In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Vladimir Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

    . . 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.”

    Memoirs and personal essays, profiles, science and nature reportage, travel writing -- literary journalists are working in all of these forms with artful styles and fresh approaches. In Literary Journalism, editors Norman Sims and Mark Kramer have collected the finest examples of literary journalism from both the masters of the genre who have been working for decades and the new voices freshly arrived on the national scene.The fifteen essays gathered here include: -- John McPhee's account of the battle between army engineers and the lower Mississippi River-- Susan Orlean's brilliant portrait of the private, imaginative world of a ten-year-old boy-- Tracy Kidder's moving description of life in a nursing home-- Ted Conover's wild journey in an African truck convoy while investigating the spread of AIDS-- Richard Preston's bright piece about two shy Russian mathematicians who live in Manhattan and search for order in a random universe-- Joseph Mitchell's classic essay on the rivermen of Edgewater, New Jersey-- And nine more fascinating pieces of the nation's best new writingIn the last decade this unique form of writing has grown exuberantly -- and now, in Literary Journalism, we celebrate fifteen of our most dazzling writers as they work with great vitality and astonishing variety.

    Written in an incredibly compressed five-month period, the novel had an electrifying impact upon publication in 1939, unleashing a political storm with its vision of America’s dispossessed struggling for survival. It continues to exert a powerful influence on American culture, and has inspired artists as diverse as John Ford, Woody Guthrie, and Bruce Springsteen. Tracing the journey of the Joad family from the dust bowl of Oklahoma to the migrant camps of California, Steinbeck creates an American epic, spacious, impassioned, and pulsating with the rhythms of living speech. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and has since sold millions of copies worldwide.This text of The Grapes of Wrath has been newly edited based on Steinbeck’s manuscript, typescript, and proofs. Many errors have been corrected, and words omitted or misconstrued by his typist have been restored. In addition, The Harvest Gypsies, his 1936 investigative report on migrant workers, which laid the groundwork for the novel, is included as an appendix.The Long Valley (1938) displays Steinbeck’s brilliance as a writer of short stories, including such classics as “The Chrysanthemums,” “The White Quail,” “Flight,” and “The Red Pony.” Set in the Salinas Valley landscape that was Steinbeck’s enduring inspiration, the stories explore moments of fear, tenderness, isolation, and violence with poetic intensity.The Log from the Sea of Cortez, an account of the 1940 marine biological expedition in which Steinbeck participated with his close friend Ed Ricketts, is a unique blend of science, philosophy, and adventure, as well as one of Steinbeck’s most revealing expositions of his core beliefs. First published in 1941 as part of the collaborative volume Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck’s narrative was reissued separately a decade later, augmented by the moving tribute “About Ed Ricketts.”This volume contains a newly researched chronology, notes, and an essay on textual selection. It is the second of four volumes in The Library of America edition of John Steinbeck’s writings.

    Screenwriter, director, and star of the acclaimed film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July brings her extraordinary talents to the page in a startling, sexy, and tender collection.

    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.

    With the publication of this Library of America volume, the third of three volumes, all Melville's fiction has now been restored to print for the first time.Pierre; or, The Ambiguities, published in 1852 (the year after Moby-Dick), moves between the idyllic Berkshire countryside and the nightmare landscape of early New York City. Its hero, a young American patrician trying to redeem the secret sins of his father, elopes to the city, discovers Bohemian life, attempts a literary epic, and struggles his way through incest, murder, and madness. Long a controversial work, it is Melville's darkest satire of American life and letters and one of his most powerful books.A pivotal work, both for Melville's career and for American literature, Pierre was followed by Israel Potter, the story of a veteran of the Revolution, victim of a thousand mischances, and a long-suffering exile in England. Along the way are memorable episodes of war and intrigue, with personal portraits of Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, and George III. In the exploits of this touchingly optimistic soldier, Melville offers a scathing image of the collapse of revolutionary hopes.The Piazza Tales demonstrates Melville's dazzling mastery of many styles, including "The Encantadas," about nature's two faces--enchanting and horrific; the famous "Bartleby the Scrivener," about a Wall Street copyist who "would prefer not to"; and the enigmatic "Benito Cereno," about a credulous Yankee sea captain who stumbles into an intricately plotted mutiny aboard a disabled slave ship.The Confidence-Man, Melville's last published novel, is in many ways a forerunner of modernist American fiction. An extended meditation on faith, hope, and charity as these are manifested on board a Mississippi riverboat one April Fools' Day, it presents a menagerie of Americans buying and selling, borrowing and lending, believing and mistrusting, as they are carried toward the auction blocks of New Orleans.Many pieces never before collected are also included: the "Authentic Anecdotes of Old Zack" (burlesque sketches of Zachary Taylor's Mexican campaign), "Fragments from a Writing-Desk" (Melville's earliest surviving prose), reviews of Hawthorne, Parkman, and Cooper, and all the tales Melville published in magazines during the 1850s.Finally, there is the posthumously published masterpiece Billy Budd, Sailor, the haunting story of a beautiful, innocent sailor who is pressed into naval service, slandered, provoked to murder, and sacrificed to military justice. While encouraging questions for which there are no answers, it invites us to meditate on the conflicts central to all Melville's work: between freedom and fate, innocence and civilized corruption.

    Plot synopsis of this classic is made meaningful with analysis and quotes by noted literary critics, summaries of the work's main themes and characters, a sketch of the author's life and times, a bibliography, suggested test questions, and ideas for essays and term papers.

    In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in.” David Sedaris’s quirky, hilarious account of a childhood spent yearning for a home where history was properly respected is also a poignant rumination on surviving the passage of time. In “The Ecstasy of Influence,” Jonathan Lethem ponders the intriguing phenomenon of cryptomnesia: a person believes herself to be creating something new but is really recalling similar, previously encountered work. Ariel Levy writes in “The Lesbian Bride’s Handbook” of her efforts to plan a party that accurately reflects her lifestyle (which she notes is “not black-tie!”) as she confronts head-on what it means to be married. And Lauren Slater is off to “Tripp Lake,” recounting the one summer she spent at camp—a summer of color wars, horseback riding, and the “wild sadness” that settled in her when she was away from home. In the end, Gopnik believes that the only real ambition of an essayist is to be a master of our common life. This latest installment of The Best American Essays is full of writing that reveals, in Gopnik’s words, “the breath of things as they are.”

    One of the first Melvilleans to advance what has since become known as the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," Olson argues that there were two versions of Moby-Dick, and that Melville's reading King Lear for the first time in between the first and second versions of the book had a profound impact on his conception of the saga: "the first book did not contain Ahab," writes Olson, and "it may not, except incidentally, have contained Moby-Dick." If literary critics and reviewers at the time responded with varying degrees of skepticism to the "theory of the two Moby-Dicks," it was the experimental style and organization of the book that generated the most controversy.

    If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."-- Sylvia Plath, from "Notebooks, February 1956"Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. "Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

    This is the dance of history in our age: slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, back and forth and from side to side, we step across these fixed and shifting lines. —from Part IVWith astonishing range and depth, the essays, speeches, and opinion pieces assembled in this book chronicle a ten-year intellectual odyssey by one of the most important, creative, and respected minds of our time. Step Across This Line concentrates in one volume Salman Rushdie’s fierce intelligence, uncanny social commentary, and irrepressible wit—about soccer, The Wizard of Oz, and writing, about fighting the Iranian fatwa and turning with the millennium, and about September 11, 2001. Ending with the eponymous, never-before-published speeches, this collection is, in Rushdie’s words, a “wake-up call” about the way we live, and think, now.

    This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature. The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni. Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.

    There couldn't be a better person to put together this tome than Hot Water Music's Chuck Ragan and here he's collected tales from members of the Gaslight Anthem, Rise Against, At The Drive-In and more, all of whom share their own unique perspective on travel. The road isn't always glamorous but for some of us it's in our blood. These are those stories.

    In this sensual bundle you'll discover that the first taste of love can be sweet or simply knock you off your feet with undeniable attraction. Three incredible couples, unique in every aspect except that the heroines are innocent. Whore: Laura Burns was screwed! She had 30 days to find a new place to live and Taylor Ross seemed like her best option. There was only one problem with that scenario. He thought she was a whore! He wanted her to seduce his clients and in return he would save her from poverty. Can a virgin be a whore? That depends on your definition of the word! Bought For Love: Can a person be bought for love? You don’t know Jack! Emily Yates was sweet, young, and innocent. The perfect pawn for a man like Jack to use. She was a blank slate that he could mold into the woman he wanted by his side for his political career. From the moment she walked into his office, he was determined to have her in his bed, in his life, and as his perfect little pet. Jack poured on the charm and Emily saw the man he wanted her to see, but would she discover out who he really was before her heart was destroyed? You don’t know Jack. He gets what he wants. Strawberry Wine: Everyone remembers their first love Luke Parks was mine. My first kiss, my first love and my first broken heart. He swept me off my feet with just one look and after a summer of awakening my body to passion left me broken. He was twenty-four and to a girl of sixteen, I'd never been prepared for the devastation of loving and losing so completely. Time, like all things moves on, but my heart never fully recovered from watching him drive off down that country road out of my life.