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In this collection of essays, an acclaimed poet and playwright searches for meaning amid catastrophe.

The twenty candid essays in Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft are the culmination of a ten-year project by acclaimed poet and playwright Dan O’Brien. Divided into three parts, this volume—portions of which originally appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, and The Times Literary Supplement—combines the deeply personal with the artistic and professional, coalescing around the experience of trauma (physical, mental, moral) and the challenges presented by catastrophe and its aftermath.

In the title essay, O'Brien links the smoke and debris of the Los Angeles wildfires to the toxic legacy of September 11, tracing the lasting repercussions of collective disaster. In “Dear Brother,” he revisits a sibling’s suicide attempt and the family silences that shaped both his life and his writing. Elsewhere, in reflections on documentary theater, political violence, and a long collaboration with Pulitzer Prize–winning war reporter Paul Watson, he weighs the responsibility and the cost of bearing witness to suffering.

Running through the book, and indeed through O’Brien’s career as poet, playwright, essayist, and memoirist, is a search for meaning in the midst of calamity, whether it results from terrorism, from conflagration, from cancer, or from victimhood and abuse. Written over a decade marked by devastating illness, profound cultural upheaval, and hard-won hope, Ash is both an intimate record of survival and a searching meditation on the resilience and reinvention to be found in the creative act.

An essential collection of Dwight Macdonald’s prophetic essays on politics, art, and violence in twentieth-century America.

What does extreme violence do to human values? Does the concept of collective guilt make sense in assessing responsibility for genocide? Has modern mechanized society forever destroyed the possibility of peaceful resistance through art and civil disobedience? Atrocities of the Mind presents anew Dwight Macdonald, one of America’s foremost literary journalists and political activists, grappling with the hard questions of his time—and ours.  
 
In this collection, Macdonald writes about major events—the Holocaust, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Gandhi’s assassination, the Vietnam War, and social phenomena such as mass shootings, campus protests, and police brutality—with clear-sighted and buoyant prose. He writes incisively about the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock and Roman Polanski, praises Dorothy Day’s pacifism, and reports circulating an antiwar petition in the White House Rose Garden. And not without effect: his essay “Our Invisible Poor” is said to have spurred the Johnson administration’s War on Poverty. 
 
Norman Mailer memorably called Macdonald “a man with whom one might seldom agree but could never disrespect because he always told the truth as he saw the truth—a man therefore of the most incorruptible integrity.” In our America, reeling from political violence, Macdonald’s truth-telling reminds us how we got here and who we might still become.

A comprehensive biography of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, one of the nineteenth-century America’s best-selling authors

A fascinating biography about Augusta Jane Evans, a nearly forgotten writer who was nevertheless one of the most popular writers of her era. She wrote nine novels about southern women, including St. Elmo, which sold a staggering one million copies within four months of its release in 1866. William Fidler traces the life of Augusta Jane Evans from her birth in 1835 in Columbus, Georgia till her death in Alabama in 1909.
 

From "a dirty hand":

Words are very powerful. You aren't sure of that? Think of all the things you won't say.

• Wonderful remark in a note I had this week from William Carlos Williams. He spoke of the "disease" of wanting to write poetry; said he had been "off" poetry for many months and—he said—"I feel clean and unhappy."
• One reason for keeping this kind of notebook: you can put on record the retort you couldn't think of at last night's party.
• Photographs of Henry James in his middle years should be commented upon. Gone is the shy aesthete of the youthful portrait (by LaFarge?) . This bearded man has a fierce look, even a bestial one. Here is perhaps-I don't know-James at his most generative. Again this man disappears in the shaven, bald, final James, the famous James—the Grand Lama.
• I noticed when Lindsay (thirteen) read aloud a passage from a hunting book the other day he pronounced "genital" as "genteel." I'd love to see a literary history titled "The Genital Tradition."
• Contrast "business ethics" and the ethics of art. Nobody writes a poem hoping it will wear out in four or five years.

Between 1951 and 1966 the distinguished American poet Winfield Townley Scott kept a series of notebooks in which he set down his thoughts on poetry, literature, the literary scene, and life in general. Shortly before his untimely death in 1968 he made a selection of the entries he thought were best and gave it the title "a dirty hand." These perceptive notes, some tart, some gentle, some boisterous, some wistful, give us a remarkable insight into the workings of his creative mind. George P. Elliott has said of Scott: "In a very solid way, I think he was as rock-bottom American a poet as we have had since Frost." The introduction is by Scott's good friend Merle Armitage, who also designed the original edition of this book.