more than two centuries of the best writers America has yet produced, bringing out the beauty of their language, the excitement of their stories, and the value in what they say about life, power, love, adventure, and what it means, in every sense, to be American. Perhaps you recall: --Melville's prowling Ahab, on the search for Moby Dick, and the power of the "grand, ungodly, Godlike man" --The quiet diner in The Grapes of Wrath and the pain of one of John Steinbeck's "Okies" trying to purchase a dime's worth of bread. --The parlor in Long Day's Journey Into Night and the lifetime of tension in a simple request to a father that he turn on the lights. Rip Van Winkle falls asleep for 25 years for some mysterious reason—but what exactly was it? Why did Emerson believe in self-reliance, and why do we? Twain, our first media celebrity, tells stories that have an inkling of Peter Pan: Tom Sawyer never does grow up. But Huck Finn must grow up to face the racism of the South and get past his own polluted conscience—can he do it? James brings American innocents to Europe for them to inherit the world—but do they? Discover the Stories behind America's Immortal Writers Consider that: --Emily Dickinson was virtually unheard of in her own time. --William Faulkner's books were out of print until the mid-1940s. --F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing he had been forgotten. Readers of their times would be astounded if they knew the immortality these writers achieved, just as we are astounded that they once were overlooked. Most of us don't know that when Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass—seemingly in answer to Ralph Waldo Emerson's memorable wish for the poet America deserved—he sent a copy to Emerson, America's most revered man of letters. When Emerson replied in extraordinarily flattering terms, Whitman published his letter, virtually forcing the new poet's acceptance by a literati that would might have preferred to flee from Whitman's startlingly new, often sexual, poetry. Perhaps you share the common picture of Emily Dickinson: a passive, gentle, reclusive spinster content in her father's Amherst, Massachusetts, home. If so, allow Professor Weinstein to introduce you to her friend, clergyman and author Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who said of "gentle" Emily: "I never was with anyone who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her." Through this course, you will learn to: --Explain the roles of self-reliance and the "self-made man" in the evolution of American literature --Identify the tenets of American Romanticism --Describe the evolution of the American ghost story, from Poe and Hawthorne to James and Morrison --Outline the epic strain in American literature, from Melville and Whitman to Faulkner and Ellison --Explain the importance of slavery as a critical subject for Stowe, Twain, Faulkner, and Morrison --Summarize perspectives on nature revealed in poets Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, and Eliot --Identify the tenets of Modernism in the work of Eliot, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner --Identify the contributions of O'Neill, Miller, and Williams to American theater --Summarize the threads of the complex relationship between America's great writers and the past. Savor the Joy of Great ReadingDr. Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching literature to packed classrooms since 1968. Brown University student course evaluation summaries reported: "By far, students' greatest lament was that they only got to listen to Professor Weinstein once a week." One customer writes: "Professor Weinstein is inspiring. Not only am I enjoying these lectures, but I am also rereading these wonderful classics and having a wonderful time." The course will lead you to read or reread masterpieces that intrigue you most. And with the deeper understanding you gain from the lectures, you will likely experience such joy from great reading that you may wonder why you have spent so much time on contemporary books. The 84 carefully crafted lectures in this course, each 30 minutes long, are your royal road to recapturing the American experience—and our intellectual and cultural heritage. Just review the lecture titles. All of this can be yours, and the journey will be as rewarding as the arrival.

    S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Madeleine L'Engle, Charles Williams, G. K. Chesterton, John Buyan, Dante and others is examined in this introductory volume to Christian mythopoeia.

    This landmark anthology is a comprehensive documentary resource for the study of Modernism, bringing together more than 150 key essays, articles, manifestos, and other writings of the political and aesthetic avant-garde between 1840 and 1950.By favoring short extracts over lengthier originals, the editors cover a remarkable range and variety of modernist thinking. Included are not just the familiar high modernist landmarks such as Gustave Flaubert, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, but also a diverse representation from the sciences, politics, philosophy, and the arts, including Charles Darwin, Thorstein Veblen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Isadora Duncan, John Reed, Adolf Hitler, and Sergei Eisenstein. Another welcome feature is a substantial selection of hard-to-find manifestos from the many modernist movements, among them futurism, cubism, Dada, surrealism, and anarchism.

    Chekhov lived during the last years of the Czars, and most of his stories are approximately of that time period. The book gives an excellent view of Russian life in czarist Russia, as well as entertaining plots and style.A Day in the CountryOld AgeKashtankaOn the WayVankaLa CigaleGriefAn InadvertenceThe Black MonkThe KissIn ExileA Work of ArtDreamsetc

    Bounty Hunters, Forty Lashes Less One, and Gunsights comprise this collection of great western stories by the author of Get Shorty.

    But shortly thereafter, the genius of her work was recognized and it has since received wide and consistent acclaim. Her verse - noted for its style, wit and bold and startling imagery - has greatly influenced the direction of 20th-century poetry. The 112 poems in this collection are taken from the definitive Johnson edition of her work and are accompanied by 65 pencil drawings, created especially for the book by Ferris Cook.

    Chronologically arranged to mirror the progression of the war, From Both Sides Now brings together a wide variety of opposing views, with poetry by American and Vietnamese soldiers, orphans, widows, priests, monks, political figures, and antiwar protesters. In addition to including extraordinary works from well-known poets such as Bruce Weigl, Margaret Atwood, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sharon Olds, Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Grace Paley, Philip Levine, and W. S. Merwin, editor Phillip Mahony has scoured the globe to find amazing and, in some cases, never-before-published poetry by North and South Vietnamese soldiers and poets and the first postwar generation of Vietnamese-Americans. Together the words of these poets cohere to a modern, many-voiced epic about the most important event in recent American history. Poignant and accessible, the poems collected here will leave an indelible impact on all readers -- not only poetry lovers but everyone who lived through, and those who want to learn about, the Vietnam War.

    Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are abused by priests.As young men, estranged from their own people and alienated from the culture imposed upon them, the Okimasis brothers fight to survive. Wherever they go, the Fur Queen--a wily, shape-shifting trickster--watches over them with a protective eye. For Jeremiah and Gabriel are destined to be artists. Through music and dance they soar.

    When Marisol's mother sends her away to Panama to live with relatives, it puts her American values to the test, as well as her friendship with Magdalena.

    Reporting back candidly at human lives steeped in urban sewers of pornography, prostitution, drug abuse, murder, and anonymous, unprotected sexual encounters, Sotos also exposes media hypocrisy surrounding these issues with ruthless clarity. Index contains reviews of the wildest porno videos and magazines, intersected by candid and shocking confessions of encounters in America's sleaziest sex bars, meat racks and glory holes. The result is a compendium of total abuse which achieves in its own right a pornographic intensity and remove.

    This best-selling reference guide is an invaluable tool for speechwriters, students, and researchers alike, or a perfect gift for any wordsmith.Includes:• Over 20,000 quotations from the famous, infamous, and legendary• Over 1,500 categories of quotations• Easy to use: arranged by subject, with an extensive keyword index and cross-referencing

    It includes two maps that provide geographical context for the readings, showing tribal locations and the Trail of Tears.

    In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them and found what he was looking for. But he found far more: the authentic saga of one of the century's most charismatic personalities. The Diaries depict in intimate detail the four years during which Alma grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Gustav Klimt, they break off shortly before her marriage to Gustav Mahler. "To me," writes Beaumont, "reading The Diaries is like raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty, and so close that one can almost reach out and touch it. The vitality of everyday life, eye-witness accounts of significant artistic events, unique insights into the behavioral patterns and linguistic conventions of homo austriacus all these serve to make the book unique."Having come to grips with Alma's handwriting, Beaumont and his coeditor for the German edition, Susanne Rode-Breymann, added meticulously researched commentaries and annotations. The German edition was published in the autumn of 1997."

    In Alison McGhee’s haunting debut, a tragic event sparks revelations from nine-year-old Mallie, her mother, her grandfather, a waitress, and Mallie’s father’s ex-lover. They discover long-hidden truths and forge new bonds in this unforgettable, heartbreaking novel about parents, children, and love.

    With hundreds of works by authors ranging from Ovid to James Baldwin, from Plato to Oscar Wilde, The Columbia Anthology of Gay Literature presents a wide range of poetry, fiction, essays, and autobiography that depict love, friendship, intimacy, desire, and sex between men.

    Classic insights on pastiche, nostalgia, and architecture stand alongside essays on the status of history, theory, Marxism, and the subject in an age propelled by finance capital and endless spectacle. Surveying the debates that blazed up around his earlier essays, Jameson responds to critics and maps out the theoretical positions of postmodernism’s prominent friends and foes.Fredric Jameson has had an immense impact on our understanding of postmodernism. However, until now, his key writings on the subject have been unavailable in an accessible and affordable form. This book is designed as a short and convenient introduction to Jameson's thought for both the student and the general reader.

    Martí transformed rebellion into revolution. . . . Like a master weaver, Martí pulled together all the separate threads of Cuban discontent—social, economic, political, racial, historical—and wove them into a radical movement of enormous force.”—Louis A. Pérez Jr, author of José Martí in the United States “Oh Cuba! . . . the blood of Martí was not yours alone; it belonged to an entire race, to an entire continent; it belonged to the powerful youth who have lost probably the best of teachers; he belonged to the future!”—Rubén Darío This new edition of an elegant anthology features bilingual poetry, a revised translation, and several new pieces. It presents the full breadth of José Martí’s work: his political essays and writings on culture, his letters, and his poetry. Readers will discover a literary genius and an insightful political commentator on troubled US-Latin America relations.

    It has long been a habit of writer Barry Lopez to remove dead animals from the road. At the conclusion of a journey from Oregon to Indiana in 1989, he wrote Apologia to explore the moral and emotional upheaval he experienced dealing with the dead every day. On the highway he encountered dozens of animals - raccoons, jackrabbits, porcupines, red foxes, sparrows, spotted skunks, owls, deer, gulls, badgers, field mice, garter snakes, barn swallows, pronghorn antelope, squirrels - all victims of vehicular destruction. Stopping for each body he saw, he gently removed each one from the road. Lopez's eloquent prose is accompanied by Robin Eschner's dramatic woodcuts. By turns violent, raw, and tender, they provide a stunning counterpoint to a reverent testimony.

    A reading of the poet's development over the past thirty years, Seamus Heaney tells a story of poetic inventiveness, of ongoing experimentation in form and expression. It is an inspired and nuanced portrait of an Irish poet of public as well as private life, whose work has given voice to his troubled times.With characteristic discernment and eloquence, Helen Vendler traces Heaney's invention as it evolves from his beginnings in Death of a Naturalist (1966) through his most recent volume, The Spirit Level (1996). In sections entitled "Second Thoughts," she considers an often neglected but crucial part of Heaney's evolving talent: self-revision. Here we see how later poems return to the themes or genres of the earlier volumes, and reconceive them in light of the poet's later attitudes or techniques. Vendler surveys all of Heaney's efforts in the classical forms--genre scene, elegy, sonnet, parable, confessional poem, poem of perception--and brings to light his aesthetic and moral attitudes.Seamus Heaney's development as a poet is inextricably connected to the violent struggle that has racked Northern Ireland. Vendler shows how, from one volume to the next, Heaney has maintained vigilant attention toward finding a language for his time--"symbols adequate for our predicament," as he has said. The worldwide response to those discovered symbols suggests that their relevance extends far beyond this moment.

    Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips's reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth."In his extraordinary new book of poems, From the Devotions, by far his best, Carl Phillips has done what few of his contemporaries have dared or managed with as much elegant authority. He has plotted here the romantic landscape of desire. Myths are unsheathed and glisten. History is held and pondered. Violence shimmers, desires are silhouetted against the light of love and death. His tone is at once erotic and mystical, hushed and compelling. This book is a blessing, a ravishing, a haunting. I urge you to read it — to succumb to it." — J.D. McClatchyCarl Phillips is the author of In the Blood, which won the Morse Poetry Prize, and Cortège , a Finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. The recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets, Phillips is associate professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University, St. Louis, where he also directs the creative writing program.

    Pang. Perhaps this is why Cupid is depicted with a quiver of arrows, because love feels at times like being pierced in the chest. It is a wholesome violence. . . . People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets." So writes Diane Ackerman in her insightful introduction.Here is a panorama of fine writing about love's many moods and majesties, from all the veils of flirtation, seduction, and marriage to the tempests of suspicion, jealousy, and heartache. Here is a treasury of more than two hundred selections from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee?" There are excerpts from Romeo and Juliet, Madame Bovary, Justine, The Odyssey, Lady Chatterley's Lover, as well as the letters from Baudelaire to Sabatier, George Eliot to Herbert Spencer, and Henry Miller to Anais Nin.General readers and scholars alike will delight in this anthology's mix of the contemporary and the classic.