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1338 books about Literary Collections and 89 start with A
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The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Duncan
Ohio University Press, 1998
Library of Congress PS1292.C6Z69 1998 | Dewey Decimal 813.4

As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson.

Following the highly autobiographical nonfiction produced by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other slave narrative writers, Chesnutt’s complex, multi-layered short fiction transformed the relationship between African-American writers and their readers. But despite generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day, and from such prominent readers as William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Sundquist in ours, Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous place in American literary history.

In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan demonstrates that Chesnutt’s uneasy position in the American literary tradition can be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. Profoundly aware of the delicacy of his situation as a black intellectual at the turn of the century, Chesnutt infused his work with an intricate, enigmatic artistic vision that defies monolithic or unambiguously political interpretation, especially with regard to issues of race and identity that preoccupied him throughout his career.

In this first book-length study of the innovative short fiction, Duncan devotes particular attention to elucidating these sophisticated narrative strategies as the grounding for Chesnutt’s inauguration of a tradition of African-American fiction.

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Absinthe: World Literature in Translation: Volume 27: Through German: Contemporary Literature in Translation
Lauren Beck
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021

The voices of many countries echo through the selection of contemporary literature featured in Absinthe 27: Through German. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are all represented in this issue, but so are England, Ghana, Israel, Moldova, Romania, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine. And while Absinthe 27 does have a distinct international flair, it is not a selection of Migrantenliteratur, a category that fences in writers as foreign rather than German or Austrian or Swiss. Rather, the authors represented are all integral to the German-speaking world and its representation, whether the authors were born there, arrived decades ago, or came recently to perhaps find another home, perhaps pass through. Translated and edited by Lauren Beck, Elisabeth Fertig, Ivan Parra Garcia, Lena Grimm, Özlem Karuç, Michaela Kotziers, Elizabeth Sokol, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Veronica Cook Williamson, Through German presents a fuller picture of what it means to live in the Germanosphere in the 21st century.
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Accidental Gravity: Residents, Travelers, and the Landscape of Memory
Bernard Quetchenbach
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Library of Congress PS3617.U49A6 2017 | Dewey Decimal 814.6

The compelling essays in Bernard Quetchenbach’s Accidental Gravity move from upstate New York to the western United States, from urban and suburban places to wild lands. In the first section of the book, he focuses on suburban neighborhoods, where residents respond ambivalently to golf-course geese and other unruly natural presences; in the second section, he juxtaposes these humanized places with Yellowstone National Park. Quetchenbach writes about current environmental issues in the Greater Yellowstone area—wildfire, invasive species, ever-increasing numbers of tourists—in the context of climate change and other contemporary pressures.
 
Accidental Gravity negotiates the difficult edge between a naive belief in an enduring, unassailable natural world and the equally naive belief that human life takes place in some unnatural, more mediated context. The title refers to the accidental but nonetheless meaningful nexus where the personal meets and combines with the universal—those serendipitous moments when the individual life connects to the larger rhythms of time and planet.
 
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Act Like You're Having a Good Time: Essays
Michele Weldon
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Library of Congress CT275.W3785A5 2020 | Dewey Decimal 070.92

Winner, 2021 Gilda Women's Book Award

In this honest and tender collection of essays, award-winning memoirist Michele Weldon asks what it means to be a mature woman seeking a life of purpose and meaning through work, family, and relationships. Facing ageism and invisibility within popular culture, Weldon examines the effects of raising children, striving for applause, failing expectations, forming new friendships, reconciling lost dreams, and restoring one’s faith. With sincerity and humor, she unwraps family traditions, painting classes, lap swimming, dress codes, and career disappointments. She addresses white privilege and her evolving understanding of racism. And she asks crucial questions about mortality, finding connection in writing and stories.

Frank, eloquent, and daring, Weldon dissects the intricacies of life, journeying toward self-discovery as a mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Readers of any age or gender will recognize the universal experience of learning to accept oneself and asking essential questions—even if there are no easy answers.

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The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Ohio University Press, 2002
Library of Congress PR9408.M273 | Dewey Decimal 823.92

An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert.

Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition.

But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

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Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 12: March 1797 – April 1798
Adams Family
Harvard University Press, 2015
Library of Congress E322.1.A27 | Dewey Decimal 929.2

Volume 12 opens with John Adams’s inauguration as president and closes just after details of the XYZ affair become public in America. Through private correspondence, and with the candor and perception expected from the Adamses, family members reveal their concerns for the well-being of the nation and the sustaining force of domestic life.
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The Addison Gayle Jr. Reader
Edited by Nathaniel Norment Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2009
Library of Congress PS153.N5G299 2009 | Dewey Decimal 810.9896073

This reader collects sixty of the personal essays, critical articles, and other seminal works of Addison Gayle Jr., one of the most influential figures in African American literary criticism and a key pioneer in the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement. The volume contains selective essays that represent the range of Gayle's writing on such subjects as relationships between father and son, cultural nationalism, racism, black aesthetics, black criticism, and black literature. The collection, the first of its kind, includes definitive essays such as "Blueprint for Black Criticism," "The Harlem Renaissance: Toward a Black Aesthetic," and "Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetics." A key chapter from Gayle's autobiography is supplemented by his literary criticism, and a general introduction and editor's notes for each section discuss the articles' lasting significance and influence.
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Adventures of a Deaf-Mute and Other Short Pieces
William B. Swett
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
Library of Congress HV2534.S94S94 2017 | Dewey Decimal 362.41092

In Adventures of a Deaf-Mute, Deaf New Englander William B. Swett recounts his adventures in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the late 1860s. Given to us in short, energetic episodes, Swett tells daring stories of narrow escapes from death and other perilous experiences during his time as a handyman and guide at the Profile House, a hotel named for the nearby Old Man of the Mountain rock formation. A popular destination, the hotel attracted myriad guests, and Swett’s tales of rugged endurance are accompanied by keen observations of the people he meets.
       Confident in his identity as a Deaf “mute,” he notes with wry humor the varied perceptions of deafness that he encounters. As a signing Deaf person from a prominent multigenerational Deaf family, he counters negative stereotypes with generosity and a smart wit. He takes pride in his physical abilities, which he showcases through various stunts and arduous treks in the wilderness. However, Swett’s writing also reveals a deep awareness of the fragility and precariousness of life. This is a portrait of a man testing his physical and emotional limits, written from the vantage point of someone who is no longer a young man but is still very much in the prime of his life.
       This collection also includes “Mr. Swett and His Diorama,” an article from 1859 in which Swett describes his miniature recreation of the Battle of Lexington, as well as Manual Alphabets, a pamphlet published in 1875 on the history of manual alphabets that includes short biographies of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, two pioneers of Deaf education in the United States. The work is accompanied by a new introduction that offers a reflection on Swett’s life and the time in which he lived.
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Aeschylus II: The Oresteia
Edited and Translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Library of Congress PA3827.A467 2012 | Dewey Decimal 882.01

Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.
 
Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.
 
In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.
 
In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
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Aesopica: A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him
Edited by Ben Edwin Perry
University of Illinois Press, 1952
Library of Congress PA3851.A2 2007

The most complete corpus of the proverbs and fables of Aesop ever assembled

Ben Edwin Perry's Aesopica remains the definitive edition of all fables reputed to be by Aesop. The volume begins traditionally with a life of Aesop, but in two different and previously unedited Greek versions, with collations that record variations in the major recensions. It includes 179 proverbs attributed to Aesop and 725 carefully organized fables, for which Perry also provides their eldest known sources. To better evaluate the place of Aesop in literary history, Perry includes testimonies about Aesop made by Greek and Latin authors, from Herodotus to Maximus Planudes.

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An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress BH61.S67 2011 | Dewey Decimal 111.85

During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak’s unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world’s languages in the name of global communication? “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.” In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the literary can still do something.”
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Affrilachian Tales: Folktales from the African-American Appalachian Tradition
Lynette Ford
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012
Library of Congress GR111.A47F67 2012 | Dewey Decimal 398.20974

Folktales from the African American Appalachian tradition. Told by Lyn Ford, one of America’s busiest touring storytellers. The power of Lyn's storytelling comes straight out of her family heritage, which is the content of this, her first book. Here she tells how she learned stories from her father and grandfather—and she includes many of the stories they told her.

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Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature
James Currey
Ohio University Press, 2008
Library of Congress Z465.3.C87 2008 | Dewey Decimal 070.5096

June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser.

Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature captures the energy of literary publishing in a new and undefined field. Portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers make Africa Writes Back a stand-out book. James Currey’s voice and insights are an added bonus.

CONTENTS
Publishing and selling the African Writers Series
The African Writers Series Portfolio & George Hallett’s covers
Main dates for the African Writers Series

INTRODUCTION: The establishment of African Literature
Publishing Chinua Achebe

1. WRITERS FROM WEST AFRICA
Nigeria: The country where so much started
Negritude from Senegal to Cameroun
Magic & realism from Ghana, The Gambia & Sierra Leone

2. WRITERS FROM EASTERN AFRICA
Towards the oral & the popular in Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania
Publishing Ngugi

3. WRITERS FROM THE HORN & NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA
Emperors in Ethiopia
Publishing Nuruddin Farah
Arab authors in Egypt & Sudan

4. WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
Resistance in South Africa
Publishing Alex la Guma
Publishing Dennis Brutus
Publishing Bessie Head
Publishing Masizi Kunene

5. WRITERS FROM SOUTHERN AFRICAN
Guns & Guerrillas in Mozambique &Angola
Zambia Shall be Free
Death & detention in Malawi
The struggle to become Zimbabwe
Publishing Dambudzo Marechera

CONCLUSION: Is there still a role for the African Writers Series?

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An African American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938
Ralph Bunche
Ohio University Press, 2001

Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.

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African Tales
Compiled by Harold Scheub
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
Library of Congress GR350.A366 2005 | Dewey Decimal 398.2096

The latest work from Harold Scheub, one of the world's leading scholars of African folktales, is the broadest collection yet assembled with tales from the entire continent of Africa, north to south. It brings together mythic, fantastic, and coming-of-age tales, some transcribed more than a hundred years ago, others dating to modern-day Africa. Scheub includes the work of storytellers from major African language groups, as well as many storytellers whose work is not often heard outside of Africa. This anthology offers a classroom-ready collection that should appeal to any scholar of African literature and culture. Realizing that these tales are part of a dying art, Scheub writes for the inner ear in everyone, bringing an oral tradition to life in written form.
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African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
Library of Congress PL8011.A35 2010 | Dewey Decimal 809.8896

African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today.  The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile.
    Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern.  It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.
 
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
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Afro Orientalism
Bill V. Mullen
University of Minnesota Press, 2004
Library of Congress E185.615.M75 2004 | Dewey Decimal 305.896073

Reveals a century of political solidarity uniting Asians and African Americans

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay “The World Problem of the Color Line,” W. E. B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. In Afro-Orientalism, Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois’s challenge.

Afro-Orientalism unfolds here as a distinctive strand of cultural and political work that contests the longstanding, dominant discourse about race and nation first fully named in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Mullen tracks Afro-Asian engagement with U.S. imperialism—including writings by Richard Wright, Grace and James Boggs, Robert F. Williams, and Fred Ho—and companion struggles against racism and capitalism around the globe. To this end, he offers Afro-Orientalism as an antidote to essentialist, race-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to re-imagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.

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After Tears
Niq Mhlongo
Ohio University Press, 2011
Library of Congress PR9369.4.M48A38 2011 | Dewey Decimal 823.92

Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

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Afterlives of Indigenous Archives
Edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Library of Congress E97.9.A48 2019 | Dewey Decimal 970.00497

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike.
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AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead
Dale Salwak
University of Iowa Press, 2011
Library of Congress PR107.A47 2011 | Dewey Decimal 820.9

If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.
 
Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.
 
Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AfterWord draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to “go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there,” readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.
 
Contributors to AfterWord are: Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).
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Against a Darkening Sky
Janet Lewis
Ohio University Press, 1943
Library of Congress PS3523.E866A7 1985 | Dewey Decimal 813.52

Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.

Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.

Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.

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Against Art: (The Notebooks)
Tomas Espedal
Seagull Books, 2018
Library of Congress PT8951.15.S64I4613 2011 | Dewey Decimal 839.8238

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal’s work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal’s own experiences. In that vein, his novel Against Art is not just the story of a boy growing up to be a writer, but it is also the story of writing. Specifically, it is about the profession of writing—the routines, responsibility, and obstacles. Yet, Against Art is also about being a father, a son, and a grandson; about a family and a family’s tales, and about how preceding generations mark their successors. It is at once about choices and changes, about motion and rest, about moving to a new place, and about living.

 
Praise for the Norwegian Edition
“One of the most beautiful, most important books I've read for years.”—Klassekampen
 
“Espedal has written an amazingly rich novel, which will assuredly stand out as one of the year’s best and will also further fortify the quality of Norwegian literature abroad.”— Adresseavisen
 
“Against Art attacks literature while at the same time being intensely literary. Our greatest sorrows and torments, the individual experiences often so anemic in art, find a voice of their own.”—Morgenbladet
 
“Against Art moves me with its maternal history and proves yet again that Tomas Espedal writes great novels.”—Dag og Tid
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Against Nihilism: Nietzsche meets Dostoevsky
Maia Johnson-Stepenberg
Black Rose Books, 2018
Library of Congress B3318.N54S74 2019

Described by Thomas Mann as “brothers in spirit, but tragically grotesque companions in misfortune,” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky remain towering figures in the intellectual development of European modernity. Maia Johnson-Stepenberg’s accessible new introduction to these philosophers compares their writings on key topics such as criminality, Christianity, and the figure of the “outsider” to reveal the urgency and contemporary resonance of their shared struggle against nihilism. Against Nihilism also considers nihilism in the context of current political and social struggles, placing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s contributions at the heart of important contemporary debates regarding community, identity, and meaning. Inspired by class discussions with her students and aimed at first-team readers of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Against Nihilism provides an accessible, unique comparative study of these two key thinkers. 
 
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Against the Closet: Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman
Duke University Press, 2012
Library of Congress E185.625.A333 2012 | Dewey Decimal 305.896073

In Against the Closet, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.

Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.

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The Age of Discovery and Other Stories
Becky Hagenston
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Library of Congress PS3558.A32316A73 2021 | Dewey Decimal 813.54

“At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems.”—Booklist

“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner

In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
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Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations
Roy Hoffman
University of Alabama Press, 2011
Library of Congress F326.6.H64 2011 | Dewey Decimal 976.1

A collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman
 
Alabama Afternoons is a collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman. Written as Sunday feature stories for the Mobile Press-Register with additional pieces from the New York Times, Preservation, and Garden & Gun, these profiles preserve the individual stories—and the individual voices within the stories—that help to define one of the most distinctive states in the union.
 
Hoffman recounts his personal visits with writer Mary Ward Brown in her library in Hamburg, with photographer William Christenberry in a field in Newbern, and with storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folk artist Charlie “Tin Man” Lucas at their neighboring houses in Selma. Also highlighted are the lives of numerous alumni of The University of Alabama—among them Mel Allen, the “Voice of the Yankees” from 1939 to 1964; Forrest Gump author Winston Groom; and Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two students who entered the schoolhouse door in 1963. Hoffman profiles distinguished Auburn University alumni as well, including Eugene Sledge, renowned World War II veteran and memoirist, and Neil Davis, the outspoken, nationally visible editor of the Lee County Bulletin.
 
Hoffman also profiles major and minor players in the civil rights movement, from Johnnie Carr, raised in segregated Montgomery and later president of the Montgomery Improvement Association; and George Wallace Jr., son of the four-time governor; to Theresa Burroughs, a Greensboro beautician trampled in the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge; and Diane McWhorter, whose award- winning book explores the trouble- filled Birmingham civil rights experience. Juxtaposed with these are accounts of lesser-known individuals, such as Sarah Hamm, who attempts to preserve the fading Jewish culture in Eufaula; Edward Carl, who was butler and chauffeur to Bellingrath Gardens founder Walter Bellingrath in Theodore; and cousins William Bolton and Herbert Henson, caretakers of the coon dog cemetery in Russellville.
 
Hoffman’s compilation of life stories creates an engaging and compelling look into what it means to be from, and shaped by, Alabama. “Alabama Afternoons,” he writes in the introduction, “is a small part of the even bigger question of what it means to be an American.”
Read an article about domestic lives by Roy Hoffman in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/garden/25Domestic.html
 
 
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Albertus Magnus On Animals V1 2: A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.and Irven Michael Resnick
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Library of Congress QL41.A3413 2018 | Dewey Decimal 590

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
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Albertus Magnus On Animals V1: A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
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Albertus Magnus On Animals V2: A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.
The Ohio State University Press, 2019

Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
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Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address
Shira Brisman
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Library of Congress N6888.D8B75 2016 | Dewey Decimal 740.92

Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.

In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
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Alexander The Great: A Novel
Nikos Kazantzakis
Ohio University Press, 1982
Library of Congress PA5610.K39M413 1982 | Dewey Decimal 889.332

Nikos Kazantzakis is no stranger to the heroes of Greek antiquity. In this historical novel based on the life of Alexander the Great, Kazantzakis has drawn on both the rich tradition of Greek legend and the documented manuscripts from the archives of history to recreate an Alexander in all his many-faceted images—Alexander the god; Alexander the descendant of Heracles performing the twelve labors; Alexander the mystic, the daring visionary destined to carry out a divine mission; Alexander the flesh-and-blood mortal who, on occasion, is not above the common soldier’s brawling and drinking.

The novel, which resists the temptation to portray Alexander in the mantle of purely romantic legend, covers his life from age fifteen to his death at age thirty-two. It opens with Alexander’s first exploit, the taming of the horse, Bucephalas, and is seen in great part through the eyes of his young neighbor who eventually becomes an officer in his army and follows him on his campaign to conquer the world.

The book, which was written primarily as an educational adjunct for young readers, is intended for the adult mind as well, and like the legends of old, is entertaining as well as instructive for readers of all ages. It was originally published in Greece in serial form in 1940, and was republished in a complete volume in 1979.

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Alfonso Reyes and Spain: His Dialogue with Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Ortega y Gasset, Jiménez, and Gómez de la Serna
By Barbara Bockus Aponte
University of Texas Press, 1972

Alfonso Reyes, the great humanist and man of letters of contemporary Spanish America, began his literary career just before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He spearheaded the radical shift in Mexico’s cultural and philosophical orientation as a leading member of the famous “Athenaeum Generation.” The crucial years of his literary formation, however, were those he spent in Spain (1914–1924). He arrived in Madrid unknown and unsure of his future. When he left, he had achieved both professional maturity and wide acclaim as a writer. This book has, as its basis, the remarkable correspondence between Reyes and some of the leading spirits of the Spanish intellectual world, covering not only his years in Spain but also later exchanges of letters. Although Reyes always made it clear that he was a Mexican and a Spanish American, he became a full-fledged member of the closed aristocracy of Spanish literature. It was the most brilliant period in Spain’s cultural history since the Golden Age, and it is richly represented here by Reyes’ association with five of its most important figures: Miguel de Unamuno and Ramón del Valle-Inclán were of the great “Generation of 98”; among the younger writers were José Ortega y Gasset, essayist and philosopher; the Nobel poet Juan Ramón Jiménez; and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a precursor of surrealism. Alfonso Reyes maintained lifelong friendships with these men, and their exchanges of letters are of a dual significance. They reveal how the years in Spain allowed Reyes to pursue his vocation independently, thereby prompting him to seek universal values. Coincidentally, they provide a unique glimpse into the inner world of those friends—and their dreams of a new Spain.
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Algerian Chronicles
Albert Camus
Harvard University Press, 2013
Library of Congress DT295.C293 2013 | Dewey Decimal 965.04

More than 50 years after independence, Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958—the year the war caused the collapse of the Fourth French Republic—it is one of Albert Camus’ most political works: an exploration of his commitment to Algeria.
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All My Days Are Saturdays
Sam Pickering
University of Missouri Press, 2014
Library of Congress AC8.P658 2014 | Dewey Decimal 814.54

A New York Times article once stated that “the art of the essay as delivered by [Sam] Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble.” As Pickering himself puts it, “Well, I have gotten considerably older, and humor has come to mean more and more to me. And if I’m on the front porch, I am in a rocking chair.” All My Days Are Saturdays offers fifteen new pieces in which he ponders a world that has changed and, in new ways, still delights him. This collection features Pickering writing about teaching and his recent retirement, visits to various locales, and, as he tell us, “the many people I meet…who tell me their stories, small tales that make one laugh and sigh.”
Distinctive and unmistakable, Pickering’s style deftly mixes the colloquial language of everyday life with references to a lifetime of extensive reading. The seamless blend of these two worlds in his writing is indicative of how they fuse together in his daily life. As Pickering puts it, “All my life I have roamed libraries, almost as much as I have roamed the natural world. I try to get at many truths, but when I tell the truth, I ‘tell it slant.’ I do so to describe life as it is and indeed celebrate that ‘as it is.’”
“Pickering is a master of his craft, one of the finest of personal essayists around, and these essays bear many of the characteristics of his other volumes—reflections on his everyday activities and on individuals around him, humorous exchanges with his wife, and so forth. But this volume seems to have something else as well. We find here a thoughtful meditation on time and self and relative old age demonstrating a close attention to the natural world—a tone not unlike Thoreau’s at times.” -- Fred C. Hobson, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author or editor of fourteen books, most recently A Southern Enigma: Essays on the U.S. South
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All Night Movie
Alicia Borinsky
Northwestern University Press, 2002
Library of Congress PQ7798.12.O687C5613 2002 | Dewey Decimal 863.64

An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.
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All the Leavings
Laurie Easter
Oregon State University Press, 2021
Library of Congress F882.J8E37 2021 | Dewey Decimal 979.525092

In All the Leavings, Laurie Easter deftly navigates both the rugged terrain of the human heart and life on the edge of wilderness. Her contemplative, often experimental essays explore love and risk: giving birth in a rustic cabin; the destructive power of wildfires; losing friends to cancer, AIDS, suicide, and meth; encounters with birds and mountain lions; and the unthinkable potential loss of a child to illness. Drawing from a reverence for the natural world—perilous yet rich with beauty—that is deeply rooted in a wild Oregon, All the Leavings examines what it means to love, lose, and find strength in facing adversity.
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All Who Belong May Enter
Nicholas Ward
Autumn House Press, 2021 Dewey Decimal 814.6

A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity.
 
Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. 
 
All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. 
 
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All Who Belong May Enter
Nicholas Ward
Autumn House Press, 2021

A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity.
 
Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. 
 
All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. 
 
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All-American Redneck: Variations on an Icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks
Matthew J. Ferrence
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Library of Congress PS173.R34F47 2014 | Dewey Decimal 810.9355

In contemporary culture, the stereotypical trappings of “redneckism” have been appropriated
for everything from movies like Smokey and the Bandit to comedy acts like Larry the
Cable Guy. Even a recent president, George W. Bush, shunned his patrician pedigree in favor
of cowboy “authenticity” to appeal to voters. Whether identified with hard work and patriotism
or with narrow-minded bigotry, the Redneck and its variants have become firmly
established in American narrative consciousness.

This provocative book traces the emergence of the faux-Redneck within the context of
literary and cultural studies. Examining the icon’s foundations in James Fenimore Cooper’s
Natty Bumppo—“an ideal white man, free of the boundaries of civilization”—and the degraded
rural poor of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Matthew Ferrence shows how Redneck
stereotypes were further extended in Deliverance, both the novel and the film, and in
a popular cycle of movies starring Burt Reynolds in the 1970s and ’80s, among other manifestations.
As a contemporary cultural figure, the author argues, the Redneck represents
no one in particular but offers a model of behavior and ideals for many. Most important,
it has become a tool—reductive, confining, and (sometimes, almost) liberating—by which
elite forces gather and maintain social and economic power. Those defying its boundaries,
as the Dixie Chicks did when they criticized President Bush and the Iraq invasion, have
done so at their own peril. Ferrence contends that a refocus of attention to the complex
realities depicted in the writings of such authors as Silas House, Fred Chappell, Janisse Ray,
and Trudier Harris can help dislodge persistent stereotypes and encourage more nuanced
understandings of regional identity.

In a cultural moment when so-called Reality Television has turned again toward popular
images of rural Americans (as in, for example, Duck Dynasty and Moonshiners), All-
American Redneck
reveals the way in which such images have long been manipulated for
particular social goals, almost always as a means to solidify the position of the powerful at
the expense of the regional.
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The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry
Doug Rutledge, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Library of Congress PS3555.S76Z54 2019 | Dewey Decimal 811.6

Of Angie Estes, the poet and critic Stephanie Burt has written that she “has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world.” In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes’s work—from a review of her first chapbook to a reading of a poem appearing in her 2018 book, Parole—that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigor and genuine awe.

In addition to presenting an overview of critical reactions to Estes’s oeuvre, reviews by Langdon Hammer, Julianne Buchsbaum, and Christopher Spaide also provide a helpful context for approaching a poet who claims to distrust narrative. Original essays consider the craft of Estes’s poetry and offer literary analysis. Ahren Warner uses line breaks to explore a postmodern analysis of Estes’s work. Mark Irwin looks at her poetic structure. Lee Upton employs a feminist perspective to explore Estes’s use of italics, and B. K. Fischer looks at the way she uses dance as a poetic image. Doug Rutledge considers her relationship to Dante and to the literary tradition through her use of ekphrasis. An interview with Estes herself, in which she speaks of a poem as an “arranged place . . . where experience happens,” adds her perspective to the mix, at turns resonating with and challenging her critics.

The Allure of Grammar will be useful for teachers and students of creative writing interested in the craft of non-narrative poetry. Readers of contemporary poetry who already admire Estes will find this collection insightful, while those not yet familiar with her work will come away from these essays eager to seek out her books.
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Alms for Oblivion
Edward DahlbergForeword by Sir Herbert Read
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Alms for Oblivion was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume makes available in book form a collection of seventeen essays by Edward Dahlberg, who has been called one of the great unrecognized writers of our time. Some of the selections have never been published before; others have appeared previously only in magazines of limited circulation. There is a foreword by Sir Herbert Read.

The individual essays are on a wide range of subjects: literary, historical, philosophical, personal. The longest is a discussion of Herman Melville's work entitled "Moby-Dick - A Hamitic Dream." The fate of authors at the hands of reviewers is the subject of the essay called "For Sale." In "No Love and No Thanks" the author draws a characterization of our time. He presents a critique of the poet William Carlos Williams in "Word-Sick and Place- Crazy," and a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Peopleless Fiction." In "My Friends Stieglitz, Anderson, and Dreiser" he discusses not only Alfred Stieglitz, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser but other personalities as well. He also writes of Sherwood Anderson in "Midwestern Fable." In "Cutpurse Philosopher" the subject is William James. "Florentine Codex" is about the conquistadores. Other essays in the collection are the following: "Randolph Bourne," "Our Vanishing Cooperative Colonies," "Chivers and Poe," "Domestic Manners of Americans," "Robert McAlmon: A Memoir," "The Expatriates: A Memoir," and an essay on Allen Tate.

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Alternative Alcott by Louisa May Alcott
Showalter, Elaine
Rutgers University Press, 1988
Library of Congress PS1016.S56 1988 | Dewey Decimal 813.4

The discovery in recent years of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous sensation stories has made readers and scholars increasingly aware of her accomplishments beyond her most famous novel, Little Women, one of the great international best-sellers of all time. What has been recovered throws new light on the children's books and asks us to question our assumptions about the suposedly staid and sentimental Alcott.

Alternative Alcott includes works never before reprinted, including "How I Went Out to Service," "My Contraband," and "Psyche's Art." It also contains Behind a Mask, her most important sensation story; the full and correct text of her last unfinished novel, Diana and Persis; "Transcendental Wild Oats"; Hospital Sketches; and Alcott's other important texts on nineteenth-century social history. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
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Amateur Sugar Maker
Noel Perrin
Brandeis University Press, 1992

Noel Perrin’s delightful account of building a sugarhouse and making maple sugar in Vermont first appeared twenty years ago. Like a sturdy New England farmhouse, Perrin has added to it over the years to reflect his subsequent sugaring experiences, and includes in this latest edition a “postpostpostscript.” His celebration of simple, hard work to produce a “quite wonderful, maybe even sacred article” has not been diminished by plastic tubing, thrip infestations, and the strange new market for Vermont sap water.
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"The Amber Gods" and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford
Bendixen, Alfred
Rutgers University Press, 1989
Library of Congress PS2896.B46 1989 | Dewey Decimal 813.4

A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace—the girls of Little Women making do until father comes home from the war. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them. Her style, though ornate by our 20th century standards, adds to its atmosphere, like heavy, Baroque furniture in a large and creepy house.

The title story presents a self-centered and captivating woman who ruthlessly steals her orphan cousin's lover. In "Circumstance," a pioneer woman returning home through the woods at night is caught by a panther; her husband, who has come to save her, can only watch from the ground as she sings for her life, pinned in a tree. A train engineer hallucinates again and again that he is running over his wife. And Mrs. Craven, who's a bit "weak" in the head, mindlessly repeats "Three men went down cellar and only two came up." These stories combine elements of the best ghost stories—timing, detail, and character —with just enough chill to make you think twice about turning out your lights at night. 
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American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume One
Edited by Michael J. Altman
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Library of Congress BL2525.A48 2021 | Dewey Decimal 200.973

Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from a church-architecture mecca of Southeast Indiana to what an atheist parent believes
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume One is the first in a series of annual anthologies published in partnership with the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. The American Examples initiative gathers scholars from around the world for a series of workshops designed to generate big questions about the study of religion in America. Bypassing traditional white Protestant narratives in favor of new perspectives on belief, social formation, and identity, American Examples fellows offer dynamic perspectives on American faith that challenge our understandings of both America and religion as categories.
 
In the first volume of this exciting academic project, five topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the potential applications of religious history. The five chapters of this inaugural volume use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask larger theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars beyond the subfield of American religious history.
 
Prea Persaud’s chapter explores the place of Hinduism among the “creole religions” of the Caribbean, while Hannah Scheidt captures what atheist parents say to each other about value systems. Travis Warren Cooper explains how the modernist church architecture of Columbus, Indiana, became central to that city’s identity. Samah Choudhury dissects how Muslim American comedians navigate Western ideas of knowledge and self to make their jokes, and their own selves legible, and Emily D. Crews uses ethnographic fieldwork to read the female reproductive body among Nigerian Pentecostal congregations. Editor Michael J. Altman also provides a brief, rich introduction assessing the state of the discipline of religious history and how the American Examples project can lead the field forward.
 
Visit americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on the group and news about upcoming projects.
 
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American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two
Edited by Samah Choudhury, Prea Persaud, and Michael J. Altman
University of Alabama Press, 2022

Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from SoulCycle to Mark Twain
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two, is the second in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this dynamic academic project, nine scholars with diverse topics and methodologies vividly reimagine the meaning of all three words in the phrase “American religious history.” The essays use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students beyond the subfield of American religious history.

Cody Musselman uses a Weberian analysis to explore questions of identity, authority, and authenticity in the world of SoulCycle while Zachary T. Smith finds commonality between the rhetoric and practices of scholarship and mixed martial arts. Erik Kline provides a new perspective on the psychedelic mysticism of the 1960s, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford takes stock of the cultural power of parody in Mark Twain’s last work of fiction. Christopher Cannon Jones examines the reciprocal relationship between religious texts and cultural contexts by comparing early Mormon missions to Hawai‘i and Jamaica and Lindsey Jackson explores what debates over circumcision can tell us about gender stereotypes and motherhood. Dana Lloyd uses the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association as a case study in order to consider how Indigenous religion and sovereignty have been understood and adjudicated in the American legal system. Matt Sheedy studies the identity categories of “atheist” and “ex-Muslim” and Brad Stoddard uses ethnographic fieldwork to evaluate the role of religious pluralism in regulating and policing correctional institutions. Editors Samah Choudhury and Prea Persaud provide an introduction that reconsiders the trajectory of the American Examples project in light of the siege on the US Capitol in January 2021 and the continuing COVID pandemic.

Visit americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on upcoming workshop dates and future projects.

CONTRIBUTORS
Michael J. Altman / Samah Choudhury / Lindsey Jackson / Christopher Cannon Jones /  / Erik Kline / Dana Lloyd / Cody Musselman / Prea Persaud / Matt Sheedy / Zachary T. Smith / Brad Stoddard / Brook Wilensky-Lanford

 
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American Homes
Ryan Ridge
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Library of Congress PS3618.I3916A84 2015 | Dewey Decimal 818.6

Poetry / Fiction / Art / Aphorisms. American Homes incorporates poetry, prose, and various schematic devices, including dozens of illustrations by the artist Jacob Heustis, to create a cracked narrative of the domestic spaces we inhabit.
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An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant
Kellman, Steven G
Rutgers University Press, 2009
Library of Congress E184.R8R2 2009 | Dewey Decimal 305.89591073

At the turn of the twentieth century, M. E. Ravage set off in steerage for America, one of almost two million Jews who, like millions of others from eastern and southern Europe, were lured by tales of worldly success. Seventeen years after arriving on Ellis Island, Ravage had mastered a new language, found success in college, and engagingly penned in English this vivid account of the ordeals and pleasures of departure and assimilation.

Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and introduction that place the memoir within historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of "America" and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.

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American Political Plays after 9/11
Edited by Allan Havis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010
Library of Congress PS627.P65A437 2010 | Dewey Decimal 812.54080358

American Political Plays after 9/11 is a diverse collection of bold, urgent, and provocative plays that respond to the highly charged, post 9/11 political landscape. Sparked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequently fueled by a series of controversial events—the Iraq war, the passing and enforcement of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the revelation of torture and other scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison—American political theater is currently experiencing a surge in activity. The plays in this collection include The Guys by Anne Nelson, At the Vanishing Point by Naomi Iizuka, The Venus de Milo Is Armed by Kia Corthron, Back of the Throat by Yusseff El Guindi, Three Nights in Prague by Allan Havis, and Question 27, Question 28 by Chay Yew.

The characters range from a New York City fire captain trying to respectfully memorialize eight of his lost comrades, to the citizens of a hog-killing Louisville neighborhood who poignantly exemplify the underside of the economic crisis, to an Arab American citizen being harshly (and possibly unfairly) interrogated by two officers as a “person of interest.” Though not all of the plays deal explicitly with the Al Qaeda attacks, they collectively reveal themes of sorrow and anxiety, moral indignation, alarmist self-preservation, and economic and social insecurity stemming from the United States’ fairly sudden shift from cold war superpower to vulnerable target.

The lively introduction by Allan Havis includes a brief history of political theater in the United States, an extensive discussion about how theater communities responded to 9/11, and an informative analysis of the six plays in the book.  A collection of dramatic material framed by this significant historical event, AmericanPolitical Plays after 9/11 will be indispensable for theater and cultural studies scholars and students.

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American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation
Baym, Nina
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Library of Congress PS217.S34B39 2002 | Dewey Decimal 810.9356

Winner of the 2000 Hubbell Award from the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America

Choice Outstanding Academic Title​

During the nineteenth century, the content and institutional organization of the sciences evolved dramatically, altering the public's understanding of knowledge. As science grew in importance, many women of letters tried to incorporate it into a female worldview. Nina Baym explores the responses to science displayed in a range of writings by American women. Conceding that they could not become scientists, women insisted, however, that they were capable of understanding science and participating in its discourse. They used their access to publishing to advocate the study and transmission of scientific information to the general public.

Bayms book includes biographies and a full exploration of these women's works. Among those considered are:
• Almira Phelps, author of Familiar Lectures on Botany (it sold 350,000 copies)
• Sarah Hale, who filled Godey's Lady's Book with science articles
• Catharine Esther Beecher, who based her domestic advice on scientific information
• Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the actual ghostwriter of her husband's popular science essays
• Emily Dickinson, whose poetry is replete with scientific images.

Baym also investigates science in women's novels, writing by and about women doctors, and the scientific claims advanced by women's spiritualist movements. This book truly breaks new ground, outlining a field of inquiry that few have noted exists.
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Amorous Games: A Critical Edition of Les adevineaux amoureux
By James Woodrow Hassell
University of Texas Press, 1974

Among the more interesting incunabula preserved in the Salle de la Réserve of the Bibliothèque National in Paris are the apparently unique copies of two editions, very similar in content, of a work entitled Les Adevineaux amoureux. In much more comprehensive form Les Adevineaux amoureux is preserved in a manuscript belonging to the Musée Conde at Chantilly. All three texts, in medieval French, appear to date from the 1470s. The present work, Amorous Games, is a critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux. The Amorous Games is a miscellany whose principal unifying force is the compiler's aim to provide a manual of conversation and entertainment for polite society. Included are series of questions and answers belonging to the well-established medieval tradition of the "Demandes amoureuses"; a very large number of riddles, mainly folk riddles; and "venditions en amours," little poems that apparently came into being as part of a social game. Students of medieval French literature, particularly those with a penchant for some of the minor genres, will find new material in the Amorous Games. Folklorists will discover what is probably the largest collection of riddles bequeathed to us by medieval France and also much that is of value to specialists in the proverb and folk tale. For this critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux Professor Hassell has selected the Chantilly manuscript, because it is the most complete and also because it had not yet been published. The Appendix contains the text of the more complete of the two incunabula and the significant variants appearing in the other fifteenth-century printed edition. The manuscript text has been collated with that of the incunabula, and copious notes and an index to the riddles have been supplied. In his Introduction Professor Hassell discusses in detail the major classes and subclasses of the riddle, drawing on the work of Petsch, Taylor, Abrahams, and other scholars of the genre.
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Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters
Linda Hunt Beckman
Ohio University Press, 2000
Library of Congress PR4886.L25Z56 2010 | Dewey Decimal 828.809

After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature.

This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy’s importance in her own time and in ours.

As an educated Jewish woman with homoerotic desires, Levy felt the strain of combating the structures of British society in the 1880s, the decade in which she built her career and moved in London’s literary and bohemian circles. Unwilling to cut herself off from her Jewish background, she had the additional burden of attempting to bridge the gap between communities.

In Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters Linda Hunt Beckman examines Levy’s writings and other cultural documents for insight into her emotional and intellectual life. This groundbreaking study introduces us to a woman well deserving of a place in literary and cultural history.

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The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
James P. Allen
SBL Press, 2005
Library of Congress BL2430.P9713 2005 | Dewey Decimal 299.3138

The Pyramid Texts are the oldest body of extant literature from ancient Egypt. First carved on the walls of the burial chambers in the pyramids of kings and queens of the Old Kingdom, they provide the earliest comprehensive view of the way in which the ancient Egyptians understood the structure of the universe, the role of the gods, and the fate of human beings after death. Their importance lies in their antiquity and in their endurance throughout the entire intellectual history of ancient Egypt. This volume contains the complete translation of the Pyramid Texts, including new texts recently discovered and published. It incorporates full restorations and readings indicated by post-Old Kingdom copies of the texts and is the first translation that presents the texts in the order in which they were meant to be read in each of the original sources.
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The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Second Edition
James P. Allen
SBL Press, 2015
Library of Congress BL2430.P9713 2015 | Dewey Decimal 299.3138

Completely revised and updated

James P. Allen provides a translation of the oldest corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the six royal pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (ca. 2350–2150 BCE). Allen’s revisions take into account recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar.

Features:

  • Sequential translations based on all available sources, including texts newly discovered in the last decade
  • Texts numbered according to the most widely used numbering system with new numbers from the latest 2013 concordance
  • Translations reflect the primarily atemporal verbal system of Old Egyptian, which conveys the timeless quality that the text’s authors understood the texts to have
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And No Birds Sing: Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Edited by Craig Waddell. Foreword by Paul Brooks. Afterword by Linda Lear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000
Library of Congress QH545.P4C3833 2000 | Dewey Decimal 363.7384

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson’s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson’s life and outlines the attention that Carson’s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson’s life and work.

Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring’seffectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

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Andre Malraux: An Age of Oppression
Roberta Newnham
Intellect Books, 2013

Anecdotal Theory
Jane Gallop
Duke University Press, 2002
Library of Congress PN98.W64G33 2002 | Dewey Decimal 801.9509048

"Anecdote" and "theory" have diametrically opposed connotations: humorous versus serious, specific versus general, trivial versus overarching, short versus grand. Anecdotal Theory cuts through these oppositions to produce theory with a sense of humor, theorizing which honors the uncanny detail of lived experience. Challenging academic business as usual, renowned literary scholar Jane Gallop argues that all theory is bound up with stories and urges theorists to pay attention to the "trivial," quotidian narratives that theory all too often represses.

Published during the 1990s, these essays are united through a common methodological engagement—writing that recounts a personal anecdote and then attempts to read that anecdote for the theoretical insights it affords. Gallop addresses many of the major questions of feminist theory, regularly revisiting not only ‘70s feminism, but also poststructuralism and the academy, for, as Gallop explains, the practice of anecdotal theory derives from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism. Whether addressing issues of pedagogy, the sexual position one occupies when on the academic job-market, bad-girl feminists, or the notion of sisterhood, these essays exemplify theory grappling with its own erotics, theory connected to the real. They are bold, illuminating, and—dare we say—fun.

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Angeleno Days: An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics
Gregory Orfalea
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Library of Congress PS3565.R427Z46 2009 | Dewey Decimal 814.54

Though he has spent half of his life elsewhere, Gregory Orfalea has remained obsessed with Los Angeles. That “brutal, beautiful city along the Pacific sea” shaped him and led to a series of essays originally published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. These deeply moving pieces are gathered here together for the first time.

Populated with fascinating characters—the Angelenos of Orfalea’s life—these essays tell the story of the author’s trials. He returns to Los Angeles to teach, trying to reconcile the LA of his childhood with the city he now faces. He takes on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shocking tragedy that took the lives of his father and sister.

With more than 400,000 Arab Americans in Los Angeles—probably surpassing Detroit as the largest contingent in America—Orfalea also explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq.

Angeleno Days takes the memoir and personal essay to rare heights. Orfalea is a deeply human writer who reveals not only what it means to be human in America now, but also what it will take to remain human in the days to come. These essays soar, confound, reveal, and strike at our senses and sensibilities, forcing us to think and feel in new ways.
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Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs: Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Ohio University Press, 2002
Library of Congress PR878.M87C58 2002 | Dewey Decimal 823.809357

Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre examines Victorian constructions of music to advance patriotism, Christianity, culture, and domestic harmony, and suggests that often these goals were undermined by political tensions in song texts or “immoral sensuality” in the “spectacle” of live music-making.

Professor Clapp-Itnyre turns her focus to the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, who present complex engagements with those musical genres most privileged by Victorian society: folk songs, religious hymns, and concert music.

Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs recovers the pervasive ambiguities of the Victorian musical period, ambiguities typically overlooked by both literary scholars and musicologists. To the literary critic and cultural historian, Professor Clapp-Itnyre demonstrates the necessity of further exploring the complete aesthetic climate behind some of the Victorian period’s most powerful literary works. And to the feminist scholar and the musicologist, Clapp-Itnyre reveals the complexities of music as both an oppressive cultural force and an expressive, creative outlet for women.

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Anger, Mercy, Revenge
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
University of Chicago Press, 2010
Library of Congress PA6665.A1 2010 | Dewey Decimal 878.0109

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities.

Anger, Mercy, Revenge comprises three key writings: the moral essays On Anger and On Clemency—which were penned as advice for the then young emperor, Nero—and the Apocolocyntosis, a brilliant satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Friend and tutor, as well as philosopher, Seneca welcomed the age of Nero in tones alternately serious, poetic, and comic—making Anger, Mercy, Revenge a work just as complicated, astute, and ambitious as its author.

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Anglicanus ortus: A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century
Henry of Huntingdon
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012
Library of Congress RM666.H33H456 2012 | Dewey Decimal 615.3210942

Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich
Krista Ratcliffe
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995
Library of Congress PS152.R33 1996 | Dewey Decimal 810.992870904

Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric.

Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies.

Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes’ "The Old Rhetoric" to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of— and apart from—these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy.

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Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology
Mary Ellis Gibson
Ohio University Press, 2011
Library of Congress PR9495.25.A64 2011 | Dewey Decimal 821.914080954

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh. The anthology brings together poets who were in fact colleagues, competitors, and influences on each other. The historical scope of the anthology, beginning with the famous Orientalist Sir William Jones and the anonymous “Anna Maria” and ending with Indian poets publishing in fin-de-siècle London, will enable teachers and students to understand what brought Kipling early fame and why at the same time Tagore’s Gitanjali became a global phenomenon. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 puts all parties to the poetic conversation back together and makes their work accessible to American audiences.With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection significantly reshapes the understanding of English language literary culture in India. It allows scholars to experience the diversity of poetic forms created in this period and to understand the complex religious, cultural, political, and gendered divides that shaped them.

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Annali d'Italianistica: The New Italy and the Jews from Massimo d'Azeglio to Primo Levi
druker
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018

Founded in 1983, Annali d’italianistica has become synonymous with timely and fundamental scholarship on Italy’s literary culture, employing broad historical, cultural, and literary perspectives that are of interest to a wide variety of scholars. Published annually and monographic in nature, the journal uses as its point of departure the study of Italian literature and the Humanities more generally to foster scholarly excellence at all levels. Annali d’italianistica is receptive to a variety of topics, critical approaches, and theoretical perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries and span several centuries, from the beginning of Italy’s cultural history to the present.
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Annali d’Italianistica: Violence Resistance Tolerance Sacrifice in Italy's Literary & Cultural History
Chiara Ferrari
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017

The Annotated Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 2012
Library of Congress PS1603.M55 2011 | Dewey Decimal 814.3

Emerson remains one of America’s least understood writers, having spawned neither school nor follower. Those wishing to discover or reacquaint themselves with Emerson’s writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than David Mikics in this richly illustrated Annotated Emerson.
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The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart
Edited by Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991
Library of Congress PR3687.S7Z48 1990 | Dewey Decimal 821.6

The only collection of all known letters of Christopher Smart provides the best psychological explanation to date of that complex and elusive eighteenth-century poet.

The significant characteristics that distinguish Smart’s prose letters from his poetry, Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony note, are that his letters were requests for assistance while his verses were bequests, gifts in which he set great store. Indeed, it was Smart’s lifelong conviction that he was a poet of major importance.

As Smart biographer Karina Williamson notes, "The splendidly informative and vivaciously written accounts of the circumstances surrounding each letter, or group of letters, add up to what is in effect a miniature biography."

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Another Way the River Has: Taut True Tales from the Northwest
Robin Cody
Oregon State University Press, 2010
Library of Congress F852.3.C63 2010 | Dewey Decimal 979.5

Another Way the River Has collects Robin Cody’s finest nonfiction writings, many appearing for the first time in print. Cody’s prose rings with a sense of place. He is a native speaker who probes the streams and woods and salmon that run to the heart of what it means to live and love, to work and play, in Oregon.

His characters—from loggers to fishers to cowboys to the kids on his school bus—are smart and curious, often off-beat, always vivid. Cody brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest, and Northwest literature, distinctive.

“A rock, you know, will sink like a stone in water. But a flat rock, slung spinningly near the water surface and at an angel parallel to it, will go skipping across the water in defiance of gravity and common sense. How cool is that?! The first time a boy pulls this off ranks just short of first-time sex on the scale of things he will want to do over and over whenever he can and as long as he lives.”

-from “The Clackamas River”

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Another Year Finds Me in Texas: The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens
By Vicki Adams Tongate
University of Texas Press, 2016
Library of Congress E628.T66 2016 | Dewey Decimal 976.405092

Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her?

Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

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Antonina
Evgeniya Tur
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Library of Congress PG3418.T75A8513 1996 | Dewey Decimal 891.733

Patterned on the novels of the Brontë sisters, Antonina is a poignant account of a young Russian whose life is shaped by the cruel neglect of her stepparents, the financial ruin of her father and husband, and—the centerpiece of the novel—her failed love affair with a sensitive but weak young man.
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Apocalypse, Darling
Barrie Jean Borich
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Library of Congress PS3552.O7529A66 2018 | Dewey Decimal 818.5403


From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world.
 
 
As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair. 
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Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Anthony Harkins
West Virginia University Press, 2019
Library of Congress F210.A58 2019 | Dewey Decimal 974

2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction


With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

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Archaeologists in Print: Publishing for the People
Amara Thornton
University College London, 2018

Archaeologists in Print is a history of popular publishing in archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a pivotal period of expansion and development in both archaeology and publishing. It examines how British archaeologists produced books and popular periodical articles for a nonscholarly audience and explores the rise in archaeologists’ public visibility. Notably, it analyzes women’s experiences in archaeology alongside better-known male contemporaries as shown in their books and archives. In the background of this narrative is the history of Britain’s imperial expansion and contraction, and the evolution of modern tourism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Archaeologists exploited these factors to gain public and financial support and interest, and build and maintain a reading public for their work, supported by the seasonal nature of excavation and tourism. Reinforcing these publishing activities through personal appearances in the lecture hall, exhibition space and site tour, and in new media—film, radio and television—archaeologists shaped public understanding of archaeology.

The image of the archaeologist as adventurous explorer of foreign lands, part spy, part foreigner, eternally alluring, solidified during this period. That legacy continues, undimmed, today.
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Archaic Greek Poetry: An Anthology
Selected and translated by Barbara Hughes Fowler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
Library of Congress PA3622.F69 1992 | Dewey Decimal 881.0108

     With this anthology, Barbara Hughes Fowler presents the most comprehensive selection of Greek poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. ever published in English.  Fowler’s brilliant translations provide access to six Homeric Hymns, eight selections from Bakchylides, twelve odes of Pindar, selections from the iambicists and elegists, virtually all of Archilochos and of the surviving lyricists, including Sappho, and a number of anonymous poems about work, play, and politics.  Archaic poets delighted in all that was radiant and delicate, and their poems should be read for their narrative charm, celebration of nature, and playful sensuality.  There are tantalizing fragments of fables here, as well as poems of friendship and warfare, love and  colonization.  Along with her notes and bibliography, Fowler has provided a biographical list of poets and a glossary of proper names. 
     In addition to its breadth, Archaic Greek Poetry stands alone as the only volume of its kind translated by a contemporary published poet.  Perhaps the most elegant translator of ancient Greek poetry into modern English, Barbara Hughes Fowler offers translations true to the original Greek while providing modern readers with superb examples of the beauty of lyric poetry.  Students and scholars of classical and comparative literature, ancient history, and art history, as well as lovers of lyric poetry, will enthusiastically welcome this volume.
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The Architectural Novel: The Construction of National Identities in Nineteenth-Century England and France: William Ainsworth, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas
Nicola Minott-Ahl
Sussex Academic Press, 2022

Scholars in disciplines from architecture and the fine arts, to the various branches of history and social studies, will find this study timely given contemporary European controversies over what constitutes national identity and what parts are played by race, philosophy and religion, economics, immigration, and invasion. Many major European national identities barely predate the nineteenth century and were shaped not just by wars, philosophies, industrial change, and governmental policies, but also by artistic manipulation of how people perceived public spaces: landscapes, cityscapes, religious and cultural structures, museums, and monuments commemorating conflict. Among the most masterful manipulators of the day were popular nineteenth-century French and British novelists, who gave famous buildings a special prominence in their writing. Some, like Victor Hugo, are still read and respected by scholars. Others, like Alexandre Dumas, though still widely read, are undervalued by contemporary critics. Still others, like William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific English writer, are all but forgotten. These three writers authored architectural novels which gave major ancient Gothic buildings a new and portable cultural presence well beyond their physical location. During these revolutionary times, when national symbolism was being questioned and challenged, the threatened rupture with the past was admirably addressed through their art.
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The Arms of Morpheus: Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism
Stephen McNeilly
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2007

The Arms of Morpheus:Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism addresses the relatively untapped subject of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his place within the mystical tradition. Highlighting the congruencies and disparities of his ideas with those mystics and visionaries who preceded him and those that followed after, the volume opens with a wonderful essay on Swedenborg by the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz and is followed by essays that offer important comparisons between Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme, Rudolf Steiner, Madame Guyon, the Kabbalah, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Paracelsus.
 
This volume, the fifth in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society series, contains the following seven essays:
 
• Czeslaw Milosz, “Swedenborg the Mystic”
• Ariel Hessayon, “Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg and Their Readers”
• Gary Lachman, “Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner and the Hypnagogic State”
• Richard Lines, “The Feminine Mysticism of Madame Guyon”
• Reuben Bell, “Swedenborg and the Kabbalah”
• James Wilson, “Swedenborg and Paracelsus”
• José Antonio Antón-Pacheco, “Ibn ‘Arabi and Swedenborg”
 
Also included are a preface by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg, biographies of the subjects of the essays, and an index.
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Art for the Ladylike: An Autobiography through Other Lives
Whitney Otto
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
Library of Congress PS3565.T795Z46 2021 | Dewey Decimal 814.00803552

“In this inviting blend of biography and memoir, novelist Otto (How to Make an American Quilt) examines her life in terms of the women artists who influenced her.…Otto provides a fascinating tour of art through the lens of her own experience. Creatives of all sorts will enjoy [her] wide-ranging insights.” —Publishers Weekly

In Art for the Ladylike, Whitney Otto limns the lives of eight pioneering women photographers—Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne, and Grete Stern—to in turn excavate her own writer’s life. The result is an affecting exploration of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an artist, and the perils and rewards of being both at once. In considering how feminism, career, and motherhood were entangled throughout her subjects’ lives as they tirelessly sought to render their visions and paved the way for others creating within the bounds of domesticity, Otto assesses her own struggles with balancing writing and the pulls of home life. Ultimately, she ponders the persistent question that artistic women face in a world that devalues women’s ambition: If what we love is what we are, how do those of us with multiple loves forge lives with room for everything?
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The Art of Good Manners
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014

While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, this petite guide offers time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.
           
The Art of Good Manners ranges broadly across topics including courtship, children’s behavior, and civilized conversation before taking the reader through each course at a dinner party, where readers are reminded to neither gurgle the soup nor to make haste with the fruit course since “to peel an orange, apple or pear with a fruit knife and fork requires some practice.”
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Manners is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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The Art of Letter Writing
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014

While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, the petite guides in the Bodleian Library’s series offer time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.

The Art of Letter Writing provides more than fifty examples of well-crafted correspondence that will lend confidence whether one needs to break off an engagement, accept an invitation to a country house weekend, complain about a courier, or write to a countess.
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Letter Writing is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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Artaud 1937 Apocalypse: Letters from Ireland
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2019

Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II.

During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
 
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Artificial Southerner: Equivocations and Love Songs
Philip Martin
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
Library of Congress F216.2.M37 2001 | Dewey Decimal 975.043

The Artificial Southerner tracks the manifestations and ramifications of "Southern identity"—the relationship among a self-conscious, invented regionalism, the real distinctiveness of Southern culture, and the influence of the South in America. In these essays columnist Philip Martin explores the region and those who have both fled and embraced it. He offers lyric portraits of Southerners real, imagined, and absentee: musicians (James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash), writers (Richard Ford, Eudora Welty), politicians (Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter). He also considers such topics as the architecture of E. Fay Jones, the biracial nature of country music, and the idea of "white trash." "Every American has a South within," he says, "a conquered territory, an old wound . . . a scar." His work meditates on the rock and roll, the literature, the life, and the love which proceed from that inner, self-created South.
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The Artist in New York: Letters to Jean Charlot and unpublished writings, 1925-1929.
By José Clemente Orozco
University of Texas Press, 1974

In his Foreword to this edition, Jean Charlot says: "An unusual feature of Orozco's letters is the great deal that he has to say about art. That one artist writing to another would emphasize art as his subject seems normal enough to the American reader. Yet, within the context of the Mexico of those days, the fact remains exceptional. The patria Orozco was leaving behind had, even from the point of view of its artists, many cares more pressing than art." The letters and unpublished writings of Orozco from this period (1925-1929) describe an important period of transition in the artist's life, from his departure from Mexico, almost as a defeated man, to the period just before he received the great mural commissions—Pomona, The New School for Social Research in New York, Dartmouth—that were to bring him lasting international fame.
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Assault on Paradise
Tatiana Lobo
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Library of Congress PQ7489.2.L58A7313 1998 | Dewey Decimal 863

Assault on Paradise vividly depicts the Conquistadores and the Church invading Central America, impoverishing one world to enrich another. In a fast-paced, bawdy, swashbuckling adventure in Central America of the early 1700s, Costa Rican novelist Tatiana Lobo lays bare the dark legacy of the Conquistadores and the Church. Through the central picaresque story of Pedro Albaran, Lobo dramatizes the intrigues of politicians and the Inquisition and the bloody battles between the native people and the invaders, while simultaneously presenting a reverent poetic recreation of indigenous cosmogony and mystical values which the natives seek to use to drive out the invaders.
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The Astonishment Tapes: Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends
Robin Blaser
University of Alabama Press, 2015
Library of Congress PS3552.L37Z46 2015 | Dewey Decimal 811.54

The edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser
 
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the expertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer.

In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions.

Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twentieth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.
 
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At a Breezy Time of Day: Selected Schall Interviews on Just about Everything
James V. Schall
St. Augustine's Press, 2016
Library of Congress BX1751.3.S265 2016 | Dewey Decimal 230.2

We have books that contain collected essays, verse, and humor. What we see less often are books that contain collected interviews on various topics. Interviews have a certain outside discipline about them. The one interviewed responds to a question someone else asks of him. Often the questions are unexpected, sometimes annoying. Answers have a freshness to them. They can be more personal, frank. 
            The responses in At a Breezy Time of Day are occasioned when someone writes or phones with a request for an interview. There may be a common theme but often side questions come up. We are curious about what someone has to say –  about sports, about God, about Plato, about education, about books, about just about anything. Usually central questions occur. The same question can be answered in different ways. We often have more to say on a given topic than we do say on our first being asked about it.
            These interviews appeared in various on-line and printed sources. Having them collected in one text makes the interview form itself seem more substantial. Interviews too often seem to be passing, ephemeral things, but often we want to hold on to them. There is something more existential about them. Yet there is also something more lightsome about them also. The truth of things seems more bearable when it is spoken, when it has a human voice. 
So, as the title of this collection intimates, we begin with the very first interview in the Garden of Eden. We touch many places and issues. The interview always has somewhere even in its written form the touch of the human voice. The one who interviews invites us to speak, to tell us what we hold, why we hold it. Interviews are themselves part of that engagement in conversation that defines our kind in its search for a full knowledge of what is. 
We know that when we have said the last word, much remains to be said. We can rejoice both in what we know, and in what we know that we do not know. I believe it was Socrates who, in an earlier form of interview at the end of The Apology, alerted us to be aware of what we know and to await the many other interviews that we hope to carry on with so many others of our kind in the Isles of the Blessed.
 
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Aucassin and Nicolette: A Facing-Page Edition and Translation
Robert S. Sturges
Michigan State University Press, 2015
Library of Congress PQ1426.E5S78 2014 | Dewey Decimal 841.1

A comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a “chantefable,” or “song-story,” and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a modern English translation on facing pages. An introduction outlines the text’s background, genre, literary relations, historical contexts, major themes, and relevance to a contemporary audience. Its alternating sections of verse and prose recount a story of love between the aristocratic but distinctly unheroic young lord Aucassin and his beloved Nicolette. Despite familial disapproval, class and ethnic differences, imprisonment, and geographical separation, Nicolette’s single-minded pursuit of Aucassin raises interesting questions about gender roles and their depiction in the Middle Ages. The issue of identity is also addressed, as the identity of Nicolette shifts in terms of class, religion, and ethnicity: born a Muslim princess, she becomes both a slave and a Christian convert, and is eventually recaptured by her Saracen family, much to her displeasure. With its daring escapes, its descriptions of travel to exotic lands, its separations, and its happy reunions, Aucassin and Nicolette is both a classic romantic comedy and an entertaining parody of the romance genre.
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Augustine’s Soliloquies in Old English and in Latin
Leslie Lockett
Harvard University Press, 2022
Library of Congress BR65.A87 2022 | Dewey Decimal 270.2092

A new edition featuring Saint Augustine’s dialogue on immortality from a tenth-century Latin manuscript, accompanied by an Old English vernacular adaptation translated into modern English for the first time in a hundred years.

Around the turn of the tenth century, an anonymous scholar crafted an Old English version of Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Soliloquia, a dialogue exploring the nature of truth and the immortality of the soul. The Old English Soliloquies was, perhaps, inspired by King Alfred the Great’s mandate to translate important Latin works. It retains Augustine’s focus on the soul, but it also explores loyalty—to friends, to one’s temporal lord, and to the Lord God—and it presses toward a deeper understanding of the afterlife. Will we endure a state of impersonal and static forgetfulness, or will we retain our memories, our accrued wisdom, and our sense of individuated consciousness?

This volume presents the first English translation of the complete Old English Soliloquies to appear in more than a century. It is accompanied by a unique edition of Augustine’s Latin Soliloquia, based on a tenth-century English manuscript similar to the one used by the translator, that provides insight into the adaptation process. Both the Latin and Old English texts are newly edited.

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The Author's Dimension: Selected Essays
Christa Wolf
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Library of Congress PT2685.O36A16 1995 | Dewey Decimal 834.914

Spanning the past three decades, these essays focus on the roles of the writer and literature today. In the first half of this series of witty, probing essays on reading and writing, Wolf examines the individual's, in particular the writer's, relationship to society. The final sections, "On War and Peace and Politics" and "The End of the German Democratic Republic," demonstrate the ways in which Wolf's political thinking has evolved and cast light on the political situation in East Germany prior to reunification.

"An important publication, ably served by the editing of Alexander Stephan; the knowledgeable translation by Jan Van Heurck; and Grace Paley's sisterly introduction, which . . . claims at least the later Christa Wolf for a pacifist feminism."—Peter Demetz, New York Times


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The Azure Cloister: Thirty-Five Poems
Carlos Germán Belli
Swan Isle Press, 2021
Library of Congress PQ8497.B43A9813 2021 | Dewey Decimal 861.64

New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.
 
This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the “red midnight sun” of hope. Belli’s contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its “azure cloister.” 
 
Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli’s original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.
 
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1338 books about Literary Collections and 89 1338 books about Literary Collections
 89
 start with A  start with A
The Absent Man
The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt
Charles Duncan
Ohio University Press, 1998

As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson.

Following the highly autobiographical nonfiction produced by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other slave narrative writers, Chesnutt’s complex, multi-layered short fiction transformed the relationship between African-American writers and their readers. But despite generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day, and from such prominent readers as William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Sundquist in ours, Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous place in American literary history.

In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan demonstrates that Chesnutt’s uneasy position in the American literary tradition can be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. Profoundly aware of the delicacy of his situation as a black intellectual at the turn of the century, Chesnutt infused his work with an intricate, enigmatic artistic vision that defies monolithic or unambiguously political interpretation, especially with regard to issues of race and identity that preoccupied him throughout his career.

In this first book-length study of the innovative short fiction, Duncan devotes particular attention to elucidating these sophisticated narrative strategies as the grounding for Chesnutt’s inauguration of a tradition of African-American fiction.

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Absinthe
World Literature in Translation: Volume 27: Through German: Contemporary Literature in Translation
Lauren Beck
Michigan Publishing Services, 2021
The voices of many countries echo through the selection of contemporary literature featured in Absinthe 27: Through German. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland are all represented in this issue, but so are England, Ghana, Israel, Moldova, Romania, Syria, Turkey, and Ukraine. And while Absinthe 27 does have a distinct international flair, it is not a selection of Migrantenliteratur, a category that fences in writers as foreign rather than German or Austrian or Swiss. Rather, the authors represented are all integral to the German-speaking world and its representation, whether the authors were born there, arrived decades ago, or came recently to perhaps find another home, perhaps pass through. Translated and edited by Lauren Beck, Elisabeth Fertig, Ivan Parra Garcia, Lena Grimm, Özlem Karuç, Michaela Kotziers, Elizabeth Sokol, Silke-Maria Weineck, and Veronica Cook Williamson, Through German presents a fuller picture of what it means to live in the Germanosphere in the 21st century.
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Accidental Gravity
Residents, Travelers, and the Landscape of Memory
Bernard Quetchenbach
Oregon State University Press, 2017
The compelling essays in Bernard Quetchenbach’s Accidental Gravity move from upstate New York to the western United States, from urban and suburban places to wild lands. In the first section of the book, he focuses on suburban neighborhoods, where residents respond ambivalently to golf-course geese and other unruly natural presences; in the second section, he juxtaposes these humanized places with Yellowstone National Park. Quetchenbach writes about current environmental issues in the Greater Yellowstone area—wildfire, invasive species, ever-increasing numbers of tourists—in the context of climate change and other contemporary pressures.
 
Accidental Gravity negotiates the difficult edge between a naive belief in an enduring, unassailable natural world and the equally naive belief that human life takes place in some unnatural, more mediated context. The title refers to the accidental but nonetheless meaningful nexus where the personal meets and combines with the universal—those serendipitous moments when the individual life connects to the larger rhythms of time and planet.
 
[more]

Act Like You're Having a Good Time
Essays
Michele Weldon
Northwestern University Press, 2020

Winner, 2021 Gilda Women's Book Award

In this honest and tender collection of essays, award-winning memoirist Michele Weldon asks what it means to be a mature woman seeking a life of purpose and meaning through work, family, and relationships. Facing ageism and invisibility within popular culture, Weldon examines the effects of raising children, striving for applause, failing expectations, forming new friendships, reconciling lost dreams, and restoring one’s faith. With sincerity and humor, she unwraps family traditions, painting classes, lap swimming, dress codes, and career disappointments. She addresses white privilege and her evolving understanding of racism. And she asks crucial questions about mortality, finding connection in writing and stories.

Frank, eloquent, and daring, Weldon dissects the intricacies of life, journeying toward self-discovery as a mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Readers of any age or gender will recognize the universal experience of learning to accept oneself and asking essential questions—even if there are no easy answers.

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The Actual True Story of Ahmed and Zarga
Mohamedou Ould Slahi
Ohio University Press, 2002

An epic story of a Bedouin family’s survival and legacy amid their changing world in the unforgiving Sahara Desert.

Ahmed is a camel herder, as his father was before him and as his young son Abdullahi will be after him. The days of Ahmed and the other families in their nomadic freeg are ruled by the rhythms of changing seasons, the needs of his beloved camel herd, and the rich legends and stories that link his life to centuries of tradition.

But Ahmed’s world is threatened—by the French colonizers just beyond the horizon, the urbanization of the modern world, and a drought more deadly than any his people have known. At first, Ahmed attempts to ignore these forces by concentrating on the ancient routines of herding life. But these routines are broken when a precious camel named Zarga goes missing. Saddling his trusted Laamesh, praying at the appointed hours, and singing the songs of his fathers for strength, Ahmed sets off to recover Zarga on a perilous journey that will bring him face to face with the best and the worst of humanity and test every facet of his Bedouin desert survival skills.

[more]

Adams Family Correspondence, Volume 12
March 1797 – April 1798
Adams Family
Harvard University Press, 2015
Volume 12 opens with John Adams’s inauguration as president and closes just after details of the XYZ affair become public in America. Through private correspondence, and with the candor and perception expected from the Adamses, family members reveal their concerns for the well-being of the nation and the sustaining force of domestic life.
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The Addison Gayle Jr. Reader
Edited by Nathaniel Norment Jr.
University of Illinois Press, 2009
This reader collects sixty of the personal essays, critical articles, and other seminal works of Addison Gayle Jr., one of the most influential figures in African American literary criticism and a key pioneer in the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic Movement. The volume contains selective essays that represent the range of Gayle's writing on such subjects as relationships between father and son, cultural nationalism, racism, black aesthetics, black criticism, and black literature. The collection, the first of its kind, includes definitive essays such as "Blueprint for Black Criticism," "The Harlem Renaissance: Toward a Black Aesthetic," and "Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetics." A key chapter from Gayle's autobiography is supplemented by his literary criticism, and a general introduction and editor's notes for each section discuss the articles' lasting significance and influence.
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Adventures of a Deaf-Mute and Other Short Pieces
William B. Swett
Gallaudet University Press, 2017
In Adventures of a Deaf-Mute, Deaf New Englander William B. Swett recounts his adventures in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the late 1860s. Given to us in short, energetic episodes, Swett tells daring stories of narrow escapes from death and other perilous experiences during his time as a handyman and guide at the Profile House, a hotel named for the nearby Old Man of the Mountain rock formation. A popular destination, the hotel attracted myriad guests, and Swett’s tales of rugged endurance are accompanied by keen observations of the people he meets.
       Confident in his identity as a Deaf “mute,” he notes with wry humor the varied perceptions of deafness that he encounters. As a signing Deaf person from a prominent multigenerational Deaf family, he counters negative stereotypes with generosity and a smart wit. He takes pride in his physical abilities, which he showcases through various stunts and arduous treks in the wilderness. However, Swett’s writing also reveals a deep awareness of the fragility and precariousness of life. This is a portrait of a man testing his physical and emotional limits, written from the vantage point of someone who is no longer a young man but is still very much in the prime of his life.
       This collection also includes “Mr. Swett and His Diorama,” an article from 1859 in which Swett describes his miniature recreation of the Battle of Lexington, as well as Manual Alphabets, a pamphlet published in 1875 on the history of manual alphabets that includes short biographies of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc, two pioneers of Deaf education in the United States. The work is accompanied by a new introduction that offers a reflection on Swett’s life and the time in which he lived.
[more]

Aeschylus II
The Oresteia
Edited and Translated by David Grene, Richmond Lattimore, Mark Griffith, and Glenn W. Most
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Aeschylus II contains “The Oresteia,” translated by Richmond Lattimore, and fragments of “Proteus,” translated by Mark Griffith.
 
Sixty years ago, the University of Chicago Press undertook a momentous project: a new translation of the Greek tragedies that would be the ultimate resource for teachers, students, and readers. They succeeded. Under the expert management of eminent classicists David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, those translations combined accuracy, poetic immediacy, and clarity of presentation to render the surviving masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in an English so lively and compelling that they remain the standard translations. Today, Chicago is taking pains to ensure that our Greek tragedies remain the leading English-language versions throughout the twenty-first century.
 
In this highly anticipated third edition, Mark Griffith and Glenn W. Most have carefully updated the translations to bring them even closer to the ancient Greek while retaining the vibrancy for which our English versions are famous. This edition also includes brand-new translations of Euripides’ Medea, The Children of Heracles, Andromache, and Iphigenia among the Taurians, fragments of lost plays by Aeschylus, and the surviving portion of Sophocles’s satyr-drama The Trackers. New introductions for each play offer essential information about its first production, plot, and reception in antiquity and beyond. In addition, each volume includes an introduction to the life and work of its tragedian, as well as notes addressing textual uncertainties and a glossary of names and places mentioned in the plays.
 
In addition to the new content, the volumes have been reorganized both within and between volumes to reflect the most up-to-date scholarship on the order in which the plays were originally written. The result is a set of handsome paperbacks destined to introduce new generations of readers to these foundational works of Western drama, art, and life.
[more]

Aesopica
A Series of Texts Relating to Aesop or Ascribed to Him
Edited by Ben Edwin Perry
University of Illinois Press, 1952
The most complete corpus of the proverbs and fables of Aesop ever assembled

Ben Edwin Perry's Aesopica remains the definitive edition of all fables reputed to be by Aesop. The volume begins traditionally with a life of Aesop, but in two different and previously unedited Greek versions, with collations that record variations in the major recensions. It includes 179 proverbs attributed to Aesop and 725 carefully organized fables, for which Perry also provides their eldest known sources. To better evaluate the place of Aesop in literary history, Perry includes testimonies about Aesop made by Greek and Latin authors, from Herodotus to Maximus Planudes.

[more]

An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Harvard University Press, 2013
During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak’s unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world’s languages in the name of global communication? “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.” In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the literary can still do something.”
[more]

Affrilachian Tales
Folktales from the African-American Appalachian Tradition
Lynette Ford
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2012

Folktales from the African American Appalachian tradition. Told by Lyn Ford, one of America’s busiest touring storytellers. The power of Lyn's storytelling comes straight out of her family heritage, which is the content of this, her first book. Here she tells how she learned stories from her father and grandfather—and she includes many of the stories they told her.

[more]

Africa Writes Back
The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature
James Currey
Ohio University Press, 2008

June 17, 2008, is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart by Heinemann. This publication provided the impetus for the foundation of the African Writers Series in 1962 with Chinua Achebe as the editorial adviser.

Africa Writes Back: The African Writers Series and the Launch of African Literature captures the energy of literary publishing in a new and undefined field. Portraits of the leading characters and the many consultants and readers providing reports and advice to new and established writers make Africa Writes Back a stand-out book. James Currey’s voice and insights are an added bonus.

CONTENTS
Publishing and selling the African Writers Series
The African Writers Series Portfolio & George Hallett’s covers
Main dates for the African Writers Series

INTRODUCTION: The establishment of African Literature
Publishing Chinua Achebe

1. WRITERS FROM WEST AFRICA
Nigeria: The country where so much started
Negritude from Senegal to Cameroun
Magic & realism from Ghana, The Gambia & Sierra Leone

2. WRITERS FROM EASTERN AFRICA
Towards the oral & the popular in Kenya, Uganda & Tanzania
Publishing Ngugi

3. WRITERS FROM THE HORN & NORTH-EASTERN AFRICA
Emperors in Ethiopia
Publishing Nuruddin Farah
Arab authors in Egypt & Sudan

4. WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA
Resistance in South Africa
Publishing Alex la Guma
Publishing Dennis Brutus
Publishing Bessie Head
Publishing Masizi Kunene

5. WRITERS FROM SOUTHERN AFRICAN
Guns & Guerrillas in Mozambique &Angola
Zambia Shall be Free
Death & detention in Malawi
The struggle to become Zimbabwe
Publishing Dambudzo Marechera

CONCLUSION: Is there still a role for the African Writers Series?

[more]

An African American in South Africa
The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche 28 September 1937–1 January 1938
Ralph Bunche
Ohio University Press, 2001

Ralph Bunche, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, traveled to South Africa for three months in 1937. His notes, which have been skillfully compiled and annotated by historian Robert R. Edgar, provide unique insights on a segregated society.

[more]

African Tales
Compiled by Harold Scheub
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
The latest work from Harold Scheub, one of the world's leading scholars of African folktales, is the broadest collection yet assembled with tales from the entire continent of Africa, north to south. It brings together mythic, fantastic, and coming-of-age tales, some transcribed more than a hundred years ago, others dating to modern-day Africa. Scheub includes the work of storytellers from major African language groups, as well as many storytellers whose work is not often heard outside of Africa. This anthology offers a classroom-ready collection that should appeal to any scholar of African literature and culture. Realizing that these tales are part of a dying art, Scheub writes for the inner ear in everyone, bringing an oral tradition to life in written form.
[more]

African Women Writing Resistance
An Anthology of Contemporary Voices
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez
University of Wisconsin Press, 2010
African Women Writing Resistance is the first transnational anthology to focus on women’s strategies of resistance to the challenges they face in Africa today.  The anthology brings together personal narratives, testimony, interviews, short stories, poetry, performance scripts, folktales, and lyrics. Thematically organized, it presents women’s writing on such issues as intertribal and interethnic conflicts, the degradation of the environment, polygamy, domestic abuse, the controversial traditional practice of female genital cutting, Sharia law, intergenerational tensions, and emigration and exile.
    Contributors include internationally recognized authors and activists such as Wangari Maathai and Nawal El Saadawi, as well as a host of vibrant new voices from all over the African continent and from the African diaspora. Interdisciplinary in scope, this collection provides an excellent introduction to contemporary African women’s literature and highlights social issues that are particular to Africa but are also of worldwide concern.  It is an essential reference for students of African studies, world literature, anthropology, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and women’s studies.
 
 
A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

Outstanding Book, selected by the Public Library Association

Best Books for High Schools, Best Books for Special Interests, and Best Books for Professional Use, selected by the American Association of School Libraries
[more]

Afro Orientalism
Bill V. Mullen
University of Minnesota Press, 2004

Reveals a century of political solidarity uniting Asians and African Americans

As early as 1914, in his pivotal essay “The World Problem of the Color Line,” W. E. B. Du Bois was charting a search for Afro-Asian solidarity and for an international anticolonialism. In Afro-Orientalism, Bill Mullen traces the tradition of revolutionary thought and writing developed by African American and Asian American artists and intellectuals in response to Du Bois’s challenge.

Afro-Orientalism unfolds here as a distinctive strand of cultural and political work that contests the longstanding, dominant discourse about race and nation first fully named in Edward Said’s Orientalism. Mullen tracks Afro-Asian engagement with U.S. imperialism—including writings by Richard Wright, Grace and James Boggs, Robert F. Williams, and Fred Ho—and companion struggles against racism and capitalism around the globe. To this end, he offers Afro-Orientalism as an antidote to essentialist, race-based, or narrow conceptions of ethnic studies and postcolonial studies, calling on scholars in these fields to re-imagine their critical enterprises as mutually constituting and politically interdependent.

[more]

After Tears
Niq Mhlongo
Ohio University Press, 2011

Bafana Kuzwayo is a young man with a weight on his shoulders. After flunking his law studies at the University of Cape Town, he returns home to Soweto, where he must decide how to break the news to his family. But before he can confess, he is greeted as a hero by family and friends. His uncle calls him “Advo,” short for Advocate, and his mother wastes no time recruiting him to solve their legal problems. In a community that thrives on imagined realities, Bafana decides that it’s easiest to create a lie that allows him to put off the truth indefinitely. Soon he’s in business with Yomi, a Nigerian friend who promises to help him solve all his problems by purchasing a fake graduation document. One lie leads to another as Bafana navigates through a world that readers will find both funny and grim.

[more]

Afterlives of Indigenous Archives
Edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Afterlives of Indigenous Archives offers a compelling critique of Western archives and their use in the development of “digital humanities.” The essays collected here present the work of an international and interdisciplinary group of indigenous scholars; researchers in the field of indigenous studies and early American studies; and librarians, curators, activists, and storytellers. The contributors examine various digital projects and outline their relevance to the lives and interests of tribal people and communities, along with the transformative power that access to online materials affords. The authors aim to empower native people to re-envision the Western archive as a site of community-based practices for cultural preservation, one that can offer indigenous perspectives and new technological applications for the imaginative reconstruction of the tribal past, the repatriation of the tribal memories, and a powerful vision for an indigenous future. This important and timely collection will appeal to archivists and indigenous studies scholars alike.
[more]

AfterWord
Conjuring the Literary Dead
Dale Salwak
University of Iowa Press, 2011
If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.
 
Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.
 
Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AfterWord draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls the deep human desire to “go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there,” readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential nature of each author.
 
Contributors to AfterWord are: Catherine Aird (on Rudyard Kipling), Brian Aldiss (on Thomas Hardy), Margaret Atwood (on negotiating with the dead), William M. Chace (on Ezra Pound), Nora Crook (on the Shelleys), Paul Delany (on George Gissing), Colin Dexter (on Alfred Edward Housman), Margaret Drabble (on Arnold Bennett), Peter Firchow (on George Orwell), Alan W. Friedman (on Samuel Beckett), Eugene Goodheart (on Jane Austen), John Halperin (on Edith Wharton), Francis King (on Oscar Wilde), Jeffrey Meyers (on Samuel Johnson), Cynthia Ozick (on Henry James), Jay Parini (on Robert Frost), Carl Rollyson (on William Faulkner), Dale Salwak and Laura Nagy (on literary imagination), Alan Sillitoe (on Joseph Conrad), and Ann Thwaite (on Frances Hodgson Burnett, Edmund Gosse, A. A. Milne, and Emily Tennyson).
[more]

Against a Darkening Sky
Janet Lewis
Ohio University Press, 1943

Against a Darkening Sky was originally published in 1943. Set in a semirural community south of San Francisco, it is the story of an American mother of the mid-1930s and the sustaining influence she brings, through her own profound strength and faith, to the lives of her four growing children.

Scottish by birth, but long a resident of America, Mary Perrault is married to a Swiss-French gardener. Their life in South Encina, though anything but lavish, is gay, serene, and friendly. As their children mature and the world outside, less peaceful and secure than the Perrault home, begins to threaten the equilibrium of their tranquil lives, Mrs. Perrault becomes increasingly aware of a moral wilderness rising from the physical wilderness which her generation has barely conquered.

Her struggle to influence, while not invading the lives of her children, is the focus of this novel of family life during the Depression years.

[more]

Against Art
(The Notebooks)
Tomas Espedal
Seagull Books, 2018

In contemporary Norwegian fiction Tomas Espedal’s work stands out as uniquely personal; it can be difficult to separate the fiction from Espedal’s own experiences. In that vein, his novel Against Art is not just the story of a boy growing up to be a writer, but it is also the story of writing. Specifically, it is about the profession of writing—the routines, responsibility, and obstacles. Yet, Against Art is also about being a father, a son, and a grandson; about a family and a family’s tales, and about how preceding generations mark their successors. It is at once about choices and changes, about motion and rest, about moving to a new place, and about living.

 
Praise for the Norwegian Edition
“One of the most beautiful, most important books I've read for years.”—Klassekampen
 
“Espedal has written an amazingly rich novel, which will assuredly stand out as one of the year’s best and will also further fortify the quality of Norwegian literature abroad.”— Adresseavisen
 
“Against Art attacks literature while at the same time being intensely literary. Our greatest sorrows and torments, the individual experiences often so anemic in art, find a voice of their own.”—Morgenbladet
 
“Against Art moves me with its maternal history and proves yet again that Tomas Espedal writes great novels.”—Dag og Tid
[more]

Against Nihilism
Nietzsche meets Dostoevsky
Maia Johnson-Stepenberg
Black Rose Books, 2018
Described by Thomas Mann as “brothers in spirit, but tragically grotesque companions in misfortune,” Nietzsche and Dostoevsky remain towering figures in the intellectual development of European modernity. Maia Johnson-Stepenberg’s accessible new introduction to these philosophers compares their writings on key topics such as criminality, Christianity, and the figure of the “outsider” to reveal the urgency and contemporary resonance of their shared struggle against nihilism. Against Nihilism also considers nihilism in the context of current political and social struggles, placing Nietzsche and Dostoevsky’s contributions at the heart of important contemporary debates regarding community, identity, and meaning. Inspired by class discussions with her students and aimed at first-team readers of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, Against Nihilism provides an accessible, unique comparative study of these two key thinkers. 
 
[more]

Against the Closet
Black Political Longing and the Erotics of Race
Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman
Duke University Press, 2012
In Against the Closet, Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman interrogates and challenges cultural theorists' interpretations of sexual transgression in African American literature. She argues that, from the mid-nineteenth century through the twentieth, black writers used depictions of erotic transgression to contest popular theories of identity, pathology, national belonging, and racial difference in American culture. Connecting metaphors of sexual transgression to specific historical periods, Abdur-Rahman explains how tropes such as sadomasochism and incest illuminated the psychodynamics of particular racial injuries and suggested forms of social repair and political redress from the time of slavery, through post-Reconstruction and the civil rights and black power movements, to the late twentieth century.

Abdur-Rahman brings black feminist, psychoanalytic, critical race, and poststructuralist theories to bear on literary genres from slave narratives to science fiction. Analyzing works by African American writers, including Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, and Octavia Butler, she shows how literary representations of transgressive sexuality expressed the longings of African Americans for individual and collective freedom. Abdur-Rahman contends that those representations were fundamental to the development of African American forms of literary expression and modes of political intervention and cultural self-fashioning.

[more]

The Age of Discovery and Other Stories
Becky Hagenston
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
“At its essence, this enjoyable collection explores how nothing is ever exactly as it seems.”—Booklist

“These ingenious stories are so funny and sparkling and slyly inventive that their pain catches you by surprise, like a sunburn after a day at the beach.”—Eric Puchner

In Becky Hagenston’s fourth collection, the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. The characters are sex-toy sellers, internet trolls, parents, students, and babysitters—all trying to make sense of a world where nothing is quite what it appears to be. A service robot makes increasingly disturbing requests. A middle school teacher is accused of witchcraft—and realizes the accusations might be true. Two college students devise a way to avoid getting hit on in bars. A baker finds bizarre anomalies in his sourdough. A librarian follows her dead ex-husband through the Atlanta airport. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness, and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy. Hagenston delivers a collection that is, at its weird and shining heart, about people discovering what—for better or worse—they are capable of.
[more]

Alabama Afternoons
Profiles and Conversations
Roy Hoffman
University of Alabama Press, 2011
A collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman
 
Alabama Afternoons is a collection of portraits of many remarkable Alabamians, famous and obscure, profiled by award-winning journalist and novelist Roy Hoffman. Written as Sunday feature stories for the Mobile Press-Register with additional pieces from the New York Times, Preservation, and Garden & Gun, these profiles preserve the individual stories—and the individual voices within the stories—that help to define one of the most distinctive states in the union.
 
Hoffman recounts his personal visits with writer Mary Ward Brown in her library in Hamburg, with photographer William Christenberry in a field in Newbern, and with storyteller Kathryn Tucker Windham and folk artist Charlie “Tin Man” Lucas at their neighboring houses in Selma. Also highlighted are the lives of numerous alumni of The University of Alabama—among them Mel Allen, the “Voice of the Yankees” from 1939 to 1964; Forrest Gump author Winston Groom; and Vivian Malone and James Hood, the two students who entered the schoolhouse door in 1963. Hoffman profiles distinguished Auburn University alumni as well, including Eugene Sledge, renowned World War II veteran and memoirist, and Neil Davis, the outspoken, nationally visible editor of the Lee County Bulletin.
 
Hoffman also profiles major and minor players in the civil rights movement, from Johnnie Carr, raised in segregated Montgomery and later president of the Montgomery Improvement Association; and George Wallace Jr., son of the four-time governor; to Theresa Burroughs, a Greensboro beautician trampled in the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge; and Diane McWhorter, whose award- winning book explores the trouble- filled Birmingham civil rights experience. Juxtaposed with these are accounts of lesser-known individuals, such as Sarah Hamm, who attempts to preserve the fading Jewish culture in Eufaula; Edward Carl, who was butler and chauffeur to Bellingrath Gardens founder Walter Bellingrath in Theodore; and cousins William Bolton and Herbert Henson, caretakers of the coon dog cemetery in Russellville.
 
Hoffman’s compilation of life stories creates an engaging and compelling look into what it means to be from, and shaped by, Alabama. “Alabama Afternoons,” he writes in the introduction, “is a small part of the even bigger question of what it means to be an American.”
Read an article about domestic lives by Roy Hoffman in the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/garden/25Domestic.html
 
 
[more]

Albertus Magnus On Animals V1 2
A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.and Irven Michael Resnick
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
[more]

Albertus Magnus On Animals V1
A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
[more]

Albertus Magnus On Animals V2
A Medieval Summa Zoologica Revised Edition
Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr.
The Ohio State University Press, 2019
Albertus Magnus has long been recognized as one of the greatest minds of the Middle Ages; his contemporaries conferred upon him the title Doctor Universalis. An epitaph at his tomb described him as prince among philosophers, greater than Plato, and hardly inferior to King Solomon in wisdom. In 1941, Pope Pius XII named Albertus Magnus patron saint of scientists.
In his work De animalibus, Albert integrated the vast amount of information on nature that had come down to him in previous centuries: the exposition of Michael Scotus’s translation from the Arabic of Aristotle’s books on the natural world (Books 1–19), Albert’s own revisions to Aristotle’s teachings (Books 20–21), and a “dictionary” of animals appropriated largely from the De natura rerum of Thomas of Cantimpré (Books 22–26). Albert’s comprehensive treatise on living things was acknowledged as the reputable authority in biology for almost five hundred years.
In this translated and annotated edition, Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. and Irven Michael Resnick illuminate the importance of this work, allowing Albert’s magnum opus to be better understood and more widely appreciated than ever before. Broken into two volumes (Books 1–10 and 11–26),Albertus Magnus On Animals is a veritable medieval scientific encyclopedia, ranging in topics from medicine, embryology, and comparative anatomy to women, hunting and everyday life, commerce, and much more—an essential work for historians, medievalists, scientists, and philosophers alike.      
 
[more]

Albrecht Dürer and the Epistolary Mode of Address
Shira Brisman
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Art historians have long looked to letters to secure biographical details; clarify relationships between artists and patrons; and present artists as modern, self-aware individuals. This book takes a novel approach: focusing on Albrecht Dürer, Shira Brisman is the first to argue that the experience of writing, sending, and receiving letters shaped how he treated the work of art as an agent for communication.

In the early modern period, before the establishment of a reliable postal system, letters faced risks of interception and delay. During the Reformation, the printing press threatened to expose intimate exchanges and blur the line between public and private life. Exploring the complex travel patterns of sixteenth-century missives, Brisman explains how these issues of sending and receiving informed Dürer’s artistic practices. His success, she contends, was due in large part to his development of pictorial strategies—an epistolary mode of address—marked by a direct, intimate appeal to the viewer, an appeal that also acknowledged the distance and delay that defers the message before it can reach its recipient. As images, often in the form of prints, coursed through an open market, and artists lost direct control over the sale and reception of their work, Germany’s chief printmaker navigated the new terrain by creating in his images a balance between legibility and concealment, intimacy and public address.
[more]

Alexander The Great
A Novel
Nikos Kazantzakis
Ohio University Press, 1982

Nikos Kazantzakis is no stranger to the heroes of Greek antiquity. In this historical novel based on the life of Alexander the Great, Kazantzakis has drawn on both the rich tradition of Greek legend and the documented manuscripts from the archives of history to recreate an Alexander in all his many-faceted images—Alexander the god; Alexander the descendant of Heracles performing the twelve labors; Alexander the mystic, the daring visionary destined to carry out a divine mission; Alexander the flesh-and-blood mortal who, on occasion, is not above the common soldier’s brawling and drinking.

The novel, which resists the temptation to portray Alexander in the mantle of purely romantic legend, covers his life from age fifteen to his death at age thirty-two. It opens with Alexander’s first exploit, the taming of the horse, Bucephalas, and is seen in great part through the eyes of his young neighbor who eventually becomes an officer in his army and follows him on his campaign to conquer the world.

The book, which was written primarily as an educational adjunct for young readers, is intended for the adult mind as well, and like the legends of old, is entertaining as well as instructive for readers of all ages. It was originally published in Greece in serial form in 1940, and was republished in a complete volume in 1979.

[more]

Alfonso Reyes and Spain
His Dialogue with Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, Ortega y Gasset, Jiménez, and Gómez de la Serna
By Barbara Bockus Aponte
University of Texas Press, 1972
Alfonso Reyes, the great humanist and man of letters of contemporary Spanish America, began his literary career just before the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He spearheaded the radical shift in Mexico’s cultural and philosophical orientation as a leading member of the famous “Athenaeum Generation.” The crucial years of his literary formation, however, were those he spent in Spain (1914–1924). He arrived in Madrid unknown and unsure of his future. When he left, he had achieved both professional maturity and wide acclaim as a writer. This book has, as its basis, the remarkable correspondence between Reyes and some of the leading spirits of the Spanish intellectual world, covering not only his years in Spain but also later exchanges of letters. Although Reyes always made it clear that he was a Mexican and a Spanish American, he became a full-fledged member of the closed aristocracy of Spanish literature. It was the most brilliant period in Spain’s cultural history since the Golden Age, and it is richly represented here by Reyes’ association with five of its most important figures: Miguel de Unamuno and Ramón del Valle-Inclán were of the great “Generation of 98”; among the younger writers were José Ortega y Gasset, essayist and philosopher; the Nobel poet Juan Ramón Jiménez; and Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a precursor of surrealism. Alfonso Reyes maintained lifelong friendships with these men, and their exchanges of letters are of a dual significance. They reveal how the years in Spain allowed Reyes to pursue his vocation independently, thereby prompting him to seek universal values. Coincidentally, they provide a unique glimpse into the inner world of those friends—and their dreams of a new Spain.
[more]

Algerian Chronicles
Albert Camus
Harvard University Press, 2013
More than 50 years after independence, Algerian Chronicles, with its prescient analysis of the dead end of terrorism, appears here in English for the first time. Published in France in 1958—the year the war caused the collapse of the Fourth French Republic—it is one of Albert Camus’ most political works: an exploration of his commitment to Algeria.
[more]

All My Days Are Saturdays
Sam Pickering
University of Missouri Press, 2014
A New York Times article once stated that “the art of the essay as delivered by [Sam] Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble.” As Pickering himself puts it, “Well, I have gotten considerably older, and humor has come to mean more and more to me. And if I’m on the front porch, I am in a rocking chair.” All My Days Are Saturdays offers fifteen new pieces in which he ponders a world that has changed and, in new ways, still delights him. This collection features Pickering writing about teaching and his recent retirement, visits to various locales, and, as he tell us, “the many people I meet…who tell me their stories, small tales that make one laugh and sigh.”
Distinctive and unmistakable, Pickering’s style deftly mixes the colloquial language of everyday life with references to a lifetime of extensive reading. The seamless blend of these two worlds in his writing is indicative of how they fuse together in his daily life. As Pickering puts it, “All my life I have roamed libraries, almost as much as I have roamed the natural world. I try to get at many truths, but when I tell the truth, I ‘tell it slant.’ I do so to describe life as it is and indeed celebrate that ‘as it is.’”
“Pickering is a master of his craft, one of the finest of personal essayists around, and these essays bear many of the characteristics of his other volumes—reflections on his everyday activities and on individuals around him, humorous exchanges with his wife, and so forth. But this volume seems to have something else as well. We find here a thoughtful meditation on time and self and relative old age demonstrating a close attention to the natural world—a tone not unlike Thoreau’s at times.” -- Fred C. Hobson, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author or editor of fourteen books, most recently A Southern Enigma: Essays on the U.S. South
[more]

All Night Movie
Alicia Borinsky
Northwestern University Press, 2002
An irreverent picaresque, All Night Movie follows the adventures of a young woman determined to conquer the world. A rogues' gallery of labor union leaders, cultists, lesbians, murderers, ne'er-do-wells, prostitutes, and visitors to a disconcertingly erotic telephone booth accompany the picara as she pushes the limits established in patriarchal postdictatorship Argentina. With lyric prose, Alicia Borinsky creates a hypnotic kaleidoscope of voices--a tantalizing and illuminating mix of the pop culture, politics, sexuality, tango, and cinema of an enigmatic society that celebrates its own demise.
[more]

All the Leavings
Laurie Easter
Oregon State University Press, 2021
In All the Leavings, Laurie Easter deftly navigates both the rugged terrain of the human heart and life on the edge of wilderness. Her contemplative, often experimental essays explore love and risk: giving birth in a rustic cabin; the destructive power of wildfires; losing friends to cancer, AIDS, suicide, and meth; encounters with birds and mountain lions; and the unthinkable potential loss of a child to illness. Drawing from a reverence for the natural world—perilous yet rich with beauty—that is deeply rooted in a wild Oregon, All the Leavings examines what it means to love, lose, and find strength in facing adversity.
[more]

All Who Belong May Enter
Nicholas Ward
Autumn House Press, 2021
A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity.
 
Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. 
 
All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. 
 
[more]

All Who Belong May Enter
Nicholas Ward
Autumn House Press, 2021
A collection of personal essays examining relationships, whiteness, and masculinity.
 
Nicholas Ward’s debut essay collection, All Who Belong May Enter, centers on self-exploration and cultural critique. These deeply personal essays examine whiteness, masculinity, and a Midwest upbringing through tales of sporting events, parties, posh (and not-so-posh) restaurant jobs, and the many relationships built and lost along the way. With a storyteller’s spirit, Ward recounts and evaluates the privilege of his upbringing with acumen and vulnerability. Ward’s profound affection for his friends, family, lovers, pets, and particularly for his chosen home, Chicago, shines through. This collection offers readers hope for healing that comes through greater understanding and inquiry into one’s self, relationships, and culture. Through these essays, Ward acknowledges his position within whiteness and masculinity, and he continuously holds himself and the society around him accountable. 
 
All Who Belong May Enter was selected by Jaquira Díaz as the winner of the 2020 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. 
 
[more]

All-American Redneck
Variations on an Icon, from James Fenimore Cooper to the Dixie Chicks
Matthew J. Ferrence
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
In contemporary culture, the stereotypical trappings of “redneckism” have been appropriated
for everything from movies like Smokey and the Bandit to comedy acts like Larry the
Cable Guy. Even a recent president, George W. Bush, shunned his patrician pedigree in favor
of cowboy “authenticity” to appeal to voters. Whether identified with hard work and patriotism
or with narrow-minded bigotry, the Redneck and its variants have become firmly
established in American narrative consciousness.

This provocative book traces the emergence of the faux-Redneck within the context of
literary and cultural studies. Examining the icon’s foundations in James Fenimore Cooper’s
Natty Bumppo—“an ideal white man, free of the boundaries of civilization”—and the degraded
rural poor of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, Matthew Ferrence shows how Redneck
stereotypes were further extended in Deliverance, both the novel and the film, and in
a popular cycle of movies starring Burt Reynolds in the 1970s and ’80s, among other manifestations.
As a contemporary cultural figure, the author argues, the Redneck represents
no one in particular but offers a model of behavior and ideals for many. Most important,
it has become a tool—reductive, confining, and (sometimes, almost) liberating—by which
elite forces gather and maintain social and economic power. Those defying its boundaries,
as the Dixie Chicks did when they criticized President Bush and the Iraq invasion, have
done so at their own peril. Ferrence contends that a refocus of attention to the complex
realities depicted in the writings of such authors as Silas House, Fred Chappell, Janisse Ray,
and Trudier Harris can help dislodge persistent stereotypes and encourage more nuanced
understandings of regional identity.

In a cultural moment when so-called Reality Television has turned again toward popular
images of rural Americans (as in, for example, Duck Dynasty and Moonshiners), All-
American Redneck
reveals the way in which such images have long been manipulated for
particular social goals, almost always as a means to solidify the position of the powerful at
the expense of the regional.
[more]

The Allure of Grammar
The Glamour of Angie Estes's Poetry
Doug Rutledge, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 2019
Of Angie Estes, the poet and critic Stephanie Burt has written that she “has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world.” In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes’s work—from a review of her first chapbook to a reading of a poem appearing in her 2018 book, Parole—that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigor and genuine awe.

In addition to presenting an overview of critical reactions to Estes’s oeuvre, reviews by Langdon Hammer, Julianne Buchsbaum, and Christopher Spaide also provide a helpful context for approaching a poet who claims to distrust narrative. Original essays consider the craft of Estes’s poetry and offer literary analysis. Ahren Warner uses line breaks to explore a postmodern analysis of Estes’s work. Mark Irwin looks at her poetic structure. Lee Upton employs a feminist perspective to explore Estes’s use of italics, and B. K. Fischer looks at the way she uses dance as a poetic image. Doug Rutledge considers her relationship to Dante and to the literary tradition through her use of ekphrasis. An interview with Estes herself, in which she speaks of a poem as an “arranged place . . . where experience happens,” adds her perspective to the mix, at turns resonating with and challenging her critics.

The Allure of Grammar will be useful for teachers and students of creative writing interested in the craft of non-narrative poetry. Readers of contemporary poetry who already admire Estes will find this collection insightful, while those not yet familiar with her work will come away from these essays eager to seek out her books.
[more]

Alms for Oblivion
Edward DahlbergForeword by Sir Herbert Read
University of Minnesota Press, 1967

Alms for Oblivion was first published in 1967. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

This volume makes available in book form a collection of seventeen essays by Edward Dahlberg, who has been called one of the great unrecognized writers of our time. Some of the selections have never been published before; others have appeared previously only in magazines of limited circulation. There is a foreword by Sir Herbert Read.

The individual essays are on a wide range of subjects: literary, historical, philosophical, personal. The longest is a discussion of Herman Melville's work entitled "Moby-Dick - A Hamitic Dream." The fate of authors at the hands of reviewers is the subject of the essay called "For Sale." In "No Love and No Thanks" the author draws a characterization of our time. He presents a critique of the poet William Carlos Williams in "Word-Sick and Place- Crazy," and a discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald in "Peopleless Fiction." In "My Friends Stieglitz, Anderson, and Dreiser" he discusses not only Alfred Stieglitz, Sherwood Anderson, and Theodore Dreiser but other personalities as well. He also writes of Sherwood Anderson in "Midwestern Fable." In "Cutpurse Philosopher" the subject is William James. "Florentine Codex" is about the conquistadores. Other essays in the collection are the following: "Randolph Bourne," "Our Vanishing Cooperative Colonies," "Chivers and Poe," "Domestic Manners of Americans," "Robert McAlmon: A Memoir," "The Expatriates: A Memoir," and an essay on Allen Tate.

[more]

Alternative Alcott by Louisa May Alcott
Showalter, Elaine
Rutgers University Press, 1988
The discovery in recent years of Louisa May Alcott's pseudonymous sensation stories has made readers and scholars increasingly aware of her accomplishments beyond her most famous novel, Little Women, one of the great international best-sellers of all time. What has been recovered throws new light on the children's books and asks us to question our assumptions about the suposedly staid and sentimental Alcott.

Alternative Alcott includes works never before reprinted, including "How I Went Out to Service," "My Contraband," and "Psyche's Art." It also contains Behind a Mask, her most important sensation story; the full and correct text of her last unfinished novel, Diana and Persis; "Transcendental Wild Oats"; Hospital Sketches; and Alcott's other important texts on nineteenth-century social history. This anthology brings together for the first time a variety of Louisa May Alcott's journalistic, satiric, feminist, and sensation texts. Elaine Showalter has provided an excellent introduction and notes to the collection.
[more]

Amateur Sugar Maker
Noel Perrin
Brandeis University Press, 1992
Noel Perrin’s delightful account of building a sugarhouse and making maple sugar in Vermont first appeared twenty years ago. Like a sturdy New England farmhouse, Perrin has added to it over the years to reflect his subsequent sugaring experiences, and includes in this latest edition a “postpostpostscript.” His celebration of simple, hard work to produce a “quite wonderful, maybe even sacred article” has not been diminished by plastic tubing, thrip infestations, and the strange new market for Vermont sap water.
[more]

"The Amber Gods" and Other Stories by Harriet Prescott Spofford
Bendixen, Alfred
Rutgers University Press, 1989
A widely held vision of nineteenth-century American women is of lives lived in naive, domestic peace—the girls of Little Women making do until father comes home from the war. Nothing could be less true of Harriet Prescott Spofford's stories. In fact, her editor at the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to believe that an unworldly woman from New England had written them. Her style, though ornate by our 20th century standards, adds to its atmosphere, like heavy, Baroque furniture in a large and creepy house.

The title story presents a self-centered and captivating woman who ruthlessly steals her orphan cousin's lover. In "Circumstance," a pioneer woman returning home through the woods at night is caught by a panther; her husband, who has come to save her, can only watch from the ground as she sings for her life, pinned in a tree. A train engineer hallucinates again and again that he is running over his wife. And Mrs. Craven, who's a bit "weak" in the head, mindlessly repeats "Three men went down cellar and only two came up." These stories combine elements of the best ghost stories—timing, detail, and character —with just enough chill to make you think twice about turning out your lights at night. 
[more]

American Examples
New Conversations about Religion, Volume One
Edited by Michael J. Altman
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from a church-architecture mecca of Southeast Indiana to what an atheist parent believes
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume One is the first in a series of annual anthologies published in partnership with the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. The American Examples initiative gathers scholars from around the world for a series of workshops designed to generate big questions about the study of religion in America. Bypassing traditional white Protestant narratives in favor of new perspectives on belief, social formation, and identity, American Examples fellows offer dynamic perspectives on American faith that challenge our understandings of both America and religion as categories.
 
In the first volume of this exciting academic project, five topically and methodologically diverse scholars vividly reimagine the potential applications of religious history. The five chapters of this inaugural volume use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask larger theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars beyond the subfield of American religious history.
 
Prea Persaud’s chapter explores the place of Hinduism among the “creole religions” of the Caribbean, while Hannah Scheidt captures what atheist parents say to each other about value systems. Travis Warren Cooper explains how the modernist church architecture of Columbus, Indiana, became central to that city’s identity. Samah Choudhury dissects how Muslim American comedians navigate Western ideas of knowledge and self to make their jokes, and their own selves legible, and Emily D. Crews uses ethnographic fieldwork to read the female reproductive body among Nigerian Pentecostal congregations. Editor Michael J. Altman also provides a brief, rich introduction assessing the state of the discipline of religious history and how the American Examples project can lead the field forward.
 
Visit americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on the group and news about upcoming projects.
 
[more]

American Examples
New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two
Edited by Samah Choudhury, Prea Persaud, and Michael J. Altman
University of Alabama Press, 2022
Fresh new perspectives on the study of religion, ranging from SoulCycle to Mark Twain
 
American Examples: New Conversations about Religion, Volume Two, is the second in a series of annual anthologies produced by the American Examples workshop hosted by the Department of Religious Studies at The University of Alabama. In the latest volume from this dynamic academic project, nine scholars with diverse topics and methodologies vividly reimagine the meaning of all three words in the phrase “American religious history.” The essays use case studies from America, broadly conceived, to ask trenchant theoretical questions that are of interest to scholars and students beyond the subfield of American religious history.

Cody Musselman uses a Weberian analysis to explore questions of identity, authority, and authenticity in the world of SoulCycle while Zachary T. Smith finds commonality between the rhetoric and practices of scholarship and mixed martial arts. Erik Kline provides a new perspective on the psychedelic mysticism of the 1960s, and Brook Wilensky-Lanford takes stock of the cultural power of parody in Mark Twain’s last work of fiction. Christopher Cannon Jones examines the reciprocal relationship between religious texts and cultural contexts by comparing early Mormon missions to Hawai‘i and Jamaica and Lindsey Jackson explores what debates over circumcision can tell us about gender stereotypes and motherhood. Dana Lloyd uses the 1988 Supreme Court decision in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association as a case study in order to consider how Indigenous religion and sovereignty have been understood and adjudicated in the American legal system. Matt Sheedy studies the identity categories of “atheist” and “ex-Muslim” and Brad Stoddard uses ethnographic fieldwork to evaluate the role of religious pluralism in regulating and policing correctional institutions. Editors Samah Choudhury and Prea Persaud provide an introduction that reconsiders the trajectory of the American Examples project in light of the siege on the US Capitol in January 2021 and the continuing COVID pandemic.

Visit
americanexamples.ua.edu for more information on upcoming workshop dates and future projects.

CONTRIBUTORS
Michael J. Altman / Samah Choudhury / Lindsey Jackson / Christopher Cannon Jones /  / Erik Kline / Dana Lloyd / Cody Musselman / Prea Persaud / Matt Sheedy / Zachary T. Smith / Brad Stoddard / Brook Wilensky-Lanford

 
[more]

American Homes
Ryan Ridge
University of Michigan Press, 2015
Poetry / Fiction / Art / Aphorisms. American Homes incorporates poetry, prose, and various schematic devices, including dozens of illustrations by the artist Jacob Heustis, to create a cracked narrative of the domestic spaces we inhabit.
[more]

An American in the Making
The Life Story of an Immigrant
Kellman, Steven G
Rutgers University Press, 2009
At the turn of the twentieth century, M. E. Ravage set off in steerage for America, one of almost two million Jews who, like millions of others from eastern and southern Europe, were lured by tales of worldly success. Seventeen years after arriving on Ellis Island, Ravage had mastered a new language, found success in college, and engagingly penned in English this vivid account of the ordeals and pleasures of departure and assimilation.

Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and introduction that place the memoir within historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of "America" and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.

[more]

American Political Plays after 9/11
Edited by Allan Havis
Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

American Political Plays after 9/11 is a diverse collection of bold, urgent, and provocative plays that respond to the highly charged, post 9/11 political landscape. Sparked by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and subsequently fueled by a series of controversial events—the Iraq war, the passing and enforcement of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, and the revelation of torture and other scandals at the Abu Ghraib prison—American political theater is currently experiencing a surge in activity. The plays in this collection include The Guys by Anne Nelson, At the Vanishing Point by Naomi Iizuka, The Venus de Milo Is Armed by Kia Corthron, Back of the Throat by Yusseff El Guindi, Three Nights in Prague by Allan Havis, and Question 27, Question 28 by Chay Yew.

The characters range from a New York City fire captain trying to respectfully memorialize eight of his lost comrades, to the citizens of a hog-killing Louisville neighborhood who poignantly exemplify the underside of the economic crisis, to an Arab American citizen being harshly (and possibly unfairly) interrogated by two officers as a “person of interest.” Though not all of the plays deal explicitly with the Al Qaeda attacks, they collectively reveal themes of sorrow and anxiety, moral indignation, alarmist self-preservation, and economic and social insecurity stemming from the United States’ fairly sudden shift from cold war superpower to vulnerable target.

The lively introduction by Allan Havis includes a brief history of political theater in the United States, an extensive discussion about how theater communities responded to 9/11, and an informative analysis of the six plays in the book.  A collection of dramatic material framed by this significant historical event, AmericanPolitical Plays after 9/11 will be indispensable for theater and cultural studies scholars and students.

[more]

American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences
Styles of Affiliation
Baym, Nina
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Winner of the 2000 Hubbell Award from the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association of America

Choice Outstanding Academic Title​

During the nineteenth century, the content and institutional organization of the sciences evolved dramatically, altering the public's understanding of knowledge. As science grew in importance, many women of letters tried to incorporate it into a female worldview. Nina Baym explores the responses to science displayed in a range of writings by American women. Conceding that they could not become scientists, women insisted, however, that they were capable of understanding science and participating in its discourse. They used their access to publishing to advocate the study and transmission of scientific information to the general public.

Bayms book includes biographies and a full exploration of these women's works. Among those considered are:
• Almira Phelps, author of Familiar Lectures on Botany (it sold 350,000 copies)
• Sarah Hale, who filled Godey's Lady's Book with science articles
• Catharine Esther Beecher, who based her domestic advice on scientific information
• Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the actual ghostwriter of her husband's popular science essays
• Emily Dickinson, whose poetry is replete with scientific images.

Baym also investigates science in women's novels, writing by and about women doctors, and the scientific claims advanced by women's spiritualist movements. This book truly breaks new ground, outlining a field of inquiry that few have noted exists.
[more]

Amorous Games
A Critical Edition of Les adevineaux amoureux
By James Woodrow Hassell
University of Texas Press, 1974
Among the more interesting incunabula preserved in the Salle de la Réserve of the Bibliothèque National in Paris are the apparently unique copies of two editions, very similar in content, of a work entitled Les Adevineaux amoureux. In much more comprehensive form Les Adevineaux amoureux is preserved in a manuscript belonging to the Musée Conde at Chantilly. All three texts, in medieval French, appear to date from the 1470s. The present work, Amorous Games, is a critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux. The Amorous Games is a miscellany whose principal unifying force is the compiler's aim to provide a manual of conversation and entertainment for polite society. Included are series of questions and answers belonging to the well-established medieval tradition of the "Demandes amoureuses"; a very large number of riddles, mainly folk riddles; and "venditions en amours," little poems that apparently came into being as part of a social game. Students of medieval French literature, particularly those with a penchant for some of the minor genres, will find new material in the Amorous Games. Folklorists will discover what is probably the largest collection of riddles bequeathed to us by medieval France and also much that is of value to specialists in the proverb and folk tale. For this critical edition of Les Adevineaux amoureux Professor Hassell has selected the Chantilly manuscript, because it is the most complete and also because it had not yet been published. The Appendix contains the text of the more complete of the two incunabula and the significant variants appearing in the other fifteenth-century printed edition. The manuscript text has been collated with that of the incunabula, and copious notes and an index to the riddles have been supplied. In his Introduction Professor Hassell discusses in detail the major classes and subclasses of the riddle, drawing on the work of Petsch, Taylor, Abrahams, and other scholars of the genre.
[more]

Amy Levy
Her Life and Letters
Linda Hunt Beckman
Ohio University Press, 2000

After a century of critical neglect, poet and writer Amy Levy is gaining recognition as a literary figure of stature.

This definitive biography accompanied by her letters, along with the recent publication of her selected writings, provides a critical appreciation of Levy’s importance in her own time and in ours.

As an educated Jewish woman with homoerotic desires, Levy felt the strain of combating the structures of British society in the 1880s, the decade in which she built her career and moved in London’s literary and bohemian circles. Unwilling to cut herself off from her Jewish background, she had the additional burden of attempting to bridge the gap between communities.

In Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters Linda Hunt Beckman examines Levy’s writings and other cultural documents for insight into her emotional and intellectual life. This groundbreaking study introduces us to a woman well deserving of a place in literary and cultural history.

[more]

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
James P. Allen
SBL Press, 2005
The Pyramid Texts are the oldest body of extant literature from ancient Egypt. First carved on the walls of the burial chambers in the pyramids of kings and queens of the Old Kingdom, they provide the earliest comprehensive view of the way in which the ancient Egyptians understood the structure of the universe, the role of the gods, and the fate of human beings after death. Their importance lies in their antiquity and in their endurance throughout the entire intellectual history of ancient Egypt. This volume contains the complete translation of the Pyramid Texts, including new texts recently discovered and published. It incorporates full restorations and readings indicated by post-Old Kingdom copies of the texts and is the first translation that presents the texts in the order in which they were meant to be read in each of the original sources.
[more]

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Second Edition
James P. Allen
SBL Press, 2015

Completely revised and updated

James P. Allen provides a translation of the oldest corpus of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the six royal pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (ca. 2350–2150 BCE). Allen’s revisions take into account recent advances in the understanding of Egyptian grammar.

Features:

  • Sequential translations based on all available sources, including texts newly discovered in the last decade
  • Texts numbered according to the most widely used numbering system with new numbers from the latest 2013 concordance
  • Translations reflect the primarily atemporal verbal system of Old Egyptian, which conveys the timeless quality that the text’s authors understood the texts to have
[more]

And No Birds Sing
Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring
Edited by Craig Waddell. Foreword by Paul Brooks. Afterword by Linda Lear
Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Craig Waddell presents essays investigating Rachel Carson’s influential 1962 book, Silent Spring. In his foreword, Paul Brooks, Carson’s editor at Houghton Mifflin, describes the process that resulted in Silent Spring. In an afterword, Linda Lear, Carson’s recent biographer, recalls the end of Carson’s life and outlines the attention that Carson’s book and Carson herself received from scholars and biographers, attention that focused so minutely on her life that it detracted from a focus on her work. The foreword by Brooks and the afterword by Lear frame this exploration within the context of Carson’s life and work.

Contributors are Edward P. J. Corbett, Carol B, Gartner, Cheryll Glotfelty, Randy Harris, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Linda Lear, Ralph H. Lutts, Christine Oravec, Jacqueline S. Palmer, Markus J. Peterson, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Craig Waddell. Together, these essays explore Silent Spring’seffectiveness in conveying its disturbing message and the rhetorical strategies that helped create its wide influence.

[more]

Andre Malraux
An Age of Oppression
Roberta Newnham
Intellect Books, 2013

Anecdotal Theory
Jane Gallop
Duke University Press, 2002
"Anecdote" and "theory" have diametrically opposed connotations: humorous versus serious, specific versus general, trivial versus overarching, short versus grand. Anecdotal Theory cuts through these oppositions to produce theory with a sense of humor, theorizing which honors the uncanny detail of lived experience. Challenging academic business as usual, renowned literary scholar Jane Gallop argues that all theory is bound up with stories and urges theorists to pay attention to the "trivial," quotidian narratives that theory all too often represses.

Published during the 1990s, these essays are united through a common methodological engagement—writing that recounts a personal anecdote and then attempts to read that anecdote for the theoretical insights it affords. Gallop addresses many of the major questions of feminist theory, regularly revisiting not only ‘70s feminism, but also poststructuralism and the academy, for, as Gallop explains, the practice of anecdotal theory derives from psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminism. Whether addressing issues of pedagogy, the sexual position one occupies when on the academic job-market, bad-girl feminists, or the notion of sisterhood, these essays exemplify theory grappling with its own erotics, theory connected to the real. They are bold, illuminating, and—dare we say—fun.

[more]

Angeleno Days
An Arab American Writer on Family, Place, and Politics
Gregory Orfalea
University of Arizona Press, 2009
Though he has spent half of his life elsewhere, Gregory Orfalea has remained obsessed with Los Angeles. That “brutal, beautiful city along the Pacific sea” shaped him and led to a series of essays originally published in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. These deeply moving pieces are gathered here together for the first time.

Populated with fascinating characters—the Angelenos of Orfalea’s life—these essays tell the story of the author’s trials. He returns to Los Angeles to teach, trying to reconcile the LA of his childhood with the city he now faces. He takes on progressively more difficult and painful subjects, finally confronting the memories of the shocking tragedy that took the lives of his father and sister.

With more than 400,000 Arab Americans in Los Angeles—probably surpassing Detroit as the largest contingent in America—Orfalea also explores his own community and its political and social concerns. He agonizes over another destruction of Lebanon and examines in searing detail a massacre of civilians in Iraq.

Angeleno Days takes the memoir and personal essay to rare heights. Orfalea is a deeply human writer who reveals not only what it means to be human in America now, but also what it will take to remain human in the days to come. These essays soar, confound, reveal, and strike at our senses and sensibilities, forcing us to think and feel in new ways.
[more]

Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs
Music as Social Discourse in the Victorian Novel
Alisa Clapp-Itnyre
Ohio University Press, 2002

Music was at once one of the most idealized and one of the most contested art forms of the Victorian period. Yet this vitally important nineteenth-century cultural form has been studied by literary critics mainly as a system of thematic motifs. Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs positions music as a charged site of cultural struggle, promoted concurrently as a transcendent corrective to social ills and as a subversive cause of those ills. Alisa Clapp-Itnyre examines Victorian constructions of music to advance patriotism, Christianity, culture, and domestic harmony, and suggests that often these goals were undermined by political tensions in song texts or “immoral sensuality” in the “spectacle” of live music-making.

Professor Clapp-Itnyre turns her focus to the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, who present complex engagements with those musical genres most privileged by Victorian society: folk songs, religious hymns, and concert music.

Angelic Airs, Subversive Songs recovers the pervasive ambiguities of the Victorian musical period, ambiguities typically overlooked by both literary scholars and musicologists. To the literary critic and cultural historian, Professor Clapp-Itnyre demonstrates the necessity of further exploring the complete aesthetic climate behind some of the Victorian period’s most powerful literary works. And to the feminist scholar and the musicologist, Clapp-Itnyre reveals the complexities of music as both an oppressive cultural force and an expressive, creative outlet for women.

[more]

Anger, Mercy, Revenge
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, dramatist, statesman, and adviser to the emperor Nero, all during the Silver Age of Latin literature. The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca is a fresh and compelling series of new English-language translations of his works in eight accessible volumes. Edited by world-renowned classicists Elizabeth Asmis, Shadi Bartsch, and Martha C. Nussbaum, this engaging collection restores Seneca—whose works have been highly praised by modern authors from Desiderius Erasmus to Ralph Waldo Emerson—to his rightful place among the classical writers most widely studied in the humanities.

Anger, Mercy, Revenge comprises three key writings: the moral essays On Anger and On Clemency—which were penned as advice for the then young emperor, Nero—and the Apocolocyntosis, a brilliant satire lampooning the end of the reign of Claudius. Friend and tutor, as well as philosopher, Seneca welcomed the age of Nero in tones alternately serious, poetic, and comic—making Anger, Mercy, Revenge a work just as complicated, astute, and ambitious as its author.

[more]

Anglicanus ortus
A Verse Herbal of the Twelfth Century
Henry of Huntingdon
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2012

Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions
Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, Adrienne Rich
Krista Ratcliffe
Southern Illinois University Press, 1995

Although women and men have different relationships to language and to each other, traditional theories of rhetoric do not foreground such gender differences. Krista Ratcliffe argues that because feminists generally have not conceptualized their language theories from the perspective of rhetoric and composition studies, rhetoric and composition scholars must construct feminist theories of rhetoric by employing a variety of interwoven strategies: recovering lost or marginalized texts; rereading traditional rhetoric texts; extrapolating rhetorical theories from such nonrhetoric texts as letters, diaries, essays, cookbooks, and other sources; and constructing their own theories of rhetoric.

Focusing on the third option, Ratcliffe explores ways in which the rhetorical theories of Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich may be extrapolated from their Anglo-American feminist texts through examination of the interrelationship between what these authors write and how they write. In other words, she extrapolates feminist theories of rhetoric from interwoven claims and textual strategies. By inviting Woolf, Daly, and Rich into the rhetorical traditions and by modeling the extrapolation strategy/methodology on their writings, Ratcliffe shows how feminist texts about women, language, and culture may be reread from the vantage point of rhetoric to construct feminist theories of rhetoric. She also outlines the pedagogical implications of these three feminist theories of rhetoric, thus contributing to ongoing discussions of feminist pedagogies.

Traditional rhetorical theories are gender-blind, ignoring the reality that women and men occupy different cultural spaces and that these spaces are further complicated by race and class, Ratcliffe explains. Arguing that issues such as who can talk, where one can talk, and how one can talk emerge in daily life but are often disregarded in rhetorical theories, Ratcliffe rereads Roland Barthes’ "The Old Rhetoric" to show the limitations of classical rhetorical theories for women and feminists. Discovering spaces for feminist theories of rhetoric in the rhetorical traditions, Ratcliffe invites readers not only to question how women have been located as a part of— and apart from—these traditions but also to explore the implications for rhetorical history, theory, and pedagogy.

[more]

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913
A Critical Anthology
Mary Ellis Gibson
Ohio University Press, 2011

Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology makes accessible for the first time the entire range of poems written in English on the subcontinent from their beginnings in 1780 to the watershed moment in 1913 when Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature.Mary Ellis Gibson establishes accurate texts for such well-known poets as Toru Dutt and the early nineteenth-century poet Kasiprasad Ghosh. The anthology brings together poets who were in fact colleagues, competitors, and influences on each other. The historical scope of the anthology, beginning with the famous Orientalist Sir William Jones and the anonymous “Anna Maria” and ending with Indian poets publishing in fin-de-siècle London, will enable teachers and students to understand what brought Kipling early fame and why at the same time Tagore’s Gitanjali became a global phenomenon. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913 puts all parties to the poetic conversation back together and makes their work accessible to American audiences.With accurate and reliable texts, detailed notes on vocabulary, historical and cultural references, and biographical introductions to more than thirty poets, this collection significantly reshapes the understanding of English language literary culture in India. It allows scholars to experience the diversity of poetic forms created in this period and to understand the complex religious, cultural, political, and gendered divides that shaped them.

[more]

Annali d'Italianistica
The New Italy and the Jews from Massimo d'Azeglio to Primo Levi
druker
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018
Founded in 1983, Annali d’italianistica has become synonymous with timely and fundamental scholarship on Italy’s literary culture, employing broad historical, cultural, and literary perspectives that are of interest to a wide variety of scholars. Published annually and monographic in nature, the journal uses as its point of departure the study of Italian literature and the Humanities more generally to foster scholarly excellence at all levels. Annali d’italianistica is receptive to a variety of topics, critical approaches, and theoretical perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries and span several centuries, from the beginning of Italy’s cultural history to the present.
[more]

Annali d’Italianistica
Violence Resistance Tolerance Sacrifice in Italy's Literary & Cultural History
Chiara Ferrari
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2017

The Annotated Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Harvard University Press, 2012
Emerson remains one of America’s least understood writers, having spawned neither school nor follower. Those wishing to discover or reacquaint themselves with Emerson’s writings but who have not known where or how to begin will not find a better starting place or more reliable guide than David Mikics in this richly illustrated Annotated Emerson.
[more]

The Annotated Letters of Christopher Smart
Edited by Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony
Southern Illinois University Press, 1991

The only collection of all known letters of Christopher Smart provides the best psychological explanation to date of that complex and elusive eighteenth-century poet.

The significant characteristics that distinguish Smart’s prose letters from his poetry, Betty Rizzo and Robert Mahony note, are that his letters were requests for assistance while his verses were bequests, gifts in which he set great store. Indeed, it was Smart’s lifelong conviction that he was a poet of major importance.

As Smart biographer Karina Williamson notes, "The splendidly informative and vivaciously written accounts of the circumstances surrounding each letter, or group of letters, add up to what is in effect a miniature biography."

[more]

Another Way the River Has
Taut True Tales from the Northwest
Robin Cody
Oregon State University Press, 2010

Another Way the River Has collects Robin Cody’s finest nonfiction writings, many appearing for the first time in print. Cody’s prose rings with a sense of place. He is a native speaker who probes the streams and woods and salmon that run to the heart of what it means to live and love, to work and play, in Oregon.

His characters—from loggers to fishers to cowboys to the kids on his school bus—are smart and curious, often off-beat, always vivid. Cody brings the ear of a novelist and the eye of a reporter to the people and places that make the Northwest, and Northwest literature, distinctive.

“A rock, you know, will sink like a stone in water. But a flat rock, slung spinningly near the water surface and at an angel parallel to it, will go skipping across the water in defiance of gravity and common sense. How cool is that?! The first time a boy pulls this off ranks just short of first-time sex on the scale of things he will want to do over and over whenever he can and as long as he lives.”

-from “The Clackamas River”

[more]

Another Year Finds Me in Texas
The Civil War Diary of Lucy Pier Stevens
By Vicki Adams Tongate
University of Texas Press, 2016

Lucy Pier Stevens, a twenty-one-year-old woman from Ohio, began a visit to her aunt’s family near Bellville, Texas, on Christmas Day, 1859. Little did she know how drastically her life would change on April 4, 1861, when the outbreak of the Civil War made returning home impossible. Stranded in enemy territory for the duration of the war, how would she reconcile her Northern upbringing with the Southern sentiments surrounding her?

Lucy Stevens’s diary—one of few women’s diaries from Civil War–era Texas and the only one written by a Northerner—offers a unique perspective on daily life at the fringes of America’s bloodiest conflict. An articulate, educated, and keen observer, Stevens took note seemingly of everything—the weather, illnesses, food shortages, parties, church attendance, chores, schools, childbirth, death, the family’s slaves, and political and military news. As she confided her private thoughts to her journal, she unwittingly revealed how her love for her Texas family and the Confederate soldier boys she came to care for blurred her loyalties, even as she continued to long for her home in Ohio. Showing how the ties of heritage, kinship, friendship, and community transcended the sharpest division in US history, this rare diary and Vicki Adams Tongate’s insightful historical commentary on it provide a trove of information on women’s history, Texas history, and Civil War history.

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Antonina
Evgeniya Tur
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Patterned on the novels of the Brontë sisters, Antonina is a poignant account of a young Russian whose life is shaped by the cruel neglect of her stepparents, the financial ruin of her father and husband, and—the centerpiece of the novel—her failed love affair with a sensitive but weak young man.
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Apocalypse, Darling
Barrie Jean Borich
The Ohio State University Press, 2018

From award-winning author Barrie Jean Borich comes Apocalypse, Darling, a narrative, lyric exploration of the clash between old and new. Set in the steel mill regions of Chicago and in Northwest Indiana, the story centers on Borich’s return to a decimated landscape for a misbegotten wedding in which her spouse’s father marries his high school sweetheart. The book is a lilting journey into an ill-fated moment, where families attempt to find communion in tense gathering spaces and across their most formative disappointments. Borich tells the story of the industrial heartland that produced the steel that made American cities, but also one of the most toxic environmental sites in the world.
 
 
As concise as a poem and as sweeping as an epic novel, Apocalypse, Darling explores the intersection of American traditional and self-invented social identities and the destruction and re-greening of industrial cityscapes. Borich asks: can toxic landscapes actually be remediated and can patriarchal fathers ever really be forgiven? In a political climate where Borich is forced to daily re-enter the toxic wastelands she thought she’d long left behind, Apocalypse, Darling is an urgent collision of broken spaces, dysfunctional affections, and the reach toward familial and environmental repair. 
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Appalachian Reckoning
A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy
Anthony Harkins
West Virginia University Press, 2019

2020 American Book Award winner, Walter & Lillian Lowenfels Criticism Award
Weatherford Award winner, nonfiction


With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region’s future?

Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachians from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia’s intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities.

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Archaeologists in Print
Publishing for the People
Amara Thornton
University College London, 2018
Archaeologists in Print is a history of popular publishing in archaeology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a pivotal period of expansion and development in both archaeology and publishing. It examines how British archaeologists produced books and popular periodical articles for a nonscholarly audience and explores the rise in archaeologists’ public visibility. Notably, it analyzes women’s experiences in archaeology alongside better-known male contemporaries as shown in their books and archives. In the background of this narrative is the history of Britain’s imperial expansion and contraction, and the evolution of modern tourism in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. Archaeologists exploited these factors to gain public and financial support and interest, and build and maintain a reading public for their work, supported by the seasonal nature of excavation and tourism. Reinforcing these publishing activities through personal appearances in the lecture hall, exhibition space and site tour, and in new media—film, radio and television—archaeologists shaped public understanding of archaeology.

The image of the archaeologist as adventurous explorer of foreign lands, part spy, part foreigner, eternally alluring, solidified during this period. That legacy continues, undimmed, today.
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Archaic Greek Poetry
An Anthology
Selected and translated by Barbara Hughes Fowler
University of Wisconsin Press, 1992
     With this anthology, Barbara Hughes Fowler presents the most comprehensive selection of Greek poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. ever published in English.  Fowler’s brilliant translations provide access to six Homeric Hymns, eight selections from Bakchylides, twelve odes of Pindar, selections from the iambicists and elegists, virtually all of Archilochos and of the surviving lyricists, including Sappho, and a number of anonymous poems about work, play, and politics.  Archaic poets delighted in all that was radiant and delicate, and their poems should be read for their narrative charm, celebration of nature, and playful sensuality.  There are tantalizing fragments of fables here, as well as poems of friendship and warfare, love and  colonization.  Along with her notes and bibliography, Fowler has provided a biographical list of poets and a glossary of proper names. 
     In addition to its breadth, Archaic Greek Poetry stands alone as the only volume of its kind translated by a contemporary published poet.  Perhaps the most elegant translator of ancient Greek poetry into modern English, Barbara Hughes Fowler offers translations true to the original Greek while providing modern readers with superb examples of the beauty of lyric poetry.  Students and scholars of classical and comparative literature, ancient history, and art history, as well as lovers of lyric poetry, will enthusiastically welcome this volume.
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The Architectural Novel
The Construction of National Identities in Nineteenth-Century England and France: William Ainsworth, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas
Nicola Minott-Ahl
Sussex Academic Press, 2022
Scholars in disciplines from architecture and the fine arts, to the various branches of history and social studies, will find this study timely given contemporary European controversies over what constitutes national identity and what parts are played by race, philosophy and religion, economics, immigration, and invasion. Many major European national identities barely predate the nineteenth century and were shaped not just by wars, philosophies, industrial change, and governmental policies, but also by artistic manipulation of how people perceived public spaces: landscapes, cityscapes, religious and cultural structures, museums, and monuments commemorating conflict. Among the most masterful manipulators of the day were popular nineteenth-century French and British novelists, who gave famous buildings a special prominence in their writing. Some, like Victor Hugo, are still read and respected by scholars. Others, like Alexandre Dumas, though still widely read, are undervalued by contemporary critics. Still others, like William Harrison Ainsworth, a prolific English writer, are all but forgotten. These three writers authored architectural novels which gave major ancient Gothic buildings a new and portable cultural presence well beyond their physical location. During these revolutionary times, when national symbolism was being questioned and challenged, the threatened rupture with the past was admirably addressed through their art.
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The Arms of Morpheus
Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism
Stephen McNeilly
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2007
The Arms of Morpheus:Essays on Swedenborg and Mysticism addresses the relatively untapped subject of the eighteenth-century Swedish philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and his place within the mystical tradition. Highlighting the congruencies and disparities of his ideas with those mystics and visionaries who preceded him and those that followed after, the volume opens with a wonderful essay on Swedenborg by the Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz and is followed by essays that offer important comparisons between Swedenborg and Jacob Boehme, Rudolf Steiner, Madame Guyon, the Kabbalah, Ibn ‘Arabi, and Paracelsus.
 
This volume, the fifth in the Journal of the Swedenborg Society series, contains the following seven essays:
 
• Czeslaw Milosz, “Swedenborg the Mystic”
• Ariel Hessayon, “Jacob Boehme, Swedenborg and Their Readers”
• Gary Lachman, “Swedenborg, Rudolf Steiner and the Hypnagogic State”
• Richard Lines, “The Feminine Mysticism of Madame Guyon”
• Reuben Bell, “Swedenborg and the Kabbalah”
• James Wilson, “Swedenborg and Paracelsus”
• José Antonio Antón-Pacheco, “Ibn ‘Arabi and Swedenborg”
 
Also included are a preface by Stephen McNeilly, a chronology of Swedenborg, biographies of the subjects of the essays, and an index.
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Art for the Ladylike
An Autobiography through Other Lives
Whitney Otto
The Ohio State University Press, 2021
“In this inviting blend of biography and memoir, novelist Otto (How to Make an American Quilt) examines her life in terms of the women artists who influenced her.…Otto provides a fascinating tour of art through the lens of her own experience. Creatives of all sorts will enjoy [her] wide-ranging insights.” —Publishers Weekly

In Art for the Ladylike, Whitney Otto limns the lives of eight pioneering women photographers—Sally Mann, Imogen Cunningham, Judy Dater, Ruth Orkin, Tina Modotti, Lee Miller, Madame Yvonne, and Grete Stern—to in turn excavate her own writer’s life. The result is an affecting exploration of what it means to be a woman, what it means to be an artist, and the perils and rewards of being both at once. In considering how feminism, career, and motherhood were entangled throughout her subjects’ lives as they tirelessly sought to render their visions and paved the way for others creating within the bounds of domesticity, Otto assesses her own struggles with balancing writing and the pulls of home life. Ultimately, she ponders the persistent question that artistic women face in a world that devalues women’s ambition: If what we love is what we are, how do those of us with multiple loves forge lives with room for everything?
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The Art of Good Manners
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, this petite guide offers time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.
           
The Art of Good Manners ranges broadly across topics including courtship, children’s behavior, and civilized conversation before taking the reader through each course at a dinner party, where readers are reminded to neither gurgle the soup nor to make haste with the fruit course since “to peel an orange, apple or pear with a fruit knife and fork requires some practice.”
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Manners is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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The Art of Letter Writing
Edited by the Bodleian Library
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
While many bemoan the lack of good manners in society today, the most courteous among us would feel mightily out of place across the dining table from a Dowager Countess. Upholding the highest standards of social decorum was of utmost importance for the 1920s British upper class and even more so for the aspiring middle class that sought to emulate it. Yet the path to perfect comportment seemed strewn—then as now—with pitfalls, from befuddling arrays of silverware to less-than-gracious houseguests. Originally published in the 1920s, the petite guides in the Bodleian Library’s series offer time-honored advice to avoid such pitfalls.

The Art of Letter Writing provides more than fifty examples of well-crafted correspondence that will lend confidence whether one needs to break off an engagement, accept an invitation to a country house weekend, complain about a courier, or write to a countess.
           
Charmingly presented, The Art of Good Letter Writing is by turns humorously old-fashioned and timeless, and it makes the perfect gift for all who miss this elegant bygone era.
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Artaud 1937 Apocalypse
Letters from Ireland
Antonin Artaud
Diaphanes, 2019
Antonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II.

During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
 
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Artificial Southerner
Equivocations and Love Songs
Philip Martin
University of Arkansas Press, 2001
The Artificial Southerner tracks the manifestations and ramifications of "Southern identity"—the relationship among a self-conscious, invented regionalism, the real distinctiveness of Southern culture, and the influence of the South in America. In these essays columnist Philip Martin explores the region and those who have both fled and embraced it. He offers lyric portraits of Southerners real, imagined, and absentee: musicians (James Brown, the Rolling Stones, Johnny Cash), writers (Richard Ford, Eudora Welty), politicians (Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter). He also considers such topics as the architecture of E. Fay Jones, the biracial nature of country music, and the idea of "white trash." "Every American has a South within," he says, "a conquered territory, an old wound . . . a scar." His work meditates on the rock and roll, the literature, the life, and the love which proceed from that inner, self-created South.
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The Artist in New York
Letters to Jean Charlot and unpublished writings, 1925-1929.
By José Clemente Orozco
University of Texas Press, 1974
In his Foreword to this edition, Jean Charlot says: "An unusual feature of Orozco's letters is the great deal that he has to say about art. That one artist writing to another would emphasize art as his subject seems normal enough to the American reader. Yet, within the context of the Mexico of those days, the fact remains exceptional. The patria Orozco was leaving behind had, even from the point of view of its artists, many cares more pressing than art." The letters and unpublished writings of Orozco from this period (1925-1929) describe an important period of transition in the artist's life, from his departure from Mexico, almost as a defeated man, to the period just before he received the great mural commissions—Pomona, The New School for Social Research in New York, Dartmouth—that were to bring him lasting international fame.
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Assault on Paradise
Tatiana Lobo
Northwestern University Press, 1998
Assault on Paradise vividly depicts the Conquistadores and the Church invading Central America, impoverishing one world to enrich another. In a fast-paced, bawdy, swashbuckling adventure in Central America of the early 1700s, Costa Rican novelist Tatiana Lobo lays bare the dark legacy of the Conquistadores and the Church. Through the central picaresque story of Pedro Albaran, Lobo dramatizes the intrigues of politicians and the Inquisition and the bloody battles between the native people and the invaders, while simultaneously presenting a reverent poetic recreation of indigenous cosmogony and mystical values which the natives seek to use to drive out the invaders.
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The Astonishment Tapes
Talks on Poetry and Autobiography with Robin Blaser and Friends
Robin Blaser
University of Alabama Press, 2015
The edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser
 
Robin Blaser moved from his native Idaho to attend the University of California, Berkeley, in 1944. While there, he developed as a poet, explored his homosexuality, engaged in a lively arts community, and met fellow travelers and poets Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. The three men became the founding members of the Berkeley core of what is now known as the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry.

In the company of a small group of friends and writers in 1974, Blaser was asked to narrate his personal story and to comment on the Berkeley poetry scene. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is the expertly edited transcript of these recordings by Miriam Nichols, Blaser’s editor and biographer.

In The Astonishment Tapes Blaser comments extensively on the poetic principles that he, Duncan, and Spicer worked through, as well as the differences and dissonances between the three of them. Nichols has edited the transcripts only minimally, allowing readers to make their own interpretations of Blaser’s intentions.

Sometimes gossipy, sometimes profound, Blaser offers his version on the inside story of one of the most significant moments in mid-twentieth century American poetry. The Astonishment Tapes is of considerable value and interest, not only to readers of Blaser, Duncan, and Spicer, but also to scholars of the early postmodern and twentieth-century American poetry.
 
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At a Breezy Time of Day
Selected Schall Interviews on Just about Everything
James V. Schall
St. Augustine's Press, 2016
We have books that contain collected essays, verse, and humor. What we see less often are books that contain collected interviews on various topics. Interviews have a certain outside discipline about them. The one interviewed responds to a question someone else asks of him. Often the questions are unexpected, sometimes annoying. Answers have a freshness to them. They can be more personal, frank. 
            The responses in At a Breezy Time of Day are occasioned when someone writes or phones with a request for an interview. There may be a common theme but often side questions come up. We are curious about what someone has to say –  about sports, about God, about Plato, about education, about books, about just about anything. Usually central questions occur. The same question can be answered in different ways. We often have more to say on a given topic than we do say on our first being asked about it.
            These interviews appeared in various on-line and printed sources. Having them collected in one text makes the interview form itself seem more substantial. Interviews too often seem to be passing, ephemeral things, but often we want to hold on to them. There is something more existential about them. Yet there is also something more lightsome about them also. The truth of things seems more bearable when it is spoken, when it has a human voice. 
So, as the title of this collection intimates, we begin with the very first interview in the Garden of Eden. We touch many places and issues. The interview always has somewhere even in its written form the touch of the human voice. The one who interviews invites us to speak, to tell us what we hold, why we hold it. Interviews are themselves part of that engagement in conversation that defines our kind in its search for a full knowledge of what is. 
We know that when we have said the last word, much remains to be said. We can rejoice both in what we know, and in what we know that we do not know. I believe it was Socrates who, in an earlier form of interview at the end of The Apology, alerted us to be aware of what we know and to await the many other interviews that we hope to carry on with so many others of our kind in the Isles of the Blessed.
 
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Aucassin and Nicolette
A Facing-Page Edition and Translation
Robert S. Sturges
Michigan State University Press, 2015
A comic masterpiece of medieval French literature, Aucassin and Nicolette is categorized by its anonymous author as a “chantefable,” or “song-story,” and is the only known work of this kind. This edition includes the thirteenth-century French text and a modern English translation on facing pages. An introduction outlines the text’s background, genre, literary relations, historical contexts, major themes, and relevance to a contemporary audience. Its alternating sections of verse and prose recount a story of love between the aristocratic but distinctly unheroic young lord Aucassin and his beloved Nicolette. Despite familial disapproval, class and ethnic differences, imprisonment, and geographical separation, Nicolette’s single-minded pursuit of Aucassin raises interesting questions about gender roles and their depiction in the Middle Ages. The issue of identity is also addressed, as the identity of Nicolette shifts in terms of class, religion, and ethnicity: born a Muslim princess, she becomes both a slave and a Christian convert, and is eventually recaptured by her Saracen family, much to her displeasure. With its daring escapes, its descriptions of travel to exotic lands, its separations, and its happy reunions, Aucassin and Nicolette is both a classic romantic comedy and an entertaining parody of the romance genre.
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Augustine’s Soliloquies in Old English and in Latin
Leslie Lockett
Harvard University Press, 2022

A new edition featuring Saint Augustine’s dialogue on immortality from a tenth-century Latin manuscript, accompanied by an Old English vernacular adaptation translated into modern English for the first time in a hundred years.

Around the turn of the tenth century, an anonymous scholar crafted an Old English version of Saint Augustine of Hippo’s Soliloquia, a dialogue exploring the nature of truth and the immortality of the soul. The Old English Soliloquies was, perhaps, inspired by King Alfred the Great’s mandate to translate important Latin works. It retains Augustine’s focus on the soul, but it also explores loyalty—to friends, to one’s temporal lord, and to the Lord God—and it presses toward a deeper understanding of the afterlife. Will we endure a state of impersonal and static forgetfulness, or will we retain our memories, our accrued wisdom, and our sense of individuated consciousness?

This volume presents the first English translation of the complete Old English Soliloquies to appear in more than a century. It is accompanied by a unique edition of Augustine’s Latin Soliloquia, based on a tenth-century English manuscript similar to the one used by the translator, that provides insight into the adaptation process. Both the Latin and Old English texts are newly edited.

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The Author's Dimension
Selected Essays
Christa Wolf
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Spanning the past three decades, these essays focus on the roles of the writer and literature today. In the first half of this series of witty, probing essays on reading and writing, Wolf examines the individual's, in particular the writer's, relationship to society. The final sections, "On War and Peace and Politics" and "The End of the German Democratic Republic," demonstrate the ways in which Wolf's political thinking has evolved and cast light on the political situation in East Germany prior to reunification.

"An important publication, ably served by the editing of Alexander Stephan; the knowledgeable translation by Jan Van Heurck; and Grace Paley's sisterly introduction, which . . . claims at least the later Christa Wolf for a pacifist feminism."—Peter Demetz, New York Times


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The Azure Cloister
Thirty-Five Poems
Carlos Germán Belli
Swan Isle Press, 2021
New translations of poems by prominent Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli.
 
This selection of poems by internationally renowned Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli tempers a dark, ironic vision of worldly injustice with the “red midnight sun” of hope. Belli’s contemplative verses express faith in language, in bodily joy, and in artistic form. These thirty-five poems explore public and domestic spaces of confinement and freedom, from paralysis to the ease of a bird in its “azure cloister.” 
 
Translations by Karl Maurer retain Belli’s original meter, follow his complex syntax, and meet the challenges of his poetic language, which ranges from colloquial Peruvian slang to the ironic use of seventeenth-century Spanish. This bilingual edition also includes notes and reflections on Belli and on the art of translation. Beyond introducing American readers to a major presence in world poetry, The Azure Cloister offers a fresh approach to the translation of contemporary verse in Spanish.
 
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