At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems.This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.

    Annotations in this edition are keyed both to the reading text of the new critical edition of Ulysses published in 1984 and to the standard 1961 Random House edition and the current Modern Library and Vintage texts.Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.

    In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. “I am marking here what most marked me,” she writes.  Ranging from Chaucer to H. D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the “growth of a poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an “erotics of interpretation”: this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be.

    . . still at work on his almost-song of himself” (The New York Times Book Review).In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent breakfast after the late shift, and Henry Ford, “supremely bored” in his mansion, clocks in at one of his plants . . . from Spain, where a woman sings a song that rises at dawn, like the dust of ages, through an open window . . . from Andorra, where an old Communist can now supply you with anything you want—a French radio, a Cadillac, or, if you have a week, an American film star.The world of his poetry is one of questionable magic: a typist lives for her only son who will die in a war to come; three boys fish in a river while a fine industrial residue falls on their shoulders. This is a haunted world in which exotic animals travel first class, an immigrant worker in Detroit yearns for the silence of his Siberian exile, and the Western mountains “maintain that huge silence we think of as divine.”A rich, deeply felt collection from one of our master poets.

    In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.

    It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” --Louise Gluck A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise GluckIn the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.”Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

    But what’s involved in bringing these narratives into the classroom—in creative writing, cultural studies, women’s and ethnic studies, and social science and literature courses? How may instructors engage the philosophical, historical, social, and theoretical contexts of the emerging field of autobiography studies?Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, two authorities in life narrative studies distill their diverse forays into life writing in a concise yet far-reaching overview of key terms, issues, histories, and texts in autobiography studies. Reading Autobiography is a step-by-step introduction to the differences of self-narrative from fiction and biography; the components of autobiographical acts; such core concepts as memory, experience, identity, agency, and the body; the textual and critical history of the field; and prospects for future research. Organized as a user-friendly handbook, it includes a glossary of key words, suggestions for teaching, and extensive primary and secondary bibliographies. Sidonie Smith is professor of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. Julia Watson is associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.

    When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes the text of the last paper Creeley gave—an essay exploring the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. On Earth reminds us what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

    In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America. Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, she challenges those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels—from Huckleberry Finn to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—she invites us to join her as citizens of her "Republic of Imagination," a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy, and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

    Included here are many of Galway Kinnell’s best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

    Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. "Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines." James Longenbach opens this provocative book with that essential statement. Through a range of examples—from Shakespeare and Milton to Ashbery and Glück—Longenbach describes the function of line in metered, rhymed, syllabic, and free-verse poetry. The Art of the Poetic Line is a vital new resource by one of America's most important critics and most engaging poets.

    Poulin, Jr., Poetry Prize. In his foreword he writes, "I was immediately struck by the boldness of imagination, the strange cadences, and wild music of these poems. We should be glad that young poets like Keetje Kuipers are making their voices heard not by tearing up the old language but by making the old language new."Keetje Kuipers, a native of the Northwest, earned her BA at Swarthmore College and MFA at the University of Oregon. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she divides her time between Stanford and Missoula, Montana.From Devils Lake Journal:“Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth is at once lovely, frank, and haunting. The poems move easily between landscapes, inhabiting the American west, Paris, and New York City with equal ease and yet, they never exploit sympathies of locale for their power. Instead, they rely on nothing but the speaker’s own candor, who is able to speak through such disparate poems as “Bondage Play as Substitue for Prayer” alongside “Waltz of the Midnight Miscarriage,” “Reading Sappho in a Wine Bar,” and “Barn Elegy” with a good spattering of honest-to-goodness sonnets.”From ForeWord Reviews:“The poems move like ghosts themselves: disappearing into walls, circling back, appearing for a moment to be captured, then evaporating into thin air. Kuipers pins moments onto the page with the care of an etymologist collecting rare specimens. Her poems are at once visceral and cosmic, “a wave as well as a particle.””

    He chronicles his journey in the New York Times bestseller Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. What brought Denby back to his alma mater was not a sense of nostalgia, but the current academic debate surrounding Western literature. This culture war centers on the left's denunciation of "dead white European males" as oppressive and exclusionary and the right's reverence of the Western canon as the foundation of traditional values and patriotism. Like many of the extremists engaged in the debate, Denby found his memories of these works faded and forgotten. "I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.... And I wanted to add my words to the debate from the ground up, beginning and ending in literature, never leaving the books themselves." Thus Denby returns to Columbia for the two "great books" courses: Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. During his yearlong education he explores the difficulties of going back to reading seriously; analyzes today's college students; observes the teaching styles of four professors; and enters into a period of self-discovery as he learns to deal with life as a middle-aged student, father, and husband. Along the way he gains a new appreciation of writers such as Homer, Boccaccio, Austen, Nietzsche, Conrad, Machiavelli, Marx, and Woolf. He walks away from his experiences believing deeply that students today, more than ever, need this type of humanistic education and that both sides of the culture war are simplifying the Western tradition.

    It includes London and The Vanity of Human Wishes among other poems, and many of his essays for the Rambler and Idler. The prefaces to his edition of Shakespeare and his famous Dictionary, together with samples from the texts, are given, as well as selections from A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, the Lives of the Poets and Rasselas in its entirety. There is also a substantial representation of lesser-known prose, and of his poetry, letters, and journals.

    These elegant, conversational excursions refuse to let a reader slide over anything, from the tiniest shards of beach glass to barren big-box wastelands. They detonate distractedness, superficiality, artificiality. In the process, Purpura inhabits many stances: metaphysician and biologist, sensualist and witness—all in service of illuminating that which Virginia Woolf called “moments of being”—previously unworded but palpably felt states of existence and knowing. Rough Likeness finds worlds in the minute, and crafts monuments to beauty and strangeness.