The book introduces readers to an unlikely hero in the titular “ugly American”—and to the ignorant politicians and arrogant ambassadors who ignore his empathetic and commonsense advice. In linked stories and vignettes set in the fictional nation of Sarkhan, William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick draw an incisive portrait of American foreign policy gone dangerously wrong—and how it might be fixed.Eerily relevant sixty years after its initial publication, The Ugly American reminds us that “today, as the battle for hearts and minds has shifted to the Middle East, we still can’t speak Sarkhanese” (New York Times).

    From Sherwood Anderson to Virginia Woolf, this anthology encompasses a rich global and historical mix of the very best works of short fiction and presents them in a way students will find accessible, engaging, and relevant. The book's unique integration of biographical and critical background gives students a more intimate understanding of the works and their authors.Contents:Part I. Introduction. The art of the short story.-- Part II. Stories [A-J]. Chinua Achebe: Dead men's path ; Author's perspective, Achebe: modern Africa as the crossroads of culture -- Sherwood Anderson: Hands ; Author's perspective, Anderson: Words not plot give form to a short story -- Margaret Atwood: Happy endings ; Author's perspective, Atwood: On the Canadian identity -- James Baldwin: Sonny's blues ; Author's perspective, Baldwin: Race and the African-American writer -- Jorge Luis Borges: The garden of forking paths ; Author's perspective, Borges: Literature as experience -- Albert Camus: The guest ; Author's perspective, Camus: Revolution and repression in Algeria -- Raymond Carver: Cathedral ; A small, good thing ; Author's perspective, Carver: Commonplace but precise language -- Willa Cather: Paul's case ; Author's perspective, Cather: Art as the process of simplification -- John Cheever: The swimmer ; Author's perspective, Cheever: Why I write short stories -- Anton Chekhov: The lady with the pet dog ; Misery ; Author's perspective, Chekhov: Natural description and "The center of gravity" -- Kate Chopin: The storm ; The story of an hour ; Author's perspective, Chopin: My writing method -- Sandra Cisneros: Barbie-Q ; Author's perspective, Cisneros: Bilingual style -- Joseph Conrad: The secret sharer ; Author's perspective, Conrad: The condition of art -- Stephen Crane: The open boat ; Author's perspective, Crane: The sinking of the Commodore -- Ralph Ellison: A party down at the square ; Author's perspective, Ellison: Race and fiction -- William Faulkner: Barn burning ; A rose for Emily ; Author's perspective, Faulkner: The human heart in conflict with itself -- F. Scott Fitzgerald: Babylon revisited ; Author's perspective, Fitzgerald: On his own literary aims -- Gustave Flaubert: A simple heart ; Author's perspective, Flaubert: The labor of style -- Gabriel García Marquez: A very old man with enormous wings ; Author's perspective, García Marquez: My beginnings as a writer -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The yellow wallpaper ; Author's perspective, Gilman: Why I wrote "The yellow wallpaper" -- Nikolai Gogol: The overcoat ; Author's perspective, Gogol: On realism -- Nadine Gordimer: A company of laughing faces ; Author's perspective, Gordimer: How the short story differs from the novel -- Nathaniel Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown ; The birthmark ; Author's perspective, Hawthorne: On the public failure of his early stories -- Ernest Hemingway: A clean, well-lighted place ; Author's perspective, Hemingway: One true sentence -- Zora Neale Hurston: Sweat ; Author's perspective, Hurston: Eatonville when you look at it -- Shirley Jackson: The lottery ; Author's perspective, Jackson: The public reception of "The lottery" -- Henry James: The real thing ; Author's perspective, James: The mirror of a consciousness -- Ha Jin: Saboteur ; Author's perspective, Jin: Deciding to write in English -- James Joyce : Araby ; The dead ; Author's perspective, Joyce: Epiphanies. Contents: Part II[ Cont.]. Stories [K-W]. Franz Kafka: Before the law ; The metamorphosis ; Author's perspective, Kafka: Discussing The metamorphosis -- D.H. Lawrence: Odour of Chrysanthemums ; The rocking-horse winner ; Author's perspective, Lawrence: The novel is the bright book of life -- Ursula K. Le Guin: the ones who walk away from Omelas ; Author's perspective, Le Guin: On "The ones who walk away from Omelas" -- Doris Lessing: A woman on a roof ; Author's perspective, Lessing: My beginnings as a writer -- Jack London: To build a fire ; Author's perspective, London: Defending the factuality of "To build a fire" -- Katherine Mansfield: Miss Brill ; The garden-party ; Author's perspective, Mansfield: On "The garden-party" -- Bobbie Ann Mason: Shiloh ; Author's perspective, Mason: Minimalist fiction -- Guy de Maupassant: The necklace ; Author's perspective, Maupassant: The realist method -- Herman Melville: Bartleby, the scrivener : a story of Wall-Street ; Author's perspective, Melville: American literature -- Yukio Mishima: Patriotism ; Author's perspective, Mishima: Physical courage and death -- Alice Munro: How I met my husband ; Author's perspective, Munro: How I write short stories -- Joyce Carol Oates: where are you going, where have you been? ; Author's perspective, Oates: Productivity and the critics -- Flannery O'Connor: A good man is hard to find ; Revelation ; Author's perspective, O'Connor: The element of suspense in "A good man is hard to find" -- Edgar Allan Poe: The fall of the House of Usher ; The Tell-tale heart ; Author's perspective, Poe: The tale and its effect -- Katherine Anne Porter: Flowering Judas ; Author's perspective, Porter: Writing "Flowering Judas" -- Leslie Marmon Silko: The man to send rain clouds ; Author's perspective, Silko: the basis of "The man to send rain clouds" -- Isaac Bashevis singer: Gimpel the Fool ; Author's perspective, Singer: The character of Gimpel -- Leo Tolstoy: The death of Ivan Ilych ; Author's perspective, Tolstoy: The moral responsibility of art -- John Updike: Separating ; Author's perspective, Why write? -- Alice Walker: Everyday use ; Author's perspective, Walker: The Black woman writer in America -- Eudora Welty: Why I live at the P.O. ; Author's perspective, Welty: The plot of the short story -- Edith Wharton: Roman fever ; Author's perspective, Wharton: The subject of short stories -- Virginia Woolf: A haunted house ; Author's perspective, Woolf: Women and fiction. Contents: Part III. Writing. The elements of short fiction -- Writing about fiction -- Critical approaches to literature. Formalist criticism: Light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" / Michael Clark -- Biographical criticism: Chekhov's attitude to romantic love / Virginia Llewellyn Smith -- Historical criticism: The Argentine context of Borges's fantastic fiction / John King -- Psychological criticism: The father-figure in "The tell-tale heart" / Daniel Hoffman -- Mythological criticism: Myth in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" / Edmond Volpe -- "Sociological criticism: Money and labor in "The rocking-horse winner" / Daniel P. Watkins -- Gender criticism: Gender and pathology in "The yellow wallpaper" / Juliann Fleenor -- Reader-response criticism: An Eskimo "A Rose for Emily" / Stanley Fish -- Deconstructionist criticism: The death of the author / Roland Barthes -- Cultural studies: What is cultural studies? / Makr Bauerlein. Part IV. Glossary of literary terms.

    This collection includes: "The Glass Essay," a powerful poem about the end of a love affair, told in the context of Carson's reading of the Brontë sisters; "Book of Isaiah," a poem evoking the deeply primitive feel of ancient Judaism; and "The Fall of Rome," about her trip to "find" Rome and her struggle to overcome feelings of a terrible alienation there.

    Now Grove Press is proud to reissue this contemporary classic by one of America's most important living writers, in a new edition of 'A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain' that includes two subsequently published stories -- "Salem" and "Missing" -- that brilliantly complete the collection's narrative journey, returning to the jungles of Vietnam.

    Biography, memoir, narrative history, reportage, the travel account: all these forms now have their interesting and original practitioners in India. In this Granta issue they tackle questions ranging from rape in village India to scandal in Mumbai clubs. And there is room, as always, for the best of India's fiction.

    Tales and sketches dealing with Hudson Valley traditions and life in England as seen by an American observer.

    Structured around the forty questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin-American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction of the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants with the reality of racism and fear both here and back home."

    However, since all of the letters referenced in the film did exist, we decided to publish this gorgeous keepsake ourselves.Love Letters of Great Men follows hot on the heels of the film and collects together some of history's most romantic letters from the private papers of Beethoven, Mark Twain, Mozart, and Lord Byron. For some of these great men, love is a delicious poison (William Congreve); for others, a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire, & books & music (Charles Darwin). Love can scorch like the heat of the sun (Henry VIII), or penetrate the depths of one's heart like a cooling rain (Flaubert). Every shade of love is here, from the exquisite eloquence of Oscar Wilde and the simple devotion of Robert Browning, to the wonderfully modern misery of the Roman Pliny the Younger, losing himself in work to forget how much he misses his beloved wife, Calpurnia.Taken together, these letters show that perhaps men haven't changed all that much over the last 2,000 years--passion, jealousy, hope and longing still rule their hearts and minds. In an age of e-mail and texted i luv us, this timeless and unique collection reminds us that nothing can compare to the simple joy of sitting down to read a letter from the one you love.

    There are more than 130 illustrators represented and 190 literary works over three volumes—many newly commissioned, some hard to find—reinterpreted here for readers and collectors of all ages.Volume 1 takes us on a visual tour from the earliest literature through the end of the 1700s. Along the way, we're treated to eye-popping renditions of the human race's greatest epics: Gilgamesh, The Iliad, The Odyssey (in watercolors by Gareth Hinds), The Aeneid, Beowulf, and The Arabian Nights, plus later epics The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales (both by legendary illustrator and graphic designer Seymour Chwast), Paradise Lost, and Le Morte D'Arthur. Two of ancient Greece's greatest plays are adapted—the tragedy Medea by Euripides and Tania Schrag’s uninhibited rendering of the very bawdy comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes (the text of which is still censored in many textbooks). Also included is Robert Crumb’s rarely-seen adaptation of James Boswell’s London Journal, filled with philosophical debate and lowbrow debauchery.Religious literature is well-covered and well-illustrated, with the Books of Daniel and Esther from the Old Testament, Rick Geary’s awe-inspiring new rendition of the Book of Revelation from the New Testament, the Tao te Ching, Rumi’s Sufi poetry, Hinduism’s Mahabharata, and the Mayan holy book Popol Vuh, illustrated by Roberta Gregory. The Eastern canon gets its due, with The Tale of Genji (the world’s first novel, done in full-page illustrations reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley), three poems from China’s golden age of literature lovingly drawn by pioneering underground comics artist Sharon Rudahl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a Japanese Noh play, and other works from Asia.Two of Shakespeare’s greatest plays (King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and two of his sonnets are here, as are Plato’s Symposium, Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Renaissance poetry of love and desire, and Don Quixote visualized by the legendary Will Eisner.Some unexpected twists in this volume include a Native American folktale, an Incan play, Sappho’s poetic fragments, bawdy essays by Benjamin Franklin, the love letters of Abelard and Heloise, and the decadent French classic Dangerous Liaisons, as illustrated by MollyCrabapple.   Edited by Russ Kick, The Graphic Canon is an extraordinary collection that will continue with Volume 2: "Kubla Khan" to the Bronte Sisters to The Picture of Dorian Gray in Summer 2012, and Volume 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest in Fall 2012. A boxed set of all three volumes will also be published in Fall 2012.

    Bennett's bestselling The Book of Virtues is an inspiring anthology that helps children understand and develop moral character—and helps parents teach it to them.Responsibility. Courage. Compassion. Honesty. Friendship. Persistence. Faith. Everyone recognizes these traits as essentials of good character. In order for our children to develop such traits, we have to offer them examples of good and bad, right and wrong. And the best places to find them are in great works of literature and exemplary stories from history. William J. Bennett has collected hundreds of stories in The Book of Virtues. From the Bible to American history, from Greek mythology to English poetry, from fairy tales to modern fiction, these stories are a rich mine of moral literacy, a reliable moral reference point that will help anchor our children and ourselves in our culture, our history, and our traditions—the sources of the ideals by which we wish to live our lives. Complete with instructive introductions and notes, The Book of Virtues is a book the whole family can read and enjoy—and learn from—together.

    The carefully chosen table of contents presents enough familiarity to reassure instructors, enough novelty to keep things interesting, and enough variety to accommodate many different teaching needs. The editorial apparatus has been designed to support that variety of needs without being intrusive. In its second edition, 50 Essays continues to offer selections that instructors love to teach, with even more flexibility and more support for academic writing.

    So opens the singular testimony of the poet Thomas Lynch who like many poets is inspired by death, but unlike the others, he is also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as the funeral director. In the conduct of these duties he has kept his eyes open, his ears tuned to the indispensable vernaculars of love and grief. Here is the voice of both witness and functionary. Lynch stands between the living and the living who have died with outrage and amazement, awe and calm, straining for the brief glimpse we all get of what mortality means to a vital species.

    Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real architects of change. There is no doubt that we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four-letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page and minority rights were ridiculous.” Anne Waldman, a renowned poet and longtime friend of many of these writers, has gathered in this volume a range of the best and most exemplary writings of the Beat poets and novelists. Selections from the Beat classics appear, as well as more recent prose and poetry demonstrating the continued vitality of the Beat experiment. Included are short biographies of the contributors, an extensive bibliography of Beat literature, and a unique guide to “Beat places” around the world—from Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, where his novel Dr. Sax takes place, to Tangier, where Burroughs wrote parts of Naked Lunch.

    Dubbed "Bitter Bierce" for his vitriolic wit and biting satire, his fame rests largely on a celebrated compilation of barbed epigrams, The Devil's Dictionary, and a book of short stories (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891). Most of the 16 selections in this volume have been taken from the latter collection.The stories in this edition include: "What I Saw at Shiloh," "A Son of the Gods," "Four Days in Dixie," "One of the Missing," "A Horseman in the Sky," "The Coup de Grace," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "The Story of Conscience," "One Kind of Officer," "Chickamauga," and five more.Bierce's stories employ a buildup of suggestive realistic detail to produce grim and vivid tales often disturbing in their mood of fatalism and impending calamity. Hauntingly suggestive, they offer excellent examples of the author's dark pessimism and storytelling power.--back coverContents:1 What I Saw of Shiloh2 Four Days in Dixie3 A Horseman in the Sky4 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge5 Chickamauga6 A Son of the Gods7 One of the Missing8 Killed at Resaca9 The Affair at Coulter's Notch10 The Coup de Grâce11 Parker Adderson, Philosopher12 An Affair of Outposts13 The Story of a Conscience14 One Kind of Officer15 George Thurston16 The Mocking-bird

    In this debut collection, she conjures the disturbing and often hilarious experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God.Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat — dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck — these seven stories showcase Zhang's compassion and moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy's Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again.