But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind — strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.

    Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush — with quite a hangover.

    Eliot or Virginia Woolf of Latin American letters.” As in all of Bolaño’s work, there is also wide-ranging discussion of the author’s many literary influences. (Explanatory notes on authors and titles that may be unfamiliar to English-language readers are included here.) The interviews, all of which were completed during the writing of the gigantic 2666, also address Bolaño’s deepest personal concerns, from his domestic life and two young children to the realities of a fatal disease.

    Never before has the renowned author revealed so much about his own life or written with such immediacy about the forces shaping America. 26 halftones.

    In its pages V. S. Naipaul trains his relentless moral intelligence on societies from India to the United States and sees how each deals with the challenges of modernity and the seductions of both the real and mythical past.Whether he is writing about a string of racial murders in Trinidad; the mad, corrupt reign of Mobutu in Zaire; Argentina under the generals; or Dallas during the 1984 Republican Convention, Naipaul combines intellectual playfulness with sorrow, indignation, and analysis so far-reaching that it approaches prophecy. The Writer and the World reminds us that he is in a class by himself.

    In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Vladimir Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

    

    On the enjoyment of unpleasant places --II. An apology for idlers --III. AEs triplex --IV. Talk and talkers --V. A gossip on romance --VI. The character of dogs --VII. A college magazine --VIII. Books which have influenced me --IX. Pulvis et umbra.

    The constant theme running through these essays is the mysterious process of creativity. Lodge discusses at length the work of writers he particularly admires - Graham Greene, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Green, Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anthony Burgess. He addresses the situation of the contemporary novelist, both aesthetically and institutionally, and describes the pleasures of the novelistic text. In delineating the different techniques required to work on a novel and a screenplay, he draws on the experience of adapting his own "Nice Work" and Dickens's "Martin Chuzzlewit" for television, bringing a refreshingly expert candor to the problems that arise between the idea and the performance. The essays conclude with revealing extracts from the diary he kept as his play, "The Writing Game," made its way to the footlights. Lodge's wit and intelligence are evident on every page of this entertaining and instructive volume, which should be of interest both to the practicing writer in any medium and to readers of Lodge who wish to know more about his own art.

    The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture.The first section of the book, -Family and History, - includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, -Writers and Writing, - offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, -Politics and Society, - includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture.Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor Emerita at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at Princeton University and is the author of Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Paradise, and other novels. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Carolyn C. Denard is the author of scholarly essays on Toni Morrison and the forthcoming Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison. She is Associate Dean of the College at Brown University and founder of the Toni Morrison Society.

    This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature. "What is the function of literature," Mr. Huxley asks, "what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?"Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of "the Two Cultures." unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples. Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience.

    For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents and activists, writers and soldiers--have turned to Shakespeare's works to address the nation's political fault lines, such as manifest destiny, race, gender, immigration, and free speech. In a narrative arching across the centuries, James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare's 400-year-old tragedies and comedies in making sense of so many of these issues on which American identity has turned. Reflecting on how Shakespeare has been invoked--and at times weaponized--at pivotal moments in our past, Shapiro takes us from President John Quincy Adams's disgust with Desdemona's interracial marriage to Othello, to Abraham Lincoln's and his assassin John Wilkes Booth's competing obsessions with the plays, up through the fraught debates over marriage and same-sex love at the heart of the celebrated adaptations Kiss Me Kate and Shakespeare in Love. His narrative culminates in the 2017 controversy over the staging of Julius Caesar in Central Park, in which a Trump-like leader is assassinated.Extraordinarily researched, Shakespeare in a Divided America shows that no writer has been more closely embraced by Americans, or has shed more light on the hot-button issues in our history. Indeed, it is by better understanding Shakespeare's role in American life, Shapiro argues, that we might begin to mend our bitterly divided land.

    

    Drawn from The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and The Adolescent, the seventeen selections are each prefaced by an explanatory note. Newcomers will find in these pages a rich, accessible sampling. Dostoyevsky devotees will be pleased to find some of the writer’s deepest, most compelling passages in one volume.Full-page woodcuts by master engraver Fritz Eichenberg enhance the book.

    His fiction and poetry burn with a passionate commitment to political justice, bringing to life not only Africa's troubled encounters with Europe but also the dark side of contemporary African political life. Now, in Home and Exile, Achebe reveals the man behind his powerful work.