This revised and expanded edition of The Feathered Heart, Mark Turcotte's celebrated collection of Native American poetry, brings traditional oral culture to print. Torn, painful, vibrant, and full of hope, his poetry weaves together the multilayered and textured fabric of contemporary Native American urban and rural existence. Appropriately, each poem in The Feathered Heart possesses a deeply lyrical quality. Raw emotion echoes in Turcotte's voice, in his verse, in the things he sees. "Ten Thousand Thousand Bones," for example, "a poem about the desecration of Native American burial sites and objects by archeologists," is dedicated "to an ancient woman taken from the Earth near New Lenox, Illinois in the winter 1993/94."
Song
for Thom Gunn
There is no east or west
in the wood you fear and seek,
stumbling past a gate of moss
and what you would not take.
And what you thought you had
(the Here that is no rest)
you make from it an aid
to form no east, no west.
No east. No west. No need
for given map or bell,
vehicle, screen, or speed.
Forget the house, forget the hill.
Taking its title from a set of writings found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, From the Book of Giants retunes the signal broadcast from these ancient fragments, transmitting a new sound in the shape of a Roman drain cover, in imitations of Dante and Martial, in the voice of a cricket and the hard-boiled American photographer Weegee, in elegies both public and personal, and in poems that range from the social speech of letters to the gnomic language of riddles. Out of poetry’s “complex of complaint and praise,” Joshua Weiner discovers, in one poem, his own complicity in Empire during his son’s baseball game at the White House. In another, an embroidered parrot sings a hermetic nursery rhyme to an infant after 9/11.
Between Parker’s 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the whole world of crime changed. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital—the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone.
But cash isn’t everything: Flashfire and Firebreak find Parker going after, respectively, a fortune in jewels and a collection of priceless paintings. In Flashfire, Parker’s in West Palm Beach, competing with a crew that has an unhealthy love of explosions. When things go sour, Parker finds himself shot and trapped—and forced to rely on a civilian to survive. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen old masters—which will fetch Parker a pretty penny if his team can just get it past the mansion’s tight security. The forests of Montana are an inhospitable place for a heister when well-laid plans fall apart, but no matter how untamed the wilderness, Parker’s guaranteed to be the most dangerous predator around.
Between Parker’s 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the whole world of crime changed. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst of all, money had gone digital—the days of cash-stuffed payroll trucks were long gone.
But cash isn’t everything: Flashfire and Firebreak find Parker going after, respectively, a fortune in jewels and a collection of priceless paintings. In Flashfire, Parker’s in West Palm Beach, competing with a crew that has an unhealthy love of explosions. When things go sour, Parker finds himself shot and trapped—and forced to rely on a civilian to survive. Firebreak takes Parker to a palatial Montana "hunting lodge" where a dot-com millionaire hides a gallery of stolen old masters—which will fetch Parker a pretty penny if his team can just get it past the mansion’s tight security. The forests of Montana are an inhospitable place for a heister when well-laid plans fall apart, but no matter how untamed the wilderness, Parker’s guaranteed to be the most dangerous predator around.
“Was it a crater or a sinkhole?” asks a voice in one of the mysterious, wonderstruck poems in Christopher Bolin’s Form from Form, whose cadences modulate with the energies of form-making, deformation, and elusive reformation. Natural forms and forms of human manufacture, forms of absence and those of urgent desire construct and deconstruct each other in Bolin’s singular music, which blends unnerving plainness and obliqueness, the childlike and the alien.
As their sites drift from workers’ camps to city squares, isolated coasts to windswept plains, the poems in Form from Form trace a map of a fragmented ecology, dense with physical detail of altered landscapes and displaced populations. In tones of austere beauty and harsh discordance, these poems provide a “field guide to luminescent things,” a visionary fretwork of the possibilities and impossibilities of faith in the present moment.
In a story that brings to life the founding of one of the world's great cities, Fort Dearborn takes us back to Chicago's early struggle of fire and blood. Through the eyes of two young boys and their fathers--one father a sergeant with the United States First Infantry, the other a Potawatomi warrior--we see the events that lead up to the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Using scores of letters, historical documents and maps, and long-forgotten Native American speeches, Jerry Crimmins breathes life into the little known drama that took place in the vicinity of the fort that once occupied what is now downtown Chicago. A suspenseful narrative, Fort Dearborn is also a remarkable historical account, minutely observed and meticulously documented, preserving a key moment in American history.
In From the Fire Hills, poet Chad Davidson shows us an Italy that is far from the romanticized notions of sun-drenched fields and self-discovery. Instead we see a maelstrom of chaos and contradiction, a place where the frenetic pace of modernity is locked in a daily struggle with recalcitrant history.
This autobiographical collection explores the myriad ways in which Italian culture survives its own parodies and evokes a modern ferocity that harkens back to Italy’s barbarian past. As the narrator, rendered vulnerable by language, embarks on his journey, lines of location, time, and perception blur. From the siren song of Dante’s grave to the heights of San Luca, from streets where policemen with Uzis tread a hair’s breadth away from the macabre remains of Capuchin monks, Davidson’s Italy is a study in contrast between the contemporary and the classical, the sacred and the profane. Within these poems sensual and savage revelations unfold, exposing new, uncanny, and often uncomfortable spaces to explore in this well-traveled realm of Western imagination.
Throughout the volume loom “the fire hills”: the scorched mountains of Sicily in summer; the memories of Italians living near the Gothic Line outside Bologna, where the Germans dug in and received heavy bombing at the close of World War II; even the wildfires igniting the San Gabriel foothills in southern California; all the way back to the burning city of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid. As the ash settles and the smoke clears, we realize that what we remember is often just remains, shells, and burned out wreckage, as if there were another type of memory.
Field Observations, the debut fiction collection from Rob Davidson, contains stories about people who find themselves at difficult turning points in their lives—times when they are faced with hard choices, broken promises, and the fear of self-destruction. Davidson's characters are diverse: a retired math teacher, an auto repair worker, a technical writer, a nurse living overseas. What connects them is the way Davidson renders each character with essential human dignity, regardless of his or her flaws. This collection addresses such contemporary concerns as love relationships, cultural interaction, divorce, aging, and alcoholism in a lively, sometimes offbeat way.
In "Inventory"—winner of a 1997 AWP Intro Journals Award—the young narrator, fresh out of the army, struggles to take stock of his civilian life and assume responsibility for himself. An estranged wife, in "You Have to Say Something," competes for attention with her husband's manic approach to work, finding both solace and frustration in a new friend, a compulsive gift-giver. "A Private Life" renders a young Peace Corps volunteer grappling with her loneliness in a foreign country, with a sense of exposure and violation. In "What We Leave Behind," a college dropout and onetime golf prodigy finds himself dissatisfied with his current career as a vacuum cleaner salesman; after a quirky encounter with a client, he finds hope for a new beginning.
A recurrent motif in the stories is the presentation of characters who either tend to observe, even spy on, others, or who have the sense that they themselves are being watched. The notion of a passive observer extends to several characters who seem to treat their own lives as subject for observation rather than action, frequently persisting in patterns of behavior that are clearly destructive.
Rendered in clean, smooth prose with sharply observed details and driven by Davidson's fine ear for dialogue, these stories poignantly capture the difficult in-between states that trouble people every day. Fully defined and evocatively written, this collection addresses important real-life issues and concerns.
Winner, 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
Winner, 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in the Poetry category
Finalist, 2015 Balcones Poetry Prize
Shortlist finalist, 2015 PEN Open Book Award for an exceptional book by an author of color
"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.
A powerful debut and a lyric coming-of-age narrative that interrogates the myths we carry
In Find Me When You’re Ready, Perry Janes traces a sweeping journey from Detroit to Los Angeles. As he leaves home and forges toward California, the speaker in these poems considers how we learn and mislearn ideas about manhood, confronts the aftershocks of childhood sexual abuse, and questions the human need for belonging. By embracing the touchstones of youth—movies, lore, graphic novels—these poems assert the speaker’s defiant right to childhood even amid damage.
As the collection arcs toward adulthood, the speaker embodies a vision of healing that refuses easy binaries and embraces the joys of intimacy. Across each of its five acts, Perry Janes’s debut collection is driven by an interest troubling our creation myths, asking who built them, why we carry them, and how we might set them aside.
Sketched together on a deceptively simple frame, this emotionally precise play uses its spare structure to devastating and darkly comic effect. A brother and sister have received word from their parents’ caretaker that their elderly parents may be a danger to each other. The brother breaks his routine to join his sister and mother on their weekly lunch date in hopes that together he and his sister can get a clearer picture of the situation. As the mother confronts the indignities of age and the children stare down a mounting list of losses and disappointments, an image of the family emerges that is true to life. Johnson gives readers an unwavering exploration of the ways that the love and knowledge family members have of one another creates both hurt and comfort.
In Fabulae, Joy Katz interrogates the physical world, constructing a sensual and striking autobiography. She turns to the familiarity and strangeness of the female body, its surfaces and inner workings, often, although her subjects range from Thomas Jefferson to an Adam and Eve plagued with obsessive-compulsive disorder to the streets of New York’s diamond district. The poems, by turns funny and philosophical, point to how we suffer from desire: the danger, she writes, is that we might love the world “like heaven and be lost.” But they come back to delight in a flawed world especially the palpable beauty of words, and even the erotic shapes of the letterforms that make them up.
After the death of her mother, Kay Seger abandons her career as a historical consultant to a Los Angeles film company and returns to her childhood home in Michigan. There, she rekindles a teenage love affair with Joe Chase, now a Vietnam War veteran and Ford auto worker. Afflicted by grief and the mysterious symptoms of an unidentified ailment, Kay, at Joe's urging, begins an investigation of her family's past.
As Kay pores over the boxes of papers, letters, and photo albums her mother left behind, vivid recollections of a bygone Detroit, ragged and teeming at the start of the automotive age, come to life alongside snapshots of Michigan's rural western counties after the settlement of the frontier. In the midst of her searches, Kay comes across the long-forgotten medical history of nostalgia, and it is this new knowledge that helps her to recover the lost histories of her family and find a resolution to her troubled relationship with Joe.
An exploration of memory as both pathology and promise, Ford Roadoffers a moving examination of the injuries we inflict on the people closest to us, the worldly injuries that are often beyond our control, and our astonishing ability to act upon and inhabit our own stories. It is also a meditation on American car culture, the road, and the role of early Hollywood in the creation of America's vision of itself. Written in spare, evocative prose, historian Amy Kenyon's first novel is as heartbreaking as it is thought-provoking.
Winner of the 3rd Annual Miguel Mármol Prize from Curbstone Press, Mary Helen Lagasse's The Fifth Sun is an inspiring story of an immigrant who struggles valiantly for a better life for herself and her family. A young Mexican woman, Mercedes, leaves her village to work as a housemaid in New Orleans. This fast-paced novel takes us through her adventures in New Orleans, her marriage, her struggle to raise her children, her deportation, and her attempt to re-cross the river and be reunited with her children.
Sacred chants are Ada Franklin’s power and her medicine. By saying them, she can remove warts, stanch bleeding, and draw the fire from burns. At age twenty, her reputation as a faith healer defines her in her rural Pennsylvania community. But on the day in 1953 that her family’s barn is consumed by flame, her identity as a healer is upended. The heat, the roar of the blaze, and the bellows of the trapped cows change Ada. For the first time, she fears death and—for the first time—she doubts God. With her belief goes her power to heal. Then Ada meets an agnostic named Will Burk and his pet raven, Cicero.
Fire Is Your Water is acclaimed memoirist Jim Minick’s first novel. Built on magical realism and social observation in equal measure, it never gives way to sentimentality and provides an insider’s glimpse into the culture of Appalachia. A jealous raven, a Greek chorus of one, punctuates the story with its judgments on the characters and their actions, until a tragic accident brings Ada and Will together in a deeper connection.
In Sari Rosenblatt’s collection, by turns tender and hilarious, we see fathers who are bullies and nervous watchdogs, haunted by their own pasts and fear of the future they may never see. And who do their daughters become? A substitute teacher who encounters mouthy students who believe she’s not real. Another lands a job on her city’s arson squad, researching derelict properties their owners might want to burn. A beleaguered mother, humiliated by the PTA’s queen bee, finds solace in an ancient piece of caramel candy. “I keep sucking,” she says, “until some flavor, no longer caramel, comes out.” In the end, this is what all these finely wrought characters want: to wring sweetness from what’s been passed down to them.
Rosenblatt’s comic sensibility, so present in these stories, entertains and consoles, while seeming to say to her readers: you might as well laugh.
A novel of love, revenge, and redemption set during three crucial years of the Mexican Revolution (1910–13).
When an eccentric Mexican general dies and leaves his entire fortune to Isabel Brentt, the American daughter-in-law he never met, his widow suspects foul play and seeks revenge against the young woman.
This is a story of love, the backlash of revenge, and the choices that define us: A young lawyer sets off on a quest to find the truth about the general’s death. A bodyguard is ordered to murder the man he is supposed to protect. A ruthless criminal falls in love with a prostitute. A priest is forced to maintain an elaborate lie. An accused patricide seeks redemption through a brotherhood of criminals. Above all, it is Isabel’s exploration of the problem of evil and of prayer as a pathway to inner freedom.
Sylvia Montgomery Shaw invites readers to follow the continuing romance of Benjamín and Isabel as both seek their freedom against the backdrop of a brutal war and learn the unexpected strength that can come from one’s inner will.
Winner, 2013 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
Winner, 2012 John C. Zacharias First Book Award for best debut book by a Ploughshares writer
A remarkably mature first collection of poems, Heidy Steidlmayer’s Fowling Piece is the debut of a highly original voice. As they search for meaning in both the extraordinary and the everyday, these poems, in exquisitely compressed language, display a fierce attention to the history of individual words and a surprising wit. In Steidlmayer's poetic landscape, words strike the reader as at once familiar and exotic, becoming instruments through which she is able to access and make sense of the most profound, irreducible aspects of human experience. Her mastery of and experiments in form are exceptional for a poet of any age. Fowling Piece offers the rare gift of a new poet whose work is truly new.
Benzonia, Michigan, 1894: a sleepy Congregationalist community, dedicated to the education of hardworking and virtuous young people of both sexes and all races. Anna Spencer Thacker is the daughter of missionaries, a faithful wife, and mother of five, pious to a fault. She is suddenly stricken with a mysterious ailment that soon proves fatal. Was it truly an unfortunate illness? Or was it murder---or suicide?
Taking a true story of a murder in her own family, Becky Thacker has crafted a historical mystery novel whose cast of characters rapidly builds, including William Henry Thacker as deputy sheriff, deacon in his church, a kind man . . . but perhaps just a trifle too fond of the attractive young housekeeper; and Charlotte Spencer, the pretty missionary sister, almost saintly in her efforts to bring Jesus to the Armenians in the mountains of Turkey, though a bit prone to exaggeration. She could be a suspect---or the next target.
The children are Roy, 19: musical, a good student, but a little too wild for Benzonia; Ralph, 17: trying to shoulder the responsibilities of farm and family; and Lottie, 14: a talented young artist trying to take care of young Will and Josie. Faithful Unto Death provides a window into the daily lives of small-town Michiganders at the turn of the century wrapped up in a riveting whodunit.
Cover image by Hemera/Thinkstock
Finalist, 2012 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction
Carla Trujillo brings to life another side of the fabled city of Santa Fe in this rollicking novel set in Dogtown, a dilapidated neighborhood on the outskirts of town. Home to a hardscrabble community of working people struggling to make a living on meager means, Dogtown is worlds apart from the tourists, artists, and upscale eateries just a stone’s throw away. The close-knit neighborhood thrives in its own way, until an entrepreneur arrives with a plan to cast out its occupants and construct a winery in its place.
Led by Dogtown’s unofficial mayor, Pepa Romero—an irreverent healer with old-world wisdom and new-age knowledge—the citizens of Dogtown revolt. Using everything at their disposal, including spying, supernatural powers, the law, and individual cunning, they set in motion a thrilling and at times hilarious chain of events that culminates in a storm of epic proportions. With an unforgettable cast of characters, Faith and Fat Chances illuminates the ingenuity and resilience of people fighting to preserve their way of life.
In John B. Wright’s debut environmental mystery, Matt Solberg is charged with discovering who is lighting fires in the forests that surround Missoula, Montana. A geographer with a deep personal need to bring people out of danger, Matt leads a search and rescue team whose job is to head directly into the mouth of hell, hiking into blazing backcountry to find missing residents. Matt and his team not only rely on their hard-won knowledge of Montana’s wild landscape, but also on Matt’s mentor, Dr. Bill Knight, a fire ecologist who understands the burning beast better than anyone.
When a suspicious fire destroys the mansion of a movie star, Matt must hike in to find his missing daughter and save her from the chaos. Then fires begin to explode everywhere as climate change drives temperatures over 100 degrees and rain refuses to fall, threatening thousands of homes. Who is setting these fires? Is it the Montana Tree Monkeys, an eco-radical group determined to scare off the newcomers? Or is it a retired smokejumper with an axe to grind about the encroaching mansions? Could it be Paladin, a shadowy figure leaving strange clues around the state? It’s Matt’s mission to find answers to these questions during a summer of heat, smoke, and unimaginable loss. Weaving together gripping drama and intriguing fire science, Fire Scars reveals the physical and psychological wounds we all carry—and the power we have to overcome.
Proceeding from Hélène Cixous’s charge to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing,” The Fix forges that woman’s reckoning with her violent past, with her sexuality, and with a future unmoored from the trappings of domestic life. These poems of lyric beauty and unflinching candor negotiate the terrain of contradictory desire—often to darkly comedic effect. In encounters with strangers in dive bars and on highway shoulders, and through ekphrastic engagement with visionaries like William Blake, José Clemente Orozco, and the Talking Heads, this book seeks the real beneath the dissembling surface. Here, nothing is fixed, but grace arrives by diving into the complicated past in order to find a way to live, now.
“Woman Seated with Thighs Apart”
Often I am permitted to return to this kitchen
tipsy, pinned to the fridge, to the precise
instant the kiss smashed in.
When the jaws of night are grinding
and the double bed is half asleep
the snore beside me syncs
to the traffic light, pulsing red, ragged up
in the linen curtain.
I leak such solicitous sighs
to asphalt, slicked with black ice, high beams speed
over my body whole
while the drugstore weeps its remedy
in strident neon throbs—
I doubt I’ll make it out.
It’s a cold country. It’s the sting of quarantine.
It’s my own two hands working
deep inside the sheets.
Judge Laura Porter fiercely guarded her privacy, and never more so than during her long-running—and long in the past—affair with disgraced quarterback-turned-private investigator Andy Hayes. Now she’s missing, disappeared just hours after she calls Andy out of the blue explaining she’s in trouble and needs his help.
A trail of clues leads Andy to a central Ohio swamp whose future lies in the judge’s hands as she weighs a lawsuit pitting environmentalists against developers. Soon Hayes encounters the case of another missing person, a young man who vanished without a trace in a different swamp two counties away. As he looks for links between the two disappearances, Hayes is led from Columbus to Cleveland, unearthing a history of secrets and betrayals threatening not just the judge but her family as well.
Along the way, Hayes is forced to confront a newly strained relationship with his older son, now a budding football star himself, and revisit his tumultuous days as a Cleveland Browns quarterback and the gridiron failures that haunt him to this day. In partnership with a cop on her own quest for justice, Hayes rushes to find the judge, and the truth, before it’s too late.
The job seems easy enough at first for private investigator Andy Hayes: save his client’s reputation by retrieving a laptop and erasing a troublesome video from its hard drive. But that’s before someone breaks into Andy’s apartment in Columbus; before someone else, armed with a shotgun, relieves him of the laptop; and before the FBI suddenly shows up on his doorstep asking questions.
Soon, there’s a growing list of people with a claim on the computer, all of them with secrets they don’t want uncovered. When one of those people ends up dead, Andy has his hands full convincing authorities he’s not responsible, while trying to figure out who is—and who’s got the laptop—before someone else dies. Soon the trail leads to the last place Andy wants to go: back to Ohio State University, where few have forgiven him for a mistake he made two decades earlier in his days as the Buckeyes’ star quarterback. That misjudgment sent him on a downward spiral that cost him a playing career, two marriages, several wrecked relationships, and above all his legacy in Ohio’s capital city, where the fortunes of the OSU team are never far from people’s minds.
As Andy tracks a laptop and a killer from the toniest of the city’s suburbs to its grittiest neighborhoods, he must confront a dark figure from his past and prove that this time he won’t drop the ball.
Laura Esther Wolfson’s literary debut draws on years of immersion in the Russian and French languages; struggles to gain a basic understanding of Judaism, its history, and her place in it; and her search for a form to hold the stories that emerge from what she has lived, observed, overheard, and misremembered.
In “Proust at Rush Hour,” when her lungs begin to collapse and fail, forcing her to give up an exciting and precarious existence as a globetrotting simultaneous interpreter, she seeks consolation by reading Proust in the original while commuting by subway to a desk job that requires no more than a minimal knowledge of French. In “For Single Mothers Working as Train Conductors” she gives away her diaphragm and tubes of spermicidal jelly to a woman in the Soviet Union who, with two unwanted pregnancies behind her, needs them more than she does. “The Husband Method” has her translating a book on Russian obscenities and gulag slang during the dissolution of her marriage to the Russian-speaker who taught her much of what she knows about that language.
In prose spangled with pathos and dusted with humor, Wolfson transports us to Paris, the Republic of Georgia, upstate New York, the Upper West Side, and the corridors of the United Nations, telling stories that skewer, transform, and inspire.
As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfilling her dream to become a veterinarian. Better to marry Jacob Winter, her parents urged her, a deaf Jewish man who made a good living. Then, Sandra met Rudy Townsend, a hearing soldier on leave before shipping out to the war in Europe.
In just four days, both Sandra and Rudy’s worlds were turned upside down. Sandra’s parents feared him for being hearing and a Gentile, while Rudy’s parents expressed openly their bias against her ethnic background and her deafness. Even so, Sandra and Rudy soon realized that they had fallen in love, deeply and passionately. As they shared the brief time they had together, they learned about each other’s dreams for the future — Sandra’s desire to be a vet and Rudy’s determination to serve in Congress. Then, Rudy had to leave for the war.
Philip Zazove’s novel Four Days in Michigan captures perfectly the power of irrepressible love between two individuals from opposite backgrounds. The struggles they encounter in an era when such differences were never more sharply drawn also reveal great detail about deaf and hearing life. Despite all, their triumph comes ultimately because of their long-lasting individual respect and love.
Winner of the 2014 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize for Best Book on Romanticism
In Fugitive Objects, Catriona MacLeod examines the question of why sculpture is both intensively discussed and yet rendered immaterial in German literature. She focuses on three forms of disappearance: sculpture’s vanishing as a legitimate art form at the beginning of the nineteenth century in German aesthetics, statues’ migration from the domain of high art into mass reproduction and popular culture, and sculpture’s dislodging and relocation into literary discourse. Through original readings of Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Adalbert Stifter, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, and others, MacLeod reveals that if sculpture has disappeared from much of nineteenth-century German literature and aesthetics, it is a vanishing act that paradoxically relocates the statue back onto another cultural pedestal, attesting to the powerful force of the medium.
In this interdisciplinary cultural history that encompasses film, literature, music, and drama, Inez Hedges follows the thread of the Faustian rebel in the major intellectual currents of the last hundred years. She presents Faust and his counterpart Mephistopheles as antagonistic—yet complementary—figures whose productive conflict was integral to such phenomena as the birth of narrative cinema, the rise of modernist avant-gardes before World War II, and feminist critiques of Western cultural traditions.
Framing Faust: Twentieth-Century Cultural Struggles pursues a dialectical approach to cultural history. Using the probing lens of cultural studies, Hedges shows how claims to the Faustian legacy permeated the struggle against Nazism in the 1930s while infusing not only the search for socialist utopias in Russia, France, and Germany, but also the quest for legitimacy on both sides of the Cold War divide after 1945.
Hedges balances new perspectives on such well-known works as Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus and Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax with discussions of previously overlooked twentieth-century expressions of the Faust myth, including American film noir and the Faust films of Stan Brakhage. She evaluates musical compositions—Hanns Eisler’s Faust libretto, the opera Votre Faust by Henri Pousseur and Michel Butor, and Alfred Schnittke’s Faust Cantata—as well as works of fiction and drama in French and German, many of which have heretofore never been discussed outside narrow disciplinary confines.
Enhanced by twenty-four illustrations, Framing Faust provides a fascinating and focused narrative of some of the major cultural struggles of the past century as seen through the Faustian prism, and establishes Faust as an important present-day frame of reference.
Summerfield G. Roberts Award for a Work of Creative Writing, Sons of the Texas Republic, 2013
First published in Germany in 1867, this fascinating autobiographical novel of German immigrants on the antebellum Texas frontier provides a trove of revelations about the myriad communities that once called the Hill Country home.
Founded in 1846, Fredericksburg, Texas, was established by German noblemen who enticed thousands of their compatriots to flee their overcrowded homeland with the prospect of free land in a place that was portrayed as a new Garden of Eden. Few of the settlers, however, were prepared for the harsh realities of the Texas frontier or for confrontation with the Comanche. In his 1867 novel Friedrichsburg, Friedrich Armand Strubberg, a.k.a. Dr. Schubbert, interwove his personal story with a fictional romance to capture the flavor of Fredericksburg, Texas, during its founding years when he served as the first colonial director.
Now available in a contemporary translation, Friedrichsburg brings to life the little-known aspects of life among these determined but often ill-equipped settlers who sought to make the transition to a new home and community on the Texas frontier. Opening just as a peace treaty is being negotiated between the German newcomers and the Comanches, the novel describes the unlikely survival of these fledgling homesteads and provides evidence that support from the Delaware Indians, as well as the nearby Mormon community of Zodiac, was key to the Germans’ success. Along the way, Strubberg also depicts the laying of the cornerstone to the Vereinskirche, the blazing of an important new road to Austin, exciting hunting scenes, and an admirable spirit of cultural cohesion and determined resilience. In so doing, he resurrects a fascinating lost world.
These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s plays introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.
The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit.
Dürrenmatt’s concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the Cold War: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of Selected Writings, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee’s crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: The Physicists, Romulus the Great, Hercules and the Augean Stables, and The Marriage of Mr. Mississippi.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
These translations of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s essays introduce the writer to a new generation of readers.
The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the Cold War, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, The Visit. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world.
Dürrenmatt’s essays, gathered in this third volume of Selected Writings, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt’s best-known essays, such as “Theater Problems” and “Monster Essay on Justice and Law,” as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States “increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism”). This third volume of Selected Writings also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as “The Winter War in Tibet,” a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth—a Plato’s Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times.
Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer—but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
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