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That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets by Kathleen Raine
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Vastarien: Vol. 1, Issue 1
Dagny PaulMichael J. Abolafia - 2018
The journal includes nonfiction, literary horror fiction, poetry, artwork and non-classifiable hybrid pieces.Vol. 1, Issue 1 Contents:• Foreword to Teatro Grottesco essay by Thomas Ligotti•The Nightmare of His Art: The Horrific Power of the Imagination in "The Troubles of Dr. Thoss and "Gas Station Carnivals" essay by W. Silverwood•The Gods in Their Seats, Unblinking short fiction by Kurt Fawver• Affirmation of the Spirit: Consciousness, Transformation, and the Fourth World in Film short fiction by Christopher Slatsky•Try the Veal poem by Robert Beveridge•How to Construct a Gun from Your Own Flesh short fiction by Michael Uhall•Notes on a Horror essay by Dr. Raymond Thoss•"Eccentric to the Healthy Social Order" : Inversions of Family, Community, and Religion in Thomas Ligotti's "The Last Feast of Harlequin" essau by Michael J. Abolafia•Wraiths poem by Wade German•Eraserhead as Antinatalist Allegoryessay by Colby Smith•The Alienation of the Self: Marx, Polanyi, and Ligottian Horroressay by S. L. Edwards•The Theatre of Ovid short fiction by Aaron Worth•Infinite Light, Infinite Darkness short fiction by Martin Rose•Night Walks: The Films of Val Lewton essay by Michael Penkas• Solar Flare short fiction by Paul L. Bates•Strange Bird poem by Ian Mullins•Nervous Wares & Abnormal Staresshort fiction by Devin Goff•My Time at the Drake Clinic short fiction by Jordan Krall•Singing the Song of My Unmaking short fiction by Christopher Ropes•"They say I should kill myself and not try to spoil their enjoyment in being alive": An Interview with Thomas Ligottiinterview by Wojciech Gunia
Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West
Linda M. Hasselstrom - 1997
Here are reflections on cowboys real and fake, tractor-driving lessons, outhouses, and the uses of baling wire; here are ranch marriages, enduring and not; family legacies; loss and renewal. Westerners will find their friends and neighbors in these pages; others will find a vivid portrait of the women of a region all too often mythologized.
The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
Martin Amis - 2001
But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart. In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing
Richard Hugo - 1978
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.
Eros the Bittersweet
Anne Carson - 1986
Beginning with: "It was Sappho who first called eros 'bittersweet.' No one who has been in love disputes her. What does the word mean?", Carson examines her subject from numerous points of view and styles, transcending the constraints of the scholarly exercise for an evocative and lyrical meditation in the tradition of William Carlos William's Spring and All and William H. Gass's On Being Blue.
All Yesterdays' Parties: The Velvet Underground in Print, 1966-1971
Clinton Heylin - 2005
"Discovered" by Andy Warhol in 1966, the VU - with their original line-up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker - would soon become the house band of the avantgarde, composing songs simultaneously furious in their abrasiveness and beautiful in their pathos, standing in striking contrast to the prevailing flower power of the era. All Yesterdays' Parties gathers for the first time almost all of the published writings contemporary with the band's existence-from sources as mainstream as the New York Times to vanished voices of the counterculture like Oz, Fusion, and Crawdaddy! The book is a revealing snapshot of an era by trailblazing rock writers such as Lester Bangs, Robert Greenfield, and Paul Williams. With photographs, posters, and other visual evocations of the period throughout, All Yesterdays' Parties is an invaluable resource, a trove of lore for anyone interested in the VU, their roots, and legacy.
Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Reader's Guide
Emma Parker - 2002
It features a biography of the author, a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more. If you're studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative and helpful. Part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.
BWWM Club
J.A. Fielding - 2015
In this book you get 6 classic BWWM stories in 1 - that's 828 pages of interracial goodness! All of the books in this bundle can be enjoyed as stand alone stories. That said, all have further parts in the series, so if you like one more than the rest you can pick up more books with the same characters when you're ready. Books in this collection are: 1. My Russian Dream: When she woke that morning, the last thing Sophie expected was to not only meet the man of her dreams, but to enter into a fast moving whirlwind romance with a mysterious Russian billionaire. Will it all be too much for Sophie? Or will this be her dream playing out like she's always felt she deserved? 2. Passion Abroad: Have you ever felt like you just need to get away from it all? Well that's exactly how Erica feels, and she's going to do something about it! The tale of a holiday romance which turns into a round the world trip with a passionate and loving new partner. 3. Home Is Where The Heart Is: When a handsome English billionaire is looking for homes to add to his portfolio, Julie is assigned the job of helping him out. But will this billionaire have another reason for his interest in her? 4. Find Me Online: After filtering through a ton of pervs on a popular interracial dating site, Cherelle finally finds someone who catches her eye. But is there more to her catch Michael than she originally realizes? And will he be the man she is looking for? 5. Is Mr White Mr Right: One of the original BWWM books, and largely held as a classic in the genre. Natasha Black is a strong African American woman, who has always been career focused and level headed. Nothing has ever been able to knock her off her game... until now! Enter 'McDreamy', the hunk of a boss at her new dream job. Will she be able to stay career focused while getting advances from possibly the man of her dreams? 6. My Billionaire Cowboy: What does a fashion stylist and a fashionably challenged cowboy have in common?! You're about to find out... Kate is the proud owner of her own fashion boutique. Bruce is a successful business man who now spends his time on his passion: working his ranch. When fate brings these two opposites together, there's no denying there's something there. But is Kate at a point in her life where she is willing to throw caution to the wind and allow herself to be swept off of her feet by an unexpected love? Authors of these books: J A Fielding, Esther Banks and Cher Etan; all authors from Saucy Romance Books. To see more great stories by us, simply search BWWM Club on Amazon Kindle. Suitable for over 18s only due to all stories having scenes of a sexual nature.
More Matter: Essays and Criticism
John Updike - 1999
. . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”
Blues & Chaos: The Music Writing of Robert Palmer
Robert Palmer - 2009
He was an authority on rock & roll, blues, jazz, punk, avant-garde, and world music -- often discovering new artists and trends years (even decades) before they hit the mainstream. Now, noted music writer Anthony DeCurtis has compiled the best pieces from Palmer's oeuvre and presents them here, in one compelling volume.A member of the elite group of the defining rock critics who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, Palmer possessed a vision so complete that, as DeCurtis writes, "it's almost as if, if you read Bob, you didn't need to read anyone else." Blues & Chaos features some of his most memorable pieces, including gripping stories about John Lennon, Led Zeppelin, Moroccan trance music, Miles Davis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Philip Glass, and Muddy Waters.Wonderfully entertaining, infused with passion, and deeply inspiring, Blues & Chaos is a must for music fans everywhere.Flirtations with chaos / by Anthony DeCurtis --The big picture : "The opinions expressed are dangerously subjective." --The blues : "A post-Heisenberg-uncertainty-principle mojo hand" --Jazz : "A kinetic kaleidoscope" --The originators : "Where the hell did this man come from?" --Soul and R&B : "It had to come from somewhere, and the church is where it all came from" --Classic rock : "Musically, we weren't afraid to go in any direction whatsoever" --John Lennon and Yoko Ono : "Now the music's coming through me again" --Punk rock and beyond : "Fear and nothing" --World music : "The world is changing and so is our music" --Morocco : "We fell through each other, weightless, into the sky" --On the edge : "Listen, as if a new world had suddenly opened up" --Sonic guitar maelstrom : "All hail the overdriven amp."
Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction
Dale Peck - 2004
From heated panels at Book Expo in Chicago to contretemps at writers’ watering holes in New York, voices—even fists—have been raised.Peck’s bracing philippic proposes that contemporary literature is at a dead end. Novelists have forfeited a wider audience, succumbing to identity politicking and self-reflexive postmodernism. In the torrent of responses to this fulguration, opinions were not so much divided as cleaved in two with, for example, Carlin Romano contending that “Peck’s judgments are worse than nasty—they are hysterical” and Benjamin Schwarz retorting that “in his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose and his disdain for pseudointellectual flatulence, Dale Peck is Mencken’s heir.”Hatchet Jobs includes swinging critiques of the work of, among others, Sven Birkerts, Julian Barnes, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, and Rick Moody.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Flannery O'Connor - 1969
At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems.This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.
The Yeats Reader, Revised Edition: A Portable Compendium of Poetry, Drama, and Prose
W.B. Yeats - 1997
His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge, in any language" and "one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." The Yeats Reader is the most comprehensive single volume to display the full range of Yeats's talents. It presents more than one hundred and fifty of his best-known poems -- more than any other compendium -- plus eight plays, a sampling of his prose tales, and excerpts from his published autobiographical and critical writings. In addition, an appendix offers six early texts of poems that Yeats later revised. Also included are selections from the memoirs left unpublished at his death and complete introductions written for a projected collection that never came to fruition. These are supplemented by unobtrusive annotation and a chronology of the life. Yeats was a protean writer and thinker, and few writers so thoroughly reward a reader's efforts to essay the whole of their canon. This volume is an excellent place to begin that enterprise, to renew an old acquaintance with one of world literature's great voices, or to continue a lifelong interest in the phenomenon of literary genius.
Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places
Gary Snyder - 2014
Over this period many things changed decisively—globally, locally, and in their personal lives—and these changing conditions provide the back story for a long conversation. It begins in the early 1980s as an intellectual exchange between an earnest graduate student and a generous distinguished writer, and becomes a long-distance friendship and an exploration of spiritual practice.At the project’s heart is Snyder’s understanding of Buddhism. Again and again, the conversations return to an explication of the teachings. Snyder’s characteristic approach is to articulate a direct experience of Buddhist practice rather than any kind of abstract philosophy. In the version he describes here, this practice finds expression not primarily as an Asian import or a monastic ideal, but in the specificities of a householder’s life as lived creatively in a particular location at a particular moment in history. This means that whatever “topic” a dialogue explores, there is a sense that all of it is about practice—the spiritual-social practice of a contemporary poet.
Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life
Lev Losev - 1999
His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.