3390 books match the query 'Fiction' and 1041 start with t

cover of The Book of Kane and Margaret: A Novel

The Book of Kane and Margaret

A Novel

Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Illustrations by Gautam Rangan

University of Alabama Press, 2020

WINNER OF FC2’S RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATIVE FICTION PRIZE

A novel about two teenage lovers who disrupt a World War II internment camp in Arizona

Kane Araki and Margaret Morri are not only the names of teenage lovers living in a World War II Japanese relocation camp. Kane Araki is also the name of a man who, mysteriously, sprouts a pair of black raven’s wings overnight. Margaret Morri is the name of the aging healer who treats embarrassing conditions (smelly feet and excessive flatulence). It’s also the name of an eleven-year-old girl who communes with the devil, trading human teeth for divine wishes.

In The Book of Kane and Margaret, dozens of Kane Arakis and Margaret Morris populate the Canal and Butte camp divisions in Gila River. Amidst their daily rituals and family dramas, they find ways to stage quiet revolutions against a domestic colonial experience. Some internees slip through barbed wire fences to meet for love affairs. Others attempt to smuggle whiskey, pornography, birds, dogs, horses, and unearthly insects into their family barracks. And another seeks a way to submerge the internment camp in Pacific seawater.

 

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cover of The Book of Mating: Stories

The Book of Mating

Stories

Laksmi Pamuntjak, Annie Tucker

Northwestern University Press, 2027

Winner of the Humanities in Translation Prize

The Book of Mating is a masterfully translated collection of stories in which Indonesian women explore the full spectrum of mating: marital, sexual, and spiritual; forced and free; transcendent, ruinous, and mundane. Laksmi Pamuntjak portrays both the constraints and opportunities facing women caught between the enduring restrictions of local norms and hierarchies and the tantalizing promises of globalized modern life, between internalized myths and social realities.

An experimental melding of Pamuntjak’s creative, journalistic, and activist work, these stories read as urgent dispatches from the Indonesian archipelago and diaspora—and as universal narratives of women’s lived experiences. Annie Tucker’s nuanced translation takes us from the prison island of Buru and the Bogor Botanical Gardens to Paris’s Left Bank, offering a polyphonic testament to the universal fight for women’s autonomy over their bodies and their lives.

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cover of The Book of Merlyn: The Conclusion to The Once and Future King

The Book of Merlyn

The Conclusion to The Once and Future King

By T. H. White, foreword by Gregory Maguire, prologue by Sylvia Townsend Warner, illustrations by Trevor Stubley

University of Texas Press, 2018

This magical account of King Arthur’s last night on earth, rediscovered in a collection of T. H. White’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, spent twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list following its publication in 1977. While preparing for his final, fatal battle with his bastard son, Mordred, Arthur returns to the Animal Council with Merlyn, where the deliberations center on ways to abolish war. More self-revealing than any other of White’s books, Merlyn shows his mind at work as he agonized over whether to join the fight against Nazi Germany while penning the epic that would become The Once and Future King. The Book of Merlyn has been cited as a major influence by such illustrious writers as Kazuo Ishiguro, J. K. Rowling, Helen Macdonald, Neil Gaiman, and Lev Grossman.

“Arriving from beyond the curve of time and apparently from the grave, The Book of Merlyn stirs its own pages, saying, wait: you didn’t get the whole story. . . . It gives us a final glimpse of those two immortal characters, Wart and Merlyn, up close, slo-mo, with a considered and affectionate scrutiny. The book is an elegiac posting from a master storyteller of the twentieth century. Its reissue in our next century is just as welcome as when it first arrived forty years ago. . . . Certainly the moral questions about the military use of force perplex the world still. . . . The efficacy of treaties, the trading of insults among the potentates of the day, the testing of weapons, the weaponizing of trade—these strategies are still front and center. Rather terrifyingly so. We do well to revisit what that old schoolteacher of children, Merlyn, has been trying to point out to us about power and responsibility.”
—Gregory Maguire, from the foreword

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cover of The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King

The Book of Merlyn

The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King

By T. H. White

University of Texas Press, 1977

This magical account of King Arthur’s last night on earth spent weeks on the New York Times best-seller list following its publication in 1977. Even in addressing the profound issues of war and peace, The Book of Merlyn retains the life and sparkle for which White is known. The tale brings Arthur full circle, an ending, White wrote, that "will turn my completed epic into a perfect fruit, ‘rounded off and bright and done.’"
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cover of The Book of Right and Wrong

The Book of Right and Wrong

Matt Debenham

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

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cover of The Book of Wanderers

The Book of Wanderers

Reyes Ramirez

University of Arizona Press, 2022

What do a family of luchadores, a teen on the run, a rideshare driver, a lucid dreamer, a migrant worker in space, a mecha soldier, and a zombie-and-neo-Nazi fighter have in common?

Reyes Ramirez’s dynamic short story collection follows new lineages of Mexican and Salvadoran diasporas traversing life in Houston, across borders, and even on Mars. Themes of wandering weave throughout each story, bringing feelings of unease and liberation as characters navigate cultural, physical, and psychological separation and loss from one generation to the next in a tumultuous nation.

The Book of Wanderers deeply explores Houston, a Gulf Coast metropolis that incorporates Southern, Western, and Southwestern identities near the borderlands with a connection to the cosmos. As such, each story becomes increasingly further removed from our lived reality, engaging numerous genres from emotionally touching realist fiction to action-packed speculative fiction, as well as hallucinatory realism, magical realism, noir, and science fiction.

Fascinating characters and unexpected plots unpack what it means to be Latinx in contemporary—and perhaps future—America. The characters work, love, struggle, and never stop trying to control their reality. They dream of building communities and finding peace. How can they succeed if they must constantly leave one place for another? In a nation that demands assimilation, how can they define themselves when they have to start anew with each generation? The characters in The Book of Wanderers create their own lineages, philosophies for life, and markers for their humanity at the cost of home. So they remain wanderers . . . for now.
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cover of The Book of Want: A Novel

The Book of Want

A Novel

Daniel A. Olivas

University of Arizona Press, 2011

When Moses descended Mount Sinai carrying the Ten Commandments, he never could have foreseen how one family in Los Angeles in the early twenty-first century would struggle to live by them.

Conchita, a voluptuous, headstrong single woman of a certain age, sees nothing wrong with enjoying the company of handsome—and usually much younger—men...that is, until she encounters a widower with unusual gifts and begins to think about what she really wants out of life.

Julieta, Conchita’s younger sister, walks a more traditional path, but she and her husband each harbor secrets that could change their marriage and their lives forever. Their twin sons, both in college, struggle to find fulfillment. Mateo refuses to let anyone stand in the way of his happiness, while Rolando grapples with his sexuality and the family’s expectations. And from time to time, Belén, the family’s late matriarch, pays a visit to advise, scold, or cajole her hapless descendants.

A delightful family tapestry woven with the threads of all those whose lives are touched by Conchita, The Book of Want is an enchanting blend of social and magical realism that tells a charming story about what it means to be fully human.
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cover of The Book of the Dead

The Book of the Dead

Orikuchi Shinobu

University of Minnesota Press, 2017

First published in 1939 and extensively revised in 1943, The Book of the Dead, loosely inspired by the tale of Isis and Osiris from ancient Egypt, is a sweeping historical romance that tells a gothic tale of love between a noblewoman and a ghost in eighth-century Japan. Its author, Orikuchi Shinobu, was a well-received novelist, distinguished poet, and an esteemed scholar. He is often considered one of the fathers of Japanese folklore studies, and The Book of the Dead is without a doubt the most important novel of Orikuchi’s career—and it is a book like no other. 

Here, for the first time, is the complete English translation of Orikuchi’s masterwork, whose vast influence is evidenced by multiple critical studies dedicated to it and by its many adaptations, which include an animated film and a popular manga. This translation features an introduction by award-winning translator Jeffrey Angles discussing the historical background of the work as well as its major themes: the ancient origins of the Japanese nation, the development of religion in a modernizing society, and the devotion necessary to create a masterpiece. Also included are three chapters from The Mandala of Light by Japanese intellectual historian Andō Reiji, who places the novel and Orikuchi’s thought in the broader intellectual context of early twentieth-century Japan.

The Book of the Dead focuses on the power of faith and religious devotion, and can be read as a parable illustrating the suffering an artist must experience to create great art. Readers will soon discover that a great deal lies hidden beneath the surface of the story; the entire text is a modernist mystery waiting to be decoded.

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cover of The Boom Economy: Or, Scenes from Clerical Life

The Boom Economy

Or, Scenes from Clerical Life

Brian Bouldrey

University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

Dennis Bacchus is a man who has outlived himself. HIV-positive and prepared to die at any minute, he finds himself in the late 1990s blessed with life-giving drugs, supportive friends, a boom economy, and an era of never-ending celebration—and he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
    For ten years he has traveled and celebrated a curtailed life with the similarly infected Jimmy and, though Dennis was never that close to Jimmy, he decided to let the friendship run its course to the end. Now there’s no end in sight. Stuck with leftover friendships, careers, and commitments, what can a man do but become a priest? The Boom Economy covers what was supposed to be the last decade of Dennis Bacchus’ life, but turns out to be the first decade of the rest of it.
    The Boom Economy is a novel about conversion—not just seroconversion or religious conversion, but all of the social, spiritual, and emotional problems of changing from one life to another. At once raucous and serious, pagan and saintly, it’s a look at the way we live now. Again.

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cover of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling

The Boundaries of Their Dwelling

Sanz, Blake

University of Iowa Press, 2021

Moving between the American South and Mexico, these stories explore how immigrant and native characters are shaped by absent family and geography. A Chilanga teen wins a trip to Miami to film a reality show about family while pining for the American brother she’s never met. A Louisiana carpenter tends to his drug-addicted son while rebuilding his house after a slew of hurricanes. A New Orleans ne’er-do-well opens a Catholic-themed bar in the wake of his devout mother’s death. A village girl from Chiapas baptizes her infant on a trek toward the U.S. border.

In the collection’s second half, we follow a Veracruzan-born drifter, Manuel, and his estranged American son, Tommy. Over decades, they negotiate separate nations and personal tragicomedies on their journeys from innocence to experience. As Manuel participates in student protests in Mexico City in 1968, he drops out to pursue his art. In the 1970s, he immigrates to Louisiana, but soon leaves his wife and infant son behind after his art shop fails. Meanwhile, Tommy grows up in 1980s Louisiana, sometimes escaping his mother’s watchful eye to play basketball at a park filled with the threat of violence. In college, he seeks acceptance from teammates by writing their term papers. Years later, as Manuel nears death and Tommy reaches middle age, they reconnect, embarking on a mission to jointly interview a former riot policeman about his military days; in the process, father and son discover what it has meant to carry each other’s stories and memories from afar.
 
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cover of The Box in Which We Live

The Box in Which We Live

Barber, Samuel Rafael

University of Iowa Press, 2026

Encompassing a wide range of formal approaches and genres, Samuel Rafael Barber captures the disparate manifestations of power and powerlessness in this era of global neoliberalism. The stories in The Box in Which We Live investigate the existential torment inflicted upon marginalized people by individuals, institutions, and states complicit in oppression. Across these experiments, a comic absurdity emerges and a distance grows between the individual and the collective in a media-oversaturated world.

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cover of The Boys from Possum Grape: A novella

The Boys from Possum Grape

A novella

Judson N. Hout

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2013

Set in the days of small, local banks when embarrassing entrepreneurs were the one family in town who bought a new car every year—those cars everyone else called ‘gunboats—and the bad guys came with black hats, this rollicking send-up of stupid criminals who even Barnie Fife could have outwitted makes for belly-laughs while reading and memories that will bring smiles to readers’ faces. 


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cover of The Bread of Those Early Years

The Bread of Those Early Years

Heinrich Boll

Northwestern University Press, 1994

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cover of The Bridge on the Drina

The Bridge on the Drina

Ivo Andric

University of Chicago Press, 1977

*NOBEL PRIZE WINNER*
A classic novel of war, suffering, and survival in Bosnia
Internationally acclaimed since its original publication just after World War II, The Bridge on the Drina is a vivid historical novel that uses the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge as the centerpiece of the story of Bosnia and its people from the late sixteenth century to the beginning of World War I. As we seek to make sense of the current nightmare in this region, this remarkable, timely book serves as a reliable guide to its people and history. Through powerful stories of the people who make history—and the people suffer under those who do—Ivo Andric traces the story of the Bosnian people from the Ottoman Empire through the domination of Austria-Hungary and into the rising tide of competing nationalist ideologies that set the stage for the tragedy of World War I. 

Written while Andric was under house arrest during the Nazi occupation, The Bridge on the Drina is as gripping as a soap opera, bringing history down to the level of compelling individual lives and experiences. It is one of the landmark works of twentieth-century literature, as powerful today as it ever was.
 
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cover of The Brightest Place in the World: A Novel

The Brightest Place in the World

A Novel

David Philip Mullins

University of Nevada Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction!

Inspired by true events, The Brightest Place in the World traces the lives of four characters haunted by an industrial disaster. On an ordinary sunny morning in 2012, a series of explosions level a chemical plant on the outskirts of Las Vegas. The shock waves are felt as far away as Fremont Street. Homes and businesses suffer broken windows and caved-in roofs. Hundreds are injured, and eight employees of the plant are unaccounted for, presumed dead.

One of the missing is maintenance technician Andrew Huntley, a husband and father who is an orbital force in the novel as those who loved him grapple with his loss. Andrew’s best friend, Russell Martin—an anxiety-plagued bartender who calms his nerves with a steady inflow of weed—misses him more than he might a brother. Meanwhile Emma, Russell’s wife—a blackjack dealer at a downtown casino—tries to keep her years-long affair with Andrew hidden. Simon Addison, a manager at the plant who could have saved Andrew’s life, is afflicted by daily remorse, combined with a debilitating knowledge of his own cowardice. And then there’s Maddie, Andrew’s only child, a model high-school student whose response to the tragedy is to experiment with shoplifting and other deviant behavior.

Against the sordid backdrop of Las Vegas—and inspired by the PEPCON disaster of May 4, 1988—this engaging novel is a story of grief and regret, disloyalty and atonement, infatuation and love.


 
 
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cover of The Brightwood Stillness

The Brightwood Stillness

Mark Pomeroy

Oregon State University Press, 2014

When Hieu Nguyen, a Portland high school teacher, is accused of sexual misconduct by two of his students, his close friend and colleague Nate Davis tries to lend support. But Nate has recently been assaulted by a former student in the school parking lot, an event that brings on not only sharp anxiety, but a final push into a long-deferred quest to find out what happened to his uncle, a drifter and a Vietnam veteran.

Meanwhile, Hieu’s family life is tested. Straining to hold form amid a police investigation into what happened in his classroom, Hieu seeks enough solitude to piece together the story of how he fled war and arrived in the US, how he came to be a father to three children in a bewildering, beloved new land—and how he’ll cope with a now uncertain future.

As their stories unfold in parallel, Hieu and Nate must confront the ways in which their pasts—each so linked to a mysterious far-off country—have left them isolated men.

With its vivid look at friendship and the challenges of cross-cultural communication, its poignant take on the legacy of Vietnam, and its Pacific Northwest setting, The Brightwood Stillness will remind readers of the best elements of A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain and Snow Falling on Cedars, while compelling them through a maze of love, betrayal, and finally, redemption.
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cover of The Broken Vase: A Novel Based On the Life of Penina Krupitsky, a Holocaust Survivor

The Broken Vase

A Novel Based On the Life of Penina Krupitsky, a Holocaust Survivor

Phillip H. McMath

Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2010

The Broken Vase is a roman à clef ("novel with a key," or novel based on real life) written by Phillip H. McMath based upon research done by his co-author, Emily Matson Lewis, and in close collaboration with Holocaust survivor Penina Krupitsky, who appears in the novel as the fictional Miriam Kellerman. With the help of the World Jewish Organization, Mrs. Krupitsky emigrated from the Soviet Union with her family to the United States and now lives in Arkansas. Born to middle-class parents in July 1924 in North Bukovina, Romania (now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Miriam Kellerman grows up in an atmosphere of culture and privilege that is interrupted when her country is invaded—first by Stalin in July 1940, then by Hitler in June 1941. Fearing for their lives, Jews like Miriam begin to flee into the Soviet Union to escape the German advance. Separated from her parents, Deborah and Max, and later from her fiancé, Isaac, Miriam finds herself alone and on foot, trudging ever eastward. This novel's compelling narrative chronicles her incredible struggle to stay alive as World War II rages. Mrs. Krupitsky lives in Little Rock with her husband, children, and grandchildren. She remains active in Holocaust remembrance organizations around the world and says that she wants The Broken Vase "to help young people and become an inspiration to them. It will teach them how to build a world of love and not of hatred."
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cover of The Bruise

The Bruise

Magdalena Zurawski

University of Alabama Press, 2008

Winner of Ronald Sukenick Prize for Innovative Fiction

 The Bruise is a prize-winning novel of imperative voice and raw sensation. In the sterile dormitories and on the quiet winter greens of an American university, a young woman named M— deals with the repercussions of a strange encounter with an angel, one that has left a large bruise on her forehead. Was the event real or imagined? The bruise does not disappear, forcing M— to confront her own existential fears and her wavering desire to tell the story of her imagination. As a writer, M— is breathless, desperate, and obsessive, questioning the mutations and directions of her words while writing with fevered immediacy. Using rhythmic language, suffused with allusions to literature and art, Magdalena Zurawski recasts the bildungsroman as a vibrant and moving form.
 
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cover of The Bureaucrats

The Bureaucrats

Honore De Balzac

Northwestern University Press, 1993

The Bureaucrats (Les Employes) stands out in Balzac's immense Human Comedy by concentrating precisely and penetratingly on a distinctive "modern" institution: France's state bureaucracy. Rabourdin, aided by his unscrupulous wife, attempts to reorganize and streamline the entire system. Rabourdin's plan will halve the government's size while doubling its revenue. When the plan is leaked, Rabourdin's rival—an utter incompetent—gains the overwhelming support of the frightened and desperate body of low-ranking functionaries.

The novel contains the recognizable themes of Balzac's work: obsessive ambition, conspiracy and human pettiness, and a melodramatic struggle between the social good and the evils of folly and stupidity. It is also an unusual, dramatized analysis of a developing political institution and its role in shaping social class and mentality.
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cover of The Burning And Other Stories

The Burning And Other Stories

Jack Cady

University of Iowa Press, 1972

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cover of The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition

The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition

Jane Friedman

University of Chicago Press, 2025

A thoroughly revised edition of the comprehensive guide to building and maintaining a successful career in writing.
 
Writers talk about their work in many ways: as an art, as a calling, as a lifestyle. Too often missing from these conversations is the fact that writing is also a business, and those who want to make a living from their writing must understand the basic business principles underlying the industry. The Business of Being a Writer offers the business education writers need but so rarely receive.

Jane Friedman is one of today’s leading experts on the publishing industry. Through her website, social media presence, online courses, email newsletters, and other media, she helps writers understand how to navigate the industry with confidence and intentionality. This book advises writers on how to build a platform in a way that aligns with their values, how to spot critical mindset issues that might sabotage their efforts before they even begin, how to publish strategically, and what it means to diversify income streams beyond book sales. For this second edition, Friedman has updated every topic to reflect how the industry has evolved over the past half decade. New features include a section on business and legal issues commonly faced by writers, exercises at the end of each chapter, and a wealth of sample materials posted on a companion website. 

Reaching beyond the mechanical aspects of publishing, The Business of Being a Writer will help both new and experienced writers approach their careers with the same creative spirit as their writing. Friedman is encouraging without sugarcoating reality, blending years of research with practical advice that will help writers market themselves and maximize their writing-related income. Her book will leave them empowered, confident, and ready to turn their craft into a sustainable career.
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cover of The Businessman: A Tale of Terror

The Businessman

A Tale of Terror

Thomas M. Disch

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

The Businessman presents the sinister tale of Bob Glandier, a morally repulsive Twin Cities executive who murders his estranged wife and attempts to go back to business as usual, until she returns sets about arranging his divine retribution. With help from her dead mother and the ghost of poet John Berryman-thoroughly bored of suburban séances and all too eager to lend a hand-Giselle undertakes the elaborate, righteous, and wickedly amusing haunting of her husband. There is justice in the afterlife after all-at least in Minnesota.
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cover of The Butterfly Tree

The Butterfly Tree

Robert E. Bell

University of Alabama Press, 1991

A love affair with a place—the legendary eastern shore of Mobile Bay
 
“There are four buses that leave Mobile daily for Moss Bayou. No matter what time the trains get in from New Orleans or Birmingham, you still have to wait around half the day for one of theses buses if you want to get to Moss Bayou. And a good many people do, for Moss Bayou is a lovely, easygoing resort town, located as it where Magnolia River runs into the bay with worlds of giant live oaks and sandy roads that wind forever under the trailing Spanish moss.”
 
So begins Robert Bell’s novel that is most of all about a love affair with a place—the legendary eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Published in 1959, the story centers on young Peter Abbott who is about to reach his 21st birthday while visiting the bay area. Peter is drawn into a search for the mythical Butterfly Tree, and finds fulfillment and an end to innocence. In his introduction, Thomas Rountree helps set the stage for a step back in time, and a slowing of pace, as we seek the timeless magic of a special locale that happens to be in Alabama, and in each of us.
 
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cover of The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television

The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television

Atara Stein

Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television bridges nineteenth- and twentieth-century studies in pursuit of an ambitious, antisocial, arrogant, and aggressively individualistic mode of hero from his inception in Byron’s Manfred, Childe Harold, and Cain, through his incarnations as the protagonists of Westerns, action films, space odysseys, vampire novels, neo-Gothic comics, and sci-fi television. Such a hero exhibits supernatural abilities, adherence to a personal moral code, ineptitude at human interaction (muddled even further by self-absorbed egotism), and an ingrained defiance of oppressive authority. He is typically an outlaw, most certainly an outcast or outsider, and more often than not, he is a he. Given his superhuman status, this hero offers no potential for sympathetic identification from his audience. At best, he provides an outlet for vicarious expressions of power and independence. While audiences may not seek to emulate the Byronic hero, Stein notes that he desires to emulate them; recent texts plot to “rehumanize” the hero or to voice through him approbation and admiration of ordinary human values and experiences.

Tracing the influence of Lord Byron’s Manfred as outcast hero on a pantheon of his contemporary progenies—including characters from Pale Rider, Unforgiven, The Terminator, Alien, The Crow, Sandman, Star Trek: The Next Generation,and Angel—Atara Stein tempers her academic acumen with the insights of a devoted aficionado in this first comprehensive study of the Romantic hero type and his modern kindred.

Atara Stein was a professor of English at California State University, Fullerton. Her articles on the development of the Byronic hero have appeared in Popular Culture Review, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Genders, and Philological Quarterly.

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cover of The Cape Cod Bicycle War: and Other Stories

The Cape Cod Bicycle War

and Other Stories

Billy Kahora

Ohio University Press, 2020

Each of the realistic worlds Billy Kahora brings us in the short stories and novella that make up The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories explores the tensions and transitions of characters moving between youthful folly and a precarious adulthood. In the title story, immigrant workers with varying ambitions work at a Wendy’s in wintry Cape Cod. Sharing one house, they must also share, or rather compete for, bicycles—crucial transportation—which are in short supply. In other stories, a young man caught between a broken family and political violence befriends an aged gorilla in a Nairobi zoo; a pastor struggles to come to terms with the arrest of his brother, who is suspected of terrorism; and a dissolute bank employee on a serious bender returns to work to face a review board. The Cape Cod Bicycle War and Other Stories is Billy Kahora’s long-awaited debut collection. Stories in this volume have appeared in Granta and McSweeney’s and have been shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing.
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cover of The Caravaggio Syndrome: A Novel

The Caravaggio Syndrome

A Novel

Alessandro Giardino

Rutgers University Press, 2024

Leyla is a headstrong Brooklyn-born art historian at a prestigious upstate New York college. When she meets feckless young computer technician Pablo at a party, she quickly becomes pregnant with his child. There’s only one problem: she can’t stand him. And one more problem: her student Michael wants Pablo for himself.

Amid this love triangle, the objects of Leyla and Michael’s study take on a life of their own. Trying to learn more about Caravaggio’s masterpiece The Seven Works of Mercy, they pore over the journal and prison writings of maverick 17th-century utopian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, which, as if by enchantment, transport them back four centuries to Naples. And while the past and present miraculously converge, Leyla, Michael, and Tommaso embark on a voyage of self-discovery in search of a new life.
 
In this fusion of historical, queer, and speculative fiction, Alessandro Giardino combines the intellectual playfulness of Umberto Eco with the psychological finesse of Michael Cunningham.
 

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cover of The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma: A Novel

The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma

A Novel

Tadeusz Dolega-Mostowicz; Translated from the Polish by Ewa Malachowska-Pasek and Megan Thomas and with an introduction by Benjamin Paloff

Northwestern University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Found in Translation Award

First published in Polish in 1932, The Career of Nicodemus Dyzma was Tadeusz Dołęga-Mostowicz’s breakout novel. Dyzma is an unemployed clerk who crashes a swanky party, where he makes an offhand crass remark that sets him on a new course. Soon high society—from government ministers to drug-fueled aristocrats—wants a piece of him. As Dyzma’s status grows, his vulgarity is interpreted as authenticity and strength. He is unable to comprehend complicated political matters, but his cryptic responses are celebrated as wise introspection. His willingness to do anything to hold on to power—flip-flopping on political positions, inventing xenophobic plots, even having enemies assaulted—only leads to greater success. 

Dołęga-Mostowicz wrote his novel in a newly independent Poland rampant with political corruption and populist pandering. Jerzy Kosinski borrowed heavily from the novel when he wrote Being There, and readers of both books will recognize similarities between their plots. This biting political satire—by turns hilarious and disturbing, contemptuous and sympathetic—is an indictment of a system in which money and connections matter above all else, bluster and ignorance are valorized, and a deeply incompetent man rises to the highest spheres of government.

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cover of The Cassique of Kiawah: A Colonial Romance

The Cassique of Kiawah

A Colonial Romance

William Gilmore Simms

University of Arkansas Press, 2003

First drafted as a novel called Oyster Point when the author was only eighteen, The Cassique of Kiawah was finally published thirty-five years later, in 1859, at the height of William Gilmore Simms’s career. It is a history through fiction of early Charleston, South Carolina, and completed Simms’s series of Revolutionary War novels. Through satire and realism he portrays the charm and the corruption of late seventeenth-century Charleston society, and he contrasts the quiet majesty of the wilderness with the violence of man. The book was widely reviewed and highly praised, and it confirmed Simms’s position as the nation’s best-known novelist.
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cover of The Castle: A Novel

The Castle

A Novel

Seth Rogoff

University of Alabama Press, 2024

A fictional return to the unsettling world of Franz Kafka’s iconic unfinished novel, The Castle.

Seth Rogoff's masterful and mesmerizing novel, The Castle, draws inspiration from the enigmatic and incomplete final sentence of Franz Kafka's influential work of the same title. Follow renowned translator Sy Kirschbaum as he finds his way into the deserted landscape of Kafka’s world where the village of Z. lies eerily silent. The inhabitants vanished like phantoms leaving only remnants of their lives.

From these fragments, Kirschbaum pieces together a vision of a world in crisis triggered by the arrival of a stranger named K. To unravel this mystery, not just for the sake of the vanished village of Z. but for the world beyond, Kirschbaum is compelled to venture where K. could not—the deepest core of the castle.

The Castle is built upon lost documents, forgotten stories, and imagined histories. Unbound by the constraints of an authoritarian and doomed reality, Kirschbaum embarks on an extraordinary journey, seeking meaning through the fertile ground of imagination and embracing the inherent paradox of existence.

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cover of The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly: An Arab Prison Novel

The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly

An Arab Prison Novel

Hashem Gharaibeh

Michigan State University Press, 2017

In his masterpiece The Cat Who Taught Me How to Fly, Hashem Gharaibeh tells the moving story of a political prisoner during Jordan’s martial law era, which spanned from 1967 to 1989. Gharaibeh defies the taboos of politics, sex, and religion to tell a thrilling and brutally honest story about the horrors and insanities of everyday life in an Arab prison. At once both a novel and an autobiography, the author draws from his own experiences as a Jordanian youth arrested and imprisoned for nearly a decade for his affiliation with the Jordanian Communist Party. The novel uniquely portrays prison culture intertwined with tribal, ideological, and political perspectives to explain both mundane and esoteric aspects of prison life in this time and era, illustrating an experience that is traumatic, humane, and inspiring. A heartwrenching story of learning, survival, and the quest for the freedom of thought is told with powerful defiance and grace, exposing us to human frailty, strength, and one man’s dream to soar beyond the walls of prison, society, and self.
 
 
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cover of The Celestial Twins: Poetry and Music through the Ages

The Celestial Twins

Poetry and Music through the Ages

H.T. Kirby-Smith

University of Massachusetts Press, 2000

All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music, wrote Walter Pater. The Celestial Twins, while recognizing many affinities between music and poetry, argues that poetry in Western culture has repeatedly separated itself from music contexts and that the best poetry is a purely verbal art.

H. T. Kirby-Smith makes his case with wit and erudition, proceeding chronologically and citing numerous examples of specific poems—from Latin, Old French, Italian, Anglo-Saxon, modern French, and English. He points out that ancient Greek poetry, including the epics, was part of a musical context. By contrast, almost no surviving Latin poetry was written for musical performance, but the meters of Latin poetry were borrowed from Greek musical meters. Similarly, in their own ways, Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot, and Langston Hughes all wrote out of musical contexts: Hardy from west-of-England songs and dances; Eliot from Wagnerian opera and late Beethoven chamber music; and Hughes from blues, jazz, and spirituals.

Although poets from Horace to Shakespeare to Dickinson have instinctively recognized the separation of music and poetry, there have also been well-meaning attempts to bring these allied arts back into close association with each other. But in Kirby-Smith's view, poetry of the highest order has always maintained a respectful distance from music, even while retaining some memory of musical rhythms and organization.
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cover of The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories

The Cemetery of Chua Village and Other Stories

Doan Le

Northwestern University Press, 2005

This seventh volume in the "Voices from Vietnam" series introduces U. S. readers to another major figure in modern Vietnamese letters: Doan Le. Noted for her versatility of style and her originality, she writes tales that are intensely human and universal, exploring such subjects as greed, marriage, divorce, aging and human rights. For the scholar, these stories give insight into Vietnamese culture after the "renovation". For the general reader, these are stories that explore all the subtle enigmas of the human heart. 

As Wayne Karlin notes in his introduction, "[She] is a master of allegory and gently complex satire...her stories can often be fantastical—Sholom Aleichem's village of Helm channeled by Kafka through Our Town—or they can be deeply personal and realistic. In both cases they grow unabashedly from the real vicissitudes of her life."

 
[more]
cover of The Censors: A Bilingual Selection of Stories

The Censors

A Bilingual Selection of Stories

Luisa Valenzuela

Northwestern University Press, 1995

The Censors is the only bilingual collection of fiction by Luisa Valenzuela, one of Latin America's best known and most widely translated authors. This selection of stories from Clara, Strange Things Happen Here, and Open Door, which delves into the personal and political realities under authoritarian rule, gives a rich representation of her literary talent.
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cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: VOL. II, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

VOL. II, THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1965

"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: VOL. IV, THE MARBLE FAUN

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

VOL. IV, THE MARBLE FAUN

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1969

The fragility-and the durability-of human life and art dominate this story of American expatriates in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century. Befriended by Donatello, a young Italian with the classical grace of the "Marble Faun," Miriam, Hilda, and Kenyon find their pursuit of art taking a sinister turn as Miriam's unhappy past precipitates the present into tragedy.

Hawthorne's 'International Novel' dramatizes the confrontation of the Old World and the New and the uncertain relationship between the 'authentic' and the 'fake' in life as in art. The author's evocative descriptions of classic sites made The Marble Faun a favorite guidebook to Rome for Victorian tourists, but this richly ambiguous symbolic romance is also the story of a murder, and a parable of the Fall of Man. As the characters find their civilized existence disrupted by the awful consequences of impulse, Hawthorne leads his readers to question the value of Art and Culture and addresses the great evolutionary debate which was beginning to shake Victorian society.
[more]
cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: VOL. IX, TWICE-TOLD TALES

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

VOL. IX, TWICE-TOLD TALES

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1974

"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: VOL. X, MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

VOL. X, MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1974

"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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cover of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Vol. XI, The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales

The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Vol. XI, The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Ohio State University Press, 1974

"Because it represents the first scholarly effort to establish texts as close as possible to the intentions of the author, this Centenary Edition makes obsolete all previous editions, notorious for their textual corruption. An eminent staff . . . has analyzed and synthesized the evidence of all MSS and worthwhile printed editions. Each volume includes a well documented introduction concerning such matters as circumstances leading to composition and history of publication as well as textual notes on alterations in the MSS, editorial emendations, etc." --Choice "The Centenary Edition, which has been producing weighty volumes of definitively edited texts of Hawthorne for a full generation, is now the sine qua non of Hawthorne scholarship. As an example of editorial care and research thoroughness it has been a model for the profession and as a physical object a model for publishers. In addition to the immensely important achievement of producing fully accurate texts of the romances, tales, and sketches, the Centenary editors have made available, for the very first time, all of the various Notebooks and letters. For the letters, especially, the wait has been long but the result is gratifying. Reading straight through the Centenary's six volumes of letters is a self-indulgent pleasure that brings us markedly closer to the man than we can get in any other way." --American Literature Representing decades of work, this is the definitive edition of Hawthorne's works. Each volume includes comprehensive notes and explanatory material. I: The Scarlet Letter $62.95 cloth 0-8142-0059-1 II: The House of the Seven Gables $69.95 cloth 0-8142-0060-5 III: The Blithedale Romance and Fanshawe $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0061-3 IV: The Marble Faun $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0062-1 V: Our Old Home $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0002-8 VI: True Stories from History and Biography $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0157-1 VII: A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0158-X VIII: The American Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0159-8 IX: Twice-told Tales $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0202-0 X: Mosses from an Old Manse $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0203-9 XI: The Snow Image and Uncollected Tales $72.95 cloth 0-8142-0204-7 XII: The American Claimant Manuscripts $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0251-9 XIII: The Elixir of Life Manuscripts $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0252-7 XIV: The French and Italian Notebooks $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0256-X XV: The Letters, 1813-1843 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0363-9 XVI: The Letters, 1843-1853 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0364-7 XVII: The Letters, 1853-1856 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0365-5 XVIII: The Letters, 1857-1864 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0383-3 XIX: The Consular Letters, 1853-1855 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0384-1 XX: The Consular Letters, 1856-1857 $83.95 cloth 0-8142-0462-7 XXI: The English Notebooks, 1853-1856 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0670-0 XXII: The English Notebooks, 1856-1860 $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0671-9 XXIII: Miscellaneous Prose and Verse $98.95 cloth 0-8142-0644-1
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cover of The Central Intelligence Agency: History and Documents

The Central Intelligence Agency

History and Documents

William M. Leary

University of Alabama Press, 1984

Provides for the first time a complete and dispassionate history of the most discussed and least known agency in the history of the American Republic

In late 1974 the U.S. Senate Select Committee on the CIA, headed by Frank Church of Idaho, began collecting documents and materials to buttress the committee hearings on the CIA’s role and activities that were to begin in the fall of 1975. Among the materials prepared for the Church Committee is History of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was written by committee staff member Anne Karalekas.

This book reproduces the History, with an introduction by Leary that establishes the historical framework for the Church Committee hearings, and also includes ten relevant documents covering events from 1944 to 1981.
[more]
cover of The Chain of Chance

The Chain of Chance

Stanislaw Lem

Northwestern University Press, 2000

Written in the style of a detective novel, The Chain of Chance is classic Lem: a combination of action, hard science, and philosophical investigation. An ex-astronaut is hired to look into the death of several wealthy businessmen. The authorities suspect a pattern, but neither the police nor a supercomputer enlisted for the investigation can crack the case.

On a trail leading across Europe, the ex-astronaut barely escapes numerous attempts on his life. Having set himself up as a potential victim, he realizes that he may now be the target of a conspiracy--and that the conspiracy is not the work of a criminal mind, but a manifestation of the laws of nature. Certain patterns have begun to emerge from the chaos of modern society. Some of those patterns can be fatal. . .
[more]
cover of The Character of Truth: Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction

The Character of Truth

Historical Figures in Contemporary Fiction

Naomi Jacobs

Southern Illinois University Press, 1990

Can the novel survive in an age when tales of historical figures and contemporary personalities dominate the reading lists of the book-buying public?

Naomi Jacobs addresses this question in a study of writers such as William Styron, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover, who challenge the dominance of nonfiction by populating their fictions with real people, living and dead. Jacobs explores the genesis, varieties, and implications of this trend in a prose as lively as that of the writers she critiques.

Using as a case study Robert Coover’s portrait of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, Jacobs addresses the important legal and ethical questions raised by this trend and applies contemporary libel law to the fictionalization of living people, such as Richard Nixon. She closes her study by speculating on the future of this device and of the novel.

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cover of The Chattertooth Eleven

The Chattertooth Eleven

Eduard Bass

Karolinum Press, 2009

In 1922, the same year that saw the establishment of the Czechoslovak Football Association, a former singer and cabaret director from Prague published a novel about soccer. Eighty-six years later, that novel, Eduard Bass’s The Chattertooth Eleven, has been reprinted more than thirty times, has been made into a film, and has become one of the most popular works of Czech fiction.

            The novel tells the extraordinary adventures of an ordinary father, Chattertooth, and his eleven sons—whom he has raised as an unbeatable soccer team. This humorous tale—set in the aftermath of World War I—celebrates fair play and perseverance while simultaneously taking a gently ironic stance towards the Czech infatuation with soccer. This edition, in a new graphic layout by Zdenek Ziegler, is accompanied by charming illustrations by Jirí Grus.

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cover of The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction

The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction

Amy J. Schneider

University of Chicago Press, 2023

A book-world veteran offers the first copyediting guide focused exclusively on fiction.
 
Although The Chicago Manual of Style is widely used by writers and editors of all stripes, it is primarily concerned with nonfiction, a fact long lamented by the fiction community. In this long-awaited book from the publisher of the Manual, Amy J. Schneider, a veteran copyeditor who’s worked on bestsellers across a wide swath of genres, delivers a companionable editing guide geared specifically toward fiction copyeditors—the first book of its type.
 
In a series of approachable thematic chapters, Schneider offers cogent advice on how to deal with dialogue, voice, grammar, conscious language, and other significant issues in fiction. She focuses on the copyediting tasks specific to fiction—such as tracking the details of fictional characters, places, and events to ensure continuity across the work—and provides a slew of sharp, practicable solutions drawn from her twenty-five years of experience working for publishers both large and small. The Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction is sure to prove an indispensable companion to The Chicago Manual of Style and a versatile tool for copyeditors working in the multifaceted landscape of contemporary fiction.
[more]
cover of The Chimeras: A Novel

The Chimeras

A Novel

Joe Fletcher

University of Alabama Press, 2026

Blending literary fiction, speculative fiction, and lyric prose, The Chimeras explores how communities create meaning in the wake of radical uncertainty. At its core, the novel is concerned with enduring human questions of belonging, family, memory, and faith in language itself. The book will appeal to readers of contemporary literary fiction, speculative literature, and works that push the boundaries of narrative form.

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cover of The Chinese Bell Murders

The Chinese Bell Murders

Robert van Gulik

University of Chicago Press, 1977

The Chinese Bell Murders describes the Judge's exploits in the tribunal of Poo-yang early in his career. He has one case left over from his predecessor—the brutal rape-murder of Pure Jade, the daughter of Butcher Hsai who lived on Half Moon Street. Her lover has been accused and is on the verge of being convicted, but Judge Dee senses that all is not right and sets out with his lieutenants to find the real murderer.

"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."—New York Times

Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
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cover of The Chinese Lake Murders

The Chinese Lake Murders

Robert van Gulik

University of Chicago Press, 1979

The Chinese Lake Murders describes how Judge Dee solves three difficult cases in A.D. 666, shortly after he has been appointed magistrate of Han-yuan.

"[Robert van Gulik] deftly interweaves three criminal cases involving exotic yet universally recognizable characters, then has his Judge Dee provide a surprising yet most plausible solution."—New York Times Book Review
[more]
cover of The Chinese Love Pavilion: A Novel

The Chinese Love Pavilion

A Novel

Paul Scott

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India and Malaya during World War II, this two powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.

The Chinese Love Pavilion
follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friend—now suspected of murder—in Malaya. Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.

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cover of The Chinese Maze Murders: A Judge Dee Mystery

The Chinese Maze Murders

A Judge Dee Mystery

Robert van Gulik

University of Chicago Press, 1997

The very first mystery in the beloved series starring Judge Dee, a detective whom the Los Angeles Times ranked with Sherlock Holmes!

Join the T'ang Dynasty detective Judge Dee on his very first full-length mystery! Poisoned plums, a cryptic scroll picture, passionate love letters, and a hidden murderer with a penchant for torturing and killing women lead Judge Dee to the heart of the Governor’s garden maze and the answers to three interwoven mysteries. This book kicked off Robert van Gulik's long-running series and introduced countless readers to a cozy, clever series and the incredible detective at its center. Read this one and you'll quickly find yourself seeking out the whole series.

 
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cover of The Chinese Nail Murders

The Chinese Nail Murders

Robert van Gulik

University of Chicago Press, 1977

Judge Dee and his four helpers solve the murders of an honored merchant, a kindly boxing master, and a paper merchant's wife, whose corpse has no head. They succeed in spite of strong pressure on Judge Dee from higher-ups to bring his investigation, which has temporarily generated unrest among the populace, rapidly to an end or face dismissal and serious punishment. The case of the headless corpse is based on a thirteenth-century Chinese casebook; the nail murder, one of the most famous motifs in Chinese crime literature, is first described in the same text.

"So scrupulously in the classic Chinese manner yet so nicely equipped with everything to satisfy the modern reader."—New York Times

Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
[more]
cover of The Church of Divine Electricity

The Church of Divine Electricity

Emily Mitchell

University of Wisconsin Press, 2025

Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchell’s created worlds, as in our own, technology bewitches, especially with its ability to heighten both connections and isolation.

Whether being held by a giant and comforting machine, allowing micro-drones to record one’s every moment for a year to win prize money, or choosing self-mutilation in exchange for a bionic hand, these characters navigate technological and social change. The familiar can turn unrecognizable and disorienting—sometimes in a flash, sometimes gradually. Lyrical, haunting, and often funny, these stories ask us to consider what—and who—gets left out of a seemingly utopian future of technological advancements. Finely observed, thoughtful, and vivid, Mitchell’s stories get under your skin. It’s not that the best-laid plans could lead us astray—it’s that they may already have.
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