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Crisis, breakdown, rejuvenation: this is the territory of poetry that Rudman takes readers into with this set of essays. Constructed as a series of character studies, the essays are rooted in autobiographical material with biographical counterpoints, tying the poets distinctly to places. Even as they are placed, however, they are displaced: Rudman's subjects, from D.H. Lawrence to Czeslaw Milosz to T. S. Eliot, are almost all exiles, either geographically or within themselves. This exile spins anger into energy, transmuting emotion into imagination the same way that Passaic Falls, known to William Carlos Williams, turns water into power.

The mosaic style of the essays touches on nerve after nerve, avoiding the snags of academic jargon to ease towards an illuminating truth about the artists' shifting work and worlds. Some of the Samuels—Beckett and Fuller—were able to navigate these shifts, while others--Coleridge and Johnson--are shown to be less able to transmute their energy into motion.

A powerhouse in photographic theory—updated and with a new essay

Every day, photographic images are relied upon as documents, evidence, and records in courtrooms, hospitals, and police work. But how did such usages come to be established, and when? What agencies and institutions had the power to give them this status? And what are the consequences of photographic representation? Drawing on semiotics, cultural theory, and the work of Foucault and Althusser, John Tagg rejects the idea of photography as a record of reality and traces a history that has profound implications not only for the theory of photography but also for understanding the role of new means of representation in modern social regulation. Now with a new essay situating this volume in the changed horizon of cultural politics, The Burden of Representation argues for a rigorous analysis of the meaning, status, and effects of photographs, rooted in a historical grasp of the growth of the modern state.

Key essays by a notable scholar address some of the most pressing questions facing Israel today.

Over the course of his rich career, David Ellenson—one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars, intellectuals, and thinkers of our time—probed the tension between tradition and modernity, especially as reflected in the ceaseless reinterpretation of liturgical and halakhic texts. Alongside that scholarly interest, largely centered on European Jewry, Ellenson produced an impressive body of work on Zionism and Israel.

This volume follows the arc of this body of work from Ellenson’s early articles on the Zionism of American rabbis to his last essay on the struggle between Jewish and democratic impulses in Israeli society. He draws on familiar sources of inquiry—Jewish prayers and legal sources—to chart changes in Israeli religious life and to excavate its theological-political foundation. What emerges is a profound meditation on some of the most important questions that Israel faces today: what does it mean to be Jewish in the state? What role should Halakhah play in a self-defined Jewish state? How should the state treat its non-Jewish minority? How deeply rooted is democracy in the state and its foundational texts? And can the state ever escape seemingly irrepressible internal and external conflict?

Although there have been substantial contributions to Chicana literature and criticism over the past few decades, Chicanas are still underrepresented and underappreciated in the mainstream literary world and virtually nonexistent in the canon. Writers like Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Gloria Anzaldúa have managed to find larger audiences and critical respect, but there are legions of Chicana writers and artists who have been marginalized and ignored despite their talent. Even in Chicano anthologies, the focus has tended to be more on male writers. Chicanas have often found themselves without a real home in the academic world.

Tey Diana Rebolledo has been writing about Chicana/Latina identity, literature, discrimination, and feminism for more than two decades. In this collection of essays, she brings together both old and new works to give a state-of-the-moment look at the still largely unanswered questions raised by vigilant women of color throughout the last half of the twentieth century. An intimate introductory essay about Rebolledo's personal experiences as the daughter of a Mexican mother and a Peruvian father serves to lay the groundwork for the rest of the volume. The essays delve into the historical development of Chicana writing and its early narratives, the representation of Chicanas as seen on book covers, Chicana feminism, being a Chicana critic in the academy, Chicana art history, and Chicana creativity. Rebolledo encourages "guerrillera" warfare against academia in order to open up the literary canon to Chicana/Latina writers who deserve validation.

The essay is one of the great inventions of the human mind. It can talk about anything and everything. It can be lightsome or solemn. It can be witty or informative. Above all, it is short. It likes the passage in which Socrates told Callicles in the Gorgias to make his answers brief. Yet, we can find in essays things we need and want to know. Aquinas often managed to make the most profound arguments in two paragraphs. Samuel Johnson did the same. 
      The Classical Moment is, indeed, a collection of “selected essays.” Such a collection is a classical and beloved form of English letters, the literary form most preferred by Schall. 
     The essays in this book all touch on knowledge and its pleasures. Schall does not tarry on the effort and determination it often takes to say just what we want to say, then say it and know that we have said it. Somehow, when an essay is written, an author simply knows that it is complete, that it is what he wanted to say. He says to himself, “Yes, that is it.” An essayist may well be conscious that when he begins an essay, he really does not know what he will finally say. The writing is the saying. Our writing is our thinking, our thinking-through, our being pleased to know this is it . . . this is the point Schall, one of America’s greatest essayists, makes here.
      The “classical moment” is that intense experience of seeing or hearing or encountering some vista, or song, or person that takes us out of ourselves. We are most ourselves somehow when we are most outside of ourselves, seeing what is not ourselves. We are intended to be more than ourselves in being ourselves, to know with others what is the truth, to know what is.
      These essays originally appeared in regular columns done in various journals, papers, and on-line sources. One can read them in any order. The order of the author or collector does have a certain “logic,” but each essay is also a whole, something contained within itself. 
     The unity of an essay collection is found more in a kind enthrallment that comes to us when we deal with the things that are both important and delightful. At bottom, these essays belong together. Aristotle warned us that if we did not delight in the things that are, we would seek our highest pleasures where they are not really found. 
        We will always seek something to delight in. What civilization is about lies in finding what is really worthy of the capacity of delight that is given to us in our being. The “classical moment” is the perfect phrase that brings us to the threshold of this experience. We have to enter it ourselves, but once inside, we will find so much more than ourselves. And we will rejoice.
 

When Hermann Seele anived in New Braunfels in 1845, the raw colony was plagued by poverty, disease, lack of food, and hostile Indians. This personal record of the Germans in Texas shows their evolution from struggling colonists to prosperous citizens.

From his viewpoint of a hardworking yet imaginative pioneer, Seele presents first a history of German immigration and settlement in Texas during the nineteenth century. Next, his autobiographical writings range from a "sentimental recollection" of his first Christmas Eve in Texas to his first day of teaching in New Braunfels, from accounts of the popular singing society to murder and justice along the Comal River. In addition, Seele's romantic novel, The Cypress, is a delightful though improbable tale of a traveling botanist, a chieftain's daughter, and a savage Indian cult.

Hermann Seele—farmer, lawyer, teacher, lay preacher, mayor, state representative, Civil War major, and editor—epitomizes the best of the German immigrants who established their communities as models of respectability and prosperity.

A memoir-in-essays on transness, dad rock, and the music that saves us.

When Wilco’s 2007 album Sky Blue Sky was infamously criticized as “dad rock,” Niko Stratis was a twenty-five-year-old closeted trans woman working in her dad’s glass shop in the Yukon Territory. As she sought escape from her hypermasculine environment, Stratis found an unlikely lifeline amid dad rock’s emotionally open and honest music. Listening to dad rock, Stratis could access worlds beyond her own and imagine a path forward.

In taut, searing essays rendered in propulsive and unguarded prose, Stratis delves into the emotional core of bands like Wilco and The National, telling her story through the dad rock that accompanied her along the way. She found footing in Michael Stipe’s allusions to queer longing, Radiohead’s embrace of unknowability, and Bruce Springsteen’s very trans desire to “change my clothes my hair my face”—and she found in artists like Neko Case and Sharon Van Etten that the label transcends gender. A love letter to the music that saves us and a tribute to dads like Stratis’s own who embody the tenderness at the genre’s heart, The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman rejoices in music unafraid to bare its soul.

In July 2002, the second Deaf Way Conference and Festival took place at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., attracting more than 5,000 people worldwide. Researchers, artists, performers, and others converged to create a singular blend of scholarship and social interaction, which inspired The Deaf Way II Anthology.

       The Deaf Way II Anthology brings together stellar contributions by 16 international writers who are deaf or hard of hearing. This remarkable collection features poetry, essays, short stories, and one play, all of which offer thought-provoking perspectives on elements from the personal universes of these gifted authors. Many are American writers well-known for their past publications, such as Douglas Bullard, Willy Conley, Christopher Heuer, and Raymond Luczak, while the outstanding work of John Lee Clark, volume editor Tonya Stremlau, Melissa Whalen, and several others have been collected for the first time in this volume. The international contributions further distinguish this anthology, ranging from poetry by Romanian Carmen Cristiu, verse by Sibylle Gurtner May from Switzerland, to a play by Nigerian Sotonwa Opeoluwa.

       All of the writers showcased in The Deaf Way II Anthology portray the Deaf experience with unmatched authenticity, presenting a perfect introduction to the Deaf world. Simultaneously, their work demonstrates that deaf and hard of hearing people can write at the highest aesthetic level and offer invaluable insights on the complete human spectrum.