Building on the strengths of the first edition, the volume is designed to introduce the reader to the guiding concepts of present literary and cultural debate by presenting substantial extracts from the period's most seminal thinkers.

    Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. “Vidal’s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine.” — San Francisco Chronicle

    In Promised Land, Jay Parini repossesses that vibrant intellectual heritage by examining the life and times of 'thirteen books that changed America.' Each of the books has been a watershed, gathering intellectual currents already in motion and marking a turn in American life and thought. Their influence remains pervasive, however hidden, and in his essays Parini demonstrates how these books entered American life and altered how we think and act in the world."-- from the book's front flap

    Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... François Fénelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years--resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

    Now, Weir follows up with another terrifically moving- and often disarmingly funny-book about loss, survival, and sexuality in the post-AIDS era. Returning to a Manhattan haunted by the memory of all the young men who died in the late 1980s and early 90s, "What I Did Wrong" has at its heart a protagonist for whom that loss is still all too palpable. Tom, a forty-two-year-old English professor, watched his best friend die years earlier and now finds himself sliding into middle age while questioning everything he thought he knew about his "gay identity." His Queens College classes are filled with borough boys displaying their own bravado along with their confused masculinity. As Tom balances their friendship with the occasional displaced erotic overtones, he finds an unexpected common ground with these proud young men and, surprisingly, claims his place in the world and in history. "What I Did Wrong" is a dazzling work juxtaposing low comedy and heartfelt tragedy with astonishing finesse, a book worthy of John Weir's return to fiction that will be warmly welcomed by critics and readers alike.

    . . nevertheless, here it is: a learned, witty study of how our curious culture has managed to get everything wrong about sex."-Gore Vidal

    Unfortunately, a stint at the airport lounge's tea vending machine does not seem to be getting her any closer to her dreams. To pass the time she daydreams, chats with air-hostesses and takes part in mock anti-terrorist drills. At home, she studies her English, fights with her twin and engages in a secret love affair with her cousin and neighbour, Eza. But when a scandal threatens her tenuous happiness, she must pull out all stops on her overactive imagination, and seek a terrible revenge.

    Some of them were entirely lost…a great chastening is upon them unlike any the ancient Christian world has ever seen.” - Alcuin of York, Letter to Arno King Horic is dead. The oaths that once bonded the Danes and Northmen in the islands of Aquitaine have broken. Hasting's new land is imperiled by fearsome challengers and old foes alike. A rumor from the continent will shatter the brittle veneer of his strength and expose his deepest wound from the past. His greatest trial will not be fought with a sword, ax, or shield, but with his heart. A supposed son of Ragnar Lodbrok, and referred to in the Gesta Normannorum as the Scourge of the Somme and Loire, his life exemplified the qualities of the ideal Viking. Join author and historian C.J. Adrien on an adventure that explores the early life and adventures of the Viking Hasting and his crew.

    What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. "I think it's largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making," Phillips writes. "I think it has something to do with revision—how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well."

    They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.

    Uses of Literature bridges the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature.Explores the diverse motives and mysteries of why we readOffers four different ways of thinking about why we read literature: for recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shockArgues for a new "phenomenology" in literary studies that incorporates the historical and social dimensions of readingIncludes examples of literature from a wide range of national literary traditions

    Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry.Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

    Thus did Harriet Beecher Stowe announce her decision to beginwork on what would become one of the most influential novels ever written. The subject she had hesitated to meddle with was slavery, and the novel, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin. Still debated today for its portrayal of African Americans and its unresolved place in the literary canon, Stowe'sbest-known work was first published in weekly installments from June 5, 1851 to April 1, 1852. It caused such a stir in both the North and South, and even in Great Britain, that when Stowe met President Lincoln in 1862 he is said to have greeted her with the words, So you are the little woman whowrote the book that created this great war! In this landmark book, the first full-scale biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe in over fifty years, Joan D. Hedrick tells the absorbing story of this gifted, complex, and contradictory woman. Hedrick takes readers into the multilayered world of nineteenth century morals and mores, exploring theinfluence of then-popular ideas of true womanhood on Stowe's upbringing as a member of the outspoken Beecher clan, and her eventful life as a writer and shaper of public opinion who was also a mother of seven. It offers a lively record of the flourishing parlor societies that launched andsustained Stowe throughout the 44 years of her career, and the harsh physical realities that governed so many women's lives. The epidemics, high infant mortality, and often disastrous medical practices of the day are portrayed in moving detail, against the backdrop of western expansion, and thegreat social upheaval accompanying the abolitionist movement and the entry of women into public life. Here are Stowe's public triumphs, both before and after the Civil War, and the private tragedies that included the death of her adored eighteen month old son, the drowning of another son, and the alcohol and morphine addictions of two of her other children. The daughter, sister, and wife ofprominent ministers, Stowe channeled her anguish and her ambition into a socially acceptable anger on behalf of others, transforming her private experience into powerful narratives that moved a nation. Magisterial in its breadth and rich in detail, this definitive portrait explores the full measure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's life, and her contribution to American literature. Perceptive and engaging, it illuminates the career of a major writer during the transition of literature from anamateur pastime to a profession, and offers a fascinating look at the pains, pleasures, and accomplishments of women's lives in the last century.

    P. Blackmur. In his prefaces, James tackles the great problems of fiction writing :character, plot, point of view, inspiration;and explains how he came to write novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and The American. As Blackmur puts it, "criticism has never been more ambitious, nor more useful." As a guide not only to James's inspiration and execution, but also to his frustrations and triumphs, this volume will be valuable both to students of his fiction and to aspiring writers.

    One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.