With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America.It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

    Her use of quilting as a metaphor for the creative legacy that African Americans inherited from their maternal ancestors changed the way we define art, women's culture, and African American lives. By putting African American women's voices at the center of the narrative for the first time, "Everyday Use" anticipated the focus of an entire generation of black women writers. This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Walker's life, an authoritative text of "Everyday Use" and of "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens," an interview with Walker, six critical essays, and a bibliography. The contributors are Charlotte Pierce-Baker, Houston A. Baker, Jr., Thadious M. Davis, Margot Anne Kelley, John O'Brien, Elaine Showalter, and Mary Helen Washington.

    Would they buy a silver fox coat, or mink?

    Set in a place beyond good and evil - literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul - it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

    Dolan, WALDEN deconstructs higher education, the struggle for individualism, and the parade of conformity in one fell swoop of a very sharp pen. In the tradition of the great angry young men novels, WALDEN presents a humorous, shocking and thoroughly modern take on a young man's struggle for self. Tucked into one day, you ll find the grand themes of love and death, revolution and freedom, hope and enlightenment. And you ll find the Who and the Stones, back before they were doing Hummer commercials, CSI theme songs, and Microsoft jingles. Pick up a copy today, and join the revolution that is WALDEN. Says author Iain Levison, author of A Working Stiff's Manifesto: WALDEN is a story about the seamier side of campus life, a life far removed from the smiling faces on the college brochures. Mike Dolan has crafted a powerful and evocative story, full of anger, frustration and misdirected emotion, about a young man caught up in the anonymous and soul-crushing world of the educational system. Should be required reading for all college freshmen.

    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

    William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities—the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love—that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

    Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.

    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.

    As Socrates' student, Plato preserved the teachings of his great mentor in many famous "dialogues"; these deal with classic issues like law and justice, perception and reality, death and the soul, mind and body, reason and passion, and the nature of love. The dialogues also discuss the value of moral principle vs. the value of life itself; how to achieve virtue; and how each of us can fulfill our true nature.The most famous of all Platonic doctrines is the "theory of forms." This theory that any object's true reality is found in its rational form or structure rather than in its material appearance. And Plato's Republic presents his distinctive (and much criticized) vision of the ideal state.Plato believed that philosophy begins in the sense of wonder. With Socrates, he sees philosophy as reason, unhindered by feelings, emotions, and the senses. And from these two great thinkers we have received perhaps the most well known of all philosophical utterances: "the unexamined life is not worth living."

    There is a brief chronology of O'Hara's short life and an index of titles.

    Three years earlier, Thoreau had put his belief into action and refused to pay taxes because of the United States government's involvement in the Mexican War, which Thoreau firmly believed was unjust. For his daring and unprecedented act of protest, he was thrown in jail. The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is a celebrated dramatic presentation of this famous act of civil disobedience and its consequences. Its poignant, lively, and accessible scenes offer a compelling exploration of Thoreau's philosophy and life.

    An introduction by Norma Millay, written expressly for this volume, focuses on examples of the poet's variations in sonnet structure. Here is the voice of Millay, whose prophetic vision, devotion to freedom, and intellectual daring combine with her mastery of the sonnet form to speak eloquently for the human spirit.

    Rather than appealing to altruism, or calling for revolution in the global economy, the Epicurean philosophy turns the developed world's credo of 'greed is good' on its head, counselling that genuine happiness comes from the quieting of desire; from less, not more. And that might just be the mindset we need to rein in unsustainable development.In this thoughtful Penguin Special, Slattery traces the radicalism of classical Epicurean thought, and its popularity despite political suppression. Along the way, he tours the archaeological sites of the ancient village of Oinoanda in Turkey and the Villa of the Papyri, buried along with Pompeii, with its ancient library of petrified scrolls. Might some of this treasure's fragments, painstakingly restored, reveal answers to the big questions faced in the twenty-first century?

    One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth."The stories in The Way to Rainy Mountain are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself." —From the new Preface