Shooting an Elephant


George Orwell - 1936
    The other masterly essays in this collection include classics such as "My Country Right or Left", "How the Poor Die" and "Such, Such were the Joys", his memoir of the horrors of public school, as well as discussions of Shakespeare, sleeping rough, boys' weeklies, and a spirited defence of English cooking. Opinionated, uncompromising, provocative, and hugely entertaining, all show Orwell's unique ability to get to the heart of any subject.

Jesus' Son


Denis Johnson - 1992
    In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.Contains:Car Crash While HitchhikingTwo MenOut on BailDundunWorkEmergencyDirty WeddingThe Other ManHappy HourSteady Hands at Seattle GeneralBeverly Home'

Flowering Judas


Katherine Anne Porter - 1993
    It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obregón Revolution. This casebook on "Flowering Judas" addresses Porter's ambivalence surrounding her roles as woman and artist and also attests to the profound influence of Mexico upon her work. Readers of this early tale will not be surprised to learn that although Porter was a practicing feminist in her life and her work, she actually eschewed the feminist label.Virginia Spencer Carr brings her own sharply focused biographer's eye to the introduction, further illuminating the story and the superb critical essays that it provokes. The casebook includes the authoritative text of the story itself, Porter's own statement regarding the genesis of this highly acclaimed work, an important interview, a collection of significant essays on "Flowering Judas" and the historical, cultural, and personal milieu from which the tale evolved, a bibliography, and a chronology of Porter's life and work.

Endgame


Samuel Beckett - 1957
    Endgame, originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is now considered by many critics to be his greatest single work. A pinnacle of Beckett's characteristic raw minimalism, it is a pure and devastating distillation of the human essence in the face of approaching death.

Mumbo Jumbo


Ishmael Reed - 1972
    In it, Reed, one of our preeminent African-American authors, mixes portraits of historical figures and fictional characters with sound bites on subjects ranging from ragtime to Greek philosophy. Cited by literary critic Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred most significant books in the Western canon, Mumbo Jumbo is a trenchant and often biting look at black-white relations throughout history, from a keen observer of our culture.

Father and Son


Edmund Gosse - 1907
    Father and Son remains one of English literature's seminal autobiographies. In it, Edmund Gosse recounts, with humor and pathos, his childhood as a member of a Victorian Protestant sect and his struggles to forge his own identity despite the loving control of his father. His work is a key document of the crisis of faith and doubt and a penetrating exploration of the impact of evolutionary science. An astute, well-observed, and moving portrait of the tensions of family life, Father and Son remains a classic of twentieth-century literature.This edition contains an illuminating introduction, and provides a series of fascinating appendices including extracts from Philip Gosse's Omphalos and Edmund Gosse's harrowing account of his wife's death from breast cancer.

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction


Michel Foucault - 1976
    Michel Foucault offers an iconoclastic exploration of why we feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex, and of the social and mental mechanisms of power that cause us to direct the questions of what we are to what our sexuality is.

Dearly


Margaret Atwood - 2020
    Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic. In poem after poem, she casts her unique imagination and unyielding, observant eye over the landscape of a life carefully and intuitively lived.While many are familiar with Margaret Atwood’s fiction—including her groundbreaking and bestselling novels The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, among others—she has, from the beginning of her career, been one of our most significant contemporary poets. And she is one of the very few writers equally accomplished in fiction and poetry.  This collection is a stunning achievement that will be appreciated by fans of her novels and poetry readers alike.

To My Dear and Loving Husband


Anne Bradstreet - 2012
    

My Life and My Life in the Nineties


Lyn Hejinian - 2013
    Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many ways in which language--the things people say and the ways they say them--shapes not only their identity, but also the very world around them.

Running in the Family


Michael Ondaatje - 1982
    As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family. An inspired travel narrative and family memoir by an exceptional writer.

Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats


Robert Penn Warren - 1992
    It is the finest anthology of lyric poetry ever published."Truth" by Geoffrey Chaucer"Ophelia's Song" by William Shakespeare"The Canonization" by John Donne"To Heaven" by Ben Jonson"Ode on Solitude" by Alexander Pope"The Tyger" by William Blake"The Solitary Reaper" by William Wordsworth"Ode to a Nightingale" by John Keats"God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins"Sailing to Byzantium" by William Butler Yeatsand more than ninety additional classic poems.

Dictee


Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - 1982
    A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.

Volpone


Ben Jonson - 1606
    The plot concerns a wealthy, lecherous old man who feigns a mortal illness in order to solicit bribes from greedy acquaintances who hope to inherit his fortune. Many complexities of plot and connivance ensue, but in the end, the guilty parties are exposed and punished. Explanatory footnotes.

The Complete Poems


Andrew Marvell - 1872
    The Complete Poems demonstrates his unique skill and immense diversity to the full, and includes lyrical love-poetry, religious works and biting satire. From the passionately erotic To his Coy Mistress, to the astutely political Cromwellian poems and the profoundly spiritual On a Drop of Dew, in which he considers the nature of the soul, these works are masterpieces of clarity and metaphysical imagery. Eloquent and compelling, they remain among the most vital and profound works of the era - works by a figure who, in the words of T. S. Eliot, 'speaks clearly and unequivocally with the voice of his literary age'.