Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure


The American Poetry and Literacy Project - 1998
    For many, the desire to explore is almost irresistible. Now for devotees of poetry, and for those who long for the open road, this highly affordable collection contains a rich selection of poems about travel and adventure.You’ll find more than 90 poems by 50 American and British masters (mainly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries), including Whitman, Byron, Millay, Sandburg, Service, Bliss Carman, Robert Louis Stevenson, John Masefield, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Christina Rossetti, and other fellow travelers. Their poems celebrate the real and metaphorical journeys each of us takes in the course of our lives towards love, discovery, loss, leaving the nest, and coming home.Whatever your mode of transportation, and wherever you are going, take this literary traveling companion with you for hours of reading enjoyment and insight into the road that lies ahead.

The Song of Hiawatha


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1855
    Once there, they've stayed to hear about the young brave with the magic moccasins, who talks with animals and uses his supernatural gifts to bring peace and enlightenment to his people. This 1855 masterpiece combines romance and idealism in an idyllic natural setting.

Book of Longing


Leonard Cohen - 2006
    Book of Longing is Cohen’s eagerly awaited new collection of poems, following his highly acclaimed 1984 title, Book of Mercy, and his hugely successful 1993 publication, Stranger Music, a Globe and Mail national bestseller. Book of Longing contains erotic, playful, and provocative line drawings and artwork on every page, by the author, which interact in exciting and unexpected ways on the page with poetry that is timeless, meditative, and at times darkly humorous. The book brings together all the elements that have brought Leonard Cohen’s artistry with language worldwide recognition.From the Hardcover edition.

The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces


Maynard MackFrancis Abiola Irele - 1956
    Like all Norton Anthologies, the Expanded Edition in One Volume of The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces is foremost a teaching anthology, edited to meet the needs of today's students discovering a range of literary traditions for the first time.

Collected Works: Wise Blood / A Good Man is Hard to Find / The Violent Bear it Away / Everything that Rises Must Converge / Essays and Letters


Flannery O'Connor - 1988
    By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man."In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"--these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

Bright Dead Things


Ada Limon - 2015
    Limón has often been a poet who wears her heart on her sleeve, but in these extraordinary poems that heart becomes a “huge beating genius machine” striving to embrace and understand the fullness of the present moment. “I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying,” the poet writes. Building on the legacies of forebears such as Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Mark Doty, Limón’s work is consistently generous and accessible—though every observed moment feels complexly thought, felt, and lived.

Greek Tragedies, Volume 1: Aeschylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound; Sophocles: Oedipus the King, Antigone; Euripides: Hippolytus


David Grene - 1960
    Over the years these authoritative, critically acclaimed editions have been the preferred choice of more than three million readers for personal libraries and individual study as well as for classroom use.

City of Glass


Paul Auster - 1985
    It's as if Kafka has gotten hooked on the gumshoe game and penned his own ever-spiraling version." As a result of a strange phone call in the middle of the night, Quinn, a writer of detective stories, becomes enmeshed in a case more puzzling than any he might have written. Written with hallucinatory clarity, City of Glass combines dark humor with Hitchcock-like suspense. Ghosts and The Locked Room are the next two brilliant installments in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness, Patience


Unknown
    SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT is one of the most important alliterative poems of Medieval literature

Best Remembered Poems


Martin Gardner - 1992
    Vincent Millay to Edward Lear's whimsical "The Owl and the Pussycat" and James Whitcomb Riley’s homespun "When the Frost Is on the Punkin." Famous poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Frost are well-represented, as are less well-known poets such as John McCrae ("In Flanders Fields") and Ernest Thayer ("Casey at the Bat"). Includes 10 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "The Owl and the Pussycat," "Casey at the Bat," "Jabberwocky," "O Captain! My Captain!," "Paul Revere's Ride," "Ozymandias," "The Raven," "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "Mending Wall," and "Ode on a Grecian Urn."

The Nation's Favourite Poems: Book 1


Griff Rhys Jones - 1996
    This unique anthology brings together the results of the poll in a collection of the nation's 100 best loved poems. Among the selection are popular classics such as Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallott' and Wordsworth's 'The Daffodils' alongside contemporary poetry such as Allan Ahlberg's 'Please Mrs Butler' and Jenny Joseph's 'Warning'. Also included is the poignant 'Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep'.

The Complete Plays


Christopher Marlowe
    In the victories of Tamburlaine, Faustus's encounters with the demonic, the irreverence of Barabas in THE JEW OF MALTA, and the humiliation of Edward II in his fall from power and influence, Marlowe explores the shifting balance between power and helplessness, the sacred and its desecration.

Trout Fishing in America


Richard Brautigan - 1967
    He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called “the last of the Beats.” His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California.

Collected Stories


Tennessee Williams - 1985
    Arranged chronologically, the forty-nine stories, when taken together with the memoir of his father that serves as a preface, not only establish Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century, but also, in Gore Vidal’s view, constitute the real autobiography of Williams’ "art and inner life."

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book


Maxine Hong Kingston - 1989
    He falls in love with Nancy the Beautiful, marries Tana, and chases his dream to write and stage an epic drama spanning America and China.