People Who Led to My Plays


Adrienne Kennedy - 1987
    Out of a sequence of deceptively spare statements emerges a complex portrait of the artist as a young woman as she examines the people and events that compelled her to be a writer.

Verses That Hurt: Pleasure and Pain from the POEMFONE Poets


Jordan Trachtenberg - 1997
    Not a telephone reciever, which is how most of the poems in this collection were first transmitted...There are plenty of examples of this spreading of one art form or another through popular mediums. There are all those wonderful Russian Constructivist posters, Dr. Alphabet's public poetry gatherings on football fields, Dada caberet antics, and various forms of street theatr...Essentially what all of these movements were trying to do was expand the playing field called "art". By making the field bigger they gave us all more room to frolic. They pushed art right out of the dusty museums and smack dab into your lives... Poetry should be everywhere, and slowly but surely it's infiltrating our lives. We are gla dto be the instruments of this infiltration." --from the IntroductionFeaturingPenny Arcade, Tish Benson, Nicole Blackman, David Cameron, Xavier Cavazos, Todd Colby, Matthew Courtney, M. Doughty, Kathy Ebel, Annie Elliot, Janice Erlbaum, Allen Ginsberg, John Giorno, John S. Hall, Bob Holman, Christian X. Hunter, Shannon Ketch, Bobby Miller, Wanda Phipps, Lee Ranaldo, Shut-Up Shelly, Hal Sirowitz, Sparrow, Spiro, Edwin Torres, Emily XYZWith unabashed fervor the Poemfone poets are redefining poetry as we know it. Archaic literary rules that have never been bent have suddenly been broken., and Versus That Hurt chronicles this poetic phenomenon. This is a revolutionary gathering of disparate and brash talent that is not to be missed.

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales


Various - 2014
    These are stories that passed down through the ages virtually unaltered in their telling. To those who told and listened to them, they expressed something fundamental about Irish culture and the Irish way of life. The stories in this volume feature a wide variety of fantastic beings, including ghosts, witches, fairies, and changelings, but several feature creatures that are virtually exclusive to Ireland: the banshee, the merrow, the pooka, and the leprechaun. Read these tales of frightening supernatural horrors, brave folk heroes, and everyday people clever enough to outwith the devil, and you'll agree that they could only take place on Irish soil.

Four Complete Novels: Great Expectations/Hard Times/A Christmas Carol/A Tale of Two Cities


Charles Dickens - 1861
    Namely, Great Expectations, Hard Times, A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities. This Library of Literary Classics edition is bound in padded leather with luxurious gold-stamping on the front and spine, satin ribbon marker and gilded edges. Other titles in this Library of Literary Classics series include: Charlotte & Emily Bronte: The Complete Novels; Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Works; Mark Twain: Selected Works; Jane Austen: The Complete Novels: Lewis Carroll: The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works; and William Shakespeare: The Complete Works.

Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century


Donald Keene十返舎 一九 - 1955
    Every genre and style, from the celebrated No plays to the poetry and novels of the seventeenth century, find a place in this book. An introduction by Donald Keene places the selections in their proper historical context, allowing the readers to enjoy the book both as literature and as a guide to the cultural history of Japan. Selections include “Man’yoshu” or “Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves” from the ancient period; “Kokinshu” or “Collection of Ancient and Modern Poetry,” “The Tosa Diary” of Ki No Tsurayuki, “Yugao” from “Tales of Genji” of Murasaki Shikibu, and “The Pillow Book” of Sei Shonagon from the Heian Period; “The Tale of the Heike” from the Kamakura Period; Plan of the No Stage, “Birds of Sorrow” of Seami Motokiyo, and “Three Poets at Minase” from the Muromachi Period; and Sections from Basho, including “The Narrow Road of Oku,” “The Love Suicides at Sonezaki” by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and Waka and haiku of the Tokugawa Period.

Gumbo A Celebration of African American Writers


Edwidge Danticat - 2002
    Not since Terry McMillan's Breaking Ice have so many African-American writers been brought together in one volume. A stellar collection of works from more than fifty hot names in fiction, Gumbo represents remarkable synergy. Edited by bestselling luminaries Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, this collection spans new and previously published tales of love and luck, inspiration and violation, hip new worlds and hallowed heritage from voices such as: Edwidge Danticat , Eric Jerome Dickey, Kenji Jasper, John Edgar Wideman, Terry McMillan, David Anthony Durham, Bertice Berry, and many, many more. Also featuring original stories by Golden and Harris themselves, Gumbo heralds the debut of the Hurston / Wright Legacy Awards for Published Black Writers (scheduled for October 2002), and all advances and royalties from the book will support the Hurston/ Wright Foundation. Combining authors with a variety of flavorful writing, Gumbo will have readers clamoring for second helpings.

100 Essential Modern Poems


Joseph Parisi - 2005
    Selected and introduced by Joseph Parisi, former longtime editor of Poetry magazine, this brilliant collection brings together the greatest poems by all the classic authors, along with the choicest works by today's most accomplished artists in America and abroad. From W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot to John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons; Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore to Sylvia Plath and Mary Oliver; Robert Frost and W. B. Yeats to Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, this comprehensive anthology features the poems that have best expressed the spirit of our times and helped create modern culture. In addition to such ground-breaking works as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Howl," Mr. Parisi has included the incisive social satire and whimsical wordplay of such wits as Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and Frank O'Hara. Among contemporary poets in the book are Seamus Heaney, Jane Kenyon, Rita Dove, Sharon Olds, Paul Muldoon, Adrienne Rich, and the redoubtable Billy Collins, all of whom have already achieved wide popular acclaim for poems that speak compellingly about modern life and the perennial concerns of the human heart. Mr. Parisi provides a general introduction to the book and introduces each poem with a brief biographical and critical note. For anyone who wishes to discover or to re-experience the most important and vital poems of our time, 100 Essential Modern Poems is, quite simply, indispensable.

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies


Deesha Philyaw - 2020
    The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions. With their secret longings, new love, and forbidden affairs, these church ladies are as seductive as they want to be, as vulnerable as they need to be, as unfaithful and unrepentant as they care to be, and as free as they deserve to be.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf


Ntozake ShangeNtozake Shange - 1975
    Brown.From its inception in California in 1974 to its Broadway revival in 2022, the Obie Award–winning for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf has excited, inspired, and transformed audiences all over the country for nearly fifty years. Passionate and fearless, Shange’s words reveal what it meant to be a woman of color in the 20th century. First published in 1975, when it was praised by The New Yorker for “encompassing…every feeling and experience a woman has ever had,” for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf will be read and performed for generations to come. Now with new introductions by Jesmyn Ward and Broadway director Camille A. Brown, and one poem not included in the original, here is the complete text of a groundbreaking dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.

The Beat Book


Anne Waldman - 1995
    Not just another literary school, it was an artistic and social revolution. William S. Burroughs proclaimed that the Beat writers were “real architects of change. There is no doubt that we’re living in a freer America as a result of the Beat literary movement, which is an important part of the larger picture of cultural and political change in this country during the last forty years, when a four-letter word couldn’t appear on the printed page and minority rights were ridiculous.” Anne Waldman, a renowned poet and longtime friend of many of these writers, has gathered in this volume a range of the best and most exemplary writings of the Beat poets and novelists. Selections from the Beat classics appear, as well as more recent prose and poetry demonstrating the continued vitality of the Beat experiment. Included are short biographies of the contributors, an extensive bibliography of Beat literature, and a unique guide to “Beat places” around the world—from Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, where his novel Dr. Sax takes place, to Tangier, where Burroughs wrote parts of Naked Lunch.

Anthology of Modern American Poetry


Cary Nelson - 1999
    Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combination of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the first time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included. Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," William Carlos Williams's The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Kenneth Rexroth's "The Love Poems of Marichiko," both Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and his "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and both Adrienne Rich's "Shooting Script" and her "Twenty-One Love Poems" are all included in their entirety. Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most detailed annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works benefit from specially commissioned research that provides students with such help as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson's poetry, translation of all foreign language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is also the only American poetry anthology to present selected poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they first appeared. In addition, an accompanying website featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http: //www.english.uiuc.edu/maps. Ideal for courses in modern American poetry, modern American literature, modern or contemporary poetry, creative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic heritage in a uniquely rich and provocative format."

How to Recognize a Demon Has Become Your Friend


Linda Addison - 2011
    Recognition is the first step, what you do with your friends/demons after that is up to you.

A Tolkien Miscellany


J.R.R. Tolkien - 2002
    Tolkien's least-known and hardest-to-find works in one volume. These include "Smith of Wootton Major (story of a magical gift concealed in the most amazing cake), "Farmer Giles of Ham" (a dragon terrorizing the English village of Ham and the townspeople only hope is a local farmer with an inflated reputation of chasing away giants), "Tree and Leaf" (a work consisting of Tolkien's groundbreaking essay "On Fairy-stores" - a most readable examination of the meaning of fantasy), "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil" (sixten poems from the Red Book) and "Sir Gawain and teh Green Knight" (Tolkien's first career translation of medieval poetry).

The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson


Jeremy Noel-Tod - 2018
    More and more writers are turning to this peculiarly rich and flexible form; it defines Claudia Rankine's Citizen, one of the most talked-about books of recent years, and many others, such as Sarah Howe's Loop of Jade and Vahni Capildeo's Measures of Expatriation, make extensive use of it. Yet this fertile mode which in its time has drawn the likes of Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein and Seamus Heaney remains, for many contemporary readers, something of a mystery.The history of the prose poem is a long and fascinating one. Here, Jeremy Noel-Tod reconstructs it for us by selecting the essential pieces of writing - by turns luminous, brooding, lamentatory and comic - which have defined and developed the form at each stage, from its beginnings in nineteenth-century France, through the twentieth-century traditions of Britain and America and beyond the English language, to the great wealth of material written internationally since 2000. Comprehensively told, it yields one of the most original and genre-changing anthologies to be published for some years, and offers readers the chance to discover a diverse range of new poets and new kinds of poem, while also meeting famous names in an unfamiliar guise.

Eldritch Tales: A Miscellany of the Macabre


H.P. Lovecraft - 2011
    His extraordinary imagination spawned both the Elder God Cthulhu and his eldritch cohorts, and the strangely compelling town of Innsmouth, all of which feature within these pages. Stephen Jones, one of the world's foremost editors of dark fiction, will complete the Lovecraft story in his extensive afterword, and award-winning artist Les Edwards will provide numerous illustrations for this must-have collection.