The Brontës Complete Works


Charlotte Brontë - 2011
    Collected in this giant book is the collective works of Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Bronte (along with their father Patrick Bronte). Included in this edition: Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Cottage Poems, The Professor, Shirley, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Villette, Wuthering Heights and many others.

Opened Ground: Selected Poems, 1966-1996


Seamus Heaney - 1997
    With these metaphors in place, he makes clear his difficult poetic task: to delve into the past, both personal and historic, while remaining ever mindful of the potentially fatal power of language.Born and raised in Northern Ireland, where any hint of Gaelic tradition in one's speech was considered a political act, Heaney is all too aware of the dire consequences of speaking one's mind. Indeed, during times of crisis, he has been expected to appear on television and dispense political wisdom. Most often, however, he stays out of the fray and opts for a supreme sense of empathy to guide his words. As excavator--of earth, of his beloved Gaelic, of his own life--Heaney is unmatched. In "Bone Dreams", the archaeologist's task is synonymous with reaching for a cultural past: I push back through dictions, Elizabethan canopies, Norman devices, the erotic mayflowers of Provence and the ivied Latins of churchmen to the scop's twang, the iron flash of consonants cleaving the line.And in early poems like "Blackberry Picking", Heaney's images--deftly, delightfully--carry us back to childhood fields: At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full... Opened Ground is a pleasure and a triumph. These three decades of work confirm Heaney as one of the most important poets of his time. --Martha Silano

Going to Meet the Man


James Baldwin - 1965
    But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it." The men and women in these eight short fictions grasp this truth on an elemental level, and their stories, as told by James Baldwin, detail the ingenious and often desperate ways in which they try to keep their head above water. It may be the heroin that a down-and-out jazz pianist uses to face the terror of pouring his life into an inanimate instrument. It may be the brittle piety of a father who can never forgive his son for his illegitimacy. Or it may be the screen of bigotry that a redneck deputy has raised to blunt the awful childhood memory of the day his parents took him to watch a black man being murdered by a gleeful mob.By turns haunting, heartbreaking, and horrifying--and informed throughout by Baldwin's uncanny knowledge of the wounds racism has left in both its victims and its perpetrators--Going to Meet the Man is a major work by one of our most important writers.

The Damnation of Theron Ware: Or Illumination


Harold Frederic - 1896
    The Damnation of Theron Ware (published in England as Illumination) is an 1896 novel by American author Harold Frederic. It is widely considered a classic of American literature by scholars and critics though the common reader often has not heard of it. The novel reveals a great deal about early 20th century provincial America, religious life, and the depressed state of intellectual and artistic culture in small towns. It is similar to Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh and Sinclair Lewis's Elmer Gantry. It is written in a realistic style.The novel centers on the life of a Methodist pastor named Theron Ware who has recently moved to a fictional small town in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, which Frederic modeled after Utica, New York. A promising young pastor recently married, Theron has a number of experiences that cause him to begin to question the Methodist religion, his role as a minister and even the very existence of God. His moral decline (or illumination) is heightened through his dealings with Father Forbes, the town's Catholic priest; Dr. Ledsmar, a local atheist, philosopher, and man of science; and Celia Madden, a local Irish Catholic girl, with whom Theron becomes hopelessly infatuated.