In Ray Bradbury Unbound, Jonathan R. Eller continues the story begun in his acclaimed Becoming Ray Bradbury, following the beloved author's evolution from a short story master to a multi-media creative force and outspoken visionary.

At the height of his powers as a poetic prose stylist, Bradbury shifted his creative attention to film and television, where new successes gave him an enduring platform as a compelling cultural commentator. His passionate advocacy validated the U.S. space program's mission, extending his pivotal role as a chronicler of human values in an age of technological wonders.

Informed by many years of interviews with Bradbury as well as an unprecedented access to personal papers and private collections, Ray Bradbury Unbound provides the definitive portrait of how a legendary American author helped shape his times.

Tao Yuanming (365?–427), although dismissed as a poet following his death, is now considered one of China’s greatest writers. Over the centuries, portrayals of his life—some focusing on his eccentricity, others on his exemplary virtue—have elevated him to iconic status. This study of the posthumous reputation of a central figure in Chinese literary history, the mechanisms at work in the reception of his works, and the canonization of Tao himself and of particular readings of his works sheds light on the transformation of literature and culture in premodern China. It focuses on readers’ interpretive negotiations with Tao’s works and on changes in hermeneutical practices, critical vocabulary, and cultural demands, as well as the intervention of interested and influential readers, in order to trace the construction of Tao Yuanming. Driven by a dialogue on categories at the very heart of literati culture—reclusion, personality, and poetry—this cumulative process spanning fifteen centuries, the author argues, helps explain the very different pictures of Tao Yuanming and the divergent ways of reading his works across time and illuminates central issues animating premodern Chinese culture.

Reading the Room is Paul Yamazaki's love letter to the work of bookselling and an engaged life of the mind.

Over twenty-four hours, Paul Yamazaki leads us through the stacks of storied City Lights Booksellers in San Francisco; the care and prowess of his approach to book buying; his upbringing in a Japanese American family in Southern California and moving to San Francisco at the height of revolutionary foment; working with legendary figures in the book publishing industry like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sonny Mehta, and others; and his vision for the future of bookselling. Navigating building trust with readers and nurturing relationships across the literary industry, Yamazaki testifies to the value of generosity, sharing knowledge, and dialogue in a life devoted to books.

2018 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

A passionate advocate for preserving wilderness and fighting the bureaucratic and business forces that would destroy it, Edward Abbey (1927–1989) wrote fierce, polemical books such as Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang that continue to inspire environmental activists. In this eloquent memoir, his friend and fellow desert rat Charles Bowden reflects on Abbey the man and the writer, offering up thought-provoking, contrarian views of the writing life, literary reputations, and the perverse need of critics to sum up “what he really meant and whether any of it was truly up to snuff.”

The Red Caddy is the first literary biography of Abbey in a generation. Refusing to turn him into a desert guru, Bowden instead recalls the wild man in a red Cadillac convertible for whom liberty was life. He describes how Desert Solitaire paradoxically “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground” that Abbey wanted to protect, while sealing his literary reputation and overshadowing the novels that Abbey considered his best books. Bowden also skewers the cottage industry that has grown up around Abbey’s writing, smoothing off its rougher (racist, sexist) edges while seeking “anecdotes, little intimacies . . . pieces of the True Beer Can or True Old Pickup Truck.” Asserting that the real essence of Abbey will always remain unknown and unknowable, The Red Caddy still catches gleams of “the fire that from time to time causes a life to become a conflagration.”

Whether in the public realm as political activists, artists, teachers, biographers, editors, and writers or in the more traditional role of domestic, nurturing women, Elizabeth Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne subverted rigid nineteenth-century definitions of women’s limited realm of influence. Reinventing the Peabody Sisters seeks to redefine this dynamic trio’s relationship to the literary and political movements of the mid nineteenth century. Previous scholarship has romanticized, vilified, or altogether erased their influences and literary productions or viewed these individuals solely in light of their relationships to other nineteenth-century luminaries, particularly men---Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Horace Mann. This collection underscores that each woman was a creative force in her own right. Despite their differences and sibling conflicts, all three sisters thrived in the rarefied---if economically modest---atmosphere of a childhood household that glorified intellectual and artistic pursuits. This background allowed each woman to negotiate the nineteenth-century literary marketplace and in the process redefine its scope. Elizabeth, Mary, and Sophia remained linked throughout their lives, encouraging, complementing, and sometimes challenging each other’s endeavors while also contributing to each other’s literary work. The essays in this collection examine the sisters’ confrontations with and involvement in the intellectual movements and social conflicts of the nineteenth century, including Transcendentalism, the Civil War, the role of women, international issues, slavery, Native American rights, and parenting. Among the most revealing writings that the sisters left behind, however, are those which explore the interlaced relationship that continued throughout their remarkable lives.

A rare and remarkable example of Indo-Persian autobiography by the poet Mir Taqi Mir.

Mir Muhammad Taqi Mir (1723–1810) is the author of six collections of Urdu poetry and widely regarded as the finest ghazal poet in that language. However, he also wrote one volume of verse and three prose works in Persian, including Zikr-e Mir, or Remembrances, a rare and remarkable example of Indo-Persian autobiography.

Remembrances recounts Mir’s ancestry, his father’s spiritual quest, and his own struggles to find education and patronage both in his native Agra and in Delhi. While the work may offer few glimpses into the author’s private life or professional literary activity, it presents a vivid picture of political events and intrigues between 1760 and 1789, when north India witnessed extensive warfare.

The Persian text, presented here in the Naskh script, includes all the author’s additions and alterations properly identified and chronologically arranged, along with a newly revised English translation. Mir concludes his autobiography with a series of jokes and witty anecdotes, some of them quite risqué, that are printed here for the first time.

2022 Atlantean Award, Robert E. Howard Foundation

You may not know the name Robert E. Howard, but you probably know his work. His most famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is an icon of popular culture. In hundreds of tales detailing the exploits of Conan, King Kull, and others, Howard helped to invent the sword and sorcery genre.

Todd B. Vick delves into newly available archives and probes Howard’s relationships, particularly with schoolteacher Novalyne Price, to bring a fresh, objective perspective to Howard's life. Like his many characters, Howard was an enigma and an outsider. He spent his formative years visiting the four corners of Texas, experiences that left a mark on his stories. He was intensely devoted to his mother, whom he nursed in her final days, and whose impending death contributed to his suicide in 1936 when he was just thirty years old.

Renegades and Rogues is an unequivocal journalistic account that situates Howard within the broader context of pulp literature. More than a realistic fantasist, he wrote westerns and horror stories as well, and engaged in avid correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers of his day. Vick investigates Howard’s twelve-year writing career, analyzes the influences that underlay his celebrated characters, and assesses the afterlife of Conan, the figure in whom Howard's fervent imagination achieved its most durable expression.

Like the miniatures of which Pope was so fond, the book is at once particular in its focus and wide-ranging in its conceptual scope. While drawing on recent feminist, historicist, and materialist criticism of Pope, as well as current theoretical work on the body, it also attends closely to the local ambiguities of the poet’s texts and cultural milieu, details often lost to critical view. The result is a revitalized—and broadened—reading of Pope, and of our understanding of the processes of authorship. By focusing on the process by which ideas of authority and authenticity took shape at specific moments in Pope’s career, Resemblance and Disgrace calls into question distinctions between theoretical abstractions and material details, between literary originality and critical derivation, following Pope’s own example of rewriting intellectual boundaries as creative opportunities.

Leila Abouzeid, whose novel Year of the Elephant has gone through six reprintings, has now translated her childhood memoir into English. Published in Rabat in 1993 to critical acclaim, the work brings to life the interlocking dramas of family ties and political conflict.

Against a background of Morocco's struggle for independence from French colonial rule, Abouzeid charts the development of personal relationships, between generations as well as between husbands and wives. Abouzeid's father is a central figure; as a strong advocate of Moroccan nationalism, he was frequently imprisoned by the French and his family forced to flee the capital. Si Hmed was a public hero, but the young daughter's memories of her famous father and of the family's plight because of his political activities are not so idyllic.

The memoir utilizes multiple voices, especially those of women, in a manner reminiscent of the narrative strategies of the oral tradition in Moroccan culture. Return to Childhood may also be classified as an autobiography, a form only now gaining respect as a valid literary genre in the Middle East. Abouzeid's own introduction and Elizabeth Fernea's foreword discuss this new development in Arabic literature.

What made the classical scholar Richard Bentley deserve to be so viciously skewered by two of the literary giants of his day—Jonathan Swift in the Battle of the Books and Alexander Pope in the Dunciad? The answer: he had the temerity to bring classical study out of the scholar's closet and into the drawing rooms of polite society. Kristine Haugen’s highly engaging biography of a man whom Rhodri Lewis characterized as “perhaps the most notable—and notorious—scholar ever to have English as a mother tongue” affords a fascinating portrait of Bentley and the intellectual turmoil he set in motion.

Aiming at a convergence between scholarship and literary culture, the brilliant, caustic, and imperious Bentley revealed to polite readers the doings of professional scholars and induced them to pay attention to classical study. At the same time, Europe's most famous classical scholar adapted his own publications to the deficiencies of non-expert readers. Abandoning the church-oriented historical study of his peers, he worked on texts that interested a wider public, with spectacular and—in the case of his interventionist edition of Paradise Lost—sometimes lamentable results.

If the union of worlds Bentley craved was not to be achieved in his lifetime, his provocations show that professional humanism left a deep imprint on the literary world of England's Enlightenment.

From the antiquity of Homer to yesterday's Naked Lunch, writers have found inspiration, and readers have lost themselves, in a world of the imagination tinged and oftentimes transformed by drugs. The age-old association of literature and drugs receives its first comprehensive treatment in this far-reaching work. Drawing on history, science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography, Marcus Boon shows that the concept of drugs is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and reveals how different sets of connections between disciplines configure each drug's unique history.

In chapters on opiates, anesthetics, cannabis, stimulants, and psychedelics, Boon traces the history of the relationship between writers and specific drugs, and between these drugs and literary and philosophical traditions. With reference to the usual suspects from De Quincey to Freud to Irvine Welsh and with revelations about others such as Milton, Voltaire, Thoreau, and Sartre, The Road of Excess provides a novel and persuasive characterization of the "effects" of each class of drug--linking narcotic addiction to Gnostic spirituality, stimulant use to writing machines, anesthesia to transcendental philosophy, and psychedelics to the problem of the imaginary itself. Creating a vast network of texts, personalities, and chemicals, the book reveals the ways in which minute shifts among these elements have resulted in "drugs" and "literature" as we conceive of them today.

Challenging convention with the SF nonconformist

Roger Zelazny combined poetic prose with fearless literary ambition to become one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 1960s. Yet many critics found his later novels underachieving and his turn to fantasy a disappointment. F. Brett Cox surveys the landscape of Zelazny's creative life and contradictions. Launched by the classic 1963 short story "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," Zelazny soon won the Hugo Award for Best Novel with …And Call Me Conrad and two years later won again for Lord of Light. Cox looks at the author's overnight success and follows Zelazny into a period of continued formal experimentation, the commercial triumph of the Amber sword and sorcery novels, and renewed acclaim for Hugo-winning novellas such as "Home Is the Hangman" and "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai." Throughout, Cox analyzes aspects of Zelazny's art, from his preference for poetically alienated protagonists to the ways his plots reflected his determined individualism.

Clear-eyed and detailed, Roger Zelazny provides an up-to-date reconsideration of an often-misunderstood SF maverick.

Poet, anthropologist, feminist—Ruth Fulton Benedict was all of these and much more. Born into the last years of the Victorian era, she came of age during the Progressive years and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

As a Lyricist poet, Ruth Benedict helped define Modernism. As an anthropologist, she wrote the classic Patterns of Culture and at one point was considered the foremost anthropologist in the United States—the first woman ever to attain such status. She was an intellectual and an artist living in a time when women were not encouraged to be either. In this fascinating study, Margaret Caffrey attempts to place Benedict in the cultural matrix of her time and successfully shows the way in which Benedict was a product of and reacted to the era in which she lived.

Caffrey goes far beyond providing simple biographical material in this well-written interdisciplinary study. Based on exhaustive research, including access for the first time to the papers of Margaret Mead, Benedict's student and friend, Caffrey is able to put Benedict's life clearly in perspective. By identifying the family and educational influences that so sharply influenced Benedict's psychological makeup, the author also closely analyzes the currents of thought that were strong when Victorianism paralleled the Modernism that figured in Benedict's life work. The result is a richly detailed study of a gifted woman.

This important work will be of interest to students of Modernism, poetry, and women's studies, as well as to anthropologists.