Mass culture and mass leisure have enabled us to spend far more time absorbing stories, real and imaginary, than any of our ancestors. Whether or not this has been to our benefit is one of the questions raised by journalist and 1999 CBC Massey lecturer Robert Fulford. Narrative, Fulford points out, is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves - often all at once. It is the bundle in which we wrap truth, hope, and dread. It is crucial to civilization.Fulford writes engagingly and energetically about narrative history, narrative in news coverage, the rise of electronic narrative, and narrative as it flourishes in the form of gossip, "the folk-art version of literature," revealing to us the mystery, power, and importance of story in all our lives.

    This compact and affordable anthology gathers complete speeches and selected excerpts from some of the twentieth century's most memorable addresses. Writers and speakers in search of memorable quotations will appreciate this collection, as will any reader seeking historical wisdom and inspiration. Featured speakers include Winston Churchill, rousing the British to defend their lives and homes against the Nazis; Mohandas Gandhi, advocating non-violent resistance to deplorable living conditions; and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, calming the nation's fears during the Great Depression. Additional orations include those of Barack Obama, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Ronald Reagan, Elie Wiesel, the Dalai Lama, César Chávez, and many others. Includes three selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat: Address to Parliament on May 13th, 1940," "I Have a Dream," and "Remarks to the Senate in Support of a Declaration of Conscience."

    And they are dangerous." In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling. With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that "there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations." That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers - N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Sherman Alexie, and others - who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future. King reminds the reader, Native and non-Native, that storytelling carries with it social and moral responsibilties. "Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now."

    In a series of sparkling essays, she explores our rich classical heritage - from Greek drama to Roman jokes, introducing some larger-than-life characters of classical history, such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Boudicca. She also invites you into the places where Greeks and Romans lived and died, from the palace at Knossos to Cleopatra's Alexandria - and reveals the often hidden world of slaves. She brings back to life some of the greatest writers of antiquity - including Thucydides, Cicero and Tacitus - and takes a fresh look at both scholarly controversies and popular interpretations of the ancient world, from The Golden Bough to Asterix. The fruit of over thirty years in the world of classical scholarship, Classical Traditions captures the world of antiquity and its modern significance with wit, verve and scholarly expertise.

    It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.

    Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

    D. Salinger, Bartleby Co. could be described as a meditation: a walking tour through the annals of literature. Written as a series of footnotes (a non-work itself), Bartleby embarks on such questions as why do we write, why do we exist? The answer lies in the novel itself: told from the point of view of a hermetic hunchback who has no luck with women, and is himself unable to write, Bartleby is an utterly engaging work of profound and philosophical beauty.

    From Machiavelli's The Prince to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, the breakdown of the family, and disastrous social experiments. And yet the toxic ideas peddled in these books are more popular and pervasive than ever. In fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Fortunately, Professor Benjamin Wiker is ready with an antidote, exposing the beguiling errors in each of these evil books. Witty, learned, and provocative, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World provides a quick education in the worst ideas in human history and explains how we can avoid them in the future.

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

    . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

    From the wealth of poetic prose left behind by the latter-day prophet of the Middle East, Mr. Sheban has selected some of the most meaningful, yet unfamiliar. The volume is prefaced by a biographical study of Gibran, including the women in his life.

    Lodge explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction, mainly English and American, in the light of recent investigations in science.

    He chronicles his journey in the New York Times bestseller Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. What brought Denby back to his alma mater was not a sense of nostalgia, but the current academic debate surrounding Western literature. This culture war centers on the left's denunciation of "dead white European males" as oppressive and exclusionary and the right's reverence of the Western canon as the foundation of traditional values and patriotism. Like many of the extremists engaged in the debate, Denby found his memories of these works faded and forgotten. "I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.... And I wanted to add my words to the debate from the ground up, beginning and ending in literature, never leaving the books themselves." Thus Denby returns to Columbia for the two "great books" courses: Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. During his yearlong education he explores the difficulties of going back to reading seriously; analyzes today's college students; observes the teaching styles of four professors; and enters into a period of self-discovery as he learns to deal with life as a middle-aged student, father, and husband. Along the way he gains a new appreciation of writers such as Homer, Boccaccio, Austen, Nietzsche, Conrad, Machiavelli, Marx, and Woolf. He walks away from his experiences believing deeply that students today, more than ever, need this type of humanistic education and that both sides of the culture war are simplifying the Western tradition.

    It's a much-needed reminder that, like J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbits, we Christians are all on an epic quest. In examining the Christian themes in the trilogy, authors Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware find that truth and fiction are not as far apart as they seem. And that although Tolkien never intended for these books to present the gospel, when read in the light of Scripture they offer a rich tapestry of redemption, values, and faith against all odds from which we may learn much.

    Less gear. Less anxiety. Less stress. Less fear. A Lesser Photographer is the missing guide you've always wanted to the only gear that really matters: the gear between your ears. In under an hour, you’ll be able to identify the myths you’ve been taught about photography and embrace useful creative habits that will set you apart. Praise for previous editions: “For something beautiful and well-said, check out A Lesser Photographer.” — David duChemin “Amazing read…I really recommend everyone get a copy.” — Chris Marquardt “CJ Chilvers reevaluates what it means to be a photographer in this manifesto. Most of the points apply to virtually any creative endeavor or obsession. ‘The real show is outside the viewfinder.’” — Jim Coudal “I have to say, CJ has a great attitude. If you care at all about photography, he’s a must read.” — Patrick Rhone “Every photographer should follow CJ Chilvers.” — Eric Kim