Book picks similar to
The American Tradition in Literature, Vol 1 by Sculley Bradley
fiction
reference
new-york
history-of-ideas
The Bounty Hunter Code: From the Files of Boba Fett
Daniel Wallace - 2013
Get the basics on making a living at the margins of galactic law. Delve into the history, philosophy, and gear of Death Watch, a secretive splinter group of Mandalorians.Legendary bounty hunter Boba Fett bound together two volumes of great personal significance: the latest edition of The Bounty Hunter's Guild Handbook and a recruiting booklet issued by Death Watch. Together, these volumes make up The Bounty Hunter code. Fett and the book's other previous owners recorded their thoughts and commentary in the margins.Boba Fett's tactics, his secrets - they're all here.
The Instructions
Adam Levin - 2010
Expelled from three Jewish day-schools for acts of violence and messianic tendencies, Gurion ends up in the Cage, a special lockdown program for the most hopeless cases of Aptakisic Junior High. Separated from his scholarly followers, Gurion becomes a leader of a very different sort, with righteous aims building to a revolution of troubling intensity.The Instructions is an absolutely singular work of fiction by an important new talent. Combining the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace, Adam Levin has shaped a world driven equally by moral fervor and slapstick comedy—a novel that is muscular and exuberant, troubling and empathetic, monumental, breakneck, romantic, and unforgettable.
The Intellectual Devotional: Revive Your Mind, Complete Your Education, and Roam Confidently with the Cultured Class
David S. Kidder - 2006
The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same—a collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each daily digest of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music.Impress your friends by explaining Plato's Cave Allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms, and unlock the mystery of how batteries work. Daily readings range from important passages in literature to basic principles of physics, from pivotal events in history to images of famous paintings with accompanying analysis. The book's goal is to refresh knowledge we've forgotten, make new discoveries, and exercise modes of thinking that are ordinarily neglected once our school days are behind us. Offering an escape from the daily grind to contemplate higher things, The Intellectual Devotional is a great way to awaken in the morning or to revitalize one's mind before retiring in the evening.
Stand Still Like the Hummingbird
Henry Miller - 1959
Many of them have appeared only in foreign magazines while others were printed in small limited editions which have gone out of print. Miller's genius for comedy is at its best in "Money and How It Gets That Way" -- a tongue-in-cheek parody of "economics" provoked by a postcard from Ezra Pound which asked if he "ever thought about money." His deep concern for the role of the artist in society appears in "An Open Letter to All and Sundry," and in "The Angel is My Watermark" he writes of his own passionate love affair with painting. "The Immorality of Morality" is an eloquent discussion of censorship. Some of the stories, such as "First Love," are autobiographical, and there are portraits of friends, such as "Patchen: Man of Anger and Light," and essays on other writers such as Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Sherwood Anderson and Ionesco.Taken together, these highly readable pieces reflect the incredible vitality and variety of interests of the writer who extended the frontiers of modern literature with Tropic of Cancer and other great books.
The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution
Christopher Hill - 1972
Its success "might have established communal property, a far wider democracy in political and legal institutions, might have disestablished the state church and rejected the protestant ethic." In The World Turned Upside Down, Christopher Hill studies the beliefs of such radical groups as the Diggers, the Ranters, the Levellers and others, and the social and emotional impulses that gave rise to them. The relations between rich and poor classes, the part played by wandering 'masterless men,' the outbursts of sexual freedom and deliberate blasphemy, the great imaginative creations of Milton and Bunyan - these and many other elements build up into a marvellously detailed and coherent portrait of this strange, sudden effusion of revolutionary beliefs. It is a portrait not of the bourgeois revolution that actually took place, but of the impulse towards a far more fundamental overturning of society."Incorporates some of Dr. Hill's most profound statements yet about the 17th-century revolution as a whole." -- The Economist
Only Dull People Are Brilliant at Breakfast
Oscar Wilde - 2016
- Oscar Wilde
City of God
E.L. Doctorow - 2000
He is a virtual repository of the predominant ideas and historical disasters of the age. But now he has found a story he thinks may be-come his next novel: The large brass cross that hung behind the altar of St. Timothy's, a run-down Episcopal church in lower Manhattan, has disappeared...and even more mysteriously reappeared on the roof of the Synagogue for Evolutionary Judaism, on the Upper West Side. The church's maverick rector and the young woman rabbi who leads the synagogue are trying to learn who committed this strange double act of desecration and why. Befriending them, the novelist finds that their struggles with their respective traditions are relevant to the case. Into his workbook go his taped interviews, insights, preliminary drafts...and as he joins the clerics in pursuit of the mystery, it broadens to implicate a large cast of vividly drawn characters - including scientists, war veterans, prelates, Holocaust survivors, cabinet members, theologians, New York Times reporters, filmmakers, and crooners - in what proves to be a quest for an authentic spirituality at the end of this tortured century.Daringly poised at the junction of the sacred and the profane, and filled with the sights and sounds of New York, this dazzlingly inventive masterwork emerges as the American novel readers have been thirsting for a defining document of our times, a narrative of the twentieth century written for the twenty-first.
Anthology of Classical Myth
Stephen M. Trzaskoma - 2004
Ancient interpretation of myth is represented here in selections from the allegorists Heraclitus, Cornutus and Fulgentius, the rationalists Palaephatus and Diodorus of Sicily, and the philosophers and historians Plato, Herodotus and Thucydides. Appendices treat evidence from inscriptions, papyri and Linear B tablets and include a thematic index, a mythological dictionary, and genealogies. A thoughtful Introduction supports students working with the primary sources and the other resources offered here; an extensive note to instructors offers suggestions on how to incorporate this book into their courses.
Later Novels: A Lost Lady / The Professor’s House / Death Comes for the Archbishop / Shadows on the Rock / Lucy Gayheart / Sapphira and the Slave Girl
Willa Cather - 1990
Their formal perfection and expansiveness of feeling are an expression of Cather’s dedication both to art and to the open spaces of America.A Lost Lady (1923) exemplifies her principle of conciseness. It concerns a woman of uncommon loveliness and grace who lends an aura of sophistication to a frontier town, and explores the hidden passions and desires that confine those who idealize her. The recurrent conflict in Cather’s work between frontier culture and an encroaching commercialism is nowhere more powerfully articulated.The Professor’s House (1925) encapsulates a story within a story. In the framing narrative, Professor St. Peter, a prizewinning historian of the early Spanish explorers, finds himself disillusioned with family, career, even the house that reflects his success. Within this story is another, of St. Peter’s friend Tom Outland, whose brief but adventurous life still shadows those he loved.Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) tells the story of the first bishop of New Mexico in a series of tableaux modeled on the medieval lives of the saints. Cather affectionately portrays the refined French Bishop Latour and his more earthy assistant within the harsh and beautiful landscape of the Southwest and among the Mexicans, Indians, and settlers they were sent to serve.Shadows on the Rock (1931), though its setting and subject are unusual for Cather, expresses her fascination with the “curious endurance of a kind of culture, narrow but definite.” It is a re-creation of 17th-century Québec as it appears to the apothecary Auclaire and his daughter Cécile: the town’s narrow streets, the supply ships on its great river, its merchants, profligates, explorers, missionaries, and towering personalities like Frontenac and Laval, all parts of a colony struggling to survive.Lucy Gayheart (1935) returns to the themes of Cather’s earlier writings, in a more somber key. Talented, spontaneous, and eager to explore the possibilities of life, Lucy leaves her prairie home to pursue a career in music. After a happy interval, her life takes an increasingly disastrous turn.Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) marks a triumphant conclusion to Cather’s career as a novelist. Set in Virginia five years before the Civil War, the story shows the effects of slaveholding on Sapphira Colbert, a woman of spirit and common sense who is frighteningly capricious in dealing with people she “owns,” and on her husband, who hates slavery even while he conforms to the social order that permits it. When through kindness he refuses to sell a slave, Sapphira’s jealous reaction precipitates a sequence of events that registers a conflict of cultural as well as personal values.
The Book of Common Prayer
The Episcopal Church - 2011
OVERVIEWThe most recent Episcopal Book of Common Prayer from 1979 contains two rites for the most common services, the first from traditional language from previous versions, and the second using only contemporary language (some of it newly composed, and some adapted from the older language).This Kindle version of the Book of Common Prayer contains a fully interactive table of contents, index, as well as references and links to the actual pages numbers in the paper version of the Book.CONTENTS:The Book of Common PrayerAdministration of the SacramentsOther RitesCeremonies of the ChurchThe Psalter or Psalms of David
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
John Bartlett - 1855
This edition has been revised and edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Justin Kaplan.
The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose
John Donne - 1929
Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."
Basic Writings of Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche - 1967
Basic Writings of Nietzsche gathers the complete texts of five of Nietzsche's most important works, from his first book to his last: The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner, and Ecce Homo. Edited and translated by the great Nietzsche scholar Walter Kaufmann, this volume also features seventy-five aphorisms, selections from Nietzsche's correspondence, and variants from drafts for Ecce Homo. It is a definitive guide to the full range of Nietzsche's thought.Includes a Modern Library Reading Group Guide
The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism
Karen Armstrong - 2000
Why? This is the fascinating, disturbing question that bestselling author Karen Armstrong addresses in her brilliant new book The Battle for God. Writing with the broad perspective and deep understanding of human spirituality that won huge audiences for A History of God, Armstrong illuminates the spread of militant piety as a phenomenon peculiar to our moment in history.Contrary to popular belief, fundamentalism is not a throwback to some ancient form of religion but rather a response to the spiritual crisis of the modern world. As Armstrong argues, the collapse of a piety rooted in myth and cult during the Renaissance forced people of faith to grasp for new ways of being religious--and fundamentalism was born. Armstrong focuses here on three fundamentalist movements: Protestant fundamentalism in America, Jewish fundamentalism in Israel, and Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt and Iran--exploring how each has developed its own unique way of combating the assaults of modernity.Blending history, sociology, and spirituality, The Battle for God is a compelling and compassionate study of a radical form of religious expression that is critically shaping the course of world history.
The Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome
E.M. Berens - 1880
Including sections on Greek and Roman Gods, Minor Deities, Heroes and the practices of the time, it also includes a large number of illustrations. This version has been specially formatted for today's e-readers, and is a fantastic addition to any eBook collection. Whether you are a student of ancient history, or just want to know more about Zeus, Saturn, Icarus and the