You don't need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest stretches to unimaginable chasms. Whether the cause of this inequality is systemic injustice, the entrenchment of racism in our culture, the long war on drugs, or immigration policies, it endangers not only the American Dream but our very lives.In Tales of Two Americas, some of the literary world's most exciting writers look beyond numbers and wages to convey what it feels like to live in this divided nation. Their extraordinarily powerful stories, essays, and poems demonstrate how boundaries break down when experiences are shared, and that in sharing our stories we can help to alleviate a suffering that touches so many people.

    Enright, I was moved to the thought that on no theme have writers shown themselves more lively. A survivor of Belsen voiced the same sentiment when, reflecting on the concentration camps, he wrote, When in death we are in the midst of life. By turns poignant, tragic, comic, and inspiriting, this anthology of thoughts about death ranges from ancient times to the present day and includes quotes from philosophers, scientists, literary figures, and common men. Arranged under headings such as Love, War, Last Words, and Children, these selections show the varied, sometimes surprising, reactions of the dying and the bereaved to the final human act.

    Now back in print and updated with a new afterword by Lawrence Gushee, Mister Jelly Roll will enchant a new generation of readers with the fascinating story of one of the world's most influential composers of jazz. Jelly Roll's voice spins out his life in something close to song, each sentence rich with the sound and atmosphere of the period in which Morton, and jazz, exploded on the American and international scene. This edition includes scores of Jelly Roll's own arrangements, a discography and an updated bibliography, a chronology of his compositions, a new genealogical tree of Jelly Roll's forebears, and Alan Lomax's preface from the hard-to-find 1993 edition of this classic work. Lawrence Gushee's afterword provides new factual information and reasserts the importance of this work of African American biography to the study of jazz and American culture.

    Your students will gain an appreciation and understanding of ancient and modern cultures through myths and epics from the Middle East, Greece and Rome, the Far East and Pacific islands, the British Isles, Northern Europe, Africa, and the Americas. An introduction and historical background supplement each myth. Questions at the end of each selection prompt analysis and response.

    Whether he's dropping into the lives of two teachers―and their love lost and found―in "Nine Inches", documenting the unraveling of a dad at a Little League game in "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face", or gently marking the points of connection between an old woman and a benched high school football player in "Senior Season", Perrotta writes with a sure sense of his characters and their secret longings.Nine Inches contains an elegant collection of short fiction: stories that are as assured in their depictions of characters young and old, established and unsure, as any written today.

    These fascinating entries identify particular deities and giants, as well as the places where they dwell and the varied and wily means by which they forge their existence and battle one another. We meet Thor, one of the most powerful gods, who specializes in killing giants using a hammer made for him by dwarfs, not to mention myriad trolls, ogres, humans and strange animals. We learn of the ongoing struggle between the gods, who create the cosmos, and the jotnar, or giants, who aim to destroy it. In the enchanted world where this mythology takes place, we encounter turbulent rivers, majestic mountains, dense forests, storms, fierce winters, eagles, ravens, salmon and snakes in a landscape closely resembling Scandinavia. Beings travel on ships and on horseback; they eat slaughtered meat and drink mead.Spanning from the inception of the universe and the birth of human beings to the universe's destruction and the mythic future, these sparkling tales of creation and destruction, death and rebirth, gods and heroes will entertain readers and offer insight into the relationship between Scandinavian myth, history, and culture.

    . . . A masterpiece.” —Margaret Atwood“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” —David Foster WallaceBy now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared.An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.

    Kennedy, Groucho Marx, Charles Dickens, Katharine Hepburn, Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Clementine Churchill, Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and many more.

    This groundbreaking anthology includes 170 authors and illustrators of alphabets and animal fables, fairy tales and fantasy, picture books and nursery verse, among many other genres. Here readers will find beloved works by Charles Perrault, Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, L. M. Montgomery, and Dr. Seuss along with historical classics—The New-England Primer and Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses—and major voices from the multicultural and global contemporary scene. Over 40 longer complete works and over 400 illustrations, including 60 in color, enhance this comprehensive and visually rich anthology.With introductions that offer fresh insights into the cultural contexts of children's literature and childhood itself over four centuries, author headnotes, annotations, bibliographies, and a timeline, The Norton Anthology of Children's Literature illuminates a literary tradition whose power to instruct and delight is both centuries old and startlingly new.

    From the ultimate David Bowie expert comes an exploration of the final four decades of his musical career, covering every song he wrote, performed or produced.From the ultimate David Bowie expert comes this exploration of the final four decades of the popstar's musical career, covering every song he wrote, performed or produced from 1976 to 2016.Starting with Low, the first of Bowie's Berlin albums, and finishing with Blackstar, his final masterpiece released just days before his death in 2016, each song is annotated in depth and explored in essays that touch upon the song's creation, production, influences and impact.

    Campbell stresses that the borders dividing the Earth have been shattered; that myths and religions have always followed the certain basic archetypes and are no longer exclusive to a single people, region, or religion. He shows how we must recognize their common denominators and allow this knowledge to be of use in fulfilling human potential everywhere.

    Laying bare the heart of a witty, belligerent and vigorous writer, this manifesto of Mailer's key beliefs contains pieces on his war experiences in the Philippines (the basis for his famous first novel The Naked and the Dead), tributes to fellow novelists William Styron, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal and magnificent polemics against pornography, advertising, drugs and politics. Also included is his notorious exposition of the phenomenon of the 'White Negro', the Beat Generation's existentialist hero whose life, like Mailer's, is 'an unchartered journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self'.

    Spanning his 50-year career and incorporating a rich and varied range of material, this second anthology is as wonderfully unmissable as the first. When Spike Milligan died in 2002, he left behind one of the most diverse legacies in British entertainment history – as well as a legion of devoted fans and admirers. His themes ranged from environmental issues to the war, from nostalgia to depression, and his prolific output covers some of the most evocative events of the twentieth century, in a style both twistedly comic and harrowingly honest.The huge success of the Spike Milligan anthology, ‘The Essential Spike Milligan’, has inspired a second raid on the original brilliant source. Milligan was arguably the most one of the prolific and mould-breaking comic writers of the twentieth century and this second anthology gives another opportunity to sample his finest writing. It includes more of the best from his war memoirs and novel Puckoon, his children's stories, poetry and drawings plus a wonderful collection from his voluminous correspondence from the 1960s onwards with such varied recipients as the House of Commons, the Director-General of the BBC, Private Eye and British Telecom. A compulsive read for all Milligan fans.

    

    Hailed by Robert Creeley as "both a deeply useful work book and an unequivocal delight," and by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years, it appears here in a revised and expanded version several years in the making. Rothenberg's revision follows the structure and themes of the original version while reworking the contents to include a European section and a large number of newly gathered and translated poems that reflect the work set in motion since 1968.