BiblioVault - Books about Window

The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore

Alan Brown

University of Alabama Press, 1996

The first scholarly collection of ghostlore from throughout the state of Alabama

Both enlightening and entertaining, The Face in the Window and Other Alabama Ghostlore is the first scholarly collection of ghostlore from throughout the state of Alabama. Alan Brown has traveled the state collecting sotries and photographs illustrating the places that gave rise to the eerie tales.

Brown recreates the experience of actually hearing the tales by reproducing each story as it was told. Additionally, he includes an analysis of the folk motifs and themes that run through the ghostlore commonly found in Alabama and examines their contributions to folk traditions, especially in those stories told by young people.

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"The Girl in the Window" and Other True Tales

An Anthology with Tips for Finding, Reporting, and Writing Nonfiction Narratives

Lane DeGregory

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Part anthology and part craft guide, this collection of pieces from the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist offers something for readers and writers alike.

Lane DeGregory loves true stories, intimate details, and big ideas. In her three-decade career as a journalist, she has published more than 3,000 stories and won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her acclaimed work in the Tampa Bay Times often takes her to the edges of society, where she paints empathetic portraits of real-life characters like a 99-year-old man who still works cleaning a seafood warehouse, a young couple on a bus escaping winter, and a child in the midst of adoption. In “The Girl in the Window” and Other True Tales, DeGregory not only offers up the first collection of her most unforgettable newspaper features—she pulls back the curtain on how to write narrative nonfiction.

This book—part anthology, part craft guide—provides a forensic reading of twenty-four of DeGregory’s singular stories, illustrating her tips for writers alongside pieces that put those elements under the microscope. Each of the pieces gathered here—including the Pulitzer Prize–winning title story—is accompanied by notes on how she built the story, plus tips on how nonfiction writers at all levels can do the same. Featuring a foreword by Beth Macy, author of the acclaimed Dopesick, this book is sure to delight fans of DeGregory’s writing, as well as introduce her to readers and writers who have not yet discovered her inspiring body of work.

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The God Behind the Window

Michael Krüger

Seagull Books, 2018

Now in paperback, a comic and moving collection of stories of grumpy old men who start to find unexpected connections with the world.

The thirteen stories of Michael Krüger’s The God behind the Window capture the poignancy and cynicism of late life through tales of misanthropic old men full of the mixture of wisdom and melancholy that so often accompanies old age. In Krüger’s stories, world-weary characters seek—and only temporarily find—solace in nature and culture, rendering their search for a better life simultaneously comedic and heart wrenching. From a solitary hiker in the Swiss Alps to the book’s eponymous shut-in, these aging malcontents are continually surprised by the unexpected interventions of a world that has come to seem predictable. Krüger captures this stage in life masterfully, contrasting the deeply personal emotions of affection, melancholy, and longing with an indifferent world. The resulting stories are lyrical, philosophical, and tender despite their cynicism.

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The Snake River

Window To The West

Tim Palmer

Island Press, 1991

Tim Palmer weaves natural history into a comprehensive account of the complex problems that plague natural resource management throughout the West, as well as the practical solutions that are available.

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Through the Window, Out the Door

Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion

Janis P. Stout

University of Alabama Press, 1998

This informative and provocative study focuses on the centrality of departure in the texts of five major American women novelists.

An important moment in many novels and poems by American women writers occurs when a central character looks out a window or walks out the door of a house. These acts of departure serve to convey such values as the rejection of constraining social patterns, the search for individual fulfillment, and the entry into the political.

Janis Stout examines such moments and related patterns of venture and travel in the fiction of five major American novelists of the 20th century: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Anne Tyler, Toni Morrison, and Joan Didion. Stout views these five writers within a spectrum of narrative engagements with issues of home and departure—a spectrum anchored at one end by Sarah Orne Jewett and at the other by Marilynne Robinson, whose Housekeeping posits a vision of female transience.

Through the Window, Out the Door ranges over an expansive territory. Moving between texts as well as between texts and contexts, Stout shows how women writers have envisioned the walls of physical and social structures (including genres) as permeable boundaries, drawing on both a rhetoric of liberation and a rhetoric of domesticity to construct narrative arguments for women's right to move freely between the two. Stout concludes with a personal essay on the dilemmas of domesticity and the ambivalence of departure.

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The Woman in the Window

Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel

Russell Scott Valentino

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

In The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel, Russell Scott Valentino offers pioneering new insights into the historical construction of virtue and its relation to the rapidly shifting economic context in modern Russia. This study illustrates how the traditional virtue ethic, grounded in property-based conceptions of masculine heroism, was eventually displaced by a new commercial ethic that rested upon consensual fantasy. The new economic world destabilized traditional Russian notions of virtue and posed a central question that Russian authors have struggled to answer since the early nineteenth century: How could a self-interested commercial man be incorporated into the Russian context as a socially valuable masculine character?

With chapters on Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as Pasternak and Nabokov, The Woman in the Window argues that Russian authors worked through this question via their depictions of “mixed-up men.” Such characters, according to Valentino, reveal that in a world where social reality and personal identity depend on consensual fantasies, the old masculine figure loses its grounding and can easily drift away. Valentino charts a range of masculine character types thrown off stride by the new commercially inflected world: those who embrace blind confidence, those who are split with doubt or guilt, and those who look for an ideal of steadfastness and purity to keep afloat—a woman in a window.

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