Katherine Anne Porter Remembered is a collection of reminiscences and memoirs by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Porter offering a revealing and intimate portrait of the elusive and complex American writer.

From a fractured and vagabond girlhood in Texas, Porter led a wildly itinerant life that took her through five marriages, innumerable love affairs, and homes in Colorado, New York, Paris, Mexico, Louisiana, California, and Maryland. With very little formal education, she grew through sheer force of will to become a major American writer of short stories and the author of several books including Flowering Judas and other stories; Ship of Fools; Pale Horse; Pale Ride; Noon Wine; and The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Because of Porter’s own dissembling and half-truths about her life, as well as the numerous factual errors that persist in biographical entries and literary dictionaries, a complete and accurate portrait of her life has been hard to establish. The 63 reminiscences gathered in this book paint a vivid portrait of Porter and are testaments to her extraordinary beauty, her gift for mesmerizing and charming audiences and friends, her yearnings for a lasting home, her delusions about love, the astonishing range and scope of her reading, her sharp tongue and vindictiveness, and her final paranoid renunciations of friends and family. Along the way, Porter formed friendships with Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Hardwick, Flannery O’Connor, and Cleanth Brooks whose remembrances of her are included in this volume. 

Here is Kathryn, "nearly 88, infinity next to infinity, / but infinity curled on itself, a whirlwind / that whipped about the house and was gone, / rain in its wake, a smell of dirt."

Kathryn is near the end of her life and is losing her memories: travels, husbands, a storm of keepsakes. As Gina Franco unleashes that storm and as Kathryn's flood of memories washes over us, we know at once that we are in the hands of a truly gifted poet. "The Keepsake Storm" is the culmination of a verse cycle that probes the depths of the heart—a meditation on the meaning of life in a difficult world. Drawing on a rich tradition of storytelling in Latino literature, Franco explores the transformative power of compassion as she addresses themes of cultural alienation, lost family roots, and the uncertain resiliency of the self. In writing that blends rapture, vision, and mystery, Franco calls on a multiplicity of voices and a prodigious command of forms to explore the underlying rhythms of life, finding poetry even in the imperfect transmissions of e-mail:

"I was happy to get your letter. I had a rough day.
My step-mom had a breakdown and is in a hospitol.
I don't understand all the why's of it. She has paranoia
scetsafrinia. (and I know that is spelled totally
wrong). I don't blame myself I just didn't see it coming."

By reaffirming the power of self-awareness, history, and place, Franco reaches out to all who struggle to find meaning in times of trouble or self-doubt. The Keepsake Storm is a personal journey through many lives that is nothing less than a celebration—and a reassessment—of American consciousness.

While small communities in Third World countries usually seem at the mercy of central governments and foreign capitalists, local activists can help exploited peoples correct environmental abuses and social injustices and seize control of their own destinies.

Kicking Off the Bootstraps is a powerful case history of such an effort. It describes a grassroots activist movement that emerged in the Puerto Rican community of Salinas to counter the poverty and economic dependence experienced by its citizens in the wake of "Operation Bootstrap," a post-World War II industrial development program. Déborah Berman Santana examines the efforts of the community to develop its own economic strategy based primarily on environmentally and socially responsible uses of local natural and human resources.

Berman Santana shows how local activists are seeking to empower the Salinas community to make decisions concerning economic development. She evaluates present-day efforts to develop positive alternatives, examining the motivations of the activists, the nature of their projects, their efforts to mobilize the community, their dealings with government and other organizations, and the obstacles they face. In a closing chapter, she addresses the potential roles of community leaders, outside activists, local businesses, and government in actualizing these alternatives.

A testimony to one community's efforts to determine its own future, Kicking Off the Bootstraps deals with real issues such as control over productive resources, quality of life, and environmental health. It also extends an examination of community-directed activism to an exploration of policy implications for sustainable development. While this concept is often too vague to be applied to real strategies, the Salinas experience provides a clear idea of what sustainable development can—and should—mean in actual practice.

Winner of the 2019 Lilla A. Heston Award
Co-winner of the 2018 Ethnography Division’s Best Book from the NCA

In recent decades, poetry slams and the spoken word artists who compete in them have sparked a resurgent fascination with the world of poetry. However, there is little critical dialogue that fully engages with the cultural complexities present in slam and spoken word poetry communities, as well as their ramifications.
 
In Killing Poetry, renowned slam poet, Javon Johnson unpacks some of the complicated issues that comprise performance poetry spaces. He argues that the truly radical potential in slam and spoken word communities lies not just in proving literary worth, speaking back to power, or even in altering power structures, but instead in imagining and working towards altogether different social relationships. His illuminating ethnography provides a critical history of the slam, contextualizes contemporary black poets in larger black literary traditions, and does away with the notion that poetry slams are inherently radically democratic and utopic.
 
Killing Poetry—at times autobiographical, poetic, and journalistic—analyzes the masculine posturing in the Southern California community in particular, the sexual assault in the national community, and the ways in which related social media inadvertently replicate many of the same white supremacist, patriarchal, and mainstream logics so many spoken word poets seem to be working against. Throughout, Johnson examines the promises and problems within slam and spoken word, while illustrating how community is made and remade in hopes of eventually creating the radical spaces so many of these poets strive to achieve. 

In an effort to define what constitutes a feminist reading of literary works, Ann C. Hall offers an analytic technique that is both a feminist and a psychoanalytic approach, applying this technique to her study of women characters in the modern dramatic texts of Eugene O’Neill, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard.

This is the first study to treat these three writers in tandem, and while Hall uses the work of Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, and other psychoanalytic feminist critics in her close readings of specific dramatic texts, she also brings in commentaries by critics, directors, performers, and historians. Her technique thereby provides us with a new and significant method for addressing female characters as written by male playwrights, a task that she argues is not only a valid and necessary part of feminist dramatic criticism but a part of theatrical production as well.

From Pinter’s play A Kind of Alaska, Hall extracts a metaphor for the patriarchal oppression of women, contextualizing such oppression through an examination of O’Neill’s madonnas, Pinter’s whores, and Shepard’s female saviors as they are represented in O’Neill’s Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into Night, and A Moon for theMisbegotten; Pinter’s Homecoming, No Man’s Land, Betrayal, and A Kind of Alaska; and Shepard’s Buried Child, True West, and A LieoftheMind.

Since the works of O’Neill, Pinter, and Shepard continue to be performed to popular acclaim, Hall hopes that a better understanding of the female characters in these plays will influence the performances themselves.

The refusal to recognize kinship relations among slaves, interracial couples, and same-sex partners is steeped in historical and cultural taboos. In Kindred Specters, Christopher Peterson explores the ways in which non-normative relationships bear the stigma of death that American culture vehemently denies.

Probing Derrida’s notion of spectrality as well as Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death,” Peterson examines how death, mourning, and violence condition all kinship relations. Through Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman, Peterson lays bare concepts of self-possession and dispossession, freedom and slavery. He reads Toni Morrison’s Beloved against theoretical and historical accounts of ethics, kinship, and violence in order to ask what it means to claim one’s kin as property. Using William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! he considers the political and ethical implications of comparing bans on miscegenation and gay marriage.

Tracing the connections between kinship and mourning in American literature and culture, Peterson demonstrates how racial, sexual, and gender minorities often resist their social death by adopting patterns of affinity that are strikingly similar to those that govern normative relationships. He concludes that socially dead “others” can be reanimated only if we avow the mortality and mourning that lie at the root of all kinship relations.

Christopher Peterson is visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College.

Sometimes described as "America's deadliest war," King Philip's War proved a critical turning point in the history of New England, leaving English colonists decisively in command of the region at the expense of native peoples. Although traditionally understood as an inevitable clash of cultures or as a classic example of conflict on the frontier between Indians and whites, in the view of James D. Drake it was neither. Instead, he argues, King Philip's War was a civil war, whose divisions cut across ethnic lines and tore apart a society composed of English colonizers and Native Americans alike. According to Drake, the interdependence that developed between English and Indian in the years leading up to the war helps explain its notorious brutality. Believing they were dealing with an internal rebellion and therefore with an act of treason, the colonists and their native allies often meted out harsh punishments. The end result was nothing less than the decimation of New England's indigenous peoples and the consequent social, political, and cultural reorganization of the region. In short, by waging war among themselves, the English and Indians of New England destroyed the world they had constructed together. In its place a new society emerged, one in which native peoples were marginalized and the culture of the New England Way receded into the past.

Winner of 2006 International Association of Theatre Critics Thalia Prize
Winner of 2006 Village Voice OBIE Awards Lifetime Achievement Award

In this collection, Eric Bentley presents Concord, a comedy adapted from Kleist's The Broken Jug;The Fall of the Amazons, a tragedy written in response to Kleist's Penthesilea; and Wannsee, a tragic-comedy which is Bentley's rendering of Kleist's Cathy of Heilbronn.

Bentley sets Concord in a courthouse during the early days of the Republic. Convened to discover who broke an irreplaceable jug symbolic of the chivalric age of Sir Walter Raleigh, Judge Adam's madcap court flounders in hilarious chaos induced by huge lies to cover comic lust.

Fall of the Amazons is the story of Achilles and the Amazon queen, Penthesilea. Through this pagan play, Bentley explores improbably love, which he exemplifies in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac: "In seeming to be cruel to both father and son, God has enabled them to find, in total vulnerability, total love," a theme that also pervades Wannsee.

Bentley's Wannsee is a play of pageantry: emperors, counts, dueling knights, a young beauty of seemingly low birth, cherubs, and witches masked in loveliness. A fabulous love story ostensibly designed to dissuade Kleist from self-destruction, Wannsee demonstrates with a flourish that, though devils roam the earth, there are also angels.

Deep within New York's compelling, sprawling history lives an odd, ornery Manhattan native named Diedrich Knickerbocker. The name may be familiar today: his story gave rise to generations of popular tributes—from a beer brand to a basketball team and more—but Knickerbocker himself has been forgotten. In fact, he was New York's first truly homegrown chronicler, and as a descendant of the Dutch settlers, he singlehandedly tried to reclaim the city for the Dutch. Almost singlehandedly, that is. Diedrich Knickerbocker was created in 1809 by a young Washington Irving, who used the character to narrate his classic satire, A History of New York. According to Irving's partisan narrator, everything good and distinctive, proud and powerful, about New York City—from the doughnuts to the twisting streets of lower Manhattan—could be traced back to New Amsterdam. Terrific general interest, cultural history of a city with a rich and lively literary past. First-ever book on the eponymous myth that has informed New York City culture since the early 1800s. Coincides with the two-hundredth anniversary of Washington Irving's publication of A History of New York. Perfect gift book or addition to library collection of New York Cityùthemed books.

Includes a gallery of images that brings Diedrich Knickerbocker, his myth, time, and place to life Knickerbocker engagingly traces the creation, evolution, and prevalence of Irving's imaginary historian in New York literature and history, art and advertising, from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Who would imagine this satiric character, at once a snob and a champion of the people, would endure for two hundred years? In Elizabeth L. Bradley's words, "Whether you call it 'blood,' style, attitude, or moxie, the little Dutchman could deliver." And, from this engaging work, it is clear that he does.

Bradley's stunning volume offers a surprising and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of New York history, and invites readers into the world of Knickerbocker, the antihero who surprised everyone by becoming the standard-bearer for the city's exceptional sense of self, or what we now call a New York "attitude."

Disputing the so-called ghetto studies that depicted the early part of the twentieth century as the nadir of African American society, this thoughtful volume by Christopher Robert Reed investigates black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago, revealing a vibrant community that grew and developed on Chicago’s South Side in the early 1900s. Reed also explores the impact of the fifty thousand black southerners who streamed into the city during the Great Migration of 1916–1918, effectively doubling Chicago’s African American population. Those already residing in Chicago’s black neighborhoods had a lot in common with those who migrated, Reed demonstrates, and the two groups became unified, building a broad community base able to face discrimination and prejudice while contributing to Chicago’s growth and development.

Reed not only explains how Chicago’s African Americans openly competed with white people for jobs, housing and an independent political voice but also examines the structure of the society migrants entered and helped shape. Other topics include South Side housing, black politics and protest, the role of institutionalized religion, the economic aspects of African American life,  the push for citizenship rights and political power for African Americans, and the impact of World War I and the race riot of 1919. The first comprehensive exploration of black life in turn-of-the-century Chicago beyond the mold of a ghetto perspective, this revealing work demonstrates how the melding of migrants and residents allowed for the building of a Black Metropolis in the 1920s.

When a racially mixed family moves into an all-white neighborhood in East Hartford, Connecticut, in 1961, lives are altered forever. Karl Luntta's Know It by Heart follows the adventures of young Dub Teed, his sister Susan and neighbor Doug Hammer, who befriend newly arrived Ricky Dubois, the daughter of an African-American woman and her white husband. When a burning cross flares in the night—and worse—the young adolescents set out to find justice and discover themselves in the process.

Despite the book's serious anti-racist theme, Know It by Heart is filled with humor reminiscent of Mark Twain. In this suspenseful novel, Karl Luntta brilliantly captures the world of the young adolescent in his characters and dialogue and in the innate comedy and awkwardness of that age. This is a book that will appeal to parents and teenagers alike.

In recent years there has been an attempt by activists, service providers, and feminists to think about violence against women in more inclusive ways. In Knowing What We Know, activist and sociologist Gail Garfield argues that this effort has not gone far enough and that in order to understand violence, we must take the lived experiences of African American women seriously.  Doing so, she cautions, goes far beyond simply adding voices of black women to existing academic and activist discourses, but rather, requires a radical shift in our knowledge of these women’s lives and the rhetoric used to describe them.

Bringing together a series of life-history interviews with nine women, this unique study urges a departure from established approaches that position women as victims of exclusively male violence. Instead, Garfield explores what happens when women’s ability to make decisions and act upon those choices comes into conflict with cultural and social constraints. Chapters explore how women experience racialized or class-based violence, how these forms of violence are related to gendered violence, and what these violations mean to a woman’s sense of identity. By showing how women maintain, sustain, and in some instances regain their sense of human worth as a result of their experiences of violation, Garfield complicates the existing dialogue on violence against women in new and important ways.

Kuria Cattle Raiders is about cattle raiding as practiced--both historically and in the present day--by the agro-pastoralist Kuria people, whose population straddles the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Based on field research conducted in the Tarime District lowlands of northern Tanzania, the book documents and analyzes an extraordinary transformation in the nature of Kuria cattle raiding that has occurred over the course of the past century. While in years past the raiding of other tribes and other Kuria clans was done for prestige and bridewealth cattle, today the practice is carried out by heavily armed multiclan and multiethnic gangs that are highly organized and cash market-oriented. This change, Michael Fleisher argues, is due to the penetration and evolution of the colonial economy into the region and the administrative policies of the post-colonial Tanzanian state.
The reciprocal raiding of cattle by pastoralists has a long and venerable history in East Africa, but there has been, until now, no book-length treatment of the practice, and, more importantly, no detailed case study of the newer, "modern" form of cattle raiding described here. In addition, the phenomenon of Kuria cattle raiding conveys significant implications for our understanding of informal economies and globalization processes.
Kuria Cattle Raiders engages issues of theoretical as well as practical significance for anthropologists, sociologists, criminologists, cultural ecologists, economic development agencies, and all those concerned with the pressing issues of globalization and rapid social and cultural change.
Michael L. Fleisher, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Rangeland Resources, Utah State University, is currently engaged in a study of conflict among pastoralists in southern Ethiopia as part of a research project jointly administered by the University of Kentucky, Utah State University, and Cornell University under a grant from U.S.A.I.D.

A collection of reminiscences that illuminate the career and private life of the iconic author of 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
 
Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), who began his writing career working for popular magazines, held both literary aspirations and an attraction to genre fiction. His conspicuous refusal to respect literary boundaries was part of what made him a countercultural icon in the 1960s and 1970s. Vonnegut’s personal life was marked in large part by public success and private turmoil. Two turbulent marriages, his sudden adoption of his late sister’s four children (and the equally sudden removal of one of those children), and a mid-eighties suicide attempt all signaled the extent of Vonnegut’s inner troubles. Yet, he was a generous friend to many, maintaining close correspondences throughout his life.

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered gathers reminiscences—by those who knew him intimately, and from those met him only once—that span Vonnegut’s entire life. Among the anecdotes in this collection are remembrances from his immediate family, reflections from his comrades in World War II, and tributes from writers he worked with in Iowa City and from those who knew him when he was young. Editor Jim O’Loughlin offers biographical notes on Vonnegut’s relationship with each of these figures.
 
Since Vonnegut’s death, much has been written on his life and work, but this new volume offers a more generous view of his life, particularly his last years. In O’Loughlin’s introduction to the volume, he argues that we can locate and understand Vonnegut’s best self through his public persona, and that in his performance as the kind and humane figure that many of the speakers here knew him as, Vonnegut became a better person than he ever felt himself to be.