A must for this counterculture idol's legion of fans.

    There, a bore is "a person who talks when you wish him to listen," and happiness is "an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another." This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce’s satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book’s ninety-year history.A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth.This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi’s exhaustive investigation into the book’s writing and publishing history. All of Bierce’s known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included.Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.

    From THE WHORE OF MENSA, to GOD (A Play), to NO KADDISH FOR WEINSTEIN, old and new Woody Allen fans will laugh themselves hysterical over these sparkling gems.

    From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except "The Cantos." In addition to the famous poems that transformed modern literature, it features dozens of rare and out-of-print pieces, such as the handmade first collection "Hilda's Book" (1905-1907), late translations of Horace, rare sheet music translations, and works from a 1917 "lost" manuscript. Pound's influential "Cathay" (1915), "Lustra" (1917), and "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1920)-as surely as his later masterly Confucian odes and Sophoclean dramas-followed the poet's own directive to "make it new," opening fresh formal pathways into ancient traditions. Through these works and others representing more than 30 different volumes and dozens of pieces that Pound never collected, "Poems and Translations" reveals the breadth of his daring invention and resonant music: lyrics echoing the Troubadors and Browning, chiseled 1920s free verse, and dazzling translations that led Eliot to call Pound "the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time." An extensive chronology offers guidance to Pound's tumultuous life. Detailed endnotes of unprecedented range and depth clarify Pound's fascinatingly recondite allusions.

    Its rhythms are those of the seasons. Its memories are savored, it losses lamented. Baseball's graceful athleticism, formal strategy, and democratic spirit have ensured the devotion of Americans for generations, and writers have been drawn to this sport as to no other. With Baseball: A Literary Anthology, The Library of America presents a vivid panorama of the game that is, in Roger Angell's words, "one of the reasons that summer exists." It offers a lively mix of stories, memoirs, poems, news reports, and insider accounts about all aspects of the great American game, from its pastoral 19th-century beginnings to its apotheosis as the undisputed national pastime. Here are the major leaguers and the bush leaguers, the umpires and broadcasters, the wives and girlfriends and would-be girlfriends, fans meticulously observant and lovingly, fanatically obsessed. Here too are the teams of storied greatness--the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Red Sox--and the luminaries who made them legendary.Unforgettable portraits of icons such as Christy Matthewson, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and Jackie Robinson are joined by glimpses of lesser-known characters such as the erudite Moe Berg, who could speak a dozen languages "but couldn't hit in any of them." Poems included in Baseball: A Literary Anthology include indispensable works whose phrases have entered the language--Ernest Thayer's "Casey at the Bat" and Franklin P. Adams's "Baseball's Sad Lexicon"--as well as more recent offerings from May Swenson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Martin Espada. Testimonies from classic oral histories offer insights into the players who helped enshrine the sport in the American imagination. Spot reporting by Heywood Broun and Damon Runyon stands side by side with journalistic profiles that match baseball legends with some of our finest writers: John Updike on Ted Williams, Gay Talese on Joe DiMaggio, Red Smith on Lefty Grove.

    1408 starred John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson and was a huge box office success in 2007. The short story "Children of the Corn" was adapted into the popular Children of the Corn. The Mangler was inspired by King's loathing for laundry machines from his own experience working in a laundromat. Hearts in Atlantis (based on "Low Men in Yellow Coats," the first part of the novel Hearts in Atlantis) starred Anthony Hopkins. This collection features new commentary and introductions to all of these stories in a treasure-trove of movie trivia.

    Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative volume.

    Now brought together for the first time in a single volume, these works show the many forms—fiction, poetry, philosophical and historical speculation, autobiography—in which Adams gave expression to his vision of the meaning of the unsettling changes in American life and values.Each of the two novels, Democracy and Esther, chooses a woman on whom to center the effects of social change. In Democracy, Madeleine Lee, an emancipated and idealistic young widow, moves to Washington to learn the nature of political power and is disillusioned upon discovering the intrigues of rampant corruption. The free-thinking heroine in Esther, caught in the warfare between science and religion, finds that she cannot surrender her moral independence, even to marry a clergyman.Adams, though a man of the modern world, remained in temperament a child of the eighteenth century, his political ideals shaped by his presidential ancestors, great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams. The failure of those ideals to withstand the challenges of an industrialized America drove him to seek refuge in the study of the medieval age of faith in France. Out of it came his skeptic’s “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres.” Her presence dominates the book that followed—Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. In evocative and sensitive prose Adams moves from the architecture, sculpture, and stained glass of Chartres to the religion, literature, politics, social order, and crusades of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. Adams translates the poetry of courtly love and recounts the drama of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s life and the timeless love of Abelard and Heloise. The narrative rises at the end to the brilliantly re-enacted drama of St. Thomas Aquinas’ victory over the rival philosophers.If Mont Saint Michel portrayed a world unified by a common faith, The Education of Henry Adams portrayed a world irresistibly moving toward chaos. The world once unified by the Virgin was now ruled by the impersonal Dynamo and was already confronted by the “metaphysical bomb” of radium and the prospect of infinite energy for man’s use. Adams balances, with extraordinary urbanity and wit, the rival claims he found as much in himself as in modern civilization. Together, these two works still pose an urgent question: can the human mind ultimately control the monstrous aggregates of power which it has wrung from nature?

    In the pages of pulp magazines that were still flourishing in the 1950s—Argosy, Dime Western Magazine, Zane Grey’s Western, and others—he perfected his trademark style, a blend of wiry tautness, sharp characterizations, and jolts of unexpected humor. Now, writer and film critic Terrence Rafferty has gathered the best of Leonard’s Westerns in a single volume, four classic novels and eight outstanding short stories, including the tales that inspired such powerful films as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma.In Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Leonard spins a tight narrative in which a homecoming Confederate veteran must fight to regain the ranch that has been stolen from him. Set, like most of Leonard’s Westerns, against a stark Arizona landscape, the novel is a masterpiece of unbroken tension, as the hero confronts a violent new war for all he holds dear.Chosen as one of the twenty-five greatest Western novels by the Western Writers of America, and the basis for a classic film starring Paul Newman, Hombre (1961) is a stagecoach drama whose hero, a man raised by Apaches, is treated with contempt by the white settlers who will ultimately depend on him for their survival.Valdez Is Coming (1970), Leonard’s favorite among his Westerns, pits Mexican American town constable Bob Valdez against the entrenched power of frontier oligarch Frank Tanner. When Valdez is maneuvered by Tanner into shooting an innocent man, he launches a one-man war for justice for the man’s widow that culminates with a surprising twist.With Forty Lashes Less One (1972) Leonard explores the comic tone that would mark his later books. Set within the harsh confines of Yuma Territorial Prison, the novel recounts the unlikely friendship of two prisoners—one part Apache, the other African American—planning a near-impossible escape.Like the novels, the eight stories included here, are tough, suspenseful, convincing, and beautifully spare in style. They range from Leonard’s first published pulp story, “Trail of the Apache” (1951), to one of his last, the fascinating character study “The Tonto Woman” (1982). Among the others are the twice-filmed “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) and “The Captives” (1955), the novella that inspired the acclaimed film The Tall T.

    An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick's finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

    One hundred and eighty voices - male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country - talk intimately to the reader. Combining great humor and pathos this remarkable selection of stories from the thousands submitted to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project gives the reader a glimpse of America's soul in all its diversity.

    It includes The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in its entirety; selected passages from The Making of Americans; "Melanctha"from Three Lives; portraits of the painters Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso; Tender Buttons; the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; and poem, plays, lectures, articles, sketches, and a generous portion of her famous book on the Occupation of France, Wars I Have Seen.

    Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made" (The New Republic), Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

    Dick is now seen as a uniquely visionary figure, a writer who, in editor Jonathan Lethem’s words, “wielded a sardonic yet heartbroken acuity about the plight of being alive in the twentieth century, one that makes him a lonely hero to the readers who cherish him.”This Library of America volume brings together four of Dick’s most original novels. The Man in the High Castle (1962), which won the Hugo Award, describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones. The dizzying The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality, and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure transcending even physical death.Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality, was the basis for the movie Blade Runner. Ubik (1969), with its future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life,” pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realities and false perceptions to ever more disturbing conclusions, as time collapses on itself and characters stranded in past eras search desperately for the elusive, constantly shape-shifting panacea Ubik. As with most of Dick’s novels, no plot summary can suggest the mesmerizing and constantly surprising texture of these astonishing books.Posing the questions “What is human?” and “What is real?” in a multitude of fascinating ways, Dick produced works—fantastic and weird, yet developed with precise logic, marked by wild humor and soaring flights of religious speculation—that are startlingly prescient imaginative anticipations of 21st-century quandaries.

    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.