A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."

    It has been unavailable for an ice age, and Coach House Books is proud to bring it back.'Crystallography' means the study of crystals, but also, taken literally, 'lucid writing.' The book exists in the intersection of poetry and science, exploring the relationship between language and crystals - looking at language as a crystal, a space in which the chaos of individual parts align to expose a perfect formation of structure. As Bök himself says, 'a word is a bit of crystal in formation,' suggesting there is a space in which words, like crystals, can resonate pure form.Lucid, sparkling, a diamond of a book: Crystallography is a crystal-clear approach to the science of poetry from the author of Eunoia.

    TV nerds have "The Walking Dead." Fiction fans have World War Z. Now, a cross-section of some of the best contemporary poets from the stage and the page rise up and shamble their way through an anthology of post-apocalyptic zombie poetry edited by Write Bloody author and GeekWeek.com personality Rob "Ratpack Slim" Sturma. Funny, creepy, shocking, and even poignant, this collection challenges award winning authors like Scott Woods, Laura Yes Yes, and Khary Jackson to shake the dust off of old conventions, pull the triggers on their imaginations, and...Aim For The Head.

    S. Eliot's letters lies at the heart of this emotionally charged novel—a story of marriage and madness, of faith and desire, of jazz-age New York and Europe in the shadow of the Holocaust.

    Over four hundred letters chronicle the author's career, recording his struggles in the publishing world, the battles over "Lolita," and his relationship with his wife.

    1 SOFTCOVER BOOK

    

    In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.

    He loves her more, while she shoves him aside and devotes her attention to their son.

    

    Some of the letters collected here are eloquent declarations of love and longing; others contain wrenching accounts of fear, jealousy and betrayal; many share sweet dreams of home. But in all the correspondence – whether from British, American, French, German, Russian, Australian and Canadian troops in the height of battle, or from the heartbroken wives and sweethearts left behind – there lies a truly human portrait of love and war. Each of the letters, many of which have never before been published, is introduced by a brief piece about the characters, some of whom were parted for ever by the tragedy of war; others reunited. A century on from the start of the First World War, these letters offer an intimate glimpse into the hearts of men and women separated by conflict, and show how love can transcend even the bleakest and most devastating of realities.

    First publication for Kerouac's 'lost novel.

    They stay with you like a significant memory.”—Roger Rosenblatt“Van Booy is a remarkable young writer. Taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, in spite of their evanescence, are frozen for a moment in these stories and celebrated, along with their subtle interconnection, in all the aspects of love.”—Fred VolkmerThe Secret Lives of People in Love is the first short story collection by award-winning writer Simon Van Booy. These stories, set in Kentucky, New York, Paris, Rome, and Greece, are a perfect synthesis of grace, intensity, atmosphere, and compassion. Love, loss, frailty, human contact, and isolation are Van Booy’s themes. In radiant prose he writes about the difficult choices we make in order to retain our humanity and about the redemptive power of love in a violent world.Born in London, Simon Van Booy grew up in Wales. A keen rugby player, he was recruited to play football for Campbellsville University in Kentucky. He eventually returned to England, where he graduated from Dartington College of Arts. Now a New Yorker, he teaches at the School of Visual Arts and in the Bard College Clemente Course. As a freelance journalist, he writes for several New York newspapers. He has won a first-place award for in-depth reporting from the New York Press Association.

    Haunting, troubling, and mesmerizing, it shines a brilliant, unwavering light into the darkest recesses of a man’s psyche.To all appearances, John Wilder has all the trappings of success, circa 1960: a promising career in advertising, a loving family, a beautiful apartment, even a country home. John’s evenings are spent with associates at quiet Manhattan lounges and his weekends with friends at glittering cocktail parties. But something deep within this seemingly perfect life has long since gone wrong. Something has disturbed John’s fragile peace, and he can no longer find solace in fleeting affairs or alcohol. The anger, the drinking, and the recklessness are building to a crescendo—and they’re about to take down John’s family and his career. What happens next will send John on a long, strange journey—at once tragic and inevitable.

    Skeat. This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1889 edition by the Clarendon Press, Oxford.