Indiana’s War is a primary source collection featuring the writings of Indiana’s citizens during the Civil War era. Using private letters, official records, newspaper articles, and other original sources, the volume presents the varied experiences of Indiana’s participants in the war both on the battlefield and on the home front. Starting in the 1850s, the documents show the sharp political divisions over issues such as slavery, race, and secession in Indiana, divisions that boiled over into extraordinary strife and violence in the state during the rebellion. This conflict touched all levels and members of society, including men, women, and children, whites and African Americans, native-born citizens and immigrants, farmers and city and town dwellers.
Collecting the writings of Indiana’s peoples on a wide range of issues, chapters focus on the politics of race prior to the war, the secession crisis, war fever in 1861, the experiences of soldiers at the front, homefront hardships, political conflict between partisan foes and civil and military authorities, reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation, and antiwar dissent, violence, and conspiracy.
Indiana’s War is an excellent accompanying primary source text for undergraduate and graduate courses on the American Civil War. It documents the experiences of Indiana’s citizens, from the African American soldier to the antiwar dissenter, from the prewar politician to the postwar veteran, from the battle-scarred soldier to the impoverished soldier’s wife, all showing the harsh realities of the war.
The war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which began in May 1998, took the world by surprise. During the war, both sides mobilized huge forces along their common borders and spent several hundred million dollars on military equipment. Outside observers found it difficult to evaluate the highly polarized official statements and proclamations issued by the two governments in conflict.
Brothers at War presents important, contextual aspects to explain the growing discord between the two formerly friendly governments. It looks at the historical relations between the two countries since the late nineteenth century, the historical border issues from local perspectives, and the complicated relations between the former liberation fronts that subsequently formed the current governments of the two countries.
Howard Nemerov—poet laureate of the United States, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and chancellor of the Academy of American Poets—was one of the most prolific and significant American poets of the twentieth century. By the time of his death in 1991, he had published fourteen collections of poetry.
Judiciously selected and introduced by poet Daniel Anderson, The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov represents the broad spectrum of Nemerov’s virtues as a poet—his intelligence, his wit, his compassion, and his irreverence. It stands as the retrospective collection of the best of what Nemerov left behind, which is some of the finest poetry that the twentieth century produced.
“To keep his errors down to a minimum,” W. H. Auden wrote, “the internal Censor to whom a poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon a nd even, perhaps, hated by all others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish.”
Such are the readers to whom the poetry of Howard Nemerov might appeal. He distinguished himself on the landscape of American letters as a writer of great versatility. More than a decade after his death, that claim still holds true.
In this, the only edition of Nemerov’s work that surveys his entire poetic output, first-time readers of these poems will find an introduction to a truly remarkable creative mind. Longtime admirers of Nemerov will be reminded once again of his significance as a craftsman and philosopher, and as a poetic steward of the many ways in which we experience the world.
The horrific tragedies of Central Africa in the 1990s riveted the attention of the world. But these crises did not occur in a historical vacuum. By peering through the mists of the past, the case studies presented in The Land Beyond the Mists illustrate the significant advances to have taken place since decolonization in our understanding of the pre-colonial histories of Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo.
Based on both oral and written sources, these essays are important both for their methods—viewing history from the perspective of local actors—and for their conclusions, which seriously challenge colonial myths about the area.
Drawing from 167 examples of decorative needlework—primarily samplers and quilts from 114 collections across the United States—made by individual women aged forty years and over between 1820 and 1860, this exquisitely illustrated book explores how women experienced social and cultural change in antebellum America.
The book is filled with individual examples, stories, and over eighty fine color photographs that illuminate the role that samplers and needlework played in the culture of the time. For example, in October 1852, Amy Fiske (1785–1859) of Sturbridge, Massachusetts, stitched a sampler. But she was not a schoolgirl making a sampler to learn her letters. Instead, as she explained, “The above is what I have taken from my sampler that I wrought when I was nine years old. It was w[rough]t on fine cloth [and] it tattered to pieces. My age at this time is 66 years.”
Situated at the intersection of women’s history, material culture study, and the history of aging, this book brings together objects, diaries, letters, portraits, and prescriptive literature to consider how middle-class American women experienced the aging process. Chapters explore the physical and mental effects of “old age” on antebellum women and their needlework, technological developments related to needlework during the antebellum period and the tensions that arose from the increased mechanization of textile production, and how gift needlework functioned among friends and family members. Far from being solely decorative ornaments or functional household textiles, these samplers and quilts served their own ends. They offered aging women a means of coping, of sharing and of expressing themselves. These “threads of time” provide a valuable and revealing source for the lives of mature antebellum women.
Publication of this book was made possible in part through generous funding from the Coby Foundation, Ltd and from the Quilters Guild of Dallas, Helena Hibbs Endowment Fund.
Between 1905 and 1939 a conspicuously tall white man with a shock of red hair, dressed in a silk shirt and white linen trousers, could be seen on the streets of Onitsha, in Eastern Nigeria. How was it possible for an unconventional, boy-loving Englishman to gain a social status among the local populace enjoyed by few other Europeans in colonial West Africa?
In The Forger’s Tale: The Search for Odeziaku Stephanie Newell charts the story of the English novelist and poet John Moray Stuart-Young (1881–1939) as he traveled from the slums of Manchester to West Africa in order to escape the homophobic prejudices of late-Victorian society. Leaving behind a criminal record for forgery and embezzlement and his notoriety as a “spirit rapper,” Stuart-Young found a new identity as a wealthy palm oil trader and a celebrated author, known to Nigerians as “Odeziaku.”
In this fascinating biographical account, Newell draws on queer theory, African gender debates, and “new imperial history” to open up a wider study of imperialism, (homo)sexuality, and nonelite culture between the 1880s and the late 1930s. The Forger’s Tale pays close attention to different forms of West African cultural production in the colonial period and to public debates about sexuality and ethics, as well as to movements in mainstream English literature.
Between the 1880s and the 1940s, the region known as British West Africa became a dynamic zone of literary creativity and textual experimentation. African-owned newspapers offered local writers numerous opportunities to contribute material for publication, and editors repeatedly defined the press as a vehicle to host public debates rather than simply as an organ to disseminate news or editorial ideology. Literate locals responded with great zeal, and in increasing numbers as the twentieth century progressed, they sent in letters, articles, fiction, and poetry for publication in English- and African-language newspapers.
The Power to Name offers a rich cultural history of this phenomenon, examining the wide array of anonymous and pseudonymous writing practices to be found in African-owned newspapers between the 1880s and the 1940s, and the rise of celebrity journalism in the period of anticolonial nationalism. Stephanie Newell has produced an account of colonial West Africa that skillfully shows the ways in which colonized subjects used pseudonyms and anonymity to alter and play with colonial power and constructions of African identity.
Subjects on Display explores a recurrent figure at the heart of many nineteenth-century English novels: the retiring, self-effacing woman who is conspicuous for her inconspicuousness. Beth Newman draws upon both psychoanalytic theory and recent work in social history as she argues that this paradoxical figure, who often triumphs over more dazzling, eye-catching rivals, is a response to the forces that made personal display a vexed issue for Victorian women. Chief among these is the changing socioeconomic landscape that made the ideal of the modest woman outlive its usefulness as a class signifier even as it continued to exert moral authority.
This problem cannot be grasped in its full complexity, Newman shows, without considering how the unstable social meanings of display interacted with psychical forces-specifically, the desire to be seen by others that is central to both masculine and feminine subjectivity. This desire raises an issue that feminist theorists have been reluctant to address: the importance of pleasure in being the object of the look. Their reluctance is characteristic of cultural theory, which has tended to equate subjectivity with the position of the observer rather than the observed.
Through a consideration of fiction by Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Newman shifts the inquiry toward the observed in the experience of being seen. In the process she reopens the question of the gaze and its relation to subjectivity.
Subjects on Display will appeal to scholars and students in several disciplines as it returns psychoanalysis to a central position within literary and cultural studies.
Dr. Nguyen Anh Tuan, former Minister of Finance of the Republic of South Vietnam, addresses a common perception of Vietnam: that South Vietnam was a fragmented society which did not deserve to succeed because of its internal weaknesses. According to Tuan, however, South Vietnam in the last decade of its life developed considerable governmental cohesion and internal social strength. Before the final failure of will, the South and its defenders were well on the way to becoming a viable society that had managed with American assistance to lift itself by its bootstraps to the point to economic take-off. Tuan argues that South Vietnam’s fall was not inevitable. This controversial book will be of great interest to all those concerned with the Vietnamese experience during the period 1954-1975.
“These two volumes clearly demonstrate the efforts by a wide range of African scholars to explain the roots, routes, regimes and resolution of African conflicts and how to re-build post-conflict societies. They offer sober and serious analyses, eschewing the sensationalism of the western media and the sophistry of some of the scholars in the global North for whom African conflicts are at worst a distraction and at best a confirmation of their pet racist and petty universalist theories.”
—From the introduction by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
This book offers analyses of a range of African conflicts and demonstrates that peace is too important to be left to outsiders.
“Africa is no more prone to violent conflicts than other regions. Indeed, Africa’s share of the more than 180 million people who died from conflicts and atrocities in the twentieth century is relatively modest.… This is not to underestimate the immense impact of violent conflicts on Africa; it is merely to emphasize the need for more balanced debate and commentary.”
—From the introduction by Paul Tiyambe Zeleza
Violent conflicts have exacted a heavy toll on Africa’s societies, polities, and economies. This book presents African scholars’ views of why conflicts start in their continent. The causes of conflict are too often examined by scholars from the countries that run the proxy wars and sell the arms to fuel them. This volume offers theoretically sophisticated, empirically grounded, and compelling analyses of the roots of African conflicts.
The Soweto uprising was a true turning point in South Africa’s history. Even to contemporaries, it seemed to mark the beginning of the end of apartheid. This compelling book examines both the underlying causes and the immediate factors that led to this watershed event. It looks at the crucial roles of Black Consciousness ideology and nascent school-based organizations in shaping the character and form of the revolt. What began as a peaceful and coordinated demonstration rapidly turned into a violent protest when police opened fire on students. This short history explains the uprising and its aftermath from the perspective of its main participants, the youth, by drawing on a rich body of oral histories.
The second novel in Anaïs Nin’s Cities of the Interior series, Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (as Nin’s father did) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
Children of the Albatross is divided into two sections: “The Sealed Room” focuses on the dancer Djuna and a set of characters, chiefly male, who surround her; “The Café” brings together a cast of characters already familiar to Nin’s readers, but it is their meeting place that is the focal point of the story.
As always, in Children of the Albatross, Nin’s writing is inseparable from her life. From Djuna’s story, told in “The Sealed Room” through hints and allusions, hazy in their details and chronology, the most important event to emerge is her father’s desertion (like Nin’s) when she was sixteen. By rejecting realistic writing for the experience and intuitions she drew from her diary, Nin was able to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, spontaneity, and improvisation, a technique that finds its parallel in the jazz music performed at the café where Nin’s characters meet.
Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river.
The full impact of Anaïs Nin’s genius is only to be found through reading the novels in context and in succession. They form a rich, luminous tapestry whose overall theme Nin has called “woman at war with herself.” Characters, symbols appear and reappear: now one, now another unfolding, gradually revealing, changing, struggling, growing, and Nin had forged an evocative language all her own for the telling.
“The diary taught me that there were no neat ends to novels, no neat denouement, no neat synthesis,” she explains. “So I began an endless novel, a novel in which the climaxes consisted of discoveries in awareness, each step in awareness becoming a stage in the growth like the layers in trees.”
Cities of the Interior fulfills a long–time desire on the part of readers, publisher, and Anaïs Nin herself to reunite the five novels in a single volume.
“Collages began with an image which had haunted me. A friend, Renate, had told me about her trip to Vienna where she was born, and of her childhood relationships to statues. She told me stories of her childhood, her relationship to her father, her first love.
I begin the novel with:
Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets. They stood on the top of the highest towers, law down on stone tombs, sat on horseback, kneeled, prayed, fought animals and wars, danced, drank wine and read books made of stone. They adorned cornices like the figureheads of old ships. They stood in the heart of fountains glistening with water as if they had just been born. They sat under the trees in the parks summer and winter. Some wore costumes of other periods, and some no clothes at all. Men, women, children, kings, dwarfs, gargoyles, unicorns, lions, clowns, heroes, wise men, prophets, angels, saints, and soldiers preserved for Vienna a vision of eternity.
As a child Renate could see them from her bedroom window. At night, when the white muslin curtains fluttered out like ballooning wedding dresses, she heard them whispering like figures which had been petrified by a spell during the day and came alive only at night. Their silence by day taught her to read their frozen lips as one reads the messages of deaf mutes. On rainy days their granite eye sockets shed tears mixed with soot.
Renate would never allow anyone to tell her the history of the statues, or to identify them. This would have situated them in the past. She was convinced that people did not die, they became statues. They were people under a spell and if she were watchful enough they would tell her who they were and how they lived now.
If I had been asked then what was going to follow the description of the statues, I could not have answered. I was fascinated by the image of these many statues and of the child Renate inventing stories about them and dialoguing with them. It may have been that this image expressed the feeling I often had that people appear to us as a one-dimensional statue until we go deeper into their life story. People are like mute statues under a spell of appearance, and static, until we let them whisper their secrets. And this only happens at night. That is, when we are able to dream, imagine, and explore the unconscious. We see the external self. Because Collages took its images from painting and sculpture, I liked the idea that sculpture and painting could become animated, speaking, confessing, and then in daylight returning to their previous forms as statues or paintings. They spoke only to the artist. To me it meant dramatizing our relation to art, one feeding the other, the interrelation between human beings and the artist’s conception of them. In daylight (consciousness) we catch them all only in one attitude, one form. At night, we discover their lives.”
—Anaïs Nin, “The Novel of the Future,” (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 128
In 1932, two years after D. H. Lawrence’s death, a young woman wrote a book about him and presented it to a Paris publisher. She recorded the event in her diary: “It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within oneself. He gave it to his assistant to revise.” The woman was Anaïs Nin.
Nin examined Lawrence’s poetry, novels, essays, and travel writing. She analyzed and explained the more important philosophical concepts contained in his writings, particularly the themes of love, death, and religion, as well as his attention to primitivism and to women. But what Anaïs Nin brought to the explication of Lawrence’s writing was an understanding of the fusion of imaginative, intuitive, and intellectual elements from which he drew his characters, themes, imagery and symbolism.
The Four-Chambered Heart, Anaïs Nin’s 1950 novel, recounts the real-life affair she conducted with café guitarist Gonzalo Moré in 1936. Nin and Moré rented a house-boat on the Seine, and under the pervading influence of the boat’s watchman and Moré’s wife Helba, developed a relationship. Moré; named the boat Nanankepichu, meaning "not really a home."
In the novel, which Nin drew from her experiences on the boat, the characters' sources are clear. Djuna is an embodiment of Nin herself. A young dancer in search of fulfillment, she encapsulates all that the author was striving for at that time. The character of Djuna features in other novels, perhaps weaving a directly autobiographical thread into Nin’s fiction. The gypsy musician, Rango, is therefore Moré, and his invalid wife is Zora. The old watchman is present as a force that, along with Zora, works against the lovers in their quest for happiness.
Nin’s main concern throughout the novel is the "exterior," and how it affects the "interior." Water is a cleverly used theme. “I have no great fear of depths,” says Djuna, “and a great fear of shallow living.” Rango and Djuna’s relationship is, in effect, their effort to remain afloat. Often, Nin employs a stream of consciousness, especially in her flowing analyses of love, life and music, which continues the water image.
Anaïs Nin’s writing is typically exquisite in its detail and texture. She describes Paris: its "black lacquered cobblestones" and "silver filigree trees." The "humid scarfs of fog" on the river, and "the sharp incense of roasted chestnuts" reveal their source through their reality: Nin’s personal experience.
With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.
Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.
With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.
Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.
After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anaïs Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style. She resisted realistic writing and drew on the experience and intuitions of her diary to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, the language of emotion, spontaneity, and improvisation.
Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Nin’s celebrated series of novels called Cities of the Interior
For Anaïs Nin, her writing and her life were not separable, they were both part of the same experience. She claimed that “is it the fiction writer who edited the diary.”
Anaïs Nin continues to find an audience, whether for her fiction, her diaries, or her own life story, which has enjoyed the attention of biographers and filmmakers. This 1995 reissue of Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.
These stories precede all of Nin’s published work to date. In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.
Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in Louveciennes, France, these stories contain many elements that will delight her readers: details remembered from childhood, of life in Paris, the cafés, theatres; characters including dancers, artists, writers, women who devote themselves to their work and visions as well as romance, strangers met in the night; themes such as the scruples of lovers, the search for brilliant, imaginative living; the writer’s experimentation with exotic words like “sybaritic” and “violaceous”. In the craft of these stories readers are treated to a deft sense of humor, ironic wit, much conversation as well as ecstatic prose, and surprise endings. Throughout all, the Nin personality shines, a wonderful mixture of feeling and rationality, of vulnerability and strength.
In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in film, art, and dance as well as literature—to chart a new direction for the young artist struggling against what she perceived as the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of mid-twentieth-century fiction. Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel and discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as its influence on the development of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Young, and Djuna Barnes. In chapters devoted to the pursuit of the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the relationship between the diary and fiction, she addresses the materials, techniques, and nourishment of the arts, and the functions of art itself.
Originally published in 1968, The Novel of the Future remains a classic among both creative writers and literary scholars. This new Swallow Press edition includes an introduction by Nin biographer Deirdre Bair.
Anaïs Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that “it was the fiction writer who edited the diary.”
Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin’s continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross,The Four-Chambered Heart,A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.
This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.
Swallow Press first published Winter of Artifice in 1945, following two vastly different versions from other presses. The book opens with a film star, Stella, studying her own, but alien, image on the screen. It ends in the Manhattan office of a psychoanalyst—the Voice—who, as he counsels patients suffering from the maladies of modern life, reveals himself as equally susceptible to them. The middle, title story explores one of Nin’s most controversial themes, that of a woman’s sexual relationship with her father. Elliptical, fragmented prose; unconventional structure; surrealistic psychic landscapes—Nin forged these elements into a style that engaged with the artistic concerns of her time but still registers as strikingly contemporary.
This reissue, accompanied by a new introduction by Laura Frost and the original engravings by Nin’s husband Ian Hugo, presents an important opportunity to consider anew the work of an author who laid the groundwork for later writers. Swallow Press’s Winter of Artifice represents a literary artist coming into her own, with the formal experimentation, thematic daring, and psychological intrigue that became her hallmarks.
Anaïs Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented. It was not until decades later, when the diaries were published in their unexpurgated form, that the world began to learn the full details of Nin’s fascinating life and the emotional and literary high-wire acts she committed both in documenting it and in defying the mores of 1950s America. Trapeze begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left off: when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a bigamous marriage.
It marks the start of what Nin came to call her “trapeze life,” swinging between her longtime husband, Hugh Guiler, in New York and her lover, Pole, in California, a perilous lifestyle she continued until her death in 1977. Today what Nin did seems impossible, and what she sought perhaps was impossible: to find harmony and completeness within a split existence. It is a story of daring and genius, love and pain, largely unknown until now.
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.
Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
Written when Anaïs Nin was in her twenties and living in France, the stories collected in Waste of Timelessness contain many elements familiar to those who know her later work as well as revelatory, early clues to themes developed in those more mature stories and novels. Seeded with details remembered from childhood and from life in Paris, the wistful tales portray artists, writers, strangers who meet in the night, and above all, women and their desires.
These experimental and deeply introspective missives lay out a central theme of Nin’s writing: the contrast between the public and private self. The stories are taut with unrealized sexual tension and articulate the ways that language and art can shape reality. Nin’s deft humor, ironic wit, and ecstatic prose display not only superb craftsmanship but also the author’s own constant balancing act between feeling and rationality, vulnerability and strength. Perhaps more than any other writer of the twentieth century, she mastered that act and wrote about it on her own terms, defying the literary and social norms of the time.
Originally published in 1995, Barns of the Midwest is a masterful example of material cultural history. It arrived at a critical moment for the agricultural landscape. The 1980s were marked by farm foreclosures, rural bank failures, the continued rise of industrialized agriculture, and severe floods and droughts. These waves of disaster hastened the erosion of the idea of a pastoral Heartland knit together with small farms and rural values. And it wasn’t just an idea that was eroded; material artifacts such as the iconic Midwestern barn were also rapidly wearing away.
It was against this background that editors Noble and Wilhelm gathered noted experts in history and architecture to write on the nature and meaning of Midwestern barns, explaining why certain barns were built as they were, what types of barns appeared where, and what their functions were. Featuring a new introduction by Timothy G. Anderson, Barns of the Midwest is the definitive work on this ubiquitous but little studied architectural symbol of a region and its history.
During the nineteenth century, geography primers shaped the worldviews of Britain’s ruling classes and laid the foundation for an increasingly globalized world. Written by middle-class women who mapped the world that they had neither funds nor freedom to traverse, the primers employed rhetorical tropes such as the Family of Man or discussions of food and customs in order to plot other cultures along an imperial hierarchy.
Cross-disciplinary in nature, X Marks the Spot is an analysis of previously unknown material that examines the interplay between gender, imperial duty, and pedagogy.
Megan A. Norcia offers an alternative map for traversing the landscape of nineteenth-century female history by reintroducing the primers into the dominant historical record. This is the first full-length study of the genre as a distinct tradition of writing produced on the fringes of professional geographic discourse before the high imperial period.
Gravel and Hawk dwells on the physical and cultural landscapes of the Texarkana border region, an area of stark natural beauty and even starker manifestations of its human habitation: oil derricks and pump jacks, logging trucks, chicken houses, come-to-Jesus billboards, and greasy catfish joints, a patchwork of dying farm towns and ragtag municipalities laced together by county roads, state highways, and that treacherous, rust-hued slurry known as the Red River. Gravel and Hawk charts the emotional landscape of a single extended family, its history of loss and gain, and, especially, its encounters with violent death. It is an eminently readable collection, rooted in a distinctly American place and united by a poetic voice that is honest, sophisticated, and persuasive.
Latin American intellectuals have traditionally debated their region’s history, never with so much agreement as in the fiction, commentary, and scholarship of the late twentieth century. Collisions with History shows how “fictional histories” of discovery and conquest, independence and early nationhood, and the recent authoritarian past were purposeful revisionist collisions with received national versions. These collisions occurred only because of El Boom, thus making Latin America’s greatest literary movement a historical phenomenon as well. Frederick M. Nunn discusses the cataclysmic view of history conveyed in Boom novels and examines the thought and self-perception of selected authors whose political activism enhanced the appeal of their works—historical and otherwise: Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, and Augusto Roa Bastos; Julio Cortázar, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Darcy Ribeiro.
Collisions with History demonstrates how their commentary on history, literature, politics, and international affairs reveals a conscious sense of purpose. From between the lines of their nonfiction emerges a consensus that outside forces have defined as well as controlled Latin America’s history.
Professor Nunn also suggests that, with novelists now no longer very interested in colliding with history, it may fall to social scientists to speak for what remains of the region’s past in the New World Order.
Patrice Lumumba was a leader of the independence struggle in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as the country’s first democratically elected prime minister. After a meteoric rise in the colonial civil service and the African political elite, he became a major figure in the decolonization movement of the 1950s. Lumumba’s short tenure as prime minister (1960–1961) was marked by an uncompromising defense of Congolese national interests against pressure from international mining companies and the Western governments that orchestrated his eventual demise.
Cold war geopolitical maneuvering and well-coordinated efforts by Lumumba’s domestic adversaries culminated in his assassination at the age of thirty-five, with the support or at least the tacit complicity of the U.S. and Belgian governments, the CIA, and the UN Secretariat. Even decades after Lumumba’s death, his personal integrity and unyielding dedication to the ideals of self-determination, self-reliance, and pan-African solidarity assure him a prominent place among the heroes of the twentieth-century African independence movement and the worldwide African diaspora.
Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja’s short and concise book provides a contemporary analysis of Lumumba’s life and work, examining both his strengths and his weaknesses as a political leader. It also surveys the national, continental, and international contexts of Lumumba’s political ascent and his swift elimination by the interests threatened by his ideas and practical reforms.
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