Sula Peace has rejected the life Nel has embraced, escaping to college, and submerging herself in city life. When she returns to her roots, it is as a rebel and a wanton seductress. Eventually, both women must face the consequences of their choices. Together, they create an unforgettable portrait of what it means and costs to be a black woman in America.

    "Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage," observed James Baldwin shortly before A Raisin in the Sun opened on Broadway in 1959.Indeed Lorraine Hansberry's award-winning drama about the hopes and aspirations of a struggling, working-class family living on the South Side of Chicago connected profoundly with the psyche of black America--and changed American theater forever.  The play's title comes from a line in Langston Hughes's poem "Harlem," which warns that a dream deferred might "dry up/like a raisin in the sun.""The events of every passing year add resonance to A Raisin in the Sun," said The New York Times.  "It is as if history is conspiring to make the play a classic."  This Modern Library edition presents the fully restored, uncut version of Hansberry's landmark work with an introduction by Robert Nemiroff.

    The Triggering Town is Hugo's now-classic collection of lectures, essays, and reflections, all "directed toward helping with that silly, absurd, maddening, futile, enormously rewarding activity: writing poems." Anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, will benefit greatly from Hugo's sayd, playful, profound insights and advice concerning the mysteries of literary creation.

    The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: Birdie appears to be white, while Cole is dark enough to fit in with the other kids at the Afrocentric school they attend. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart. Their father's new black girlfriend won't even look at Birdie, while their mother gives her life over to the Movement: at night the sisters watch mysterious men arrive with bundles shaped like rifles.One night Birdie watches her father and his girlfriend drive away with Cole—they have gone to Brazil, she will later learn, where her father hopes for a racial equality he will never find in the States. The next morning—in the belief that the Feds are after them—Birdie and her mother leave everything behind: their house and possessions, their friends, and—most disturbing of all—their identity. Passing as the daughter and wife of a deceased Jewish professor, Birdie and her mother finally make their home in New Hampshire.Desperate to find Cole, yet afraid of betraying her mother and herself to some unknown danger, Birdie must learn to navigate the white world—so that when she sets off in search of her sister, she is ready for what she will find. At once a powerful coming-of-age story and a groundbreaking work on identity and race in America, "Caucasia deserves to be read all over" (Glamour).

    

    

    It began life as a slapstick comedy about Siamese twins, but as he wrote, something deepened. "The tale kept spreading along, and spreading along, and other people got to intruding themselves and taking up more and more time with their talk and their affairs. It changed from a farce to a tragedy while I was going along with it," Twain wrote in his frank afternote to the novel. In the end, the voice that comes to dominate the tale is Roxana's, a light-skinned slave who switches her infant son with her master's son to keep him from being sold down the river. Roxana, Twain's most complex and fully-realized adult female character, is a compelling and memorable tragic heroine, trapped with her son by the brutal system of slavery and by their own inescapable racial identities. At his best, Twain is the most uniquely American of writers, and it is inevitable that his best work revolves around the issues of race and of slavery embedded in the American psyche. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson is a dark and powerful novel of race in America, written by the American master.

    The book's hallmark values-accuracy, currency, and passion for teaching and learning-have made Campbell/Reece the most successful book for readers for seven consecutive editions. More than 6 million readers have benefited from "BIOLOGY's"clear explanations, carefully crafted artwork, and student-friendly narrative style.Introduction: Themes in the Study of Life, The Chemical Context of Life, Water and the Fitness of the Environment, Carbon and the Molecular Diversity of Life, The Structure and Function of Large Biological Molecules, A Tour of the Cell, Membrane Structure and Function, An Introduction to Metabolism, Cellular Respiration: Harvesting Chemical Energy, Photosynthesis, Cell Communication, The Cell Cycle, Meiosis and Sexual Life Cycles, Mendel and the Gene Idea, The Chromosomal Basis of Inheritance, The Molecular Basis of Inheritance, From Gene to Protein, Control of Gene Expression, Viruses, Biotechnology, Genomes and Their Evolution, Descent with Modification: A Darwinian View of Life, The Evolution of Populations, The Origin of Species, The History of Life on Earth, Phylogeny and the Tree of Life, Bacteria and Archaea, Protists, Plant Diversity I: How Plants Colonized Land, Plant Diversity II: The Evolution of Seed Plants, Fungi, An Introduction to Animal Diversity, Invertebrates, Vertebrates, Plant Structure, Growth, and Development, Transport in Vascular Plants, Soil and Plant Nutrition, Angiosperm Reproduction and Biotechnology, Plant Responses to Internal and External Signals, Basic Principles of Animal Form and Function, Animal Nutrition, Circulation and Gas Exchange, The Immune System, Osmoregulation and Excretion, Hormones and the Endocrine System, Animal Reproduction, Animal Development, Neurons, Synapses, and Signaling, Nervous Systems, Sensory and Motor Mechanisms, Animal Behavior, An Introduction to Ecology and the Biosphere, Population Ecology, Community Ecology, Ecosystems, Conservation Biology and Restoration Ecology.For readers interested in learning the basics of Biology.

    In the 1920s and since, it has also given white readers a startling new perspective on their own culture, revealing to many the double standard of racial identity imposed on black Americans.Narrated by a mulatto man whose light skin allows him to "pass" for white, the novel describes a pilgrimage through America's color lines at the turn of the century--from a black college in Jacksonville to an elite New York nightclub, from the rural South to the white suburbs of the Northeast.This is a powerful, unsentimental examination of race in America, a hymn to the anguish of forging an identity in a nation obsessed with color. And, as Arna Bontemps pointed out decades ago, "the problems of the artist [as presented here] seem as contemporary as if the book had been written this year."

    As Williams's first popular success, it launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career, of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, Menagaerie has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world. The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition. A new introduction by the editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, Robert Bray, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes." (back cover)

    It also includes information on feature writing, from stories and reviews to column-writing.

    L. Rosenthal's classic selection of Yeats's poems and plays has attracted hundreds of thousands of readers. This newly revised edition includes 211 poems and 4 plays. It adds The Words Upon the Window-Pane, one of Yeats's most startling dramatic works in its realistic use of a seance as the setting for an eerily powerful reenactment of Jonathan Swift's rigorous idealism, baffling love relationships, and tragic madness. The collection profits from recent scholarship that has helped to establish Yeats's most reliable texts, in the order set by the poet himself. And his powerful lyrical sequences are amply represented, culminating in the selection from Last Poems and Two Plays, which reaches its climax in the brilliant poetic plays The Death of Cuchulain and Purgatory. Scholars, students, and all who delight in Yeats's varied music and sheer quality will rejoice in this expanded edition. As the introduction observes, "Early and late he has the simple, indispensable gift of enchanting the ear....He was also the poet who, while very much of his own day in Ireland, spoke best to the people of all countries. And though he plunged deep into arcane studies, his themes are most clearly the general ones of life and death, love and hate, man's condition, and history's meanings. He began as a sometimes effete post-Romantic, heir to the pre-Raphaelites, and then, quite naturally, became a leading British Symbolist; but he grew at last into the boldest, most vigorous voice of this century." Selected Poems and Four Plays represents the essential achievement of the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in English.

    Ewing's narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical circumstances, and identifies everyday objects - hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook - as precious icons.Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant: a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what Black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up.

    

    Some take a more traditional form, some are highly experimental, but what these poems share is a lyrical intelligence and musical gift that has been visible in his work since his first book of poems, Nil Nil, in 1993.Addressed to children, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, musicians, poets and dogs, these poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Here, voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the storm cave and the séance, the coalshed, the war, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. These are voices frustrated by distance, by shot glass and bar rail, by the dark, leaving the 'sound that fades up from the hiss, / like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, / now full of its only note, its lonely call . . .'In 40 Poems Paterson returns to some of his central themes - contradiction and strangeness, tension and transformation, the dream world, and the divided self - in some of the most powerful and formally assured poems he has written to date. This is a rich and accomplished new work from one of the foremost poets writing in English today.