Trout Fishing in America


Richard Brautigan - 1967
    He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called “the last of the Beats.” His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise. This new edition includes an introduction by the poet Billy Collins, who first encountered Brautigan’s work as a student in California.

Six American Poets: An Anthology


Joel Conarroe - 1991
    From the overflowing pantheism of Walt Whitman to the exquisite precision of Emily Dickinson; from the democratic clarity of William Carlos Williams to the cerebral luxuriance of Wallace Stevens; and from Robert Frost's deceptively homespun dramatic monologues to Langston Hughes's exuberant jazz-age lyrics, this anthology presents the best work of six makers of the modern American poetic tradition. Six American Poets includes 247 poems, among them such famous masterpieces as "I Hear America Singing," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Dance," and "Mending Wall," as well as lesser-known works. With perceptive introductory essays by the distinguished scholar Joel Conarroe and selections that capture the distinctive voices and visions of its authors, this volume is an invaluable addition to any poetry library.

The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks


Gwendolyn Brooks - 2005
    There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing." From the life of Chicago's South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts."Her formal range," writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, "is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso." That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks's poetry retains its power to move and surprise.

Wolf Whistle


Lewis Nordan - 1993
    The two white men responsible were tried— and acquitted— in a Mississippi town near Lewis Nordan’s boyhood home. These events changed him forever. In this extraordinary novel, Nordan transforms one of America’s most notorious racial killings into a magical mystery ride of hilarity and horror that you will never forget.“An immense and wall-shattering display of talent. Wolf Whistle will help usher Lewis Nordan into the Hall of Fame of American Letters.” —Randall Kenan, The Nation

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow - 1847
    Longfellow's epic poem about the expulsion of the Acadians has become mythologized and immortalized by Acadians in the Maritimes and Cajuns in Louisiana.

Early Irish Myths and Sagas


Jeffrey Gantz - 1981
    Rich with magic and achingly beautiful, they speak of a land of heroic battles, intense love and warrior ideals, in which the otherworld is explored and men mingle freely with the gods. From the vivid adventures of the great Celtic hero Cu Chulaind, to the stunning 'Exile of the Sons of Uisliu' - a tale of treachery, honour and romance - these are masterpieces of passion and vitality, and form the foundation for the Irish literary tradition: a mythic legacy that was a powerful influence on the work of Yeats, Synge and Joyce.

Look Homeward, Angel


Thomas Wolfe - 1929
    It is Wolfe's first novel, and is considered a highly autobiographical American Bildungsroman. The character of Eugene Gant is generally believed to be a depiction of Wolfe himself. The novel covers the span of time from Gant's birth to the age of 19. The setting is the fictional town and state of Altamont, Catawba, a fictionalization of his home town, Asheville, North Carolina. Playwright Ketti Frings wrote a theatrical adaptation of Wolfe's work in a 1957 play of the same title.

Selected Tales and Sketches


Nathaniel Hawthorne - 1959
    With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly – often wickedly – unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader’s imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne’s longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.--back coverHollow of the Three HillsSir William PhipsMrs. HutchinsonWives of the DeadMy Kinsman, Major MolineuxRoger Malvin's BurialPassages from a Relinquished WorkMr. Higginbotham's CatastropheHaunted MindAlice Doane's AppealGray ChampionYoung Goodman BrownWakefieldNotch of the White MountainsAmbitious GuestMay-Pole of Merry MountMinister's Black VeilSunday at HomeMan of AdamantEndicott and the Red CrossNight SketchesLegens of the Province-HouseHall of FantasyBirthmarkEgotism; or the Bosom-SerpentChristmas BanquetCelestial RailroadEarth's HolocaustArtist of the BeautifulRappacini’s DaughterEthan Brand

Rhett Butler's People


Donald McCaig - 2007
    Twelve years in the making, the publication of Rhett Butler’s People marks a major and historic cultural event. Through the storytelling mastery of award-winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfolds. Through Rhett’s eyes we meet the people who shaped his larger than life personality as it sprang from Margaret Mitchell’s unforgettable pages: Langston Butler, Rhett’s unyielding father; Rosemary his steadfast sister; Tunis Bonneau, Rhett’s best friend and a onetime slave; Belle Watling, the woman for whom Rhett cared long before he met Scarlett O’Hara at Twelve Oaks Plantation, on the fateful eve of the Civil War. Of course there is Scarlett. Katie Scarlett O’Hara, the headstrong, passionate woman whose life is inextricably entwined with Rhett’s: more like him than she cares to admit; more in love with him than she’ll ever know…Brought to vivid and authentic life by the hand of a master, Rhett Butler’s People fulfills the dreams of those whose imaginations have been indelibly marked by Gone With The Wind.

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales


Various - 2014
    These are stories that passed down through the ages virtually unaltered in their telling. To those who told and listened to them, they expressed something fundamental about Irish culture and the Irish way of life. The stories in this volume feature a wide variety of fantastic beings, including ghosts, witches, fairies, and changelings, but several feature creatures that are virtually exclusive to Ireland: the banshee, the merrow, the pooka, and the leprechaun. Read these tales of frightening supernatural horrors, brave folk heroes, and everyday people clever enough to outwith the devil, and you'll agree that they could only take place on Irish soil.

The Portable Twentieth-Century Russian Reader


Clarence Brown - 1985
    It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction


J.D. Salinger - 1955
    Whatever their differences in mood or effect, they are both very much concerned with Seymour Glass, who is the main character in my still-uncompleted series about the Glass family. It struck me that they had better be collected together, if not deliberately paired off, in something of a hurry, if I mean them to avoid unduly or undesirably close contact with new material in the series. There is only my word for it, granted, but I have several new Glass stories coming along ? waxing, dilating ? each in its own way, but I suspect the less said about them, in mixed company, the better. Oddly, the joys and satisfactions of working on the Glass family peculiarly increase and deepen for me with the years. I can't say why, though. Not, at least, outside the casino proper of my fiction.

Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway


Corinne Demas - 2004
    From Sarah Orne Jewett's portraits of rural Maine to F. Scott Fitzgerald's brilliant tales from the Jazz Age, these stories span the breadth of the American experience. In addition to acknowledged masters of the short story form, such as O. Henry, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway, this volume features stories by Charles W. Chesnutt, the first important African-American novelist, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a leading theorist of the early women's movement.

Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories


Sandra Cisneros - 1991
    A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.

The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake


Breece D'J Pancake - 1983
    In 1983 Little, Brown and Company's posthumous publication of this book electrified the literary world with a force that still resounds across two decades. A collection of stories that depict the world of Pancake's native rural West Virginia with astonishing power and grace, The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake has remained continuously in print and is a perennial favorite among aspiring writers, participants in creative writing programs, and students of contemporary American fiction. "Trilobites", the first of Pancake's stories to be published in The Atlantic, elicited an extraordinary immediate response from readers and continues to be widely anthologized.