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A Tale of Two Capitalisms
Sacred Economics in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Supritha Rajan
University of Michigan Press, 2015
No questions are more pressing today than the ethical dimensions of global capitalism in relation to an unevenly secularized modernity. A Tale of Two Capitalisms offers a timely response to these questions by reexamining the intellectual history of capitalist economics during the nineteenth century. Rajan’s ambitious book traces the neglected relationships between nineteenth-century political economy, anthropology, and literature in order to demonstrate how these discourses buttress a dominant narrative of self-interested capitalism that obscures a submerged narrative within political economy. This submerged narrative discloses political economy’s role in burgeoning theories of religion, as well as its underlying ethos of reciprocity, communality, and just distribution.

Drawing on an impressive range of literary, anthropological, and economic writings from the eighteenth through the twenty-first century, Rajan offers an inventive, interdisciplinary account of why this second narrative of capitalism has so long escaped our notice. The book presents an unprecedented genealogy of key anthropological and economic concepts, demonstrating how notions of sacrifice, the sacred, ritual, totemism, and magic remained conceptually intertwined with capitalist theories of value and exchange in both sociological and literary discourses.

Rajan supplies an original framework for discussing the ethical ideals that continue to inform contemporary global capitalism and its fraught relationship to the secular. Its revisionary argument brings new insight into the history of capitalist thought and modernity that will engage scholars across a variety of disciplines.
 
 
 
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Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois
Collected by Charles Neely
Southern Illinois University Press, 1998

First published in 1938, this lively collection of over 150 tales and songs runs the gamut from joy to woe, from horror to humor. In forming the collection, Charles Neely required only that the tales and songs—whether home grown or transplanted from the great body of world lore— had taken root somehow in the area of southern Illinois known as Egypt.

Notable tales include "Bones in the Well," "A Visit from Jesse James," "The Flight of the Naked Teamsters," "The Dug Hill Boger," and "How Death Came to Ireland"; among the songs and ballads are "Barbara Allen," "Hog and Hominy," "The Drunkard’s Lone Child," "The Belleville Convent Fire," "Shawneetown Flood," and "The Death of Charlie Burger."

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Tales of the Metric System
A Novel
Imraan Coovadia
Ohio University Press, 2016
In Tales of the Metric System, Coovadia explores a turbulent South Africa from 1970 into the present. He takes his home country’s transition from imperial to metric measurements as his catalyst, holding South Africa up and examining it from the diverse perspectives of his many characters. An elite white housewife married to a radical intellectual; a rock guitarist; the same guitarist’s granddaughter thirty years later; a teenaged boy at the mercy of mob justice—each story takes place over one of ten days across the decades, and each protagonist has his own stakes, her own moment in time, but each is equally caught in the eddies of change. Tales of the Metric System is clear eyed, harrowing, and daring.
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Talking Together
Letters of David Ignatow, 1946-1990
David Ignatow; Selected, Edited and Introduced by Gary Pacernick
University of Alabama Press, 1992
In his letters, David Ignatow finds company and shares the news with them and now, with us, his new company of readers
 
The letters of David Ignatow reveal the poet in “company” with a community of writers as he shares with them the details and nuances of his everyday existence: the key acts of friendship and enmity, of good news and bad, of struggle, work, success, and failure that comprise a life devoted to making art. The letters also serve as a vehicle for Ignatow to express his views on a whole range of issues from writing, teaching, and editing poetry, to his visions of the self, death and the cosmos. But the key is “company”—the support system that helps sustain the poet and that enables him to help others.
 
One of the many things we may learn from the letters of David Ignatow is the power of the individual to affect another’s life, to help sustain and even change it.
 
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Tall Tales Davy Crockett
Second Nashville Series Crockett Almanacs, 1839-1841
Michael A. Lofaro
University of Tennessee Press, 1987

These never before collected or reprinted tales, were part of the original primary force that created the tall tale Davy Crockett.

The Nashville almanacs significantly contributed to the development of the Davy Crockett myths. Two-thirds of the tales found in this edition have never before been collected or reprinted in any readily accessible form.

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The Tallgrass Prairie Reader
John T. Price
University of Iowa Press, 2014
The tallgrass prairie of the early 1800s, a beautiful and seemingly endless landscape of wildflowers and grasses, is now a tiny remnant of its former expanse. As a literary landscape, with much of the American environmental imagination focused on a mainstream notion of more spectacular examples of wild beauty, tallgrass is even more neglected. Prairie author and advocate John T. Price wondered what it would take to restore tallgrass prairie to its rightful place at the center of our collective identity.

The answer to that question is his Tallgrass Prairie Reader, a first-of-its-kind collection of literature from and about the tallgrass bioregion. Focusing on autobiographical nonfiction in a wide variety of forms, voices, and approaches—including adventure narrative, spiritual reflection, childhood memoir, Native American perspectives, literary natural history, humor, travel writing and reportage—he honors the ecological diversity of tallgrass itself and provides a range of models for nature writers and students.

The chronological arrangement allows readers to experience tallgrass through the eyes and imaginations of forty-two authors from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Writings by very early explorers are followed by works of nineteenth-century authors that reflect the fear, awe, reverence, and thrill of adventure rampant at the time. After 1900, following the destruction of the majority of tallgrass, much of the writing became nostalgic, elegiac, and mythic. A new environmental consciousness asserted itself midcentury, as personal responses to tallgrass were increasingly influenced by larger ecological perspectives. Preservation and restoration—informed by hard science—emerged as major themes. Early twenty-first-century writings demonstrate an awareness of tallgrass environmental history and the need for citizens, including writers, to remember and to help save our once magnificent prairies.
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Taming the Revolution
Andrea Acle-Kreysing
Campus Verlag, 2022
An essential study of nineteenth-century Spanish political thought.

Jaime Balmes and Juan Donoso Cortés–the two most important conservative thinkers in nineteenth-century Spain–actively sought to preserve the centrality of church and monarchy in the wake of the rise of liberalism, while at the same time discrediting the stereotypical view of Spain as a backward and isolated country. Although they pursued a similar goal, their positions differed: while Balmes’ works anticipated a socially oriented Catholicism, Donoso presented Christianity as the supreme social good, incompatible with modern liberalism. In Taming the Revolution, Andrea Acle-Kreysing highlights the unresolved tensions in their works, escaping the dualistic interpretations of this period that defines tradition from modernity. This work endeavors to show how Spanish political thought was a compelling variation–rather than an aberration–of contemporary European debates.
 
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The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature
Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt
Ohio University Press, 2003

Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home.

In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism—a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice.

People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places—but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains.

While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.

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Teaching Life
Letters from a Life in Literature
Dale Salwak
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Part epistolary memoir, part handbook, Teaching Life reflects on more than three decades of teaching literature and touching the lives of students. Both a reflection on a life in literature and a primer on teaching as a vocation, this soul-stirring work also provides behind-the-scenes stories of many of the authors who have influenced Dale Salwak’s career.

Written in response to the sudden death of one of his students, who died tragically in an automobile accident on her way to Salwak’s office to talk over her career plans, Teaching Life is an effort to impart lessons to the next generation of teachers: “It was the suddenness of her death, I think, along with the utter loss of so much potential, which struck me forcibly, and I found myself wondering if anything I had said in class had made a difference in her too-short life or, for that matter, in the lives of any of my students.”

By turns analytical, reflective, and exhortatory, Teaching Life unselfconsciously captures the fascination, enlightenment, and sheer joy that literary studies can offer professors and students. It also implicitly speaks to society's prevailing—and disturbing—prejudice against the profession.
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Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom
Approaches to Difficult Texts
Alison Gulley
Arc Humanities Press, 2018
<p >Teachers of medieval literature help students bridge thetemporal, contextual, and linguistic gulfs between the Middle Ages and thetwenty-first century. When episodes involving rape are thrown into the mix,that task becomes even more difficult. Students and teachers bring a variety ofexperiences to the classroom. This volume proposes ways educators can helpstudents navigate the divide between in- and out-of-class experiences and offerssuggestions for classroom activities and assignments for a range of medievaltexts, as well as insight into the concerns of students in various settings.</p>
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"Tell Me a Riddle"
Tillie Olsen
Rosenfelt, Deborah S
Rutgers University Press, 1995
“Tell Me a Riddle” renders an unforgettable portrait of a working class couple when the gender determined differences in their experiences of poverty and familial life give rise to bitter conflict after almost four decades of marriage.  As she dies from cancer, Eva, the protagonist, recollects a revolutionary past that both critiques and offers hope for the present.  Deborah Rosenfelt’s introduction and the essays in this volume survey the critical reception of this highly acclaimed story, analyze its biographical and historical contexts, examine the text’s language, structure, spiritual and moral significance, and illuminate Olsen’s relationship to the American midwest, the American left, and the Jewish enlightenment tradition.

This casebook includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of Olsen’s life, an authoritative text of “Tell Me a Riddle,” relevant essays by Olsen, seven critical essays, and a bibliography.

The contributors are: Joanne Trautmann Banks, Constance Coiner, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Mara Faulkner, Elaine Orr, Linda Ray Pratt, and Deborah Silverton Rosenfelt.

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Terrible Swift Sword
The Legacy of John Brown
Peggy A. Russo
Ohio University Press, 2005

More than two centuries after his birth and almost a century and a half after his death, the legendary life and legacy of John Brown go marching on. Variously deemed martyr, madman, monster, terrorist, and saint, he remains one of the most controversial figures in America’s history. Brown’s actions in Kansas and in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, were major catalysts for the American Civil War, and continue today to evoke praise or condemnation.

Through the prisms of history, literature, psychology, criminal justice, oral history, African American studies, political science, film studies, and anthropology, Terrible Swift Sword offers insights not only into John Brown’s controversial character and motives but also into the nature of a troubled society before, during, and after the Civil War. The contributors discuss reasons why Brown’s contemporaries supported him, analyze Brown’s behavior and his depiction in literature, and examine the iconography and mythology surrounding him.

The interdisciplinary focus brought by editors Peggy A. Russo and Paul Finkelman makes this collection unique. Terrible Swift Sword: The Legacy of John Brown will appeal to a broad audience of readers interested in this turbulent moment in American history.

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The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here
Susanne Paola Antonetta
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
At their family’s New Jersey seaside cottages, Susanne Paola Antonetta’s grandmother led seances, swam nude, and imaginatively created a spiritualist paradise on earth. In The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, Antonetta chronicles how in that unique but tightly controlled space, she began to explore the questions posed by her family’s Christian Science beliefs, turning those questions secular: What is consciousness? Does time exist? And does the world we see reflect reality? In this book, scientific research, family story, and memoir intertwine to mimic the indefinable movements of quantum particles.
 
Antonetta reflects on a life spent wrestling with bipolar disorder, drug dependency, and the trauma of electroshock treatment—exploring these experiences alongside conversations with some of the world’s leading neuroscientists and physicists, and with psychics. The result is a meditation on the legacy of family, on thought and being, and what we humans can actually ever really know about our world.
 
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Testaments
Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile
Danuta Mostwin
Ohio University Press, 2005

Translated from Polish by Marta Erdman and Nina Dyke.

Polish émigrés have written poignantly about the pain of exile in letters, diaries, and essays; others, more recently, have recreated Polish-American communities in works of fiction. But it is Danuta Mostwin’s fiction, until now unavailable in English translation, that bridges the divide between Poland and America, exile and emigration.

Mostwin and her husband survived the ravages of World War II, traveled to Britain, and then emigrated to the United States. Mostwin devoted her scholarly career to the study of immigrants trapped between cultural worlds. Winner of international awards for her fiction, Danuta Mostwin here offers two novellas, translated by the late Marta Erdman, which are the first of her works published in English in the United States.

Deeply melancholic and moving in its unsentimental depiction of ordinary people trying to make sense of their uprooted lives, Testaments presents two powerful vignettes of life in immigrant America, The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski and Jocasta. This timely publication provides an introduction to Mostwin’s work that will ensure that she is recognized as the creator of one of the most nuanced and deeply moving pictures of emigration and exile in Polish-American literature.

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Testimony
Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone
Shanee Stepakoff
Bucknell University Press, 2021
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category

Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives. 
 
Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world. 
 
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
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Tests of Time
Essays
William H. Gass
University of Chicago Press, 2003
Tests of Time brings us fourteen witty and elegant essays by novelist and literary critic William H. Gass, "the finest prose stylist in America" (Steven Moore, Washington Post). Whether he's exploring the nature of narrative, the extent and cost of political influences on writers, or the relationships between the stories we tell and the moral judgments we make, Gass is always erudite, entertaining, and enlightening.
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The Texanist
Fine Advice on Living in Texas
By David Courtney and Jack Unruh
University of Texas Press, 2017

The Texanist, Texas Monthly’s perennially popular back-page column, has become the magazine’s most-read feature. With an inimitable style and an unassailable wholesomeness, columnist David Courtney has counseled many a well-intentioned Texan, native or wannabe, on how to properly conduct him- or herself. Until the July 2016 issue, an original illustration by the late award-winning artist Jack Unruh, depicting the Texanist in a situation described in the column, accompanied the Texanist’s sage wisdom. Unruh’s peerless illustrations displayed a sly wit that paired perfectly with Courtney’s humorous ripostes.

The Texanist gathers several dozen of Unruh’s most unforgettable illustrations, along with the fascinating, perplexing, and even downright weird questions that inspired them. Curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, the Texanist advises on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team’s jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it’s served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos? The Texanist addresses all of these important subjects and more. Whether you heed the good guidance, or just enjoy the whimsical illustrations, The Texanist will both entertain and educate you.

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That Guy Wolf Dancing
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Michigan State University Press, 2014
From one of the writers of the twentieth-century Native American Literary Renaissance comes a remarkable tale about how to acknowledge the past and take a chance on the future. Rooted in tribal-world consciousness, That Guy Wolf Dancing is the story of a young tribal wolf-man becoming a part of his not-sonatural world of non-tribal people. Twenty-something Philip Big Pipe disappears from an unsettled life he can hardly tolerate and ends up in an off-reservation town. When he leaves, he doesn’t tell anyone where he is going or what his plans, if he has any, might be. Having never taken himself too seriously, he now faces a world that feels very foreign to him. As he struggles to adapt to the modern universe, Philip, ever a “wolf dancer,” must improvise, this time to a sound others provide for him. Like the wolf, Philip sometimes feels hunted, outrun, verging on extinction. Only by moving rhythmically in a dissident, dangerous, and iconic world can Philip Big Pipe let go of the past and craft a new future.
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Theogony and Works and Days
Hesiod
University of Michigan Press, 2006
Written in the late eighth century BC by Hesiod, one of the oldest known of Greek poets, Theogony and Works and Days represent the earliest account of the origin of the Greek gods, and an invaluable compendium of advice for leading a moral life, both offering unique insights into archaic Greek society. There are a number of modern translations of Hesiod available, rendered in serviceable English, but until now no one has created a work of literature equal to the original. This translation is the result of a unique collaboration between a classicist and a poet, capturing in English fourteeners the works’ true poetic flavor while remaining faithful to the Greek text and the archaic world in which it was composed.
This translation contains a general introduction, a translator’s introduction, notes, and a glossary. It will be of interest to general readers, students of and specialists in classical literature, and lovers of poetry.

"This Schlegel-Weinfield translation of Hesiod is superbly crafted: compelling, unforgettable poetry to be read aloud with delight and gratitude."
—Allen Mandelbaum, Endowed Kenan Professor of Humanities, Wake Forest University

"This exciting and unique collaboration between a classical philologist and a poet will not just provide insight into archaic Greek society, but also offer something new: the opportunity to experience the richness of Hesiod's style, language, and modes of thought with remarkable fidelity to the ancient Greek. Weinfield and Schlegel make Hesiod sing."
—Carole Newlands, Classics Department, University of Wisconsin

"Schlegel and Weinfield have produced one of the most remarkable of a current resurgence of translations from the classics, allowing the modern world to hear a poet who may have known Homer. Hesiod’s song makes us understand why the Greeks thought a poet could draw dolphins through the seas or raise the walls of Thebes. Weinfield translates by ear and transfers what he hears to the page, resonant fourteeners, a worthy echo of the past."
—Charles Stanley Ross, Professor, Department of English, and Director, Comparative Literature, PurdueUniversity

Catherine Schlegel is Associate Professor of Classics, University of Notre Dame. Henry Weinfield is Professor and Chair of Liberal Studies, University of Notre Dame, and translator of The Collected Poems of Stephane Mallarme.
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Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism
Selected Essay and Reviews
Donald Pizer
Southern Illinois University Press, 1993

In his first book devoted exclusively to naturalism, Donald Pizer brings together thirteen essays and four reviews written over a thirty-year period that in their entirety constitute a full-scale interpretation of the basic character and historical shape of naturalism in America.

The essays fall into three groups. Some deal with the full range of American naturalism, from the 1590s to the late twentieth century, and some are confined either to the 1890s or to the twentieth century. In addition to the essays, an introduction in which Pizer recounts the development of his interest in American naturalism, reviews of recent studies of naturalism, and a selected bibliography contribute to an understanding of Pizer’s interpretation of the movement.

One of the recurrent themes in the essays is that the interpretation of American naturalism has been hindered by the common view that the movement is characterized by a commitment to Emile Zola’s deterministic beliefs and that naturalistic novels are thus inevitably crude and simplistic both in theme and method. Rather than accept this notion, Pizer insists that naturalistic novels be read closely not for their success or failure in rendering obvious deterministic beliefs but rather for what actually does occur within the dynamic play of theme and form within the work.

Adopting this method, Pizer finds that naturalistic fiction often reveals a complex and suggestive mix of older humanistic faiths and more recent doubts about human volition, and that it renders this vital thematic ambivalence in increasingly sophisticated forms as the movement matures. In addition, Pizer demonstrates that American naturalism cannot be viewed monolithically as a school with a common body of belief and value. Rather, each generation of American naturalists, as well as major figures within each generation, has responded to threads within the naturalistic impulse in strikingly distinctive ways. And it is indeed this absence of a rigid doctrinal core and the openness of the movement to individual variation that are responsible for the remarkable vitality and longevity of the movement.

Because the essays have their origin in efforts to describe the general characteristics of American naturalism rather than in a desire to cover the field fully, some authors and works are discussed several times (though from different angles) and some referred to only briefly or notat all. But the essays as a collection are "complete" in the sense that they comprise an interpretation of American naturalism both in its various phases and as a whole. Those authors whose works receive substantial discussion include Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, James T. Farrell, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and William Kennedy. Of special interest is Pizer’s essay on Ironweed, which appears here for the first time.

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Therigatha
Selected Poems of the First Buddhist Women
Charles Hallisey
Harvard University Press, 2021

A stunning modern translation of a Buddhist classic that is also one of the oldest literary texts in the world written by women.

The Therīgāthā, composed more than two millennia ago, is an anthology of poems in the Pali language by and about the first Buddhist women. These women were therīs, the senior ones, among ordained Buddhist women, and they bore that epithet because of their religious achievements. The poems they left behind are arguably among the most ancient examples of women’s writing in the world and they are unmatched for their quality of personal expression and the extraordinary insight they offer into the lives of women in the ancient Indian past—and indeed, into the lives of women as such.

This new version of the Therīgāthā, based on a careful reassessment of the major editions of the work and printed in the Roman script common for modern editions of Pali texts, offers the most powerful and the most readable translation ever achieved in English.

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These Dark Skies
Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad
Arianne Zwartjes
University of Iowa Press, 2022
In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands—with her wife, who is Russian—and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness.

The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.

This is a lyrical, timely book deeply salient to the political moment we continue to find ourselves in: a moment of incredible anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment, a moment of xenophobic and misogynistic violence.
 
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They Forged the Signature of God
A Novel
Viriato Sención
Northwestern University Press, 1995
This vivid exposé of corruption and political tyranny in the Dominican Republic rang so true to the reality that the President of that country went on television to denounce the book. They Forged the Signature of God went on to become the best-selling book in the history of the Dominican Republic. 

Sención's novel follows the lives of three seminary students who suffer from church-state oppression. The book also gives a chilling portrait of Dr. Ramos, a sinister autocrat, who manages to survive six terms as president of his country through manipulation and tyranny. This finely textured novel gives a vivid picture of the internal politics of the Dominican Republic.
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Thirsty
A Novel
Kristin Bair O’Keeffe
Ohio University Press, 2009

It is 1883, and all of Klara Bozic’s girlish dreams have come crashing down as she arrives in Thirsty, a gritty steel town carved into the slopes above the Monongahela River just outside of Pittsburgh. She has made a heartbreaking discovery. Her new husband Drago is as abusive as the father she left behind in Croatia.

In Kristin Bair O’Keeffe’s debut novel, Klara’s life unfolds over forty years as she struggles to find her place in a new country where her survival depends on the friends who nurture her: gutsy, funny Katherine Zupanovic, who isn‘t afraid of Drago’s fist; BenJo, the only black man in Thirsty to have his own shop; and strangely enough, Old Man Rupert, the town drunk.

Thirsty follows a chain of unlikely events that keep Klara’s spirit aloft: a flock of angelic butterflies descends on Thirsty; Klara gives birth to her first child in Old Man Rupert’s pumpkin patch; and BenJo gives her a talking bird. When Klara’s daughter marries a man even more brutal than Drago, Klara is forced to act. If she doesn’t finally break the cycle of violence in her family, her granddaughters will one day walk the same road, broken and bruised. As the threads that hold her family together fray and come undone, Klara has to decide if she has the courage to carve out a peaceful spot in the world for herself and her girls.

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Thirteen Cents
A Novel
K. Sello Duiker
Ohio University Press, 2013
Every city has an unspoken side. Cape Town, between the picture postcard mountain and sea, has its own shadow: a place of dislocation and uncertainty, dependence and desperation, destruction and survival, gangsters, pimps, pedophiles, hunger, hope, and moments of happiness. Living in this shadow is Azure, a thirteen-year-old who makes his living on the streets, a black teenager sought out by white men, beholden to gang leaders but determined to create some measure of independence in this dangerous world. Thirteen Cents is an extraordinary and unsparing account of a coming of age in Cape Town. Reminiscent of some of the greatest child narrators in literature, Azure’s voice will stay with the reader long after this short novel is finished. Based on personal experiences, Thirteen Cents is Duiker’s debut novel, originally published in 2000. This first edition to be published outside South Africa includes an introduction by Shaun Viljoen and a special glossary of South African words and phrases from the text translated into English.
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Thirty Years of Phoenix Poets, 1983 to 2012
An E-Sampler
Selected by University of Chicago Press Staff
University of Chicago Press, 2013
For thirty years now the Phoenix Poets series has been publishing the best poets working in English, from young poets publishing their first books to renowned masters at the peak of storied careers. This sample presents some of the best poets and poems from those three decades—it’s sure to whet your appetite and get you coming back for more!
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This America of Ours
The Letters of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo
By Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo
University of Texas Press, 2003

2005 — Best Book Translation Prize – New England Council of Latin American Studies

Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo were the two most influential and respected women writers of twentieth-century Latin America. Mistral, a plain, self-educated Chilean woman of the mountains who was a poet, journalist, and educator, became Latin America's first Nobel Laureate in 1945. Ocampo, a stunning Argentine woman of wealth, wrote hundreds of essays and founded the first-rate literary journal Sur. Though of very different backgrounds, their deep commitment to what they felt was "their" America forged a unique intellectual and emotional bond between them.

This collection of the previously unpublished correspondence between Mistral and Ocampo reveals the private side of two very public women. In these letters (as well as in essays that are included in an appendix), we see what Mistral and Ocampo thought about each other and about the intellectual and political atmosphere of their time (including the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the dictatorships of Latin America) and particularly how they negotiated the complex issues of identity, nationality, and gender within their wide-ranging cultural connections to both the Americas and Europe.

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This America We Dream of
Rodo and "Ariel" One Hundred Years on
Edited by Gustavo San Roman
University of London Press, 2001

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This One Will Hurt You
Paul Crenshaw
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
The powerful essays in Paul Crenshaw’s This One Will Hurt You range in subject matter from the fierce tornadoes that crop up in Tornado Alley every spring and summer to a supposedly haunted one-hundred-year-old tuberculosis sanatorium that he lived on the grounds of as a child. They ruminate on the effects of crystal meth on small southern towns, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, and the ongoing struggle of being a parent in an increasingly disturbing world. They surprise, whether discovering a loved one’s secret, an opossum’s motivation, or the unexpected decision four beer-guzzling, college-aged men must make. They tell stories of family and the past, the histories of small things such as walls and weather, and the faith it takes to hold together in the face of death.
 
With eloquence, subtle humor, and an urgent poignancy, Crenshaw delivers a powerful and moving collection of nonfiction essays, tied together by place and the violence of the world in which we live.
 
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Thomas Wolfe Remembered
Edited by Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A collection of reminiscences captures the private life of a great American writer.
 
Thomas Wolfe’s life may seem to be an open book. A life that, after all, was the source for his best-known works, including the novels Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, as well as his numerous short stories and dramas. Since his death in 1938, scholars and admirers of Wolfe have relied largely on these texts to understand the man himself.
 
Thomas Wolfe Remembered provides something new: a rich, multifaceted portrait painted by those who knew him (casually or intimately), loved him (or didn’t), and saw, heard, and experienced the literary (and literal) giant. This volume gathers in one place for the first time dozens of reminiscences by friends, family members, colleagues, and casual acquaintances, adding color and fine details to the self-portrait the author created in his novels.
 
Wolfe found plenty to challenge and frustrate him throughout his life, from his boyhood in Asheville, North Carolina, to his education at the University of North Carolina and Harvard University, through his time in New York and Europe, his travels through the American West, and his death in Baltimore. He experienced two distracted parents in a loveless marriage, the premature death of a beloved brother, a minor stutter, and the difficulties of controlling a mercurial temper. Yet Wolfe’s exuberance, perceptiveness, memory, and compulsion to record virtually all that he experienced made for an extravagance of material that sometimes angered the people whose lives he used as source material.
 
Editors Mark Canada and Nami Montgomery have collected dozens of remembrances, many unpublished or long forgotten, including pieces from Julia Wolfe, Margaret Roberts, Frederick Koch, Maxwell Perkins, Elizabeth Nowell, Edward Aswell, and Martha Dodd. Some are endearing, others are disturbing, and many are comical. All provide glimpses into the vibrant, haunted, boyish, paranoid, disheveled, courteous, captivating, infuriating, and altogether fascinating giant who was Thomas Wolfe.
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Thoreaus Sense of Place
Essays in American Environmental Writing
Richard J. Schneider
University of Iowa Press, 2000
 Recent Thoreau studies have shifted to an emphasis on the green" Thoreau, on Thoreau the environmentalist, rooted firmly in particular places and interacting with particular objects. In the wake of Buell's Environmental Imagination, the nineteen essayists in this challenging volume address the central questions in Thoreau studies today: how “green,” how immersed in a sense of place, was Thoreau really, and how has this sense of place affected the tradition of nature writing in America?

The contributors to this stimulating collection address the ways in which Thoreau and his successors attempt to cope with the basic epistemological split between perceiver and place inherent in writing about nature; related discussions involve the kinds of discourse most effective for writing about place. They focus on the impact on Thoreau and his successors of culturally constructed assumptions deriving from science, politics, race, gender, history, and literary conventions. Finally, they explore the implications surrounding a writer's appropriation or even exploitation of places and objects.
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A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Ben Hecht
University of Chicago Press, 2009
In 1921, Ben Hecht wrote a column for the Chicago Daily News that his editor called “journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature.” Hecht’s collection of sixty-four of these pieces, illustrated with striking pen drawings by Herman Rosse, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age, updated with a new Introduction for the twenty-first century. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

“The hardboiled audacity and wit that became Hecht’s signature as Hollywood’s most celebrated screen-writer are conspicuous in these vignettes. Most of them are comic and sardonic, some strike muted tragic or somber atmospheric notes. . . . The best are timeless character sketches that have taken on an added interest as shards of social history.”—L. S. Klepp, Voice Literary Supplement

 

 

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The Three-Legged Woman and Other Excursions in Teaching
Robert Klose
University Press of New England, 2013
Since 1986, Robert Klose has taught biology at a “small, impoverished, careworn” college in central Maine. Located on a former military base, the school became first the South Campus of the University of Maine, or SCUM, and later, Penobscot Valley Community College, then Bangor Community College, and most recently University College of Bangor. Despite its improved nomenclature, University College of Bangor remains an open-admissions environment at which “one never knows what’s going to come in over the transom.” Klose’s nontraditional students have included, in addition to single parents and veterans, the homeless, the abused, ex-cons, and even a murderer (who was otherwise “a very nice person”). Chronicling his experiences teaching these diverse students, Klose describes with equal doses of care and wry wit those who are profoundly unfit for college, their often inadequate command of the lingua franca, and the alacrity with which they seize upon the paranormal (the three-legged woman) while expressing skepticism about mainstream science. He reflects on the decline of reading for enjoyment and the folly of regarding email as a praiseworthy substitute for expository writing. He details what works in the classroom, identifies what has failed, and relates stories of the absurd, the sublime, and the unanticipated, such as one student’s outburst following a discussion of evolution: “For what you have taught today you shall be damned to everlasting fires of hell!” Tempering thoughtfulness with a light touch and plenty of humor, these essays prove that teaching, an “imperfect occupation,” remains a “special profession.”
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Through a Long Absence
Words from My Father's Wars
Joy Passanante
The Ohio State University Press, 2017
A 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Silver Winner for Biography

Against the backdrop of World War II, Joy Passanante’s touching new book, Through a Long Absence: Words from My Father’s Wars, is the saga of a wartime medical unit, a passionate long-distance love, the making of a surgeon, and two first-generation American families. Told through her father’s eyes—drawing on hundreds of his letters to his beloved wife, his four-volume wartime diary, and his paintings—Passanante masterfully recreates his wartime journey and physically retraces his steps more than sixty years later in an attempt to understand a time in her parents’ lives that they’d spoken about very little.
 
More than just a World War II story, Through a Long Absence delves into one man’s past to explore his personal wars: a stint as a child bootlegger, a marriage between newlyweds separated by continents and strained by years apart, and his struggle late in life with his own mind. The narrative propels readers to surprising places—from a freight train through North Africa to an underground St. Louis distillery during Prohibition, from a young couple’s forbidden courtship to the chaos of surgical tents under fire in Normandy, from an underground trove of priceless artwork hidden by the Nazis to Jewish New Year services in Paris a week after its liberation. Through a Long Absence is a love story, an honest look into one man’s life, and a daughter’s moving quest to rediscover her father years later through his own words.
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Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon
Anita Endrezze
University of Arizona Press, 2000
Perhaps you know them for their deer dances or for their rich Easter ceremonies, or perhaps only from the writings of anthropologists or of Carlos Castaneda. But now you can come to know the Yaqui Indians in a whole new way. Anita Endrezze, born in California of a Yaqui father and a European mother, has written a multilayered work that interweaves personal, mythical, and historical views of the Yaqui people.

Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon is a blend of ancient myths, poetry, journal extracts, short stories, and essays that tell her people's story from the early 1500s to the present, and her family's story over the past five generations. Reproductions of Endrezze's paintings add an additional dimension to her story and illuminate it with striking visual imagery. Endrezze has combed history and legend to gather stories of her immediate family and her mythical ancient family, the two converging in the spirit of storytelling. She tells Aztec and Yaqui creation stories, tales of witches and seductresses, with recurring motifs from both Yaqui and Chicano culture. She shows how Christianity has deeply infused Yaqui beliefs, sharing poems about the Flood and stories of a Yaqui Jesus. She re-creates the coming of the Spaniards through the works of such historical personages as Andrés Pérez de Ribas. And finally she tells of those individuals who carry the Yaqui spirit into the present day. People like the Esperanza sisters, her grandmothers, and others balance characters like Coyote Woman and the Virgin of Guadalupe to show that Yaqui women are especially important as carriers of their culture.

Greater than the sum of its parts, Endrezze's work is a new kind of family history that features a startling use of language to invoke a people and their past--a time capsule with a female soul. Written to enable her to understand more about her ancestors and to pass this understanding on to her own children, Throwing Fire at the Sun, Water at the Moon helps us gain insight not only into Yaqui culture but into ourselves as well.
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Tierra del Fuego
Sylvia Iparraguirre
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Tierra del Fuego is more than a suspenseful seafaring tale in the tradition of Captain Hornblower; it is also a chilling psychological and cultural tale, reminiscent of Heart of Darkness or Lord of the Flies, that probes deeply into human nature. Based on the true story of the Yámana Indian, Jemmy Button (parts of which are recorded in Chapter 10 of Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle), the novel explores Captain Robert Fitzroy's abduction of Jemmy Button and his attempt to "civilize" him in England and return him to his country as a bearer of "enlightened society." His experiment leads to tragic consequences. The novel deals with European arrogance and exploitation, but avoids falling into the cliché of "the Noble Savage." Jemmy (the "Other") remains strange and the attempt to co-opt him fails.

Tierra del Fuego has already won two major awards for the Spanish edition: The Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award for the best work of fiction written by a woman and The Best Book of the Year Award at the Buenos Aires Book Fair.

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The Time between Places
Stories That Weave In and Out of Egypt and America
Pauline Kaldas
University of Arkansas Press, 2010
This collection of twenty stories delves into the lives of Egyptian characters, from those living in Egypt to those who have immigrated to the United States. With subtle and eloquent prose, the complexities of these characters are revealed, opening a door into their intimate struggles with identity and place. We meet people who are tempted by the possibilities of America and others who are tempted by the desire to return home. Some are in the throes of re-creating themselves in the new world while others seem to be embedded in the loss of their homeland. Many of these characters, although physically located in either the United States or Egypt, have lives that embrace both cultures. "A Game of Chance" follows the actions of a young man when he wins the immigration lottery and then must decide whether or not to change his life. "Cumin and Coriander" takes us inside a woman's thoughts as she tries to come to terms with the path her life has taken while working as a cook for American expatriates in Egypt. "The Top" enters the mind of a man whose immigration results in a loss of identity and sanity. These compelling stories pull us into the lives of many different characters and offer us striking insights into the Arab American experience.
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Time, Forward!
Valentin Kataev
Northwestern University Press, 1995
A classic of Soviet realism, Time, Forward! captures the enthusiasm and optimism of the first Five-Year Plan in its portrayal of the construction of Magnitogorsk, an enormous metallurgical plant considered one of the finest industrial achievements of the period. It embodies the beliefs of the era—that the collective (here a multinational brigade) through its determination and the application of technology can accomplish the impossible, conquer nature, even overcome time. Utilizing cinematic technique to tell his story, Kataev focuses on a twenty-four hour period when of the Magnitogorsk shock-brigades breaks a world record for pouring cement. The result is a remarkably affecting portrait of the idealism and sacrifice powering the early Soviet era.
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Time Gifts
Zoran Zivkovic
Northwestern University Press, 2000
Zoran Zivkovic weaves four mysterious encounters around philosophical questions at the core of human existence. Provocative and original, Time Gifts is a meditation on the nature of time and, especially, on the nature of those at its mercy.
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To Demonicus. To Nicocles. Nicocles or the Cyprians. Panegyricus. To Philip. Archidamus
Isocrates
Harvard University Press

The sophisticated schoolmaster.

The importance of Isocrates for the study of Greek civilization of the fourth century BC is indisputable. From 403 to 393 he wrote speeches for Athenian law courts, and then became a teacher of composition for would-be orators. After setting up a school of rhetoric in Chios he returned to Athens and established there a free school of “philosophia” involving a practical education of the whole mind, character, judgment, and mastery of language. This school had famous pupils from all over the Greek world, such as the historians Ephorus and Theopompus and orators Isaeus, Lycurgus, and Hypereides. Isocrates also wrote in gifted style essays on political questions, his main idea being a united Greece to conquer the Persian empire. Thus in his fine Panegyricus (written for the 100th Olympiad gathering in 380) he urged that the leadership should be granted to Athens, possibly in conjunction with Sparta. In the end he looked to Philip of Macedon, but died just as Philip’s supremacy in Greece began.

Twenty-one discourses by Isocrates survive; these include political essays, treatises on education and on ethics, and speeches for legal cases. Nine letters are also extant; they are concerned more with public than with private matters. The Loeb Classical Library edition of Isocrates is in three volumes. Volume I contains six discourses: To Demonicus, To Nicocles, Nicocles or The Cyprians, Panegyricus, To Philip, and Archidamus. Five are in Volume II: Areopagiticus, On the Peace, Panathenaicus, Against the Sophists, Antidosis. Volume III contains Evagoras, Helen, Busiris, Plataicus, Concerning the Team of Horses, Trapeziticus, Against Callimachus, Aegineticus, Against Lochites, and Against Euthynus, as well as the nine extant letters and a comprehensive index.

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To Go Into the Words
Norman Finkelstein
University of Michigan Press, 2023

To Go Into the Words is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the “gnosis” or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more.

Pulling from Finkelstein’s experience of writing thirteen books of poetry and six books of literary criticism, To Go Into the Words consistently rewards the reader with insights as transformative as they are well-considered and deftly mapped out.  This volume opens the world of poetry to poets, scholars, and readers by showcasing “the gnosis that is to be found in modern poetry.”
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The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edited by Susan Sutton Smith
University of Missouri Press, 1990

Published here for the first time are seven of Emerson's topical notebooks, which served as a source for his lectures, essays, and books of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s.  Concerned primarily with nature, art, philosophy, American culture, and his comtemporaries, the notebooks presented in this first of a three-volume editions afford fascinating insight into Emerson's creative practices.  They will offer new perspectives for future readings of his completed works.

The editors provide faithful transcriptions of the notebooks using the highest standards of textual practice.  Their detailed annotations describe and comment on erased or revised passages, translate Greek and Latin quotations, and identify books and articles referred to in the texts of the notebooks.  References to similar passages in Emerson's journals, lectures, and published works are also provided in the annotations.

Publication of these notebooks will inable scholars to trace ideas that have gone unnoticed previously.  The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 1, offers valuable insight into the art and philosophy of one of America's foremost thinkers.  These volumes will be an important addition to any personal or institutional library of nine-teenth-century American literature.

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The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2
Ralph Waldo Emerson; Edited by Ronald A. Bosco; Chief Editor, Ralph H. Orth
University of Missouri Press, 1993

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the magus of of American Transcendentalism, was an inveterate keeper of journals and notebooks, which he used as source and proving ground for his poems, lectures, and essays.  This is the second in a three-volume edition that brings twelve of Emerson's topical notebooks and four other notebooks into print for the first time.  These notebooks were Emerson's repositories for anecdotes, quotations, reminiscences, drafts of his poems, outlines for lectures, and observations on everything from daily life to profound cultural and philosophical issues.

Among the highlights of the five notebooks in Volume 2, "Orientalist" provides an unusual opportunity to view closely Emerson's adaptation of Eastern thought.
 
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The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 3
Ralph Waldo Emerson; Edited by Glen M. Johnson; Series Editor, Ralph H. Orth
University of Missouri Press, 1994

"Ralph Orth...has been indefatigable in giving us volumes of the highest accuracy and usefulness," said American Renaissance Literary Report. Volume 3 completes the series that brings twelve of Emerson's topical notebooks and four other notebooks into print for the first time. In this final volume, Glen Martin Johnson presents four of the topical notebooks dating from the mid 1840s through the early 1870s, the end of Emerson's productive life. The notebooks include diverse material from which Emerson wrote his lectures, essays, and books.

Each of the four notebooks illustrates some of the many uses Emerson made of these collections of quotations and ideas: OP Gulistan is a compendium of biographical information and anecdotes about dozens of Emerson's acquaintances; S Salvage takes stock of and preserves parts of his earlier writings; ZO was used in preparing the lectures that became "Poetry and Imagination"; and ML was employed for extensive notes on the moral law and religion, and as a resource in preparing lectures and readings during the late 1860s.

The publication of these notebooks renders an invaluable service to the scholarly community and to students of American literature. Collectively, they dipict in great detail the subtle changes that occurred in Emerson's thought from the beginning until the end of his career to give a complete picture of the man and the writer. The younger Emerson, whose writing abounds with enthusiasm, became someone whose darker wisdom about inevitable limitations was expressed in essays such as "Fate" and "Illusions." The notebooks in this volume will allow us to better understand the last three decades of Emerson's career, which have remained less than fully explored.

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Touching Feeling
Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Duke University Press, 2003
A pioneer in queer theory and literary studies, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick brings together for the first time in Touching Feeling her most powerful explorations of emotion and expression. In essays that show how her groundbreaking work in queer theory has developed into a deep interest in affect, Sedgwick offers what she calls "tools and techniques for nondualistic thought," in the process touching and transforming such theoretical discourses as psychoanalysis, speech-act theory, Western Buddhism, and the Foucauldian "hermeneutics of suspicion."

In prose sometimes somber, often high-spirited, and always accessible and moving, Touching Feeling interrogates—through virtuoso readings of works by Henry James, J. L. Austin, Judith Butler, the psychologist Silvan Tomkins and others—emotion in many forms. What links the work of teaching to the experience of illness? How can shame become an engine for queer politics, performance, and pleasure? Is sexuality more like an affect or a drive? Is paranoia the only realistic epistemology for modern intellectuals? Ultimately, Sedgwick's unfashionable commitment to the truth of happiness propels a book as open-hearted as it is intellectually daring.

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The Toughest Kid We Knew
The Old New West: A Personal History
Frank Bergon
University of Nevada Press, 2020
From critically acclaimed author Frank Bergon comes a new personal narrative about the San Joaquin Valley in California. This intimate companion to Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man brings us back to an Old West at odds with New West realities where rapid change is a common trait and memories are of rural beauty. Despite the physical transformations wrought by technology and modernity in the twenty-first century, elements of an older way of thinking still remain, and Bergon traces its presence using experiences from his own family and friends.

Communal camaraderie, love of the land and its food, and joy in hard work done well describe Western lives ignored or misrepresented in most histories of California and the West. Yet nostalgia does not drive Frank Bergon’s intellectual return to that world. Also prevalent was a culture of fighting, ignorance about alcoholic addiction, brutalizing labor, and a feudal mentality that created a pain better lost and bid good riddance.

Through it all, what emerges from his portraits and essays is a revelation of small-town and ranch life in the rural West. A place where the American way of extirpating the past and violently altering the land is accelerated. What Bergon has written is a portrayal of a past and people shaping the country he called home.
 
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The Tower of Myriad Mirrors
A Supplement to Journey to the West
Tung Yüeh; Translated from the Chinese by Shuen-fu Lin and Larry J. Schulz
University of Michigan Press, 2000
China’s most outrageous character—the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters—returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary’s body in Journey to the West.
The Tower of Myriad Mirrors is the only novel of Tung Yüeh (1620–1686), a monk and Confucian scholar. Tung picks up the slapstick of the original tale and overlays it with Buddhist theory and bitter satire of the Ming government’s capitulation to the Manchus. After a nod to Journey’s storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey’s quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important though relatively unknown link in the development of the Chinese novel, and a window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a wonderful read.
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The Town of N
Leonid Dobychin
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Leonid Dobychin's The Town of N, an unrecognized masterpiece of the Soviet 1930s, virtually vanished, together with its author, following its publication in 1935 and the subsequent vilification of Dobychin by Leningrad's cultural authorities. It portrays a fallen provincial world reminiscent of the town of N found in Gogol's Dead Souls, a place populated with characters who are petty, grasping, perfidious, and cruel, quite unlike the positive heroes of socialist realist novels.
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Tradition and Innovation in Old English Metre
Rachel A. Burns
Arc Humanities Press, 2023
The importance of metrical analysis to the broad work of textual criticism and literary analysis cannot be overstated. In the thirty years since the publication of R. D. Fulk’s A History of Old English Meter, metrical theory has been brought to bear on questions of poetic style, dating and literary history, linguistics and language history, editing practice, manuscript analysis and scribal practice. The essays in this collection include contributions from both new scholars and established metrists. They focus on the application of metrical study to literary criticism and manuscript studies, engaging with current debate and offering new perspectives on the crucial role of metre to Old English scholarship.
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The Traffic In Poems
Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange
McGill, Meredith L
Rutgers University Press, 2008
The transatlantic crossing of people and goods shaped nineteenth-century poetry in surprising ways that cannot be fully understood through the study of separate national literary traditions. American and British poetic cultures were bound by fascination, envy, influence, rivalry, recognition, and piracy, as well as by mutual fantasies about and competition over the Caribbean.

Drawing on examples such as Felicia Hemans's elaboration of the foundational American myth of Plymouth Rock, Emma Lazarus's ambivalent welcome of Europe's cast-off populations, black abolitionist Mary Webb's European performances of Hiawatha, and American reprints of Robert Browning and George Meredith, the eleven essays in this book focus on poetic depictions of exile, slavery, immigration, and citizenship and explore the often asymmetrical traffic between British and American poetic cultures.
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The Tragic Menagerie
Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Though published a decade before the Bolshevik Revolution, The Tragic Menagerie possesses a sensibility that is modern in its descriptions of a childhood of passionate affections and unsettling revelations. This fictionalized autobiography follows the tomboyish Vera, who counts among her friends bears, wolves, and a wild crane, as well as local peasant girls. Sent to a German boarding school and exiled from her kingdom, Vera turns into a demonic, disobedient student, rejecting a life she finds constraining and artificial. Only when she returns to her natural world can her deeper compassionate and imaginative self emerge.
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Tragic Thoughts at the End of Philosophy
Language, Literature, and Ethical Theory
Gerald L. Bruns
Northwestern University Press, 1999
Recently, a number of Anglo-American philosophers of very different sorts--pragmatists, metaphysicians, philosophers of language, philosophers of law, moral philosophers—have taken a reflective rather than merely recreational interest in literature. Does this literary turn mean that philosophy is coming to an end or merely down to earth? In this collection of essays, one of the most insightful of contemporary literary theorists investigates the intersection of literature and philosophy, analyzing the emerging preferences for practice over theory, particulars over universals, events over structures, inhabitants over spectators, an ethics of responsibility over a morality of rules, and a desire for intimacy with the world instead of simply a disengaged knowledge of it.
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Transatlantic Dialogue
Selected American Correspondence of Edmund Gosse
Edited by Paul F. Mattheisen and Michael Millgate
University of Texas Press, 1965

The mauve life and times of Edmund Gosse glow warmly in these letters, delightful to even the most casual reader, engrossing to one with an interest in the distinguished correspondents or in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.

An obscure figure today to all but literary connoisseurs, Gosse was, in his day, a near giant in both England and the United States. Max Beerbohm, that discriminating man, in a mural of prominent figures who were also his friends, sketched Edmund Gosse large among George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Lytton Strachey.

This volume consists primarily of a selection of the letters exchanged between Gosse and a number of American writers, notably William Dean Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, contain much of biographical and general historical interest, but the main theme of the book is the exploration of Anglo-American literary relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth.

The letters that passed between Gosse and Stedman provide valuable evidence for the study of literary taste on the two sides of the Atlantic and also show how each man sought to enhance the other's transatlantic reputation; the correspondence between Gosse and Gilder, particularly during the period when Gosse was London editor of Gilder's Century magazine, is especially revealing of cultural attitudes and antagonisms. A central thread is provided by the warm and long-sustained friendship between Gosse and Howells, the leading American man of letters of his day.

The long introduction to the book deals with such topics as Gosse's American reputation, his immensely successful visit to the United States in the winter of 1884–1885 (based on the manuscript diary that Gosse kept during the visit), and his American friendships, with particular attention to the relationship with Howells. The thoroughness and vitality of the annotation are extremely effective in familiarizing the reader with the people and events in the book.

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TransBuddhism
Transmission, Translation, and Transformation
Nalini Bhushan
University of Massachusetts Press, 2009
The global spread of Buddhism is giving rise to new forms of religious complexity, both in the West and in Asia. This collection of essays examines the religious and cultural conversations that are occurring in this process from a diverse range of disciplinary, methodological, and literary perspectives, including philosophy, ethnography, history, and cultural studies.

The chapters in the first section explore the transmission of Buddhism to the West, ranging from the writings of one of its earliest western interpreters, the Wesleyan missionary R. Spence Hardy, to the globalization of Tibetan Buddhist reincarnation, to the development and practice of Buddhism within the American prison system. The concluding chapter of this section presents a case study of a Japanese Buddhist temple in Oregon that ultimately died out—an example of a transmission that failed.

The second section looks at the complex issues that arise in the translation of Buddhist terms, texts, and concepts from one language or cultural milieu to another. Two chapters examine the challenges confronted by those who translate Buddhist texts—one exploring the contemporary translation of Tibetan Buddhism, the second analyzing an exchange of poetry in medieval Japan. The other two chapters describe the translation of Buddhist ideas into new cultural domains in America, specifically film and sports.

The final section presents case studies in the transformation of Buddhism which is resulting from its new global interconnections. Topics include the role of women in transforming Buddhist patriarchy, Buddhist-Freudian dialogue in relationship to mourning, and the interplay between Buddhism and the environmental movement.

The book also includes images created by the noted artist Meridel Rubenstein which frame the individual chapters within a nonverbal exploration of the themes discussed.

In addition to the editors, contributors include Mark Blum, Mario D'Amato, Sue Darlington, Elizabeth Eastman, Connie Kassor, Tom Rohlich, Judith Snodgrass, Jane Stangl, and Karma Lekshe Tsomo.
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Transcendental Wordplay
America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature
Michael West
Ohio University Press, 2000

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.

Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened “romantic irony.” Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it.

Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.

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Transitions and Transformations
Elizabyth Hiscox
University Press of Colorado, 2018
Volume 7, Manifest West Series, Western Press Books

What changes, alters, undergoes renewal or metamorphosis in the West? The space shared and sparred-over in urban Oregon versus remote Colorado casts doubt on the concept of a true continuity to the west. Where and when do those frontiers, borders, or alterations in course occur? Each watershed and microclimate is a slight shift from the next, each city center and community hall a locus of both change and tradition, and the emotional landscapes can be as dramatic or serene as those on the map. Language can do some of the work of capturing that flux: tracking transition and transformation to get at the heart of a life lived. The poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction essays collected here raise as many questions as they answer about that often fraught, always exciting liminal space between the proverbial here and there, the now and now again.

Contributors:Eric Aldrich, Jeffrey Alfier, Betsy Bernfeld, Heidi E. Blankenship, Kierstin Bridger, Yuan Changming, David Lavar Coy, Tim Donovan, Andrea England, Matthew Gavin Frank, Rick Kempa, Mark Haunschild, Cynthia Hogue, Caitlin Horrocks, Charles Jensen, Lisa Levine, Stephen Lottridge, Jessica McDermott, Scot Siegel, Jared Smith, Victoria Waddle, Tim Weed, Susan Brown Weitzman, Lesley Wheeler

Manifest West is Western Press Books’ literary anthology series. The press, affiliated with Western State Colorado University, produces one anthology annually and focuses on Western regional writing.
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Translation, Resistance, Activism
Maria Tymoczko
University of Massachusetts Press, 2010
More than merely linguistic transposition, translation is a vector of power, resistance, rebellion, and even revolution. Exploring these facets of the ideology of translation, the contributors to this volume focus on the agency of translators and their activism. Spanning two centuries and reaching across the globe, the essays examine the varied activist strategies of key translators and translation movements.

From silence to radical manipulation of texts, translation strategies are instrumental in significant historical interventions and cultural change. Translation plays a pivotal role in ideological dialogue and struggle, including resistance to oppression and cultural straitjackets of all types, from sexual puritanism to military dictatorships. Situated in their own space, time, history, and political contexts, translators promote ideological agendas by creating new cultural narratives, pragmatically adjusting tactics so as to maximize the social and political impact.

The essays in this volume explore ways to read translations as records of cultural contestation and ideological struggle; as means of fighting censorship, physical coercion, cultural repression, and political dominance; and as texts that foster a wide variety of goals from cultural nationalism to armed confrontation. Translations are set in relief as central cultural documents rather than derivative, peripheral, or marginalized productions. They are seen as forms of ethical, political, and ideological activity rather than as mere communicative transactions or creative literary exercises.

The contributors demonstrate that engaged and activist translations are performative acts within broader political and ideological contexts. The essays detail the initiative, resourcefulness, and courage of individual translators, whose willingness to put themselves on the line for social change can sometimes move the world.

In addition to Maria Tymoczko, contributors include Pua'ala'okalani D. Aiu, Brian James Baer, Mona Baker, Paul F. Bandia, Georges L. Bastin, Nitsa Ben-Ari, Ángela Campo, Antonia Carcelen-Estrada, Álvaro Echeverri, Denise Merkle, John Milton, and Else R.P. Vieira.
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The Translator's Daughter
A Memoir
Grace Loh Prasad
The Ohio State University Press, 2024
A Taiwanese American writer unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, language, and loss to tell a unique story about reclaiming one’s heritage while living in a diaspora.

Born in Taiwan, Grace Loh Prasad was two years old when the threat of political persecution under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship drove her family to the United States, setting her up to become an “accidental immigrant.” The family did not know when they would be able to go home again; this exile lasted long enough for Prasad to forget her native Taiwanese language and grow up American. Having multilingual parents—including a father who worked as a translator—meant she never had to develop the fluency to navigate Taiwan on visits. But when her parents moved back to Taiwan permanently when she was in college and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she recognized the urgency of forging a stronger connection with her birthplace before it was too late. As she recounts her journey to reclaim her heritage in The Translator’s Daughter, Prasad unfurls themes of memory, dislocation, and loss in all their rich complexity. The result is a unique immigration story about the loneliness of living in a diaspora, the search for belonging, and the meaning of home.
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Trapeze
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1947–1955
Anaïs Nin
Ohio University Press, 2017

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.

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Traslados/Translations
Essays on Latin America in Honour of Jason Wilson
Edited by Claire Lindsay
University of London Press, 2012

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Travel
A Literary History
Peter Whitfield
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2011

Taking the form of fact-filled travelogues, stunt-writing spectaculars, or genre-blurring imaginative works, travel writing has never been more popular than it is today. But beyond the self-conscious literary artistry of today’s narratives lies a rich and well-documented history of travel writing, stretching back over several thousand years and incorporating the work of mariners and missionaries, diplomats and dilettantes alike.

From the ancient world to the present, Peter Whitfield offers the first broad survey to range over the whole history of travel writing, highlighting more than one hundred texts, including works by Marco Polo, T. E. Lawrence, Christopher Columbus, Daniel Defoe, Joseph Conrad, and Captain Cook. Whether their travels were merely for pleasure or the result of exploration, military occupation, or trade, the writers discussed here all sought to reimagine their surroundings and, through their writings, reinterpret them for the reader. Because of that personal, interpretive approach, Whitfield shows, their work inhabits a strange borderland between fact and fiction. Over time, as our travel objectives have changed, so too has the tone of travel writing, eschewing the traditional stance of cultural superiority in favor of a deeper sensitivity to other peoples and places. The book is rounded out by numerous illustrations from manuscripts and books of travel in the collection of the Bodleian Library.
 
A world-class examination of a little-explored genre, Travel: A Literary History offers an accessible look at the history of travel writing that will make a great addition to any carry-on.
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A Traveled First Lady
Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams
Louisa Catherine AdamsEdited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor
Harvard University Press, 2014

Congress adjourned on 18 May 1852 for Louisa Catherine Adams’s funeral, according her an honor never before offered a first lady. But her life and influence merited this extraordinary tribute. She had been first the daughter-in-law and then the wife of a president. She had assisted her husband as a diplomat at three of the major capitals of Europe. She had served as a leading hostess and significant figure in Washington for three decades. And yet, a century and a half later, she is barely remembered. A Traveled First Lady: Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams seeks to correct that oversight by sharing Adams’s remarkable experiences in her own words.

These excerpts from diaries and memoirs recount her early years in London and Paris (to this day she is the only foreign-born first lady), her courtship and marriage to John Quincy Adams, her time in the lavish courts of Berlin and St. Petersburg as a diplomat’s wife, and her years aiding John Quincy’s political career in Washington. Emotional, critical, witty, and, in the Adams tradition, always frank, her writings draw sharp portraits of people from every station, both servants and members of the imperial court, and deliver clear, well-informed opinions about the major issues of her day.

Telling the story of her own life, juxtaposed with rich descriptions of European courts, Washington political maneuvers, and the continuing Adams family drama, Louisa Catherine Adams demonstrates why she was once considered one of the preeminent women of the nineteenth century.

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Traveling Women
Narrative Visions of Early America
Susan Clair Imbarrato
Ohio University Press, 2006
Women’s travel narratives recording journeys north and south along the eastern seaboard and west onto the Ohio frontier enhance our historical understanding of early America. Drawing extensively from primary sources, Traveling Women documents women’s role in westward settlement and emphasizes travel as a culture-building event.

Susan Clair Imbarrato closely examines women’s accounts of their journeys from 1700 to 1830, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s well-known journal of her trip from Boston to New York in 1704 and many lesser-known accounts, such as Sarah Beavis’s 1779 journal of her travel to Ohio via Kentucky and Susan Edwards Johnson’s account or her 1801–2 journey from Connecticut to North Carolina.

In the women’s keen observations and entertaining wit, readers will find bravado mixed with hesitation, as women set forth on business, to relocate, and for pleasure. These travelers wrote compellingly of crossing rivers and mountains, facing hunger, encountering native Americans, sleeping in taverns, and confronting slavery, expressing themselves in voices that differed in sensibility from male explorers and travelers.

These accounts, as Imbarrato shows, challenge assumptions that such travel was predominately a male enterprise. In addition, Traveling Women provides a more balanced portrait of westward settlement by affirming women’s importance in the settling of early America.
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Travels in the Americas
Notes and Impressions of a New World
Albert Camus
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Albert Camus’s lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation.

In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown to American audiences at the time, all that was about to change—The Stranger, his first book translated into English, would soon make him a literary star. By 1949, when he set out on a tour of South America, Camus was an international celebrity. Camus’s journals offer an intimate glimpse into his daily life during these eventful years and showcase his thinking at its most personal—a form of observational writing that the French call choses vues (things seen). 

Camus’s journals from these travels record his impressions, frustrations, joys, and longings. Here are his unguarded first impressions of his surroundings and his encounters with publishers, critics, and members of the New York intelligentsia. Long unavailable in English, the journals have now been expertly retranslated by Ryan Bloom, with a new introduction by Alice Kaplan. Bloom’s translation captures the informal, sketch-like quality of Camus’s observations—by turns ironic, bitter, cutting, and melancholy—and the quick notes he must have taken after exhausting days of travel and lecturing. Bloom and Kaplan’s notes and annotations allow readers to walk beside the existentialist thinker as he experiences changes in his own life and the world around him, all in his inimitable style.
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The Tree Stump
An Arabic Historical Novel
Samiha Khrais
Michigan State University Press, 2017
One of the most prominent Arabic novels to document the intricate details of the revolt of the Arabs against the Turks and their collaboration with the English, The Tree Stump brings to life a critical period of history that includes key players such as King Faisal, Odeh  Abu Tayeh , and T. E. Lawrence. It places the reader in the heart of that remarkable era with accuracy, authenticity, and an added human dimension that introduces the Arabian Desert people, traditions, and way of life. Author Samiha Khrais weaves tribal customs, religion, politics, and love into a history with characters that actually walked the land, lived on the land, and fought the land’s war of independence with originality, pride, and wisdom. The novel stands witness to the lived experience of many Arabs in the region—experience that can still be seen today. The novel’s style, content, and strong human dimension makes it an exception literary work with regional flavor and global appeal.
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Tremors
New Fiction by Iranian American Writers
Anita Amirrezvani
University of Arkansas Press, 2013
This groundbreaking anthology brings together twenty-seven authors from a wide range of experiences that offer new perspectives on the Iranian American story. The authors in Tremors represent the maturing voice of Iranian American fiction from the vantage point of those who were born and raised in Iran, as well as those writers who reflect a more distant, but still important, connection to their Iranian heritage. Altogether, these narratives capture the diversity of the Iranian diaspora and complicate the often-narrow view of Iranian culture represented in the media. The stories and novel excerpts explore the deeply human experiences of one of the newest immigrant groups to the United States in its attempts to adjust and assimilate in the face of major historical upheavals such as the 1979 Iranian revolution, the hostage crisis, and the attacks of September 11, 2001. The stories set in Iran testify to the resilience, dignity, and humor of a people rich in history and culture.
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Trial Balance
The Collected Short Stories of William March
William March
University of Alabama Press, 2011

  The Collected Short Stories of William March

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The Trial of Sören Qvist
Janet Lewis
Ohio University Press, 2013

Originally published in 1947, The Trial of Sören Qvist has been praised by a number of critics for its intriguing plot and Janet Lewis’s powerful writing. And in the introduction to this new edition, Swallow Press executive editor and author Kevin Haworth calls attention to the contemporary feeling of the story—despite its having been written more than fifty years ago and set several hundred years in the past. As in Lewis’s best-known novel, The Wife of Martin Guerre, the plot derives from Samuel March Phillips’s nineteenth-century study, Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence, in which this British legal historian considered the trial of Pastor Sören Qvist to be the most striking case.

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Trillin on Texas
By Calvin Trillin
University of Texas Press, 2011

A remarkably perceptive portrait of the Lone Star State, this collection of pieces from the New Yorker, the Nation, and other publications presents highlights of bestselling author Calvin Trillin’s classic writing on Texas subjects.

"Yes, I do have a Texas connection, but, as we say in the Midwest, where I grew up, not so's you'd know it." So Calvin Trillin introduces this collection of articles and poems about a place that turns up surprisingly often when he's ostensibly writing about something else. Whether reporting on the American scene for the New Yorker, penning comic verse and political commentary for the Nation, or writing his memoirs, Trillin has bumped into Texas again and again. He insists that "this has not been by design . . . there has simply been a lot going on in Texas." Astute readers will note, however, that Trillin's family immigrated to the United States through the port of Galveston, and, after reading this book, many will believe that the Lone Star State has somehow imprinted itself in the family's imagination.

Trillin on Texas gathers some of Trillin's best writing on subjects near to his heart—politics, true crime, food, and rare books, among them—which also have a Texas connection. Indulging his penchant for making "snide and underhanded jokes about respectable public officials," he offers his signature sardonic take on the Bush dynasty and their tendency toward fractured syntax; a faux, but quite believable, LBJ speech; and wry portraits of assorted Texas county judges, small town sheriffs, and Houston immigration lawyers. Trillin takes us on a mouthwatering pilgrimage to the barbecue joint that Texas Monthly proclaimed the best in Texas and describes scouting for books with Larry McMurtry—who rejects all of his "sleepers." He tells the stories of two teenagers who dug up half a million dollars in an ice chest on a South Texas ranch and of rare book dealer Johnny Jenkins, who was found floating in the Colorado River with a bullet wound in the back of his head. And he recounts how redneck movie reviewer "Joe Bob Briggs" fueled a war between Dallas's daily newspapers and pays tribute to two courageous Texas women who spoke truth to power—Molly Ivins and Sissy Farenthold.

Sure to entertain Texans and other folks alike, Trillin on Texas proves once again that Calvin Trillin is one of America's shrewdest observers and wittiest writers.

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The Trouble with Men
Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power
David Shields
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint. While unashamedly intellectual, it’s also irresistibly readable and extremely moving. Over five increasingly intimate chapters, Shields probes the contours of his own psyche and marriage, marshalling a chorus of other voices that leaven, deepen, and universalize his experience; his goal is nothing less than a deconstruction of eros and conventional masculinity. Masterfully woven throughout is an unmistakable and surprisingly tender cri de coeur to his wife. The risk and vulnerability on display are in the service of radical candor, acerbic wit, real emotion, and profound insight—exactly what we’ve come to expect from Shields, who, in an open invitation to the reader, leaves everything on the page.
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Truck
On Rebuilding a Worn-Out Pickup and Other Post-Technological Adventures
John Jerome
University Press of New England, 1996
“Know thy gadgets; first step in restoring some kind of wholeness to one’s life.” So observes John Jerome about his purpose for rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup. Yes, he needs the truck to haul manure, but Jerome also hopes that “by knowing every nut, lockwasher, and cotter pin I could have a machine that had some meaning to me.” Thus his year-long odyssey under the hood, among the brake shoes and valves, becomes more than a mechanic’s memoir; it is a meditation on machines, metaphysics, and the moral universe. Long after its publication in 1977, the essential dilemma of Truck still rings true: as Jerome dismantles the aged straight six, he also disassembles our reliance on “two-hundred-dollar appliances that sport flaws in thirty-five-cent parts” and decries the “deliberate encapsulation, impenetrability, of the overtechnologized things with which we furnish our lives.” Despite gouged knuckles, a frigid New Hampshire winter, frustrating and inexplicable assemblies, and a close call when the truck rolls off its jacks, he perseveres. In the end, he admits, “I did not find God out there in the barn among the cans of nuts and bolts.” What he does find, however, is that he must make peace with technology; it’s a mistake, he says, to “assume there is a point on that line between the caveman’s club and the moon shot that marks the moral turnaround, before which technology was somehow benign, after which it is malign.” While Jerome gains a truck that runs—sometimes—we gain new insight into a technology that continues to encroach upon our lives.
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The True Medicine
Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera, Edited by Gianna Pomata, Translated by Gianna Pomata
Iter Press, 2010
This volume offers a new annotated translation, also with a new introduction, of the Dialogue on the True Medicine, one of a series of dialogues published in 1587 as Nueva Filosofia de la Naturaleza del Hombre (New Philosophy of Human Nature), under the name of Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera. Believed for centuries to be a woman’s work, the book was attributed to Oliva’s father, Miguel Sabuco, in the early twentieth century, and its authorship remains a matter of controversy today. Sabuco’s work is one of the most intriguing texts of sixteenth-century medicine. Defined by its author as “a book that was missing in the world,” the work proposes a new ambitious medical theory challenging the humoral view of disease and the main tenets of Galenic physiology.

This annotated translation allows the reader to locate the Dialogue on the True Medicine in the context of early modern medical and philosophical culture, identifying Sabuco’s ancient and modern sources. The editor’s introduction reviews the contested issue of authorship, offers new documentation for the history of the reception of Sabuco’s ideas in the seventeenth century, and relates Sabuco’s work to the Querelle des femmes, the protofeminist debate which had remarkable echoes in early modern medicine.
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The True Story of the Novel
Margaret Anne Doody
Rutgers University Press, 1997

Twentieth-century historians and critics defending the novel have emphasized its role as superseding something else, as a sort of legitimate usurper that deposed the Epic, a replacement of myth, or religious narrative. To say that the Age of Early Christianity was really also the Age of the Novel rumples such historical tidiness––but so it was. From the outset of her discussion, Doody rejects the conventional Anglo-Saxon distinction between Romance and Novel. This eighteenth-century distinction, she maintains, served both to keep the foreign––dark-skinned peoples, strange speakers, Muslims, and others––largely out of literature, and to obscure the diverse nature of the novel itself.

This deeply informed and truly comparative work is staggering in its breadth. Doody treats not only recognized classics, but also works of usually unacknowledged subgenres––new readings of novels like The Pickwick Papers, Puddn’head Wilson, L’Assommoir, Death in Venice, and Beloved  are accompanied by insights into Death on the Nile or The Wind in the Willows. Non-Western writers like Chinua Achebe and Witi Ihimaera are also included. In her last section, Doody goes on to show that Chinese and Japanese novels, early and late, bear a strong and not incidental affinity to their Western counterparts. Collectively, these readings offer the basis for a serious reassessment of the history and the nature of the novel.

The True Story of the Novel marks the beginning of the twenty-first century’s understanding of fiction and of culture. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in literature.

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The Truth About Stories
A Native Narrative
Thomas King
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
"Stories are wondrous things. And they are dangerous." In The Truth About Stories, Native novelist and scholar Thomas King explores how stories shape who we are and how we understand and interact with other people. From creation stories to personal experiences, historical anecdotes to social injustices, racist propaganda to works of contemporary Native literature, King probes Native culture's deep ties to storytelling. With wry humor, King deftly weaves events from his own life as a child in California, an academic in Canada, and a Native North American with a wide-ranging discussion of stories told by and about Indians. So many stories have been told about Indians, King comments, that "there is no reason for the Indian to be real. The Indian simply has to exist in our imaginations." That imaginative Indian that North Americans hold dear has been challenged by Native writers - N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, Robert Alexie, and others - who provide alternative narratives of the Native experience that question, create a present, and imagine a future. King reminds the reader, Native and non-Native, that storytelling carries with it social and moral responsibilties. "Don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now."
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Truth and Lies in Literature
Essays and Reviews
Stephen Vizinczey
University of Chicago Press, 1988
"Gathered here is a selection of the essays [of] the distinguished Hungarian born novelist Stephen Vizinczey. . . . Taken together they have a weight and amplitude of a very high order. . . . What is most impressive about these essays (apart from their range and erudition) is the way that literature and life are so subtly intertwined with each other. The passion for the one is the passion for the other. As it ought to be in criticism, but seldom is."—Mark Le Fanu, The Times (London)

"If a critic's job is to puncture pomposity, deflate over-hyped reputations and ferret out true value, then Vizinczey is master of the art."—Publishers Weekly

"Stephen Vizinczey comes on like a pistol-packing stranger here to root out corruption and remind us of our ideals. He carries the role off with inspired gusto. His boldness and pugnacity are bracing and can be very funny."—Ray Sawhill, Newsweek

"Every piece in the book is good, and many are so good that, after dipping into the middle, I stayed up half of the night, reading with growing amazement and admiration."—Bruce Bebb, Los Angeles Reader
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Truth in Nonfiction
Essays
David Lazar
University of Iowa Press, 2008
Even before the controversy that surrounded the publication of A Million Little Pieces, the question of truth has been at the heart of memoir. From Elie Wiesel to Benjamin Wilkomirski to David Sedaris, the veracity of writers’ claims has been suspect. In this fascinating and timely collection of essays, leading writers meditate on the subject of truth in literary nonfiction. As David Lazar writes in his introduction, “How do we verify? Do we care to? (Do we dare to eat the apple of knowledge and say it’s true? Or is it a peach?) Do we choose to? Is it a subcategory of faith? How do you respond when someone says, ‘This is really true’? Why do they choose to say it then?”

The past and the truth are slippery things, and the art of nonfiction writing requires the writer to shape as well as explore. In personal essays, meditations on the nature of memory, considerations of the genres of memoir, prose poetry, essay, fiction, and film, the contributors to this provocative collection attempt to find answers to the question of what truth in nonfiction means.

Contributors: John D’Agata, Mark Doty, Su Friedrich, Joanna Frueh, Ray González, Vivian Gornick, Barbara Hammer, Kathryn Harrison, Marianne Hirsch, Wayne Koestenbaum, Leonard Kriegel, David Lazar, Alphonso Lingis, Paul Lisicky, Nancy Mairs, Nancy K. Miller, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Phyllis Rose, Oliver Sacks, David Shields, and Leo Spitzer
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The Truth of Uncertainty
Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature
Edward L. Galligan
University of Missouri Press, 1998

In the last chapter of Walden, Henry David Thoreau proclaims a simple yet profound conviction: "Any truth is better than make- believe." Edward Galligan shares this conviction. In The Truth of Uncertainty: Beyond Ideology in Science and Literature, he argues that contemporary American critics should embrace literary truths with all of their ardent uncertainties rather than cling to the make-believe certainties of ideologies.

 Postmodern critics fail to ask the truth-seeker's essential question, What does the evidence prove? and instead trust the generalizations and slogans of ideologies to guide their interpretations. Attempting to be up-to-date and profound, these critics lose sight of the literature they are supposed to explore.

The Truth of Uncertainty celebrates values commonly associated with modern, not postmodern criticism, applying them to contemporary works in a series of fresh and unusual inquiries. Galligan finds important implications for criticism in work from the physical sciences that are rarely touched on by American intellectuals, such as Gerald M. Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind and Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. Likewise, he finds illumination in the works of novelists that American critics have largely ignored—Josef Skvorecky, George V. Higgins, Mary Lee Settle, Robertson Davies.

As a consequence of dealing with these "unusual" texts, Galligan presents a refreshing interpretation of a number of important concepts: language is grounded in talk; all literary criticism is subjective and tentative because reading is a highly subjective enterprise; and, most important, the world is real and any truth is indeed better than make-believe. He moves from a rejection of criticism in the service of ideology to an affirmation of criticism in the service of truthfulness.

The ideas celebrated in The Truth of Uncertainty are timeless and valuable. Galligan returns to the text and provides a penetrating critique of the state of contemporary criticism, which has abandoned truth for ideology. The result is an eloquent salute to literature itself.

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Tsing
David Albahari
Northwestern University Press, 1997
Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and daughter, David Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together to create a multilayered narrative combining a wholly fictional novel with a chronicle of the narrator's visit to the United States. As the fragments accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.
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Tu Fu's Gedichte
Tu Fu
Harvard University Press

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Tumult
Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Seagull Books, 2016
A collection of writings based on Enzensberger’s personal experience as a left-wing sympathizer during the 1960s. 

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, widely regarded as Germany’s greatest living poet, was already well known in the 1960s, the tempestuous decade of which Tumult is an autobiographical record. Derived from old papers, notes, jottings, photos, and letters that the poet stumbled upon years later in his attic, the volume is not so much about the man, but rather the many places he visited and people whom he met on his travels through the Soviet Union and Cuba during the 1960s. The book is made up of four long-form pieces written from 1963 to 1970, each episode concluding with a poem and postscript written in 2014. Translated by Mike Mitchell, the book is a lively and deftly written travelogue offering a glimpse into the history of leftist thought. Dedicated to “those who disappeared,” Tumult is a document of that which remains one of humanity’s headiest times.
 
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Turn Out the Lights
Chronicles of Texas during the 80s and 90s
By Gary Cartwright
University of Texas Press, 2000

Whether the subject is Jack Ruby, Willie Nelson, or his own leukemia-stricken son Mark, when it comes to looking at the world through another person's eyes, nobody does it better than Gary Cartwright. For over twenty-five years, readers of Texas Monthly have relied on Cartwright to tell the stories behind the headlines with pull-no-punches honesty and wry humor. His reporting has told us not just what's happened over three decades in Texas, but, more importantly, what we've become as a result.

This book collects seventeen of Cartwright's best Texas Monthly articles from the 1980s and 1990s, along with a new essay, "My Most Unforgettable Year," about the lasting legacy of the Kennedy assassination. He ranges widely in these pieces, from the reasons for his return to Texas after a New Mexican exile to profiles of Kris Kristofferson and Willie Nelson. Along the way, he strolls through San Antonio's historic King William District; attends a Dallas Cowboys old-timers reunion and the Holyfield vs. Foreman fight; visits the front lines of Texas' new range wars; gets inside the heads of murderers, gamblers, and revolutionaries; and debunks Viagra miracles, psychic surgery, and Kennedy conspiracy theories. In Cartwright's words, these pieces all record "the renewal of my Texas-ness, a rediscovery of Texas after returning home."

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Turtle Pictures
Ray Gonzalez
University of Arizona Press, 2000
The rhythm of vision, the rhythm of dream, the rhythm of voices saturating the hot southwestern landscape. These are the rhythms of Ray Gonzalez, the haunting incantations of Turtle Pictures.

Gonzalez has forged a new Chicano manifesto, a cultural memoir that traces both his personal journey and the communal journey that Mexican Americans have traveled throughout this century, across this land. He interweaves lyrical poetry, prose poems, short fiction, and nonfiction commentary into a lush cacophony that traces the evolution of today's politically charged Chicano voices from the deafening silence of their ancestors. Adopting the turtle as a metaphor for the Native American origins of border culture, Gonzalez frames this multitextured individual vision until it becomes a universal portrait of American life: a slow, ancient creature morphing into one of voracious rapidity. In wild and challenging surrealistic images, he hammers out a political statement from language that takes on a special urgency. Walking a fine line between lyricism and polemic, and succeeding where others have stumbled, he calls on Mexican Americans to return to their roots in order to avoid being swept up in American material culture.

Turtle Pictures is a complex body of work by a poet totally in tune with the spirit and nuances of language, imbued with a deep sense of craft and literary tradition. It invites readers to revel in its richness and vitality, to be caught up in its chantlike spirit, to luxuriate in its hauntingly beautiful passages. It is a work to devour, to savor, to return to, for it speaks with all the rhythms of the soul.
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Twain at Sea
The Maritime Writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Mark Twain
University Press of New England, 2018
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) repeatedly traversed the ocean during his globetrotting life. A keen observer, the man who recast himself as Mark Twain was fascinated by seafaring. This book compiles selections ranging from his first voyage in 1866—San Francisco to Hawaii—to his circumnavigation of the world by steamship 1897. Despite his background as a “brown water” mariner, Twain was out of his element on the ocean. His writings about being at sea (as well as feeling at sea) reflect both a growing familiarity with voyaging and an enduring sense of amazement. Twain’s shipboard observations capture his interest and amusement in the “blue water” mariners he encountered, with their salty subculture and individual quirks. Twain at Sea collects the author’s essays and travelogues on the maritime world in one volume, including excerpts from Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, and other sources.
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The Twelve Best Books by African Women
Critical Readings
Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi
Ohio University Press, 2009
In 2002, at the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair, twelve literary books by African women were included for the first time in the category of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century.” This was an important but belated affirmation of women writers on the continent and a first step toward establishing a recognized canon of African women’s literature. The Twelve Best Books by African Women is a collection of critical essays on eleven works of fiction and one play. The titles by African women that were included in the list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century” are: Anowa, Ama Ata Aidoo (1970); A Question of Power, Bessie Head (1974); Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi (1975); The Beggars’ Strike, Aminata Sow Fall (1979); Burger’s Daughter, Nadine Gordimer (1979); The Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emecheta (1979); So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ (1980); Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Assia Djebar (1983); Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988); Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night, Sindiwe Magona (1991); Butterfly Burning, Yvonne Vera (1998); Riwan ou le chemin de sable, Ken Bugul (1999). This collection of original essays recognizes the gesture of inclusion as an important shift in consciousness and creates a fresh awareness of the literary works by African women writers. Each essay offers a penetrating analysis of individual texts and opens up a fresh perspective that allows scholars and students alike to explore new dimensions of these writers’ work.
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Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism
An Interpretation
Donald Pizer
Southern Illinois University Press, 1982

Scorned by critics since birth, decreed dead by many, naturalism, according to Donald Pizer, is “one of the most persistent and vital strains in American fiction, perhaps the only modern literary form in America that has been both popular and significant.”

To define naturalism and explain its tena­cious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination, Pizer explores six novels: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Stein­beck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and Saul Bellow’s The Adven­tures of Augie March.

Pizer’s approach to these novels is empiri­cal; he does not wrench each novel awk­wardly until it fits his framework of general­izations and principles; rather, he approaches the novels as fiction and arrives at his defini­tion through his close reading of the works.

Establishing the background of natural­ism, Pizer explains that it comes under attack because it is “sordid and sensational in sub­ject matter,” it challenges “man’s faith in his innate moral sense and thus his responsibility for his actions,” and it is so full of “social documentation” that it is often dismissed as little more than a photographic record of a life or an era; thus the “aesthetic valid­ity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.”

Pizer posits the 1890s, the 1930s,and the late 1940s as the decades when naturalism flourished in America. He concentrates on literary criticism, not on the philosophy ofnaturalism, to show that literary criticism can make a contribution to a particularly muddled area of literary history—a natural­ism that is alive and changing, thus resisting the neat definitions reserved for the dead.

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Twenty Square Feet of Skin
Megan Baxter
The Ohio State University Press, 2023
“A pensive inquiry, often breathtakingly beautiful and relatable, into how and where and with whom we fit.” —Kirkus

The essays in Twenty Square Feet of Skin tell their stories through the body—encased as it is in “that greatest of organs, that membrane that protects the individual from the universe”—as Megan Baxter’s entrée to and home within the larger world that surrounds her. What does a tattoo mean? How can plastic surgery transform? What is the history of pedicures? Where does the mind wander on a long run? Through every example, Baxter writes toward a greater understanding of how self-knowledge is forged through physical experiences.
 
With the input of Prince, Walt Whitman, Don Johnson, Andrew Wyeth, Meriwether Lewis, and others, Baxter reflects on love, identity, and belonging by looking closely at her skin, toenails, and DNA. Playful, wandering, and deeply felt, Twenty Square Feet of Skin weaves a strange, rich tapestry of flesh and bones, art and body, skin and scar. In embracing the beauty and peril of physicality in crystalline detail, Baxter asks us all to ponder what makes us human within these frail, flawed, powerful, and wonderful bodies of ours.
 
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Twenty-one Texas Short Stories
Edited by William Peery
University of Texas Press, 1954

This is a splendid collection of stories about Texas by Texans—stories that appeared in leading magazines in the first half of the twentieth century.

Authors in this volume:

  • Dillon Anderson
  • Barry Benefield
  • Charles Carver
  • Margaret Cousins
  • Chester T. Crowell
  • Eugene Cunningham
  • J. Frank Dobie
  • Fred Gipson
  • William Goyen
  • O. Henry
  • Sylvan Karchmer
  • Harry Kidd, Jr.
  • Mary King O’Donnell
  • George Pattullo
  • George Sessions Perry
  • Katherine Anne Porter
  • Winifred Sanford
  • John W. Thomason, Jr.
  • Thomas Thompson
  • John Watson
  • John W. Wilson
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Two Prospectors
The Letters of Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark
By Sam Shepard and Johnny Dark
University of Texas Press, 2013

Sam Shepard was arguably America’s finest working dramatist, as well as an accomplished screenwriter, actor, and director. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, he wrote more than forty-five plays, including True West, Fool for Love, and Buried Child. Shepard also appeared in more than fifty films, beginning with Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in The Right Stuff. Despite the publicity his work and life attracted, however, Shepard remained a strongly private man who said many times that he would never write a memoir. But he did write intensively about his inner life and creative work to his former father-in-law and housemate, Johnny Dark, who was Shepard’s closest friend, surrogate brother (they were nearly the same age), and even artistic muse.

Two Prospectors gathers nearly forty years of correspondence and transcribed conversations between Shepard and Dark. In these gripping, sometimes gut-wrenching letters, the men open themselves to each other with amazing honesty. Shepard’s letters give us the deepest look we will ever get into his personal philosophy and creative process, while in Dark’s letters we discover insights into Shepard’s character that only an intimate friend could provide. The writers also reflect on the books and authors that stimulate their thinking, their relationships with women (including Shepard’s anguished decision to leave his wife and son—Dark’s stepdaughter and grandson—for actress Jessica Lange), personal struggles, and accumulating years. Illustrated with Dark’s candid, revealing photographs of Shepard and their mutual family across many years, as well as facsimiles of numerous letters, Two Prospectors is a compelling portrait of a complex friendship that anchored both lives for decades, a friendship also poignantly captured in Treva Wurmfeld’s film, Shepard & Dark.

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Two Works on Trebizond
Michael Panaretos and BessarionEdited and translated by Scott Kennedy
Harvard University Press, 2019

In 1204, brothers Alexios and David Komnenos became the unwitting founders of the Empire of Trebizond, a successor state to the Byzantine Empire that emerged after Crusaders sacked Constantinople. Trebizond, which stretched along the coast of the Black Sea, outlasted numerous rivals and invaders until its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1461. Though this empire has fascinated writers from Cervantes to Dorothy Dunnett, few Trapezuntine writings survive.

This volume presents translations from the Greek of two crucial primary sources published together for the first time: On the Emperors of Trebizond and Encomium on Trebizond. In the fourteenth century, Michael Panaretos, the emperor’s personal secretary, penned the only extant history of the ruling dynasty, including key details about foreign relations. The encomium by Bessarion (1403–1472), here in English for the first time, praises the author’s native city and retells Trapezuntine history from antiquity to his own moment. It provides enlightening perspectives on Byzantine identity and illuminating views of this major trading hub along the Silk Road.

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Two-Buck Chuck & The Marlboro Man
The New Old West
Frank Bergon
University of Nevada Press, 2019
Frank Bergon’s astonishing portrayals of people in California’s San Joaquin Valley reveal a country where the culture of a vanishing West lives on in many twenty-first-century Westerners, despite the radical technological transformations around them. All are immigrants, migrants, their children, or their grandchildren whose lives intertwine with the author’s, including several races and ethnicities: Chicanos, Mexicans, African Americans, Italians, Asians, Native Americans, Scots-Irish descendants of Steinbeck’s Okies, and Basques of the author’s own heritage.

Bergon presents a powerful array of rural and small-town Westerners who often see themselves as part of a region and a way of life most Americans aren’t aware of or don’t understand, their voices unheard, their stories untold. In these essays, Westerners from the diverse heritage of the San Joaquin Valley include California’s legendary Fred Franzia, the maker of the world’s best-selling Charles Shaw wines dubbed “Two-Buck Chuck,” and Darrell Winfield, a Dust Bowl migrant and lifelong working cowboy who for more than thirty years reigned as the iconic Marlboro Man. Their voices help us understand the complexities of today’s rural West, where Old West values intersect with New West realities. This is the West (and America today)—a region in conflict with itself.
 
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