What we as her audience take away from this remarkable drama is a keener sense that, while death is real and unavoidable, our lives are ours to cherish or throw away—a lesson that can be both uplifting and redemptive. As the playwright herself puts it, “The play is not about doctors or even about cancer. It’s about kindness, but it shows arrogance. It’s about compassion, but it shows insensitivity.” In Wit, Edson delves into timeless questions with no final answers: How should we live our lives knowing that we will die? Is the way we live our lives and interact with others more important than what we achieve materially, professionally, or intellectually? How does language figure into our lives? Can science and art help us conquer death, or our fear of it? What will seem most important to each of us about life as that life comes to an end?The immediacy of the presentation, and the clarity and elegance of Edson’s writing, make this sophisticated, multilayered play accessible to almost any interested reader. As the play begins, Vivian Bearing, a renowned professor of English who has spent years studying and teaching the intricate, difficult Holy Sonnets of the seventeenth-century poet John Donne, is diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. Confident of her ability to stay in control of events, she brings to her illness the same intensely rational and painstakingly methodical approach that has guided her stellar academic career. But as her disease and its excruciatingly painful treatment inexorably progress, she begins to question the single-minded values and standards that have always directed her, finally coming to understand the aspects of life that make it truly worth living.

    The first-person narrative is supplemented by forty-four photographs which form an integral part of the work -- pictures of various surreal people, places, and objects which the author visits or is haunted by in naja's presence and which inspire him to mediate on their reality or lack of it. The Nadja of the book is a girl, but, like Bertrand Russell's definition of electricity as not so much a thing as a way things happen, Nadja is not so much a person as the way she makes people behave. She has been described as a state of mind, a feeling about reality, k a kind of vision, and the reader sometimes wonders whether she exists at all. yet it is Nadja who gives form and structure to the novel.

    He was the self-styled spokesman of the "Lost Generation" and author of The Great Gatsby (1925). His debut novel, This Side of Paradise (1920) examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Flappers and Philosophers (1920) was his first collection of short stories. His second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), demonstrates an evolution and maturity in his writing, and provides an excellent portrait of America during the Jazz Age, as does Tales of the Jazz Age (1922).

    Featuring rewritten fairytale heroines, goddess wisdom, and poetry that burns with revolution, this collection is an explosion of femininity, empowerment, and personal growth.

    Includes "There's a certain slant of light," "Because I could not stop for death," "It was not death for I stood up."

    This volume consists of new translations edited by Deepak Chopra to evoke the rich mood and music of Rumi's love poems. Exalted yearning, ravishing ecstasy, and consuming desire emerge from these poems as powerfully today as they did on their creation more than 700 years ago.'These poems reflect the deepest longings of the human heart as it searches for the divine. They celebrate love. Each poetic whisper is urgent, expressing the desire that penetrates human relationships and inspires intimacy with the self, silently nurturing an affinity for the Beloved. Both Fereydoun Kia, the translator, and I hope that you will share the experience of ravishing ecstasy that the poems of Rumi evoked in us. In this volume we have sought to capture in English the dreams, wishes, hopes, desires, and feelings of a Persian poet who continues to amaze, bewilder, confound, and teach, one thousand years after he walked on this earth' - Deepak Chopra

    I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

    Along with such visionaries as William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac changed the face of American literature, igniting a counterculture revolution that even now, decades later, burns brighter than ever in Desolation Angels.In one of the major cinematic events of 2012, Jack Kerouac's legendary Beat classic, On the Road, finally hits the big screen. Directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries; Paris, Je T'Aime) and with a cast of some of Hollywood's biggest young stars, including Kristen Stewart (The Twilight Saga), Sam Riley, Garrett Hedlund, Kirsten Dunst, Amy Adams (Julie & Julia, The Fighter), Tom Sturridge, and Viggo Mortensen (the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Road), the film will attract new fans who will be inspired by Kerouac's revolutionary writing.

    At the center of the famed Round Table at New York's Algonquin Hotel, Parker distinguished herself among a circle of urbane literati with her excoriating quips and wonderfully realized epigrammatic poems. By the time her first collection of poems, Enough Rope, was published in 1926, she had been dubbed the "wittiest woman in America".Confronting the hard facts of existence facing a woman of talent and boldness in the 1920s and '30s, Parker's poems depict a world haunted by unrequited love, alcohol, razor blades, and men of overbearing will. Her poetry earned much admiration from critics such as Odgen Nash, Somerset Maugham, and Edmund Wilson, who hailed it as "flatly brutal as the wit of the age of Pope". Complete Poems collects Parker's three volumes of poetry, Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes, as well as a hundred other previously uncollected works -- such as the "hate songs", compact satiric descriptions of husbands and wives, actors and politicians, bores and ne'er-do-wells, and others who attracted her barbed pen.

    The greatest Americans Have not been born yet They are waiting quietly For their past to die please give blood Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an Incongruent mean of babble and brilliance...

    'Where I'm Calling From', his last collection, encompasses classic stories from 'Cathedral', 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previosly unpublished in book form. Together, these 37 stories give us a superb overview of Carver's life work and show us why he was so widely imitated but never equaled.

    Gatwood's poems deftly deconstruct traditional stereotypes. The focus shifts from childhood to adulthood, gender to sexuality, violence to joy. And always and inexorably, the book moves toward celebration, culminating in a series of odes: odes to the body, to tough women, to embracing your own journey in all its failures and triumphs.

     Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.

    Sin's first book of poetry.