In a fast-paced narrative, Nelson George's book chronicles the rise and fall of "race music" and its transformation into the R&B that eventually dominated the airwaves only to find itself diluted and submerged as crossover music.

    It's a window on a whole genre of literature through the words invented and passed along by the genre's most talented writers. In addition, it shows how many words we consider everyday vocabulary-words like spacesuit, blast off, and robot-had their roots in imaginative literature, and not in hard science.Citations are included for each definition, starting with the earliest usage that can be found. These citations are drawn not only from science fiction books and magazines, but also from mainstream publications, fanzines, screenplays, newspapers, comics, film, songs, and the Internet. In addition to illustrating the different ways each word has been used, citations also show when and where words have moved out of the science fiction lexicon and into that of other subcultures or mainstream English.Brave New Words covers the shared language of science fiction, as well as the vocabulary of science fiction criticism and its fans--those terms that are used by many authors in multiple settings. Words coined in science fiction have become part of the vocabulary of any number of subcultures and endeavors, from comics, to neo-paganism, to aerospace, to computers, to environmentalism, to zine culture. This is the first book to document this vocabulary transfer. Not just a useful reference and an entertaining browse, this book also documents the enduring legacy of science fiction writers and fans.

    This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia OzickFollowing the collection The Broken Estate--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--The Irresponsible Self confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contemporary novels.In twenty-three passionate, sparkling dispatches, he effortlessly connects his encyclopedic, passionate understanding of the literary canon with an equally earnest and appreciative view of the most discussed authors writing today, including Franzen, Pynchon, Rushdie, DeLillo, Naipaul, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith.This collection includes Wood's famous and controversial attack on "hysterical realism", and his sensitive but unsparing examinations of White Teeth and Brick Lane. The Irresponsible Self is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about modern fiction.

    After a year's work on that program, covering 49,000 miles, the film crew had learned a lot of natural history, and Durrell had a new appreciation of filmmaking. This story of the journeys is vintage Durrell: breezy and entertaining as he recounts misadventures and the problems of filming wild animals, serious in his plea for conservation. The Durrells' travels took them from the English countryside to New York City, from the Shetland Islands to South Africa, to the rain forest of Panama and Arizona's Sonoran desert, to the Canadian Rockies and the island of Corfu. (Summary from Goodreads)

    Porter certainly acknowledges France's importance, but here makes an overwhelming case for consideringBritain the true home of modernity - a country driven by an exuberance, diversity and power of invention comparable only to twentieth-century America. Porter immerses the reader in a society which, recovering from the horrors of the Civil War and decisively reinvigorated by the revolution of 1688, had emerged as something new and extraordinary - a society unlike any other in the world.

    In this case, an entire cult is involved.Winner, 1992 Nebula Award and 1993 Hugo Award, Best Short Story."At the Rialto": A look at a scientific conference held in Chaos Central, and an attempt to explain the link among quantum physics, mid-life romance, and the Frederick's of Hollywood bra museum.Winner, 1989 Nebula Award, Best Short Story."Death on the Nile": The story of a vacation to Egypt gone seriously wrong.Winner, 1994 Hugo Award, Best Short Story."Why the World Didn't End Last Tuesday": Armageddon by committee."Close Encounter": Yes, everyone hates hospitals. They're just hating them for the wrong reasons.

    Resourcefully, doggedly, Jacky nurtures his spirit of independence, his capacity to love, and his faith in a nation's dream in a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi and from poverty to possibility.

    Rodriguez argues that America has been brown since its inception-since the moment the African and the European met within the Indian eye. But more than simply a book about race, Brown is about America in the broadest sense-a look at what our country is, full of surprising observations by a writer who is a marvelous stylist as well as a trenchant observer and thinker.

    Drawing on a wide range of beliefs and literature, it traces these horrors from their earliest recorded inceptions and charts their impact upon the human psyche. In this book, history and terror mix to create the things that lurk in the darkest corners of our minds.

    One Secret.Separated by a river and twenty years of lies.Two families. One secret.Separated by a river and twenty years of lies.Five minutes changed Poppy Sadler’s life forever. Tick. The hospital called. Her mother’s battle with cancer was finally over. Tock. The police showed up at her door. Her father’s body has just been pulled from the River. Tick. Murdered. Tick, Tock. Five minutes and a secret is coming undone.Across the river, Justin Caulfield’s vast fortune can buy him anything but more time. Tick. A deadly disease is stealing his daughter’s life. He needs a miracle. Tock. The person he never doubted names the price he never knew he owed. A price more than one man can pay. Tick. Betrayed. Tick, Tock. Twenty years of lies may cost him his very soul.

    In Piano Notes, a finalist for a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, Charles Rosen, one of the world's most talented pianists, distills a lifetime of wisdom and lore into an unforgettable tour of the hidden world of piano playing. You'll read about how a note is produced, why a chord can move us, why the piano -- "hero and villain" of tonality -- has shaped the course of Western music, and why it is growing obsolete. Rosen explains what it means that Beethoven composed in his head whereas Mozart would never dream of doing so, why there are no fortissimos in the works of Ravel, and why a piano player's acrobatics have an important dramatic effect but nothing more. Ending on a contemplative note, Piano Notes offers an elegant argument that piano music "is not just sound or even significant sound" but a mechanical, physical, and fetishistic experience that faces new challenges in an era of recorded music. Rosen ponders whether piano playing will ever again be the same, and his insights astonish.

    Today our shared anxiety has become far more complex and insidious, arising from tyranny, terrorism, and the invisible power of the “quasi state.” As Wole Soyinka suggests, the climate of fear that has enveloped the world was sparked long before September 11, 2001. Rather, it can be traced to 1989, when a passenger plane was brought down by terrorists over the Republic of Niger. From Niger to lower Manhattan to Madrid, this invisible threat has erased distinctions between citizens and soldiers; we’re all potential targets now.In this seminal work, Soyinka explores the implications of this climate of fear: the conflict between power and freedom, the motives behind unthinkable acts of violence, and the meaning of human dignity. Fascinating and disturbing, Climate of Fear is a brilliant and defining work for our age.

    Poet Laureate Robert Hass considers some of the twentiethcentury poets who bring him pleasure: Robert Lowll, JamesWright, Tomas Transtromer, Joseph Brodsky, Yvor Winters,Robert Creeley, James McMichael, Czeslaw Milosz, and others,in this, his first collection of essays. Originally published in1984, Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry won theNational Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. A new collection of Robert Hass's essays will be published by Ecco in 1998.

    Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange."This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald JusticeIn Tennessee I Found a FireflyFlashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clungto the dark of it: the legs of the spiderheld the tucked wings close,held the abdomen still in the midst of callingwith thrusts of phosphorescent light—When I am tired of being human, I try to rememberthe two stuck together like burrs. I try to place themcentral in my mind where everything else mustsurround them, must see the burr and the barb of them.There is courtship, and there is hunger. I supposethere are grips from which even angels cannot fly.Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.When I am tired of only touching,I have my mouth to try to tell youwhat, in your arms, is not erased"This is poetry of a rare fine delicacy. Its very modesty testifies to a great ambition—to overcome by the quietest of means."—Donald Justice

    The first "transatlantic" history of the Irish, Emigrants and Exiles offers the fullest account yet of the diverse waves of Irish emigration to North America.Drawing on enormous original research, Miller focuses on the thought and behavior of the "ordinary" Irish emigrants, as revealed in their personal letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs as well as in their songs, poems and folklore. Miller shows that the exile mentality was deeply rooted in Irish history, culture and personality, and it profoundly affected both the traumatic course of modern Irish history and the Irish experience in America.