Results by title

This collection, the first of its kind, gathers original and previously published fiction and poetry from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer authors from Appalachia. Like much Appalachian literature, these works are pervaded with an attachment to family and the mountain landscape, yet balancing queer and Appalachian identities is an undertaking fraught with conflict. This collection confronts the problematic and complex intersections of place, family, sexuality, gender, and religion with which LGBTQ Appalachians often grapple.

With works by established writers such as Dorothy Allison, Silas House, Ann Pancake, Fenton Johnson, and Nickole Brown and emerging writers such as Savannah Sipple, Rahul Mehta, Mesha Maren, and Jonathan Corcoran, this collection celebrates a literary canon made up of writers who give voice to what it means to be Appalachian and LGBTQ.

This unique book is a graphic novel and performance poem, a mixed-media musical cartoon, an animated feature film come to life. Lee Breuer’s La Divina Caricatura is in the pataphysical tradition of Alfred Jarry—if Jarry had been a Dante fan. In this play we meet unforgettable characters: Rose the Dog, who thinks she is a woman; her lover John, a junkie filmmaker; Ponzi Porco, PhD, a pig in love with the New York Times; and the Warrior Ant, who, to impress his father, Trotsky the Termite, declares the “perpetual revolution” of the bugs of the fifth world. Each a soul on its own pilgrimage, seldom with a Virgil or a Beatrice to guide them, they often try to guide each other, only to get more lost. A dazzling, comic, potent mix of ideas and character, invention and reality, the plays in La Divina Caricatura reinvigorate the stage for our time.
 

After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anaïs Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style. She resisted realistic writing and drew on the experience and intuitions of her diary to forge a novelistic style emphasizing free association, the language of emotion, spontaneity, and improvisation.

Ladders to Fire is the first volume of Nin’s celebrated series of novels called Cities of the Interior

For Anaïs Nin, her writing and her life were not separable, they were both part of the same experience. She claimed that “is it the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Anaïs Nin continues to find an audience, whether for her fiction, her diaries, or her own life story, which has enjoyed the attention of biographers and filmmakers. This 1995 reissue of Ladders to Fire has a new cover and foreword.

Anaïs Nin’s Ladders to Fire interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author’s own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that “it was the fiction writer who edited the diary.”

Ladders to Fire is the first book of Nin’s continuous novel, Cities of the Interior, which also includes Children of the Albatross,The Four-Chambered Heart,A Spy in the House of Love, and Seduction of the Minotaur. These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.

This Swallow Press reissue of Ladders to Fire includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann’s classic foreword to the 1995 edition.

One writer's quest to locate herself within the wet, wild, and diversely human cultural heritage that has shaped her

There has been plenty of scholarship on science fiction over the decades, but it has left one crucial aspect of the genre all but unanalyzed: the visual. Ambitious and original, Landscape and the Science Fiction Imaginary corrects that oversight, making a powerful argument for science fiction as a visual cultural discourse. Taking influential historical works of visual art as starting points, along with illustrations, movie matte paintings, documentaries, artist’s impressions, and digital environments, John Timberlake focuses on the notion of science fiction as an “imaginary topos,” one that draws principally on the intersection between landscape and historical/prehistorical time. Richly illustrated, this book will appeal to scholars, students, and fans of science fiction and the remarkable visual culture that surrounds it.

The oil-rich sultanate of Brunei Darussalam is located on the northern coast of Borneo between the two Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah. Though the country is small in size and in population, the variety of language use there provides a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, bilingual studies, and sociolinguistic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.

This useful reference is divided into three sections: one on varieties of the Malay language used in the country, one on other indigenous languages, and one on the role and form of the English used there. Contributors to the collection include Bruneian scholars as well as established experts in the fields of Austronesian linguistics, sociolinguistics studies, and the description of new varieties of English.

Only a few plays by Sophocles—one of the great tragic playwrights from Classical Athens—have survived, and each of them dramatizes events from the rich store of myths that framed literature and art. Sophocles’ treatment evokes issues that were vividly contemporary for Athenian audiences of the Periclean age: How could the Athenians incorporate older, aristocratic ideas about human excellence into their new democratic society? Could citizens learn to be morally excellent, or were these qualities only inherited? What did it mean to be a creature who knows that he or she must die?

Late Sophocles traces the evolution of the Sophoclean hero through the final three plays, Electra, Philoctetes, and Oedipus at Colonus. The book’s main thesis, that Sophocles reimagined the nature of the tragic hero in his last three works, is developed inductively through readings of the plays. This balanced approach, in which a detailed argument about the plays is offered in a format accessible to nonspecialists, is unusual—perhaps unique—in contemporary Classical scholarship on Sophocles.

This book will appeal to nonspecialist readers of serious literature as well as scholars of classical and other literatures. While including ample guidance for those not familiar with the plays, Late Sophocles goes beyond a generalized description of “what happens” in the plays to offer a clear, jargon-free argument for the enduring importance of Sophocles’ plays. The argument’s implications for longstanding interpretational issues will be of interest to specialists. All Greek is translated.

The epic story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cannot be told without including its dedication to speechmaking and eloquence. Richard Benjamin Crosby and Isaac James Richards collect important speeches from a broad range of sources that highlight the history, diversity, and centrality of public speaking in Latter-day Saint life. An expert introduces each speech while offering perspective on its place in Latter-day Saint history. The collected works express a diversity of viewpoints and experiences at odds with the notion that Latter-day Saints speak in a single voice while declaring the significance of the Latter-day Saint faith in their lives.

Essential and one-of-a-kind, Latter-day Eloquence provides a foundational reference for the study of Latter-day Saint rhetoric and oratory.

Jimmy Santiago Baca’s newest collection of essays picks up where his earlier acclaimed book, Working in the Dark, left off. Laughing in the Light is the writer’s first attempt to revisit his past, launching into the past twenty years with a renewed heart and wizened spirit as he shares his experiences, what he has learned along the way, and how his views have changed. Baca delves deeper into contemporary issues as he explores themes ranging from arts, culture, education, and justice reform.

Internationally known during her lifetime, Laura Battiferra (1523-89) was a gifted and prolific poet in Renaissance Florence. The author of nearly 400 sonnets remarkable for their subtlety, intricate narrative structure, and learned allusions, Battiferra, who was married to the prominent sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, traversed an elite literary and artistic network, circulating her verse in a complex and intellectually fecund exchange with some of the most illustrious figures in Italian history. In this bilingual anthology, Victoria Kirkham gathers Battiferra's most essential writing, including newly discovered poems, which provide modern readers with a valuable social chronicle of sixteenth-century Italy and the courtly culture of the Counter-Reformation.

Before Laura Ingalls Wilder found fame with her Little House books, she made a name for herself with short nonfiction pieces in magazines and newspapers. Read today, these pieces offer insight into her development as a writer and depict farm life in the Ozarks—and also show us a different Laura Ingalls Wilder from the woman we have come to know.

            This volume collects essays by Wilder that originally appeared in the Missouri Ruralist between 1911 and 1924. Building on the initial compilation of these articles under the title Little House in the Ozarks, this revised edition marks a more comprehensive collection by adding forty-two additional Ruralist articles and restoring passages previously omitted from other articles.

            Writing as “Mrs. A. J. Wilder” about modern life in the early twentieth-century Ozarks, Laura lends her advice to women of her generation on such timeless issues as how to be an equal partner with their husbands, how to support the new freedoms they’d won with the right to vote, and how to maintain important family values in their changing world. Yet she also discusses such practical matters as how to raise chickens, save time on household tasks, and set aside time to relax now and then.

            New articles in this edition include “Making the Best of Things,” “Economy in Egg Production,” and “Spic, Span, and Beauty.” “Magic in Plain Foods” reflects her cosmopolitanism and willingness to take advantage of new technologies, while “San Marino Is Small but Mighty” reveals her social-political philosophy and her interest in cooperation and community as well as in individualism and freedom. Mrs. Wilder was firmly committed to living in the present while finding much strength in the values of her past.

            A substantial introduction by Stephen W. Hines places the essays in their biographical and historical context, showing how these pieces present Wilder’s unique perspective on life and politics during the World War I era while commenting on the challenges of surviving and thriving in the rustic Ozark hill country. The former little girl from the little house was entering a new world and wrestling with such issues as motor cars and new “labor-saving” devices, but she still knew how to build a model small farm and how to get the most out of a dollar.

            Together, these essays lend more insight into Wilder than do even her novels and show that, while technology may have improved since she wrote them, the key to the good life hasn’t changed much in almost a century. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farm Journalist distills the essence of her pioneer heritage and will delight fans of her later work as it sheds new light on a vanished era.

In the late fifties and early sixties, Govan Mbeki was a central figure in the African National Congress and director of the ANC campaigns from underground. Born of a chief and the daughter of a Methodist minister in the Transkei of South Africa in 1910, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and tireless labor organizer in a lifetime of protest against the government policy of apartheid. Over two decades of imprisonment on Robben Island did not consign him to obscurity. Along with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu, his name has become a symbol of resistance, not only to the oppressed people of South Africa, but also to the international community who have conferred on him many honors and awards.

For over twenty years, John Hanson Mitchell has visited Beaver Brook almost daily. This small, slow-flowing Massachusetts stream was of vital importance for early settlers and an indispensable resource for the Native peoples who lived and fished along its shores, but it has been largely forgotten in our own time. Revisiting the river's oxbows, bends, and marshes over the course of a year, Legends of the Common Stream combines a natural history of Beaver Brook with a study of the people who lived on this land and a meandering, but stunning, examination of the myths and legends that can help us to better understand humanity's relationship to the natural world.

While Mitchell never leaves the brook's shores, he draws from a range of traditions and takes readers on excursions to regions and cultures across the globe and across time, making the case that our contemporary separation from nature goes hand in hand with our alienation from the world of myth. This book seeks to restore these broken relationships and offers the reminder that while cultures may come and go, the stream goes on forever.

In his introduction, Lloyd Strickland proposes that Sophie, Electress of Hanover, and her daughter, Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, found consolation in the idea of divine justice. Too long themselves unfairly dismissed as philosophical lightweights, proper justice may now be given to their views through this edition of their private correspondences with Leibniz. Appearing for the first time in English translation, the philosophical selections cover topics from the nature of substance to universal salvation and evidence the independence of the women’s thought as they defend materialism and challenge Leibniz’s conviction that God created the best possible world. The edition also boasts copious and highly informative editorial notes. It is a most welcome addition to The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: Toronto series.

Until recently, Iranian literature has overwhelmingly been the domain of men. But the new hybrid culture of diaspora Iranians has produced a prolific literature by women that reflects a unique perspective and voice. Let Me Tell You Where I've Been is an extensive collection of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by women whose lives have been shaped and influenced by Iran's recent history, exile, immigration and the formation of new cultural identities in the United States and Europe. These writings represent an emerging and multi-cultural female sensibility. Unlike many flat media portrayals of Iranian women—as veiled, silenced—these writers offer a complex literary view of Iranian culture and its influences. These writers interrogate, challenge, and re-define notions of home and language and their work offers readers an experience of Iranian diaspora culture. Featuring over one hundred selections (two-thirds of which have never been published before) by more than fifty contributors--including such well-known writers as Gelareh Asayesh, Tara Bahrampour, Firoozeh Dumas, Roya Hakakian and Mimi Khalvati--the collection represents a substantial diversity of voices in this multicultural community. Divided into six sections, the book's themes of exile, family, culture resistance, and love, create a rich and textured view of the Iranian diaspora. The poems, short stories, and essays are suggestive of an important conversation about Iran, Iranian culture, the Persian and English languages, and the dual identities of many of its authors. This powerful collection is a tribute to the wisdom, insight, and sensitivity of women attempting to invent and articulate a literature of in-betweenness.

The definitive collection of speeches and writings of one of America's most important social reformers

Celebrated as the most famous woman in America at the time of her death in 1898, Frances E. Willard was a leading nineteenth-century American temperance and women's rights reformer and a powerful orator. President of Evanston College for Ladies (before it merged with Northwestern University) and then professor of rhetoric and aesthetics and the first dean of women at Northwestern, Willard is best known for leading the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), America's largest women's organization. The WCTU shaped both domestic and international opinion on major political, economic, and social reform issues, including temperance, women's rights, and the rising labor movement. In what Willard regarded as her most important and far-reaching reform, she championed a new ideal of a powerful, independent womanhood and encouraged women to become active agents of social change. Willard's reputation as a powerful reformer reached its height with her election as president of the National Council of Women in 1888. 

This definitive collection follows Willard's public reform career, providing primary documents as well as the historical context necessary to clearly demonstrate her skill as a speaker and writer who addressed audiences as diverse as political conventions, national women's organizations, teen girls, state legislators, church groups, and temperance advocates. Including Willard's representative speeches and published writings on everything from temperance and women's rights to the new labor movement and Christian socialism, Let Something Good Be Said is the first volume to collect the messages of one of America's most important social reformers who inspired a generation of women to activism.

Coerced into taking the veil, Venetian writer Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–1652) spent her life protesting the practice of forcing girls into convents. Her fearless defense of women and attacks on patriarchal Venetian society earned her renown and access to the presses. Her publications, however, invited constant controversy. Tarabotti published her Letters Familiar and Formal to protect and enhance her literary reputation while also chronicling contemporary literary society and material existence in an early modern convent. The Letters flaunted Tarabotti’s literary accomplishments, humiliated her critics, and advertised her powerful network of allies in Northern Italy and France. The Letters document how Tarabotti established herself as one of the most forceful proponents for women’s self-determination in early modern Europe.

John Muir (1838–1914), founder of the Sierra Club, was one of the most famous and influential environmental conservationists of all time. From 1879 to 1880 Muir traveled the waters of southeastern Alaska in a Tlingit Indian dugout canoe and reported his encounters in a series of letters published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. Collected here are Muir’s original letters, bearing the immediacy and candor of his best work and providing a rare account of southeastern Alaska history, alongside breathtaking observations of glaciers and the untamed landscape. Through Muir we encounter gold miners, rogue towns, Taku Inlet, Glacier Bay, profiles of Tlingit Indians, and the infancy of the tourist industry. This collection of work by one of America’s foremost naturalists provides a magnificent look into early conservationist thought and one individual’s encounter with nature.

Forgotten for more than a century in an old cardboard box, these are the letters of Guy Carlton Taylor, a farmer who served in the Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War. From March 23, 1864, to July 14, 1865, Taylor wrote 165 letters home to his wife Sarah and their son Charley.

From the initial mustering and training of his regiment at Camp Randall in Wisconsin, through the siege of Petersburg in Virginia, General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and the postwar Grand Review of the Armies parade in Washington, D.C., Taylor conveys in vivid detail his own experiences and emotions and shows himself a keen observer of all that is passing around him. While at war, he contracts measles, pneumonia, and malaria, and he writes about the hospitals, treatments, and sanitary conditions that he and his comrades endured during the war. Amidst the descriptions of soldiering, Taylor’s letters to Sarah are threaded with the concerns of a young married couple separated by war but still coping together with childrearing and financial matters. The letters show, too, Taylor’s transformation from a lonely and somewhat disgruntled infantryman to a thoughtful commentator on the greater ideals of the war.

This remarkable trove of letters, which had been left in the attic of Taylor’s former home in Cashton, Wisconsin, was discovered by local historian Kevin Alderson at a household auction. Recognizing them for the treasure they are, Alderson bought the letters and, aided by his wife Patsy, painstakingly transcribed the letters and researched Taylor’s story in Wisconsin and at historical sites of the Civil War. The Aldersons’ preface and notes are augmented by an introduction by Civil War historian Kathryn Shively Meier, and the book includes photographs, maps, and illustrations related to Guy Taylor’s life and letters.

Through epistolary essays and poems, American Book Award- and Colorado Book Award-winning author and poet Aaron A. Abeyta captures the soul of the cultural and geographical crossroads of the driest quadrant in the nation, the Colorado headwaters, source to all the rivers in the southwestern and mid-western United States. Originating from and expanding on the themes of twenty-five years of “Headwaters” conferences at Western State Colorado University, these essays and poems embrace the region’s past while also exploring the struggles of a present that seeks a sustainable future for the borderlands that define the very cross-cultural essence of the American experience.

Stocking writes about the people and places she knows so intimately

This edition presents in English, for the first time, Jeanne d’Albret’s Letters to the king, his mother, his brother, her own brother-in-law, and the queen of England, together with her Ample Declaration (1568) defending her decampment to the Protestant stronghold of La Rochelle. A historical-biographical introduction situates these writings in the larger context of Reformation politics and examines in detail the specific literary characteristics of her memoir. In her works, Jeanne d’Albret asserts her own position as legal sovereign of Béarn and Navarre and situates herself at the nexus of overlapping political, religious, and familial tensions.

The letters of Margherita Datini to her husband, “the merchant of Prato,” are virtually impossible to put down. Margherita is never obsequious, and never holds her tongue as she chastises Francesco for staying up too late, asks about a case before the Eight of Florence, beseeches him to help friends in prison, worries over financial transactions, and updates him on his business, the harvests, and his illegitimate child (whom she cares for) when he is away. Rich in emotional life and historical particulars, the letters are a unique window into late medieval Tuscany and women’s “work.” Thanks to Carolyn James and Antonio Pagliaro for their illuminating introduction and equally luminous translation.
—Jane Tylus
Professor of Italian Studies and vice provost for academic affairs, New York University

The seventy-three surviving letters written by Florentine widow, Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (c.1406–1471), to her distant sons first appeared in print well over a century ago, but are here translated into English in their entirety for the first time. Whether for the professional historian or for the general reader interested in Renaissance Florence, they constitute a most precious testimony regarding both private and public life in the mid-fifteenth century, with themes ranging from familial relations, motherhood, marriage, and aspects of material culture to the harsh realities of political exile meted out by the Medici to their perceived opponents, these latter including her husband and, subsequently, her sons.

He published his only novel more than fifty years ago. He has hardly been seen or heard from since 1965. Most writers fitting such a description are long forgotten, but if the novel is The Catcher in the Rye and the writer is J. D. Salinger . . . well, he’s the stuff of legends, the most famously reclusive writer of the twentieth century. If you could write to him, what would you say?

Salinger continues to maintain his silence, but Holden Caulfield, Franny and Zooey, and Seymour Glass—the unforgettable characters of his novel and short stories—continue to speak to generations of readers and writers. Letters to Salinger includes more than 150 personal letters addressed to Salinger from well-known writers, editors, critics, journalists, and other luminaries, as well as from students, teachers, and readers around the world, some of whom have just discovered Salinger for the first time. Their voices testify to the lasting impressions Salinger’s ideas and emotions have made on so many diverse lives.

Contributors include Marvin Bell, Frederick Busch, Stephen Collins, Nicholas Delbanco, Warren French, Herbert Gold, W. P. Kinsella, Molly McQuade, Stewart O’Nan, Robert O’Connor, Ellis Paul, Molly Peacock, Sanford Pinsker, George Plimpton, Gerald Rosen, Sid Salinger, David Shields, Joseph Skibell, Melanie Rae Thon, Alma Luz Villanueva, Katharine Weber, and many others

Gathers some of the most intimate, personal writing on life and the art of poetry by a crucial figure in late twentieth-century American letters
 
Celebrated by both the Black Mountain poets in the 1950s and 1960s and the Language poets in the 1970s and 1980s, Larry Eigner’s poems occupy an important place in American poetry and poetics, and his reputation and legacy grow seemingly stronger with each passing year. Letters to Jargon collects all of the known correspondence between Larry Eigner and Jonathan Williams, the influential publisher of Jargon Society Press and himself a poet.
 
Eigner’s correspondence with Williams began in the early 1950s, as the two were in conversation over the manuscript of On My Eyes, published by Jargon in 1960. Their correspondence continued for many years thereafter, extending into the period when Eigner’s work started to gain recognition from the nascent movement that would become known as “Language” writing.
 
The letters are quite broad in their range of reference and provide a fuller context for Eigner’s poetry and thinking. Eigner and Williams discuss their own poetic practices, including the source material for specific poems, general writing practices, and small press and little magazine publication. This volume offers considerable insight into their shared literary communities as Eigner reports on his readings in contemporary poetry and poetics, as well as his correspondence and contact with other poets including Charles Olson, Vincent Ferrini, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Robert Grenier, and Barrett Watten.
 
Also recorded are Eigner’s reactions to current events and explications of his own poems, including the contexts for appropriated lines and distinctions of character spacing. Eigner also shares with Williams details of his home life, his financial difficulties and the daily challenges of his cerebral palsy. Finally, the book features a series of images of the original letters, enabling readers to see Eigner’s specific material-textual practices.

The first English translation of essays from one of the twentieth century's most intriguing avant-garde writers

Compiled from two volumes of Raymond Queneau's essays (Bâtons, chiffres et lettres and Le Voyage en Grèce), these selections find Queneau at his most playful and at his most serious, eloquently pleading for a certain classicism even as he reveals the roots of his own wildly original oeuvre. Ranging from the funny to the furious, they follow Queneau from modernism to postmodernism by way of countless fascinating detours, including his thoughts on language, literary fashions, myth, politics, poetry, and other writers (Faulkner, Flaubert, Hugo, and Proust). Translator Jordan Stump provides an introduction as well as explanatory notes about key figures and Queneau himself.

The Tlingit Indians of southeastern Alaska are known for their totem poles, Chilkat blankets, and ocean-going canoes. Nora Marks Dauenhauer is a cultural emissary of her people and now tells the story of her own life within the context of her community's. Life Woven with Song re-creates in written language the oral tradition of the Tlingit people as it records memories of Dauenhauer's heritage--of older relatives and Tlingit elders, of trolling for salmon and preparing food in the dryfish camps, of making a living by working in canneries. She explores these recurring themes of food and land, salmon and rainforest, from changing perspectives--as a child, a mother, and a grandmother--and through a variety of literary forms.

In prose, Dauenhauer presents stories such as "Egg Boat"--the tale of a twelve-year-old girl fishing the North Pacific for the first time alone--and an autobiographical piece that reveals much about Tlingit lifeways. Then in a section of short lyrical poems she offers crystalline tributes to her land and people. In a concluding selection of plays, Dauenhauer presents three Raven stories that were adapted as stage plays from oral versions told in Tlingit by three storytellers of her community. These plays were commissioned by the Naa Kahidi Theater and have been performed throughout America and Europe. They take the form of a storyteller delivering a narrative while other members of the cast act and dance in masks and costumes.

Collectively, Dauenhauer's writings form an "autoethnography," offering new insight into how the Tlingit have been affected by modernization and how Native American culture perseveres in the face of change. Despite the hardships her people have seen, this woman affirms the goodness of life as found in family and community, in daily work and play, and in tribal traditions.