Powell was a prolific letter writer, and her correspondence provides an intimate look at the woman about whom The New York Times recently said: "[She] is wittier than Dorothy Parker, dissects the rich better than F. Scott Fitzgerald, is more plaintive than Willa Cather in her evocation of the heartland, and has more supple control of satirical voice than Evelyn Waugh."Living most of her life in Greenwich Village, Powell supported herself as a writer through the Great Depression and two world wars while nursing an autistic son, an alcoholic husband, and her own parade of illnesses. In her correspondence, including gossip-filled letters to such luminaries as Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and the legendary editor Max Perkins, we find the record of a courageous and dramatic woman who produced fifteen novels, ten plays, and more than one hundred stories.

    Compiled by the staff and contributors of Mojo magazine, The Mojo Collection tells the stories behind the greatest albums of all time and the artists who made them.

    Combining science with a sense of adventure, she conveys the sheer excitement of her work, from riding the tail of a white whale to saving animals harmed by drift nets or toxic spills.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Although many critics have commented on the poetic quality of Dickinson's letters, William Shurr is the first to draw fully developed poems from them. In this remarkable volume, he presents nearly 500 new poems that he and his associates excavated from her correspondence, thereby expanding the canon of Dickinson's known poems by almost one-third and making a remarkable addition to the study of American literature. Here are new riddles and epigrams, as well as longer lyrics that have never been seen as poems before. While Shurr has reformatted passages from the letters as poetry, a practice Dickinson herself occasionally followed, no words, punctuation, or spellings have been changed. Shurr points out that these new verses have much in common with Dickinson's well-known poems: they have her typical punctuation (especially the characteristic dashes and capitalizations); they use her preferred hymn or ballad meters; and they continue her search for new and unusual rhymes. Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility.

    So, she dedicated herself to visiting 31 houses of worship over a period of as many weeks. A Month of Sundays is the story of her enlightening spiritual pilgrimage.In each chapter, Mars takes readers to a different scene -- whether it's a synagogue, a Baptist church, or a mosque -- and with each visit readers are able to piece together a more complete, heartfelt picture of faith, God, and the search for meaning. Along the way, a poignant memoir of the relationship between two sisters unfolds.Drifting in and out of her memories with her sister, a grief-stricken Mars weaves between past and present, moving readers along her narrative path. Her story spills out like that of an old friend sitting at the kitchen table, fanning out her photos, sharing her struggles. A generosity and lack of judgment season her tale, full of joy and loss. Early on in her memoir, Mars says of her dying sister, "I consider it an honor and a privilege to be with her, every day, as she reflects on the state of her soul." We could say the same of Julie Mars. (Summer 2005 Selection)

    He focuses his study on the question: Was the war inevitable, or could it have been avoided?Kagan takes issue with Thucydides' view that the war was inevitable, that the rise of the Athenian Empire in a world with an existing rival power made a clash between the two a certainty. Asserting instead that the origin of the war "cannot, without serious distortion, be treated in isolation from the internal history of the states involved," Kagan traces the connections between domestic politics, constitutional organization, and foreign affairs. He further examines the evidence to see what decisions were made that led to war, at each point asking whether a different decision would have been possible.

    Full of revealing anecdotes and biting observations, these pages make abundantly clear why he was our greatest social commentator, and why he has had an enduring impact on American society and writing.

    As she puts it: “The economic game is not supposed to be rigged like some shady ring toss on a carnival midway.” Yet it has been, allowing corporate crooks to bilk the public out of trillions of dollars, magically making our pensions and 401(k)s disappear and walking away with astronomical payouts and absurdly lavish perks-for-life.The media have put their fingers on pieces of the sordid puzzle, but Pigs at the Trough presents the whole ugly picture of what’s really going on for the first time—a blistering, wickedly witty portrait of exactly how and why the worst and the greediest are running American business and government into the ground.Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski, Adelphia’s John Rigas, and the Three Horsemen of the Enron Apocalypse—Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andrew Fastow—are not just a few bad apples. They are manifestations of a megatrend in corporate leadership—the rise of a callous and avaricious mind-set that is wildly out of whack with the core values of the average American. WorldCom, Enron, Adelphia, Tyco, AOL, Xerox, Merrill Lynch, and the other scandals are only the tip of the tip of the corruption iceberg.Making the case that our public watchdogs have become little more than obedient lapdogs, unwilling to bite the corporate hand that feeds them, Arianna Huffington turns the spotlight on the tough reforms we must demand from Washington. We need, she argues, to go way beyond the lame Corporate Responsibility Act if we are to stop the voracious corporate predators from eating away at the very foundations of our democracy.Devastatingly funny and powerfully indicting, Pigs at the Trough is a rousing call to arms and a must-read for all those who are outraged by the scandalous state of corporate America.From the Hardcover edition.

    Numbering more than 200, these poems form a literary landmark—the first time her poems have appeared in a complete edition in either English or Spanish. Many of the verses presented here had been lost and are presented here for the first time in print. De Burgos broke new ground in her poetry by fusing a romantic temperament with keen political insights. This book will be essential reading for lovers of poetry and for feminists.

    Terrifying yet tender, darkly humorous and deeply moving, Nervous System is a tale of literary madness like no other.

    In May 1974, one year after Patty Hearst and her captors robbed Hibernia National Bank, a second kidnapping took place, far from the glare of the headlines. Virginia Holman's mother, in the thrall of her first psychotic episode, believed she'd been inducted into a secret army. On command of the voices in her head, she spirited her two daughters to the family cottage on the Virginia Peninsula, painted the windows black, and set up the house as a field hospital. They remained there for four years, waiting for a war that never came. At first, it was easy to explain away her mother's symptoms in the context of the changing times -- her mother was viewed as "finding herself" in the spirit of the decade. When challenged about her delusion of the secret war, she invoked the name of Martha Mitchell. When she exhibited florid psychosis, her aunt, influenced by Hollywood's smash hit movie The Exorcist, seriously suggested that an exorcism might be in order. Even after she was hospitalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia in the early 1980s, Holman's mother retained just enough lucidity to appease caseworkers in a system seemingly more concerned with protecting a patient's rights than with halting the progress of a woman's desperately dangerous illness. Rescuing Patty Hearst is an unflinching account of the dark days during which Holman's family was held hostage by her mother's delusions and the country was beset by the folly of the Watergate era. It is a startling memoir of a daughter's harrowing sojourn in the prison of her mother's mind. And, finally, it lingers as a moving portrait of a young woman defined by her mother's illness -- until at last she rekindles a family love that had lost its way.

    The city in question is London in the 1690s; but it is also New York in the 1990s. The new technologies are diving bells, pneumatic winches, and "sucking-worm" drainage engines; but they are also wireless telecommunication devices, patented biotechnology processes, and revolutionary electronic Internet routers. Only the sense of unlimited possibility remains the same throughout.Unfolding simultaneously in two distant--but remarkably similar--periods of history, Extravagance is a comic, pictaresque novel of financial mania, the story of a world gripped by a terminal case of irrational exuberance. Navigating the perils of both eras is a single cast of characters: Will himself, a young man on the make, eager to do whatever it takes to make his fortune; Will's uncle (and sponsor) Gilbert Hawking, a shrewd businessman with one foot in the Old Economy and one in the New; Benjamin Fletcher, the developer of a pioneering new technology destined to set the world on fire; and Theodore Witherspoon, the cheerfully unscrupulous wizard of the financial markets who promises to make them all wealthy beyond their dreams.Meanwhile, Will's aspirations are complicated by his pursuit of Ben Fletcher's sister, Eliza, the gorgeous and disconcertingly aggressive woman who is as desirable as she is elusive. Can Will succeed in his efforts to win both Eliza and the fortune that her brother's new technology seems likely to bring him? And can he make it all happen before the general euphoria of the age reaches its inevitable climax?Extravagance is a uniquely conceived work of high comic entertainment -- an ultra-smart time machine of a novel that proves that both love and greed are timeless.From the Hardcover edition.

    Here are over 100 memorable misstatements by our syntactically challenged president, collected, annotated, and introduced by Slate magazine's Jacob Weisberg. "I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully." "Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream." "We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers." "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family." "I do know I'm ready for the job [the presidency]. And if not, that's just the way it goes.

    Hersh who traveled more than 50,000 miles around the United States and interviewed nearly fifty members of Charlie Company to write this book.