Essays examine significant runs (by Jim Shooter, Paul Levitz, and Keith Giffen); the Legion's science, future architecture, and fashion; the role of women, homosexuality, and race; the early Legion's classical adaptations, its teenage cruelty, and its relation to the early Justice League; Lightning Lad's death and resurrection; whether the Legion should be allowed to age; the Amethyst saga; the themes of the reboot Legion; and the so-called Threeboot's relationship to adult adolescence and generational theory. From Sequart Research & Literacy Organization. More info at http: //Sequart.org

    Whistler not only refused to tolerate misunderstanding by critics and the so-called art-loving public — but launched vicious counterattacks as well. His celebrated passages-at-arms with Oscar Wilde and Swinburne, the terse and penetrating "letters to the editor," his rebuttals to attacks from critics, and biting marginal notes to contemptuous comments on his paintings and hostile reviews (which are also reprinted) are all part of this record of the artist's vendettas.Whistler's most famous battle began when critic John Ruskin saw one of the artist's "Nocturnes" exhibited in Grosvenor Gallery. "I have seen, and heard," wrote Ruskin, "much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler was incensed with this criticism, and initiated the famous libel case "Whistler vs. Ruskin." Extracts from the resultant trial record are among the highlights of this book, with Whistler brilliantly annihilating his Philistine critics, but winning only a farthing in damages.The Gentle Art, designed by Whistler himself, is a highly entertaining account of personal revenges, but it is also an iconoclast's plea for a new and better attitude toward painting. As a historical document, it is the best statement of the new aesthetics versus the old guard academics, and it helped greatly in shaping the modern feeling toward art.

    In a "continuous thread of revelation" she sketches her autobiography and tells us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing. Homely and commonplace sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection: the striking clocks, the Victrola, her orphaned father's coverless little book saved since boyhood, the tall mountains of the West Virginia back country that become a metaphor for her mother's sturdy independence, Eudora's earliest box camera that suspended a moment forever and taught her that every feeling awaits a gesture. She has recreated this vanished world with the same subtlety and insight that mark her fiction.Even if Eudora Welty were not a major writer, her description of growing up in the South--of the interplay between black and white, between town and countryside, between dedicated schoolteachers and the public they taught--would he notable. That she is a splendid writer of fiction gives her own experience a family likeness to others in the generation of young Southerners that produced a literary renaissance. Until publication of this book, she had discouraged biographical investigations. It undoubtedly was not easy for this shy and reticent lady to undertake her own literary biography, to relive her own memories (painful as well as pleasant), to go through letters and photographs of her parents and grandparents. But we are in her debt, for the distillation of experience she offers us is a rare pleasure for her admirers, a treat to everyone who loves good writing and anyone who is interested in the seeds of creativity.

    A book about our growing alienation from nature, it is also a brilliant meditation on the capacity of the writer to bring us back to earth, our home.In the first ecological reading of English literature, Jonathan Bate traces the distinctions among nature, culture, and environment and shows how their meanings have changed since their appearance in the literature of the eighteenth century. An intricate interweaving of climatic, topographical, and political elements poetically deployed, his book ranges from greenhouses in Jane Austen's novels to fruit bats in the poetry of Les Murray, by way of Thomas Hardy's woodlands, Dr. Frankenstein's Creature, John Clare's birds' nests, Wordsworth's rivers, Byron's bear, and an early nineteenth-century novel about an orangutan who stands for Parliament. Though grounded in the English Romantic tradition, the book also explores American, Central European, and Caribbean poets and engages theoretically with Rousseau, Adorno, Bachelard, and especially Heidegger.The model for an innovative and sophisticated new ecopoetics, The Song of the Earth is at once an essential history of environmental consciousness and an impassioned argument for the necessity of literature in a time of ecological crisis.

    In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.In more than two hundred original essays, "A New Literary History of America" brings together the nation s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what Made in America means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood s "American Gothic," Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on "Tarzan," Bharati Mukherjee on "The Scarlet Letter," Gish Jen on "Catcher in the Rye," and Ishmael Reed on "Huckleberry Finn." From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, "Life," Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information. "

    Strand deftly illuminates the work of the frequently misunderstood American painter, whose enigmatic paintings—of gas stations, storefronts, cafeterias, and hotel rooms—number among the most powerful of our time.   In brief but wonderfully compelling comments accompanying each painting, the elegant expressiveness of Strand’s language is put to the service of Hopper’s visual world. The result is a singularly illuminating presentation of the work of one of America’s best-known artists. Strand shows us how the formal elements of the paintings—geometrical shapes pointing beyond the canvas, light from unseen sources—locate the viewer, as he says, “in a virtual space where the influence and availability of feeling predominate.”   An unforgettable combination of prose and painting in their highest forms, this book is a must for poetry and art lovers alike.From the Hardcover edition.

    First published in 1846, it is about the mysteries of artistic creation. “Most writers—poets in especial—prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy—an ecstatic intuition…” This edition also contains a long note on Poe’s life and work written by French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in 1852. The essay was translated in English by Henry Curwen (1845-1892) in 1873.

    Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.

    He has played everyone from Ned Ryerson in "Groundhog Day" to Sandy Ryerson in "Glee." He has amused thousands with his true stories on "The Tobolowsky Files" at Slashfilm.com. Here he shares some homespun philosophy and more true stories that prove tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll are often the most humiliating and almost always the most enjoyable.

    

    Lynskey delves into how Orwell's harrowing Spanish Civil War experiences shaped his concern with political disinformation by exposing him to the deceptiveness of people he'd once regarded as allies against fascism: the Soviets and their Western apologists.

    The name conjures up J.K. Rowling's wondrous world of magic that has captured the imaginations of millions on both the printed page and the silver screen with bestselling novels and blockbuster films. The true magic found in this children's fantasy series lies not only in its appeal to people of all ages but in its connection to the greater world of classic literature. Harry Potter's Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Hogwarts Adventures explores the literary landscape of themes and genres J.K. Rowling artfully wove throughout her novels-and the influential authors and stories that inspired her. From Jane Austen's Emma and Charles Dickens's class struggles, through the gothic romances of Dracula and Frankenstein and the detective mysteries of Dorothy L. Sayers, to the dramatic alchemy of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and William Shakespeare, Rowling cast a powerful spell with the great books of English literature that transformed the story of a young wizard into a worldwide pop culture phenomenon.

    Louis until he had settled in England and published The Waste Land. Edited and with an Introduction by Valerie Eliot; Index; photographs.

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

    But the writer possessed another side, one which is delightfully exposed in this hilariously charming memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont. Fans of Please Don't Eat the Daisies, Cheaper by the Dozen, and anything Erma Bombeck ever wrote will find much to recognize in Shirley Jackson's home and neighborhood: children who won't behave, cars that won't start, furnaces that break down, a pugnacious corner bully, household help that never stays, and a patient, capable husband who remains lovingly oblivious to the many thousands of things mothers and wives accomplish every single day."Our house," writes Jackson, "is old, noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books." Jackson's literary talents are in evidence everywhere, as is her trenchant, unsentimental wit. Yet there is no mistaking the happiness and love in these pages, which are crowded with the raucous voices of an extraordinary family living a wonderfully ordinary life.