From Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, leading critics Richard Ruland (American) and Malcolm Bradbury (British) address questions of literary and cultural nationalism. They demonstrate that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define America's cultural and social parameters. Above all, they argue that American literature has always been essentially "modern," illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to Fitzgerald and Pound, to Wallace Stevens, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Thomas Pynchon.From Puritanism to Postmodernism pays homage to the luxuriance of American writing by tracing the creation of a national literature that retained its deep roots in European culture while striving to achieve cultural independence.

    Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us.This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation―Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five―while bringing together some of the finest voices of today’s Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, shaping our own journeys in the process.

    Every morning, Marcel Proust sipped his two cups of strong coffee with milk, ate a croissant from one boulangerie, dunking it in his coffee as he slowly read the day’s paper with great care—poring over each headline and section. Only Alain de Botton could have pulled so many useful insights from the oeuvre of one the world’s greatest literary masters. Fascinating and vital, How to Take Your Time will urge you to find the wisdom in defying “the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.” A Vintage Shorts Wellness selection. An ebook short.

    This world of total human experience is the world that is (or at least ought to be) reflected and molded by the arts, above all by the art of literature. "What is the function of literature," Mr. Huxley asks, "what its psychology, what the nature of literary language? And how do its function, psychology and language differ from those of science? What in the past has been the relationship between literature and science? What is it now? What might it be in the future? And what would it be profitable, artistically speaking, for a twentieth-century man of letters to do about twentieth-century science?"Ours is the Age of Science; but from a study of the best contemporary literature one would find it difficult to infer this most obvious of facts. Contemporary poetry, drama and fiction contain remarkably few references to contemporary science—few references even to the metaphysical and ethical problems which contemporary science has raised. That this state of affairs should somehow be remedied is the theme of every recent discussion of "the Two Cultures." unfortunately most of these discussions have been carried on in abstract terms and with almost no citations of case histories, no references to the concrete problems of literary and scientific writing, no illustrative examples. Mr. Huxley has approached the subject in a different way. He deals with specific questions in the fields of immediate experience, of conceptualization, of philosophical interpretation and of verbal expression; and he illustrates these wide-ranging themes with copious quotations, drawn from a great variety of sources. He analyzes the nature of literary language and contrasts its many-meaninged richness with the simplified and jargonized language of science. He shows how the poets of earlier centuries made use of the scientific knowledge available to them. He gives examples of the ways in which modern science has modified and added to the traditional raw materials of literature. And he concludes with a speculative discussion of the ways in which future men of letters may work up the raw materials of brand new fact and revolutionary hypothesis provided by science, transfiguring them into a new kind of literature, capable of expression and at the same time coordinating and giving significance to the totality of an ever-widening human experience.

    Memories and dreams in turn conjure their magical counterparts—people without names or pasts, fantastic animals, half-animals, and talking machines that traverse the dark psychic underworld of this writer’s extraordinary fiction.Fervently acclaimed worldwide, Murakami’s wildly imaginative work in many ways remains a mystery, its worlds within worlds uncharted territory. Finally in this book readers will find a map to the strange realm that grounds virtually every aspect of Murakami’s writing. A journey through the enigmatic and baffling innermost mind, a metaphysical dimension where Murakami’s most bizarre scenes and characters lurk, The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami exposes the psychological and mythological underpinnings of this other world. Matthew Carl Strecher shows how these considerations color Murakami’s depictions of the individual and collective soul, which constantly shift between the tangible and intangible but in this literary landscape are undeniably real.Through these otherworldly depths The Forbidden Worlds of Haruki Murakami also charts the writer’s vivid “inner world,” whether unconscious or underworld (what some Japanese critics call achiragawa, or “over there”), and its connectivity to language. Strecher covers all of Murakami’s work—including his efforts as a literary journalist—and concludes with the first full-length close reading of the writer’s newest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

    He is senior pastor of Oak Cliff Bible Fellowship in Dallas, TX and founder of The Urban Alternative, a ministry which promotes a kingdom agenda philosophy designed to enable people to live all of life underneath the comprehensive rule of God.   The Tony Evans Bible Commentary includes an introduction to each Bible book followed by passage-by-passage exposition of the entire Bible by Dr. Tony Evans. In addition, there is a special front matter section with introductory resources. The insights in this commentary will help explain God’s Word in a fresh way. Applying these truths will empower readers to have transformed lives that then transfer the values of the kingdom of God to others.   The Tony Evans Bible Commentary features the highly readable, highly reliable text of the Christian Standard Bible® (CSB). The CSB stays as literal as possible to the Bible's original meaning without sacrificing clarity, making it easier to engage with Scripture's life-changing message and to share it with others.

    It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war.A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun.With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away.With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

    In leader David Miscavige's inner sanctum, they built their mental prison as they melded into its radicalized lifestyle where danger, captivity and abuse were normalized. After three escapes, Karen chose between two unbearable options. Escaping Scientology Part I sweeps you into the lives of two young adults filled with hope and love as designer Karen and her award-winning musician-composer husband Peter overcome obstacles to succeed in the music and fashion industries together. Scientology re-focuses their goals toward the importance of clearing the planet and recruiting celebrities to build Scientology's social capital. Karen portrays the basic beliefs of Scientology that led to her radicalization into the Sea Org at the Celebrity Centre, a fortress where artists aspire to achieve greatness while attaining spiritual freedom through L. Ron Hubbard’s teachings. Karen shows how celebrities are lured into Scientology and develop a co-dependent relationship from which few break out. Part II reveals Karen as a flawed and complex woman when she and Peter move to the secretive International Management headquarters, where they join 800 fanatical Sea Org members that made billion-year commitments to make this a Scientology world without war, criminality, or insanity. Karen finds the dystopian outpost and its global operations to be proof that Time magazine’s 1991 article, “The Thriving Cult of Greed and Power” captures the essence of Scientology’s mindset, that she describes as “war is everything and everything is war.” She is no passive victim as she attempts to stay in the driver’s seat and keep their marriage intact while fighting the pressures of the Int base culture that attempt to break them apart. Scientology goes under “Cruise Control” as Miscavige becomes obsessed with his biggest trophy, Tom Cruise, and stiffens his control and abusive punishment methods on the Int base staff. Karen rebels against regulations and spends time in Scientology’s prison camp. After two attempts to escape the Int base, she is trailed by security guards and coerced into returning. Failing to escape, she questions the evidence of her own senses, and makes a mind-twisting re-commitment to become the best version of a Sea Org member she can be. Karen carves out a world she can live within as she is promoted into the highest echelons of management, appointed by the Chairman of the Board RTC to Int Management Public Relations Officer and later to take charge of the image of Sea Org staff internationally from the Int Finance Office. While working on special projects under David and Shelley Miscavige, she travels to Scientology bases around the world where she sees human rights violations set in place by Hubbard’s policies that cause her to conclude Scientology is a for-profit business that builds billions of dollars of assets on the backs of Sea Org slave labor, while hiding behind the banner of the First Amendment, claiming benefits and protection as a non-profit religion. The epilogue of Part III portrays the mind-wrenching process of physical escape, and psychological anguish as Karen plies herself out of Scientology’s grip and endures its cruel disconnection policy. She re-acclimates herself to life on the outside while, brick by brick, she disassembles the walls of the mental prison she had built, and survives with the help of her accomplice and the love and support of her family. Karen's narrative memoir shows that Scientology's plan, authored by L.

    What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction scene pulling no punches in response to a writer who continues to beguile, charm, fascinate, and frustrate generations of readers. Contributors Walter Kirn, Ren? Steinke, Charles D’Ambrosio, Emma Forrest, Aleksander Hemon, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Amy Sohn, John McNally, Karen E. Bender, Thomas Beller, Benjamin Anastas, Aimee Bender, Joel Stein, and Jane Mendelsohn turn themselves inside out as they discuss their personal reactions to reading Salinger classics–not only The Catcher in the Rye but also Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and the short stories–and explore, with begrudging gratitude, how Salinger helped to form the deepest reaches of their literary imaginations.

    Twenty-two essays spanning five centuries, along with author notes and full bibliographies, provide an insight into one of humanity's greatest solitary diversions - reading.

    As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia among them.Divided into three sections, Why Write? begins with Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, first published in 1975 and expanded for a second edition ten years later. It opens with the remarkable hybrid story-essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” a critical evaluation that yields to a fictional imagination of Kafka as young Roth’s Hebrew School teacher in 1940s Newark, the first of the provocative forays into speculative alternative realities that would take shape in novels like The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. In the essays and interviews given in the wake of the explosive release of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth clarifies how he sought to “raise obscenity to the level of a subject,” provides sharp-edged insights into an America wracked by political turmoil and sexual revolution, and defends the imaginative freedom of writers and readers alike.The volume’s second section presents in its entirety the 2001 book Shop Talk, a series of conversations with writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, and Edna O’Brien, as well as essays on Malamud, Bellow, and the artist Philip Guston. The collection highlights Roth’s skill as an astute literary interlocutor, engaged with writers whose traditions, assumptions, and experience can differ markedly from those of the American world of his own fiction.The concluding section, “Explanations,” comprises fourteen later pieces collected here for the first time, six of them never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; “Forty-Five Years On,” Roth’s absolute last word on Portnoy; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that evokes the Newark of Roth’s childhood and examines the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work: “Morning after morning for fifty years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation.”

    As he analyzes the opening sections of novels and short stories by such writers as Agnon, Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov, García Márquez, and Raymond Carver, Oz instructs, challenges, and guides. He writes about the notion of "beginnings," what the beginning of a novel or short story might "mean" to the author and how important it is. And best of all-he entertains. He highlights opening paragraphs in which authors make promises they may or may not deliver later in the work, or deliver in unexpected ways, or they may deliver more than they have promised. It is a game that miraculously and playfully engages both writer and reader. The Story Begins is a resourceful, accessible, and friendly companion for all students of literature and writing and for all book lovers.

    On the very day Richard Millhous Nixon became the 37th President, Ivan was born into a dysfunctional family. From a mentally challenged mother to an incapable father and a fragile brother, Ivan was faced with challenges no child is ready for. And yet despite all the anger and frustration that came with them, he somehow managed to persevere, to become more what society deemed him to be: an executive. This creative uncensored biography recounts in vivid detail the anger and depression of growing up in poverty, the gripping homicidal effects of drugs, racism, police brutality and a broken government system. Ivan’s voice is expressed through a masterful use of syntax that reveals a soul that, while battered, is far from broken. His tale maintains steadfast a hope for a better future that would give Richard Nixon himself reason to pause. From Illinois to Indiana comes a story over forty-years that highlights the indomitable power of a determined soul. Relive some of the most unimaginable situations, leading up to a meeting with a certain angel that will change his life for the better. Find out how a word as simple as “FAVOR” can make all the difference in the world. This unrestricted story will leave you never looking at your own “Dirty Laundry” the same.

    Delving into the electric atmosphere of the arcades where he misspent his youth, he asks: Why did Space Invaders invade our hearts and minds? How much time, loose change and sex appeal did they cost us? And most importantly, which secret cheats and tactics must we master to reach the next level?Part cautionary tale, part celebration of a lifelong addiction, this is an essential manual for many a self-confessed cyber geek, computer nerd and joystick junkie.

    Each volume’s series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected — and most popular — of its kind.The Best American Essays 2012 includesMarcia Angell, Miah Arnold, Mark Doty, Joseph Epstein, Jonathan Franzen,Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Lauren Slater,Sandra Tsing Loh, Jose Antonio Vargas, and others