A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY208 start with C start with C
Laura Wilmote is a television journalist living in Paris. Her life couldn’t be better—a stimulating job, a loving boyfriend, interesting friends—until her phone rings in the middle of one night. It is C., an old school friend whom Laura recently helped find a job at the same television station: “My phone rang. I knew right away it was you.”
Thus begins the story of C.’s unrelenting, obsessive, incurable love/hatred of Laura. She is convinced that Laura shares her love, but cannot—or will not—admit it. C. begins to dress as Laura, to make her friends and family her own, and even succeeds in working alongside Laura on the unique program that is Laura’s signature achievement. The obsession escalates, yet is artfully hidden. It is Laura who is perceived as the aggressor at work, Laura who appears unwell, Laura who is losing it. Even Laura’s adoring boyfriend begins to question her. Laura seeks the counsel of a psychiatrist who diagnoses C. with De Clérambault syndrome—she is convinced that Laura is in love with her. And worse, the syndrome can only end in one of two ways: the death of the patient, or that of the object of the obsession.
A Cage in Search of a Bird is the gripping story of two women caught in the vise of a terrible delusion. Florence Noiville brilliantly narrates this story of obsession and one woman’s attempts to escape the irrational love of another—an inescapable, never-ending love, a love that can only end badly.
graduation traveling the country, hoping to make it
all the way to San Francisco before returning home
to Illinois. However, a broken motorcycle leaves him
stuck in Idaho, where he surprises himself by falling
in love with the mountains and the local culture.
He converts to Mormonism and marries Charlene
Simmons—a perfect Mormon girl deeply dedicated
to her church.
After a fifteen-year hiatus in Arizona, Kail moves
his family back to Idaho to solve some unresolved
issues between his wife and God. What he and Charlene
find are shocking surprises beneath the surface
of every beautiful thing, from the Idaho mountains to
Charlene’s deceptively devout family.
Acclaimed author Jack Harrell creates a world
of complex and troubled characters, each seeking
happiness from a God simultaneously familiar and
mysterious, each wrestling with the doubts and eternal
optimism integral to their faith.
The poisoning of the painter Hieronymus Bosch; anchorman Dan Rather’s mysterious mugging on Park Avenue as he strolls home alone one October evening; a series of postcard meditations on the idea of travel from a young American journalist visiting Burma; a husband-and-wife team of fundamentalist Christian suicide bombers; the myth of Iphigenia from Agamemnon’s daughter’s point of view—these and other stories form a mosaic, connected through a pattern of musical motifs, transposed scenes, and recurring characters. It is a narrative about narrativity itself, the human obsession with telling ourselves and our worlds over and over again in an attempt to stabilize a truth that, as Nabokov once said, should only exist within quotation marks.
Lorraine López (author of Soy la Avon Lady and Other Stories) has created a vivid picture of barrio life, filled with honesty, insight, and humor for young adults. She paints a balanced and detailed landscape of Enrique's world. Although Enrique is confused and angered by his mother's refusal to stand up for him against the abuse of his stepfather, he also draws strength from the supportive and loving family of his friend Francisco. While some of his teachers are uncaring or inept, others provide help and encouragement at critical moments in his life.
When Enrique witnesses his friend Horacio gunned down in a drive-by shooting and is seen by the assailants, gang members set out to kill him. As the novel reaches its climax, Enrique must make some agonizing decisions.
Although specifically about barrio life, this novel is universal in its themes—the drive for success, the desire for love and family support, and the need for true friendship. López's fully delineated characters provide a rich and credible mural of our human comedy.
An ancient Greek tale of romance and adventure.
Chariton’s Callirhoe, subtitled “Love Story in Syracuse,” is the oldest extant novel. It is a fast-paced historical romance with ageless charm.
Chariton narrates the adventures of an exceptionally beautiful young bride named Callirhoe, beginning with her abduction by pirates—adventures that take her as far as the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes and involve shipwrecks, several ardent suitors, an embarrassing pregnancy, the hazards of war, and a happy ending. Animated dialogue captures dramatic situations, and the novelist takes us on picturesque travels. His skill makes us enthralled spectators of plots and counterplots, at trials and a crucifixion, inside a harem, among the admiring crowd at weddings, and at battles on land and sea.
This enchanting tale is here made available for the first time in an English translation facing the Greek text. In his Introduction G. P. Goold establishes the book’s date in the first century AD and relates it to other ancient fiction.
Born in the United States, Casey was raised in Cuba and spent most of his life there and in Europe. He chose Spanish as his primary artistic tongue. A member of the intelligentsia surrounding Castro in the early years of the revolution, he was eventually exiled—and in 1969 committed suicide in Rome at the age of forty-five. Although most of his luminous stories are set in Havana, his is not a touristy, picturesque landscape but an often strange and nightmarish theater of human passions, inhabited by figures—silhouettes, really—that live on the edge of normality. This volume, which showcases Casey’s mastery of the skill of indirect and gradual revelation, is the most complete to appear in any language and includes a biographical and critical introduction written by Ilan Stavans, the noted novelist and scholar of Hispanic culture.
Readers interested in the art of fiction and in the complexities of the human psyche will find Casey’s work irresistible.
Based mostly on his own experiences, Theophile Maher’s local color novel Cannel Coal Oil Days challenges many popular ideas about antebellum Appalachia, bringing it more fully into the broader story of the United States. Written in 1887, discovered in 2018, and published here for the first time, it offers a narrative of life between 1859 and 1861 in what was then western Virginia as it became West Virginia.
Cannel coal (a soft form of coal whose oil, when distilled, was competitive in the lighting oil business after overfishing reduced the whale oil supply) was at the center of one of Appalachia’s first extractive industries. Using the development of coal oil manufacturing in the Kanawha valley as its launching point, Maher’s semiautobiographical novel tells of a series of interrelated changes, each reflecting larger transformations in the United States as a whole. It shows how coal oil manufacturing was transformed from an amateurish endeavor to a more professional industry, with implications for Appalachian environment and labor. Then, Maher foreshadows the coming Progressive Era by insisting on moral and environmental reforms based in democratic and Christian principles. Finally, he tells the story of the coming of the Civil War to the region, as the novel’s protagonist, a mining engineer, works closely with a Black family to organize the local abolitionist mountain folk into a Union militia to aid in the secession of West Virginia from Virginia.
The job seems simple enough: Reporter Lee Hershey needs protection for a couple of weeks as he pursues the biggest story of his career with all eyes on swing state Ohio in the midst of a presidential election. Columbus private eye Andy Hayes, broke as usual, doesn’t have much choice but to sign on, even with his girlfriend falling for the charming journalist.
Then murder strikes at the Statehouse and Andy finds himself partly responsible for the death. With an innocent man behind bars, a mysterious vehicle following Andy around the city, and more lives in danger, the detective has his hands full trying to solve a killing in a poisonous political environment where everyone has a motive for murder and anyone could be the next target.
Leyla is a headstrong Brooklyn-born art historian at a prestigious upstate New York college. When she meets feckless young computer technician Pablo at a party, she quickly becomes pregnant with his child. There’s only one problem: she can’t stand him. And one more problem: her student Michael wants Pablo for himself.
Amid this love triangle, the objects of Leyla and Michael’s study take on a life of their own. Trying to learn more about Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy, they pore over the journal and prison writings of maverick 17th-century utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which, as if by enchantment, transport them back four centuries to Naples. And while the past and present miraculously converge, Leyla, Michael, and Tommaso embark on a voyage of self-discovery in search of a new life.
In this fusion of historical, queer, and speculative fiction, Alessandro Giardino combines the intellectual playfulness of Umberto Eco with the psychological finesse of Michael Cunningham.
Written with keen intelligence and biting humor, Carbine is a book about the ridiculousness of contemporary life—a book about what cannot be said.
Winner of the 2021 Found in Translation Award
First published in Polish in 1932, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma was Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s breakout novel. Dyzma is an unemployed clerk who crashes a swanky party, where he makes an offhand crass remark that sets him on a new course. Soon high society—from government ministers to drug-fueled aristocrats—wants a piece of him. As Dyzma’s status grows, his vulgarity is interpreted as authenticity and strength. He is unable to comprehend complicated political matters, but his cryptic responses are celebrated as wise introspection. His willingness to do anything to hold on to power—flip-flopping on political positions, inventing xenophobic plots, even having enemies assaulted—only leads to greater success.
Dołęga-Mostowicz wrote his novel in a newly independent Poland rampant with political corruption and populist pandering. Jerzy Kosinski borrowed heavily from the novel when he wrote Being There, and readers of both books will recognize similarities between their plots. This biting political satire—by turns hilarious and disturbing, contemptuous and sympathetic—is an indictment of a system in which money and connections matter above all else, bluster and ignorance are valorized, and a deeply incompetent man rises to the highest spheres of government.
"The editors have included only material that will stand easily with her more familiar work and satisfy her large following. . . . The rough drafts and variant treatments have been set aside for scholars."—Joseph McLellan, Washington Post
"The wit, the imagination, the elevated philosophical dialogue mark most of the stories in this volume as vintage Dinesen . . . of special interest to Dinesen fans."—Robert Langbaum, New York Times Book Review
Nellie Campobello, a prominent Mexican writer and "novelist of the Revolution," played an important role in Mexico's cultural renaissance in the 1920s and early 1930s, along with such writers as Rafael Muñoz and Gregorio López y Fuentes and artists Diego Rivera, Orozco, and others. Her two novellas, Cartucho (first published in 1931) and My Mother's Hands (first published as Las manos de Mamá in 1938), are autobiographical evocations of a childhood spent amidst the violence and turmoil of the Revolution in Mexico. Campobello's memories of the Revolution in the north of Mexico, where Pancho Villa was a popular hero and a personal friend of her family, show not only the stark realism of Cartucho but also the tender lyricism of My Mother's Hands. They are noteworthy, too, as a first-person account of the female experience in the early years of the Mexican Revolution and unique in their presentation of events from a child's perspective.
Edgar Brau, one of the most exciting South American writers to emerge in the past twenty years, debuts his first English-language collection with the publication of Casablanca and Other Stories. The fiction of Edgar Brau draws not only upon the rich literary heritage of his native Argentina but also upon the body of work that has now rightly been formed into a South American canon, embracing those such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Marquez, and Isabelle Allende. He brings a unique perspective to his narratives—narratives forged in the political and social upheaval that has been modern South America. Employing a fantasy-like aspect that goes beyond magical realism, his work is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe in his use of atmosphere as an additional character. These short stories signal a new era, much as the publication of Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths in 1962 heralded a coming-of-age for his generation.
Translated by Donald A. Yates, Andrea Labinger, and Joanne M. Yates, this collection includes stories from two of Edgar Brau’s collections—El poema y otras historias and Tres cuentos—to bring to a fresh audience the very best new work of a major Argentinean author.
Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books.
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant (1960), the fifth book, finds Nick marrying Isobel Tolland and launching happily into family life—including his new role as brother-in-law to Isobel’s many idiosyncratic siblings. But even as Nick’s life is settling down, those of his friends are full of drama and heartache: his best friend, Hugh Moreland, is risking his marriage on a hopeless affair, while Charles Stringham has nearly destroyed himself with drink. Full of Powell’s typically sharp observations about life and love, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offers all the rewards and frustrations, pleasures and regrets of one’s thirties.
"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune
"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times
"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker
“The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”—Kingsley Amis
This is the first digital version of Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, a collection of three historical novels by noted American writer Janet Lewis. For the first time, these works have been brought together in a single edition, each with a new introduction by Kevin Haworth:
The Wife of Martin Guerre
Based on a notorious trial in sixteenth-century France, The Wife of Martin Guerre follows Bertrande de Rois and her lost-and-returned husband through a tale of impersonation, conspiracy, and small-town intrigue. Their fascinating story has also inspired a bestselling historical study and two films, including The Return of Martin Guerre.
The Trial of Sören Qvist
Although set in seventeenth-century Denmark, The Trial of Sören Qvist has a contemporary feel and has been praised for its intriguing plot and for Lewis’s powerful writing. In this second novel in the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, Lewis recounts the story of a murder, an investigation, and a pious town pastor who confesses to the crime, driven perhaps more by a recognition of his own moral flaws than by guilt for the acts of which he stood accused.
The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
The court of Louis XIV and a modest Paris street provide the incongruous settings for this tale of a humble bookbinder, his wife, and the young craftsman who seduces her and blackmails her husband into covering up a terrible crime. This third and last case of circumstantial evidence bristles with character, the smell of blood, and considerable suspense against a backdrop of national political unrest in the cruel and dingy Paris of the seventeenth century.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
In Cast a Blue Shadow, his fourth Amish mystery, P. L. Gaus spins a suspenseful tale of power, pride, and tested faith. As always, Gaus explores the threshold of culture and faith among the Amish sects and their English neighbors, combining it here with the political divisions unique to the academic world.
After an early winter blizzard in Holmes County, Ohio, a wealthy socialite is found murdered in her mansion. That same morning, a troubled student, Martha Lehman, turns up at her psychiatrist’s office, bloody and unable to speak.
Professor Michael Branden and Sheriff Bruce Robertson begin an investigation that threatens to tear Millersburg College apart. Mute for many years as a child, Martha is once again unable (or unwilling) to speak. As Branden wrestles with the murder of the college’s leading benefactor, the real story of Martha Lehman begins to emerge—born Amish, converted to Mennonite, and drawn to the “English” world for the worst of reasons.
This new edition of Cast a Blue Shadow features an exclusive interview with the author, reading group materials, and a detailed map and driving guide to Holmes County, Ohio, with everything one needs to visit the iconic scenes depicted in the story.
Castle Nowhere is Constance Woolson's collection of stories set for the most part in the Great Lakes, in particular northern Lake Michigan and Lake Huron near Detroit.
Several themes inhabit Woolson's writing: an environmental consciousness and concern with landscapes; an awareness of the complexities of race; and an abidingly careful eye for the shallowness that sometimes accompanies wealth or social pretensions. She also had a unique perspective as a woman who pioneered the use of controversial subjects---such as unrequited or misplaced passion---and methods in fiction during a time that valorized domesticity.
As Margot Livesey notes in her introduction, reading about thwarted love is only one of the pleasures to be found in Castle Nowhere. "The majority of these stories are set in remote areas on the shores of Lake Michigan, which Woolson evokes with great vividness and beauty while always remaining keenly aware that beauty in no way mitigates hardship. As a writer, she was nearly always looking over her shoulder, and many, if not all, of these stories were written at a time when she no longer visited the Lake and her beloved Mackinac Island."
Contemporary readers will find a curiously modern atmosphere in Woolson's stories, as well as a distinct regional flavor in her careful renderings of the Great Lakes landscape. As such, Castle Nowhere represents a rare woman's voice in literature of its period and setting.
Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was born in New Hampshire and moved to Cleveland shortly thereafter. She spent time on Mackinac Island, Michigan, then traveled to Florida before moving to Europe. Much of her time there was spent in Italy. She died in Venice in 1894. Novelist Margot Livesey is the author of Eva Moves the Furniture and Homework.
The volume is introduced by its award-winning translator, Martha Ann Selby, who worked closely with the author. The universal appeal of these stories is rooted in their utterly truthful local specificity as they explore complex themes of abduction and restoration, humiliation and despair, and related issues of identity and wholeness. Known by Tamil readers for his description and detail, Dilip Kumar also writes with humor and a deep compassion for his characters, highlighting their strengths in the face of degradation and strife. His perspective and insight build on his own status as a northerner in this southern setting for whom Tamil is a second language—much like his characters.
The Thackeray Edition proudly announces two additions to its collection: Catherine and The Luck of Barry Lyndon. The Thackeray Edition is the first full-scale scholarly edition of William Makepeace Thackeray's works to appear in over seventy years, and the only one ever to be based on an examination of manuscripts and relevant printed texts. It is also a concrete attempt to put into practice a theory of scholarly editing that gives new insight into Thackeray's own compositional process.
Written in 1839-40 for Fraser's Magazine, Catherine was Thackeray's first novel. Although originally intended as a spoof of the 1830s Newgate school of criminal romance, it has intrinsic merit of its own for its cynical narrator and roguish heroine, both of whom harbinger similar creations in Vanity Fair eight years later.
Sheldon F. Goldfarb is an independent scholar who received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.
Edgar F. Harden is Professor of English, Simon Fraser University.
Peter L. Shillingsburg is Dean of Graduate Studies and Research, Lamar University.
Catina’s Haircut: A Novel in Stories spans four generations of a peasant family in the brutal poverty of post-Unification southern Italy and in an immigrant’s United States. The women in these tales dare to cross boundaries by discovering magical leaps inherent in the landscape, in themselves, and in the stories they tell and retell of family tragedy at a time of political unrest. Through an oral tradition embedded in the stone of memory and the flow of its reinvention, their passionate tale of resistance and transformation courses forward into new generations in a new world.
A woman threatens to join the land reform struggle in her Calabrian hill town, against her husband’s will, during a call for revolution in 1919. A brother and sister turn to the village sorceress in Fascist Italy to bring rain to their father’s drought-stricken farm. In Pittsburgh, new immigrants witness a miraculous rescue during the Great Flood of 1936. A young girl courageously dives into the Allegheny River to save her grandfather’s only memento of the old country. With only broken English to guide her, a widow hops a bus in search of live chickens to cook for Easter dinner in her husband’s memory. An aging woman in the title story is on a quest to cut the ankle-length hair as hard as the rocky soil of Calabria in a drought. A lonely woman who survived World War II bombings in her close-knit village, struggles to find community as a recent immigrant. A daughter visits her mother’s hill town to try and fulfill a wish for her to see the Fata Morgana. These haunting images permeate Corso’s linked stories of loss, hope, struggle, and freedom.
An official selection of The Sons of Italy® Book Club
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association
In 1986 Soviet Ukraine, two boys and two girls are welcomed into the world in a Donetsk maternity ward. Following a Soviet tradition of naming things after prominent Communist leaders from far away, a local party functionary offers great material benefits for naming children after Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German Communist Party from 1925 to 1933. The fateful decision is made, and the local newspaper presents the newly born Ernsts and Thälmas in a photo on the front page, forever tying four families together.
In Cecil the Lion Had to Die, Olena Stiazhkina follows these families through radical transformations when the Soviet Union unexpectedly implodes, independent Ukraine emerges, and neoimperial Russia occupies Ukraine’s Crimea and parts of the Donbas. Just as Stiazhkina’s decision to transition to writing in Ukrainian as part of her civic stance—performed in this book that begins in Russian and ends in Ukrainian—the stark choices of family members take them in different directions, presenting a multifaceted and nuanced Donbas.
A tour de force of stylistic registers, intertwining stories, and ironic voices, this novel is a must-read for those who seek deeper understanding of how Ukrainian history and local identity shapes war with Russia.
Set during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), Celia in the Revolution is the last in a series of young adult novels written by Encarnación Aragoneses, known by the pen name Elena Fortún, one of the most prolific and popular Spanish authors of the mid-twentieth century.
In a series of more than twenty novels, Fortún’s protagonist is Celia Gálvez de Montalbán, a precocious and rebellious girl from an affluent family who’s not afraid to question authority and dream, and that often gets her into trouble. Readers watch her grow from age seven through adolescence to the threshold of womanhood at seventeen, which is her age in this dark, inspiring novel about the war that changed Spain.
In this last narrative in the legendary series, Celia has an awakening that not even her lively imagination could have anticipated. The once carefree, innocent child prone to playful fantasies must suddenly confront a world that’s utterly changed, finding herself amid a bloody conflict, la Guerra Civil. Celia, now a madrecita, a little mother to her two younger sisters since the death of their mother, is forced into a life of hardship, a world of hunger, witness to violence, executions, bombing raids, and death. With Celia’s sorrows come her courageous and profound compassion, consoling and caring for virtually every war victim that crosses her path, no matter their political inclinations, and no matter all that Celia must contend with herself. Celia, despite all her travails, manages to survive with determination, defiance, and dignity.
Written immediately after the war, Celia in the Revolution was not published during Elena Fortún’s lifetime, until after the death of the dictator, Francisco Franco, due to censorship. This first major English translation by eminent scholar and Hispanist Michael Ugarte captures the narrative and nuances of Celia’s voice and others in this character-rich novel, and fellow eminent scholar and Hispanist Nuria Capdevila-Arguëlles’s preface brings powerful insights into this remarkable work by Elena Fortún that transcends young adult literature.
This seventh volume in the "Voices from Vietnam" series introduces U. S. readers to another major figure in modern Vietnamese letters: Doan Le. Noted for her versatility of style and her originality, she writes tales that are intensely human and universal, exploring such subjects as greed, marriage, divorce, aging and human rights. For the scholar, these stories give insight into Vietnamese culture after the "renovation". For the general reader, these are stories that explore all the subtle enigmas of the human heart.
As Wayne Karlin notes in his introduction, "[She] is a master of allegory and gently complex satire...her stories can often be fantastical—Sholom Aleichem's village of Helm channeled by Kafka through Our Town—or they can be deeply personal and realistic. In both cases they grow unabashedly from the real vicissitudes of her life."
Learn more about Karen Osborn at www.karenosborn.net.
In late 1974 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on the CIA, headed by Frank Church of Idaho, began collecting documents and materials to buttress the committee hearings on the CIA’s role and activities that were to begin in the fall of 1975. Among the materials prepared for the Church Committee is History of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was written by committee staff member Anne Karalekas.
This book reproduces the History, with an introduction by Leary that establishes the historical framework for the Church Committee hearings, and also includes ten relevant documents covering events from 1944 to 1981.
A haunting story of the power of death, the pain of loss, and the possibility of hope.
"Gripping, damning, and transfixing."
---Entertainment Weekly
" . . . possesses a time-bending gravity. . . . [A] small classic of graceful language and earned emotion."
---San Francisco Chronicle
". . . a beautifully written novel of war and the wrenching grief and unanswerable questions it leaves in its wake. . . . A Century of November is full of precise, startling imagery and elegant, richly poetic description---Wetherell seems genuinely incapable of writing a lazy sentence---and this last section of the novel is as surreal, hypnotic and harrowing as any literature in recent memory. The whole thing, in fact, is a jewel, an unforgettable historical novel that Wetherell has carefully (and artfully) seeded with loads of contemporary resonance." ---Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)
"A poignant, probing story. . . . Wetherell's prose and character writing are unflinching . . . [and his] take on a parent's anguish is deeply moving."
---Publishers Weekly
"A timely reminder of the devastation of mortal combat. . . ."
---Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Françoise Sagan is best known for her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, which caused a scandal when she first published it at the age of eighteen in 1953. But her second novel, A Certain Smile, less shocking and more psychologically convincing, was preferred by many critics. Like Bonjour Tristesse, this story is set in Paris in the 1950s and told by a young student bored by her law books, restless and curious about love and sex. She is fond of her loyal boyfriend, but he, too, bores her. His worldly uncle strikes her as more exciting, appealingly risky and forbidden. Frank and spontaneous, vulnerable and cruel, thoughtless and insightful, Sagan's young narrator explores such perennial themes as unrequited love and the precarious balance of irrational emotions and self-restraint.
Originally published in 1981 as En breve cárcel,Certificate of Absence is the first novel of the Argentinian scholar-critic Sylvia Molloy. Innovative in its treatment of women's relationships and in its assertion of woman's right to author her own text, the novel has won wide approval in Latin America and the United States.
The novel centers around a woman writing in a small room. As she writes, remembering a past relationship and anticipating a future one, the room becomes a repository for nostalgia, violence, and desire, a space in which writing and remembering become life-sustaining ceremonies. The narrator reflects on the power of love to both shelter and destroy. She meditates on the act of writing, specifically on writing as a woman, in a voice that goes against the grain of established, canonical voices.
Latin American male writers are prone to self-portrayal in their texts. Certifcate of Absence is one of the few novels by Latin American women that successfully use this technique to open new windows on women's experiences.
On a trail leading across Europe, the ex-astronaut barely escapes numerous attempts on his life. Having set himself up as a potential victim, he realizes that he may now be the target of a conspiracy--and that the conspiracy is not the work of a criminal mind, but a manifestation of the laws of nature. Certain patterns have begun to emerge from the chaos of modern society. Some of those patterns can be fatal. . .
In Change, Mo Yan, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Literature, personalizes the political and social changes in his country over the past few decades in this novella disguised as autobiography—or vice-versa. Unlike most historical narratives from China, which are pegged to political events, Change is a representative of “people’s history,” a bottom-up rather than top-down view of a country in flux. By moving back and forth in time and focusing on small events and everyday people, Mo Yan breathes life into history by describing the effects of larger-than-life events on the average citizen.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”— Nobel Committee for Literature
Can the novel survive in an age when tales of historical figures and contemporary personalities dominate the reading lists of the book-buying public?
Naomi Jacobs addresses this question in a study of writers such as William Styron, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover, who challenge the dominance of nonfiction by populating their fictions with real people, living and dead. Jacobs explores the genesis, varieties, and implications of this trend in a prose as lively as that of the writers she critiques.
Using as a case study Robert Coover’s portrait of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, Jacobs addresses the important legal and ethical questions raised by this trend and applies contemporary libel law to the fictionalization of living people, such as Richard Nixon. She closes her study by speculating on the future of this device and of the novel.
Dramatis personae.
This volume collects important examples of Greek literary portraiture. The Characters of Theophrastus consists of thirty fictional sketches of men who are each dominated by a single fault, such as arrogance, boorishness, or superstition. Unassuming in style, his character sketches nonetheless bear resemblance to the vivid figures of the period’s New Comedy. The Hellenistic poet Herodas wrote mimes, a popular Greek entertainment in which one actor or a small group portrayed a situation from everyday urban life, concentrating on depiction of character rather than on plot. Here too in a new text and translation are substantial portions of the mimes of Sophron, a Syracusan of the fifth century BC whose work Plato is said to have enjoyed, as well as a selection of anonymous mime fragments.
The extant work of Sophron and the anonymous mime fragments are newly added to the Loeb Classical Library in this edition. And Jeffrey Rusten and Ian Cunningham have updated their editions of Theophrastus and Herodas (both first published in 1993) in light of the latest scholarship.
Charlotte’s Rose—justifiably back in print—tells the story of a young Welsh girl, Charlotte Edwards, who, soon after her mother dies, sails with her father from England to the United States to become part of a company of Mormon handcart pioneers—emigrants with no horses or oxen who themselves pulled the heavy carts filled with their belongings. These were arduous journeys. While on the Mormon Trail, Charlotte befriends a young mother who later dies in childbirth. Though only 12 years old, Charlotte assumes responsibility for the infant and carries her to Utah. Over the course of their journey together, Charlotte becomes deeply attached to the baby she calls Rose, which makes Charlotte’s choice at the novel’s end particularly poignant.
The author, A. E. Cannon, is adept at creating vivid, multifaceted, believable characters and has crafted a story of pioneers that will seem relevant to today’s young people. The reader will quickly be drawn into the story as Charlotte struggles to navigate the trials of an adolescent moving into adulthood. Although this is a book about Mormon pioneers, it is in fact about the larger American experience of immigration—a drama still unfolding today—and Charlotte’s coming-of-age journey will resonate with readers young and old.
In 1922, the same year that saw the establishment of the Czechoslovak Football Association, a former singer and cabaret director from Prague published a novel about soccer. Eighty-six years later, that novel, Eduard Bass’s The Chattertooth Eleven, has been reprinted more than thirty times, has been made into a film, and has become one of the most popular works of Czech fiction.
The novel tells the extraordinary adventures of an ordinary father, Chattertooth, and his eleven sons—whom he has raised as an unbeatable soccer team. This humorous tale—set in the aftermath of World War I—celebrates fair play and perseverance while simultaneously taking a gently ironic stance towards the Czech infatuation with soccer. This edition, in a new graphic layout by Zdenek Ziegler, is accompanied by charming illustrations by Jirí Grus.
Previously available only in India, this hugely successful novel was adapted into a film, winning great critical acclaim and commercial success. Anita Nair’s evocative translation from Malayalam brings this tale of love and longing, a classic of Indian literature, to a new audience.
Ariel Magnus leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to learn more about his grandfather and the country to which he emigrated in the 1930s. Chess with My Grandfather is a playful, genre-shifting novel combining tales of international espionage, documentary evidence, and family lore. In this extraordinary book, Magnus blends fact and fiction in a delirious exploration of a dark period of history, family, identity, the power of art and literature and, of course, the fascinating world of chess.
Although The Chicago Manual of Style is widely used by writers and editors of all stripes, it is primarily concerned with nonfiction, a fact long lamented by the fiction community. In this long-awaited book from the publisher of the Manual, Amy J. Schneider, a veteran copyeditor who’s worked on bestsellers across a wide swath of genres, delivers a companionable editing guide geared specifically toward fiction copyeditors—the first book of its type.
In a series of approachable thematic chapters, Schneider offers cogent advice on how to deal with dialogue, voice, grammar, conscious language, and other significant issues in fiction. She focuses on the copyediting tasks specific to fiction—such as tracking the details of fictional characters, places, and events to ensure continuity across the work—and provides a slew of sharp, practicable solutions drawn from her twenty-five years of experience working for publishers both large and small. The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction is sure to prove an indispensable companion to The Chicago Manual of Style and a versatile tool for copyeditors working in the multifaceted landscape of contemporary fiction.
A key figure in the foundation of Chicano literature, Mario Suárez (1923–1998) was among the first writers to focus not only on Chicano characters but also on the multicultural space in which they live, whether a Tucson barbershop or a Manhattan boxing ring. Many of his stories have received wide acclaim through publication in periodicals and anthologies; this book presents those eleven previously published stories along with eight others from the archive of his unpublished work. It also includes a biographical introduction and a critical analysis of the stories that will broaden readers’ appreciation for his place in Chicano literature.
In most of his stories, Suárez sought to portray people he knew from Tucson’s El Hoyo barrio, a place usually thought of as urban wasteland when it is thought of at all. Suárez set out to fictionalize this place of ignored men and women because he believed their human stories were worth telling, and he hoped that through his depictions American literature would recognize their existence. By seeking to record the so-called underside of America, Suárez was inspired to pay close attention to people’s mannerisms, language, and aspirations. And by focusing on these barrio characters he also crafted a unique, mild-mannered realism overflowing with humor and pathos.
Along with Fray Angélico Chávez, Suárez stands as arguably the mid-twentieth century’s most important short story writer of Mexican descent. Chicano Sketches reclaims Suárez as a major figure of the genre and offers lovers of fine fiction a chance to rediscover this major talent.
Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics features new work by Rikki Ducornet, Eurydice, Elizabeth Graver, Ursule Molinaro, and fourteen other witty and deadly serious writers.
Chick-Lit 2 discovers new and alternative voices in women’s fiction whose stories do not involve trauma that comes from the outside. As Mazza writes in her introduction, “Sexual assaults and harassments and injurious poor body images do exist and have waged a war on women (the American Medical Association says so). But for this book, I was interested in seeing what action(s) women characters can incite on their own, whether bad or good, hopeful or dead-end, progressive or destructive.”
Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction is the fourth volume in “On the Edge: New Women’s Fiction,” FC2’s ongoing effort to discover new and innovative voices in women’s fiction. Determined to contradict the myth that “women don't write experimental fiction,” Chick-Lit discovers women writers with a fresh and irreverent wit and honesty, but no less powerful in their rendering of human experience.
Chick-Lit collects the original fiction of newly discovered writers, but also the award winning work of notable writers like Carole Maso, Jonis Agee, Stacy Levinne and Carolyn Banks. Marked by innovations in form and point-of-view, the writers in this collection are not satisfied with the terrain commonly referred to as “women’s writing.” Insane asylum sex, board games that control people’s lives, a masochistic pedophile humiliated by his victim, an obese woman paying nickels and quarters for attention from teenage girls, a deranged hair stylist and her disloyal dog, a men's impotence therapy group, a surreal landscape constantly producing the body of a woman's mother: this is writing that shouts, yes, there is such a thing as postfeminist fiction.
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.
Ibtihal Salem's writing provides an excellent forum for studying both everyday life in Egypt and current literary experimentation in the Middle East. Her poignant pieces hover between the structure of story-telling, the visuality of vignettes, and the compression of poetry. They both record and evoke a literary ferment going on in Egypt today.
Salem's writing of the last thirty years is lauded for its social messages also. Finding the expression of sexuality necessary to explicate problems of Egyptian identity, Salem often links poverty to gender marginality. Her heroines, however, celebrate the heritages that have shaped them, even as they resist certain aspects of them. Like many writers in Egypt, Salem honors traditional folktales, even as she deals with contemporary problems from class and economic perspectives.
Marilyn Booth, one of the best translators of Arabic fiction working today, has dealt in her introduction to this collection with the unusual experimental form by examining Salem's craft as well as the contextual history surrounding the stories. Since Salem is writing "across genres," Booth helps the reader also by opening each piece with an explanatory comment, often quoting the author, and thus further illuminating Salem's portrayals of lives bounded by Egypt's waters—the Canal, the Nile, and the Mediterranean.
When attorney Lucinda Hayes reluctantly agrees to represent the mother of a brutally slain child, she must convince the court that the makers of a pornographic film are liable for the murder. As the case unfolds, Lucinda calls upon all her personal strength and legal talent, facing down her own ghosts as well as the powerful entertainment industry's star lawyers.
In Chilling Effect, Wesson affirms the power of free speech to inspire the best and the worst human behavior and explores the tension between freedom and accountability
Jing Wang has selected provocative examples of this new school of writing, which gained prominence in the late 1980s. Contradicting many long-cherished beliefs about Chinese writers—including the alleged tradition of writing as a political act against authoritarianism—these stories make a dramatic break from conventions of modern Chinese literature by demonstrating an irreverence toward history and culture and by celebrating the artificiality of storytelling. Enriched by the work of a distinguished group of translators, this collection presents an aesthetic experience that may have outraged many revolutionary-minded readers in China, but one that also occupies an important place in the canon of Chinese literature. China’s Avant-Garde Fiction brings together a group of exceptional writers (including Raise the Red Lantern author Su Tong) to the attention of an English-speaking audience.
This book will be enjoyed by those interested in Chinese literature, culture, and society—particularly readers of contemporary fiction.
Contributors. Bei Cun, Can Xue, Gei Fei, Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Sun Ganlu, Yu Hua
Translators. Eva Shan Chou, Michael S. Duke, Howard Goldblatt, Ronald R. Janssen, Andrew F. Jones, Denis C. Mair, Victor H. Mair, Caroline Mason, Beatrice Spade, Kristina M. Torgeson, Jian Zhang, Zhu Hong
Lin Yutang (1895–1976), author of more than thirty-five books, was arguably the most distinguished Chinese American writer of the twentieth century. In Chinatown Family, he brings humor and wisdom to issues of culture, race, and religion as he tells the engrossing and heart-warming story of an immigrant, working-class Chinese American family that settled in New York City during the 1930s and 1940s. Tracing their sometimes troubled and sometimes rewarding journey, Lin paints a vivid portrait of the wonder and the woe of settling into a new land. In an era when interracial marriages were frowned upon and it was forbidden for working-class Chinese men to bring their families to America, this story shows how one family struggled to become new Americans by applying their Taoist philosophy to resist peacefully the discriminatory laws and racism they encountered.
Beyond the quest for acceptance and economic success, Chinatown Family also probes deep into the heart of the immigration experience by presenting the perils of assimilation. The burgeoning tensionbetween the desire for material wealth and the traditional Chinese belief in the primary importance of family poses the question: Is it possible to attain the American dream without damaging these primary ties? For each family member, the answer to this question turns out to be different. Through the varied paths that each character takes, the novel dramatizes the ways that Chinese immigrants have negotiated between the competing interests of economic opportunity and traditional values.
"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."—New York Times
Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
"[Robert van Gulik] deftly interweaves three criminal cases involving exotic yet universally recognizable characters, then has his Judge Dee provide a surprising yet most plausible solution."—New York Times Book Review
The Chinese Love Pavilion follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friend—now suspected of murder—in Malaya. Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.
"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."—New York Times
Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
The stories depict male homoeroticism in quotidian situations: a man brings a lover to his disapproving friend’s house; a good-looking young man becomes the object of desire at his school. The love never ends well, but the depictions are not always unsympathetic. Although Ugra claimed that the stories were aimed at suppressing homosexuality by exposing it, Vanita highlights the ambivalence of his characterizations. Cosmopolitan, educated, and hedonistic, the Hindu and Muslim men he portrayed quote Hindi and Urdu poetry to express their love, and they justify same-sex desire by drawing on literature, philosophy, and world history. Vanita’s introduction includes anecdotal evidence that Chocolate was enthusiastically received by India’s homosexual communities.
Choke Box isn't Jane's first book. From her room in the Buffalo Psychiatric Institute, she slowly reveals a hidden history of the ghost authorship that has sabotaged her family and driven her to madness. Her latest work, finally written under her own name, is designed to reclaim her dark and troubled story. Yet even as Jane portrays her life as a wife, mother, and slighted artist with sardonic candor, her every word is underscored by one belief above all others: the complete truth is always a secret. But the stories we tell may help us survive—if they don't kill us first.
Cinco Becknell is the story of a homeless man with no memory. Locked in the emptiness of his mind is a secret, a past, which will either keep him alive or get him killed.
As Cinco staggers through a dangerous journey of rediscovery, he is hunted by psychopaths who want to kill him, and he has no idea why; he is shadowed by a woman who may keep him alive—or not; and he is finally helped by another woman who can bring back to him the light he looks for—if he can stay alive. But he is running out of time, and people around him are dying, always violently.
Gradually, he begins to understand the true, brutal, nature of himself and of the darkness of his past. But it is a past, and a present, that he may never fully understand.
This novel, based on generations of violent, local family history, is set in the underbelly of the pseudo-glitzy streets of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The circus has fascinated Alexander Kluge ever since he was a child, and his devotion to it has been preserved throughout his cinematic output and his most recent literary work. In the circus, he finds both the shadow image of work and the epitome of human excellence, from love to war to revolution. As surfaces onto which utopias are projected, these elaborate performances offer a tangible representation of developments within civilization, with its nearly infinite possibilities and sometimes inevitable crashes—from the excited roar of the crowd to death on the floor of the ring.
In Circus Commentary, Kluge’s montage of modernities moves back and forth through time and space, expressing his unique mix of fictional and non-fictional reports, histories, and stories through semantic fields, images, and film sequences inserted in the book via QR codes. We encounter a broad panorama of perplexed artists and sophisticated surgeons cavorting alongside fighter pilots, sans-culottes drunk with dreams of omnipotence, and, most importantly, animals—to whose superhuman performances, this book creates a lasting memorial.
Maura Stanton's previous books include the novel Molly Companion and the story collections The Country I Come From and Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling. Stanton is a recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award and a two-time winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She teaches in the M.F.A. program at Indiana University.
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.
Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s The City was a landmark event in the history of Ukrainian literature. Written by a master craftsman in full control of the texture, rhythm, and tone of the text, the novel tells the story of Stepan, a young man from the provinces who moves to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, and achieves success as a writer through a succession of romantic encounters with women.
At its core, the novel is a philosophical search for harmony in a world where our intellectual side expects rational order, whereas the instinctive natural world follows its own principles. The resulting alienation and disorientation reflect the basic principles of existential philosophy, in which Pidmohylnyi is close to his European counterparts of the day.
But what started out as a study of other people's stories became a compelling story itself. City of Dreadful Night is an astonishing work of fiction, a tangle of tales that transports the reader from the Medieval India of magicians, witches, and vampires, through the British India of Brahm Kathuwala's childhood, into the chaos and political terror of contemporary India. Vividly recreating Indian literary and oral traditions, Siegel weaves a web of possession, reincarnation, and magical transformation unlike any found in the Western tradition. Flesh-eating demons, Rajiv Gandhi's assassin, even Bram Stoker and Dracula populate the serpentine narrative, which intermingles stories about the characters with the terrifying tales they tell.
Siegel pursues Brahm Kathuwala from the ghastly lights of the cremation ground at Banaras through villages all over north India. Brahm's life story is revealed through countless tales along the way. We learn that he was raised, and abandoned, by two mothers—one the destitute floor sweeper who bore him; the other her employer, a wealthy Irish woman who read and reread to him the story of Dracula. We hear of his marriage to the daughter of a cremation ground attendant, his battles against her demonic possession, and their painful parting. We come to understand the daily life and motivations of this "horror professional," who uses terrifying tales to ward off the evil he himself fears.
This unorthodox book is more than a story; it blends scholarship, fantasy, travelogue, and autobiography—fusing and overlapping historical accounts and newscasts, literary texts and films, dreams and nocturnal tales. Siegel uses imagination to explore the relation of real terror to horror fiction and to contemplate the ways fear and disgust become thrilling elements in stories of the macabre.
This book is the product of Siegel's deep knowledge of both Indian and Western literary and philosophical traditions. It is also an attempt to come to grips with the omnipresence of political and religious terror in contemporary India. Shocking, original, beautifully written, City of Dreadful Night offers readers a captivating immersion in the wonder and terror of India, past and present.
Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.
The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.
Winner, International Latino Book Award for Latino Fiction, Latino Literacy Now
Second place, International Latino Book Award for Historical Fiction, Latino Literacy Now
Finalist, Gay Fiction, Lambda Literary Awards
Honorable Mention in Drama, Latino Books into Movies Award, International Latino Book Awards
Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians
Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Reviewers
![front cover of The City of Refuge [New and Expanded Edition]](https://www.bibliovault.org/thumbs/978-0-8262-1812-4-thumb.jpg)
A definitive collection of Fisher’s short stories, The City of Refuge offers vibrant tales that deal with the problems faced by newcomers to the city, ancestor figures who struggle to instill a sense of integrity in the young, problems of violence and vengeance, and tensions of caste and class. This anthology has now been expanded to include seven previously unpublished stories that take up such themes as marital infidelity and passing for black and also relate the further adventures of Jinx and Bubber, the comic duo who appeared in Fisher’s two novels.
This new edition also includes two unpublished speeches and the popular article “The Caucasian Storms Harlem,” describing the craze for black music and dance. John McCluskey’s introduction has been updated to place the additional works within the context of Fisher’s career while situating his oeuvre within the broader context of American writing during the twenties.
Fisher recognized the dramatic and comic power in African American folklore and music and frequented Harlem’s many cabarets, speakeasies, and nightclubs, and at the core of his work is a strong regard for music as context and counterpoint. The City of Refuge now better captures the sounds of the city experience by presenting all of Fisher’s known stories. It offers a portrait of Harlem unmatched in depth and range by Fisher’s contemporaries or successors, celebrating, as Booklist noted, “the complexity of black urban life in its encounter with the dangers and delights of the city.” This expanded edition adds new perspectives to that experience and will enhance Fisher’s status for a new generation of readers.
The City of Trembling Leaves by Walter Van Tilburg Clark was first published in 1945 by Random House and reprinted by the University of Nevada Press in paperback in 1991 with a new foreword by Robert Laxalt.
Clark’s novel broke new ground in his telling of the story of the rites of passage of a boy, Tim Hazard, into adulthood in the setting of the Western town of Reno, Nevada. The descriptions of Reno’s landscape and the realistic characters depict the role of nature during the tumultuous stages of adolescence and the potential risk of obstruction and loss in the attainment of maturity.
Classics in Film and Fiction looks at a wide range of texts and their adaptations. Authors discussed are Shakespeare, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Truman Capote and Lewis Carroll. Book to film adaptations analysed include Jane Eyre, The Crucible, The Tempest and Alice in Wonderland. The collection also evaluates the term 'classic' in a wider context, including a comparison of Joyce's Ulysses with Hitchcock's Rear Window. Throughout, the contributors challenge the dichotomy between high culture and pop culture.
On Thursday nights, the players assemble in the back of Readmore Comix and Games. Celeste is the dungeon master; Valerie, who works at the store, was roped in by default; Mooneyham, the banker, likes to argue; and Ben, sensitive, unemployed, and living at home, is still recovering from an unrequited love. In the real world they go about their days falling in love, coming out at work, and dealing with their family lives all with varying degrees of success. But in the world of their fantasy game, they are heroes and wizards fighting to stop an evil cult from waking a sleeping god.
But then a sexy new guy, Albert, joins the club, Ben’s character is killed, and Mooneyham’s boyfriend is accosted on the street. The connections and parallels between the real world and the fantasy one become stronger and more important than ever as Ben struggles to bring his character back to life and win Albert’s affection, and the group unites to organize a protest at a neighborhood bar. All the while the slighted and competing vampire role playing club, working secretly in the shadows, begins to make its move.
Focusing on a diverse range of issues, including fossil fuels, cheap energy, the intricacies of human–more-than-human relationships, and postcolonial geographies, Konrad illustrates how cli-fi transcends mere storytelling. The genre ultimately emerges as an important means to forecast, imagine, and contemplate climatic events.
The book invites a broadening of the environmental humanities discourse, asking readers not only to deepen their understanding of the current climate crisis, but also to consider how cli-fi culture can be viewed as an effective method to address climate change.
Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming.
Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.
Closed for Repairs is a series of eleven vignettes that depict Cuban ingenuity in the face of urban problems. Each solution is framed with humor and irony and gives a glimpse of life on the island today.
In a clever fashion, Nancy Alonso shows us the spirit of resolve on the part of Cubans when faced with such issues as transportation problems, lack of water, and the shortage of consumer goods and construction materials caused by the embargo.
Illuminating the endurance and resilience of the Cuban people, these stories will make you chuckle. Alonso's sly wit is compelling as she satirizes the bureaucracy—an element of her work that will resonate universally.
The master of Old Comedy.
Aristophanes of Athens, one of the world’s greatest comic dramatists, has been admired since antiquity for his iridescent wit and beguiling fantasy, exuberant language, and brilliant satire of the social, intellectual, and political life of Athens at its height. The Loeb Classical Library edition of his plays is in four volumes.
The Introduction to the edition is in Volume I. Also in the first volume is Acharnians, in which a small landowner, tired of the Peloponnesian War, magically arranges a personal peace treaty; and Knights, perhaps the most biting satire of a political figure (Cleon) ever written.
Three plays are in Volume II. Socrates’ “Thinkery” is at the center of Clouds, which spoofs untraditional techniques for educating young men. Wasps satirizes Athenian enthusiasm for jury service. In Peace, a rollicking attack on war-makers, the hero travels to heaven on a dung beetle to discuss the issues with Zeus.
The enterprising protagonists of Birds create a utopian counter-Athens ruled by birds. Also in Volume III is Lysistrata, in which our first comic heroine organizes a conjugal strike of young wives until their husbands end the war between Athens and Sparta. Women again take center stage in Women at the Thesmophoria, this time to punish Euripides for portraying them as wicked.
Frogs, in Volume IV, features a contest between the traditional Aeschylus and the modern Euripides, yielding both sparkling comedy and insight on ancient literary taste. In Assemblywomen Athenian women plot to save Athens from male misgovernance—with raucously comical results. Here too is Wealth, whose gentle humor and straightforward morality made it the most popular of Aristophanes’ plays from classical times to the Renaissance.
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