Authors include Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Muriel Spark, Anne Tyler, Italo Calvino, Henry Green, Robert Pinget, L.E. Sissman, R.K. Narayan and Roland Barthes. He also writes of actresses Louise Brooks and Doris Day and golfers Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer.

    Written by one of America's most innovative and articulate feminists, this book illustrates how childhood experience, gender and sexuality, private aspirations, and public personae all assume undeniable roles in the causes and effects of war.

    Arlen goes beyond the portrait of his father, the famous Anglo-Armenian novelist of the 1920s, that he created in Exiles to try to discover what his father had tried to forget: Armenia and what it meant to be an Armenian, a descendant of a proud people whom conquerors had for centuries tried to exterminate. But perhaps most affectingly, Arlen tells a story as large as a whole people yet as personal as the uneasy bond between a father and a son, offering a masterful account of the affirmation and pain of kinship.

    From dark fairytales to alien skies, Monk's stories blend haunting yesterdays, forgotten todays and twisted tomorrows wherein:...A normal little girl in a city made of gears, takes on the world to save a toy.......A normal ancient monster living in Seattle, must decide if love is worth trusting a hero......A normal patchwork woman and her two-headed boyfriend stitch their life and farm together with needle, thread, and time......a normal vampire in a knitting shop must face sun-drenched secrets......a normal snow creature's wish changes a mad man's life......a normal man breaks reality with a hamster......and yes, a normal little robot, defines how extraordinary friendship can be.Poignant, bittersweet, frightening, and funny, these stories pour out worlds that are both lovely and odd, darkly strange and tantalizingly familiar, where no matter how fantastic the setting or situation, love, freedom, and hope find a way to take root and thrive.“Dusi” (Realms of Fantasy, Oct 1999)“Beer with a Hamster Chaser”(Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #14, June 2004)“Probe” (Odyssey #5, 1998)“That Saturday” (Better off Dead, Daw Books, Nov 2008)“The Wishing Time” (First publication in the 1st edition, 2010)“Bearing Life” (Maiden, Matron, Crone, Daw Books, May 2005)“A Cup of Normal” (First publication in 2nd edition, 2015)“Stitchery” (Black Gate #2, 2001; Year’s Best Fantasy 2, Eos, 2002)“Last Tour of Duty” (Realms of Fantasy, Dec 2001)“Oldblade” (Talebones #19, Spring 2000)“Skein of Sunlight” (Mammoth Book of Vampire Romance 2, 2009)“Stringing Tomorrow” (Talebones #32, Spring 2006)“X-Day” (First publication in the 1st edition, 2010)“Menders” (First publication in the 1st edition, 2010)“Leeward to the Sky” (Realms of Fantasy, June 2002)“Fishing the Edge of the World” (Talebones #28, Summer 2004)“Moonlighting” (Fantasy Gone Wrong, Daw Books, Sept 2006)“Christmas Card” (First publication in the 1st edition, 2010)“Ducks in a Row” (Realms of Fantasy, April 2006)“Singing Down the Sun” (Fantastic Companions, May 2005)“Here After Life” (Realms of Fantasy, Feb 2003)“Falling with Wings” (Realms of Fantasy, Aug 2004)“When the Train Calls Lonely” (Realms of Fantasy, Oct 2007)

    Poets in a Landscape is his delightful exploration of Latin literature and the Italian landscape. As Highet writes in his introduction, “I have endeavored to recall some of the greatest Roman poets by describing the places were they lived, recreating their characters and evoking the essence of their work.” The poets are Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. Highet brings them life, setting them in their historical context and locating them in the physical world, while also offering crisp modern translations of the poets’ finest work. The result is an entirely sui generis amalgam of travel writing, biography, criticism, and pure poetry—altogether an unexcelled introduction to the world of the classics.

    In the years that followed, Willis’s daring insights went beyond popular music, taking on such issues as pornography, religion, feminism, war, and drugs.The Essential Ellen Willis gathers writings that span forty years and are both deeply engaged with the times in which they were first published and yet remain fresh and relevant amid today’s seemingly intractable political and cultural battles. Whether addressing the women’s movement, sex and abortion, race and class, or war and terrorism, Willis brought to each a distinctive attitude—passionate yet ironic, clear-sighted yet hopeful.Offering a compelling and cohesive narrative of Willis’s liberationist “transcendence politics,” the essays—among them previously unpublished and uncollected pieces—are organized by decade from the 1960s to the 2000s, with each section introduced by young writers who share Willis’s intellectual bravery, curiosity, and lucidity: Irin Carmon, Spencer Ackerman, Cord Jefferson, Ann Friedman, and Sara Marcus. The Essential Ellen Willis concludes with excerpts from Willis’s unfinished book about politics and the cultural unconscious, introduced by her longtime partner, Stanley Aronowitz. An invaluable reckoning of American society since the 1960s, this volume is a testament to an iconoclastic and fiercely original voice.

    It’s a guide you’ll turn to again and again for information on every series ever telecast. There are entries for all the great shows, from evergreens like The Honeymooners, All in the Family, and Happy Days to modern classics like 24, The Office, and Desperate Housewives; all the gripping sci-fi series, from Captain Video and the new Battle Star Galactica to all versions of Star Trek; the popular serials, from Peyton Place and Dallas to Dawson’s Creek and Ugly Betty; the reality show phenomena American Idol, Survivor, and The Amazing Race; and the hits on cable, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Top Chef, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Project Runway, and SpongeBob SquarePants. This comprehensive guide lists every program alphabetically and includes a complete broadcast history, cast, and engaging plot summary–along with exciting behind-the-scenes stories about the shows and the stars.MORE THAN 500 ALL-NEW LISTINGS from Heroes and Grey’s Anatomy to 30 Rock and Nip/Tuck UPDATES ON CONTINUING SHOWS such as CSI, Gilmore Girls, The Simpsons, and The Real WorldEXTENSIVE CABLE COVERAGE with more than 1,000 entries, including a description of the programming on each major cable networkAND DON’T MISS the exclusive and updated “Ph.D. Trivia Quiz” of 200 questions that will challenge even the most ardent TV fan, plus a streamlined guide to TV-related websites for those who want to be constantly up-to-dateSPECIAL FEATURES!• Annual program schedules at a glance for the past 61 years • Top-rated shows of each season • Emmy Award winners • Longest-running series • Spin-off series • Theme songs • A fascinating history of TV “This is the Guinness Book of World Records . . .the Encyclopedia Britannica of television!”–TV Guide

    Sensuous, witty, exalted, ironic, grave, analytical, the letters illustrate the artist's life--and they trumpet his artistic opinions--in an outpouring of uninhibited eloquence.An acknowledged master of translation, Francis Steegmuller has given us by far the most generous and varied selection of Flaubert's letters in English. He presents these with an engrossing narrative that places them in the context of the writer's life and times. We follow Flaubert through his unhappy years at law school, through his tumultuous affair with Louise Colet; we share his days and nights amid the temples and brothels of Egypt, then on to Palestine, Turkey, Greece, and Rome. And the letters chronicle one of the central events in literary history--the conception and composition of what has been called the first modern novel, Madame Bovary. Steegmuller's selection concludes with Flaubert's standing trial for immoral writing, Madame Bovary's immediate popular success, and Baudelaire's celebration of its psychological and literary power.Throughout this exposition in Flaubert's own words of his views on life, literature, and the passions, readers of his novels will be powerfully reminded of the fertility of his genius, and delighted by his poetic enthusiasm. "Let us sing to Apollo as in ancient days," he wrote to Louise Colet, "and breathe deeply of the fresh cold air of Parnassus; let us strum our guitars and clash our cymbals and whirl like dervishes in the eternal hubbub of forms and ideas!"Flaubert's letters are documents of life and art; lovers of literature and of the literary adventure can rejoice in this edition.

    But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political, and religious. James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father Joe had abandoned his own dream of becoming a priest to rise through the ranks of Hoover's FBI and then become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived the privileged life of a general's son, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope, all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents' house. He worshiped his father until Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, turmoil in the Catholic Church, and then Vietnam combined to outweigh the bond between father and son. These were issues on which they would never agree. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer and husband with children of his own did he come to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In this work of nonfiction, the bestselling novelist draws on the skills he honed with nine much-admired novels to tell the story he was, literally, born to tell. An American Requiem is a benediction on his father's life, his family's struggles, and the legacies of an entire generation.

    He argues that, of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives, and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works – among others, Chekhov’s story ‘The Kiss’, W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, and Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a provincial boy growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he makes between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. The Nearest Thing to Life is not simply a brief, tightly argued book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic – it is also an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to re-consider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

    All the while he has been writing some of the wittiest, most incisive criticism we have on an astonishing array of subjects—music, literature, photography, and travel journalism—that, in Dyer's expert hands, becomes a kind of irresistible self-reportage.Otherwise Known as the Human Condition collects twenty-five years of essays, reviews, and misadventures. Here he is pursuing the shadow of Camus in Algeria and remembering life on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s; reflecting on Richard Avedon and Ruth Orkin, on the status of jazz and the wonderous Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, on the sculptor ZadKine and the saxophonist David Murray (in the same essay), on his heroes Rebecca West and Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, on haute couture and sex in hotels. Whatever he writes about, his responses never fail to surprise. For Dyer there is no division between the reflective work of the critic and the novelist's commitment to lived experience: they are mutually illuminating ways to sharpen our perceptions. His is the rare body of work that manages to both frame our world and enlarge it.

    Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.

    Beginning in 1905, with Franklin and Eleanor's honeymoon, it covers FDR's years as New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, his early struggle to overcome the ravages of polio and ends with his election as governor of New York in 1928. Ward not only traces the development of Roosevelt's "first-class temperament" but provides dimensional characterizations of friends, enemies and family members, gallantly defending FDR's often-maligned mother, Sara, and revealing the effect on the Roosevelt children of the tensions between Franklin and Eleanor. FDR's jaunty, fun-loving nature and his "breezy duplicity" are brought into focus in the early sections, but the tone deepens in the moving account of the future president's valiant but hopeless attempt to regain the use of his legs. Going against the accepted legend, Ward maintains that "the Roosevelt who could not walk was in most respects very like the one who could."

    It also provides the best, most sustained exposure possible to the most wide-ranging, acute, and original literary intelligence of the post—World War II years. United States is an essential book in the canon of twentieth-century American literature and an endlessly fascinating work.

    In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—each one glinting with “verve and sparkle,” “acumen and passion”—on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, “Private Lives,” prefaced by Mendelsohn’sNew Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noël Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”