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Bedtime Stories
Diana Secker Tesdell - 2011
The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller’s art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire. In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between waking and dreaming. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest,” from Washington Irving’s comical “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to Ursula K. LeGuin’s sly perspective on Sleeping Beauty in “The Poacher,” these spellbinding stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art. Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Steven Millhauser, Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, and many more mingle their voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams--the perfect bedside companion for fiction lovers everywhere.
The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop
Kevin Coval - 2015
This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation.It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters.The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for.The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.
Black Feeling, Black Talk / Black Judgement
Nikki Giovanni - 1970
This book, electrifying generations with its revolutionary phrases and inspiring them with such Nikki Giovanni masterpieces as the lyrical "Nikki-Rosa" and the intimate "Knoxville, Tennessee," is the seminal volume of Nikki Giovanni's body of work. "Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement made Nikki Giovanni famous in 1968, and this reissue of her classic will enthrall those who have always adored her poems--and those who are just getting to know her work.As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered."Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement" is one of the single most important volumes of modern African-American poetry. This book, electrifying generations with its revolutionary phrases and inspiring them with such Nikki Giovanni masterpieces as the lyrical "Nikki-Rosa" and the intimate "Knoxville, Tennessee," is the seminal volume of Nikki Giovanni's body of work. "Black Feeling Black Talk/Black Judgement" made Nikki Giovanni famous in 1968, and this reissue of her classic will enthrall those who have always adored her poems-and those whoare just getting to know her work.As a witness to three generations, Nikki Giovanni has perceptively and poetically recorded her observations of both the outside world and the gentle yet enigmatic territory of the self. When her poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately became a celebrated and controversial poet of the era. Written in one of the most commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century, Nikki Giovanni's poems embody the fearless passion and spirited wit for which she is beloved and revered."Nikki Giovanni is sometimes gentle, sometimes angry, and always moving." --Julius Lester in "The Guardian."
The Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Frost
Harold Bloom - 2004
For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry--a master critic’s distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Blooms writes “the work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves.” This essay is an invaluable guide to poetry.This edition will also include a recommended reading list of poems.
Americans' Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology
Robert Pinsky - 1999
Some poems are memories treasured in the mind since childhood; some crystallize the passion of love or recall the trail of loss and sorrow. The poems and poets in this anthology—from Sappho to Lorca, from Shakespeare and Chaucer to Gwendolyn Brooks, Louise Bluck, and Allen Ginsberg—are poems to be read aloud and memorized, poems to be celebrated as part of our nation's cultural inheritance. Accompanying the poems are comments by people who speak not as professional critics but as passionate readers of various ages, professions and regions. This anthology, in a manner unlike any other, discloses the rich and vigorous presence of poetry in American life at the millennium and provides a portrait of the United States through the lens of poetry.
Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems
H.P. Lovecraft - 1920
Since publication of The Outsider and Others in 1939, his work has been published in many parts of the world, widely anthologised, and filmed. His books include The Survivor and Others, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems, The Tomb and Other Tales, At the Mountains of Madness, The Lurker at the Threshold (Lovecraft and Derleth) and The Lurking Fear. Lovecrat was born and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island.1."Foreword", by August Derleth2."Providence"3."On a Grecian Colonnade in a Park"4."Old Christmas"5."New England Fallen"6."On a New England Village Seen by Moonlight"7."Astrophobos"8."Sunset"9."To Pan"10."A Summer Sunset and Evening"11."To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema"12."A Year Off"13."Sir Thomas Tryout"14."Phaeton"15."August"16."Death"17."To a Youth"18."My Favorite Character"19."To Templeton and Mount Monadnock"20."The Poe-et's Nightmare"21."Lament for the Vanished Spider"22."Regnar Lodbrug's Epicedium"23."Little Sam Perkins"24."Drinking Song from the Tomb"25."The Ancient Track"26."The Eidolon"27."The Nightmare Lake"28."The Outpost"29."The Rutted Road"30."The Wood"31."The House"32."The City"33."Hallowe'en in a Suburb"34."Primavera"35."October"36."To a Dreamer"37."Despair"38."Nemesis"39."Yule Horror"40."To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch's Tale, 'The Faceless God'"41."Where Once Poe Walked"42."Christmas Greetings to Mrs. Phillips Gamwell—1925"43."Brick Row"44."The Messenger"45."To Klarkash-ton, Lord of Averoigne"46."Psychopompos"47."The Book"48."Pursuit"49."The Key"50."Recognition"51."Homecoming"52."The Lamp"53."Zaman's Hill"54."The Port"55."The Courtyard"56."The Pigeon-Flyers"57."The Well"58."The Howler"59."Hesperia"60."Star Winds"61."Antarkos"62."The Window"63."A Memory"64."The Gardens of Yin"65."The Bells"66."Night Gaunts"67."Nyarlathotep"68."Azathoth"69."Mirage"70."The Canal"71."St. Toad's"72."The Familiars"73."The Elder Pharos"74."Expectancy"75."Nostalgia"76."Background"77."The Dweller"78."Alienation"79."Harbour Whistles"80."Recapture"81."Evening Star"82. "Continuity"Cover Illustration: Gervasio Gallardo
Tennyson: Poems
Alfred Tennyson - 1892
Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries. And though he treasured poetic tradition, his work nevertheless engaged directly with the great issues of his time, from industrialization and the crisis of faith to scientific progress and women’s rights. A master of the short, intense lyric, he can also be sardonic, humorous, voluptuous, earthy, and satirical.This collection includes, of course, such famous poems as “The Lady of Shalott” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” There are extracts from all the major masterpieces—“Idylls of the King,” “The Princess,” “In Memoriam”—and several complete long poems, such as “Ulysses” and “Demeter and Persephone,” that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as “Come into the Garden, Maud” and “Break, Break, Break,” for which he is justly celebrated.
The Complete Poems
Hart Crane - 1938
Hart Crane, prodigiously gifted and tragically doom-eager, was the American peer of Shelley, Rimbaud, and Lorca. Born in Garrettsville, Ohio, on July 21, 1899, Crane died at sea on April 27, 1932, an apparent suicide. A born poet, totally devoted to his art, Crane suffered his warring parents as well as long periods of a hand-to-mouth existence. He suffered also from his honesty as a homosexual poet and lover during a period in American life unsympathetic to his sexual orientation. Despite much critical misunderstanding and neglect, in his own time and in ours, Crane achieved a superb poetic style, idiosyncratic yet central to American tradition. His visionary epic, The Bridge, is the most ambitious and accomplished long poem since Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Marc Simon's text is accepted as the most authoritative presentation of Hart Crane's work available. For this centennial edition, Harold Bloom, who was introduced to poetry by falling in love with Crane's work while still a child, has contributed a new introduction.
The Short Novels of John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck - 2009
From the tale of commitment, loneliness and hope in Of Mice and Men, to the tough yet charming portrait of people on the margins of society in Cannery Row, to The Pearl's examination of the fallacy of the American dream, Steinbeck stories of realism, that were imbued with energy and resilience.
The Best American Sports Writing 2008
William Nack - 2008
In these pages, you will find the most provocative, compelling, tragic, and triumphant moments in sports from 2007, captured by the knights of the keyboard who make sports come alive for us day after day, week after week, year after year. Here you’ll find Paul Solotaroff’s excellent and uncompromising take on the neglect that a growing number of crippled NFL players continually face from the NFL players’ union. Jeanne Marie Laskas’s “G-L-O-R-Y!” offers a rousing inside look at the pregame rituals of the Cincinnati Bengals cheerleaders. A riveting online diary by Wright Thompson reveals a bleak and merciless landscape in China, which that country’s government would rather not have the world see during preparations for the Olympics. Nack finds a place for the fascinating offbeat story as well as the sensational. Alongside Eli Saslow’s captivating article about an obscure seventeenth-century sport, similar to a giant rugby scrum, carried out in the streets of Kirkwall, Scotland, stands Franz Lidz’s “scoop of the year,” a controversial and rare look into the life of George Steinbrenner, baseball’s largest but recently most enigmatic figure. This year’s collection marks another wonderful addition to “one of the most consistently satisfying titles in the Best American series” (Booklist).Contributors include Scott Price, Rick Bragg, Gary Smith, J.R. Moehringer, and others.
Dirty Pretty Things
Michael Faudet - 2014
His whimsical and often erotic writing has already captured the hearts and minds of literally thousands of readers from around the world. He paints vivid pictures with intricate words and explores the compelling themes of love, loss, relationships and sex. All beautifully captured in poetry, prose, quotes and little short stories.
Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation
John Freeman - 2017
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.
"I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare
John Clare - 2003
Where dawning genius never met the day, Where useless ignorance slumbers life awayUnknown nor heeded, where low genius triesAbove the vulgar and the vain to rise.--from "Helpstone""I Am": The Selected Poetry of John Clare is the first anthology of the great "peasant poet"'s remarkable verse that makes available the full range of his accomplishments. Here are the different Clares that have beguiled readers for two centuries: the tender chronicler of nature and childhood; the champion of folkways in the face of oppression; the passionate, sweet-tongued love-poet; and the lonely visionary confined, in old age and senility, to asylums.