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EDITOR

Yvonne Vera was born and raised in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, gained her Ph.D. from York University in Canada, and was the Director of the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo. Yvonne Vera died at age 40 in 2005

Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Under the Tongue both won first prize in the Zimbabwe Publishers Literary Awards of 1995 and 1997 respectively. Under the Tongue won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Africa Region). Yvonne Vera won the Swedish literary award The Voice of Africa 1999.

", "wears.authors": "Yvonne Vera (Editor), Yvonne Vera", "wears.title_slug": "opening-spaces", "wears.author_slug": "yvonne-vera", "wears.isbn13": 9780435910105, "wears.isbn10": 435910108, "wears.price": "$14.52", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Heinemann", "wears.pubdate": "September 1999", "wears.edition": "1st Edition", "wears.subjects": "General & Miscellaneous Literature Anthologies, Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 186, "wears.dimensions": "5.07 (w) x 7.78 (h) x 0.42 (d)", "wears.overview": "In this anthology the award-winning author Yvonne Vera brings together the stories of many talented writers from different parts of Africa.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

African women are seldom given the space to express their concerns, their ideas and their reflections about the societies in which they live. In situations where a good woman is expected to remain silent, literature can provide an important medium for the expression of deeply-felt and sometimes shocking views. In this anthology the award-winning author Yvonne Vera brings together the stories of many talented writers from different parts of Africa. The act as witnesses to the dramas of private and public life. Their stories challenge contemporary attitudes and behaviour, leaving no room for complacency.

", "wears.toc": "

Preface

The Girl Who Can - Ama Ata Aidoo (Ghana)

Deciduous Gazettes - Melissa Tandiwe Myambo (Zimbabwe)

The Enigma - Lindsey Collen (Mauritius)

The Red Velvet Dress - Farida Karodia (South Africa)

Uncle Bunty - Norma Kitson (South Africa)

The Betrayal - Veronique Tadjo (Cote D'Ivoire)

The Museum - Leila Aboulela (Sudan)

The Power of a Plate of Rice - Ifeoma Okoye (Nigeria)

Stress - Lilia Momple (Mozambique)

A State of Outrage - Sindiwe Magona (South Africa)

Crocodile Tails - Chiedze Musengezi (Zimbabwe)

Night Thoughts - Monde Sifuniso (Zambia)

The Barrel of a Pen - Gugu Ndlovu (Zimbabwe)

A Perfect Wife - Anna Doa (Mali)

The Home-Coming - Milly Jafta (Namibia)

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "2": { "wears.id": 2, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 2, "wears.title": "The Caine Prize for African Writing 2010: 11th Annual Collection", "wears.author": "The Caine Prize for African Writing", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "The Caine Prize for African Writing", "wears.title_slug": "the-caine-prize-for-african-writing-2010", "wears.author_slug": "the-caine-prize-for-african-writing", "wears.isbn13": 9781906523374, "wears.isbn10": 1906523371, "wears.price": "$13.46", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "New Internationalist", "wears.pubdate": "August 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, African Fiction, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 208, "wears.dimensions": "5.00 (w) x 7.70 (h) x 0.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa's leading literary prize. For the past ten years it has supported and promoted contemporary African writing. Previous winners and entrants include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Segun Afolabi, EC Osondu, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Mary Watson, and Binyavanga Wainaina.

The 2010 collection will include the shortlisted stories and the stories written at the Caine Prize Writers' Workshop. It will be published in time for the announcement of the award in July 2010.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The best in new short story fiction from Africa's leading literary award.

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction 6

Caine Prize 2010 Shortlisted Stories

The Life of Worm Ken Barris (South Africa) 9

How Shall We Kill the Bishop? Lily Mabura (Kenya) 20

Muzungu Namwali Serpell (Zambia) 31

Soulmates Alex Smith (South Africa) 48

Stickfighting Days Olufemi Terry (Sierra Leone) 59

The CDC Caine Prize African Writers' Workshop Stories 2010

The Plantation Ovo Adagha (Nigeria) 76

Soul Safari Alnoor Amlani (Kenya) 86

A Life in Full Jude Dibia (Nigeria) 96

Mr Oliver Mamle Kabu (Ghana) 108

Happy Ending Stanley Onjezani Kenani (Malawi) 122

The David Thuo Show Samuel Munene (Kenya) 137

Set Me Free Clifford Chianga Oluoch (Kenya) 147

Invocations to the Dead Gill Schierhout (South Africa) 163

Almost Cured of Sadness Vuyo Seripe (South Africa) 176

The Journey Valerie Tagwira (Zimbabwe) 187

The King and I Novuyo Rosa Tshuma (Zimbabwe) 200

Indigo Molara Wood (Nigeria) 212

Rules 224", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "3": { "wears.id": 3, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 3, "wears.title": "African Folktales", "wears.author": "Roger D. Abrahams", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Roger D. Abrahams, Dan Frank", "wears.title_slug": "african-folktales", "wears.author_slug": "roger-d-abrahams", "wears.isbn13": 9780394721170, "wears.isbn10": 394721179, "wears.price": "$18.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "August 1983", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Travel, Africa", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Nearly 100 stories from over 40 tribe-related myths of creation, tales of epic deeds, ghost stories and tales set in both the animal and human realms.

Library Journal

This volume sports a hefty 95 stories gleaned from the notes of the earliest missionaries on up to recent anthropological studies. Abrahams admits that reading the stories lacks the full impact of hearing them told aloud but contends that they can nonetheless still be enjoyed. The stories feature numerous illustrations. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "4": { "wears.id": 4, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 4, "wears.title": "Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century", "wears.author": "Vincent Carretta", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Vincent Carretta", "wears.title_slug": "unchained-voices", "wears.author_slug": "vincent-carretta", "wears.isbn13": 9780813190761, "wears.isbn10": 813190762, "wears.price": "$30.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "University Press of Kentucky", "wears.pubdate": "December 2003", "wears.edition": "Expanded", "wears.subjects": "United States History - African American History, African American History, African Diaspora History, American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies, Ethnic & Minority Studies, United States History - 18th Century - General & Miscellaneous, Africana - Afric", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 416, "wears.dimensions": "6.10 (w) x 9.40 (h) x 1.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, capturing the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic--America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa--between 1760 and 1798.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, capturing the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic—America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa—between 1760 and 1798.

African American Review

This excellent anthology meets a longstanding need for a scholarly collection of early Anglo African and African American writers.

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
	A Note on the Texts and Editorial Policy	17
	A Note on Money	18
	Notes on the Illustrations	19
	Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro Man	20
	Poems: An Evening Thought	26
	An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess	26
	A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As related by Himself	32
	Poems: An Elegiac Poem, on the Death of ... George Whitefield	59
	Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral	59
	\"To His Excellency General Washington\"	59
	\"An Ode\"	72
	Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, in Two Volumes. To Which are Prefixed, Memoirs of his Life	77
	A Narrative of the Lord's wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black	110
	The Life and Confession of Johnson Green, Who Is to Be Executed this day, August 17th, 1786, for the Atrocious Crime of Burglary; Together with his Last and Dying Words	134
	\"Petition of an African Slave, to the Legislature of Massachusetts\" (1782), from The American Museum, or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical. For June 1787	142
	Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of The Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, By Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa	145
	The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself	185
	Copy of a Letter from Benjamin Banneker to the Secretary of State with his Answer	319
	\"An Account of several Baptist Churches, consisting chiefly of Negro Slaves: particularly of one of Kingston, in Jamaica; and another at Savannah in Georgia\"	325
	\"An Account of the Life of Mr. David George, from Sierra Leone in Africa; given by himself in a Conversation with Brother Rippon of London, and Brother Pearce of Birmingham\"	333
	\"Memoirs of the Life of Boston King, a Black Preacher. Written by Himself, during his Residence at Kingswood-School\"	351
	A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa: But resident above sixty years in the United States of America. Related By Himself	369
	App: Biographical Sketches	389

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

African American Review

This excellent anthology meets a longstanding need for a scholarly collection of early Anglo African and African American writers.\n\n

\n\n

From the Publisher

\"An important work for gaining an understanding of a heretofore little examined aspect of the eighteenth century.\" -- Bloomsbury Review

\"The selection of texts is diverse and wide-ranging.... The most comprehensive anthology on the subject and deserves to become the standard text for students in eighteenth-century studies and American studies.\" -- British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies

\"Establishes the canon of Black diasporic authors writing in English in the 18th century and makes the texts accessible to scholars and students.\" -- East-Central Intelligencer

\"Carretta has done eighteenth-century studies an immeasurable service.... The definitive anthology of black writing of the eighteenth-century African diaspora, serving the purpose of both introduction to and contestation of the overlapping fields of American, British, religious, and African studies.\" -- Eighteenth-Century Fiction

\"Most challenging and exhaustive, both in quality and quantity of research, presentation, scope, and premise. Carretta seeks to validate what for him is an unbroken link of unshackled black literary voices.\" -- Eighteenth-Century Studies

\"This is the most comprehensive collection of writings by people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic more than 200 years ago.\" -- Lexington Herald-Leader

\"An excellent anthology.\" -- Times Literary Supplement

\"Cause for celebration.... Will no doubt contribute to the ongoing rethinking of the eighteenth-century canon.\" -- Year's Work in English Studies

\n\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "5": { "wears.id": 5, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 5, "wears.title": "Women Writing Africa: West Africa and the Sahel", "wears.author": "Esi Sutherland-Addy", "wears.author_bio": "

Esi Sutherland-Addy (Ph.D. Hon, Hon FCP) is senior research fellow, head of the Language, Literature, and Drama Section, Institute of African Studies, and associate director of the African Humanties Institue Program at the University of Ghana. Aminata Diaw teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Sénégal, where she is currently the public affairs director of the Centre for Cultural and Scientific Programs. She is also Secretary General of the Sénégalese Council of Women and Chair for the subcommittee on Humanities and Social Sciences of the National Commission of UNESCO.

", "wears.authors": "Esi Sutherland-Addy (Editor), Abena P. A. Busia (Editor), Aminata Diaw", "wears.title_slug": "women-writing-africa", "wears.author_slug": "esi-sutherland-addy", "wears.isbn13": 9781558615007, "wears.isbn10": 1558615008, "wears.price": "$29.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Feminist Press at CUNY, The", "wears.pubdate": "August 2005", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Oral Tradition & Storytelling, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 560, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The acclaimed Women Writing Africa project “opens up worlds too often excluded from the history books” (Booklist) and is an “essential resource for scholars and general readers alike” (Library Journal). It reveals the cultural legacy of African women in their own words, in never-before- published texts that include communal songs and lullabies, letters and speeches, poetry and fiction.

Representing 20 languages and 12 countries, volume 2 covers western Africa, where most African Americans find their roots. The collection presents an epic history of the region through the eyes of its women, from the age of African kings through colonialism and independence.

Volume 1 of the series, Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region, is also available; volumes 3 and 4 will be published in 2006.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

A major literary and scholarly work that transforms perceptions of West African women's history and culture.

Library Journal

This second of four volumes representing the literary expression of African women focuses on 12 West African nations, documenting the history of this expression since upward of six centuries before colonialism and 20th-century independence. Editors Sutherland-Addy (language, literature, & drama, Inst. for African Studies, Univ. of Ghana) and Diaw (philosophy, Univ. Cheikh Anta Kiop in Dakar, Senegal) have compiled 132 texts accompanied by head notes by eminent authors (e.g., Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Bernadette Dao Sanou) to explain their cultural and historical contexts. These texts showcase not just the written word-in the form of letters, diaries, historical documents-but the spoken word as well, in lullabies, songs, and other oral traditions. Some of these texts are full of celebration and some of powerful emotions; all evoke powerful imagery. Both the texts and the head notes are fascinating to read, and the reader is truly gripped by the passion and emotion of the writers. This anthology provides an epic tale of African history while highlighting African women's valuable contributions to their culture and bringing their voices to life for readers everywhere. Highly recommended.-Susan McClellan, Avalon P.L., Pittsburgh Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Library Journal

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "6": { "wears.id": 6, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 6, "wears.title": "10 Years of the Caine Prize for African Writing: Plus Coetzee, Gordimer, Achebe, Okri", "wears.author": "The Caine The Caine Prize for African Writing", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "The Caine The Caine Prize for African Writing", "wears.title_slug": "10-years-of-the-caine-prize-for-african-writing", "wears.author_slug": "the-caine-the-caine-prize-for-african-writing", "wears.isbn13": 9781906523244, "wears.isbn10": "190652324X", "wears.price": "$18.95", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "New Internationalist", "wears.pubdate": "September 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The 10 winning stories accompanied by stories from the former African Booker prizewinners.

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review.

As exhibited in this collection, the Caine Prize, founded in 1999 in honor of the late Sir Michael Caine's work to popularize African writing in English, has spotlighted some exceptional writing; each prize-winning short story included here (the Caine is also known as the African Booker; as such, African winners of the Booker prize also appear) examines and explodes stereotypes about Africa and its literature. Characters reveal dignity and doubt in extraordinary situations, including a grandmother who abandons her frail husband in order to carry her grandchildren to safety in Nadine Gordimer's powerful \"The Ultimate Safari.\" J. M. Coetzee's \"Nietverloren\" examines the changing face of Africa through the demise of a small family farm. Binyavanga Wainaina's \"Discovering Home,\" meanwhile, contrasts a young man's year at home in Kenya after several years of cosmopolitan Cape Town life. Despite a rich diversity of style and subject matter, each story, as described in Ben Okri's introduction, \"reveals what hides in people,\" offering intimate glimpses into an array of African lives. Anyone who enjoys realistic literary fiction will treasure this collection.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "7": { "wears.id": 7, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 7, "wears.title": "Introduction to African Oral Literature and Performance", "wears.author": "Bayo Ogunjimi", "wears.author_bio": "

Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah, Ph.D., has taught African performance, African and African Diaspora literature, folklore and comparative poetics in Nigeria, Canada and the United States. Among his books are Ogoni's Agonies, Almajiri, and The People's Poet: Emerging Perspectives on Niyi Osundare.

Bayo Ogunjimi, Ph.D., deceased in 1996, was a professor of African oral literature and English at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. His critical essays have appeared in journals around the world.

", "wears.authors": "Bayo Ogunjimi, Abdul Rasheed Na'allah", "wears.title_slug": "introduction-to-african-oral-literature-and-performance", "wears.author_slug": "bayo-ogunjimi", "wears.isbn13": 9781592211517, "wears.isbn10": 1592211518, "wears.price": "$23.95", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Africa World Press", "wears.pubdate": "February 2006", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Africa - Anthropology & Sociology, African Folklore & Mythology, Oral Tradition & Storytelling, General & Miscellaneous African Literature - Literary Criticism, African Literature Anthologies, Fables, Fairy Tales, & Folk Tales - Literary Criticism", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 146, "wears.dimensions": "8.30 (w) x 5.30 (h) x 0.80 (d)", "wears.overview": "This new book puts together in a single cover, two earlier volumes by the authors, now revised to meet the challenges of a twenty-first century scholarship in African performance and cultural studies. Topics covered range from sources of African oral traditions, relevance of cosmology to African oral performance, fieldwork practice and research methodology, archetypes, folktales, myths and legends, performance and stylistic features, to various areas of poetic performances like praise poetry, religious poetry, topical, occupational and heroic poetry, their performances and more. The central theme of the book is performance, and students, scholars and readers are provided with projects and exercises intended to keep them involved in research and performance experience of the oral forms. Teaching and curriculum development suggestions are given to teachers of African oral performances. Important information is provided to guide researchers into a continued exciting experience in the study of and research into African oral traditions. Materials are included from a good number of languages and cultures of Africa including Yoruba, Hausa, Nupe, among others, so that students would be able to explore these important examples as testimony of the richness of the scholarly and cultural resources in African oral traditions.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This new book puts together in a single cover, two earlier volumes by the authors, now revised to meet the challenges of a twenty-first century scholarship in African performance and cultural studies. Topics covered range from sources of African oral traditions, relevance of cosmology to African oral performance, fieldwork practice and research methodology, archetypes, folktales, myths and legends, performance and stylistic features, to various areas of poetic performances like praise poetry, religious poetry, topical, occupational and heroic poetry, their performances and more.

The central theme of the book is performance, and students, scholars and readers are provided with projects and exercises intended to keep them involved in research and performance experience of the oral forms. Teaching and curriculum development suggestions are given to teachers of African oral performances. Important information is provided to guide researchers into a continued exciting experience in the study of and research into African oral traditions.

Materials are included from a good number of languages and cultures of Africa including Yoruba, Hausa, Nupe, among others, so that students would be able to explore these important examples as testimony of the richness of the scholarly and cultural resources in African oral traditions.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "8": { "wears.id": 8, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 8, "wears.title": "Violence in Francophone African and Caribbean Women's Literature", "wears.author": "Marie-Chantal Kalisa", "wears.author_bio": "

Chantal Kalisa is an associate professor of francophone studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She is a coeditor of a book in French on the Rwandan genocide.

", "wears.authors": "Marie-Chantal Kalisa", "wears.title_slug": "violence-in-francophone-african-and-caribbean-womens-literature", "wears.author_slug": "marie-chantal-kalisa", "wears.isbn13": 9780803211025, "wears.isbn10": 803211023, "wears.price": "$45.00", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "UNP - Nebraska", "wears.pubdate": "December 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Caribbean Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 236, "wears.dimensions": "5.80 (w) x 8.60 (h) x 1.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "African and Caribbean peoples share a history dominated by the violent disruptions of slavery and colonialism. While much has been said about these “geographies of pain,” violence in the private sphere, particularly gendered violence, receives little attention. This book fills that void. It is a critical addition to the study of African and Caribbean women’s literatures at a time when women from these regions are actively engaged in articulating the ways in which colonial and postcolonial violence impact women. Chantal Kalisa examines the ways in which women writers lift taboos imposed on them by their society and culture and challenge readers with their unique perspectives on violence. Comparing women from different places and times, Kalisa treats types of violence such as colonial, familial, linguistic, and war-related, specifically linked to dictatorship and genocide. She examines Caribbean writers Michele Lacrosil, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, and Edwidge Danticat, and Africans Ken Begul, Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bar, and Monique Ilboudo. She also includes Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon for their unique contributions to the questions of violence and gender. This study advances our understanding of the attempts of African and Caribbean women writers to resolve the tension between external forms of violence and internal forms resulting from skewed cultural, social, and political rules based on gender.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

African and Caribbean peoples share a history dominated by the violent disruptions of slavery and colonialism. While much has been said about these “geographies of pain,” violence in the private sphere, particularly gendered violence, receives little attention. This book fills that void. It is a critical addition to the study of African and Caribbean women’s literatures at a time when women from these regions are actively engaged in articulating the ways in which colonial and postcolonial violence impact women.

Chantal Kalisa examines the ways in which women writers lift taboos imposed on them by their society and culture and challenge readers with their unique perspectives on violence. Comparing women from different places and times, Kalisa treats types of violence such as colonial, familial, linguistic, and war-related, specifically linked to dictatorship and genocide. She examines Caribbean writers Michele Lacrosil, Simone Schwartz-Bart, Gisèle Pineau, and Edwidge Danticat, and Africans Ken Begul, Calixthe Beyala, Nadine Bar, and Monique Ilboudo. She also includes Sembène Ousmane and Frantz Fanon for their unique contributions to the questions of violence and gender. This study advances our understanding of the attempts of African and Caribbean women writers to resolve the tension between external forms of violence and internal forms resulting from skewed cultural, social, and political rules based on gender.

African Affairs

\"This study advances our understanding of the attempts of African and Caribbean women writers to resolve the tension between external forms of violence and internal forms resulting from skewed cultural, social, and political rules based on gender.\"—African Affairs

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

African Affairs

\n\n

Choice

\"Including an excellent bibliography, this is an important work in literary and gender studies.\"—A. J. Guillaume Jr., Choice

— A. J. Guillaume

\n\n\n

Research in African Literatures

\"Kalisa’s analysis of gendered violence is a persuasive and timely study of violence in francophone African and Caribbean literature. It is a significant contribution to the field of women studies and is of interest to any gender theorist, postcolonial specialist, and Africana scholar.\"—Cheikh Thiam, Research in African Literatures

— Cheikh Thiam

\n\n\n

\n\n

Choice

\"Including an excellent bibliography, this is an important work in literary and gender studies.\"—A. J. Guillaume Jr., Choice\n\n

\n\n

Research in African Literatures

\"Kalisa's analysis of gendered violence is a persuasive and timely study of violence in francophone African and Caribbean literature. It is a significant contribution to the field of women studies and is of interest to any gender theorist, postcolonial specialist, and Africana scholar.\"—Cheikh Thiam, Research in African Literatures\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "9": { "wears.id": 9, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 9, "wears.title": "Oral Epics from Africa", "wears.author": "John William Johnson", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "John William Johnson, Thomas A. Hale, Stephen (Eds.) Belcher, Thomas A. Hale (Editor), Stephen Belcher", "wears.title_slug": "oral-epics-from-africa", "wears.author_slug": "john-william-johnson", "wears.isbn13": 9780253211101, "wears.isbn10": 253211107, "wears.price": "$24.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Indiana University Press", "wears.pubdate": "March 2008", "wears.edition": "1st Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism, African", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

\"The editors... must be congratulated... Long live the African storytellers!\" — Africa Today

\"It is difficult to imagine a more practical introduction to contemporary African epic than this anthology... no other single volume comprehends the full scope of African epic (as opposed to praise poetry) the way this one does.... The stories are engaging, and the free-verse translations are surprisingly readable.... Recommended for all academic collections.\" — Choice

Western culture traces its literary heritage to such well-known epics as the Iliad and the Odyssey and Gilgamesh. But it is only recently that scholars have turned their attention toward capturing the rich oral tradition that is still alive in Africa today. These 25 selections introduce English-speaking readers to the extensive epic traditions in Africa.

", "wears.toc": "

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: The Oral Epic in Africa
	Soninke Epics	3
1	The Epic of Wagadu	4
	Mande Epics	8
2	The Epic of Son-Jara (Maninka)	11
3	The Epic of Fa-Jigi (Wasulunka)	23
4	The Epic of Bamana Segu (Bamana)	34
5	The Epic of Sonsan of Kaarta (Bamana)	50
6	The Epic of Almami Samori Toure (Bamana)	68
7	The Epic of Musadu (Maninka)	80
8	The Epic of Kelefa Saane (Mandinka)	92
9	The Epic of Kambili (Wasulunka)	100
10	The Epic of Sara (Maninka)	114
	Songhay and Zarma Epics	124
11	The Epic of Askia Mohammed	126
12	The Epic of Mali Bero	133
13	The Epic of Issa Korombe	140
	Fulbe Epics	147
14	The Epic of Hambodedio and Saigalare	149
15	The Epic of Silamaka and Poullori	162
16	The Epic of Silamaka and Hambodedio	172
17	The Epic of Samba Gueladio Diegui	185
	Wolof Epics	200
18	The Epic of Njaajaan Njaay	201
19	The Epic of Lat Dior	211
	Egyptian Epics	227
20	The Epic of the Bani Hilal: The Birth of the Horo Abu Zayd. I. (Northern Egypt)	228
21	The Epic of Bani Hilal: The Birth of Abu Zayd. II (Southern Egypt)	240
	Central African Epics	255
22	The Epic of Mvet Moneblum, or The Blue Man	257
23	The Epic of Jeki la Njambe Inono	274
	baNyanga Epics of Zaire	285
24	The Mwindo Epic	286
25	The Epic of Kahindo	294
	Bibliography	303
	Index	315

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "10": { "wears.id": 10, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 10, "wears.title": "African Fundamentalism: A Literary and Cultural Anthology of Garvey's Harlem Renaissance", "wears.author": "Tony Martin", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Tony Martin", "wears.title_slug": "african-fundamentalism", "wears.author_slug": "tony-martin", "wears.isbn13": 9780912469096, "wears.isbn10": 912469099, "wears.price": "$14.95", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Majority Press, Incorporated, The", "wears.pubdate": "October 1991", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism, General", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 363, "wears.dimensions": "5.31 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.85 (d)", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "11": { "wears.id": 11, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 11, "wears.title": "Land Apart: A South African Reader", "wears.author": "Various", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Various, Andre Brink, J. M. Coetzee", "wears.title_slug": "land-apart", "wears.author_slug": "various", "wears.isbn13": 9780140100044, "wears.isbn10": 140100040, "wears.price": "$12.71", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "June 1987", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 256, "wears.dimensions": "5.08 (w) x 7.74 (h) x 0.56 (d)", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "12": { "wears.id": 12, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 12, "wears.title": "Women Writing Africa: The Eastern Region", "wears.author": "Amandina Lihamba", "wears.author_bio": "

Amandina Lihamba is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Dar Es Salaam University, in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. She holds a degree in film studies from UCLA. Fulata L. Moyo has been Coordinator of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Malawi, in Zomba, Malawi. She is now working on a doctorate in religious studies at Lutheran Theological Institute in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Mugyabuso M. Mulokozi is Director of the Institute of Kiswahili Research at Dar Es Salaam University in Tanzania. He is a scholar, a well-known poet, and translator. Naomi L. Shitemi, was a coordinator of the Department of Kiswahili and other African Languages at Moi University, in Eldoret, Kenya. She is now Dean of a division in that university.

", "wears.authors": "Amandina Lihamba (Editor), Fulata L. Moyo (Editor), Mugaybuso M. Mulokozi", "wears.title_slug": "women-writing-africa", "wears.author_slug": "amandina-lihamba", "wears.isbn13": 9781558615342, "wears.isbn10": 1558615342, "wears.price": "$29.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Feminist Press at CUNY, The", "wears.pubdate": "February 2007", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Social Sciences, Women's Studies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Third installment of major literary and scholarly project exposes East African women's history and culture.

Publishers Weekly

The third volume from the Women Writing Africa Project makes a significant contribution to the study of African literature and offers a textured portrait of women's lives in Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. These pieces span the centuries from 1711 to 2003, address topics ranging from religion to HIV and represent prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, lullabies and protest songs. Marriage is a theme that runs throughout: \"A Mother's Advice and Prayer\" from 1858 is a nuptial manual in verse, and \"I Want a Divorce,\" taken from a 1922 court record, gives a valuable glimpse of the power struggles between husband and wife. On a lighter note, a collection of recent song lyrics complains about useless husbands and lovers. Many 20th-century writers address colonialism and independence: Penina Muhando Mlama's \"Creating in the Mother-Tongue\" looks at the linguistic, literary and socioeconomic obstacles to writing in indigenous languages. The editors' lucid introduction usefully contextualizes these wonderful writings, and this volume will be especially welcome in college classrooms. General readers who want to be entertained, educated and chastened about women's struggles and triumphs in east Africa will delight in this literary feast. (July)

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "13": { "wears.id": 13, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 13, "wears.title": "Nobody Ever Said AIDS: Poems and Stories from Southern Africa", "wears.author": "Nobantu Rasebotsa", "wears.author_bio": "

Nobantu Rasebotsa is the dean of the faculty of humanities and lectures in the department of English at the University of Botswana.

Meg Samuelson is completing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Cape Town and has been involved with HIV/AIDS projects. She is the coordinator of the \"Share Your Story about HIV/AIDS\" creative writing competition.

", "wears.authors": "Nobantu Rasebotsa (Editor), Kylie Thomas (Editor), Meg Samuelson (Editor), Njabulo S. Ndebele", "wears.title_slug": "nobody-ever-said-aids", "wears.author_slug": "nobantu-rasebotsa", "wears.isbn13": 9780795701849, "wears.isbn10": 795701845, "wears.price": "$22.13", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "NB Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "March 2010", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Places - Literary Anthologies, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 192, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.60 (d)", "wears.overview": "While numerous texts have dealt with the AIDS pandemic in Africa from the clinical, economic, and sociological to the academic and technical this anthology of poems and short stories connects on a human level and reflects an entire society dealing with the challenges of overcoming AIDS and HIV. Well-known writers such as Achmat Dangor, Dambudzo Marechera, and Sindiwe Magona join 16 new writers selected from the \"Share Your Story about HIV/AIDS\" creative writing competition funded by the Swedish donor foundation, SIDA, and conducted in collaboration with the University of Cape Town. Their intimate stories and poems explore love, sexuality, stigma, and loss, bearing witness to the disease and responding to its silent taboo.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

While numerous texts have dealt with the AIDS pandemic in Africa from the clinical, economic, and sociological to the academic and technical this anthology of poems and short stories connects on a human level and reflects an entire society dealing with the challenges of overcoming AIDS and HIV. Well-known writers such as Achmat Dangor, Dambudzo Marechera, and Sindiwe Magona join 16 new writers selected from the \"Share Your Story about HIV/AIDS\" creative writing competition funded by the Swedish donor foundation, SIDA, and conducted in collaboration with the University of Cape Town. Their intimate stories and poems explore love, sexuality, stigma, and loss, bearing witness to the disease and responding to its silent taboo.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "14": { "wears.id": 14, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 14, "wears.title": "Step into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature", "wears.author": "Kevin Powell", "wears.author_bio": "

KEVIN POWELL is a critically acclaimed poet, journalist, essayist, and public speaker. A former senior writer for Vibe, he has been published in dozens of periodicals, including the Washington Post, Essence, Code, Rolling Stone, the New York Times, George, Ms., and voter.com.

", "wears.authors": "Kevin Powell (Editor), Powell", "wears.title_slug": "step-into-a-world", "wears.author_slug": "kevin-powell", "wears.isbn13": 9780471380603, "wears.isbn10": 471380601, "wears.price": "$26.31", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Wiley, John & Sons, Incorporated", "wears.pubdate": "October 2000", "wears.edition": 1, "wears.subjects": "Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, Literature Anthologies - General & Miscellaneous, African Literature Anthologies, African Diaspora (outside U.S.) - General & Miscellaneous, English & Irish Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 496, "wears.dimensions": "6.48 (w) x 9.55 (h) x 1.48 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Step Into A World

\"Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness. Step into a World is a kaleidoscope into the world not bound by artificial constructs like nation. John Coltrane recorded ‘Giant Steps,’ which is a riff on the sight and sounds in his muse. Powell plays the computer with equal astuteness.\" Nikki Giovanni

\"Those of us who pay attention were aware that the younger generation of black writers was being smothered by the anointment of talented tenth Divas and Divuses, and their commercial accommodationist ‘Fourth Renaissance. ’This anthology is indeed a breakthrough! It combines the boldness and daring of hip-hop with the intellectual keenness of a Michele Wallace or a Clyde Taylor.\" Ishmael Reed

\"In a culture where videos, the Internet, and other high-tech communication is being consumed like the latest mind-altering drug, how does great literature grow and survive? These writers will answer that all-important question. This anthology provides a clue, a hint, as to where we might be going. They are resisting all this vacant, empty-minded nothingness. Read them. Listen to them. If you don’t, you do so at your peril.\" Quincy Troupe

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Step Into A World

\"Kevin Powell is pushing to bring, as he has so brilliantly done before, the voices of his generation: the concerns, the cares, the fears, and the fearlessness. Step into a World is a kaleidoscope into the world not bound by artificial constructs like nation. John Coltrane recorded 'Giant Steps,' which is a riff on the sight and sounds in his muse. Powell plays the computer with equal astuteness.\" -Nikki Giovanni

\"Those of us who pay attention were aware that the younger generation of black writers was being smothered by the anointment of talented tenth Divas and Divuses, and their commercial accommodationist 'Fourth Renaissance. 'This anthology is indeed a breakthrough! It combines the boldness and daring of hip-hop with the intellectual keenness of a Michele Wallace or a Clyde Taylor.\" -Ishmael Reed

\"In a culture where videos, the Internet, and other high-tech communication is being consumed like the latest mind-altering drug, how does great literature grow and survive? These writers will answer that all-important question. This anthology provides a clue, a hint, as to where we might be going. They are resisting all this vacant, empty-minded nothingness. Read them. Listen to them. If you don't, you do so at your peril.\" -Quincy Troupe

Essence - Patrick Henry Bass

Cultural critic Kevin Powell's Step into a World is a watershed moment in hip-hop writing, a thought-provoking book with a broad range of voices, from Ben Okri to Junot Didaz.

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgments
	The Word Movement	1
	Are Black People Cooler than White People?	15
	GWTW	19
	Race Natters - The Chattering Classes Convene on Martha's Vineyard	23
	In Search of Alice Walker	26
	Mama's Girl	32
	The Visible Man	37
	Return to the Planet of the Apes	40
	The Sports Taboo: Why blacks are like boys and whites are like girls	42
	Are We Tiger Woods Yet?	49
	On the Disappearance of Joe Wood Jr.	51
	She and I	53
	White Girl?	59
	What Happens When Your 'Hood Is the Last Stop on the White Flight Express?	68
	Texaco	78
	Speaking in Tongues	80
	Your Friendly Neighborhood Jungle	82
	Hip-Hop Hi-Tech	91
	Homophobia: Hip-Hop's Black Eye	95
	The Death of Rock n' Roll	101
	Confessions of a Hip-Hop Critic	105
	hip-hop feminist	107
	This Is Not a Puff Piece	113
	Live from Death Row	124
	Hit 'Em Up: On the Life and Death of Tupac Shakur	133
	Angles of Vision	143
	The Soul of Black Talk	152
	Do Books Matter?	159
	The Other Side of Paradise - Feminist Pedagogy, Toni Morrison Iconography, and Oprah's Book Club Phenomenon	163
	She's Gotta Have It	172
	No Entry	174
	What About Black Romance?	177
	\"It be's that way sometimes 'cause I can't control the rhyme.\" - Notes from the Post-Soul Intelligentsia	183
	Facing Unknown Possibilities: Lance Jeffers and the Black Aesthetic	195
	The White Boy Shuffle	203
	Interpolation: Peace to My Nine	207
	Epilogue: Women Like Us	211
	The Sun, the Moon, the Stars	213
	Prologue, 1963	223
	The Emperor's Babe	227
	the missionary position	229
	My Son, My Heart, My Life	238
	The Last Integrationist	252
	slave	256
	The Famished Road	262
	Stigmata	265
	The Pagoda	269
	face	273
	The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones	281
	Baker	282
	Rika	288
	Butterfly Burning	296
	The Intuitionist	299
	Safari	307
	The Rumor	307
	Fugue	308
	The Clearing	311
	I Dream of Jesus	311
	personal	312
	Tat Tvam Asi (You Are the One)	316
	One Irony of the Caribbean	318
	Legba, Landed	320
	Excursion to Port Royal	322
	Dear Mr. Ellison	323
	Assam	323
	Church Y'all	324
	The Yellow Forms of Paradise	327
	swampy river	329
	from \"Awakening\"	332
	Sleep	334
	When the Neighbors Fight	335
	You Are Chic Now, Che	336
	Visitation: Grenada, 1978	337
	100 Times	339
	Discubriendo una Fotografia de mi Madre	340
	sometime in the summer there's october	340
	The Outcome	344
	Toi Derricotte at Quail Ridge Books	345
	Nairobi Streetlights	346
	3 movements	347
	The Night when Mukoma Told the Devil to Go to Hell	348
	Autobiography of a Black Man	350
	Spotlight at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe	351
	Blue	353
	Patrimony	354
	Intermission in three acts in service of PLOT	355
	Calypso the outside woman	357
	The Woman	358
	Woman	359
	Sunday	361
	Purple Impala	362
	Windows of Exile	363
	gin and juice	364
	Collection Day	365
	Insomnia	366
	Shrine outside Basquiat's Studio, September 1988	367
	Black Youth Black Art Black Face - An Address	371
	leaving a feminist organization: a personal/poetics	374
	we are trying to (have me) conceive	376
	if we've gotta live underground and everybody's got cancer/will poetry be enuf? - A Letter to Ntozake Shange	380
	Binga - Diary Entry	385
	The Six-Hour Difference: A Dutch Perspective on the New World	388
	Just Beneath the Surface - An Email	395
	By Invitation - An Open Letter to the President of South Africa	398
	What Happened to Your Generation's Promise of \"Love and Revolution\"? - A Letter to Angela Davis	401
	An Atlantic Away: A Letter from Africa	404
	Contributors	419
	Self-Portraith Radcliffe Bailey, the Cover Artist	452
	Selected Bibliography of Black Literature	453
	Books Essential to Understanding Hip-Hop Culture	457
	Permissions	459
	Index	467

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Patrick Henry Bass

Cultural critic Kevin Powell's Step into a World is a watershed moment in hip-hop writing, a thought-provoking book with a broad range of voices, from Ben Okri to Junot Didaz.
\n— Essence\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

This anthology of young, contemporary black writers generally maintains a precarious balance between authentic discovery and promotional marketing, although the writing varies widely in quality and relevance (some selections are quite riveting, others just self-absorbed). Divided into six sections--\"Essays,\" \"Hip-Hop Journalism,\" \"Criticism,\" \"Fiction,\" \"Poetry,\" and \"Dialogue\"--the collection presents a broad range of voices and perspectives, although a majority of them are, not surprisingly, from the United States. While some of the texts, particularly those on hip-hop, seem overly dramatic and hyperbolic, some very fine writing emerges in the \"Essays\" section. Mostly autobiographical, these selections address the very real contemporary problems of black identity in a post-Civil Rights era in which the political battle lines have become much more blurred and the issues of self, nation, class, gender, sexuality, and history are immensely complicated. The items in the \"Dialogue\" section are the most strident and the most inventive and compelling. Even though this book will mainly be used as a classroom textbook, it could be a valuable addition to larger collections and other libraries interested in offering brief introductions to young black writers.--Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "15": { "wears.id": 15, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 15, "wears.title": "An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New", "wears.author": "Werner Sollors", "wears.author_bio": "

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of Afro-American Studies and Chair of the History of American Civilization Program at Harvard University. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature, Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, and Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, all available from NYU Press.

", "wears.authors": "Werner Sollors, Werner Sollors", "wears.title_slug": "an-anthology-of-interracial-literature", "wears.author_slug": "werner-sollors", "wears.isbn13": 9780814781432, "wears.isbn10": 814781438, "wears.price": "", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "New York University Press", "wears.pubdate": "February 2004", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Language Arts & Disciplines", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus' ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia MariaChild, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Library Journal

Sollors (English literature & Afro-American studies, Harvard) has compiled the first scholarly anthology that centers on the theme in literature of love and family across, or crossed by, racial boundaries. As Sollors explains in the introduction, \"It is a theme that makes for unusual intersections of the plots of love and family relations with issues of society and politics.\" The anthology contains a broad range of texts, including epics, poems, and novellas, and spans numerous cultures from the ancient to the contemporary. The authors included range from Hans Christian Andersen and Alexander Pushkin to Eugene O'Neill and Gwendolyn Brooks. One is reminded that color was an accidental quality in antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages; that during later times, censure existed; and that, in the United States in particular, interracial marriage bans were not deemed unconstitutional until 1967. As stated in a Rita Dove play: \"A sniff of freedom's all it takes to feel history's sting.\" Recommended for academic libraries and for any reader working around the race rubric.-Scott Hightower, Fordham Univ., New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	\"Riddle\" (5th century B.C.)	7
2	From Parzival (1197-1210)	8
3	From The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night	57
4	From Il Novellino (1475)	69
5	From Hecatommithi (1565)	85
6	\"The Beautiful Slave-Girl\" (1614)	97
7	\"A Negress Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Colour\" (1633)	99
8	\"A Faire Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her\" (1658)	101
9	\"The Inversion\" (1657), \"One Enamour'd on a Black-moor\" (1657), \"A Black Nymph Scorning a Fair Boy Courting Her\" (1657)	103
10	\"To Mrs. Diana Cecyll\" (1665), \"The Brown Beauty\" (1665), \"Sonnet of Black Beauty (1665), \"Another Sonnet to Black It Self\" (1665)	107
11	\"In Laudem Aethiopissae\" (1778)	110
12	The Isle of Pines (1668)	115
13	From Oroonoko: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1696)	132
14	\"On a Young Lady's Weeping at Oroonooko\" (1732), \"To a Gentleman in Love with a Negro Woman\" (1732)	143
15	Two Versions of the Story of Inkle and Yarico	145
16	The Dying Negro (1773)	152
17	Letter to James Tobin (1788)	161
18	The Engagement in Santo Domingo (1811)	167
19	Ourika (1823)	189
20	The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827-1828)	208
21	\"The Quadroons\" (1842)	232
22	From Georges (1843)	240
23	From Beyond the Seas (1863-1864)	253
24	\"The Quadroom Girl\" (1842)	278
25	\"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point\" (1848)	280
26	\"The Pilot's Story\" (1860)	288
27	From Mulatto: An Original Romantic Drama in Five Acts (1840)	292
28	The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana: A Play in Five Acts (1859)	300
29	From Black and White: A Drama in Three Acts (1869)	337
30	From Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1863)	350
31	Madame Delphine (1881)	383
32	From \"The Pariah\" (1895)	421
33	\"Boitelle\" (1889)	424
34	\"The Father of Desiree's Baby\" (1893)	431
35	\"Uncle Wellington's Wives\" (1899)	436
36	\"The Mulatto to His Critics\" (1918)	461
37	\"The Octoroon\" (1922), \"Cosmopolite\" (1922), \"The Riddle\" (1925)	462
38	From The Vengeance of the Gods (1922)	464
39	\"Hope\" (1922)	473
40	\"Withered Skin of Berries\" (1923)	476
41	\"Confession\" (1929)	498
42	All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)	504
43	\"Near White\" (1925), \"Two Who Crossed a Line\" (1925)	530
44	\"Cross\" (1925), \"Mulatto\" (1927), Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South (1935)	532
45	\"The Mulatto\" (1925), \"Near-White\" (1932)	559
46	\"The Pink Hat\" (1926)	573
47	\"Ballad of Pearl May Lee\" (1945)	577
48	The Owl Answers (1963)	583
49	From Oxherding Tale (1982)	594
50	From The Darker Face of the Earth (1994)	606
51	From Buck (2001)	634
52	From The Secret Life of Fred Astaire (2001)	653
	Sources	667
	Index	673
	About the Editor	675

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "16": { "wears.id": 16, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 16, "wears.title": "The Caine Prize 2009: The Caine Prize for African Writing 10th Annual Collection", "wears.author": "New Internationalist", "wears.author_bio": "

The New Internationalist is an independent not-for-profit publishing co-operative. Our mission is to report on issues of world poverty and inequality: to focus attention on the unjust relationship between the powerful and the powerless worldwide: to debate and campaign for the radical changes necessary if the needs of all are to be met.

", "wears.authors": "New Internationalist", "wears.title_slug": "the-caine-prize-2009", "wears.author_slug": "new-internationalist", "wears.isbn13": 9781906523145, "wears.isbn10": 1906523142, "wears.price": "$16.24", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "New Internationalist", "wears.pubdate": "July 2009", "wears.edition": 10, "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, African Fiction, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 214, "wears.dimensions": "5.80 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.60 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa’s leading literary prize and is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. This edition collects the five 2009 shortlisted stories, along with twelve stories written at the Caine Prize Writers’ Workshop, taking place in spring 2009.

Previous winners and entrants include Segun Afolabi, Leila Aboulela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Brian Chikwava, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Mary Watson, and Binyavanga Wainaina.

The collection will be released in time for the announcement of the award in July 2009.

This year's shortlist:

* Mamle Kabu (Ghana), 'The End of Skill from Dreams,' from Miracles and Jazz, published by Picador Africa, Johannesburg 2008

* Parselelo Kantai (Kenya), 'You Wreck Her,' from the St Petersburg Review, NY 2008

* Alistair Morgan (South Africa), 'Icebergs,' from The Paris Review no.
\n183, NY 2008

* EC Osondu (Nigeria), 'Waiting,' from Guernicamag.com, October 2008

* Mukoma wa Ngugi (Kenya), 'How Kamau wa Mwangi Escaped into Exile,' from Wasafiri No54, Summer 2008, London

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The best in new short story fiction from Africa's leading literary award.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "17": { "wears.id": 17, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 17, "wears.title": "Traditions in World Literature: Literature of Africa, Softcover Student Edition", "wears.author": "McGraw-Hill", "wears.author_bio": "

McGraw-Hill authors represent the leading experts in their fields and are dedicated to improving the lives, careers, and interests of readers worldwide

", "wears.authors": "McGraw-Hill, McGraw-Hill Staff", "wears.title_slug": "traditions-in-world-literature", "wears.author_slug": "mcgraw-hill", "wears.isbn13": 9780844212029, "wears.isbn10": 844212024, "wears.price": "$7.55", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Glencoe/McGraw-Hill", "wears.pubdate": "January 1999", "wears.edition": 1, "wears.subjects": "Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 320, "wears.dimensions": "7.40 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.80 (d)", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Presents writings from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, and other parts of Africa, with biographical information about the authors, discussion questions, and writing ...

Biography

McGraw-Hill authors represent the leading experts in their fields and are dedicated to improving the lives, careers, and interests of readers worldwide

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "18": { "wears.id": 18, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 18, "wears.title": "Love Child", "wears.author": "Gcina Mhlophe", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Gcina Mhlophe", "wears.title_slug": "love-child", "wears.author_slug": "gcina-mhlophe", "wears.isbn13": 9781869140014, "wears.isbn10": "186914001X", "wears.price": "$8.97", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "University Of KwaZulu-Natal Press", "wears.pubdate": "March 2002", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 124, "wears.dimensions": "8.50 (w) x 5.30 (h) x 0.40 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Gcina Mhlophe is a poet, playwright, performer and South Africa's favorite storyteller. In this fascinating retrospective collection, she shares her personal journey through the social and political landscapes of the 1980s, with its recollected moments of struggle and transformation along the way. Written in a variety of styles and voices, ranging from anecdotal memory to historical moment to folklore tradition, these simply presented poems and stories are by turns funny, touching, chilling, thought-provoking and absorbing. Love Child is a collection for the new millennium generation. It is valuable not just for the deeply-felt personal and political insights it has to offer, but for the accessible ease with which it manages to capture the seminal moments of black South African history in the preserving amber of the author's personal recollection.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "

	Foreword
	Transforming Moments	1
	In the Company of Words	9
	The Toilet	11
	Nongenile	19
	Sweet Honey Nights	22
	Praise to Our Mothers	26
	My Dear Madam	29
	Say No	45
	My Father	47
	I Fell in Love	53
	The Crocodile Spirit	56
	Sometimes When it Rains	62
	Nokulunga's Wedding	64
	We Are at War	73
	Dumisani	76
	Sitting Alone Thinking	85
	It's Quiet Now	87
	The Dancer	90
	Fly, Hat, Fly!	92
	Leader Remember	95
	Love Child	98
	A Brighter Dawn for African Women	107

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "19": { "wears.id": 19, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 19, "wears.title": "Seventh Street Alchemy 2004: A Selection of Works from the Caine Prize for African Writing", "wears.author": "Jacana Media", "wears.author_bio": "

Brian Chikwava is Zimbabwean writer and the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing winner. Doreen Baingana, Monica Arac de Nyeko, and Parselelo Kantai were on the shortlist for the same prize. Nick Elam is the administrator for the Caine Prize for African Writing.

", "wears.authors": "Jacana Media (Manufactured by), Monica Arac de Nyeko, Doreen Baingana, Parselelo Kantai", "wears.title_slug": "seventh-street-alchemy-2004", "wears.author_slug": "jacana-media", "wears.isbn13": 9781770091450, "wears.isbn10": 1770091459, "wears.price": "$25.13", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Jacana Media", "wears.pubdate": "June 2006", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, African Fiction, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 228, "wears.dimensions": "5.75 (w) x 8.25 (h) x 0.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The 2004 winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Brian Chikwava's \"Seventh Street Alchemy\" is featured alongside shortlisted stories from 2004, compositions from the Caine Prize's March 2005 Workshop for African Writers, and Charles Mungoshi's previously unpublished \"Letter from a Friend\" in this inspired collection of work from some of Africa's most promising young and new writers.
\n

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "20": { "wears.id": 20, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 20, "wears.title": "Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region: Volume 1", "wears.author": "Sheila Meintjes", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Sheila Meintjes, Dorothy Driver (Editor), Sheila Meintjes (Editor), Margie Orford (Editor), Chiedza Musengezi", "wears.title_slug": "women-writing-africa", "wears.author_slug": "sheila-meintjes", "wears.isbn13": 9781558614062, "wears.isbn10": 1558614060, "wears.price": "$1.99", "wears.format": "Library Binding", "wears.publisher": "Feminist Press at CUNY, The", "wears.pubdate": "December 2002", "wears.edition": "First Edition", "wears.subjects": "Places - Literary Anthologies, African Literature Anthologies, General & Miscellaneous African History, Women's History - Africa, Sub-Saharan", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 560, "wears.dimensions": "6.30 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "

A landmark in scholarship and culture, this volume uncovers the stunning literary legacy of African women, heretofore all but invisible.

Beginning with a Sesotho women’s lament song from 1842, this volume brings together poetry, songs, newspaper columns, political petitions, personal letters, and prison diaries, along with little-known works by writers such as Bessie Head, Doris Lessing, Yvonne Vera, Zoë Wicomb, and Nadine Gordimer. Each of the 120 texts in the volume is accompanied by a scholarly note that provides detailed background information, while an introductory essay sets the broader historical stage. Approximately one third of the texts are oral in origin, and few have previously been available in book form.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

An essential text for libraries—the definitive collection of women's literatures from southern Africa.

Library Journal

This rich resource for scholars and general readers alike is the product of a decade of research by the Women Writing Africa Project. The project, funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, seeks to bring African women's literary voices to the public through four volumes of texts arranged by region. The first volume in this distinctive series presents 120 southern African texts that are rich, evocative, and shaped by endless complexities. The settler colonies, such as Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, offer the largest body of research materials to be mined. Botswana's lack of colonialism meant that literacy came at a later date than in other countries, so texts are available only from the mid-1920s. Lesotho has older texts, however, owing to the presence of a Christian mission. Spanning two centuries (the 19th and the 20th) and featuring such writers as Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nadine Gordimer, Lauretta Ngcobo, Doris Lessing, and Winnie Mandela, the anthology includes texts that range from songs, poems, fiction, praise poems, and folktales to letters, journals, historical documents, journalism pieces, and oral testimonies. The volume's editors, all South African scholars, have also included a journal by a Boer woman written during the Anglo-Boer War, a testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and songs of female initiation into adulthood. These selections, most of which have never before been assembled or published, often call into question such important matters as borders, language, vocabulary, translation, and colonialism. The lengthy introduction adequately explicates the historical as well as textual meaning, and each text's headnote provides context and useful details about the date of its origin, location, and language. Essential for all academic libraries and highly recommended for larger public libraries.-Neal Wyatt, Chesterfield Cty. P.L., VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

", "wears.toc": "

	A Note on the Women Writing Africa Project
	Preface
	Introduction	1
	Nineteenth Century
	Song of the Afflicted	85
	Testimony	86
	Letters and Land Submission	91
	God's Peace and Blessing	96
	Account of Cape Town	98
	A Mother Praises Her Baby	105
	Unanana-bosele	106
	Affidavit	109
	What the Maidens Do with Rooi Klip	111
	Letter to Miss Mackenzie	113
	The Story of Ngangezwe and Mnyamana	115
	The War in Zululand	120
	Two Lions Who Changed Themselves into People and Married Two Herero Girls	124
	Leaving the Farm	125
	Portrait of Louisa	128
	Penelopa Lienguane	131
	Testimony of a School Girl	134
	1900 to 1919
	Journal of the War	139
	Moliege's Vengeance	144
	Ominous Weather	147
	Court Record	152
	Women's Petition: Domestic Unhappiness	155
	Letter from Karibib	157
	Petition of the Native and Coloured Women of the Province of the Orange Free State	158
	Africa: My Native Land	161
	A \"Little Woman's\" Advice to the Public	162
	Baster Affidavit	165
	1920s to 1950s
	Address to the Resident Commissioner	171
	Going to School	173
	Listen, Compatriots!	176
	Letter to the High Commissioner	180
	Inheritance: Two Letters	182
	Speech to the Bangwaketse	187
	Bantu Home Life	189
	Social Conditions Among Bantu Women and Girls	195
	The Story of Nosente	200
	UMandisa	205
	Nation Is Going to Ruination	209
	Flight of the Royal Household	212
	Letter from Keetmanshoop	219
	Meeting of Herero Women	221
	The Case of the Foolish Minister	225
	Though I Am Black, I Am Comely	229
	Song of King Iipumbu	231
	Women's Charter	236
	Presidential Address to the African National Congress Women's League, Transvaal	240
	Two Songs	245
	African Women Do Not Want Passes	246
	The Widows of the Reserves	248
	It's Gotta Be Cash for a Cookie	252
	Aunt, Stretch out the Blanket	254
	1960s and 1970s
	The Girl Aga-abes	259
	Diary of a Detainee	263
	Past and Present	268
	Bus Journey to Tsolo	271
	Three Court Statements	283
	The Widow and the Baboons	285
	Ballad of Nomagundwane	287
	For \"Napoleon Bonaparte,\" Jenny, and Kate	290
	What of the Future?	303
	I Drift in the Wind	306
	I am a Wailing Fool	308
	Murmurs in the Kutum	309
	Tobacco, Sugar Alcohol, and Coffee: These Things Have Turned Us into Slaves	315
	A Man Hides Food from His Family	316
	Fall Tomorrow	333
	The Old People Give You Life	335
	Emergency Call from the Women of Namibia	337
	Women Are Wealth	339
	Poem for My Mother	343
	Detention Alone Is a Trial in Itself	344
	The Basking Lizard	346
	Working on the Mail	348
	1980s
	The Rending of the Veil	357
	The Haunting Melancholy of Klipvoordam	363
	Return Journey	372
	Arrested for Being Women	375
	Crossroads	377
	Kandishiwo - I Don't Know	380
	The Woman	385
	Citizenship: An Open Letter to the Attorney-General	386
	I, the Unemployed	390
	The Letter	392
	Our Sharpeville	397
	Our Government Is a Glowing Ember	398
	For Willy Nyathele	400
	Jesus Is Indian	402
	Children of Namibia	411
	Praise to Our Mothers	413
	T.M.T. [actual symbol not reproducible] T.B.M.G.	415
	1990s and 2000s
	Another Story	419
	War from Within	430
	Krotoa's Story	433
	Stella	438
	Giraffe Song	442
	Nhamiwa's Magic Stick	444
	\"Lend Me a Dress\": Testimonies on Education	446
	A Broken Family	448
	Two Dream-Miracle Stories	453
	Praise to Mbuya Nehanda	455
	A Noble Woman of Africa	457
	Swazi Wedding Songs	461
	Izisho Zokusebenza - Work Songs	463
	April 27: The First Time	467
	Before the Beginning	470
	The Price of Freedom	471
	Ngonya's Bride-Price	476
	Testimony: Truth and Reconciliation Commission	479
	We Will Be Leasing for Ourselves	484
	Writing near the Bone	488
	African Wisdom	491
	War Memoir	494
	The Birth of This Country's Language	500
	Bojale - Setswana Initiation Songs	506
	Intonjane - Xhosa Initiation Songs	507
	Mutondo - Nyemba Initiation Songs	510
	Setswana Wedding Songs	513
	Good as Dead	515
	Caring for the Dying	520
	Generations	522
	Contributors	525
	Permissions Acknowledgments and Sources	537
	Authors Listed by Country	549
	Index	551

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Library Journal

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "21": { "wears.id": 21, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:14", "wears.nullid": 21, "wears.title": "Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women's", "wears.author": "ValZrie Orlando", "wears.author_bio": "

Valérie Orlando is Associate Professor of French, specializing in Francophone Studies, at Illinois Wesleyan University. She is the author of Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (1999).

", "wears.authors": "ValZrie Orlando, Valzrie Orlando, Valrie Orlando", "wears.title_slug": "of-suffocated-hearts-and-tortured-souls", "wears.author_slug": "valzrie-orlando", "wears.isbn13": 9780739105627, "wears.isbn10": 739105620, "wears.price": "$82.00", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group Inc", "wears.pubdate": "December 2002", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Caribbean Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, African Literature Anthologies, Psychology & Literature", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 218, "wears.dimensions": "0.63 (w) x 6.00 (h) x 9.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Female characters who suffer madness and insanity are strikingly prominent in novels by women writers of Africa and the Caribbean. To find out why there are so many \"suffocated hearts and tortured souls\" in this literature, Valerie Orlando, who has long studied Francophone text and culture, here closely reads the work of Aminata Sow Fall, Mariama Bâ, Myrian Warner-Vieyra, and Simone Schwarz-Bart, among others. In these women's novels, Orlando finds, madness is the manifestation of a split identity, and in this study she sets herself the task of interrogating the nature of that identity. Francophone women novelists of Africa and the Caribbean—though they come from countries whose unique experiences of colonialism, revolution, and postcolonial regimes have shaped specific and discrete cultures—express a common search for a meaningful relationship between their experience as women to the history and destiny of their nations. Only when \"woman\"' is understood not as an ahistorical object but as a subject whose lived body is entwined with political, cultural, and economic structures, Orlando argues, will insanity finally give way to clarity of being. Interweaving literary citations with theoretical discussion, Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls is just as much a masterful explication of profoundly affecting literary work as it is an essential addition to feminist scholarship and theory.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

A striking number of hysterical or insane female characters populate Francophone women's writing. To discover why, Orlando reads novels from a variety of cultures, teasing out key elements of Francophone identity struggles.

", "wears.toc": "

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Writing New H(er)stories for Francophone Women of Africa and the Caribbean	1
1	The Politics of Race and Patriarchy in Suzanne Lacascade's Claire-Solange, ame africaine	37
2	Home Is Where I Eat My Bread: Multiculturality and Becoming Multiple in Leila Hoauri's Zeida de nulle part	51
3	Self-Loathing, Self-Sacrifice: Michele Lacrosil's Cajou and Myriam Warner-Vieyria's Juletane	73
4	Out(in)side the Confinement of Cultures: Marie Chauvet's Amour, Colere, et Folie and Mariama Ba's Un Chant ecarlate	97
5	Rooms and Prisons, Sex and Sin: Places of Sequestration in Nina Bouraoui's La Voyeuse Interdite and Calixthe Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga	125
6	War, Revolution, and Family Matters: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte eclatee and Hajer Djilani's Et Pourtant le ciel etait bleu	147
7	Feminine Voices and H(er)stories: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle and Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail	165
	Epilogue: Transgressing Boundaries, Reconstructing Stories	181
	Bibliography	187
	Index	193

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

T Denean Sharpley-Whiting

Orlando has brought together a number of sublimely heartwrenching texts by Francophone women writers with thematic aplomb, if you will. The theme of madness and alienation stretch across what would appear to be dissimiliar works, particular in their own cultural milieus yet united in their \"Frenchness\"—a source of the women writers' psychological angst.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "22": { "wears.id": 22, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 22, "wears.title": "Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women's Writing", "wears.author": "Kenneth W. Harrow", "wears.author_bio": "

Kenneth W. Harrow (Ph.D., New York University) is a professor of English at Michigan State University and is past president of the African Literature Association. He has co-edited Crisscrossing the Boundaries of African Literature, and has published widely on African literature and film.

", "wears.authors": "Kenneth W. Harrow", "wears.title_slug": "less-than-one-and-double", "wears.author_slug": "kenneth-w-harrow", "wears.isbn13": 9780325070254, "wears.isbn10": 325070253, "wears.price": "$116.43", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Heinemann", "wears.pubdate": "November 2001", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, General & Miscellaneous African Literature - Literary Criticism, Women Authors - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 384, "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "Harrow's provocative book introduces a psychoanalytic dimension to the study of African women's writing. In so doing, he opens up relatively uncharted terrain in African literary studies.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Harrow's provocative book introduces a psychoanalytic dimension to the study of African women's writing. In so doing, he opens up relatively uncharted terrain in African literary studies. Comprehensive, nuanced, occasionally lyrical, the book covers an impressive range of hitherto neglected francophone novels that are examined alongside canonical anglophone texts. The author places these texts in their colonial and postcolonial contexts, developing upon, and linking, structuralist theories of colonialism and patriarchy. This study offers a radical new position for those scholars who have long sought alternatives to the liberal humanist bias pervading many studies of African women's writing.

Students often struggle with the models employed by feminist and postcolonial theorists such as Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha. The clarity with which Harrow explains the positions of such theorists makes his book an essential companion to, and commentary upon, their publications. Kenneth Harrow's study will be of interest not only to African literature specialists, but also to non-literary scholars concerned with questions about feminism, gender construction, colonialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial theory.

", "wears.toc": "

	Preface
	Introduction: Insider Writers/Outsider Theory
1	First Wave and Second Wave African Feminism: Butler and the Question of Gender	1
2	The Other (Side of the) Mirror	23
3	Jewish Abjection, African Abjection, and The Subject Presumed to Know: Kristeva and Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga	43
4	Standing Like a Tower: Plagiarism, Castration, and the Phallus in Le Petit Prince de Belleville	97
5	Less Than One and Double: Irigaray/Bhabha, Nervous Conditions/Asseze l'Africaine	157
6	Division, Disunity, Disturbance, and Difference: Safi Faye's Mossane and the Challenge of Postmodern Feminism	247
7	City of Mud and Diamonds, City of Dis: Tanella Boni, Veronique Tadjo - A Feminism of the Cities	277
	Conclusion: Rebuilding Dis: Words of a Second Wave	331
	Bibliography	335
	Index	343

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "23": { "wears.id": 23, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 23, "wears.title": "The Rienner Anthology of African Literature", "wears.author": "Anthonia C. Kalu", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Anthonia C. Kalu", "wears.title_slug": "the-rienner-anthology-of-african-literature", "wears.author_slug": "anthonia-c-kalu", "wears.isbn13": 9781588264916, "wears.isbn10": 1588264912, "wears.price": "$30.39", "wears.format": "Library Binding", "wears.publisher": "Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "April 2007", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 900, "wears.dimensions": "6.30 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.90 (d)", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "24": { "wears.id": 24, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 24, "wears.title": "Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures", "wears.author": "Toyin Falola", "wears.author_bio": "

Toyin Falola is the Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor in History at the University of Texas at Austin as well as a University Distinguished Teaching Professor. Fallou Ngom is the Director of the African Language Program at Boston University's African Studies Center.

", "wears.authors": "Toyin Falola, Fallou Ngom", "wears.title_slug": "oral-and-written-expressions-of-african-cultures", "wears.author_slug": "toyin-falola", "wears.isbn13": 9781594606472, "wears.isbn10": 1594606471, "wears.price": "$26.88", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Carolina Academic Press", "wears.pubdate": "March 2009", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Africa - Anthropology & Sociology, Oral Tradition & Storytelling, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 264, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 0.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures challenges the traditional view of exotic and atavistic Africa with a balanced examination of the continent's realities and challenges. It shows how oral and written expressions capture the complexity, concerns, dynamism, challenges and ingenuity of African masses. It brings together twelve scholars from different academic backgrounds who draw from the rich repertoire of music, poetry, literature and the media in the continent to unearth the underlying socio-cultural, economic and political factors that shape African societies in the twenty first century. These scholars discuss issues ranging from political manipulations of popular music in Kenya and Argentina, the role of print media in the democratization process in Nigeria, motivations of \"vulgar poetry\" in South Africa, contemporary gender issues in the Islamic Republic of Sudan, the perseverance of aspects of African cultures in Puerto Rico, misrepresentations of Africa in Rene Maran's Batouala, the function of \"lowbrow fiction\" in Apartheid South Africa, female African authors' techniques to counter male dominance, to HIV/AID and the cultural taboos associated with the disease in southern Africa, among others.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures challenges the traditional view of exotic and atavistic Africa with a balanced examination of the continent's realities and challenges. It shows how oral and written expressions capture the complexity, concerns, dynamism, challenges and ingenuity of African masses. It brings together twelve scholars from different academic backgrounds who draw from the rich repertoire of music, poetry, literature and the media in the continent to unearth the underlying socio-cultural, economic and political factors that shape African societies in the twenty first century. These scholars discuss issues ranging from political manipulations of popular music in Kenya and Argentina, the role of print media in the democratization process in Nigeria, motivations of "vulgar poetry" in South Africa, contemporary gender issues in the Islamic Republic of Sudan, the perseverance of aspects of African cultures in Puerto Rico, misrepresentations of Africa in Rene Maran's Batouala, the function of "lowbrow fiction" in Apartheid South Africa, female African authors' techniques to counter male dominance, to HIV/AID and the cultural taboos associated with the disease in southern Africa, among others.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "25": { "wears.id": 25, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 25, "wears.title": "Jambula Tree and other stories: The Caine Prize for African Writing 8th Annual Collection", "wears.author": "Monica Arac de Nyeko", "wears.author_bio": "

Caine Prize Judges award the Caine Prize to a work (or a short story) by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. The 2008 judges included Jude Kelly, the artistic director of the Southbank Centre; Mark McMorris, a Jamaican poet and a professor of English; Hisham Matar, the Libyan author of In the Country of Men; Hannah Pool, an Eritrean-born journalist for the Guardian; and Jonty Driver, a South African poet, novelist, and lecturer.

", "wears.authors": "Monica Arac de Nyeko", "wears.title_slug": "jambula-tree-and-other-stories", "wears.author_slug": "monica-arac-de-nyeko", "wears.isbn13": 9781904456735, "wears.isbn10": 1904456731, "wears.price": "$16.18", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "New Internationalist", "wears.pubdate": "July 2008", "wears.edition": 8, "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, African Fiction, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 214, "wears.dimensions": "5.80 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The Caine Prize for African Writing is Africa’s leading literary prize and is awarded to a short story by an African writer published in English, whether in Africa or elsewhere. Each year, the full shortlist and twelve other stories are collected and published in one volume.

This year’s winner is Monica Arac de Nyeko for Jambula Tree, described as “a witty and touching portrait of a community which is affected forever by a love which blossoms between two adolescents.”

Previous winners and entrants include Segun Afolabi, Leila Aboulela, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Brian Chikwava, Mary Watson, and Binyavanga Wainaina.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The best in new African writing—winner and shortlisted stories from the continent's leading award.

", "wears.toc": "

Caine Prize Stories 2007: Winner and Shortlist

Jambula Tree (Winner) Monica Arac de Nyeko de Nyeko, Monica Arac

My Parents' Bedroom Uwem Akpan Akpan, Uwem

Jimmy Carter's Eyes E. C. Osondu Osondu, E. C.

Bad Places Henrietta Rose-Innes Rose-Innes, Henrietta

Night Bus Ada Udechukwu Udechukwu, Ada

Celtel Caine Prize African Writers' Workshop Stories 2008, (in alphabetical order, by author)

Night Commuter Monica Arac de Nyeko de Nyeko, Monica Arac

Lost Ellen Banda-Aaku Banda-Aaku, Ellen

Where You Came From Karen Hurt Hurt, Karen

The Cost Kingwa Kamencu Kamencu, Kingwa

Valley of Voices Russell H. Kaschula Kaschula, Russell H.

Mrs Siro's Harvest Jacqueline Lebo Lebo, Jacqueline

First Time Kgaogelo Lekota Lekota, Kgaogelo

The Lost Boy Wam Kaume Marambii Marambii, Kaume

Love is like Botswana Rain e Molefhe Molefhe, e

The Boulder Henrietta Rose-Innes Rose-Innes, Henrietta

Digitalis Lust Olufemi Terry Terry, Olufemi

Harmattan Fires Ada Udechukwu Udechukwu, Ada

Caine Prize Stories 2008: Shortlist (in alphabetical order, by author)

Mallam Sile Mohammed Naseehu Ali Ali, Mohammed Naseehu

For Honour Stanley Onjezani Kenani Kenani, Stanley Onjezani

Poison Henrietta Rose-Innes Rose-Innes, Henrietta

The Day of the Surgical Colloquium Hosted by the Far East Rand Hospital Gill Schierhout Schierhout, Gill

Cemetery of Life Uzor Maxim Uzoatu Uzoatu, Uzor Maxim", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "26": { "wears.id": 26, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 26, "wears.title": "Up the Down Escalator", "wears.author": "Linda Rode", "wears.author_bio": "

LINDA RODE was born in Ladismith, Western Cape. She studied at Stellenbosch University, where she obtained an Honours degree in German and a Teacher's Diploma. She taught school in Calvinia, in Hermannsburg, at the Pionierskool in Worcester (school for the blind) and at Herzlia in Cape Town and works as a free-lance translator for publishers. Linda is married to Erwin Rode. They live in Bellville and have two children.

", "wears.authors": "Linda Rode, Hans Bodenstein", "wears.title_slug": "up-the-down-escalator", "wears.author_slug": "linda-rode", "wears.isbn13": 9780795701061, "wears.isbn10": 795701063, "wears.price": "$10.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "NB Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "March 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections, African", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The third and final book in Kwela's Young African Writing seriers. It offers an open-eyed view of reality as currently experienced by young people. Without sparing the reader, they raise their views on the rapidly changing social, moral and political fabric of this country.

It is an 'open book' for every young person and interested adult; a journey through the fantasies and perspectives of young South Africans at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "27": { "wears.id": 27, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 27, "wears.title": "Basali!: Stories by and about Women in Lesotho", "wears.author": "K. Limakatso Kendall", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "K. Limakatso Kendall", "wears.title_slug": "basali", "wears.author_slug": "k-limakatso-kendall", "wears.isbn13": 9780869809181, "wears.isbn10": 869809180, "wears.price": "$24.44", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "University of Natal Press", "wears.pubdate": "February 1995", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Anthologies, Southern African History", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 136, "wears.dimensions": "5.70 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.40 (d)", "wears.overview": "Basali! means 'women' and is one of the most common exclamations in the Sesotho language. Usually uttered by a woman and delivered with a laugh, a shaking of the head, or a clapping of hands, Basali! evokes Basotho women's admiration and wonderment for themselves and each other. These stories in 'Sesotho-ised' English reveal a way of life and a way of perceiving experience that is unique in African literature. The stories offer glimpses of traditional healers, circumcision schools, witches, bride-prices, and extended rural family life. There are families disrupted by migrant labour, women and men brutalised by apartheid, teenagers who violate tradition, and middle-class office-workers whose rural families live by a different click than the one that ticks for them. The focus of each story is the decisions women make, the actions they take to protect and to provide for themselves and their children, and to care for the people they love.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Basali! means 'women' and is one of the most common exclamations in the Sesotho language. Usually uttered by a woman and delivered with a laugh, a shaking of the head, or a clapping of hands, Basali! evokes Basotho women's admiration and wonderment for themselves and each other. These stories in 'Sesotho-ised' English reveal a way of life and a way of perceiving experience that is unique in African literature. The stories offer glimpses of traditional healers, circumcision schools, witches, bride-prices, and extended rural family life. There are families disrupted by migrant labour, women and men brutalised by apartheid, teenagers who violate tradition, and middle-class office-workers whose rural families live by a different click than the one that ticks for them. The focus of each story is the decisions women make, the actions they take to protect and to provide for themselves and their children, and to care for the people they love.

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgements
	Introduction
	Three Moments in a Marriage	1
	An Unexpected Daughter	17
	The Lost Sheep is Found	24
	Give Me a Chance	31
	Arriving Home in a Helicopter	39
	How She Lost Her Eye	51
	A Letter to 'M'e	61
	Catastrophe	64
	The Decision to Remain	70
	The Universe	77
	Why Blame Her?	79
	The African Goddess: The Figure in My Past	86
	What about the Lobola?	92
	Escape to Manzini	99
	Ask Him to Explain	104
	How I Became an Activist	109
	Basali! A Photographic Essay	119
	Glossary	128
	Contributors	131

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "28": { "wears.id": 28, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 28, "wears.title": "How God Fix Jonah", "wears.author": "Lorenz Graham", "wears.author_bio": "

Lorenz Graham (1902-1989) was a pioneer in African American literature. His books include South Town, North Town, and Whose Town?, a trilogy of novels that were among the first to provide an honest portrayal of the lives of African Americans.

Ashley Bryan is the illustrator of more than thirty titles, many of them with texts he also wrote, retold, or selected. His books have been richly acclaimed and highly honored. Beat the Story Drum, Pum-Pum won the Coretta Scott King Award, and four more of his titles have been selected Coretta Scott King Honor Books. Mr. Bryan lives on a small island off the coast of Maine.

", "wears.authors": "Lorenz Graham, Ashley Bryan (Illustrator), Effie Lee Morris", "wears.title_slug": "how-god-fix-jonah", "wears.author_slug": "lorenz-graham", "wears.isbn13": 9781563976988, "wears.isbn10": 1563976986, "wears.price": "$16.15", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Boyds Mills Press", "wears.pubdate": "October 2000", "wears.edition": "1ST, REVISED", "wears.subjects": "Bible - Stories, African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 160, "wears.dimensions": "7.33 (w) x 10.32 (h) x 0.67 (d)", "wears.overview": "

\"Utterly delightful\" is how Zora Neal Hurston described this classic book when it was first published in 1946. Long out of print, Lorenz Graham's beautiful collection of Bible stories, told in the idiom of West Africa, is available again in an expanded edition newly illustrated by Ashley Bryan.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

\"Utterly delightful\" is how Zora Neal Hurston described this book when it was first published in 1946. Long out of print, Lorenz Graham's beautiful collection of Bible stories, told in the idiom of West Africa, is available again in an expanded edition newly illustrated by Ashley Bryan. This revised edition includes a foreword by Effie Lee Morris, along with the original foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois. Together they provide an appreciation of the work of Lorenz Graham and his classic book.

(Booklist) - Hazel Rochman

The son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister in California, Graham taught in a missionary school in Liberia in the 1920s. He wrote this collection of biblical story-poems, which he published in 1946, in the voices of West African teachers and students. Now the collection has been reissued in a handsome volume with dramatic, new, full-page block prints by Ashley Bryan. The stories, great for reading aloud, have the simplicity and rhythm of the oral tradition. Both colloquial and poetic, they bring the holy into daily life. There's Noah (\"God Wash the World and Start Again\"), Solomon (\"Wise Sword Find True Mommy\"), Ruth, Samson, and many others. There are also a few selections from the New Testament, among them, \"Make glad all people / God's pican be born in Bethlehem.\" The word pican, with its racist associations to picaninny, may be a problem with some readers, but as Graham explains in his introduction, the original word, meaning baby, son, or child, was used with great tenderness up and down the West African coast. It would be a shame to deprive today's children of this newly illustrated collection, endorsed by leading black authors, educators, and political leaders, because of the occasional use of this word. Most beautiful is the story of the Prodigal Son, told with a dramatic simplicity that's just right for readers' theater: the wastrel son's return and celebration, the good son's complaint to his father (\"I work, I work, I work, I never left you. All the time you never kill one small goat for me. How you do me so?\"), and the moving reply (\"He was dead and now he live. He ain't got nothin. And he hungry\"). A book to share across generations.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Hazel Rochman

\n\n

Children's Literature

These poems, first published in 1946, are at times profound or humorous, but each reflects the uncomplicated view of an African child recounting the Biblical stories in his own way. As Graham presents the poems, the reader (or better the listener) is aware of the importance of the oral tradition in the West African culture. Graham, a missionary to West Africa in the 1920s, heard the stories and wanted others to share them. In this newly published edition, Ashley Bryan adds detailed black-and-white blockprints to offer visual images to accompany the text. Each story is accompanied by one full-page print. Because of the dialect used by Graham, these stories lend themselves to being read aloud or told. One might question the use of dialect, but Graham's introduction presents the origin of the dialect and offers the proper argument for its use. This new edition would be a worthy addition to a body of African literature. 2000 (orig. 1946), Boyds Mills Press, Ages 5 to 8, $17.95. Reviewer: Jenny B. Petty\n\n

School Library Journal

Gr 4 Up-A newly illustrated edition of a 1946 title. Using the vernacular English of West Africa in the 1920s, Graham eschewed \"Uncle Remus\" phonetic spelling, but preserved the idiomatic and idiosyncratic grammar of Sudanic coastal groups (Mandingo, Golah, Kru). Excerpts may sound awkward (\"Now you mens they dead,\" Naomi tells Ruth), but the ear catches on quickly to the meaning of the phrases sung in poetic rhythms. Biblical order is not followed, so the Prodigal Son appears between two Moses episodes, rather than as a Christian parable; only brief accounts of the Nativity, the lost boy-Jesus, and the loaves and fishes come from the New Testament. All of the stories focus on relationships. There is unexpected humor (Goliath's question to David, \"Do you mommy know you out?), drama (Goliath's protracted fall), and poignancy (David's mourning). Solomon's wisdom; Joshua's leadership; and the stories of Joseph, Esther, Job, Elisha, and Cain and Abel are among those memorably retold. Bryan's blockprints communicate a simplicity and strength in harmony with the text. Highly decorative in their intricate design, they also recognize the central character and dramatic moment in each story: Daniel embracing the lions, Isaac embracing Jacob. This book conveys a distinctive flavor of West African culture, and offers fresh, piquant seasoning for familiar Bible tales.-Patricia Lothrop-Green, St. George's School, Newport, RI Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "29": { "wears.id": 29, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 29, "wears.title": "Glass Jars among Trees", "wears.author": "Arja Salafranca", "wears.author_bio": "

Arja Salafranca was born in Spain to a Spanish father and a South African mother. She has lived in South Africa since the age of five. In 1993 she earned a degree in African Literature and Psychology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her fiction and poetry has been published in a number of local and international journals and anthologies. A Life Stripped of Illusions, her first poetry collection, won the 1994 Sanlam Award for poetry, while her short story, 'Couple on the Beach' won the same award in 1999 for short fiction. Her second collection of poetry, The Fire in Which We Burn, was published in 2000. Arja has worked as a journalist and sub-editor for various newspapers.

Alan Finlay was born in Johannesburg and earned his BA in Philosophy and English at Rhodes University. From 1994 to 1999 he published the literary magazine Bleksem, and later founded the online literary magazine Donga (www.donga.co.za). His own published collections of poetry include: Burning Aloes (Dye Hard Press, 1994); No Free Sleeping (with Donald Parenzee and Vonani Bila; Botsotso Publishers, 1998); and The Red Laughter Of Guns In Green Summer Rain (chainpoems with Phillip Zhuwao; Dye Hard Press, 2002). Alan works in social and media research and lives in Johannesburg with his wife and two sons.

", "wears.authors": "Arja Salafranca (Editor), Alan Finlay", "wears.title_slug": "glass-jars-among-trees", "wears.author_slug": "arja-salafranca", "wears.isbn13": 9781919931234, "wears.isbn10": 1919931236, "wears.price": "$44.59", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Jacana Media", "wears.pubdate": "April 2005", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 188, "wears.dimensions": "7.75 (w) x 5.00 (h) x 0.47 (d)", "wears.overview": "This genre-shattering anthology includes writings in a variety of styles by pensioners, prisoners, schoolchildren, drifting teenagers, praise-singers, and even a few poets.
", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This genre-shattering anthology includes writings in a variety of styles by pensioners, prisoners, schoolchildren, drifting teenagers, praise-singers, and even a few poets.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "30": { "wears.id": 30, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 30, "wears.title": "Running Towards Us: New Writing from South Africa", "wears.author": "Isabel Balseiro", "wears.author_bio": "

ISABEL BALSEIRO is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvey Mudd College, The Claremont Colleges, in California. Her work has been published in journals in the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa. She is currently editing an anthology on South African cinema and a book on Caribbean literature and culture.

", "wears.authors": "Isabel Balseiro (Editor), Isabel Balseiro", "wears.title_slug": "running-towards-us", "wears.author_slug": "isabel-balseiro", "wears.isbn13": 9780325002118, "wears.isbn10": 325002118, "wears.price": "$33.63", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Heinemann", "wears.pubdate": "May 2000", "wears.edition": "1st Edition", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 216, "wears.dimensions": "5.90 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "In Running Towards Us, 31 contemporary authors offer literary responses to the end of apartheid, demonstrating what the creative imagination in South Africa has to offer at the turn of the 21st century.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

In Running Towards Us, 31 contemporary authors offer literary responses to the end of apartheid, demonstrating what the creative imagination in South Africa has to offer at the turn of the 21st century.

Internet Book Watch

Running Towards Us presents new writings from South Africa from both established and new writers, revealing new subjects and concerns from writers who are now beyond the focus on apartheid. How does one define history and plan for the future? This turns to accepted masters of South African literature and new voices to consider changed themes and perceptions.

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction
Running towards Us, Jeremy Cronin
Marilyn's Dress, Graeme Friedman
Memory, Chris van Wyk
The Women Sing, Luvuyo Mkangelwa
I'm retelling a womanburning, Roshila Nair
Spiral Child, Louise Green
Homeland Banter, Pumla Dineo Gqola
The Awakening of Katie Fortuin, Finuala Dowling
The Puddle, Immanuel Suttner
Mind-Reader, Maureen Isaacson
moni, Seitlhamo Motsapi
At the Commission, Ingrid de Kok
Mending, Ingrid de Kok
TRC Stories: It Gets under the Skin, Heidi Grunebaum-Ralph
Truth Commission, Joan Metelerkamp
The Devil, Achmat Dangor
Emotions and the Delegates, Jonathan Grossman
What's in a Name, Bernadette Muthien
Je To Mozny, Edward Lurie
The Day of the Boycott, Felicity Wood
The WHITES ONLY Bench, Ivan Vladislavic
land, Antjie Krog
Recognition, David Medalie
Excerpt from \"Freedom Lament and Song\", Mongane Wally Serote
Fragments from the Life of Norman Rubarto Paul Mason
This Carting Life, Rustum Kozain
The Naked Song, Mandla Langa
Telegraph to the Sky, Sandile Dikeni
Rituals for Martha, Zachariah Rapola
Habari Gani Africa Ranting, Lesego Rampolokeng
Tiresias in the City of Heroes, Karen Press
Eternity is a Hell of a Thing to Waste, Natasha Distiller
Glossary", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From The Critics

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "31": { "wears.id": 31, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 31, "wears.title": "Of Suffocated Hearts And Tortured Souls", "wears.author": "Valerie Key Orlando", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Valerie Key Orlando", "wears.title_slug": "of-suffocated-hearts-and-tortured-souls", "wears.author_slug": "valerie-key-orlando", "wears.isbn13": 9780739105634, "wears.isbn10": 739105639, "wears.price": "$27.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Lexington Books", "wears.pubdate": "December 2002", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Social Sciences, Women's Studies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: Writing New H(er)stories for Francophone Women of Africa and the Caribbean	1
1	The Politics of Race and Patriarchy in Suzanne Lacascade's Claire-Solange, ame africaine	37
2	Home Is Where I Eat My Bread: Multiculturality and Becoming Multiple in Leila Hoauri's Zeida de nulle part	51
3	Self-Loathing, Self-Sacrifice: Michele Lacrosil's Cajou and Myriam Warner-Vieyria's Juletane	73
4	Out(in)side the Confinement of Cultures: Marie Chauvet's Amour, Colere, et Folie and Mariama Ba's Un Chant ecarlate	97
5	Rooms and Prisons, Sex and Sin: Places of Sequestration in Nina Bouraoui's La Voyeuse Interdite and Calixthe Beyala's Tu t'appelleras Tanga	125
6	War, Revolution, and Family Matters: Yamina Mechakra's La Grotte eclatee and Hajer Djilani's Et Pourtant le ciel etait bleu	147
7	Feminine Voices and H(er)stories: Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle and Aminata Sow Fall's Douceurs du bercail	165
	Epilogue: Transgressing Boundaries, Reconstructing Stories	181
	Bibliography	187
	Index	193

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "32": { "wears.id": 32, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 32, "wears.title": "An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New", "wears.author": "Werner Sollors", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Werner Sollors (Editor), Werner Sollors", "wears.title_slug": "an-anthology-of-interracial-literature", "wears.author_slug": "werner-sollors", "wears.isbn13": 9780814781449, "wears.isbn10": 814781446, "wears.price": "", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "New York University Press", "wears.pubdate": "February 2004", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism, American", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Library Journal

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	\"Riddle\" (5th century B.C.)	7
2	From Parzival (1197-1210)	8
3	From The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night	57
4	From Il Novellino (1475)	69
5	From Hecatommithi (1565)	85
6	\"The Beautiful Slave-Girl\" (1614)	97
7	\"A Negress Courts Cestus, a Man of a Different Colour\" (1633)	99
8	\"A Faire Nimph Scorning a Black Boy Courting Her\" (1658)	101
9	\"The Inversion\" (1657), \"One Enamour'd on a Black-moor\" (1657), \"A Black Nymph Scorning a Fair Boy Courting Her\" (1657)	103
10	\"To Mrs. Diana Cecyll\" (1665), \"The Brown Beauty\" (1665), \"Sonnet of Black Beauty (1665), \"Another Sonnet to Black It Self\" (1665)	107
11	\"In Laudem Aethiopissae\" (1778)	110
12	The Isle of Pines (1668)	115
13	From Oroonoko: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1696)	132
14	\"On a Young Lady's Weeping at Oroonooko\" (1732), \"To a Gentleman in Love with a Negro Woman\" (1732)	143
15	Two Versions of the Story of Inkle and Yarico	145
16	The Dying Negro (1773)	152
17	Letter to James Tobin (1788)	161
18	The Engagement in Santo Domingo (1811)	167
19	Ourika (1823)	189
20	The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827-1828)	208
21	\"The Quadroons\" (1842)	232
22	From Georges (1843)	240
23	From Beyond the Seas (1863-1864)	253
24	\"The Quadroom Girl\" (1842)	278
25	\"The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point\" (1848)	280
26	\"The Pilot's Story\" (1860)	288
27	From Mulatto: An Original Romantic Drama in Five Acts (1840)	292
28	The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana: A Play in Five Acts (1859)	300
29	From Black and White: A Drama in Three Acts (1869)	337
30	From Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro (1863)	350
31	Madame Delphine (1881)	383
32	From \"The Pariah\" (1895)	421
33	\"Boitelle\" (1889)	424
34	\"The Father of Desiree's Baby\" (1893)	431
35	\"Uncle Wellington's Wives\" (1899)	436
36	\"The Mulatto to His Critics\" (1918)	461
37	\"The Octoroon\" (1922), \"Cosmopolite\" (1922), \"The Riddle\" (1925)	462
38	From The Vengeance of the Gods (1922)	464
39	\"Hope\" (1922)	473
40	\"Withered Skin of Berries\" (1923)	476
41	\"Confession\" (1929)	498
42	All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924)	504
43	\"Near White\" (1925), \"Two Who Crossed a Line\" (1925)	530
44	\"Cross\" (1925), \"Mulatto\" (1927), Mulatto: A Tragedy of the Deep South (1935)	532
45	\"The Mulatto\" (1925), \"Near-White\" (1932)	559
46	\"The Pink Hat\" (1926)	573
47	\"Ballad of Pearl May Lee\" (1945)	577
48	The Owl Answers (1963)	583
49	From Oxherding Tale (1982)	594
50	From The Darker Face of the Earth (1994)	606
51	From Buck (2001)	634
52	From The Secret Life of Fred Astaire (2001)	653
	Sources	667
	Index	673
	About the Editor	675

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "33": { "wears.id": 33, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 33, "wears.title": "Among the Blacks", "wears.author": "Ron Padgett", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Ron Padgett, Raymond Roussel", "wears.title_slug": "among-the-blacks", "wears.author_slug": "ron-padgett", "wears.isbn13": 9780939691029, "wears.isbn10": 939691027, "wears.price": "$14.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Avenue B", "wears.pubdate": "October 1988", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "African Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 64, "wears.dimensions": "5.30 (w) x 7.80 (h) x 0.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "
\nFiction. African American Studies. Translated from the French. AMONG THE BLACKS consists of two works: Ron Padgett's translation of Raymond Roussel's early story \"Parmi les noirs,\" first published in 1935 in his book Comment j'ai ecrit certain de mes livres, together with Padgett's memoir focusing upon his own experience among black people. Roussel's story, about a master mariner named White who encounters an African chief named Booltable, is built upon the kind of whimsical and extravagant word play (its first and last sentences are identical except for one letter in one word--\"pooltable\"/ \"Booltable\") for which Roussel was idolized by the French Surrealists. In contrast, as he writes in his Afterword, Padgett's memoir \"grew out of the nagging need to come to grips with the frustrations of being a white American who had grown up in a racist environment and who, despite his rejections of racism at an early age, had rarely felt unselfconscious in the company of a black person.\" \"What he leaves us with is a work that is like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which has disappeared without a trace, or a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered. But even though we may never be able to 'use' [Roussel's] work in the way he hoped, we can still admire its inhuman beauty, and be stirred by a language that seems always on the point of revealing its secret, of pointing the way back to the 'republic of dreams' whose insignia blazed on his forehead\"--John Ashbery.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "34": { "wears.id": 34, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 34, "wears.title": "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race", "wears.author": "Jon Stewart", "wears.author_bio": "

Jon Stewart was born in New York and lives with his wife and children in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "Jon Stewart", "wears.title_slug": "the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-presents-earth", "wears.author_slug": "jon-stewart", "wears.isbn13": 9780446579223, "wears.isbn10": "044657922X", "wears.price": "$1.99", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Grand Central Publishing", "wears.pubdate": "September 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Humor", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 244, "wears.dimensions": "8.40 (w) x 10.30 (h) x 0.90 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The eagerly awaited new book from the Emmy-winning, Oscar-hosting, Daily Show-anchoring Jon Stewart—the man behind the megaseller America (The Book).

Where do we come from? Who created us? Why are we here? These questions have puzzled us since the dawn of time, but when it became apparent to Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show that the world was about to end, they embarked on a massive mission to write a book that summed up the human race: What we looked like; what we accomplished; our achievements in society, government, religion, science and culture — all in a tome of approximately 256 pages with lots of color photos, graphs and charts.

After two weeks of hard work, they had their book. EARTH (The Book) is the definitive guide to our species. With their trademark wit, irreverence, and intelligence, Stewart and his team will posthumously answer all of life's most hard-hitting questions, completely unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity, or even accuracy.

Also available as an ebook and as an audiobook.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The eagerly awaited new book from the Emmy-winning, Oscar-hosting, Daily Show-anchoring Jon Stewart—the man behind the megaseller America (The Book).

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Like the \"Daily Show\" this parody delivers wittily framed absurdities in a sweetly deadpan way…like the show, [it's] best when it takes on subjects of real substance…That's why the funniest material is about religion and science.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. \n

Eight-time Emmy-winner Stewart (America: The Book) seeks to expand his audience to aliens who might land on earth after the extinction of the human race and be puzzled over the artifacts we've left behind. \"Greetings... on behalf of not only ourselves, but the entire Viacom family,\" he writes in this laugh-out-loud, rollicking social satire. In place of skits there are elaborate, color illustrations accompanied by captions written with his trademark deadpan humor; for instance, a photo of a mother and baby-elephant holds the caption, \"advances in contraception and industrialized food production allowed modern couples to have fewer offspring, while leaving the total weight of families constant.\" Nothing is off-limits here, not even Benjamin Franklin, whose pithy saying \"Nothing is certain but death and taxes\" Stewart expands upon. The book ends with a plea to the aliens to reconstruct the human race from DNA in the hope that, with guidance from the visitors, \"we could overcome the baser aspects of our nature... and give this planet the kind of caretakers it deserves,\" revealing the tears behind Stewart's clown. Photos.
\nCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

\n\n\n

\n\n

E.W.com

Has it really been a full six years since Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show released their last book? Well, the delay's understandable. It's a daunting task to cover the history of a 4.5 billion-year-old planet (including the entirety of human existence) in 244 pages.\n

You'll recognize Earth's faux-textbook design and irreverent tone from America (The Book), and some gags recur nearly unchanged — the terrifyingly nude bodies of the Supreme Court justices are replaced here with the terrifyingly nude body of Larry King. But the subject's bigger, and the high concept higher. Earth is written as a Baedeker for the aliens who will eventually discover our planet after our species has expired, likely by our own hand. All the entries, hitting topics like love (''liking another person very very very very very very much'') and work (''that which we didn't want to do, but had to, if we didn't want to eat dirt''), are written in the past tense. It's the ultimate gallows humor: We had it pretty good, and now we're all dead.

Earth is The Devil's Dictionary for a new generation, twisting our lives in the light and bringing mordant humor to the commonplace. Despite the timelessness of most topics, the writers manage to be pretty lively at times, such as when they refer to the Grand Canyon as ''the biggest rift in Arizona not involving Mexicans.''

Earth isn't meant to be read straight through. It's designed to be perused, so you can discover at your leisure all the fun gags and wordplay crammed into its nooks and crannies. Because there are a lot. Enough, in fact, to make you believe this would actually be a fairly comprehensive guide for extraterrestrial visitors, just so long as they have a sense of humor. A–--(Staskiewicz, Keith)

\n\n\n

Library Journal

Following the 2004 Publishers Weekly Book of the Year America (The Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction—the Hachette Audio version of which won a Grammy Award—Stewart and the writers of his celebrated Daily Show together narrate this satirical overview of humanity written as though it were being explained to aliens of the future who discover Earth after the demise of all human life. Stewart, the primary narrator, explains religion, history, commerce, government, customs, and society in his trademark delivery. Unfortunately, he often swallows his punch lines, thus defeating the efficacy of many of the jokes. Perhaps his brand of humor is better suited to television. Nonetheless, this is a timely and entertaining title sure to do well among Stewart's many fans, who will doubtless laugh along. Recommended. [The Grand Central hc was a No. 1 New York Times and LJ best seller; see the review of the Grand Central hc, also in this issue, p. 122.—Ed.]—J. Sara Paulk, Wythe-Grayson Regional Lib., Independence, VA\n\n

\n\n

Kirkus Reviews

A goofy guide to our planet, with literate ironist Stewart (America: The Book, 2004) at the helm.

Continuing in the vein ofAmerica, but with a touch more detail in both words and images, Stewart and hisDaily Showcomrades posit that someday soon the ETs we've been hailing for all these decades will arrive—only to find us gone. And why would we not be here? Well, Stewart relegates the possible answers to an appendix that opens, \"At some point between the time this was written and the time you are reading it, we perished.\" Some of those possibilities include ecological catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, disease, robot rebellion and rapture—the last with a generous 30:1 chance of occurring, and evidenced by an \"overall 'Jesus-y' feeling in the air.\" To gauge by the rest of the book, however, the end may well come by dint of our soufflé-like culture's having finally become too airy and collapsed. So it is thatEarthis studded with images of all those pop-culture and media figures that one would gladly leave the planet to escape, from Bernie Madoff to Nicole Kidman and J-Lo (or, if not J-Lo, a convincing simulacrum). Stewart lampoons with a broad brush rather than the scalpel with which he dissects pomposity and prevarication on his Comedy Central show. Some of his targets include creationists and school boards, fast-food restaurants, obesity, the medical bureaucracy, the Venus of Willendorf and, not connected to the aforementioned Venus, the use of the brassiere as an instrument of social control. George Bush doesn't escape, of course; but then, neither does Florence Henderson.

The legions of readers ofAmerica will know exactly what they're in for—and readers of whatever stripe, save those who are fans of McDonald's and Satan, are likely to enjoy this one.

\n\n\n

\n\n

Janet Maslin

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "35": { "wears.id": 35, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 35, "wears.title": "The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010", "wears.author": "Dave Eggers", "wears.author_bio": "

Dave Eggers is the editor of McSweeney's and a cofounder of 826 National, a network of nonprofit writing and tutoring centers for youth, located in seven cities across the United States. He is the author of four books, including What Is the What and How We Are Hungry.

David Sedaris is the author of six books, including When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and Public Radio International's This American Life.

", "wears.authors": "Dave Eggers (Editor), David Sedaris", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-nonrequired-reading-2010", "wears.author_slug": "dave-eggers", "wears.isbn13": 9780547241630, "wears.isbn10": 547241631, "wears.price": "$11.17", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "October 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies, Fiction Subjects", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 484, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "

An eclectic volume introduced by David Sedaris and compiled by Dave Eggers and students of his San Francisco writing center, who don’t leave a stone unturned in their search for nonrequired gems. Cover art by art by Maurice Sendak.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

An eclectic volume introduced by David Sedaris and compiled by Dave Eggers and students of his San Francisco writing center, who don’t leave a stone unturned in their search for nonrequired gems.

Cover art by art by Maurice Sendak.

Publishers Weekly

David Sedaris's unflappable inventiveness translates, in the first section of this anthology, to a smattering of pieces with giddiness, daring, and heart. A particular highlight, by Wendy Molyneux, earned his award for \"Best American Woman Comedy Piece Written by a Woman\" and is guaranteed to set off snorts of delight with each re-read. In the second section, as in previous years, Eggers's picks prove solid and balanced, if expected. Rana Dasgupta's superb article, exploring India's new wealth and subsequent fallout, as well as David Rhode's profound and gripping account of his seven months as a Taliban hostage reflect not only the literary achievements of 2009, but also the horrors and complexities of these current times on. Meanwhile, Tea Obreht's \"The Tiger's Wife\" and Kurt Vonnegut's \"The Nice Little People\" embody the ageless miracles of surprise and originality that comprise the human imagination. (Oct.)

", "wears.toc": "

Editor's Note xi

Introduction David Sedaris xv

Best American Woman Comedy Piece Written by a Woman: From therumpus.net Wendy Molyneux 3

Best American Sentences on Page 50 of Books Published in 2009 5

Best American Magazine Letters Section: From Newsweek Stephen Colbert 8

Best American Fast-Food-Related Crimes 10

Best American Gun Magazine Headlines 11

Best American Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: From Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak 13

Best American New Patents: From United States Patent and Trademark Office 14

Best American Tweets: From twitter.com 16

Best American Letter to the Editor: From Bidoun 17

Best American Overqualified Cover Letters: From Overqualified Joey Comeau 18

Best American Fictional Character Names 22

Best American 350-Word Story: From Orion Barry Lopez 23

Best American Farm Names 24

Best American First Lines of Poems Published in 2009 26

Best American Journal Article Titles Published in 2009 28

Best American Illustrated Missed Connections: From missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com Sophie Blackall 29

Best American New Band Names 37

Best American Lawsuits 38

Best American Poems Written in the Last Decade or So by Soldiers and Citizens in Iraq and Afghanistan 40

War Dances: From War Dances Sherman Alexie 49

Like I Was Jesus: From Harper's Magazine Rachel Aviv 75

Burying Jeremy Green: From Shenandoah Nora Bonner 95

The Carnival: From Mome Lilli Carré 104

Capital Gains: From Granta Rana Dasgupta 137

The Encirclement: From Granta Tamas Dobozy 165

Man of Steel: From Ninth Letter Bryan Furuness 180

Half Beat: From The Greensboro Review Elizabeth Gonzalez 198

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines: From San Francisco Panorama Andrew Sean Greer 213

Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier. The Photographer: From The Photographer, translated from French by Alexis Siegel Emmanuel Guibert 238

What, of this Goldfish, Would You Wish?: From Tin House, translated from Hebrew by Nathan Englander Etgar Keret 262

Fed to The Streets: From L.A. Weekly Courtney Moreno 268

The Tiger's Wife: From The New Yorker Téa Obreht 287

Breakdown: From Mome T. Ott 308

Ideas: From The Paris Review, translated from Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem Patricio Pron 316

Vanish: From Wired Evan Ratliff 323

Seven Months, Ten Days in Captivity: From New York Times David Rohde 345

Tent City, U. S. A.: From GQ George Saunders 395

The Nice Little People: From Zoetrope: All-Story Kurt Vonnegut 431

Freedom: From Boston Review Amy Waldman 439

Contributors' Notes 456

The Best American Nonrequired Reading Committee 463

Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2009 472

About 826 National 479

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "36": { "wears.id": 36, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 36, "wears.title": "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race", "wears.author": "Jon Stewart", "wears.author_bio": "

Jon Stewart was born in New York and lives with his wife and children in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "Jon Stewart", "wears.title_slug": "the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-presents-earth", "wears.author_slug": "jon-stewart", "wears.isbn13": 9781607886150, "wears.isbn10": 1607886154, "wears.price": "$24.98", "wears.format": "Compact Disc", "wears.publisher": "Hachette Audio", "wears.pubdate": "October 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The eagerly awaited new book from the Emmy-winning, Oscar-hosting, Daily Show-anchoring Jon Stewart—the man behind the megaseller America (The Book).

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "37": { "wears.id": 37, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 37, "wears.title": "100 Best-Loved Poems", "wears.author": "Philip Smith", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Philip Smith", "wears.title_slug": "100-best-loved-poems", "wears.author_slug": "philip-smith", "wears.isbn13": 9780486285535, "wears.isbn10": 486285537, "wears.price": "$1.80", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Dover Publications", "wears.pubdate": "May 1995", "wears.edition": "Special Value", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 96, "wears.dimensions": "5.22 (w) x 8.28 (h) x 0.28 (d)", "wears.overview": "Popular, well-known poetry: \"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,\" \"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?\" \"Death, be not proud,\" \"The Raven,\" \"The Road Not Taken,\" plus works by Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, Emerson, Browning, Keats, Kipling, Sandburg, Pound, Auden, Thomas, and many others. Includes 13 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

\"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,\" \"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?\" \"Death, be not proud,\" \"The Raven,\" \"The Road Not Taken,\" plus works by Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, many others.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "38": { "wears.id": 38, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 38, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Seventh Edition, One-Volume Paperback", "wears.author": "Wayne Franklin", "wears.author_bio": "

Nina Baym (General Editor), Ph.D. Harvard, is Swanlund Endowed Chair and Center for Advanced Study Professor Emerita of English, and Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is author of The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career; Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America; Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America; American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790-1860; and American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences. Some of her essays are collected in Feminism and American Literary History; she has also edited and introduced many reissues of work by earlier American women writers, from Judith Sargent Murray through Kate Chopin. In 2000 she received the MLA’s Hubbell medal for lifetime achievement in American literary studies.

Wayne Franklin, Ph.D. (University of Pittsburgh), is Professor and Head of English, University of Connecticut. He is the author of James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (the first volume of his definitive biography, from Yale University Press), The New World of James Fenimore Cooper, and Discoverers, Explorers, Settlers: The Diligent Writers of Early America. He is the editor of American Voices, American Lives: A Documentary Reader and co-editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and of, with Michael Steiner, Mapping American Culture.

Philip F. Gura (Editor, 1700-1820), Ph.D. Harvard, is William S. Newman Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture and Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of seven books, including The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance; A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620-1660; and Jonathan Edwards, America's Evangelical. For ten years he was editor of the journal Early American Literature. He is an elected member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts.

Jerome Klinkowitz (co-editor, American Literature since 1945), Ph.D. Wisconsin, is University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. He is the author or editor of over forty books in postwar culture and literature, among them, Structuring the Void: The Struggle for Subject in Contemporary American Fiction; Slaughterhouse Five: Reforming the Novel and the World; Literary Subversions: New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism; and The Practice of Fiction in America: Writers from Hawthorne to the Present.

Arnold Krupat (editor, Native American Literatures), Ph.D. Columbia, is Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author, among other books, of Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon, Red Matters, and most recently, All That Remains: Native Studies (2007). He is the editor of a number of anthologies, including Native American Autobiography: An Anthology and New Voices in Native American Literary Criticism. With Brian Swann, he edited Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, which won the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Award for best book of nonfiction prose in 2001.

Robert S. Levine (editor, American Literature, 1820-1865), Ph.D. Stanford, is Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville; and Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. He has edited a number of books, including The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville; Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader; and a Norton Critical Edition of Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables.

Mary Loeffelholz (editor, 1914-1945), Ph.D. Yale, is Professor of English at Northeastern University. She is the author of Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Theory; Experimental Lives: Women and Literature, 1900-1945; and, most recently, From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry. Her essays have appeared in such journals as American Literary History, English Literary History, the Yale Journal of Criticism, and Modern Language Quarterly. Since 1991 she has been the editor of Studies in American Fiction.

Jeanne Campbell Reesman (editor, 1865-1914), Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, is Ashbel Smith Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is author of Houses of Pride: Jack London’s Race Lives, Jack London: A Study of the Short Fiction, and American Designs: The Late Novels of James and Faulkner, and editor of Speaking the Other Self: American Women Writers, and Trickster Lives: Culture and Myth in American Fiction. With Wilfred Guerin et al. she is co-author of A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature and with Earle Labor of Jack London: Revised Edition. With Kenneth Brandt she is co-editor of MLA Approaches to Teaching Jack London, with Leonard Cassuto Rereading Jack London, with Dale Walker No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on Writing and Writers, and with Sara S. Hodson Jack London: One Hundred Years a Writer. She and Noël Mauberret are co-editors of a series of 25 new Jack London editions in French published by Éditions Phébus of Paris. She is presently at work on two books: Mark Twain Versus God: The Story of a Relationship, and, with Sara S. Hodson, The Photography of Jack London. She is a member of the Executive Board of the American Literature Association and founder and Executive Coordinator of the Jack London Society.

Patricia B. Wallace (co-editor, American Literature since 1945), Ph.D. Iowa, is Professor of English at Vassar College. She is a contributing editor of The Columbia History of American Poetry; her essays and poems have appeared in such journals as The Kenyon Review, The Sewanee Review, MELUS and PEN America. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the NEA, the Mellon Foundation, and the ACLS.

", "wears.authors": "Wayne Franklin (Editor), Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor), Mary Loeffelholz (Editor), Arnold Krupat (Editor), Philip F. Gura", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-american-literature-shorter-seventh-edition-one-volume-paperback", "wears.author_slug": "wayne-franklin", "wears.isbn13": 9780393930573, "wears.isbn10": 393930572, "wears.price": "$63.03", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "July 2007", "wears.edition": "7th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 3008, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 2.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "Under Nina Baym's direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and the entire apparatus to make the Shorter Edition an even better teaching tool for the one-semester and brief two-semester courses.
", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Firmly grounded in the core strengths that have made it the best-selling undergraduate survey in the field, The Norton Anthology of American Literature has been revitalized in this Seventh Edition through the collaboration between three new period editors and five seasoned ones.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "39": { "wears.id": 39, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 39, "wears.title": "The Best American Poetry 2009", "wears.author": "David Wagoner", "wears.author_bio": "

David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He lives in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "David Wagoner (Editor), David Lehman", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-poetry-2009", "wears.author_slug": "david-wagoner", "wears.isbn13": 9781615521647, "wears.isbn10": "161552164X", "wears.price": "", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "September 2009", "wears.edition": "Bargain", "wears.subjects": "", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

David Wagoner writes about regular lives with plain grace and transcendent humanity, and the seventy-five poems he has chosen for the 2009 edition of The Best American Poetry grapple with life, celebrate freedom, and teem with imaginative energy. With engaging notes from the poets, Wagoner's superb introductory essay, series editor David Lehman's astute foreword about the current state of poetry and criticism, and cover art from the beloved poet John Ashbery, The Best American Poetry 2009 is a memorable and delightful addition to a series dedicated to showcasing the work of poets at their best.

Publishers Weekly

From the moment series editor David Lehman invokes the myth of Jacob wrestling the Angel in his introduction, the gloves are off in this year's installment of this popular annual anthology. Lehman devotes much of his introduction to throwing jabs at longtime sparring partner and professional poetry grump William Logan, whom Lehman calls “wounded” and “thin skinned.” Guest editor Wagoner chooses to abstain from the scuffle, but there's no denying the aesthetic character amassed by the poems he's selected: American poets not only want to talk about their country this year, they want to talk violence in (and toward) their country. “They came to blow up America,” writes John Ashbery, followed hard on his heels by Mark Bibbins, who warns our fifth state, “Connecticut! we're sawing you in half.” Denise Duhamel envisions “How It Will End” (“We look around, but no one is watching us”) and Rob Cook, in his bold and incantatory “Song of America,” tells us, “I'm raising my child to drown and drop dead and to carry buildings on his back.” It appears our poets are at last ready to confront the hysteria and violence of the past eight years, and who can say there's a better year than 2009 to begin. (Sept.)

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "40": { "wears.id": 40, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 40, "wears.title": "The Oxford Book of American Short Stories", "wears.author": "Joyce Carol Oates", "wears.author_bio": "

In a prolific and varied oeuvre that ranges over essays, plays, criticism, and several genres of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has proved herself one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world.

", "wears.authors": "Joyce Carol Oates", "wears.title_slug": "the-oxford-book-of-american-short-stories", "wears.author_slug": "joyce-carol-oates", "wears.isbn13": 9780195092622, "wears.isbn10": 195092627, "wears.price": "$19.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Oxford University Press, USA", "wears.pubdate": "September 1994", "wears.edition": "~", "wears.subjects": "Biographies & Autobiographies, General", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

\"How ironic,\" Joyce Carol Oates writes in her introduction to this marvelous collection, \"that in our age of rapid mass-production and the easy proliferation of consumer products, the richness and diversity of the American literary imagination should be so misrepresented in most anthologies.\" Why, she asks, when writers such as Samuel Clemens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, and John Updike have among them written hundreds of short stories, do anthologists settle on the same two or three titles by each author again and again? \"Isn't the implicit promise of an anthology that it will, or aspires to, present something different, unexpected?\"
In The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, Joyce Carol Oates offers a sweeping survey of American short fiction, in a collection of fifty-six tales that combines classic works with many \"different, unexpected\" gems, and that invites readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Some selections simply can't be improved on, Oates admits, and she happily includes such time-honored works as Irving's \"Rip Van Winkle,\" Poe's \"The Tell-Tale Heart,\" and Hemingway's \"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.\" But alongside these classics, Oates introduces such little-known stories as Mark Twain's \"Cannibalism in the Cars,\" a story that reveals a darker side to his humor (\"That morning we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I ever sat down to...a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy\"). From Melville come the juxtaposed tales \"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,\" of which Oates says, \"Only Melville could have fashioned out of 'real' events...such harrowing and dreamlike allegorical fiction.\" From Flannery O'Connor we find \"A Late Encounter With the Enemy,\" and from John Cheever, \"The Death of Justina,\" one of Cheever's own favorites, though rarely anthologized. The reader will also delight in the range of authors found here, from Charles W. Chesnutt, Jean Toomer, and Sarah Orne Jewett, to William Carlos Williams, Kate Chopin, and Zora Neale Hurston. Contemporary artists abound, including Bharati Mukherjee and Amy Tan, Alice Adams and David Leavitt, Bobbie Ann Mason and Tim O'Brien, Louise Erdrich and John Edgar Wideman. Oates provides fascinating introductions to each writer, blending biographical information with her own trenchant observations about their work, plus a long introductory essay, in which she offers the fruit of years of reflection on a genre in which she herself is a master.
This then is a book of surprises, a fascinating portrait of American short fiction, as filtered through the sensibility of a major modern writer.

Library Journal

In these lean times, it is difficult to imagine many libraries champing at the bit to purchase yet another anthology of American short stories. But institutions seeking to expand the diversity of their holdings in this area may find this collection the perfect choice. ``Familiar names, unfamiliar titles'' is the raison d'etre for this new volume. Along with some old chestnuts such as ``The Tell-Tale Heart'' and ``A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,'' editor Oates presents many fresh selections such as Edith Wharton's ``The Journey'' and John Cheever's ``The Death of Justina.'' She includes lesser-known minority and women writers such as Jean Toomer and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman alongside stories by newcomers Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and David Leavitt. Each author is given a brief biographical introduction. Recommended for serious literary collections.-- Rita Ciresi, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park

", "wears.toc": "

Stories include:
1. Rip Van Winkle, Washington Irving
2. The Wives of the Dead, Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, Herman Melville
4. The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allan Poe
5. The Ghost in the Mill, Harriet Beecher Stowe
6. Cannibalism in the Cars, Mark Twain
7. The Storm, Kate Chopin
8. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Gilman Perkins
9. The Middle Years, Henry James
10. In a Far Country, Jack London
11. The Little Regiment, Stephen Crane
12. A Journey, Edith Wharton
13. A Death in the Desert, Willa Carter
14. A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Ernest Hemingway
15. An Alcoholic Case, F. Scott Fitzgerald
16. The Girl with the Pimply Face, William Carlos Williams
17. He, Katherine Anne Porter
18. Red-Headed Baby, Langston Hughes
19. A Late Encounter with the Enemy, Flannery O'Connor
20. Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin
21. There will Come Soft Rains, Ray Bradbury
22. Where is the Voice Coming From, Eudora Welty
23. The Lecture, Isaac Beshevis Singer
24. My Son the Murderer, Bernard Malamud
25. Something to Remember Me By, Saul Bellow
26. The Death of Justina, John Cheever
27. Texts, Ursula Le Guin
28. The Persistence of Desire, John Updike
29. Are These Actual Miles?, Raymond Carver
30. Heat, Joyce Carol Oates", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "41": { "wears.id": 41, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 41, "wears.title": "The Best American Essays 2009", "wears.author": "Mary Oliver", "wears.author_bio": "

Mary Oliver is one of the most celebrated and best-selling poets in America. Her books include Red Bird; Our World; Thirst; Blue Iris; New and Selected Poems, Volume One; and New and Selected Poems, Volume Two. She has also published five books of prose, including Rules for the Dance and, most recently, Long Life. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

ROBERT ATWAN has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

", "wears.authors": "Mary Oliver (Editor), Robert Atwan (Editor), Mary Oliver", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-essays-2009", "wears.author_slug": "mary-oliver", "wears.isbn13": 9780618982721, "wears.isbn10": 618982728, "wears.price": "$13.56", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "October 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "American Essays, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 224, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 0.60 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Edited by award-winning poet and essayist Mary Oliver, the latest edition of this \"rich and thoughtful collection\" (Publishers Weekly) offers the finest essays \"judiciously selected from countless publications\" (Chicago Tribune).

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver presides over this edition of the celebrated Best American Essays series. Quite predictably, this stellar number exhibits a full range of refreshing pieces from a variety of magazines, quarterlies, and other periodicals.\\\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "42": { "wears.id": 42, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 42, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Package 2: Volumes C, D, and E", "wears.author": "Jerome Klinkowitz", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor), Robert Levine (Editor), Mary Loeffelholz (Editor), Arnold Krupat (Editor), Patricia Wallace", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-american-literature-package-2", "wears.author_slug": "jerome-klinkowitz", "wears.isbn13": 9780393929942, "wears.isbn10": 393929949, "wears.price": "$20.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "April 2007", "wears.edition": "7th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2870, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 3.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Firmly grounded in the core strengths that have made it the best-selling undergraduate survey in the field, The Norton Anthology of American Literature has been revitalized in this Seventh Edition through the collaboration between three new period editors and five seasoned ones.

Under Nina Baym’s direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "43": { "wears.id": 43, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 43, "wears.title": "Early African American Classics (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)", "wears.author": "Barnes & Noble", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Barnes & Noble", "wears.title_slug": "early-african-american-classics", "wears.author_slug": "barnes-amp-noble", "wears.isbn13": 9781400500284, "wears.isbn10": 1400500281, "wears.price": "$24.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Barnes & Noble", "wears.pubdate": "October 2008", "wears.edition": "Special Value", "wears.subjects": "Slavery - Social Sciences, Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, American Fiction & Literature Classics, Slave Narratives & Biographies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "11.10 (w) x 14.10 (h) x 6.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "Culled from the annals of early African American history, these personal narratives recount the stories of men and women who survived the cruel injustice of slavery to become prominent leaders in the struggle for freedom and equality.\n

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass,
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives

\nThe Barnes & Noble Classics series offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: \n

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
Biographies of the authors
Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
Footnotes and endnotes
Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
Comments by other famous authors
Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
Bibliographies for further reading
Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

\nAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Culled from the annals of early African American history, these personal narratives recount the stories of men and women who survived the cruel injustice of slavery to become prominent leaders in the struggle for freedom and equality.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass,
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass
Great Escapes: Four Slave Narratives

The Barnes & Noble Classics series offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
Biographies of the authors
Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
Footnotes and endnotes
Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
Comments by other famous authors
Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
Bibliographies for further reading
Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences biographical, historical, and literary to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "44": { "wears.id": 44, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 44, "wears.title": "African-American Poetry: An Anthology, 1773-1930", "wears.author": "Joan R. Sherman", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Joan R. Sherman", "wears.title_slug": "african-american-poetry", "wears.author_slug": "joan-r-sherman", "wears.isbn13": 9780486296043, "wears.isbn10": 486296040, "wears.price": "$1.80", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Dover Publications", "wears.pubdate": "July 1997", "wears.edition": "Special Value", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, African Americans - Fiction & Literature, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 96, "wears.dimensions": "5.29 (w) x 8.21 (h) x 0.25 (d)", "wears.overview": "Rich selection of 74 poems ranging from the religious and moral verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (ca. 1753–1784) to 20th-century work of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Other contributors include James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, many others. Indispensable for students of the black experience in America and any lover of fine poetry. Includes 4 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Rich selection of 74 poems ranging from religious and moral verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (ca. 1753–1784) to 20th-century work of Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes. Introduction.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "45": { "wears.id": 45, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 45, "wears.title": "Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters", "wears.author": "Wally Lamb", "wears.author_bio": "

Wally Lamb's books are neither short nor simple; but like a James Patterson of emotions, he pulls readers in and doesn't let go. His affecting novels are marvels of imagination and empathy.

", "wears.authors": "Wally Lamb, Diane Bartholomew, Nancy Birkla, Robin Cullen, Brenda Medina", "wears.title_slug": "couldnt-keep-it-to-myself", "wears.author_slug": "wally-lamb", "wears.isbn13": 9780060595371, "wears.isbn10": "006059537X", "wears.price": "$10.59", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "HarperCollins Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "February 2004", "wears.edition": "Reprint", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies, Penology & Correctional Studies, True Crime", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 368, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 0.92 (d)", "wears.overview": "

In a stunning work of insight and hope, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb once again reveals his unmatched talent for finding humanity in the lost and lonely and celebrates the transforming power of the written word.

For several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are powerful stories of hope and healing, told by writers who have left victimhood behind.

In his moving introduction, Lamb describes the incredible journey of expression and self-awareness the women took through their writing and shares how they challenged him as a teacher and as a fellow author. Couldn't Keep It to Myself is a true testament to the process of finding oneself and working toward a better day.

", "wears.excerpt": "

Couldn't Keep It to Myself

\nTestimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters \n

\nBy Wally Lamb and the Women of the York Correctional Institution \n

HarperCollins Publishers

\nCopyright © 2003 Wally Lamb
\n All right reserved.
\nISBN: 006053429X
\n

\n
\n

Chapter One

Couldn't Keep it to Ourselves

The toy department at the Durable store sold two blackboards. The modest two-by-three-foot model came with wall brackets and a three-piece starter box of chalk. Its deluxe cousin was framed in wood, had legs and feet, and came \"loaded\": a pair of erasers, a pointer, a twelve-stick chalk set, and a bonus box of colored chalk. I was a third-grader when I spotted that blackboard. Good-bye to Lincoln Logs and Louisville Sluggers. From the age of eight, I wanted to teach.

My first students were my older sisters. As preteenagers, Gail and Vita were more interested in imitating the dance steps of the American Bandstand \"regulars\" than in playing school, but a direct order from our mother sent them trudging upstairs to my classroom. I'd prepared for their arrival: work sheets, white shirt and clip-on tie, alarm clock hidden under my bed for the surprise fire drill. If my sisters had to play, then they would playact. Vita cast herself as hip-swiveling Cookie Crane, as smoldering a third-grader as there ever was. Gail was Rippy Van Snoot, the class incorrigible. I was launching into opening exercises when Rippy reached past me, grabbed a blackboard eraser, and bounced it off my forehead. Cookie shrieked with delight and lit an imaginary cigarette. I forget which reprobate flung my flash cards into the air and made the room rain arithmetic.

Fourteen years later I was a high school English teacher with my first actual students. Paula Plunkett and Seth Jinks were the two I remember most vividly from my rookie year. Paula had pretty eyes and graceful penmanship, but she was encased in a fortress of fat. Sad and isolated, she sat at a special table in back because she didn't fit the desks. She never spoke; no one ever spoke to her. In my first-year-teacher naïveté, I sought to draw Paula into the dynamic, thinking group work and class discussion would save her. My plan failed miserably.

Seth Jinks was in the twelfth-grade class I'd been assigned because I had no seniority. \"The sweathogs,\" these kids dubbed themselves. I was twenty-one, and so were three or four of my sweathogs. We honeymooned for a couple of weeks. Then one morning I walked up the aisle and tapped Seth Jinks on the shoulder. I needed to wake him up so I could exchange the paperback he hadn't read for the new one he wasn't going to read. \"Seth, get your head off the desk,\" I said. \"Here's the new book.\" No response. I poked him. He looked up at me with little-boy-lost eyes. \"Go fuck yourself,\" he said. The room went quiet. The sweathogs, Seth, and I held our collective breath and waited for my response. And in that uneasy silence, and the days, and months, and decades that followed, teaching became for me not just a job but a calling. I have found special meaning in working with hard nuts, tough cookies, and hurtin' buckaroos - those children among us who are the walking wounded.

That said, I did not want to go to York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's maximum-security prison for women, on that warm August afternoon in 1999. I was keeping a promise I'd made to Marge Cohen, the prison school librarian. Marge had called three months earlier, as I was preparing for a twelve-city book tour in support of my second novel, I Know This Much Is True. Several suicides and suicide attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair at the prison, Marge had explained; the school staff, groping to find help, was canvasing the community. They thought writing might prove useful to the women as a coping tool. Would I come and speak? Because I'm frequently asked to support good causes and have a hard time saying no, I keep an index card taped to my phone - a scripted refusal that allows me to preserve family and writing time. That day, though, I couldn't find my card. I told Marge I'd visit when I got back from my book tour.

I would never have predicted an author's life for myself, but when I was thirty, while on summer hiatus from teaching, I'd sat down and written a short story on a whim. I liked doing it and wrote another. For my third story, I fused a sarcastic voice to the visual memory of the mute, isolated Paula Plunkett. For years I had worried and wondered about my former student. What had become of her? What had all that weight meant? Who had she been as a child? In the absence of actual knowledge, the life I invented around her remembered image became my first novel, She's Come Undone. It took me nine years to figure out the story of that bruised fictional soul whom I'd fathered and then grown to love and worry over. I loved and stewed over the flawed identical twins of my second novel, too - one of whom had a generous measure of Seth Jinks's anger. What I did not see coming was that the world would embrace these characters also. \"Hello, Wally? Guess what?\" The caller on the other end of the phone line was Oprah Winfrey. She called twice, once for each novel. The result: best-seller lists, limo rides, movie deals, and foreign translations. Oprah's Book Club had taken my life by the seat of the pants and sent me on the road.

Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high, trash the furniture with their bandmates, party with groupies. But authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments, we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room service sandwiches, or ironing our clothes for the next reading, or watching Judge Judy. Perhaps the most surreal moment during my book tour that summer occurred in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. While channel-surfing, I came upon the quiz show Jeopardy! at the exact moment my name surfaced. \"He wrote the novel She's Come Undone,\" Alex Trebek stated. In the long and torturous pause that followed, the three contestants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the bed in room 417 of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a sheepish voice, \"Who is Wally Lamb?\"

I'm a family man, a fiction writer, a teacher, and a guy who can't say no without the index card. On that nervous first drive to York Correctional Institution, I sought to calm myself with music. I was fumbling with CD cases and radio buttons when suddenly, over the airwaves, a piano pounded and the car shook with the vocal thunder of Newark, New Jersey's Abyssinian Baptist Choir. The unfamiliar song so overpowered me that I pulled to the shoulder to listen. When it ended, I looked up at the highway sign in front of which I'd landed. correctional facility area, it said. do not stop. The inexplicable emotional wallop of that moment fills me with wonder to this day.

To gain access to the women of York prison, you check in with the guard at the main gate, hang your laminated badge on your shirt pocket, walk through a metal detector, then pass through a series of ten doors, some of which slide open mysteriously after you stand and wait. You don't see who's flipping the switches, so it's an Orwellian entrance. At the prison school, I met my liaison, Dale Griffith, a warm and exuberant English teacher. Dale and I arranged the chairs in a circle, a uniformed corrections officer bellowed orders from the corridor, and thirty inmates entered the room.

Dressed identically in cranberry T-shirts and pocketless jeans, the women came in all colors, shapes, sizes, and degrees of gender identification. Their attitudes ranged from hangdog to Queen of Sheba. Most had shown up not to write but to check out \"that guy who was on Oprah.\" I spoke. We tried some exercises. I asked if anyone had questions about writing. Several hands shot into the air. \"You met Oprah?\" \"What's Oprah like?\" \"Oprah's cool, you know what I'm sayin'?\" Uh, was that a question?

At the end of my talk, one of the women stood, thanked me for coming, and pitched me a curveball. \"You coming back?\" she asked. Thirty pairs of wary eyes were upon me and my index card was back in my office. \"Uh, well . . . okay,\" I said. \"Write something and I'll see you in two weeks. Any subject, two pages minimum. Your drafts will be your tickets into the workshop.\"

At session two, fifteen of the thirty chairs were empty. Stacie wanted praise, not feedback. Manhattan said she'd meant to be vague and nonspecific - that her business wasn't necessarily the reader's business. Ruth must have thought she was a guest on Oprah; she'd written only a paragraph, but man oh man, did she want to talk. At age fifty-five Diane was the senior member of the group. For ninety minutes she hunched forward, fists clenched on her desktop. Her suspicious eyes followed my every move. Diane had written under the pseudonym Natasha and had exacted a promise before class that her work would never, ever be read aloud. I predicted she'd be gone by session three.

But it was during session three that Diane Bartholomew (\"Snapshots of My Early Life\") couldn't keep her writing to herself. Her shaky hand went up and she asked if she could share what she'd written. In a barely audible voice, she read a disjointed, two-page summary of her horrific life story: incest, savage abuse, spousal homicide, lawyerly indifference, and, in prison, parallel battles against breast cancer and deep, dark depression. When she stopped, there was silence, a communal intake of breath. Then, applause - a single pair of hands at first, joined by another pair, and then by everyone. Bartholomew had sledgehammered the dam of distrust, and the women's writing began to flow.

That was three years ago. I stopped counting sessions somewhere around number fifty. Writers have come and gone: the narcotics-addicted nurse who wrote a moving apologia to a deceased aunt whose support had never wavered; the high school athlete who, a month after graduation, brandished her softball bat during a convenience store robbery and wrote to figure out why; the young alcoholic mother who time-traveled, penning a personal letter to one of the prison's original 1917 inmates, also an alcoholic. The workshop sessions have been a journey rich with laughter, tears, heart-stopping leaps of faith, and miraculous personal victories. There have been bumps in the road, too. Addicts are elusive; they tend to begin promising drafts, take them to some interesting midway point, then give up on themselves and stop coming. There have been trust issues. Prison is not a place where trust is given easily, and a writer who shares her work in progress risks exposure. That risk taking must be honored. Only the writer should decide when, and if, her work is ready for the eyes and ears of nongroup members - ready, in other words, to go public. If another group member breaches that trust, she has to leave. Similarly, a few con artists and drama queens have been handed their walking papers. A functional writing community cannot accommodate the needs of would-be superstars or instigators of the guess-what-she-said-about-you variety. But those have been the exceptions. The brave writers whose work is represented in this volume have acted in good faith, faced their demons, stayed the course, and revised relentlessly. And in taking on the subject of themselves - making themselves vulnerable to the unseen reader - they have exchanged powerlessness for the power that comes with self-awareness.

\"I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness,\" the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. \"There's nothing to writing,\" the columnist Red Smith once commented. \"All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.\"

Michelle Jessamy (\"Motherlove\") was fourteen when she became pregnant by her teenage boyfriend. Despite the challenges, Jessamy's impending motherhood helped her get closer to her own emotionally distant mother. As she drafted her memory piece, that mother-daughter epiphany emerged as the centerpiece. Then, mid-draft, Jessamy hit a snag. She began writing a flashback to an earlier instance of sexual abuse - a hallway molestation by a friend of the family when she was eleven. The painful incident was integral to the story she needed to tell, but disclosing her long-kept secret made Jessamy feel uncomfortable. She stopped writing. But self-censorship felt uncomfortable, too. Jessamy had worked hard on her essay and wanted to see it through. The solution? A change of genre. On paper, Jessamy became Mo'Shay Shambly, and the pronoun I became she. Mo'Shay had the same hazel eyes as Michelle, the same experiences. But now Jessamy was writing autobiographical fiction. That little bit of distance unblocked her and she finished her piece.

Brenda Medina (\"Hell, and How I Got Here\") was self-censoring like Michelle Jessamy, but for a very different reason. For months after she joined our group, she labored on the same short essay about the death of her uncle Carlos - draft after draft after draft. One day I suggested to Medina that, God bless him, I didn't think I had the strength to attend to poor Uncle Carlos's death one more time. \"There's something else I want to write about, but I can't,\" she told me. That \"something\" was what had landed her in prison ten years earlier at age seventeen: her affiliation with a violent street gang.

York Correctional Institution is vigilant in its efforts to eliminate gang influence within the compound. Incarcerated gang members who choose to uphold their allegiance to \"the family\" pay a steep price in the form of punitive segregation, loss of privileges, and loss of the \"good time\" that can shorten their stay on the inside. A self-described punk when she arrived at York, Brenda Medina had traveled a long and difficult road as an inmate, freeing herself from the psychological grip of her \"family\" and undertaking the rigorous step-by-step process by which an inmate repudiates her gang affiliation and begins rehabilitation in earnest. Even mentioning the name of a gang can cast suspicion that the inmate has reneged on her disaffiliation. Medina's very real fear was that, if she wrote about her past life, her work might be seized, taken out of context, and misconstrued as gang-friendly. If that happened, she could lose much of what she had worked so hard to achieve. My collaborator, Dale Griffith, dealt with the problem directly. She sought and received permission from prison officials for Medina to take up her gang experience as subject matter. With that hurdle cleared, the writer was on her way to a personal essay that, far from glorifying gangs, depicts their insidious hold on young people's lives and the cancerous destruction of their futures.

In her much-loved book on writing, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, Anne Lamott observes: \"We write to expose the unexposed.
\n
\nContinues...
\n

\n
\n Excerpted from Couldn't Keep It to Myself by Wally Lamb and the Women of the York Correctional Institution Copyright © 2003 by Wally Lamb
\n Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. \n
\n

", "wears.synopsis": "

The Los Angeles Times

One truth this book affirms is the capacity for people to change. The writers of Couldn't Keep It to Myself chart their own journeys of growth, navigating the terrain of their internal worlds, their pasts and present prison realities. Who they have become is clear both in self-awareness and what they do with their lives teaching others, advocacy, computer work, construction in prison and out. It is in this change that hope resides; lying next to and rising out of despair, hope permeates the book. Why, in the end, does Lamb want us to care about 10 women in prison? Perhaps because in noticing the humanity of others, we become more human ourselves. — Kathy Boudin

", "wears.toc": "

	Acknowledgments
	Notes to the Reader
	Couldn't Keep it to Ourselves	1
	The True Face of Earth	19
	Orbiting Izzy	53
	Thefts	65
	Hair Chronicles	95
	Three Steps Past the Monkeys	113
	Hell, and How I Got Here	143
	Christmas in Prison	177
	Faith, Power, and Pants	185
	Puzzle Pieces	211
	Motherlove	245
	Snapshots of My Early Life	267
	Bad Girls	335
	Sources and Suggested Reading	351

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

Wally Lamb's novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True were both Oprah's Book Club selections and No. 1 New York Times bestsellers. On the surface, Couldn't Keep It to Myself is far different than these works of fiction. In this heart-wrenching collection, Lamb introduces and presents 11 female writers who happen to be convicted felons. Their pieces, as potent as their personalities, would be less accessible without Lamb's modest and disarming preludes. \"Prison,\" he writes, \"is not a place where trust is given easily.\" Obviously, he earned that trust, and we now share its fruits.\n\n

\n\n

The Los Angeles Times

One truth this book affirms is the capacity for people to change. The writers of Couldn't Keep It to Myself chart their own journeys of growth, navigating the terrain of their internal worlds, their pasts and present prison realities. Who they have become is clear both in self-awareness and what they do with their lives — teaching others, advocacy, computer work, construction in prison and out. It is in this change that hope resides; lying next to and rising out of despair, hope permeates the book. Why, in the end, does Lamb want us to care about 10 women in prison? Perhaps because in noticing the humanity of others, we become more human ourselves. — Kathy Boudin\n\n

Publishers Weekly

Bestselling author and Oprah Winfrey favorite Lamb (She's Come Undone; I Know This Much Is True) takes a cue from Winfrey herself in collecting and editing this book of writings gleaned from a workshop he conducted for the female inmates of Connecticut's York Correctional Institution. The result is an intriguing and powerful collection of unlikely literary debuts. Although the 11 selections cover the range one might expect from writings plucked from a women's prison-tales of broken homes, poverty, violence, teenage pregnancy, race and gender bias, and, of course, crime and punishment-Lamb succeeds in giving the collection an intense, recognizable emotional core reminiscent of his blockbuster debut novel, She's Come Undone. Indeed, each selection bears the marks of Lamb's heavy involvement-the clipped yet elegant prose and the delicate, occasionally humorous manner in which difficult emotional situations are rendered. Standout selections include Nancy Whiteley's opening remembrance of her troubled adolescence and Diane Bartholomew's artfully rendered, heart-wrenching \"Snapshots of My Early Life.\" As a sad footnote, Bartholomew, whom Lamb credits with inspiring the success of the workshop, will never see her opus in print. Sent to prison in 1990 for murdering her abusive husband, Bartholomew was stricken with cancer while serving her sentence and died in November 2001. In his introduction, Lamb calls the workshop \"a journey rich with laughter, tears, [and] heart-stopping leaps of faith.\" To the credit of Lamb and his authors, this book, the end product of the workshop, is as well. (On sale Feb. 1) Forecast: Although this book is a departure for Lamb, fans of She's Come Undone will undoubtedly enjoy it. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

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Library Journal

At the urgent request of the librarian at York Correctional Institution in Connecticut, Lamb (She's Come Undone) organized a writing class for incarcerated women. The intention was to make writing a coping tool that might counter an epidemic of despair at the prison. The 12 pieces in this volume are the best of the students' efforts, and as efforts they are noteworthy, offering memoirs of childhood and acute observations about prison life. In \"Three Steps Past the Monkeys,\" Nancy Birkla chronicles her dependence on drugs by describing her early dependence on candy. In \"Christmas in Prison,\" Robin Cullen describes a congregation at a prison church service as \"a rainbow of skin tones, their chocolate, honey vanilla, and raspberry ripple-colored hair topped with crocheted red scrunchies that sit like cherries atop ice cream parlor hairdos.\" All in all, the volume represents good student writing and a success from everyone's point of view. If it is vying for shelf space with professional writers, it will probably (and justifiably) lose out. But if funds permit, it is worth considering.-Frances Sandiford, formerly with Green Haven Correctional Facility Lib., Stormville, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\n\n

\n\n

Kirkus Reviews

Intense attestations of lives that ran afoul of the law, from women who have done or are doing time at a prison in Connecticut. Bestselling novelist Lamb (I Know This Much Is True, 1998, etc.) teaches a course in writing at the York Correctional Institution, and he offers here a selection of ten works from the women in his class, plus one by his co-instructor. The pieces are uniformly wrenching, reported from desperate circumstances by authors doomed to punishment. Yet they are as far from self-pity as possible, written by extremely self-aware authors who give a clear sense of setting out to take some degree of control of their destinies. Each piece is a probing re-examination of its author’s life and of the reasons she ended up in prison. Some recount childhoods taxing by any yardstick, years of learning to become \"experts at detecting the slightest barometric fluctuations of Storm Mom,\" or of being raped by a father who’d just lost the house in a card game—and, at term, having the baby spirited away before its mother was allowed to touch him. There are demons aplenty, inner ones begging to be tamed by drugs, and outer ones, like husbands, uncontrollable (one woman asks, \"Why do I feel safer here in prison than I felt at home?\"). The maximum-security prison is a tough house, and prospects of release for some of the writers are dim: \"Ineligible for parole, I have served the first nine years of my twenty-five year sentence. I am 27.\" This same person will also say, \"I’m kept afloat by my writing.\" And her writing, like other of the women’s, is lean, with the momentum and clarity needed for its work of helping frame and make sense of these authors’ situations. There are things, says Lamb,that need \"to be known about prison and prisoners. There are misconceptions to be abandoned, biases to be dropped.\" Here’s a step in that direction.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 2 }, "46": { "wears.id": 46, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 46, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Shorter 5th Edition", "wears.author": "Margaret Ferguson", "wears.author_bio": "

Margaret Ferguson (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California—Davis. She is author of Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (2003) and Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1984). She is coeditor of Feminism in Time, Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law, Literacies in Early Modern England and a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam.

Mary Jo Salter (M.A. Cambridge University) is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches poetry and poetry-writing. She has published several books of poems, including Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989), Sunday Skaters (1994), A Kiss in Space (1999), and, most recently, Open Shutters (2003). A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she has also served as poetry editor of The New Republic.

Jon Stallworthy (M.A. and B.Litt. Oxford) is Senior Research Fellow at Wolfson College of Oxford University, where he is also Professor of English Literature. He is also the former John Wendell Anderson Professor at Cornell, where he taught after a career at Oxford University Press. His biography of Wilfred Owen won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His biography of Louis MacNeice won the Southern Arts Literary Prize. He is also the author of Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems and Singing School: The Making of a Poet and he is the editor of the definitive edition of Wilfred Owen’s poetry, The Complete Poems and Fragments; The Penguin Book of Love Poetry; and The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Stallworthy has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature.

", "wears.authors": "Margaret Ferguson (Editor), Jon Stallworthy (Editor), Mary Jo Salter (Editor), Mary Jo Salter (Editor), Jon Stallworthy", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-poetry-shorter-5th-edition", "wears.author_slug": "margaret-ferguson", "wears.isbn13": 9780393979213, "wears.isbn10": 393979210, "wears.price": "$58.69", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "December 2004", "wears.edition": "5th Edition", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, English Poetry, English & Irish Literature Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1424, "wears.dimensions": "9.16 (w) x 5.86 (h) x 1.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Offering over one thousand years of verse from the medieval period to the present, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the classroom standard for the study of poetry in English.

The Fifth Edition retains the flexibility and breadth of selection that has defined this classic anthology, while improved and expanded editorial apparatus make it an even more useful teaching tool.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Offering over one thousand years of verse from the medieval period to the present, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the classroom standard for the study of poetry in English.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "47": { "wears.id": 47, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 47, "wears.title": "The Best American Poetry 2010", "wears.author": "Amy Gerstler", "wears.author_bio": "

David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He lives in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "Amy Gerstler (Editor), David Lehman", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-poetry-2010", "wears.author_slug": "amy-gerstler", "wears.isbn13": 9781439181454, "wears.isbn10": 1439181454, "wears.price": "$13.87", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "September 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 229, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.30 (h) x 0.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also presents poems that poignantly capture the current moment, such as the sonnets John Updike wrote to chronicle his dying weeks. And there are exciting poems from a constellation of rising stars: Bob Hicok, Terrance Hayes, Denise Duhamel, Dean Young, and Elaine Equi, to name a very few.

The anthology’s mainstays are in place: It opens with series editor David Lehman’s incisive foreword about the state of American poetry and has a marvelous introduction by Amy Gerstler. Notes from the poets, illuminating their poems and their writing processes, conclude this delightful addition to a classic series.

Dick Allen • John Ashbery • Sandra Beasley • Mark Bibbins • Todd Boss • Fleda Brown • Anne Carson • Tom Clark • David Clewell • Michael Collier • Billy Collins • Dennis Cooper • Kate Daniels • Peter Davis • Tim Dlugos • Denise Duhamel • Thomas Sayers Ellis • Lynn Emanuel • Elaine Equi • Jill Alexander Essbaum • B. H. Fairchild • Vievee Francis • Louise Glück • Albert Goldbarth • Amy Glynn Greacen • Sonia Greenfield • Kelle Groom • Gabriel Gudding • Kimiko Hahn • Barbara Hamby • Terrance Hayes • Bob Hicok • Rodney Jones • Michaela Kahn • Brigit Pegeen Kelly • Corinne Lee • Hailey Leithauser • Dolly Lemke • Maurice Manning • Adrian Matejka • Shane McCrae • Jeffrey McDaniel • W. S. Merwin • Sarah Murphy • Eileen Myles • Camille Norton • Alice Notley • Sharon Olds • Gregory Pardlo • Lucia Perillo • Carl Phillips • Adrienne Rich • James Richardson • J. Allyn Rosser • James Schuyler • Tim Seibles • David Shapiro • Charles Simic • Frank Stanford • Gerald Stern • Stephen Campbell Sutherland • James Tate • David Trinidad • Chase Twichell • John Updike • Derek Walcott • G. C. Waldrep • J. E. Wei • Dara Wier • Terence Winch • Catherine Wing • Mark Wunderlich • Matthew Yeager • Dean Young • Kevin Young

", "wears.excerpt": "

FOREWORD

by David Lehman

Over the years I’ve read novels centering on lawyers, doctors, diplomats, teachers, financiers, even car salesmen and dentists, but not until 2009 did I come across one about the travails of the editor of a poetry anthology. When word of The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker’s new novel, reached me last September, I couldn’t wait to read it. Baker’s novels defy convention and reveal an obsessive nature, and I wondered what he would make of American poetry, for surely his novel would reflect a strenuous engagement with the art. The title character here, Paul Chowder by unfortunate name, has put together an anthology of poems he is calling Only Rhyme. The phrase describes the notional book’s contents and indicates the editor’s conception of poetic virtue. Paul has chosen the contents of his anthology but is now, on the eve of a deadline, afflicted with writer’s block. He needs to write a foreword but cannot. “How many people read introductions to poetry anthologies, anyway?” he wonders, then volunteers, “I do, but I’m not normal.”

Having asked myself that same question and given a similar answer, I can appreciate the speaker’s troubling awareness of the many poets who have to be left out of his book—and the relatively few people who will bother to read his introductory essay. The task of writing a prefatory note becomes no less difficult when it is an annual requirement, though Nicholson Baker may have made my job a little easier this time around. Every editor has the impulse to use the introductory space to open the door, welcome the guest, and disappear without further ado. But some things are worth saying, and one such is Baker’s defense of anthologies. For a poet facing all the perils that lurk in a poet’s path—a poet very like the novel’s Paul Chowder—anthologies represent the possibility of a belated second chance. And it is that possibility, however slim, that spurs the poet to stick to a vocation that offers so much resistance and promises so few rewards. The “you” in these sentences refers to the American poet—and perhaps to American poetry itself, an oddity in an age that worships celebrity. “You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now.” The poet’s conception of fame exists within modest limits, but it is persistent: “And you think: Maybe the very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.”

Baker’s skeptical distance from the fray makes his take on things particularly compelling. The opinions he puts forth are provocative and entertaining. A proponent of the sit-com as the great American art form, Baker’s anthologist believes that “any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.” That is quite a statement, even allowing for the complexity of irony. (After all, to be “uplifting for the human spirit” may not be the ideal criterion by which to judge poetry or history.) The speaker establishes his credentials as an American poet with his realism for self-pity’s sake. He suspects that poets form a “community” only in the realm of piety: “We all love the busy ferment, and we all know it’s nonsense. Getting together for conferences of international poetry. Hah! A joke. Reading our poems. Our little moment. Physical presence. In the same room with. A community. Forget it. It’s a joke.”

Baker (or his mouthpiece) likes Swinburne, Poe, Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, and the contemporary British poets Wendy Cope and James Fenton. He disapproves of free verse, distrusts the “ultra-extreme enjambment” that you find in William Carlos Williams or Charles Olson, and argues that “iambic pentameter” is something of a hoax. As for the unrhymed poems that dominate literary magazines and university workshops, he feels it would be more accurate to call them “plums” and their authors “plummets” or “plummers.” How did we get to this state of affairs? In Baker’s account, the chief villain is Ezra Pound, “a blustering bigot—a humorless jokester—a talentless pasticheur—a confidence man.” Pound advocated modernism in verse with the same bullying arrogance that went into his radio broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini, and that is no accident, because the impulse that led to fascism also gave rise to modern poetry. Modernism as Pound preached it and T. S. Eliot practiced it—in The Waste Land, “a hodge-podge of flummery and borrowed paste”—was, in short, probably as ruinous for the art of verse as fascism was for Europe. The popularity of translations, especially prose versions of exotic foreign verse rendered from a language that the translator doesn’t know, also did its part to hasten the “death of rhyme.”

The views articulated in The Anthologist are antithetical to contemporary practice in ways that recall Philip Larkin’s conviction that Pound ruined poetry, Picasso ruined painting, and Charlie Parker ruined jazz: the dissenting position, pushed to an amusing extreme, and stated with uncompromising intelligence. The narrator can sound a sour note. To teach creative writing to college students is to be “a professional teller of lies,” he maintains, gleefully quoting Elizabeth Bishop on the subject: “I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this ‘Creative Writing’ business.” Nevertheless Baker’s opinions are worth pondering, especially when the “difficulty versus accessibility” question becomes the subject of debate. And his advice to the aspiring poet is astute. Don’t postpone writing the poem, he says. “Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don’t get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year’s Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else’s name you’ll hate yourself.”

The Anthologist was well received and prominently reviewed in book supplements that rarely notice poetry books, let alone anthologies of them, except with a certain contempt, which was a mild irony but an old story. Some laudatory articles went so far as to declare that “you” will enjoy the work “even if you generally couldn’t care less about verse.” But then, when poetry or the teaching of poetry is discussed, commentators have a hard time avoiding a note of condescension. Poetry is called a “lost art.” It is thought to be something young people go through, a phase; something you have to apologize for, as when a poet at a reading reassures the audience that only three more poems remain on the docket. And yet poetry retains its prestige. The term exists as a sort of benchmark in fields ranging from politics to athletics. Columnists enjoy reminding newly elected officials that “you campaign in poetry but govern in prose”—an axiom that aligns poetry on the side of idealism and eloquence against the bureaucratic details and inconveniences of prosaic administration. In the Financial Times, the Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý, who spied on women with his homemade viewfinder, “stealing their likenesses as they giggled, gossiped and dreamed,” is described as “a peeping Tom with a poet’s eye.” Of Nancy Pelosi, readers of Time learned that, to the Speaker’s credit, when a colleague’s mother dies, she “encloses a poem written by her own mother with her condolence.” In the same issue of the magazine, a flattering profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, appeared. During the Iraq war, McChrystal sent copies of “The Second Coming” to his special operators, challenging them to flip the meaning of Yeats’s lines: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Has there ever been a really good movie about a poet as opposed to the many excellent movies in which poetry is quoted to smart effect? Bright Star, Jane Campion’s film about the ill-starred romance of John Keats and the barely legal Fanny Brawne, came out in 2009 and showed there is life left in the familiar stereotype of the consumptive poet burning a fever for love. Campion won over Quentin Tarantino. “The movie made me think about taking a writing class,” the director of Pulp Fiction said. “One of the best things that can happen from a movie about an author is that you actually want to read their work.” On television, poetry continues to put in regular appearances on The PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and sometimes sneaks into scripted shows. When an advertising copywriter on Mad Men loses his job, he doesn’t take it well. He “did not go gentle into that good night,” an ex-associate observes. The critic Stephen Burt believes that Project Runway holds some useful lessons for poetry critics: “Project Runway even recalls the famous exercises in ‘practical criticism’ performed at the University of Cambridge in the 1920s, in which professor I. A. Richards asked his students to make snap judgments about unfamiliar poems.” I have commented on the inspired way that quotations from poems turn up in classic Hollywood movies, and if you’re lucky enough to catch It’s Always Fair Weather the next time Robert Osborne shows it on TCM, you’ll see a superb 1950s movie musical (music by André Previn, book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) that sums itself up brilliantly in three lines from As You Like It that enliven a conversation between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse:

Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.

Then heigh-ho, the holly!

This life is most jolly.

Meanwhile, you can’t pull the wool over the creative writers responsible for Law and Order: Criminal Intent. In a 2009 episode, a celebrated campus bard is murdered by his ex-girlfriend, who is handy with a knife. Has he been pimping out his attractive young assistants to wealthy donors? After learning how rotten the poets are to one another, the major case squad detective says that if her daughter ever says she wants to be a poet, she’d tell her to join the Mafia instead: “Nicer people.” As convalescents confined to hospital beds know, you can go wall to wall with reruns of Law and Order, and sure enough, the day after this episode aired I saw a rerun of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, in which the villain is a nerdy insurance man, an actuary with Asperger’s syndrome, whose name is Wallace Stevens. The detectives call him Wally affectionately. I spent the rest of my bedridden day with Stevens’s collected poems.

Haaretz, Israel’s oldest Hebrew-language daily, turned over its pages entirely to poets and novelists for one day in June 2009. The results were unsurprising in some ways (a lot of first-person point of view) but inventive and unconventional in the coverage of the stock market (“everything okay”) and the weather (a sonnet likening summer to an unsharpened pencil). The experiment reminded me of W. S. Di Piero’s assertion that the writing of good prose is the acid test of a poet’s intelligence. “Some shy from putting prose out there because it’s a giveaway,” Di Piero has written. “You can’t fake it. It reveals quality of mind, for better or worse, in a culture where poems can be faked. Find a faker and ask him or her to write anything more substantial than a jacket blurb, and the jig is up.” When we posted Di Piero’s remark on the Best American Poetry blog, Sally Ashton added an apt simile (a poem can be faked “like an orgasm”) and a few inevitable questions (“Who is fooled? Who benefits?”). Speaking of the BAP blog, there are days when it resembles nothing so much as a cross-cultural newspaper written by poets and poetry lovers. Recent visitors to the BAP blog could read Catharine Stimpson’s reaction to homicidal violence at the University of Alabama; Lewis Saul’s meticulously annotated commentary on thirty films by Akira Kurosawa; Jennifer Michael Hecht’s heartfelt plea to poets contemplating the suicide of Rachel Wetzsteon (“don’t kill yourself”); Laura Orem’s obituaries for Lucille Clifton, Jean Simmons, and J. D. Salinger; Katha Pollitt on Berlin in the fall; Larry Epstein on Bob Dylan; Ken Tucker on new books of poetry; Todd Swift on young British poets; Phoebe Putnam on the covers poets choose for their books; Mitch Sisskind’s “poetic tips of the day” (e.g., “Secrecy sustains the world”); Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the sports desk; Terence Winch on Irish American music; Stacey Harwood on nocino, the Italian liqueur made from under-ripe green walnuts; and a James Cummins epigram entitled “Anti-Confessional”: “What it was like, I don’t recall, or care to; / believe me, you should be grateful I spare you.”

The Best American Poetry anthology itself, now in its twenty-third year, remains committed to the idea that American poetry is as vital as it is various and that it is possible to capture the spirit of its diversity and a measure of its excellence in an annual survey of our magazines, in print or online. As the selections are made by a different editor each year, each a distinguished practitioner, the series has inevitably become an annotated chronicle of the taste of our leading poets. I persuaded Amy Gerstler to make the selections for the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry because of my delight in her poems and my respect for her judgment, and it was wonderful to work with her. Amy’s new book, Dearest Creature, came out last year, and augmented her reputation as arguably the most inventive and ambitious poet of her generation. Gerstler can be very funny without forfeiting her right to be taken seriously; she has a quality of sincerity, of truth-telling, that can coexist with the most sophisticated of comic sensibilities. Her poems of deep feeling may take on an insouciant disguise: a letter to a cherished niece about the virtues of an encyclopedia, a conversation between a black taffeta and strapless pink dress, a riff consisting entirely of slang phrases from the not too distant past. Yet always at the heart of the poetry is an insight into the human condition and the ability to state it simply and powerfully: “Some of us grow up doing / credible impressions of model citizens / (though sooner or later hairline / cracks appear in our facades). The rest / get dubbed eccentrics, unnerved and undone / by other people’s company, for which we / nevertheless pine.” David Kirby reviewed Dearest Creature in The New York Times Book Review. “Gerstler is skilled in every kind of comedy, from slapstick to whimsy,” Kirby wrote. “Yet there’s a deep seriousness in every one of these poems, like the plaintive ‘Midlife Lullaby,’ in which the cow who is now the meatloaf in somebody’s sandwich speaks of life’s passing pleasures as hauntingly as one of those skeletons who tend to pop up in medieval allegories to remind young knights of their mortality.” Kirby concluded his review with a ringing endorsement: “In Amy Gerstler I trust.”

The world has been slow to react to the case of Saw Wai, the imprisoned Burmese poet who was arrested two years ago for publishing a love poem for Valentine’s Day with a secret message critical of Burma’s military dictator, Than Shwe. But the story refuses to die, and the anonymously translated poem itself has now been published (in Pen America) and reprinted (in Harper’s, in February 2010). What early journalistic accounts called a “straightforward” or “innocuous” love poem turns out to be something much richer and stranger. Entitled “February 14,” Saw Wai’s poem, which appeared in the Rangoon magazine The Love Journal, was initially said to have been a torch song to the fashion model who rejected the poet but taught him the meaning of love. Nothing of the sort. It exemplifies rather a particular strain of modernist poetry, the leading-edge poems of the 1930s that were aped (and perfected) by the Australian hoax poet Ern Malley. The poem is an acrostic—that is, the first letters of the lines, when read down vertically, spell out a message, and in this case that message is, “General Than Shwe is power crazy.” In Burmese, Than means “million” and Shwe means “gold,” so when Saw Wai concludes his poem with the injunction “Millions of people / Who know how to love / Please clap your gilded hands / And laugh out loud,” he is secretly urging his compatriots to laugh the “power crazy” head of the junta off the stage. It took courage to write these lines. It also took an extraordinary talent for modern poetry considered as a kind of cipher, and the result in its English translation might be read as either a brief for the methods of modernism or a textbook illustration of what Nicholson Baker would have us see as the tempting dangers of the non-rhyming, prose-saturated “plum”:

Arensberg said:¹

Only once you have experienced deep pain

And madness

And like an adolescent

Thought the blurred photo of a model

Great art

Can you call it heartbreak.

Millions of people

Who know how to love

Please clap your gilded hands

And laugh out loud.

¹. Walter Conrad Arensberg, the noted art collector and donor of great paintings to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, wrote The Cryptography of Shakespeare (1922), purporting to find, in the Bard’s plays, anagrams and acrostics that prove Francis Bacon’s authorship. Arensberg wrote symbolist-influenced poetry, but it is conceivable that spurious cryptography is his real contribution to the radical element in modern poetry.

", "wears.synopsis": "

AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of The Best American Poetry. The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise GlÜck, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also presents poems that poignantly capture the current moment, such as the sonnets John Updike wrote to chronicle his dying weeks. And there are exciting poems from a constellation of rising stars: Bob Hicok, Terrance Hayes, Denise Duhamel, Dean Young, and Elaine Equi, to name a very few.

Dick Allen
• John Ashbery
• Sandra Beasley
• Mark Bibbins
• Todd Boss
• Fleda Brown
• Anne Carson
• Tom Clark
• David Clewell
• Michael Collier
• Billy Collins
• Dennis Cooper
• Kate Daniels
• Peter Davis
• Tim Dlugos
• Denise Duhamel
• Thomas Sayers Ellis
• Lynn Emanuel
• Elaine Equi
• Jill Alexander Essbaum
• B. H. Fairchild
• Vievee Francis
• Louise GlÜck
• Albert Goldbarth
• Amy Glynn Greacen
• Sonia Greenfield
• Kelle Groom
• Gabriel Gudding
• Kimiko Hahn
• Barbara Hamby
• Terrance Hayes
• Bob Hicok
• Rodney Jones
• Michaela Kahn
• Brigit Pegeen Kelly
• Corinne Lee
• Hailey Leithauser
• Dolly Lemke
• Maurice Manning
• Adrian Matejka
• Shane McCrae
• Jeffrey McDaniel
• W. S. Merwin
• Sarah Murphy
• Eileen Myles
• Camille Norton
• Alice Notley
• Sharon Olds
• Gregory Pardlo
• Lucia Perillo
• Carl Phillips
• Adrienne Rich
• James Richardson
• J. Allyn Rosser
• James Schuyler
• Tim Seibles
• David Shapiro
• Charles Simic
• Frank Stanford
• Gerald Stern
• Stephen Campbell Sutherland
• James Tate
• David Trinidad
• Chase Twichell
• John Updike
• Derek Walcott
• G. C. Waldrep
• J. E. Wei
• Dara Wier
• Terence Winch
• Catherine Wing
• Mark Wunderlich
• Matthew Yeager
• Dean Young
• Kevin Young

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "48": { "wears.id": 48, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 48, "wears.title": "Classic Slave Narratives: The Life of Olaudah Equiano, The History of Mary Prince, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl", "wears.author": "Henry Louis Gates Jr.", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor), Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince", "wears.title_slug": "classic-slave-narratives", "wears.author_slug": "henry-louis-gates-jr", "wears.isbn13": 9780451528247, "wears.isbn10": 451528247, "wears.price": "$1.99", "wears.format": "Mass Market Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "January 2002", "wears.edition": "Reissue", "wears.subjects": "Slavery - Social Sciences, Slave Narratives & Biographies, Historical Figures - Women's Biography, African American Women's Biography, African American Political & Historical Biography", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 688, "wears.dimensions": "4.36 (w) x 7.08 (h) x 1.48 (d)", "wears.overview": "

No group of slaves anywhere, in any era, has left such prolific testimony to the horror of bondage as African-American slaves. Here are four of the most notable narratives: The Life of Olaudah Equiano; The History of Mary Prince; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass; and Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl.

\n\n\n

Along with the writings of Frederick Douglas and Olaudah Equiano, this anthology includes the writings of women slaves Harriet Jacobs and Mary Prince.\n

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Selected Bibliography A Note on the Texts

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "49": { "wears.id": 49, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 49, "wears.title": "The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009", "wears.author": "Dave Eggers", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Dave Eggers (Editor), Marjane Satrapi", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-nonrequired-reading-2009", "wears.author_slug": "dave-eggers", "wears.isbn13": 9780547241609, "wears.isbn10": 547241607, "wears.price": "$14.39", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "October 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 432, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 1.20 (d)", "wears.overview": "

This \"great volume\" highlights the \"very best of this year's fiction, nonfiction, alternative comics, screenplys, blogs and more\" (OK!). Compiled by Dave Eggers and students from his San Francisco writing center, it is \"both uproarious and illuminating\" (Publishers Weekly).

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From the Publisher

\"...zesty...a terrific hodgepodge of essays, satirical pieces, short fiction, lists and comics\"—The Cleveland Plain Dealer\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "50": { "wears.id": 50, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 50, "wears.title": "In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction", "wears.author": "Lee Gutkind", "wears.author_bio": "

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the literary journal Creative Nonfiction and a pioneer in the field of narrative nonfiction. Writer-in-residence at Arizona State University, Gutkind is also the editor of In Fact, the author of Almost Human, and has written books about baseball, health care, travel, and technology.

Annie Dillard is a noted novelist and poet.

", "wears.authors": "Lee Gutkind (Editor), Annie Dillard", "wears.title_slug": "in-fact", "wears.author_slug": "lee-gutkind", "wears.isbn13": 9780393326659, "wears.isbn10": 393326659, "wears.price": "$15.24", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "November 2004", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Journalism - Collections & History, American Essays, Nonfiction Writing - General & Miscellaneous, American Literature Anthologies, Journalism - General & Miscellaneous", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 480, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 1.20 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Twenty-five arresting selections from the groundbreaking journal that defined a genre.

Creative nonfiction, also known as narrative nonfiction, liberated journalism by inviting writers to dramatize, interpret, speculate, and even re-create their subjects. Lee Gutkind collects twenty-five essays that flourished on this new ground, all originally published in the journal he founded, Creative Nonfiction, now celebrating its tenth anniversary. Lauren Slater is a therapist in the institution where she was once a patient. John Edgar Wideman reacts passionately to the unjust murder of Emmett Till. Charles Simic tells of wild nights with Uncle Boris. John McPhee creates a rare, personal, album quilt. Terry Tempest Williams speaks on the decline of the prairie dog. Madison Smartt Bell invades Haiti. Many of the writers are crossing genres—from poetry and fiction to nonfiction—symbolic of Creative Nonfiction's scope and popularity. A cross section of the famous and those bound to become so, this collection is a riveting experience highlighting the expanding importance of this dramatic and exciting new genre.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Twenty-five arresting selections from the groundbreaking journal that defined a genre.

", "wears.toc": "

	Introduction : notes for young writers
	The creative nonfiction police?
	Three spheres	3
	Looking at Emmett Till	24
	Shunned	49
	An album quilt	71
	Dinner at Uncle Boris's	85
	Prayer dogs	92
	What is it we really harvestin' here?	109
	The brown study	119
	Killing wolves	133
	Being Brians	163
	Language at play	174
	Finders keepers : the story of Joey Coyle	189
	Notes from a difficult case	226
	Adventures in celestial navigation	245
	Leaving Babylon : a walk through the Jewish divorce ceremony	269
	Gray area : thinking with a damaged brain	288
	Joe stopped by	307
	In the woods	318
	Sa'm Pedi	331
	Going native	356
	Chimera	368
	Mixed-blood stew	382
	Why I ride	395
	Delivering Lily	419

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "51": { "wears.id": 51, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 51, "wears.title": "The Best American Essays of the Century", "wears.author": "Joyce Carol Oates", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Atwan", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-essays-of-the-century", "wears.author_slug": "joyce-carol-oates", "wears.isbn13": 9780618155873, "wears.isbn10": 618155872, "wears.price": "$14.84", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "October 2001", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "American Essays, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 624, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.
\n From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.

", "wears.excerpt": "Foreword
\nThe Essay in the Twentieth Century
\nWhen I was very young, my father purchased a small, uniform set of
\ncheap literary classics. Why, I never knew. He was not a reader.
\nPerhaps he had been duped by a door-to-door salesman. Perhaps he had
\naspirations for his children. The books crowded the only bookshelf in
\na cramped two-family house hedged in by humming factories on a narrow
\nstreet that dead-ended into the mysterious and spectacular sumac-
\nlined banks of the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. As a result
\nof his once-in-a-lifetime purchase I grew up with the privilege of
\nknowing that Emerson was not merely the name of a television set.
\n
\nI found Emerson's message bracing and liberating. I can see
\nit now as self-help elevated to the highest literary standard, but
\nreading \"Self-Reliance\" as an adolescent I simply took heart from his
\nexhortations to resist conformity, trust in oneself, and not feel
\npressured by conventions, parties, and authority: \"I am ashamed to
\nthink how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large
\nsocieties and dead institutions,\" he said. \"If I know your sect, I
\nanticipate your argument,\" he said. \"Insist on yourself; never
\nimitate,\" he said. He warned about the physical pain of forced smiles
\nand acknowledged the advantages of being misunderstood. If the
\nwritings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides comprised a
\nGuide for the Perplexed, Emerson's essays provided a Guide for the
\nIntimidated. His independent, freethinking, inquisitive mind shaped
\nAmerican thought and writing, and his spiritual heirsinvented the
\ntwentieth-century essay.
\nAlthough Emerson may be said to hover over the volume, his
\npresence can be detected more directly in one of his most prominent
\ndescendants, William James. Although this selection of great American
\nessays begins in 1901, one could argue that the symbolic origins of
\nthe twentieth-century essay go back to the day in 1842 when Emerson
\nwas invited by the James family to visit their New York apartment
\nand \"bless\" young William in his cradle. As a teacher, lecturer,
\nphysician, scientist, and one of the founders of modern psychology,
\nWilliam James would exert a powerful influence over the new century.
\nTwo of his students, W.E.B. Du Bois and Gertrude Stein, would
\npermanently alter the course of the American essay by initiating two
\nnew modes of literary introspection: Du Bois's \"double-consciousness\"
\ngrounded in racial identity and Stein's experiments with \"stream of
\nconsciousness.\" Both originated in the critical first decade of the
\ncentury, and their literary legacies can be felt throughout this
\ncollection.
\nThe twentieth-century essay also emerged from a resistance to
\nthe \"familiar\" or \"polite\" essay that had been a literary staple of
\nthe preceding era. Proper, congenial, Anglophilic, the genteel essay
\nsurvived, even against the skepticism and irascibility of the Mark
\nTwains, Randolph Bournes, and H. L. Menckens, who did their best to
\nbury it. By the 1930s, however, some writers were lamenting its
\ndemise, and in the most curious metaphors. \"The familiar essay, that
\nlavender-scented little old lady of literature, has passed away,\" one
\nwrote, regretting that magazines now filled their pages with \"crisp
\narticles, blatant exposés, or statistic-laden surveys,\" and
\nconcluding that one day \"her pale ghost will not appear at all, and
\nthe hard young sociologists can have her pages all to themselves.\"
\nBut the \"pale ghost\" did not vanish all at once. It lived on in
\ncollege courses and gave the essay a bad name for decades. The goal
\nof English teachers, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut recalls, was to get
\nyou \"to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.\"
\nThis collection features none of those \"lavender-scented\"
\nessays, not even for historical reasons. Our object was not to
\nconstruct a Museum of the American Essay. Although some vestiges
\nof \"gentility\" or essayistic \"leisure\" may have seeped in here and
\nthere, the ruling idea behind the volume was that the essays should
\nspeak to the present, not merely represent the past. So you will find
\nmore \"hard young sociologists\" here than \"cultivated\" literati. After
\nall, some of those young social scientists were Jane Addams, Zora
\nNeale Hurston, and a youthful Saul Bellow, who happened to be
\nstudying sociology and anthropology at Northwestern at precisely the
\nsame time the genteel essayists were lamenting their own demise. The
\nsociologists, accompanied by such self-taught social critics as
\nEdmund Wilson, Richard Wright, and James Agee, brought the essay out
\nof the library and into the American factories, city streets,
\ncourthouses, and tenant farms. For many of them, ardent pacifists and
\nreformers, writing essays would amount to what James called \"the
\nmoral equivalent of war.\"
\nUnlike their predecessors, twentieth-century essayists were
\neager to confront inner as well as outer strife. To be sure, the
\ngenteel essay was personal, but no matter how \"familiar,\" it always
\npolitely stopped short of full disclosure. Here, too, William James
\nmade his presence felt. The brilliant chapters \"The Divided Self\"
\nand \"The Sick Soul\" in his monumental The Varieties of Religious
\nExperience (1902) would become a valuable resource for essayists
\nseeking ways to articulate despair, breakdowns, aberrant states of
\nconsciousness, psychic confusion, the ineffable in general. F. Scott
\nFitzgerald's famous observation in \"The Crack-Up\" - \"The test of a
\nfirst-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in
\nthe mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function\" -
\n laid out a course for future essayists and expanded the
\npossibilities of self-disclosure. As writers began amplifying the
\npersonal essay into what is now known singularly as \"the memoir,\" the
\nprocesses of confession would know no limits.
\nWhat next? Will this new century reject our \"best\" essays as
\ndramatically as the twentieth discarded those of James Russell Lowell
\nand Oliver Wendell Holmes? The 1890s, too, saw astonishing changes in
\ntechnology, rapid changes that frightened Henry Adams as he wondered
\nwhat the \"Law of Acceleration\" would finally lead to. We have reached
\nhis speculative end point - visionary though he was, he never
\nimagined a world transformed by electronics. The Internet is already
\ngenerating new sources of essays. Will it somehow channel the usual
\nprocesses of prose into new literary forms the way some thought the
\ntypewriter had once done? Will young essayists discover audiences
\nwithout having to sweat through the hundreds of rejection slips James
\nThurber received before he could break into print? And will they do
\nwhat few from any century have ever done: make a living writing
\nessays? These remain to be seen, but what I think we can say for
\ncertain is that whatever new forms the essay takes, if they are
\nwonderful, they will have the blessing of William James and his
\nlegitimate heirs.
\n
\nAbout This Collection
\nThis volume is not a \"best of the best.\" I founded The Best American
\nEssays series in 1986, and therefore Joyce Carol Oates and I had only
\na small slice of the century to provide us with essays that had
\nalready achieved an annual \"best\" status. Only seven of the essays in
\nthis volume come from the series. We wish we could have included many
\nmore of the superb contemporary writers who have contributed to the
\nyearly books, but it was of course not possible. Our consolation is
\nthat their work is still accessible to readers and that the annual
\nbooks are for the most part available in libraries and bookstores. It
\nwas important that we include writers from previous generations who
\nmay not be well known to today's readers and who in our opinion still
\nvery much deserve an audience.
\nI proceeded with this book in much the same way that I have
\nwith the annual volumes. I screened a good number of essays - though
\nfar, far more than usual - and turned them over to Joyce Carol Oates
\nfor a final decision. There were hundreds of essays to consider and
\nso little space. But we winnowed and winnowed and arrived at these
\nfifty-five. We tried to include the best of as many different kinds
\nof essay as possible - personal, critical, philosophical, humorous,
\npastoral, autobiographical, scientific, documentary, political.
\nObviously we had to pull back in many cases. A comparable volume
\ncould be assembled to showcase each one of these categories. I also
\nexercised one final choice: I insisted that Oates's essay from The
\nBest American Essays 1996, \"They All Just Went Away,\" be included.
\n \"Essays end up in books,\" Susan Sontag writes, \"but they
\nstart their lives in magazines.\" That fact may not interest many
\nreaders, but it played a large role in the research for this book,
\nsince between an essay's debut in a periodical and its inclusion in a
\ncollection, a good deal of revision often occurs. Vladimir Nabokov's
\nmemoir of his father, for example, went through three very distinct
\npublishing stages. It began life as \"The Perfect Past\" in The New
\nYorker in 1950, but Nabokov, dissatisfied with some of the editing,
\nreturned to his original typescript when he included (and expanded)
\nit as the opening chapter of his 1951 autobiography, Conclusive
\nEvidence. When he revised that book as Speak, Memory: An
\nAutobiography Revisited in 1966, he expanded the essay yet again. Of
\nthe three published versions, we chose - as we did with many of the
\nselections - to reprint the final version, as it would reflect and
\nrespect the author's final decisions. But in some instances
\n(consistency \"is the hobgoblin of little minds,\" Emerson said), we
\nselected the first or a different published version.
\nSome essays start out looking like essays only to reemerge in
\nunexpected contexts. James Agee's lovely childhood
\nreminiscence, \"Knoxville: Summer of 1915,\" started out in Partisan
\nReview in 1938 but was given a new twist when an editor cleverly
\nborrowed and italicized it in 1957 to serve as the introduction to
\nAgee's posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family. Other
\nessays in this book were also put to service by their authors to
\nintroduce works of fiction: Richard Wright's \"The Ethics of Living
\nJim Crow\" became the preface to his collection of stories Uncle Tom's
\nChildren, and N. Scott Momaday's \"The Way to Rainy Mountain\" now
\nserves as the prologue to his popular novel of the same title.
\nI discovered that there is rarely only one version of an
\nessay. Susan Sontag's useful observation sometimes gets reversed: an
\nessay starts out in book form and ends up in a magazine. Several
\nessays in this volume were skillfully carved out of books and re-
\ncreated either by their authors or a magazine's editors as
\nindependent essays. Usually, what's required is the removal of the
\ninterstitial glue that connects a book's separate chapters. For
\nexample, the opening sections of Maya Angelou's 1970 memoir, I Know
\nWhy the Caged Bird Sings, were transformed into a memorable childhood
\nreminiscence of the same title in Harper's Magazine.
\nBecause essays may go through so many publishing variations,
\nsettling on a precise date for each selection was no easy matter. I
\nproceeded largely case by case. Nabokov's 1966 essay on his father
\nwas so transformed from its 1950 origins that it seemed only
\nreasonable to use the later date. So, too, I decided to use the final
\npublication date for John Muir's Alaskan adventures with his
\nunforgettable companion Stickeen; it was that version, and not the
\nearlier and now forgotten essay, that became his most popular work.
\nBut occasionally I thought it would be misleading to use the final
\ndate of publication. Langston Hughes's \"Bop,\" for example, clearly
\ncomes out of the forties; though it was revised considerably for
\nsubsequent book publication, to place it in a later decade would
\ndistort its contemporary flavor. An essay like Mark Twain's \"Corn-
\npone Opinions,\" never published in the author's lifetime, is listed
\nby date of composition.
\nFor the reader's convenience, I have attached brief notes to
\neach essay outlining its publishing history and supplying relevant
\ncontextual information. I have placed an asterisk before the source
\nused for this collection. I have also translated foreign words and
\nphrases within brackets when it seemed necessary. Additional
\ninformation is contained in the Biographical Notes in the back of the
\nbook, where I included pertinent information on the writer's career,
\nrelevant details to establish a context for the selected essay, and
\ntitles of books and collections (with the emphasis on nonfiction)
\nthat will direct interested readers to more books by that writer.
\nWriters and magazine editors interested in submitting
\npublished essays for the annual volumes should send complimentary
\nissues, subscriptions, or appropriate material to Robert Atwan,
\nSeries Editor, The Best American Essays, Box 220, Readville,
\nMassachusetts 02137-9998. Criteria and guidelines can be found in the
\nannual book.
\nAcknowledgments
\nAs I researched books and periodicals for this unprecedented volume,
\nI often felt like Henry Adams, poised at the crossroads of two time
\nperiods: the rapidly accelerating age of cyberspace that instantly
\nfurnishes vast amounts of information and the old-fashioned era of
\ndim library stacks and dusty, out-of-print books. The experience was
\nboth high-tech and low-tech. If it was satisfying to sit at my desk
\nand click a few keys for immediate access to material that only a few
\nyears ago would have required frequent library visits, it was even
\nmore satisfying to hold in my hand hardcover first editions of books
\nlike Martin Luther King's Why We Can't Wait or H. L. Mencken's
\nPrejudices. Even obtaining these books involved travel in both
\nworlds: through the Internet I could enter my local library's
\nregional network, discover books it didn't own, and conveniently
\norder them online. A day or two later - and sometimes within hours -
\nI would be experiencing the tactile and intellectual pleasures of
\nhandling some of the treasured pieces of our literary heritage. For
\ntheir invaluable assistance, then, I want to thank especially the
\nstaff of the Milton Public Library as well as all the other
\ninstitutions connected with the Old Colony Library Network in
\nMassachusetts.
\nWhat I was unable to find, my researcher could. Much of the
\nknottier research - establishing the original source or date of an
\nessay, or tracking down an elusive periodical - was performed by
\nDonna Ashley, who relied on the superb resources of the libraries at
\nthe Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston University, Boston
\nCollege, and the Boston Public Library. Nearly all of the source
\nnotes attached to each essay derive from her dogged research; without
\nher assistance this project might have taken another year to
\ncomplete. I want to thank, too, Arthur Johnson for his generous help
\nin providing permissions data for all of the essays. I borrowed a
\ngood deal of biographical information about the essayists from some
\nof my previous anthologies and would like to thank a few coeditors
\nfor their contributions: Martha Banta, Bruce Forer, Justin Kaplan,
\nDonald McQuade, David Minter, Jon Roberts, Robert Stepto, and William
\nVesterman. I'm enormously grateful to Charles H. Christensen for his
\nadvice and encouragement over the years. The Houghton Mifflin staff
\nhas been helpful and supportive as always, and I'd like to thank
\nJanet Silver, Sean Lawler, Larry Cooper, Bridget Marmion, Dean
\nJohnson, and Bruce Cantley for all their efforts. My wife, Hélène
\nAtwan, kindly read over portions of the manuscript and offered many
\nvaluable suggestions for which I am very grateful. Finally, it was a
\ngreat pleasure to work once again with Joyce Carol Oates. Her broad
\nknowledge of American writing and her literary judgment transformed
\nwhat seemed like a paralyzing critical task - reducing several
\nhundred great essays to a mere fifty-five - into a spirited,
\nilluminating assessment of the modern American essayist's struggle to
\nencompass the creative energies and social emergencies of a century
\nthat had no shortage of either.
\nRobert Atwan
\n
\nIntroduction
\nThe Art of the (American) Essay
\nHere is a history of America told in many voices.
\nIt's an elliptical tale, or a compendium of tales, of the
\nAmerican twentieth century by way of individual essays that, fitting
\ntogether into a kind of mobile mosaic, suggest where we've come from,
\nand who we are, and where we are going. In his probing,
\nprovocative \"The Creation Myth of Cooperstown,\" Stephen Jay Gould
\nasks: \"Why do we prefer creation myths to evolutionary stories?\" The
\nmore we know of history, of both the natural and the civilized
\nworlds, the more we understand that our tangled lives are ever
\nevolving, and that our culture, far from being timeless, is a living
\nexpression of Time.
\nThe essay, in its directness and intimacy, in its first-
\nperson authority, is the ideal literary form to convey such a vision.
\nBy tradition essays have been categorized as formal or informal; yet
\nit can be argued that all essays are an expression of the human voice
\naddressing an imagined audience, seeking to shift opinion, to
\ninfluence judgment, to appeal to another in his or her common
\nhumanity. Even the most artfully composed essay suggests a
\nnaturalness of discourse. As our precursor Montaigne advised, \"We
\nmust remove the mask.\"
\nThe essays in this volume have all been written by writers
\nwho have published at least one collection of essays or nonfiction.
\nNot only did this principle allow the editors a reasonable means of
\nlimiting selections, it is an acknowledgment that writing is a
\nvocation, not merely an avocation. In a historical overview of a
\ncentury virtually teeming with talent, I wanted to honor those
\nwriters who have made writing their life's work. I didn't see my role
\nas one to reward the lucky amateur who writes a single good essay,
\nthen disappears forever. Better to search for little-known but
\nexcellent essays by, for instance, writers of historical significance
\nlike John Jay Chapman, Jane Addams, Edmund Wilson. Most of the essays
\nare \"informal\"; but this isn't to suggest that they are innocent,
\nunmediated utterances lacking the stratagems of art. Even Mark
\nTwain's \"Corn-pone Opinions,\" delivered in the author's
\ncharacteristic forthright voice, is driven by a passionate
\nintellectual conviction regarding the gullibility of mankind and the
\ntragic consequences of this gullibility.
\nMy general theme in the assemblage of this volume has been a
\nsearch for the expression of personal experience within the
\nhistorical, the individual talent within the tradition (to paraphrase
\nT. S. Eliot). My preference was always to essays that, springing from
\nintense personal experience, are nonetheless significantly linked to
\nlarger issues, even if, as in the case of James Thurber and S. J.
\nPerelman, these issues are viewed playfully. The emotion I felt when
\nbeginning to read most of the essays gathered here was one of great
\nexcitement and anticipation; even, at times, a distinct visceral
\nthrill. As an editor, I am primarily a reader. I could not
\ncountenance including essays out of duty's sake that, in fact, I
\nfound deadly dull. For the many essays considered for this volume,
\nthe majority of which ultimately had to be excluded, I was the ideal
\nreader: I wanted to like what I read, and I was committed to reading
\nthe entire essay with sympathy. If you will substitute \"literature\"
\nfor \"poetry\" in this famous remark in a letter of Emily Dickinson's,
\nyou have my basic criterion for the work included in The Best
\nAmerican Essays of the Century: \"If I read a book [and] it makes my
\nwhole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If
\nI feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know
\nthat is poetry.\"
\nAnd what powerful openings in certain of these exemplary
\nessays:
\nWe are met to commemorate the anniversary of one of the most terrible
\ncrimes in history - not for the purpose of condemning it, but to
\nrepent of our share in it.
\n- John Jay Chapman, \"Coatesville\" (1912)
\nThe knowledge of the existence of Devil Baby burst upon the residents
\nof Hull House one day when three Italian women, with an excited rush
\nthrough the door, demanded that he be shown to them.
\n- Jane Addams, \"The Devil Baby at Hull-House\" (1916)
\nOf course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that
\ndo the dramatic side of the work - the big sudden blows that come, or
\nseem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things
\non and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show
\ntheir effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes
\nfrom within - that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything
\nabout it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you
\nwill never be as good a man again.
\n- F. Scott Fitzgerald, \"The Crack-Up\" (1936)
\nThe cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our
\nexistence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of
\ndarkness.
\n- Vladimir Nabokov, \"Perfect Past\" (1950)
\nOn the twenty-ninth of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same
\nday, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before
\nthis, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these
\nevents, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots
\nof the century.
\n- James Baldwin, \"Notes of a Native Son\" (1955)
\nThe decaying, downtown shopping section of Memphis - still another
\nMain Street - lay, the weekend before Martin Luther King's funeral,
\nunder a siege.
\n- Elizabeth Hardwick, \"The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King\" (1968)
\nWe were all strapped into the seats of the Chinook, fifty of us, and
\nsomething, someone was hitting it from the outside with an enormous
\nhammer. How do they do that? I thought, we're a thousand feet in the
\nair!
\n- Michael Herr, \"Illumination Rounds\" (1977)
\nWe tell ourselves stories in order to live.
\n- Joan Didion, \"The White Album\" (1978)
\nOf course there are crucial distinctions between the art of
\nthe essay and the art of prose fiction, yet to the reader the
\nimmediate experience in reading is an engagement with that mysterious
\npresence we call voice. Reading, we \"hear\" another's speech
\nreplicated in our heads as if by magic. Where in life we sometimes
\n(allegedly infrequently) fall in love at first sight, in reading we
\nmay fall in love with the special, singular qualities of another's
\nvoice; we may become mesmerized, haunted; we may be provoked,
\nshocked, illuminated; we may be galvanized into action; we may be
\nenraged, revulsed, and yet! - drawn irresistibly to experience this
\nvoice again, and again. It's a writer's unique employment of language
\nto which we, as readers, are drawn, though we assume we admire the
\nwriter primarily for what he or she \"has to say.\" For consider: how
\nmany intelligent, earnest, right-minded commentators published essays
\non such important subjects as racial conflict in twentieth-century
\nAmerica, social and personal disintegration in the thirties,
\nmorality, democracy, nostalgia-for-a-vanishing-America; class
\nstruggle, civil rights, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Vietnam War, the
\nmystical experience of nature, ethnic diversity, various
\nAmerican \"myths\" - and how few of these are worth rereading, let
\nalone enshrining, in this new century. To be an editor in so massive
\nan undertaking, committed to reading with sympathy countless essays
\nof high worth and distinction published in the most prestigious
\njournals of their era, beginning in about 1900 and sweeping through
\nthe decades, is to experience first-hand that quickening of dread,
\nwhich Nabokov calls mere \"common sense,\" in the realization of human
\nmortality. So many meritorious voices, so much evidence of American
\ngood will and wisdom, and so many fallen by the wayside! There were
\ntimes when I felt as if I were indeed standing at the edge of an
\nabyss, entrusted with rescuing pages of impeccable prose being blown
\npast me into oblivion, preserving what I could, surrendering all the
\nrest. (Those excellent essayists of a bygone time John Muir, Randolph
\nBourne, and John Jay Chapman are preserved here; surrendered to the
\nexigencies of space limitations are John Burroughs, George Santayana,
\nJoseph Wood Krutch, Ellen Glasgow, and others listed in the Appendix.)
\nMy belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort,
\nwe have mass entertainment, and one another. Art should provoke,
\ndisturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we
\nmay not anticipate and may not even wish. Art should certainly aspire
\nto beauty, but there are myriad sorts of beauty: the presentation of
\na subject in the most economical way, for instance; a precise choice
\nof language, of detail. There is beauty in the calibrated ugliness of
\nthe opening of William Gass's meditation on suicide and art, \"The
\nDoomed in Their Sinking,\" because it is so finely calibrated; there
\nis beauty in the eloquent, elegiac expression of hurt, rage, and
\ndespair in James Baldwin's \"Notes of a Native Son,\" because it is
\neloquent and elegiac, in the service of art. That staple of
\ntraditional essay collections, the unhurried musings of a disembodied
\n(Caucasian, male, privileged) consciousness, is missing here, except
\nfor its highest, most lyric expression in E. B. White's classic \"Once
\nMore to the Lake\" and its total transmogrification in Edward
\nHoagland's powerful \"Heaven and Nature\" - which is about neither
\nheaven nor nature. (Hoagland, one of the few American writers who has
\nforged a brilliant career out of essays, is our Chopin of the genre.
\nThough best known for such nature essays as \"The Courage of
\nTurtles,\" \"Red Wolves and Black Bears,\" and \"Earth's Eye,\" in the
\ntradition of Thoreau, Hoagland is equally memorable as a recorder of
\nstartling, confessional utterances of a kind the very private Thoreau
\nwould not have dared.) Though there are deeply moving essays in the
\nnostalgic/musing mode by such fine writers as White, James Agee,
\nEudora Welty, and John Updike, I have given more space to what might
\nbe called a radical expansion of this familiar genre, essays that
\nhave the power of personal nostalgia yet are not sentimental, and in
\nwhich private contemplation touches on crucial public issues, as Zora
\nNeale Hurston's \"How It Feels to Be Colored Me,\" Richard
\nWright's \"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,\" Baldwin's \"Notes of a
\nNative Son,\" Loren Eiseley's \"The Brown Wasps,\" N. Scott
\nMomaday's \"The Way to Rainy Mountain,\" Maya Angelou's \"I Know Why the
\nCaged Bird Sings,\" Richard Rodriguez's \"Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual
\nChildhood,\" and others. If you begin Edmund Wilson's \"The Old Stone
\nHouse\" presuming it to be another nostalgic lament for a vanishing
\nAmerica, you will be shocked by the author's conclusion:
\nAnd what about me? As I come back in the train, I find that - other
\ncauses contributing - my depression of Talcottville deepens. I did
\nnot find the river and the forest of my dream - I did not find the
\nmagic of the past . . . I would not go back to that old life if I
\ncould: the civilization of northern New York - why should I idealize
\nit? - was too lonely, too poor, too provincial.
\nSimilarly, Donald Hall's \"A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails\" is
\nboth a sympathetic portrait of an older relative of the writer's and
\na devastating critique of the romance of American rural eccentricity,
\nthe stock material of how many homespun reminiscences in the Norman
\nRockwell mode:
\n[Washington Woodward] worked hard all his life at being himself, but
\nthere were no principles to examine when his life was over . . . The
\nlife that he could recall totally was not worth recalling; it was a
\nbox of string too short to be saved.
\nApart from being first-rate reportage, Joan Didion's \"The White
\nAlbum\" can be seen as a radical variant of the genre of nostalgia as
\nwell, in which the essayist positions her intimate, interior life
\n(\"an attack of vertigo and nausea does not seem to me an
\ninappropriate response to the summer of 1968\") within the larger,
\nwayward, and \"poorly comprehended\" life of our culture circa 1966-
\n1978, with the defiant conclusion \"writing [this] has not yet helped
\nme to see what it means\": the antithesis of the traditional essay,
\nwhich was organized around a principle, or epiphany, toward which it
\nconfidently moved. So too Michael Herr's \"Illumination Rounds,\" from
\nDispatches, is appropriately ironically titled, for little is finally
\nilluminated in this account of a young American journalist's visit to
\nVietnam in the mid-seventies, at the height of that protracted and
\ntragic war; the techniques of vividly cinematic fiction writing are
\nhere employed in the service of the author's vision, but there is,
\nconspicuously, no \"moral\" - no \"moralizing.\" This is the art of the
\ncontemporary essay, or memoir: a heightened, trompe l'oeil attention
\nto detail that allows the reader to see, hear, witness, as if at
\nfirst hand, what the essayist has witnessed. Though this
\nis \"informal\" writing, there is no lack of form. Postmodernist
\nstrategies of fragmentation and collage have replaced that of
\nexposition, summary, and argument.
\n
\nFor all their diversity, essays tend to fall into three general
\ntypes: those that present opinions primarily, and have been written
\nto \"instruct\"; those that impart information and knowledge; and those
\nthat record personal impressionistic experiences, especially
\nmemories. These categories often overlap, of course, as in the
\noutstanding essays named above, and in recent years, judging from the
\nannual series The Best American Essays, from which essays in this
\nvolume published since 1985 have been taken, the genre has evolved
\ninto a form closely akin to prose fiction and prose poetry, employing
\ndialogue, dramatic scenes, withheld information, suspense.
\nThe essay of opinion, of which Montaigne (1533-1592) was an
\nearly, highly influential master, was for centuries the
\nquintessential essay. Here, you find no dialogue or dramatic scenes,
\nonly a rational, reasoning voice. Such an essay is an argument, often
\ncouched in conversational terms; its intention is to instruct, to
\nilluminate, to influence. Except for editorial and op-ed pages of
\nnewspapers, in which they appear in miniature form, and in a very few
\ngeneral-interest magazines like Harper's and the Atlantic, such
\nessays are not much favored today. In our egalitarian culture we tend
\nto feel, rightly or wrongly, that an essayist's opinion is only as
\ngood as his or her expertise, and in such uncharted areas as ethics,
\nmorals, and general wisdom, whose opinion should be taken more
\nseriously than anyone else's? In the past, however, the gentlemanly
\nart of opinion-offering was commonplace; Ralph Waldo Emerson is the
\nNorth American master of this form. With the publication of \"Nature\"
\nin 1836, Emerson's prestige and influence through the whole of the
\nnineteenth century was incalculable. Here was a brilliant aphoristic-
\nphilosophical mind expressed in an elegantly idiosyncratic language.
\nHenry David Thoreau, Emerson's younger contemporary, combines strong
\nopinions with a wealth of observed information and firsthand
\nexperience in a crystalline, poetic prose, and for this reason seems
\nto us more modern, and far more accessible, than Emerson. There is a
\nrich subcategory of American essays, the confrontation of nature by a
\nrefined, fastidiously observing consciousness, that has descended to
\nus from Thoreau; I would have dearly liked to include more
\npractitioners of this sort but had room for only John Muir, Rachel
\nCarson, Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, and Gretel Ehrlich. (But all
\nthese essays are gems.) In general, our patience tends to wear thin
\nwhen we're confronted with sermonizing in its many forms; I most
\noften encountered such essays among those published in the first four
\nor five decades of the century, when magazines seemed to have
\nunlimited space for rambling, genial prose by men with nothing
\nespecially urgent on their minds apart from platitudes of nature and
\nmorality. Who were the readers of these essays, I wondered. The more
\nelusive the subject, the more verbose the style, as in two
\nfascinating masterpieces of ellipsis, indirection, and irresolution
\nby Henry James at his most baroque, \"Is There a Life after Death?\"
\n(1910) and \"Within the Rim\" (1915). (\"Is There a Life after Death?\"
\nwas initially included in this volume, and then reluctantly excluded;
\nthen included again, and finally excluded. A longtime admirer of
\nHenry James, I wanted badly for him to be represented, but the essay
\nis, one might say, \"Jamesian,\" and long, and could hardly be
\njustified as among the best of the century. And \"Within the Rim,\" on
\nthe apparent theme of war, is even more abstruse.)
\nYet for all their unfashionableness, the opinion essays
\nincluded here are, I think, excellent, and will repay the sort of
\nclose, sympathetic reading required for prose that isn't immediately
\ngripping and specific. Henry Adams's \"A Law of Acceleration,\" from
\nthe classic The Education of Henry Adams, is a bravura work of
\nastonishing intellectual abstraction; written nearly one hundred
\nyears ago, it strikes a disturbingly contemporary note in its somber
\ncontemplation of a mechanistic universe reduced to a series
\nof \"relations\" and mankind itself reduced to \"Motion in a universe of
\nMotions, with an acceleration . . . of vertiginous violence.\" With
\nthe authority of science, Adams says, history has no right to meddle,
\nsince science \"now lay in a plane where scarcely one or two hundred
\nminds in the world could follow its mathematical processes.\"
\nFittingly, William James's famous \"The Moral Equivalent of War\" was
\nwritten in the same year, 1910, as Henry James's \"Is There a Life
\nafter Death?\" Though William James is a far more lucid prose stylist
\nthan his younger brother, both brothers are concerned with profound
\nquestions of life and death; William James broods upon the future of
\ncivilization itself in a prophetic work that looks ahead to Freud's
\nlate, melancholic Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). What is
\nhistory but a bloodbath? \"The horrors make the fascination. War is
\nthe strong life; it is life in extremis; war-taxes are the only ones
\nmen never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.\"
\nJohn Jay Chapman, once considered an essayist of nearly Emerson's
\nstature, is not much read today, yet his passionate meditation upon a
\nnotorious lynching that took place in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in
\n1911 transcends its time and tragic circumstances.
\nThe two most influential literary essays of the twentieth
\ncentury are perhaps T. S. Eliot's \"Tradition and the Individual
\nTalent\" (\"The emotion of art is impersonal\") and Robert Frost's \"The
\nFigure a Poem Makes\" (\"No tears in the writer, no tears in the
\nreader\"); each gains from being read in conjunction with the other.
\nSui generis is Gertrude Stein's \"What Are Master-pieces and Why Are
\nThere So Few of Them,\" itself a masterpiece of polemics, an argument
\nthat convinces by sheer repetition:
\n. . . One has not identity [when] one is in the act of doing
\nanything. Identity is recognition, you know who you are because you
\nand others remember anything about yourself but essentially you are
\nnot that when you are doing anything. I am I because my little dog
\nknows me but, creatively speaking the little dog knowing that you are
\nyou and your recognizing that he knows, is what destroys creation.
\nH. L. Mencken's \"The Hills of Zion\" is, like many of
\nMencken's essays and columns, a passionate repudiation of evangelical
\nChristianity and anti-intellectualism. This is sermonizing disguised
\nas social satire, zestful in its accumulation of damning details; one
\ncan see why the young Negro Richard Wright was so impressed by
\nMencken's example, seeing the older white man as \"fighting, fighting
\nwith words . . . using words as a weapon . . . as one would use a
\nclub.\" Katherine Anne Porter's \"The Future Is Now\" is an almost
\npurely cerebral opinion piece, less compelling perhaps than Porter's
\nelegantly composed short stories, but gracefully argued nonetheless,
\nwhile \"Artists in Uniform,\" one of Mary McCarthy's most anthologized
\nessays, smoothly combines her satirical gifts with her passion for
\nintellectual discourse. Susan Sontag's \"Notes on Camp\" is both
\nopinion essay and cultural criticism of a high order; Adrienne Rich's
\ndramatically fragmented \"Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying\" might
\nbe defined as an essay of opinion in a unique, poetic form. Essays by
\nAlice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, N. Scott Momaday, and Cynthia Ozick
\nadvance arguments by means of an accumulation of memoirist detail,
\nand each presents us with the wonder of how, in Ozick's words, \"a
\nwriter is dreamed and transfigured into being.\" And essays that seem
\nto be primarily concerned with the imparting of information and
\ndescription, like Loren Eiseley's \"The Brown Wasps,\" Tom
\nWolfe's \"Putting Daddy On,\" Elizabeth Hardwick's \"The Apotheosis of
\nMartin Luther King,\" Lewis Thomas's \"The Lives of a Cell,\" Annie
\nDillard's \"Total Eclipse,\" among others, contain arguments of
\nsubtlety and insight. Saul Bellow's \"Graven Images\" is a meditation
\nin the author's characteristic ironic mode on photography as a
\nviolation of personal dignity and privacy and the \"revolutionary
\ntransformation\" of a world that no longer honors such values. John
\nMcPhee's wonderfully original \"The Search for Marvin Gardens\" makes
\nof the popular American board game an allegory of capitalist
\nadventure, and rewards us with the unexpected discovery of the
\nsecluded middle-class bastion Marvin Gardens, the security-
\npatrolled \"suburb within a suburb\" that is one's reward for winning
\nthe game.
\nThe earliest essay in the anthology, Mark Twain's \"Corn-pone
\nOpinions,\" is a superbly modulated argument that begins with an
\nengaging portrait of a young black slave (this is the Missouri of
\nTwain's childhood, in the 1850s) and proceeds to a ringing
\ndenunciation of cultural chauvinism that is as relevant to our time
\nas it was to Twain's:
\nBroadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly
\nspeaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is
\nacquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is
\nconformity.
\nBy which Twain means that deathly conformity that leads to an
\nacceptance of slavery, lynchings, white bigotry, and injustice in a
\nnation constituted as a democracy.
\nTwain's essay strikes a chord that resounds through the
\nanthology: the ever-shifting, ever-evolving issue of race in America.
\nIt can't be an accident that the essays in this volume by men and
\nwomen of ethnic minority backgrounds are outstanding; to paraphrase
\nMelville, to write a \"mighty\" work of prose you must have a \"mighty\"
\ntheme. And what mightier, what more challenging and passionate theme
\nfor both writer and reader than how it feels to be of minority status
\nin America, from the time of W.E.B. Du Bois in the first decade of
\nthe century to our contemporaries Maya Angelou, N. Scott Momaday,
\nMaxine Hong Kingston, Alice Walker, Richard Rodriguez, and Gerald
\nEarly? For historical reasons obviously having to do with slavery,
\nthe experience of blacks in America has been significantly different
\nfrom that of other minorities, and this fact is reflected in the
\nessays included here.
\nW.E.B. Du Bois's \"Of the Coming of John,\" from The Souls of
\nBlack Folk (1903), is a chillingly prophetic work that traces the
\nintellectual and spiritual evolution of a seemingly ordinary black
\nboy from southeastern Georgia who is sent north to be educated in a
\nNegro school, returns after seven years to his hometown so thoroughly
\nchanged that he seems more foreign to his former relatives and
\nneighbors than a Georgian white man would be, and is given advice by
\nthe kindly white Judge:
\n\". . . You and I both know, John, that in this country the Negro must
\nremain subordinate, and can never expect to be the equal of white
\nmen. In their place, you people can be honest and respectful; and God
\nknows, I'll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse
\nnature . . . by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every
\nNigger in the land.\"
\nZora Neale Hurston in \"How It Feels to Be Colored Me\" (1928) defines
\nherself very differently from Du Bois's tragic protagonist, partly
\nbecause she has been raised in a \"colored town\" in Florida,
\nEatonville. Her defiance strikes us as courageous, and touching:
\nAt certain times I have no race, I am me . . . Sometimes, I feel
\ndiscriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely
\nastonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my
\ncompany! It's beyond me.
\nRichard Wright's \"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical
\nSketch,\" the preface to Wright's 1938 collection of novellas, Uncle
\nTom's Children, would become a section of his heralded Black Boy
\n(1945). Wright's education in Jim Crow \"wisdom\" begins ironically
\nwith a beating his mother gives him for having dared to fight with
\nwhite boys, and carries him into a prematurely cynical adolescence;
\nit's a vision of the American South contiguous with that of New York
\nCity in the 1940s experienced by Langston Hughes.
\nPerhaps the preeminent essayist of the American twentieth
\ncentury is James Baldwin, and it seems fitting that Baldwin wrote his
\nmost powerful and influential nonfiction works, Notes of a Native
\nSon, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time, at about
\nmidcentury. Baldwin was a natural master of a kind of nonfiction
\nnarration we associate with the most engaging fiction, in which
\npersonal, familial experience is linked with a larger social and
\npolitical context that enhances it as myth. Like his mentor Richard
\nWright, James Baldwin was a poet of irony; his bitterness and rage at
\nsocial injustice was so finely distilled, his use of language so
\nimpassioned and fluent, he made of the most tragically debased
\nmaterials a world of startling beauty. Baldwin's is a secular
\nmystical vision that seems to us quintessentially American:
\nAll of my [newly deceased] father's texts and songs, which I had
\ndecided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like
\nempty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them
\nfor me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped . . . The dead
\nman mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not
\nmatter; to believe they did was to acquiesce in one's own
\ndestruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to
\ndestroy the man who hated and this man was an immutable law.
\nThis is the vision of Martin Luther King, Jr., expressed in
\nhis historic 1963 \"Letter from Birmingham Jail\": \"One who breaks an
\nunjust law must do it openly, lovingly . . . and with a willingness
\nto accept the penalty.\"
\n
\nRobert Atwan, who has been an invaluable series editor for the highly
\nregarded The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986,
\nassisted me tirelessly and with inspiration in our months-long effort
\nof sifting through any and all essays that were possibilities for
\nthis anthology. We have been limited, or, one might say, assisted, in
\nour selections only since 1986, being obliged to choose essays from
\nthe series anthology after that date; before 1986, we had no
\nrestrictions. Our decision to reprint essays only by writers who have
\npublished nonfiction books helped to limit our search, as did our
\nexclusion of journalism, excepting unique reportage like
\nHemingway's \"Pamplona in July\" and Michael Herr's \"Illumination
\nRounds.\" We hoped to avoid prose fiction in essay form, though such
\nprose pieces as W.E.B. Du Bois's \"Of the Coming of John\" and Langston
\nHughes's \"Bop\" certainly employ fictional techniques; we excluded
\nliterary criticism - though some of our finest writers, like Randall
\nJarrell, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling, have excelled in it -
\nand footnote-laden academic essays for a limited readership, even by
\nHannah Arendt. Much as I wanted to include Henry James, as I've noted
\nabove, I could not justify reprinting a long, convoluted skein of
\nwords that few readers would read. Nor could I include another major
\ntwentieth-century writer, Willa Cather, whose available essays were
\nsimply inappropriate, and lengthy. Of Norman Mailer's nonfiction
\nwork, \"The Fight\" would have been my choice for this volume, but it's
\nbook length (and has already appeared in The Best American Sports
\nWriting of the Century); other essays of Mailer's, like \"The White
\nNegro,\" controversial in their time, are badly dated today. Gay
\nTalese, a brilliant practitioner of what has come to be known as New
\nJournalism, has written no \"essays\" per se. William Carlos Williams,
\nRalph Ellison, John Hersey, Wallace Stegner, Barbara Tuchman, Gore
\nVidal, most painfully William Faulkner: these important writers had
\nno single appropriate essay. Faulkner in particular seems to have had
\nlittle aptitude, or perhaps inspiration, for the essay form.
\nOf contemporary essayists there are so many - so very many! -
\nwho might well be included here, it isn't possible to list their
\nnames except in the Appendix. Quite apart from the numerous memoirs
\nof high quality being written today, and published to much acclaim,
\nthis is a remarkably fruitful era for the personal essay. The
\ntriumph, one might say, of the mysterious pronoun \"I.\"
\nIt was the aim of the editors to tell a more or less
\nchronological story of America as the century unfolded, with
\nrepresentative essays from each decade, as we have done; yet, the
\nreader will note, the traumatic experiences of World War II, vividly
\ndescribed by William Manchester in \"Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of
\nAll,\" does not appear in the forties but decades later, in 1987; and
\nnumerous other essays, stimulated by memory and meditation, have been
\nwritten years after the occasion of their subjects. The ideal essay,
\nin any case, is as timeless as any work of art, transcending the
\ncircumstances of its inception. It moves, as Robert Frost says of the
\nideal poem, from delight to wisdom, and \"rides on its own melting,\"
\nlike ice on a hot stove.
\nJoyce Carol Oates
\n
\nCopyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company
\nIntroduction copyright © 2000 by The Ontario Review Inc.
\nAll rights reserved", "wears.synopsis": "

This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience.
From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.

Publishers Weekly

\"Here is a history of America told in many voices,\" declares Oates in her introduction, revealing the heart of her intelligent and incisive collection of 55 essays by American writers. Never attempting to capture or replicate a single, authentic \"American identity,\" this collection succeeds by producing a comprehensive and multifaceted look at what America has been and, by extension, what it is and might become. While it's not explicitly political, the volume's multicultural intentions are visible. Beginning with \"Cone-pone Opinions,\" a 1901 Mark Twain essay that uses the wisdom of an African-American child as its central image, Oates has fashioned a collection that calls attention to the way that \"America\" is made up of competing, and often antagonistic, cultural and social visions. There is not only the apparent contrast between the populist, overtly political visions of W.E.B. Du Bois's \"Of the Coming of John,\" James Baldwin's \"Notes of a Native Son\" and Mary McCarthy's \"Artists in Uniform\" and the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot's \"Tradition and the Individual Talent.\" Oates has managed to find numerous pieces whose vision and philosophy resonate with one another without becoming homogeneous, so Gretel Ehrlich's meditation on pastoral aesthetics in \"The Solace of Open Spaces\" contrasts abruptly and ingeniously with Susan Sontag's urban-centered \"Notes on Camp.\" In all, Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities. QPB and History Book Club selections; BOMC alternate. (Sept.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

", "wears.toc": "

	Foreword	x
	Introduction	xvii
	1901: Corn-pone Opinions	1
	1903: Of the Coming of John	6
	1906: A Law of Acceleration	20
	1909: Stickeen	28
	1910: The Moral Equivalent of War	45
	1911: The Handicapped	57
	1912: Coatesville	71
	1916: The Devil Baby at Hull-House	75
	1919: Tradition and the Individual Talent	90
	1923: Pamplona in July	98
	1925: The Hills of Zion	107
	1928: How It Feels to Be Colored Me	114
	1933: The Old Stone House	118
	1935: What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them	131
	1936: The Crack-Up	139
	1937: Sex Ex Machina	153
	1937: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch	159
	1938: Knoxville: Summer of 1915	171
	1939: The Figure a Poem Makes	176
	1941: Once More to the Lake	179
	1944: Insert Flap \"A\" and Throw Away	186
	1949: Bop	190
	1950: The Future Is Now	193
	1953: Artists in Uniform	199
	1955: The Marginal World	214
	1955: Notes of a Native Son	220
	1956: The Brown Wasps	239
	1957: A Sweet Devouring	246
	1961: A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails	252
	1963: Letter from Birmingham Jail	263
	1964: Putting Daddy On	280
	1964: Notes on \"Camp\"	288
	1966: Perfect Past	303
	1967: The Way to Rainy Mountain	313
	1968: The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King	319
	1969: Illumination Rounds	327
	1970: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings	342
	1971: The Lives of a Cell	358
	1972: The Search for Marvin Gardens	361
	1972: The Doomed in Their Sinking	373
	1975: No Name Woman	383
	1975: Looking for Zora	395
	1977: Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying	412
	1979: The White Album	421
	1980: Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood	447
	1981: The Solace of Open Spaces	467
	1982: Total Eclipse	477
	1982: A Drugstore in Winter	490
	1987: Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All	497
	1988: Heaven and Nature	507
	1989: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown	520
	1990: Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant	532
	1993: The Disposable Rocket	549
	1995: They All Just Went Away	553
	1997: Graven Images	564
	Biographical Notes	569
Appendix	Notable Twentieth-Century American Literary Nonfiction	591

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

Bookseller Reviews \n

These essays educate us, amuse us, startle us with their immediacy. Who among us can read Henry Adam's \"A Law of Acceleration,\" penned in 1904, and not think of our mind-zapping digital age? Who could resist the first sentence of Zora Neale Hurston's piece:I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.\" And which of you could disagree with the unrepeatable wisdom of Gertrude Stein's \"The tradition has always been that you may more or less describe the things that happen nowadays everybody all day long knows what is happening and so what is happening is not really interesting.\"

The essays that Joyce Carol Oates has selected linger with us, not because their authors (from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King), retain their fame, but because each piece is a talisman, irreducible and well-carved. James Age's prose-poems \"Knoxville, Summer of 1915\" appeals to us today just as it inspired composer Samuel Barber decades ago, and two thirds of a century have only enhanced the thrall of the languorous rhythms of Edmund Wilson's \"The Old Stone House.\" H.L. Mencken's article on the 1925 Scopes trial shames this week's pale convention prose with its freshness, and T.S. Eliot's 1919 \"Tradition and The Individual Talent\" still has something to teach us.

\n\n\n

\n\n

Publishers Weekly\n - Publisher's Weekly\n

\"Here is a history of America told in many voices,\" declares Oates in her introduction, revealing the heart of her intelligent and incisive collection of 55 essays by American writers. Never attempting to capture or replicate a single, authentic \"American identity,\" this collection succeeds by producing a comprehensive and multifaceted look at what America has been and, by extension, what it is and might become. While it's not explicitly political, the volume's multicultural intentions are visible. Beginning with \"Cone-pone Opinions,\" a 1901 Mark Twain essay that uses the wisdom of an African-American child as its central image, Oates has fashioned a collection that calls attention to the way that \"America\" is made up of competing, and often antagonistic, cultural and social visions. There is not only the apparent contrast between the populist, overtly political visions of W.E.B. Du Bois's \"Of the Coming of John,\" James Baldwin's \"Notes of a Native Son\" and Mary McCarthy's \"Artists in Uniform\" and the cultural elitism of T.S. Eliot's \"Tradition and the Individual Talent.\" Oates has managed to find numerous pieces whose vision and philosophy resonate with one another without becoming homogeneous, so Gretel Ehrlich's meditation on pastoral aesthetics in \"The Solace of Open Spaces\" contrasts abruptly and ingeniously with Susan Sontag's urban-centered \"Notes on Camp.\" In all, Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces reflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of various American identities. QPB and History Book Club selections; BOMC alternate. Sept. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

From The Critics

\". . . Oates has assembled a provocative collection of masterpieces
\nreflecting both the fragmentation and surprising cohesiveness of
\nvarious American identities.\"\n\n

\n\n

KLIATT

In her excellent introduction to this collection, Joyce Carol Oates states her belief that \"art should not be comforting.\" It should, instead, \"provoke, disturb,...and expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.\" The reader should therefore be prepared to have these 55 carefully selected essays do just that. Arranged chronologically, the essays span the century with an average of five essays per decade. From Mark Twain to Saul Bellow by way of William James, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein, the collection notes literary trends as well as social upheavals as recorded in essays of W.E.B DuBois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Chosen from authors who had published at least one book of nonfiction or essays, this collection attempts to present a \"mobile mosaic\" of 20th-century America. Category: Collections. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001, Houghton Mifflin, 624p., Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Patricia A. Moore; Brookline, MA\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

One of the pleasures of an anthology like this is reading people you might not otherwise have picked up. Like John Muir, whose \"Stickeen,\" a life-and-death adventure on an Alaskan glacier with a singular small black dog, is a great piece of adventure writing. Or Jane Addams, whose insights into the spread of an urban legend of \"The Devil Baby at Hull House\" are thoughtful and compassionate. Another sort of pleasure comes from rereading familiar works in a new context: E.B. White's \"Once More to the Lake,\" N. Scott Momaday's \"The Way to Rainy Mountain,\" John McPhee's \"The Search for Marvin Gardens,\" and Annie Dillard's \"Total Eclipse.\" Only seven of the essays come from the annual \"Best American Essays\" series that Atwan has coedited since 1986. The other 48 were culled from the rest of the century, with the ruling idea, Atwan says, \"that the essays should speak to the present, not merely represent the past.\" Oates looked \"for the expression of personal experience within the historical.\" They have created a mosaic of a century in an America whose dominant and recurring theme has been race. Essential for most libraries.--Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\\\n\n

\n\n

Megan Harlan

...all the essays transcend fashion and speak just as eloquestly to us today as they did when they were first published.
\n—Entertainment Weekly\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 3 }, "52": { "wears.id": 52, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 52, "wears.title": "The Best Loved Poems of the American People", "wears.author": "Hazel Felleman", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Hazel Felleman (Selected by), Edward Frank Allen (Introduction), Hazel Felleman", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-loved-poems-of-the-american-people", "wears.author_slug": "hazel-felleman", "wears.isbn13": 9780385000192, "wears.isbn10": 385000197, "wears.price": "$17.92", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "October 1936", "wears.edition": "Reissue", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, Poetry - General & Miscellaneous, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 670, "wears.dimensions": "5.99 (w) x 8.56 (h) x 2.06 (d)", "wears.overview": "More than 1,500,000 copies in print! Over 575 traditional favorites to be read and reread. Categorized by theme, and indexed by author and first line, this is a collection that will be treasured.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

More than 1,500,000 copies in print! Over 575 traditional favorites to be read and reread. Categorized by theme, and indexed by author and first line, this is a collection that will be treasured.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "53": { "wears.id": 53, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 53, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume A: Beginnings to 1820", "wears.author": "Wayne Franklin", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Wayne Franklin (Editor), Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor), Arnold Krupat (Editor), Philip F. Gura (Editor), Bruce Michelson", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-american-literature", "wears.author_slug": "wayne-franklin", "wears.isbn13": 9780393927399, "wears.isbn10": 393927393, "wears.price": "$37.77", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "April 2007", "wears.edition": "7th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 972, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Under Nina Baym’s direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "54": { "wears.id": 54, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 54, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of Poetry", "wears.author": "Margaret Ferguson", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Margaret Ferguson, Jon Stallworthy, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy (Editor), Mary Jo Salter", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-poetry", "wears.author_slug": "margaret-ferguson", "wears.isbn13": 9780393979206, "wears.isbn10": 393979202, "wears.price": "$66.30", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "December 2004", "wears.edition": "5th Edition", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, English Poetry, English & Irish Literature Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2256, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 2.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Offering over one thousand years of verse from the medieval period to the present, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the classroom standard for the study of poetry in English.

The Fifth Edition retains the flexibility and breadth of selection that has defined this classic anthology, while improved and expanded editorial apparatus make it an even more useful teaching tool.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Offering over one thousand years of verse from the medieval period to the present, The Norton Anthology of Poetry is the classroom standard for the study of poetry in English.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "55": { "wears.id": 55, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 55, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Vol. 2", "wears.author": "Henry Louis Gates Jr.", "wears.author_bio": "

Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Ph.D. Cambridge) is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. He is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race (with Cornel West); Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans. He is general editor (with the late Nellie Y. McKay) of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature; editor-in-chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center (online); editor of The African-American Century (with Cornel West); Encarta Africana (with Kwame Anthony Appiah); and The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Craft; African American National Biography (with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham) and The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin (with Hollis Robbins). For PBS, Professor Gates has written and produced several documentaries, among them African American Lives, series 1 and 2, and America Behind the Color Line.

Nellie Y. McKay (Ph.D. Harvard), General Editor. Professor of American and Afro-American Literature, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Associate editor of the African American Review; author of Jean Toomer—the Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894-1936; editor of Critical Essays on Toni Morrison; co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Beloved—A Casebook, and Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison.

William L. Andrews (Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), Editor, \"The Literature of Slavery and Freedom,\" Co-Editor, \"the Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance.\" E. Maynard Adams Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. General editor of the Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography series and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Other works include The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865; Sisters of the Spirit; Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass; and Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance.

Houston A. Baker, Jr. (Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles), Editor, \"The Black Arts Era.\" George D. and Susan Fox Beischer Professor of English, Duke University. Editor of American Literature; Editor of the anthology Black Literature in America and author of three books of poetry. Other works include Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of Harlem and The Black Aesthetic; Workings of the Spirit: A Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing; Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy; Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory; Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance; Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.

Frances Smith Foster (Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), Co-Editor, \"The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance.\" Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Emory University. Author of Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. Co-editor of the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Editor of several works, including Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes.

A former fellow of the Bunting Institute and the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Deborah E. McDowell is a professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Robert G. O’Meally (Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, \"The Vernacular Tradition.\" Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English, Columbia University. Author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison and the biography Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and editor of the essay collection History and Memory in African American Culture. Currently editing an essay collection titled The Jazz Cadence of American Culture.

Arnold Rampersad (Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, \"The Harlem Renaissance.\" Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University. Co-Editor of Slavery and the Literary Imagination (with Deborah E. McDowell); editor of the definitive Collected Poems of Langston Hughes and author of the two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes. Also author of Jackie Robinson: A Biography and joint author of tennis star Arthur Ashe’s Days of Grace: A Memoir.

Hortense Spillers (Ph.D. Brandeis), Co-Editor, \"Realism, Naturalism, Modernism.\" Frederick J. Whiton Chair of English, Cornell University. Editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text; co-editor (with Marjorie Pryse) of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the Literary Tradition, and an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature.

Cheryl A. Wall (Ph.D. Harvard), Editor, \"Literature since 1975.\" Professor and Chair of English, Rutgers University. Author of Women of the Harlem Renaissance; editor of Zora Neale Hurston: Novels and Stories, Zora Neale Hurston: Folklore, Memoirs & Other Writings, and Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women.

", "wears.authors": "Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Editor), Nellie Y. McKay", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-african-american-literature", "wears.author_slug": "henry-louis-gates-jr", "wears.isbn13": 9780393977783, "wears.isbn10": 393977781, "wears.price": "$72.82", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "December 2003", "wears.edition": "2nd Edition", "wears.subjects": "Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2832, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 2.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Welcomed on publication as \"brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from,\" The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Welcomed on publication as \"brilliant, definitive, and a joy to teach from,\" The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was adopted at more than 1,275 colleges and universities worldwide. Now, the new Second Edition offers these highlights.

Publishers Weekly

Collaborating on The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, editors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay have compiled what may be the definitive collection of its kind. Organized chronologically, the massive work gathers writings from six periods of black history: slavery and freedom; Reconstruction; the Harlem Renaissance; Realism, Naturalism and Modernism; the Black Arts Movement and the period since the 1970s. The work begins with the vernacular tradition of spirituals, gospel and the blues; continues through work songs, jazz and rap; ranges through sermons and folktales; and embraces letters and journals, poetry, short fiction, novels, autobiography and drama. BOMC selection; companion audio CD.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly\n - Publisher's Weekly\n

\n\n

Library Journal

In this anthology, blues, gospel, jazz, rap, and sermons take center stage. In close proximity are poetry, fiction, drama, and autobiography by major authors like Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "56": { "wears.id": 56, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 56, "wears.title": "Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology", "wears.author": "Helen Vendler", "wears.author_bio": "

HELEN VENDLER, critic and scholar of English-language poetry from the seventeenth century to the present, is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University-the first woman to hold a University Professorship, the highest academic distinction Harvard bestows. She has been poetry critic of The New Yorker since 1978, and has been a member of the Pulitzer Prize jury for poetry. Author of ground-breaking scholarly studies on George Herbert, John Keats, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, Shakespeare's sonnets, and Seamus Heaney, she won the National Book Critic's Circle Award for Criticism in 1981, and her criticism has been collected in several volumes, including Part of Nature, Part of Us, The Music of What Happens, and Soul Says.

", "wears.authors": "Helen Vendler", "wears.title_slug": "poems-poets-poetry", "wears.author_slug": "helen-vendler", "wears.isbn13": 9780312463199, "wears.isbn10": 312463197, "wears.price": "$1.99", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Bedford/St. Martin's", "wears.pubdate": "October 2009", "wears.edition": "3rd Edition", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, English Poetry, English & Irish Literature Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 752, "wears.dimensions": "5.90 (w) x 9.00 (h) x 1.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "
\nMany students today are puzzled by the meaning and purpose of poetry. Poems, Poets, Poetry demystifies the form and introduces students to its artistry and pleasures, using methods that Helen Vendler has successfully used herself over her long, celebrated career. Guided by Vendler’s erudite yet down-to-earth approach, students at all levels can benefit from her authoritative instruction. Her blend of new and canonical poets includes the broadest selection of new and multi-racial poets offered by any introductory text. Comprehensive and astute, this text engages students in effective ways of reading — and taking delight in — poetry.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Written by a preeminent critic and legendary teacher, this text and anthology presents the incisive, practical methods of reading and writing that Helen Vendler has used for decades to demystify poetry for her students and introduce them to its artistry and pleasures.

", "wears.toc": "

Preface: About This Book

Brief Contents

Contents

Chronological Contents

About Poets and Poetry

PART I. AN INTRODUCTION TO POETRY

1. The Poem as Life

The Private Life

William Blake, Infant Sorrow

Louise Glück, The School Children

E. E. Cummings, in Just-

NEW Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Walt Whitman, Hours Continuing Long

Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

The Public Life

Michael Harper, American History

Charles Simic, Old Couple

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

Nature and Time

Anonymous, The Cuckoo Song

Dave Smith, The Spring Poem

John Keats, The Human Seasons

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60 (Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore)

In Brief: The Poem as Life

Reading Other Poems

Sir Thomas Wyatt, They Flee from Me

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

John Milton, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

John Keats, When I Have Fears

Emily Dickinson, A narrow Fellow in the grass

Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Dylan Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Rita Dove, Flash Cards

Yusef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Julia Alvarez, Homecoming

2. The Poem as Arranged Life

The Private Life

William Blake, Infant Joy

William Blake, Infant Sorrow

Louise Glück, The School Children

E. E. Cummings, in Just-

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Walt Whitman, Hours Continuing Long

Wallace Stevens, The Plain Sense of Things

The Public Life

Michael S. Harper, American History

Charles Simic, Old Couple

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

Nature and Time

Anonymous, The Cuckoo Song

Dave Smith, The Spring Poem

John Keats, The Human Seasons

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 60 (Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore)

In Brief: The Poem as Arranged Life

Reading Other Poems

Anonymous, Lord Randal

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29 (When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes)

Chidiock Tichborne, Tichborne's Elegy

John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Robert Herrick, Upon Julia's Clothes

George Herbert, Love (III)

Walt Whitman, A Noiseless Patient Spider

Thomas Hardy, The Convergence of the Twain

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Margaret Atwood, Footnote to the Amnesty Report on Torture

Marilyn Nelson, Live Jazz, Franklin Park Zoo

3. Poems as Pleasure

Rhythm

Rhyme

Ben Jonson, On Gut

Structure

William Carlos Williams, Poem

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Images

William Blake, London

Argument

Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Walter Ralegh, The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

Poignancy

William Wordsworth, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Wisdom

A New Language

Finding Yourself

In Brief: Poems as Pleasure

Reading Other Poems

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130 (My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun)

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

William Blake, The Sick Rose

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Thomas Hardy, The Darkling Thrush

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Robert Frost, Unharvested

D.H. Lawrence, Snake

William Carlos Williams, The Dance

Theodore Roethke, My Papa's Waltz

Derek Walcott, The Season of Phantasmal Peace

Elizabeth Alexander, Nineteen

4. Describing Poems

Poetic Kinds

Narrative versus Lyric; Narrative as Lyric

Adrienne Rich, Necessities of Life

Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed

Classifying Lyric Poems

Content genres

Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure--first--

Speech Acts

Carl Sandburg, Grass

Outer Form

Line Width

Rhythm

Poem Length

Combinatorial Form Names

Inner Structural Form

Sentences

Robert Herrick, The Argument of His Book

Person

Agency

Randall Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Tenses

William Wordsworth, A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal

Images, or Sensuous Words

Sylvia Plath, Metaphors

Exploring a Poem

John Keats, Upon First Looking into Chapman's Homer

In Brief: Describing Poems

Reading Other Poems

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 129 (Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame)

George Herbert, Easter Wings

Andrew Marvell, The Garden

John Milton, When I Consider How My Light is Spent

Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband

John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale

Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

Ezra Pound, The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Mark Strand, Courtship

Seamus Heaney, From the Frontier of Writing

Jorie Graham, San Sepolcro

Sherman Alexie, Evolution

5. The Play of Language

Sound Units

Word Roots

Words

Sentences

Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure--first--

Implication

The Ordering of Language

George Herbert, Prayer (I)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 66 (Tired with all these, for restful death I cry)

Michael Drayton, Since there's no help

In Brief: The Play of Language

Reading Other Poems

John Donne, Holy Sonnet 14 (Batter my heart, three-personed God; for You)

John Keats, To Autumn

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Henry Reed, Naming of Parts

William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice-Cream

H.D., Oread

E.E. Cummings, r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

Joy Harjo, Song for Deer and Myself to Return On

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Poema para los Californios Muertos

6. Constructing a Self

Multiple Aspects

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 30 (When to the sessions of sweet silent thought)

Change of Discourse

Space and Time

Seamus Heaney, Mid-Term Break

Testimony

Motivations

Typicality

Tone as a Marker of Selfhood

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

Imagination

Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz--when I died--

Persona

William Butler Yeats, Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

In Brief: Constructing a Self

Reading Other Poems

John Dryden, Sylvia the Fair

Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

Emily Dickinson, I'm Nobody! Who are you?

William Butler Yeats, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

Thomas Hardy, The Ruined Maid

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

William Carlos Williams, To Elsie

Countee Cullen, Heritage

Anne Sexton, Her Kind

Charles Wright, Self-Portrait

Jane Kenyon, Otherwise

Carl Phillips, Africa Says

7. Poetry and Social Identity

Adrienne Rich, Mother-in-Law

Adrienne Rich, Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Langston Hughes, Genius Child

Langston Hughes, Me and the Mule

Langston Hughes, High to Low

Seamus Heaney, Terminus

In Brief: Poetry and Social Identity

Reading Other Poems

Robert Southwell, The Burning Babe

Thomas Nashe, A Litany in Time of Plague

Anne Bradstreet, A Letter to Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employment

William Blake, The Little Black Boy

Edward Lear, How Pleasant to Know Mr. Lear

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Felix Randal

Sylvia Plath, The Applicant

David Mura, An Argument: On 1942

Rita Dove, Wingfoot Lake

Sheila Ortiz Taylor, The Way Back

8. History and Regionality

History

William Wordsworth, A slumber did my spirit seal

Robert Lowell, The March 1

Langston Hughes, World War II

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Regionality

Sherman Alexie, On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City

William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

In Brief: History and Regionality

Reading Other Poems

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

William Butler Yeats, Easter 1916

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar

Robert Lowell, For the Union Dead

Robert Hayden, Night, Death, Mississippi

W.S. Merwin, The Asians Dying

Derek Walcott, The Gulf

Simon J. Ortiz, Bend in the River

Jorie Graham, What the End Is For

Gary Soto, History

Silvia Curbelo, Balsero Singing

Dionisio Martinez, History as a Second Language

9. Attitudes, Values, Judgments

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 76 (Why is my verse so barren of new pride?)

Robert Lowell, Epilogue

In Brief: Attitudes, Values, Judgments

Reading Other Poems

John Milton, Lycidas

Ben Jonson, Still to Be Neat

Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Phillis Wheatley, On Being Brought from Africa to America

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How Do I Love Thee?

Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

William Butler Yeats, Meru

Robert Frost, The Gift Outright

Allen Ginsberg, Sunflower Sutra

Louise Glück, Mock Orange

Rita Dove, Parsley

Heidy Steidlmayer, Knife-Sharpener’s Song

New 10. Poets on Poetry

Poetry as Imagination

Art’s Fiction, Truth’s Claims

Poetry as Song

Poetry as Words

Poetry as an Evolving Structure

Poetry as a Destructive Force

The Idea of Lyric

Why Poetry at All?

Emily Dickinson, This is my letter to the World

Poetry Over Time

The Poet’s Audience

Poetry and Style

PART II. WRITING ABOUT POETRY

11. Writing about Poems

Basic Principles

A Brief Example

Robert Herrick, Divination by a Daffodil

A Longer Example:

William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Getting it Down on Paper

Begin with a Question

Present Your Case

Draw Your Conclusions

Keeping Your Readers in Mind

A Note on Writing about Unrhymed Poems

Organizing Your Paper

A Note on Well-Ordered Paragraphs

Checking Your Work

12. Studying Groups of Poems

Walt Whitman: Poems on Lincoln

Walt Whitman, Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day

Walt Whitman, O Captain! My Captain!

Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

Walt Whitman, This dust was once a man

Emily Dickinson: Poems on Time

Emily Dickinson, I like to see it lap the Miles—

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for Death—

Emily Dickinson, The Heart asks Pleasure—first—

Emily Dickinson, I felt a Cleaving in my Mind

Emily Dickinson, The first Day's Night had come—

Emily Dickinson, After great pain, a formal feeling comes

Emily Dickinson, There's a certain Slant of light

Emily Dickinson, Pain-expands the Time

Writing Your Paper

PART III. ANTHOLOGY

Sherman Alexie, Reservation Love Song

Paula Gunn Allen, Zen Americana

New Julia Alvarez, from 33

A. R. Ammons, The City Limits

A. R. Ammons, Easter Morning

Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens

Anonymous, Western Wind

Matthew Arnold, Shakespeare

Matthew Arnold, To Marguerite

John Ashbery, Paradoxes and Oxymorons

John Ashbery, Street Musicians

New Margaret Atwood, Habitation

Margaret Atwood, This is a Photograph of Me

Margaret Atwood, Up

W. H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening

W.H. Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts

John Berryman, from Dream Songs

4 (Filling her compact & delicious body)

45 (He stared at ruin. Ruin stared straight back)

384 (The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done)

New Frank Bidart, An American in Hollywood

New Frank Bidart, If See No End In Is

Frank Bidart, To My Father

Elizabeth Bishop, At the Fishhouses

Elizabeth Bishop, Poem

Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina

William Blake, Ah! Sun-flower

William Blake, The Garden of Love

William Blake, The Lamb

New William Blake, The Mental Traveller

William Blake, The Tyger

Richard Blanco, Letters for Mamá

Michael Blumenthal, A Marriage

New Michael Blumenthal, Early Childhood Education

Anne Bradstreet, Before the Birth of One of Her Children

Lucy Brock-Broido, Carrowmore

Lucy Brock-Broido, Domestic Mysticism

New Lucy Brock-Broido, Self-Deliverance by Lion

Emily Bronte, No Coward Soul Is Mine

Emily Bronte, Remembrance

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

New Gwendolyn Brooks, Beverly Hills, Chicago

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Musical Instrument

Robert Browning, Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came

Robert Burns, O, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast

Robert Burns, A Red, Red Rose

George Gordon, Lord Byron, When We Two Parted

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Freeway 280

Marilyn Chin, Autumn Leaves

New Victoria Chang, $4.99 All You Can Eat Sunday Brunch

John Clare, Badger

John Clare, First Love

John Clare, I Am

New Lucille Clifton, the lost baby poem

New Henry Cole, Car Wash

Henri Cole, 40 Days and 40 Nights

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

New Eduardo C. Corral, Monologue of a Vulture’s Shadow

William Cowper, The Castaway

William Cowper, Epitaph on a Hare

Hart Crane, The Broken Tower

Hart Crane, To Brooklyn Bridge

New Robert Creeley, When I think

Countee Cullen, Incident

E.E. Cummings, may I feel he said he

New E.E. Cummings, next to of course god america i

Emily Dickinson, The Brain--is wider than the Sky--

Emily Dickinson, I like a look of Agony

Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense--

Emily Dickinson, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (1859)

Emily Dickinson, Safe in their Alabaster Chambers (1861)

Emily Dickinson, The Soul selects her own Society—

Emily Dickinson, There's a certain Slant of light

Emily Dickinson, Wild Nights--Wild Nights!

New John Donne, Breake of day

John Donne, Death, be not proud

John Donne, The Sun Rising

New Timothy Donnelly, Reading of Medieval Life, I Wonder Who I Am

Rita Dove, Adolescence--II

Rita Dove, Dusting

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Gould Shaw

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

New Roberto Durán, Protest

T. S. Eliot, Preludes

Thomas Sayers Ellis, View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn

Louise Erdrich, The Strange People

New Rhina Espaillat, Translation

New Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Turning the Times Tables

New Mark Ford, The Long Man

Robert Frost, Birches

Robert Frost, Design

Allen Ginsberg, America

Louise Glück, All Hallows

Louise Glück, The Balcony

New Louise Glück, Midsummer

New Albert Goldbarth, The Novel That Asks to Erase Itself

New Albert Goldbarth, Unforeseeables

Jorie Graham, Of Forced Sightes and Trusty Ferefulness

Jorie Graham, Soul Says

New Jorie Graham, The Strangers

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Thom Gunn, The Man with Night Sweats

Thom Gunn, My Sad Captains

H.D., Helen

Thomas Hardy, Afterwards

Michael S. Harper, Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Michael S. Harper, We Assume: On the Death of Our Son, Reuben Masai Harper

Robert Hayden, Frederick Douglass

Robert Hayden, Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday

New Terrance Hayes, WOOFER (When I Consider the African-American)

New Terrance Hayes, A Small Novel

Seamus Heaney, Bogland

Seamus Heaney, Punishment

George Herbert, The Collar

George Herbert, Redemption

Robert Herrick, Corinna's Going A-Maying

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God's Grandeur

Gerard Manley Hopkins, No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief

New John Hollander, By Nature

A.E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

A.E. Housman, With Rue My Heart Is Laden

New Langston Hughes, Dream Variation

Langston Hughes, Harlem

Langston Hughes, I, Too

Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues

Ben Jonson, Come, My Celia

New Laura Kasischke, Miss Consolation for Emotional Damages

John Keats, In drear nighted December

John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci

John Keats, On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again

John Keats, This Living Hand

New Jane Kenyon, Back

New Jane Kenyon, Otherwise

Jane Kenyon, Surprise

Etheridge Knight, A Poem for Myself (Or Blues for a Mississippi Black Boy)

Kenneth Koch, Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

Yusef Komunyakaa, Boat People

Yusef Komunyakaa, My Father's Loveletters

New Yusef Komunyakaa, The Towers

Stanley Kunitz, The Portrait

Philip Larkin, High Windows

Philip Larkin, Reasons for Attendance

Philip Larkin, This Be the Verse

D.H. Lawrence, The English Are So Nice!

New Inada Lawson, XI. Japs

New Li-Young Lee, Mother Deluxe

Denise Levertov, The Ache of Marriage

Harold Littlebird, White-Washing the Walls

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Aftermath

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire

Robert Lowell, Sailing Home from Rapallo

Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica

New Victor Martínez, The Ledger

New Andrew Marvell, The Definition of Love

Andrew Marvell, The Mower’s Song

Andrew Marvell, The Mower to the Glowworms

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

New Shara McCallum, The Incident

Herman Melville, The Berg

Herman Melville, Monody

New James Merrill, The Christmas Tree

W.S. Merwin, For a Coming Extinction

W.S. Merwin, For the Anniversary of My Death

John Milton, L'Allegro

John Milton, Methought I Saw My Late Espousèd Saint

John Milton, On Shakespeare

New Marianne Moore, A Grave

New Marianne Moore, England

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Marianne Moore, The Steeple-Jack

Pat Mora, La Migra

New Pat Mora, Rituals

New Thylias Moss, One for All Newborns

New Harryette Mullen, Omnivore

Frank O'Hara, Ave Maria

Frank O'Hara, Why I Am Not a Painter

Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth

Wilfred Owen, Disabled

New Grace Paley, from Detour

New Carl Phillips, Blue

Carl Phillips, The Kill

Carl Phillips, Passing

Sylvia Plath, Edge

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

Sylvia Plath, Morning Song

Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee

Alexander Pope, from An Essay on Man (Epistle 1)

Ezra Pound, In a Station of the Metro

New D.A. Powell, [autumn set us heavily to task: unrooted the dahlias]

New D.A. Powell, [cherry elixir: the first medication. so mary poppins]

Sir Walter Ralegh, The Lie

New Srikanth Reddy, Fourth Circle

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

New Adrienne Rich, I Am in Danger—Sir--

Adrienne Rich, The Middle-Aged

Alberto Ríos, Teodoro Luna's Two Kisses

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Theodore Roethke, Elegy for Jane

Theodore Roethke, The Waking

New Aleida Rodríquez, Lexicon of Exile

New Noelle Brynn Saito, Turkey People

William Shakespeare, Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun

William Shakespeare, Full Fathom Five

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?)

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of true minds)

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Sir Philip Sidney, from Astrophel and Stella

1 (Loving in Truth)

31 (With how sad steps)

Charles Simic, Charon's Cosmology

Charles Simic, Fork

New Charles Simic, A Suitcase Strapped with a Rope

Christopher Smart, From Jubilate Agno

Christopher Smart, On a Bed of Guernsey Lilies

Dave Smith, On a Field Trip at Fredericksburg

New Ron Smith, The Teachers Pass the Popcorn

Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning

New Tracy K. Smith, El Mar

New Tracy K. Smith, Credulity

Gary Snyder, Axe Handles

Gary Snyder, How Poetry Comes to Me

New Edmund Spenser, A Hymne in Honour of Love

Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 75 (One day I wrote her name upon the strand)

Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

Wallace Stevens, The Planet on the Table

Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Mark Strand, Keeping Things Whole

New Adrienne Su, The English Canon

New May Swenson, Untitled

New May Swenson, I Look at My Hand

New May Swenson, How Everything Happens

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from In Memoriam A.H.H.

7 (Dark house)

99 (Risest thou thus)

106 (Ring out, wild bells)

12 (Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Tears, Idle Tears

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill

Dylan Thomas, In My Craft or Sullen Art

New Natasha Trethewey, What is Evidence

Henry Vaughan, They Are All Gone into the World of Light!

Derek Walcott, Blues

Derek Walcott, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen

New Derek Walcott, Perhaps it exists….

Rosanna Warren, In Creve Coeur, Missouri

New Joshua Weiner, The Yonder Tree

New James Welch, Getting Things Straight

James Welch, Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation

New Phillis Wheatley, To S.M. a young African Painter, on seeing his Works

Walt Whitman, A Hand-Mirror

Walt Whitman, from Song of Myself

1. (I celebrate myself)

6 (A child said, What is the grass?)

52 (The spotted hawk)

Walt Whitman, Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

Richard Wilbur, Cottage Street, 1953

Richard Wilbur, The Writer

William Carlos Williams, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

William Carlos Williams, The Raper from Passenack

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

William Carlos Williams, This Is Just to Say

William Wordsworth, My Heart Leaps Up

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality

William Wordsworth, The Solitary Reaper

James Wright, A Blessing

James Wright, Small Frogs Killed on the Highway

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Forget Not Yet

New John Yau, Autobiography in Red and Yello

William Butler Yeats, Among School Children

New William Butler Yeats, A Dialogue Between Self and Soul

William Butler Yeats, Down by the Salley Gardens

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

William Butler Yeats, Leda and the Swan

William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Appendices

On Prosody

On Grammar

On Speech Acts

On Rhetorical Devices

On Lyric Subgenres

Index of Authors, Titles, and First Lines

Index of Terms [Endpapers]

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "57": { "wears.id": 57, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 57, "wears.title": "The Poets Laureate Anthology", "wears.author": "Elizabeth Hun Schmidt", "wears.author_bio": "

Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, a former poetry editor at the New York Times Book Review, is the editor of the acclaimed anthology Poems of New York and The Poets Laureate Anthology. She lives in New York City and currently teaches American literature at Sarah Lawrence College.

Billy Collins was a Poet Laureate of the United States.

", "wears.authors": "Elizabeth Hun Schmidt, Library of Congress Staff (With), Billy Collins", "wears.title_slug": "the-poets-laureate-anthology", "wears.author_slug": "elizabeth-hun-schmidt", "wears.isbn13": 9780393061819, "wears.isbn10": 393061817, "wears.price": "$38.52", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "October 2010", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Poetry, American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 816, "wears.dimensions": "6.50 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.

As a record of poetry, The Poets Laureate Anthology is groundbreaking, charting the course of American poetry over the last seventy-five years, while being, at the same time, a pleasure to read, full of some of the world’s best-known poems and many new surprises. Elizabeth Hun Schmidt has gathered and introduced poems by each of the forty-three poets who have been named our nation’s poets laureate since the post (originally called Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress) was established in 1937. Poets range from Robert Pinsky, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop to Charles Simic, Billy Collins, and Rita Dove. Schmidt’s spirited introductions place the poets and their poems in historical and literary context and shine light on the interesting and often uneasy relationship between politics and art. This is an inviting, monumental collection for everyone’s library, containing much of the best poetry written in America over the last century.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The first anthology to gather poems by the forty-three poets laureate of the United States.

Publishers Weekly

The United States has a long tradition of choosing a national poet, though the term poet laureate only came to be used here after 1985. Before that, since its inception in 1935, the post was called consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. So far we've had 43 of them, including some of America's most famous and best-loved poets, such as Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Billy Collins, perhaps the most popular poet to hold the title (2001 2003), and also the author of the foreword to this enjoyable anthology, which offers a sampling of work from all 43 laureates, plus short introductions about each one. Former New York Times Book Review poetry editor Schmidt calls the laureates \"the gatekeepers of the American idiom,\" and above all, that's what a reader will find here: a good sampling of what the mainstream of American poetry has to offer--the careful descriptions of Bishop, the powerful critiques of Brooks, the surreal landscapes of Simic, Merwin's deep images, Bogan's careful stanzas, Lowell's blustery lines. There are a few occasional poems, but mostly, it's a gathering of great poets hanging together because they held an important job. This will be a wonderful holiday gift for poetry lovers. (Oct.)

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly

The United States has a long tradition of choosing a national poet, though the term poet laureate only came to be used here after 1985. Before that, since its inception in 1935, the post was called consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. So far we've had 43 of them, including some of America's most famous and best-loved poets, such as Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and, of course, Billy Collins, perhaps the most popular poet to hold the title (2001–2003), and also the author of the foreword to this enjoyable anthology, which offers a sampling of work from all 43 laureates, plus short introductions about each one. Former New York Times Book Review poetry editor Schmidt calls the laureates \"the gatekeepers of the American idiom,\" and above all, that's what a reader will find here: a good sampling of what the mainstream of American poetry has to offer--the careful descriptions of Bishop, the powerful critiques of Brooks, the surreal landscapes of Simic, Merwin's deep images, Bogan's careful stanzas, Lowell's blustery lines. There are a few occasional poems, but mostly, it's a gathering of great poets hanging together because they held an important job. This will be a wonderful holiday gift for poetry lovers. (Oct.)\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

\"Be careful what you say to us now./ The street-lamp is smashed, the window is jagged,/ There is a man dead in his blood by the base of the fountain./ If you speak/ You cannot be delicate or sad or clever.\" With these lines, Josephine Jacobsen reminds readers that despite all the hardship in the world, poetry is there to report. With this sweeping behemoth of an anthology, Norton and the Library of Congress have given readers and libraries an excellent excuse to own another book. Schmidt, former poetry editor for the New York Times Book Review, has included all of the Poet Laureate Consultants (commonly known as U.S. Poet Laureates) from Joseph Auslander (1937–41) to Kay Ryan (2007–10). Even newly named Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin is included because he served as Special Bicentennial Consultant with Rita Dove and Louise Glück (1999–2000). Schmidt gives readers a fine selection of poems for each poet, some expected and some surprises. In addition, she includes introductions that place poets in social and literary context and elaborates their contributions to the office of Consultant. For example, William Carlos Williams's term was mired in Communist controversy and health problems, and while appointed, he never served. VERDICT A hefty and worthy read that everyone will want to savor. Essential for all contemporary poetry collections.—Karla Huston, Appleton Arts Ctr., WI\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "58": { "wears.id": 58, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 58, "wears.title": "The Portable Beat Reader", "wears.author": "Various", "wears.author_bio": "

Ann Charters is the editor of The Portable Sixties Reader, The Portable Jack Kerouac, two volumes of Jack Kerouac's Selected Letters, and Beat Down to Your Soul. She teaches at the University of Connecticut.

", "wears.authors": "Various, Ann Charters", "wears.title_slug": "the-portable-beat-reader", "wears.author_slug": "various", "wears.isbn13": 9780142437537, "wears.isbn10": 142437530, "wears.price": "$18.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "July 2003", "wears.edition": "Reissue", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections, American", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Through poetry, fiction, essays, song lyrics, letters, and memoirs, this authoritative single-volume collection of Beat literature captures the triumphant energy of a movement that swept through American letters with hurricane force.

Featuring: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Charles Bukowski, Michael McClure, and more.

Publishers Weekly

Cutting through bohemian posturing and excess, Charters here reprints much of the most vital, readable and relevant material produced by the Beat generation, primarily in the 1950s and '60s, with some selections from the '70s and '80s. The novels of such leading figures as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs lend themselves well to excerpting, giving this volume creditable ballast. Representative works of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gary Snyder are included along with those of lesser-known Beats (e.g., John Clellon Holmes), fellow travelers like Frank O'Hara and Amiri Baraka, and wives and girlfriends often overlooked at the time, including Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady and Joyce Johnson. Charters ( Kerouac ) offers a broad perspective on this seminal literary movement: she links East Coast Beats to the San Francisco Renaissance poets; pays attention to such latter-day Beats as Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg; and explains the position of non-Beat but related writers--Alan Watts, Anne Waldman, Diane DiPrima and the young Norman Mailer--in her helpful introductory essay and notes preceeding each entry. Her energizing, liberating anthology makes it clear that such Beat preoccupations as the bomb, the meaninglessness of modern existence and ecological destruction remain current. ( Jan. )

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "59": { "wears.id": 59, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 59, "wears.title": "The Best American Short Plays 2008-2009", "wears.author": "Barbara Parisi", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Barbara Parisi", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-short-plays-2008-2009", "wears.author_slug": "barbara-parisi", "wears.isbn13": 9781557837608, "wears.isbn10": 1557837600, "wears.price": "$14.85", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Applause Theatre Book Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "October 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Drama Anthologies, American Drama, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 356, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.40 (h) x 1.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

This edition of the highly esteemed and long-enduring Best American Short Plays series contains fresh-voiced, cutting-edge plays by nineteen playwrights, both established and among the most promising of the new millennium. Each of these plays reflects the enormous diversity of contemporary American theatre.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Applause is proud to continue the series that for over 70 years has been the standard of excellence for one-act plays in America. From its inception, The Best American Short Plays has identified new, cutting-edge playwrights who have gone on to establish award-winning careers, including Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Wendy Wasserstein, Terrence McNally, and David Mamet. The complex and diverse plays that make up this collection reflect both personal concerns and social issues. The 2008-2009 edition includes A Second of Pleasure, by Neil LaBute; St. Francis Preaches to the Birds, by David Ives; The Stormy Waters, The Long Way Home, by Carey Lovelace; Early Morning, by Eric Lane; Sisters, by Adam Kraar, Maria Filimon, and Tasnim Mansur; Little Duck, by Billy Aronson; A Portrait of the Woman as a Young Artist, by Meg Miroshnik; Slapped Actress, by Emily Conbere; The Last Artist in NYC, by Polly Frost and Ray Sawhill; THE TRUE AUTHOR of the plays formerly attributed to Mister William Shakespeare REVEALED to the world for the first time by Miss Delia Bacon, by James Armstrong; The Lovers and Others of Eugene O'Neill, by Marla Del Collins; III, by Joe Salvatore; Pete and Joe at the Dew Drop Inn, by Lewis Gardner; This Is Your Lifetime, by Jill Elaine Hughes; Decades Apart, by Rick Pulos; Never Spoke Again, by Barbara Parisi-Pasternack; 508, by Amy Herzog; Ella, by Dano Madden; and Naked Old Man, by Murray Schisgal.

", "wears.toc": "

Foreword: A Simple, Brilliant Idea David Ives ix

Introduction Barbara Parisi xiii

A Second of Pleasure Neil LaBute 1

St. Francis Preaches to the Birds David Ives 17

The Stormy Waters, the Long Way Home Carey Lovelace 41

Early Morning Eric Lane 49

Sisters Adam Kraar Maria Filimon Tasnim Mansur 81

Little Duck Billy Aronson 89

A Portrait of the Woman as a Young Artist Meg Miroshnik 113

Slapped Actress Emily Conbere 153

The Last Artist in New York City Polly Frost Ray Sawhill 163

The True Author of the Plays Formerly Attributed to Mister William Shakespeare Revealed to the World for the First Time by Miss Delia Bacon James Armstrong 179

The Lovers and Others of Eugene O'Neill Maria Del Collins 191

III Joe Salvatore 217

Pete and Joe at the Dew Drop Inn Lewis Gardner 271

Decades Apart: Reflections of Three Gay Men Rick Pulos 285

508 Amy Herzog 313

Naked Old Man Murray Schisgal 325

Acknowledgments 351

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "60": { "wears.id": 60, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 60, "wears.title": "The Gift of Love", "wears.author": "Lori Foster", "wears.author_bio": "

Lori Foster is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of many contemporary romances, including My Man Michael (2/09). She lives in Ohio.

", "wears.authors": "Lori Foster, Gia Dawn, Ann Christopher, Lisa Cooke, Heidi Betts", "wears.title_slug": "the-gift-of-love", "wears.author_slug": "lori-foster", "wears.isbn13": 9780425234280, "wears.isbn10": 425234282, "wears.price": "$14.43", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "June 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, Family & Friendship - Fiction, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 368, "wears.dimensions": "5.10 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 1.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Edited by New York Times bestselling author Lori Foster-a heartwarming anthology of all-new stories that celebrate family love.

Families come in many configurations, and every one is unique, made up of the personalities of each member. But the love that connects families is universal. Whether it is the love of parents for their children, the love between a husband and wife, the love between siblings, a love that transcends generations, or even the love for a family member never met, the family ties that bind us are the strongest and deepest emotional connections we experience. Families influence a person's development, how they treat others, and how they view life. In The Gift of Love, eight exceptional writers offer a variety of unique perspectives on what family love means and how it impacts our lives in ways profound and often surprising.

Featuring:

Lori Foster ? Heidi Betts ? Jules Bennett ? Ann Christopher ? Lisa Cooke ? Paige Cuccaro ? Gia Dawn ? Helen Kay Dimon

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Edited by New York Times bestselling author Lori Foster-a heartwarming anthology of all-new stories that celebrate family love.

Featuring:

Lori Foster • Heidi Betts • Jules Bennett • Ann Christopher • Lisa Cooke • Paige Cuccaro • Gia Dawn • Helen Kay Dimon

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "61": { "wears.id": 61, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 61, "wears.title": "One Hundred and One Famous Poems (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)", "wears.author": "Roy J. Cook", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Roy J. Cook", "wears.title_slug": "one-hundred-and-one-famous-poems", "wears.author_slug": "roy-j-cook", "wears.isbn13": 9781435114760, "wears.isbn10": 1435114760, "wears.price": "$8.95", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Barnes & Noble", "wears.pubdate": "February 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This treasury of beloved poems collects all your favorite poets in one book. Whether you’re looking for a love poem or something to mend a broken heart, perhaps you’re feeling patriotic or struggling to understand the nature of man, the timeless words of Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, John Milton, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti are at your fingertips.

From the Romantic poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats to the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson, this comprehensive collection contains examples of the many periods of writing from England to Scotland and on to the United States.

Included are such favorites as:

Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain!

Eugene Field’s Little Boy Blue

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s To a Skylark

Joyce Kilmer’s Trees

Robert Burns’ Letter to a Young Friend

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven

Three indices let you find your favorite poems by title, author, and first line.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "62": { "wears.id": 62, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 62, "wears.title": "The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry", "wears.author": "J. D. McClatchy", "wears.author_bio": "

J. D. McClatchy is the author of five collections of poems: Scenes From Another Life, Stars Principal, The Rest of the Way, Ten Commandments, and Hazmat. He has also written two books of essays: White Paper and Twenty Questions. He has edited many other books, including The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry, Poets on Painters, and Horace: The Odes. In addition, he edits The Voice of the Poet series for Random House AudioBooks, and has written seven opera libretti. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at Princeton, UCLA, and Johns Hopkins, and is now a professor at Yale, where since 1991 he has edited The Yale Review. He lives in Stonington, Connecticut.

", "wears.authors": "J. D. McClatchy", "wears.title_slug": "the-vintage-book-of-contemporary-american-poetry", "wears.author_slug": "j-d-mcclatchy", "wears.isbn13": 9781400030934, "wears.isbn10": 1400030935, "wears.price": "$13.65", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "April 2003", "wears.edition": "Revised", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 656, "wears.dimensions": "5.20 (w) x 7.99 (h) x 1.16 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Dazzling in its range, exhilarating in its immediacy and grace, this collection gathers together, from every region of the country and from the past forty years, the poems that continue to shape our imaginations. From Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich, to Robert Haas and Louise Gluck, this anthology takes the full measure of our poetry's daring energies and its tender understandings.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Publishers Weekly

Poetry devotees will be familiar with much of the work in this fine collection, which focuses on the period from WW II until the present. Sixty-five poets, including such well-known writers as Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, James Dickey, Denise Levertov and Gary Snyder, are represented by anywhere from one to a dozen poems each, as well as a brief biography that touches on the writer's aesthetic ideas. McClatchy, himself a poet and critic, has done an exceptional job of selecting works that typify the poets' styles and beliefs. Standouts are Elizabeth Bishop's ``In the Waiting Room,'' about the poet's first perception of herself in relation to others; Randall Jarrell's ``The Woman at the Washington Zoo,'' which deals with the dull, emotionless routine of modern life; Frank O'Hara's ``Having a Coke with You,'' a dizzy declaration of love during a visit to a New York museum; and Mark Strand's ``Keeping Things Whole,'' in which the poet sees his presence in the world as subtracting from the whole of reality. Unfortunately, the poems are not dated, giving the reader no sense of the writers' chronological development. (Nov.)

", "wears.toc": "

	Introduction
	A Note on the Second Edition, 2003
	The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket	3
	Memories of West Street and Lepke	8
	Man and Wife	9
	Skunk Hour	10
	The Mouth of the Hudson	12
	For the Union Dead	13
	Waking Early Sunday Morning	15
	History	18
	The Nihilist as Hero	18
	Reading Myself	19
	Obit	19
	Fishnet	20
	Dolphin	20
	Epilogue	21
	The Bight	22
	Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance	23
	At the Fishhouses	25
	The Shampoo	28
	Brazil, January 1, 1502	28
	Under the Window: Ouro Preto	30
	The Armadillo	32
	Filling Station	33
	In the Waiting Room	34
	One Art	37
	Poem	38
	Cuttings	40
	Root Cellar	41
	The Shape of the Fire	41
	The Waking	44
	I Knew a Woman	45
	In a Dark Time	46
	The Moon and the Night and the Men	47
	From the Dream Songs (1, 4, 5, 14, 29, 46, 76, 77, 143, 257, 384)	48
	90 North	56
	Eighth Air Force	57
	The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner	58
	The Woman at the Washington Zoo	58
	Cinderella	59
	Next Day	60
	Well Water	62
	Masts at Dawn	63
	Birth of Love	65
	Rattlesnake Country	66
	Evening Hawk	72
	The Kingfishers	73
	For My Contemporaries	80
	To My Wife	81
	From a Century of Epigrams 9 (29, 53, 55, 62, 76)	81
	Night, Death, Mississippi	83
	Frederick Douglass	85
	Middle Passage	85
	Amsterdam Letter	91
	Cracked Looking Glass	93
	After Reading The Country of the Pointed Firs	94
	Teleology	97
	Unconscious Came a Beauty	98
	Stone Gullets	99
	Staying at Ed's Place	99
	Strawberrying	100
	A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar	101
	Styx	109
	The Illiterate	111
	Thoughts on One's Head	112
	Consequences	113
	Country Stars	115
	The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi	115
	Storm Windows	117
	Writing	118
	Money	119
	The Dependencies	120
	Learning the Trees	121
	Because You Asked About the Line Between Prose and Poetry	122
	The War in the Air	123
	A Baroque Wall-Foundation in the Villa Sciarra	124
	Looking Into History	126
	Love Calls Us to the Things of This World	128
	Mind	129
	Advice to a Prophet	130
	Walking to Sleep	131
	Hamlen Brook	135
	Homework	136
	Into Mexico	137
	The Twins	138
	A View	139
	The Stream	141
	The Pruned Tree	145
	The Wars	146
	Menage a Trois	147
	Elegy for My Sister	149
	Rules of Sleep	152
	Einstein's Bathrobe	153
	The Heaven of Animals	155
	The Hospital Window	156
	The Sheep Child	158
	The Strength of Fields	160
	A Hill	162
	Third Avenue in Sunlight	163
	\"More Light! More Light!\"	164
	Peripeteia	165
	The Feast of Stephen	168
	The Crystal Lithium	170
	Shimmer	175
	Korean Mums	176
	Clouds	178
	The Ache of Marriage	179
	Intrusion	180
	Seeing for a Moment	180
	Prisoners	181
	Graves at Elkhorn	183
	The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir	184
	Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg	186
	The River Now	187
	An Afternoon at the Beach	188
	Amor Vincit Omnia	189
	From Autumn Shade (3, 6, 8, 9)	189
	A Muse of Water	192
	Amusing Our Daughters	194
	From Pro Feminia (I, II)	195
	The Evening of the Mind	198
	Men at Forty	199
	The Tourist from Syracuse	200
	Variations on a Text by Vallejo	201
	The Assassination	202
	Mule Team and Poster	202
	To the Harbormaster	204
	A Step Away from Them	205
	Meditations in an Emergency	206
	Why I Am Not a Painter	208
	The Day Lady Died	208
	Having a Coke With You	209
	Ave Maria	211
	The Best Slow Dancer	212
	The Naval Trainees Learn How to Jump Overboard	213
	The Excursion of the Speech and Hearing Class	214
	Five Dawn Skies in November	215
	Making Camp	215
	The Source	216
	I Know a Man	218
	The Rescue	219
	Air: \"The Love of a Woman\"	219
	For Friendship	220
	For Love	220
	Again	222
	The World	223
	From Howl (I)	225
	Sunflower Sutra	229
	My Sad Self	231
	Wales Visitation	233
	April Inventory	237
	From Heart's Needle (2, 6)	239
	Mementos, 1	241
	A Locked House	242
	A Renewal	244
	Voices from the Other World	245
	Days of 1964	246
	Willowware Cup	248
	Lost in Translation	249
	The Animals	256
	Some Last Questions	257
	The River of Bees	257
	For the Anniversary of My Death	258
	The Asians Dying	259
	For a Coming Extinction	260
	The Night of the Shirts	261
	Bread	261
	St. Vincent's	262
	He Held Radical Light	265
	Gravelly Run	266
	Corsons Inlet	267
	Reflective	271
	Terrain	271
	The City Limits	272
	Glazunoviana	274
	Soonest Mended	275
	As One Put Drunk Into the Packet-Boat	277
	Pyrography	278
	And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name	281
	Syringa	282
	My Erotic Double	284
	At the Executed Murderer's Grave	286
	Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio	289
	Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota	290
	Beginning	290
	A Blessing	291
	In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia, Has Been Condemned	292
	A Winter Daybreak Above Vence	293
	Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond	295
	Last Songs	296
	The Bear	297
	After Making Love We Hear Footsteps	300
	The Man Splitting Wood in the Daybreak	301
	The Vow	302
	The Man on the Hotel Room Bed	302
	Her Kind	304
	Music Swims Back to Me	305
	The Truth the Dead Know	306
	The Starry Night	307
	With Mercy for the Greedy	307
	Wanting to Die	308
	The Room of My Life	310
	The Horse	311
	They Feed They Lion	313
	Belle Isle, 1949	314
	You Can Have It	314
	Rain Downriver	316
	Sweet Will	317
	Family History	320
	The Dream	324
	From All of Us Here	325
	The Night Mirror	328
	From Powers of Thirteen (3, 29, 69, 82, 87, 130)	329
	Swan and Shadow	333
	The Mad Potter	334
	The Venetian Interior, 1889	338
	At the Monument to Pierre Louys	342
	Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law	345
	Planetarium	349
	The Burning of Paper Instead of Children	351
	Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff	354
	For the Record	357
	For an Album	358
	Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout	359
	Riprap	360
	Burning Island	361
	The Bath	362
	I Went Into the Maverick Bar	365
	Axe Handles	366
	The Colossus	368
	The Hanging Man	369
	Morning Song	370
	Daddy	370
	Fever 103[degree]	373
	Ariel	375
	Lady Lazarus	376
	Edge	378
	Words	379
	Keeping Things Whole	381
	Coming to This	382
	The Prediction	382
	\"The Dreadful Has Already Happened\"	383

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\n

\n\n

Library Journal

Alluding to the anthology wars of a generation ago, McClatchy writes in his introduction that his choices are strictly nonpartisan (neither ``Paleface or Redskin, or Academic and Avant-Garde''). But from the 65 poets he has selected to represent the course of American poetry over the last half century--beginning with Robert Lowell and ending with Jorie Graham--it is clear his preferences are formalistic and academic. The typical poem a reader will encounter in these pages is urbane, finely honed, and smoothly accomplished. As in all anthologies, the omissions and inclusions are telling. Where are Rexroth, Kees, and Rukeyser? Why Cunningham, Bowers, Feldman, and Garrigue and not Ignatow, Brooks, Blackburn, and Bly? While it is a delight to have many of the poets McClatchy has chosen collected together in a reasonably priced edition, a greater variety of voice and aesthetic would have made this anthology a livelier survey of the state of contemporary American poetry. Still, it is a useful addition to most collections. For the 100 most anthologized poems in English, see review of The Concise Columbia Book of Poetry, p. 74.--Ed.-- Christine Sten strom, New York Law Sch. Lib.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "63": { "wears.id": 63, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 63, "wears.title": "Literature: A Pocket Anthology", "wears.author": "R. S. Gwynn", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "R. S. Gwynn", "wears.title_slug": "literature", "wears.author_slug": "r-s-gwynn", "wears.isbn13": 9780205655106, "wears.isbn10": 205655106, "wears.price": "$46.67", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Longman", "wears.pubdate": "January 2009", "wears.edition": "4th Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Always a good price with quality selections, the Fourth Edition of Gwynn's Literature: A Pocket Anthology continues that tradition. Organized chronologically with a thematic appendix and streamlined apparatus, this anthology can be taylored to however the course is taught. Individual Fiction, Poetry, and Drama introductions provide an overview for reading and analyzing each genre, defining key terms in context. More than a third of the selections overall represent voices of women, people of color, and writers from cultures outside the United States, and a strong effort has been made to include work that reflects contemporary social questions and will stimulate classroom discussion. New poems, stories, and plays are among the changes to the Fourth Edition.

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction

Experience, Experiment, Expand: Three Reasons to Study Literature

Fiction

Introduction to Fiction

The Telling of the Tale

The Short Story Genre

Reading and Analyzing Short Fiction

Nathanel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

* The Minister’s Black Veil

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

• Ligeia

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)

A White Heron

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

Mother Savage

Kate Chopin (1851-1904)

The Story of an Hour

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935)

The Yellow Wallpaper

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Roman Fever

Willa Cather (1876-1947)

Paul’s Case

James Joyce (1882-1941)

Araby

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

Sweat

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

A Rose for Emily

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

• Up in Michigan

John Steinbeck (1902-1968)

The Chrysanthemums

Richard Wright (1908-1960)

The Man Who Was Almost a Man

John Cheever (1912-1982)

Reunion

Ralph Ellison (1914-1995)

A Party Down at the Square

Shirley Jackson (1919-1965)

The Lottery

* Hisaye Yamamoto (b. 1921)

Seventeen Syllables

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)

• Everything That Rises Must Converge

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928)

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)

Dead Men’s Path

Alice Munro (b. 1931)

• The Bear Came Over the Mountain

Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Raymond Carver (1938-1988)

Cathedral

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)

Happy Endings

Bobbie Ann Mason (b. 1940)

Shiloh

Alice Walker (b. 1944)

Everyday Use

* Tim O’Brien

The Things They Carried

Tim Gautreaux (b. 1947)

Died and Gone to Vegas

Sandra Cisneros (b. 1954)

Woman Hollering Creek

Louise Erdrich (b. 1954)

The Red Convertible

Gish Jen (b. 1955)

In the American Society

Daniel Orozco (b. 1957)

Orientation

* Sherman Alexie

This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

Poetry

Introduction to Poetry

An Anecdote: Where Poetry Starts

Speaker, Listener, and Context

“The Star-Spangled Banner”

Lyric, Narrative, Dramatic

The Language of Poetry

Figurative Language

Allegory and Symbol

Tone of Voice

Repetition: Sounds and Schemes

Meter and Rhythm

Free Verse and Open Form

Stanza Forms

Fixed Forms

Literary History and Poetic Conventions

Anonymous

Western Wind

Bonny Barbara Allan

Sir Patrick Spens

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503?-1542)

They Flee from Me

Whoso List to Hunt

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

Amoretti: Sonnet 75

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Astrophel and Stella: Sonnet 1

Robert Southwell (1561?-1595)

The Burning Babe

Michael Drayton (1563-1631)

Idea: Sonnet 61

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Sonnet 18

Sonnet 20

Sonnet 29

Sonnet 73

Sonnet 116

Sonnet 130

When Daisies Pied (Spring and Winter)

Thomas Campion (1567-1620)

There Is a Garden in Her Face

John Donne (1572-1631)

The Flea

Holy Sonnet 10

Holy Sonnet 14

• The Sun Rising

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

Ben Jonson (1573-1637)

On My First Son

Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount

Mary Wroth (1587?-1651?)

In this Strange Labyrinth How Shall I Turn

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

George Herbert (1593-1633)

Easter Wings

Love (III)

The Pulley

Redemption

Edmund Waller (1606-1687)

Song

John Milton (1608-1674)

How Soon Hath Time

On the Late Massacre in Piedmont

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

The Author to Her Book

Richard Lovelace (1618-1658)

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

To His Coy Mistress

John Dryden (1631-1700)

To the Memory of Mr. Oldham

Edward Taylor (1642-1729)

Huswifery

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

A Description of a City Shower

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

from An Essay on Criticism

Ode on Solitude

Thomas Gray (1716-1771)

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

William Blake (1757-1827)

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Black Boy

A Poison Tree

The Tyger

Robert Burns (1759-1796)

A Red, Red Rose

John Barleycorn

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

It Is a Beauteous Evening

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Frost at Midnight

Kubla Khan

Work Without Hope

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

She Walks in Beauty

Stanzas

When We Two Parted

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Ode to the West Wind

Ozymandias

William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

To the Fringed Gentian

John Keats (1795-1821)

La Belle Dame sans Merci

Ode to a Nightingale

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

When I Have Fears

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 18

Sonnets from the Portuguese, 43

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

The Arsenal at Springfield

The Cross of Snow

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

The Haunted Palace

The Raven

* Sonnet to Science

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

The Lady of Shallot

Tears, Idle Tears

Ulysses

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My Last Duchess

Porphyria's Lover

• Prospice

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

A Noiseless Patient Spider

O Captain, My Captain

• A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Grey and Dim

Song of Myself, 6

Song of Myself, 11

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Dover Beach

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes

Because I Could Not Stop for Death

The Brain Is Wider than the Sky

A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church

The Soul Selects Her Own Society

Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant

Wild Nights—Wild Nights

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Up-Hill

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Ah, Are You Digging on My Grave?

* Chanel Firing

• The Man He Killed

Neutral Tones

The Ruined Maid

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

God's Grandeur

Pied Beauty

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)

The New Colossus

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

Eight O'Clock

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now

Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall

“Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff . . .”

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Leda and the Swan

Sailing to Byzantium

The Second Coming

The Song of Wandering Aengus

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)

Firelight

The Mill

Richard Cory

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers

The Wayfarer

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

We Wear the Mask

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

Design

Home Burial

The Road Not Taken

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Adelaide Crapsey (1878-1034)

Amaze

Languor after Pain

Trapped

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

Anecdote of the Jar

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Snow Man

Sunday Morning

• The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

The Red Wheelbarrow

Spring and All

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro

Portrait d'une Femme

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

Let No Charitable Hope

Ophelia

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)

Pear Tree

Sea Rose

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Dreamers

Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962)

The Purse-Seine

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

The Fish

Silence

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Journey of the Magi

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974)

Piazza Piece

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

If I Should Learn, in Some Quite Casual Way

Oh, Oh, You Will Be Sorry for that Word

What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Dulce et Decorum Est

e. e. cummings (1894-1962)

nobody loses all the time

pity this busy monster,manunkind

* plato told

r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

Jean Toomer (1894-1967)

Georgia Dusk

Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

Women

Hart Crane (1899-1933)

Chaplinesque

Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Dream Boogie

Theme for English B

The Weary Blues

Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

Incident

Yet Do I Marvel

A. D. Hope (1907-2000)

Imperial Adam

W. H. Auden (1907-1973)

As I Walked Out One Evening

Musée des Beaux Arts

The Unknown Citizen

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

Dolor

My Papa's Waltz

Root Cellar

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

The Fish

One Art

Sestina

Robert Hayden (1913-1980)

Those Winter Sundays

Dudley Randall (b. 1914)

Ballad of Birmingham

William Stafford (1914-1993)

Traveling through the Dark

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Poem in October

Weldon Kees (1914-1955)

For My Daughter

Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)

• 8^th Air Force

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

Margaret Walker (b. 1915)

For Malcolm X

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

the ballad of chocolate Mabbie

the mother

We Real Cool

Robert Lowell (1917-1977)

For the Union Dead

Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919)

A Coney Island of the Mind, #15

May Swenson (1919-1989)

How Everything Happens

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)

A Primer of the Daily Round

Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)

• Altitudes

The Writer

Year's End

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Next, Please

This Be the Verse

• The Whitsun Weddings

James Dickey (1923-1997)

The Heaven of Animals

Alan Dugan (b. 1923)

Love Song: I and Thou

Anthony Hecht (b. 1923)

• The Dover Bitch

Third Avenue in Sunlight

Denise Levertov (1923-1999)

The Ache of Marriage

Louis Simpson (b. 1923)

American Classic

My Father in the Night Commanding No

Vassar Miller (1924-1997)

Subterfuge

Donald Justice (b. 1925)

Counting the Mad

Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925)

The Ungrateful Garden

Maxine Kumin (b. 1925)

Noted in the New York Times

Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)

A Supermarket in California

James Merrill (1926-1995)

Casual Wear

W. D. Snodgrass (b. 1926)

Mementos, I

Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

The Day Lady Died

John Ashbery (b. 1927)

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

Paradoxes and Oxymorons

W. S. Merwin (b. 1927)

For the Anniversary of My Death

The Last One

James Wright (1927-1980)

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Saint Judas

Philip Levine (b. 1928)

You Can Have It

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Cinderella

Thom Gunn (b. 1929)

From the Wave

Terminal

X. J. Kennedy (b. 1929)

In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day

• Little Elegy

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Diving into the Wreck

Rape

Ted Hughes (b. 1930)

Pike

Gary Snyder (b. 1930)

A Walk

Derek Walcott (b. 1930)

Central America

Miller Williams (b. 1930)

The Book

Linda Pastan (b. 1932)

Ethics

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Daddy

Edge

Metaphors

Gerald Barrax (b. 1933)

Strangers like Us: Pittsburgh, Raleigh, 1945-1985

Mark Strand (b. 1934)

The Tunnel

Russel Edson (b. 1935)

Ape

Mary Oliver (b. 1935)

The Black Walnut Tree

Fred Chappell (b. 1936)

Narcissus and Echo

Lucille Clifton (b. 1936)

homage to my hips

wishes for sons

Marge Piercy (b. 1936)

What’s That Smell in the Kitchen?

Betty Adcock (b. 1938)

Voyages

Gary Gildner (b. 1938)

First Practice

Robert Phillips (b. 1938)

• The Stone Crab: A Love Poem

Dabney Stuart (b. 1938)

Discovering My Daughter

Margaret Atwood (b. 1939)

Siren Song

Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)

The Sacred

Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Punishment

* Clive James (b. 1959)

After the Storm

Ted Kooser (b. 1939)

Abandoned Farmhouse

Tom Disch (b. 1940)

Ballade of the New God

Florence Cassen Mayers (b. 1940)

All American Sestina

Pattiann Rogers (b. 1940)

Foreplay

Billy Collins (b. 1941)

Litany

Robert Hass (b. 1941)

• Meditation at Lagunitas

Simon J. Ortiz (b. 1941)

The Serenity in Stones

Gibbons Ruark (b. 1941)

The Visitor

Gladys Cardiff (b. 1942)

Combing

B.H. Fairchild (b. 1942)

Body and Soul

Charles Martin (b. 1942)

E.S.L.

Sharon Olds (b. 1942)

The One Girl at the Boys Party

Diane Lockward (b. 1943)

My Husband Discovers Poetry

Ellen Bryant Voight (b. 1943)

Daughter

Robert Morgan (b. 1944)

Mountain Bride

Craig Raine (b. 1944)

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Enid Shomer (b. 1944)

Women Bathing at Bergen-Belsen

Wendy Cope (b. 1944)

Rondeau Redoublé

Dick Davis (b. 1945)

A Monorhyme for the Shower

Kay Ryan (b. 1945)

Bestiary

Leon Stokesbury (b. 1945)

The Day Kennedy Died

* John Whitworth (b. 1945)

The Examiners

Marilyn Nelson (b. 1946)

The Ballad of Aunt Geneva

Ai (b. 1947)

Child Beater

Jim Hall (b. 1947)

Maybe Dats Your Pwoblem Too

Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947)

Facing It

Timothy Steele (b. 1948)

Sapphics Against Anger

James Fenton (b. 1949)

God, a Poem

Sarah Cortez (b. 1950)

Tu Negrito

Carolyn Forché (b. 1950)

The Colonel

Dana Gioia (b. 1950)

Planting a Sequoia

Rodney Jones (b. 1950)

Winter Retreat: Homage to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Timothy Murphy (b. 1950)

Case Notes

Joy Harjo (b. 1951)

She Had Some Horses

Andrew Hudgins (b. 1951)

Air View of an Industrial Scene

Judith Ortiz Cofer (b. 1952)

The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Rita Dove (b. 1952)

• American Smooth

Mark Jarman (b. 1952)

After Disappointment

Julie Kane (b. 1952)

Alan Doll Rap

Naomi Shihab Nye (b. 1952)

The Traveling Onion

Alberto Ríos (b. 1952)

The Purpose of Altar Boys

Julia Alvarez (b. 1953)

Bilingual Sestina

Harryette Mullen (b. 1953)

Dim Lady

Kim Addonizio (b. 1954)

* Sonnenizio on a Line from Michael Drayton

David Mason (b. 1954)

• Fog Horns

Mary Jo Salter (b. 1954)

Welcome to Hiroshima

Cathy Song (b. 1955)

Stamp Collecting

Ginger Andrews (b. 1956)

Primping in the Rearview Mirror

* Joseph Harrison (b. 1957)

Air Larry

Catherine Tufariello (b. 1963)

Useful Advice

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)

The Exaggeration of Despair

Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966)

Domestic Work, 1937

* Brian Turner (b. 1967)

Here, Bullet

Suji Kwock Kim (b. 1968)

Occupation

* Allison Joseph (b. 1967)

The Athlete

A. E. Stallings (b. 1968)

• First Love: A Quiz

Beth Ann Fennelly (b. 1971)

Asked for a Happy Memory of Her Father, She Recalls Wrigley Field

* Sophie Hannah (b. 1971)

The Guest Speaker

* Emily Moore (b. 1977)

Auld Lang Syne

Drama

Introduction to Drama

The Play’s the Thing

Origins of Drama

Aristotle on Tragedy

Brief History and Description of Dramatic Conventions

Sophocles (496?-406 B.C.)

• Antigone

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

Othello

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

• An Enemy of the People

Susan Glaspell (1882-1948)

Trifles

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)

The Glass Menagerie

Athold Fugard (b. 1932)

“Master Harold” . . . and the boys

August Wilson (b. 1945)

The Piano Lesson

David Ives (b. 1950)

• Sure Thing

* Milcha Sanchez-Scott (b. 1953)

The Cuban Swimmer

* Arlene Hutton (b. 1958)

A Dream Before I Take the Stand

Appendix A: Writing about Literature", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "64": { "wears.id": 64, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 64, "wears.title": "I'll Fly Away: Further Testimonies from the Women of York Prison", "wears.author": "Wally Lamb", "wears.author_bio": "

Wally Lamb's books are neither short nor simple; but like a James Patterson of emotions, he pulls readers in and doesn't let go. His affecting novels are marvels of imagination and empathy.

", "wears.authors": "Wally Lamb, I'll Fly Away Contributors", "wears.title_slug": "ill-fly-away", "wears.author_slug": "wally-lamb", "wears.isbn13": 9780061626395, "wears.isbn10": 61626392, "wears.price": "$10.99", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "HarperCollins Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "October 2008", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Penology & Correctional Studies - General & Miscellaneous, Prisons & Prison Life, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 288, "wears.dimensions": "5.30 (w) x 7.90 (h) x 0.80 (d)", "wears.overview": "

For several years, Wally Lamb, the author of two of the most beloved novels of our time, has run a writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's only maximum-security prison for women. Writing, Lamb discovered, was a way for these women to face their fears and failures and begin to imagine better lives. Couldn't Keep It to Myself, a collection of their essays, was published in 2003 to great critical acclaim. With I'll Fly Away, Lamb offers readers a new volume of intimate pieces from the York workshop. Startling, heartbreaking, and inspiring, these stories are as varied as the individuals who wrote them, but each illuminates an important core truth: that a life can be altered through self-awareness and the power of the written word.

", "wears.excerpt": "I'll Fly Away
\nFurther Testimonies from the Women of York Prison \n

Chapter One

Florida Memories

By Bonnie Jean Foreshaw

It's Thursday morning at 6:00 A.M., and we two have just arrived at the open-air flea market, the largest in south Florida. I'm an apprentice shopper and my teacher is my Aunt Mandy. Later this morning, the market will be hot and crowded—alive with music, laughter, gossip, and bartering about the price of everything from necklaces to nectarines. But at the moment, it's cool and quiet. Our focus is fish.

\"Pay close attention to the eyes of the fish,\" Aunt Mandy instructs as we walk from stall to stall. \"If the eyes are clear, not cloudy, and the color of the skin's not fading, then the fish is fresh.\" Auntie's dressed for shopping in a pink sleeveless blouse, burgundy pedal pushers, Italian sandals, and a white sun visor. I'm wearing shorts, a T-shirt, and rubber flip-flops. I am tall for my age, and starting to get the kind of shape men take a second look at. My glasses take up half my face. \"But you have to shop with your finger and your nose, too, not just your eyes,\" Auntie instructs. \"Poke the fish gently near its fin. If it leaves a dent, then you don't want it. If it doesn't, it's probably part of the morning's catch. And listen to me, Jeannie. Fresh fish never smells foul.\"

We stop at one of the stalls where the fish are lined up, one against the other, on a bed of ice. The fish man approaches us. He's handsome—black hair, hazel eyes, tank top and cut-off jeans. \"May I help you, ma'am?\" I watch him take in Aunt Mandy's curves, her green eyes andhoney-colored complexion. I might as well be invisible.

\"Well, maybe you can,\" Auntie says. \"Oh, by the way, I'm Mandy and this is my niece, Jeannie. Now what's your name?\"

\"I'm Ricardo,\" the fish man says. He's sucking in his stomach, and his feet are moving up and down like he's trying to stretch his height. \"It's nice to meet you, Mandy.\"

\"Nice to meet you, too. Now tell me, Ricardo, how much you want for these five yellowtails?\"

\"Well, let's see. They're seventy-five cents apiece, so that's a total of . . .\"

He stops to watch Auntie pass her fingers through her shoulder-length hair. It's salt-and-pepper-colored, but Mandy's still got it. \"Uh, three seventy-five.\" \"Oh,\" Auntie says, half-shocked and half-disappointed. \"That fellow three stalls down says he's selling his yellowtails for fifty cents each. So unless we can work out a deal . . .\"

The smile drops off of Mr. Ricardo's face, but Auntie's smile returns. Her gold tooth is glimmering. She shifts her weight, puts her hand on her hip.

\"Mandy, it's a deal,\" Ricardo says. \"Five yellowtails for two-fifty. That's a dollar twenty-five cut I'm giving you.\"

\"Which I appreciate,\" Auntie says. \"And look at it this way: you've just gained yourself a faithful customer. Now, tell me. How much you selling those red snappers for? If I can get them for the same price as the yellowtails, I'll buy some of them, too. And conch.\"

I stand there looking from one to the other. Auntie touches the small gold cross at her throat. She fingers her earring. I can tell Mr. Ricardo is only pretending to do the math in his head. \"Okay,\" he finally says. \"Sold.\"

Auntie pays for the fish and conch, thanks him, and we walk away. A few stalls down from Mr. Ricardo's, she turns to me. \"Okay, now,\" she says. \"Show me a fresh fish.\"

I go up and down the row, looking each fish in the eye, then pick one up by its tail. I turn it, look at its other eye, study its coloration. When I press my finger against its head, near the fin, there's no indentation. \"This one.\"

Her look is serious. \"You think this fish is fresh?\"

I hesitate. \"Yes.\"

Aunt Mandy flashes me her gold-toothed smile. \"Well, Jeannie, now you know how to pick fresh fish.\"

I'm excited to have passed the test, but I've been wondering something. \"Auntie?\" I say. \"I don't remember going to any other fish stalls before we went to Mr. Ricardo's.\"

She laughs. \"You and I knew that, but Ricardo didn't. It's one of the tricks of the trade when you shop at the flea market. But bear in mind, Ricardo would rather make a sale than not sell. If he has fish left at the end of the day, that's a loss and a waste for him. So we were doing him a favor. Now, come on. Let's cross the street and I'll teach you how to pick out vegetables and fruit.\"

We meander among the tomatoes and squashes, the potatoes and mangoes and plums. Shopping for fresh produce is a matter of looking and smelling, but mostly of feeling, Auntie says. \"Fruits and vegetables can get damaged by cold weather, the way they're packed, or how far they've traveled to get to the market. If the skin is firm, that means it's fresh. If it's loose, then it isn't. And always check for bruises.\"

Although I'm listening to my aunt, it's the peaches in the stall to my right that have my attention. They're big and beautiful, golden yellow with blushes of pink, and their aroma makes my mouth juice up. I'm thinking about how I might get myself one of those peaches.

\"Pick us out some bananas,\" Auntie says. It's test number two.

My eyes pass over several bunches before I pick one up. I check each banana, one by one, then walk over to Auntie, who is examining pears. \"These are nice, firm, and yellow,\" I say, handing her the bunch I've chosen. \"Tight skin, no bruises.\"

She twists the bunch back and forth, then nods her approval. \"Good job,\" she says. Smiling all over myself, I decide to seize the moment. \"Auntie, may I get a few peaches?\"

\nI'll Fly Away
\nFurther Testimonies from the Women of York Prison. Copyright © by Wally Lamb. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.", "wears.synopsis": "

For several years, Wally Lamb, the author of two of the most beloved novels of our time, has run a writing workshop at the York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's only maximum-security prison for women. Writing, Lamb discovered, was a way for these women to face their fears and failures and begin to imagine better lives. Couldn't Keep It to Myself, a collection of their essays, was published in 2003 to great critical acclaim. With I'll Fly Away, Lamb offers readers a new volume of intimate pieces from the York workshop. Startling, heartbreaking, and inspiring, these stories are as varied as the individuals who wrote them, but each illuminates an important core truth: that a life can be altered through self-awareness and the power of the written word.

Booklist

“Lamb . . . continues to offer readers an intimate look at women struggling to maintain their humanity.”

", "wears.toc": "
In Remembrance     vii
Acknowledgments     ix
Revisions and Corrections   Wally Lamb     1
When I Was a Child...
Florida Memories   Bonnie Jean Foreshaw     13
Kidnapped!   Robin Ledbetter     19
Shhh, Don't Tell   Deborah Ranger     26
In the Mood \"Savannah\"     37
Tinker Bell   Brendalis Medina     39
One Saturday Morning   Chasity C. West     47
Gifts My Family Gave Me
The Captain   Kathleen Wyatt     57
A Brother's Gift   Jennifer Rich     63
The Rainbow Ring   Carmen Ramos     64
Pictures of a Daughter, Viewed in Prison   Christina MacNaughton     67
Under-Where?   Lynne M. Friend     68
Why I Write   Careen Jennings     75
Lavender and Vanilla   Kimberly Walker     77
A Gift   Robin Ledbetter     78
Broken Dolls and Marionettes
Broken Doll   Lynda Gardner     85
\"No\" Is Not Just a Word   Christina MacNaughton     89
Wishes   Charissa Willette     92
The Marionette   Lynne M. Friend     104
Falling   Robin Ledbetter     114
Crime and Punishment
Lost and Found   Roberta Schwartz     119
The Chase   Brendalis Medina     151
Prom Queen   Jennifer Rich     159
Down on the Farm   Kelly Donnelly     166
Big Girl Jail   Robin Ledbetter     168
Wasted Time   Lisa White     176
Serpents   Robin Ledbetter     177
The Lights Are Flickering, Again   Susan Budlong Cole     179
Just Another Death   Christina MacNaughton     182
I'll Fly Away
My Three Fates   Chasity C. West     191
Dance of the Willow   Kelly Donnelly     202
I Won't Burn Alone   Brendalis Medina     203
Seasons' Rhythms   Kelly Donnelly     211
Flight of the Bumblebee   Kathleen Wyatt     213
Reawakening Through Nature: A Prison Reflection   Barbara Parsons     215
Contributors     241
Facilitators' Biographical Statements     253", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

In 1998, Wally Lamb began teaching writing to female convicts at Connecticut's York Correctional Institute. It was not for lack of a résumé; he was already an acclaimed novelist (I Know This Much Is True; She's Come Undone) and had been teaching high school for a quarter century. York was something different. After adjusting to his new constituency, Lamb realized that his students had disarming, often frightening stories to tell. In 2003, he published an anthology of these testimonies, the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award-winning Couldn't Keep It to Myself. This follow-up collection is just as bracing and profound.\n\n

\n\n

Booklist

\"Lamb . . . continues to offer readers an intimate look at women struggling to maintain their humanity.\"\n\n

Library Journal

Novelist Lamb's (I Know This Much Is True) second collection of writing by the students in his writing workshop at the maximum-security York Correctional Institution in Connecticut, after Couldn't Keep It to Myself(2003), also focuses on the inspiring and raw emotions of women sharing the good and bad memories that shaped them. The 20 women whose work is featured here-18 inmates and two of Lamb's cofacilitators-show that writing is not just a way of capturing their most private thoughts and gripping emotions (e.g., hope, despair, courage), but also a powerful tool to foster hope and healing. They write from the heart in works ranging from poems to essays to short stories; each vignette is more compelling than the one before it. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
\n—Susan McClellan

\n\n\n

\n\n

Kirkus Reviews

The second accomplished collection of writings from women incarcerated in Connecticut's York Correctional Institution, edited again by bestselling novelist Lamb (Couldn't Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters, 2003, etc.). One would have thought the first volume, with its probing examinations of lives run amok, would have convinced prison authorities of the value of a writing program in which prisoners focus and take account. But the prison bureaucracy tried to shut it down, writes an incredulous and furious Lamb, and they confiscated the prisoners' material. That particular draconian administration was replaced with a more enlightened group, Lamb reports, one that allowed for the rehabilitative value of writing. These works radiate what Lamb saw as the program's critical mission: to give the women wings \"to hover above the confounding maze of their lives, and from that perspective . . . to see the patterns and dead ends of their past, and a way out.\" Some of the stories are rueful, others bitter, but all bite, even-perhaps especially-when they are gentle. None are self-pitying, but none shy away from speaking directly to the gross cruelties so often inflicted on their early years or young marriages. Each story, no matter how grim or gritty, shows polish, and the women display a wide array of emotions: unbridled anger, innocence, hope, resigned acceptance. While a few of the stories speak of angels who touched the women's lives, most display open wounds that are continuing to be healed by the cathartic power of words. Writing as an act of self-realization and liberation and, not incidentally, an indictment of the penal system.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 2 }, "65": { "wears.id": 65, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 65, "wears.title": "American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau", "wears.author": "Bill McKibben", "wears.author_bio": "

Bill McKibben is the author of ten books, including The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. A former staff writer for The New Yorker, he writes regularly for Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College and lives in Vermont with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, and their daughter.

", "wears.authors": "Bill McKibben (Editor), Al Gore", "wears.title_slug": "american-earth", "wears.author_slug": "bill-mckibben", "wears.isbn13": 9781598530209, "wears.isbn10": 1598530208, "wears.price": "$29.13", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Library of America", "wears.pubdate": "April 2008", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Natural Literature & History, Literature Anthologies - General & Miscellaneous, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 900, "wears.dimensions": "5.12 (w) x 8.18 (h) x 2.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

As America and the world grapple with the consequences of global environmental change, writer and activist Bill McKibben offers this unprecedented, provocative, and timely anthology, gathering the best and most significant American environmental writing from the last two centuries.

Classics of the environmental imagination-the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring'are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of 'nature' join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

", "wears.excerpt": "AMERICAN EARTH Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
\n By Bill McKibben
\n THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA Copyright © 2008 Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY.
\n All right reserved.
\n ISBN: 978-1-59853-020-9
\n
\n
\n
\n Chapter One HENRY DAVID THOREAU \n

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born, grew up, lived out his life, and died in Concord, Massachusetts. He studied at Harvard from 1833 to 1837, then signed on as a teacher at Concord Academy but was dismissed for refusing to whip students. He and his brother John opened an elementary school in 1838, where, according to some authorities, they invented the idea of the field trip. John became sick in 1841 and the brothers closed the school; Henry went to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson, beginning a long friendship with him and with the other members of the Transcendental Club, among them Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. The other transcendentalists experimented with communes like Brook Farm, but Thoreau was more solitary, and the most important years in his life began in 1845 when he took up residence in a small cabin he'd built on the shore of Walden Pond a short walk from town. He spent two years, two months, and two days there, experimenting with simplifying his life. Thorean's isolation at Walden wasn't absolute or deliberately ascetic-he often returned to town to see friends and eat meals, had a steady stream of visitors (often too steady for his taste), and at one point engaged in a political protest, spending a night in Concord jail for his refusal to pay his poll tax. But it was notably productive: he returned to town with the draft of one book (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) and the notes that he would spend the next six years turning into Walden (1854), perhaps the most remarkable book in the American canon. As dense as scripture, crowded with aphorism, Walden is full of enough ideas for a score of ordinary books. But it has lived as long and as fully as any other writing of its vintage and inspired all the best kinds of people: both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. claimed him as a major influence. Thoreau suffered from tuberculosis contracted during his college years: his condition worsened beginning in 1859, and he spent his last years revising his accounts of the Maine woods and other works. As he neared death his aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God. \"I did not know we had ever quarreled,\" he said. He died at the age of 44.

Picking a few fragments from his writings is an impossible task: an anthology of American environmental writing might well be one-third Thoreau. Here are a few entries from his copious journals, and then the description from Walden of the building of the famous cabin. \"Huckleberries,\" a late essay or lecture-text, shows the modern nature essay being born, with a small root giving way to a luxuriant growth of thought and speculation.

from Journals

Oct. 24th 1837.

The Mould our Deeds Leave.

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest - - The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil-the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. - -

So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak, but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth. - -

March 6th 1838

- - How can a man sit down and quietly pare his nails, while the earth goes gyrating ahead amid such a din of sphere music, whirling him along about her axis some twenty four thousand miles between sun and sun? but mainly in a circle some two millions of miles actual progress. And then such a hurly-burly on the surface-wind always blowing-now a zephyr, now a hurricane-tides never idle, ever fluctuating, no rest for Niagara, but perpetual ran-tan on those limestone rocks-and then that summer simmering which our ears are used to-which would otherwise be christened confusion worse confounded, but is now ironically called \"silence audible\"-and above all the incessant tinkering named hum of industry-the hurrying to and fro and confused jabbering of men-Can man do less than get up and shake himself?

April 24th 1838.

Steam ships

-Men have been contriving new means and modes of motion-Steam ships have been westering during these late days and nights on the Atlantic waves-the fuglers of a new evolution to this generation - - Meanwhile plants spring silently by the brook sides-and the grim woods wave indifferent-the earth emits no howl pot on fire simmers and seethes and men go about their business. - -

Saturday March 19th 1842

When I walk in the fields of Concord and meditate on the destiny of this prosperous slip of the Saxon family-the unexhausted energies of this new country-I forget that this which is now Concord was once Musketaquid and that the American race has had its destiny also. Everywhere in the fields-in the corn and grain land-the earth is strewn with the relics of a race which has vanished as completely as if trodden in with the earth.

I find it good to remember the eternity behind me as well as the eternity before. Where ever I go I tread in the tracks of the Indian-I pick up the bolt which he has but just dropped at my feet. And if I consider destiny I am on his trail. I scatter his hearth stones with my feet, and pick out of the embers of his fire the simple but enduring implements of the wigwam and the chace-In planting my corn in the same furrow which yielded its increase to his support so long-I displace some memorial of him.

I have been walking this afternoon over a pleasant field planted with winter rye-near the house. Where this strange people once had their dwelling place. Another species of mortal men but little less wild to me than the musquash they hunted-Strange spirits-daemons-whose eyes could never meet mine. With another nature-and another fate than mine- The crows flew over the edge of the woods, and wheeling over my head seemed to rebuke-as dark winged spirits more akin to the Indian than I. Perhaps only the present disguise of the Indian- If the new has a meaning so has the old.

Nature has her russet hues as well as green-Indeed our eye splits on every object, and we can as well take one path as the other-If I consider its history it is old-if its destiny it is new-I may see a part of an object or the whole-I will not be imposed on and think nature is old, because the season is advanced I will study the botany of the mosses and fungi on the decayed-and remember that decayed wood is not old, but has just begun to be what it is. I need not think of the pine almond or the acorn and sapling when I meet the fallen pine or oak-more than of the generations of pines and oaks which have fed the young tree.

The new blade of the corn-the third leaf of the melon-these are not green but gray with time, but sere in respect of time.

September 12, 1851

2 PM To the Three Friends' Hill beyond Flints Pond-via RR. RWEs Wood Path S side Walden-Geo Heywood's Cleared Lot & Smith's orchards-return via E of Flints' P via Goose P & my old home to RR-

I go to Flints P. for the sake of the Mt view from the hill beyond looking over Concord. I have thought it the best especially in the winter which I can get in this neighborhood. It is worth the while to see the Mts in the horizon once a day. I have thus seen some earth which corresponds to my least earthly & trivial-to my most heaven-ward looking thoughts-The earth seen through an azure an etherial veil. They are the natural temples elevated brows of the earth-looking at which the thoughts of the beholder are naturally elevated and etherialized. I wish to see the earth through the medium of much air or heaven-for there is no paint like the air. Mts thus seen are worthy of worship. I go to Flints' Pond also to see a rippling lake & a reedy-island in its midst-Reed Island.

A man should feed his senses with the best that the land affords

At the entrance to the Deep Cut I heard the telegraph wire vibrating like an AÆolian Harp. It reminded me suddenly-reservedly with a beautiful paucity of communication-even silently, such was its effect on my thoughts-It reminded me, I say, with a certain pathetic moderation-of what finer & deeper stirrings I was susceptible-which grandly set all argument & dispute aside- -a triumphant though transient exhibition of the truth. It told me by the faintest imaginable strain-it told me by the finest strain that a human ear can hear-yet conclusively & past all refutation-that there were higher infinitely higher plains of life-which it behoved me never to forget. As I was entering the Deep Cut the wind which was conveying a message to me from heaven dropt it on the wire of the telegraph which it vibrated as it past. I instantly sat down on a stone at the foot of the telegraph pole-& attended to the communication. It merely said \"Bear in mind, Child & never for an instant forget-that there are higher plains infinitely higher plains of life than this thou art now travelling on. Know that the goal is distant & is upward and is worthy all your life's efforts to attain to.\" And then it ceased and though I sat some minutes longer I heard nothing more.

There is every variety & degree of inspiration from mere fullness of life to the most rapt mood. A human soul is played on even as this wire-which now vibrates slowly & gently so that the passer can hardly hear it & anon the sound swells & vibrates with such intensity as if it would rend the wire-as far as the elasticity & tension of the wire permits-and now it dies away and is silent-& though the breeze continues to sweep over it, no strain comes from it-& the traveller hearkens in vain. It is no small gain to have this wire stretched through Concord though there may be no Office here. Thus I make my own use of the telegraph-without consulting the Directors-like the sparrows which I perceive use it extensively for a perch.

Shall I not go to this office to hear if there is any communication for me-as steadily as to the Post office in the village?

Tuesday Dec 30th

Mem. Go to the Deep Cut. The flies now crawl forth from the crevices all covered with dust, dreaming of summer-without life or energy enough to clean their wings

This afternoon being on fair Haven Hill I heard the sound of a saw-and soon after from the cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath about 40 rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell-the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for 15 years have waved in solitary majesty over the sproutland. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive mannikins with their crosscut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement-one of the tallest probably now in the township & straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hill side.-its top seen against the frozen river & the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop-and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again-Now surely it is going-it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and breathless I expect its crashing fall-But no I was mistaken it has not moved an inch, it stands at the same angle as at first. It is 15 minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind as if it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree-the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid.-The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles-it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel's nest not a lichen has forsaken its mastlike stem- -its raking mast-the hill is the hull. Now's the moment the mannikins at its base are fleeing from their crime-they have dropped the guilty saw & axe. How slowly & majestically it starts-as if it were only swayed by a summer breeze and would return without a sigh to its location in the air-& now it fans the hill side with its fall and it lies down to its bed in the valley from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior-as if tired of standing it embraced the earth with silent joy.-returning its elements to the dust again-but hark! there you only saw-but did not hear-There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks-advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, & mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more & forever both to eye & ear.

I went down and measured it. It was about 4 feet in diameter where it was sawed-about 100 feet long. Before I had reached it-the axe-men had already half divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hill side as if it had been made of glass-& the tender cones of one years growth upon its summit appealed in vain & too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe-and marked out the mill logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next 2 centuries. It is lumber He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch.-& the henhawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect rising by slow stages into the heavens-has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell. I hear no knell tolled-I see no procession of mourners in the streets-or the woodland aisles-The squirrel has leapt to another tree-the hawk has circled further off-& has now settled upon a new eyre but the woodman is preparing to lay his axe at the root of that also.

Dec 31st

The 3d warm day. now overcast and beginning to drizzle. Still it is inspiriting as the brightest weather though the sun surely is not agoing to shine. There is a latent light in the mist-as if there were more electricity than usual in the air. These are warm foggy days in winter which excite us.

It reminds me this thick spring like weather, that 1 have not enough valued and attended to the pure clarity & brilliancy of the winter skies-Consider in what respects the winter sunsets differ from the summer ones. Shall I ever in summer evenings see so celestial a reach of blue sky contrasting with amber as I have seen a few days since-The day sky in winter corresponds for clarity to the night sky in which the stars shine & twinkle so brightly in this latitude.

I am too late perhaps, to see the sand foliage in the deep cut-should have been there day before yesterday-it is now too wet & soft.

(Continues...)

\n Excerpted from AMERICAN EARTH by Bill McKibben Copyright © 2008 by Literary Classics of the United States, New York, NY.. Excerpted by permission.
\n All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
\nExcerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
\n

", "wears.synopsis": "

Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson's Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America's greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature” join ecologists' memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

The Washington Post - Gregory McNamee

What truly sets the anthology apart is not the mix of the obscure and the familiar but McKibben's habit of enlisting voices whom we are not accustomed to thinking of as environmentalists or ecologists. I'd be willing to bet that this is the first work of nature writing to feature the drawings of R. Crumb, of Zap Comix fame, alongside lyrics by Marvin Gaye…Well selected, full of surprises and informed by McKibben's thoughtful commentary, American Earth is the first anthology of American nature writing to come close to the standard Thomas Lyon set two decades ago with \"This Incomperable Lande\": A Book of American Nature Writing. Ours is an incomparable land indeed, and McKibben's collection is a welcome reminder.

", "wears.toc": "Contents Foreword, by Al Gore....................xvii
Introduction....................xxi
Henry David Thoreau from Journals....................2
from Walden; or, Life in the Woods....................9
from Huckleberries....................26
George Catlin from Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North American Indians....................37
Lydia Huntley Sigourney Fallen Forests....................46
Susan Fenimore Cooper from Rural Hours....................48
Table Rock Album....................59
Walt Whitman from Leaves of Grass George Perkins Marsh from Man and Nature....................71
P. T. Barnum from The Humbugs of the World....................81
John Muir from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf....................85
A Wind-Storm in the Forests....................89
from My First Summer in the Sierra....................98
Hetch Hetchy Valley....................104
W.H.H. Murray from Adventures in the Wilderness....................113
Frederick Law Olmsted from A Review of Recent Changes, and Changes Which Have Been Projected, in the Plans of the Central Park....................120
J. Sterling Morton About Trees....................126
Theodore Roosevelt To Frank Michler Chapman....................130
To John Burroughs....................131
Speech at Grand Canyon, Arizona, May 6, 1903....................132
Mary Austin The Scavengers....................134
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler from Man and the Earth....................140
John Burroughs The Art of Seeing Things....................146
The Grist of the Gods....................159
Nature NearHome....................168
Gifford Pinchot Prosperity....................173
William T. Hornaday The Bird Tragedy on Laysan Island....................181
Theodore Dreiser A Certain Oil Refinery....................186
Gene Stratton-Porter The Last Passenger Pigeon....................192
Henry Beston Orion Rises on the Dunes....................205
Benton MacKaye The Indigenous and the Metropolitan....................209
J. N. \"Ding\" Darling \"What a few more seasons will do to the ducks\"....................224
Robert Marshall from Wintertrip into New Country....................225
Don Marquis what the ants are saying....................235
Caroline Henderson Letter from the Dust Bowl....................239
Donald Culross Peattie Birds That Are New Yorkers....................245
Robinson Jeffers The Answer....................251
Carmel Point....................252
John Steinbeck from The Grapes of Wrath....................254
Woody Guthrie This Land Is Your Land....................958
Marjory Stoneman Douglas from The Everglades: River of Grass....................260
Aldo Leopold from A Sand County Almanac....................266
Berton Roueché The Fog....................295
Edwin Way Teale The Longest Day....................313
Helen and Scott Nearing from Living the Good Life....................318
Sigurd F. Olson Northern Lights....................323
E. B. White Sootfall and Fallout....................327
Loren Eiseley How Flowers Changed the World....................337
William O. Douglas from My Wilderness: The Pacific West....................348
Dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton....................355
Jane Jacobs from The Death and Life of Great America Cities....................359
Rachel Carson from Silent Spring....................366
Russell Baker The Great Paver....................377
Eliot Porter The Living Canyon....................380
Howard Zahniser from The Wilderness Act of 1964....................392
Lyndon B. Johnson Remarks at the Signing of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965....................395
Kenneth E. Boulding from The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth....................399
Lynn White Jr. On the Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis....................405
Edward Abbey Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks....................413
Paul R. Ehrlich from The Population Bomb....................434
Garrett Hardin from The Tragedy of the Commons....................438
Philip K. Dick from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?....................451
Colin Fletcher A Sample Day in the Kitchen....................454
R. Buckminster Fuller Spaceship Earth....................464
Stephanie Mills Mills College Valedictory Address....................469
Gary Snyder Smokey the Bear Sutra....................473
Covers the Ground....................477
Denis Hayes The Beginning....................480
Joseph Lelyveld Millions Join Earth Day Observances Across the Nation....................484
Joni Mitchell & Marvin Gage Big Yellow Taxi....................490
Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)....................491
John McPhee from Encounters with the Archdruid....................493
Friends of the Earth from Only One Earth....................500
Wendell Berry Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front....................505
The Making of a Marginal Farm....................507
Preserving Wildness....................516
Annie Dillard Fecundity....................531
Lewis Thomas The World's Biggest Membrane....................550
David R. Brower The Third Planet: Operating Instructions....................555
Amory B. Lovins from Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?....................559
N. Scott Momaday A First American Views His Land....................570
Leslie Marmon Silko from Ceremony....................582
R. Crumb A Short History of America....................591
Wes Jackson Outside the Solar Village: One Utopian Farm....................595
Lois Marie Gibbs from Love Canal: My Story....................609
Jonathan Schell from The Fate of the Earth....................622
William Cronon Seasons of Want and Plenty....................632
Alice Walker Everything Is a Human Being....................659
E. O. Wilson Bernhardsdorp....................671
César Chávez Wrath of Grapes Boycott Speech....................690
Barry Lopez A Presentation of Whales....................696
W. S. Merwin Place....................716
Bill McKibben from The End of Nature....................718
Robert D. Bullard from Dumping in Dixie....................725
Mary Oliver The Summer Day....................737
Terry Tempest Williams from Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place....................739
Rick Bass from The Ninemile Wolves....................760
Alan Durning The Dubious Rewards of Consumption....................770
Scott Russell Sanders After the Flood....................781
George B. Schaller from The Last Panda....................790
Ellen Meloy The Flora and Fauna of Las Vegas....................793
Linda Hogan Dwellings....................809
David Abram from The Ecology of Magic....................815
Jack Turner The Song of the White Pelican....................835
Carl Anthony & Renée Soule A Multicultural Approach to Ecopsychology....................849
Al Gore Speech at the Kyoto Climate Change Conference....................855
Richard Nelson from Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America....................860
David Quammen Planet of Weeds....................874
Janisse Ray from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood....................898
Julia Butterfly Hill from The Legacy of Luna....................907
Calvin B. DeWitt from Inspirations for Sustaining Life on Earth: Greeting Friends in Their Andean Gardens....................920
Sandra Steingraber from Having Faith....................929
Barbara Kingsolver Knowing Our Place....................939
Michael Pollan from The Omnivore's Dilemma....................948
Paul Hawken from Blessed Unrest....................961
Rebecca Solnit The Thoreau Problem....................971
Chronology....................997
Note on the Illustrations....................1005
Sources and Acknowledgments....................1015
Index....................1025
", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Gregory McNamee

\n\n

Publishers Weekly

In his introduction to this superb anthology, McKibben (The End of Nature) proposes that \"environmental writing is America's most distinctive contribution to the world's literature.\" The collected pieces amply prove the point. Arranged chronologically, McKibben's selection of more than 100 writers includes some of the great early conservationists, such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir and John Burroughs, and many other eloquent nature writers, including Donald Cultross Peattie, Edwin Way Teale and Henry Beston. The early exponents of national parks and wilderness areas have their say, as do writers who have borne witness to environmental degradation-John Steinbeck and Caroline Henderson on the dust bowl, for example, and Berton Roueché and others who have reported on the effects of toxic pollution. Visionaries like Buckminster Fuller and Amory Lovins are represented, as are a wealth of contemporary activist/writers, among them Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, Paul Hawken, and Calvin deWitt, cofounder of the Evangelical Environmental Network. McKibben's trenchant introductions to the pieces sum up each writer's thoughts and form a running commentary on the progress of the conservation movement. The book, being published on Earth Day, can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing. 80-page color illus, not seen by PW. (Apr. 22 [Earth Day])

School Library Journal

Adult/High School- There have been some excellent collections of nature writing published in recent years (The Norton Anthology of Nature Writing is one fine example), but not until now has there been a definitive anthology of American environmental writing. In this superbly edited volume, McKibben draws a clear distinction between the two. The best of the latter often celebrates nature, but also asks searching questions about the impact of human life on the planet. After a poignant foreword by Al Gore, as well as his own illuminating introduction, McKibben begins with the work of a writer, thinker, and activist ahead of his time, Henry David Thoreau, and ends the volume with Rebecca Solnit's essay, \"The Thoreau Problem.\" She notes that many people think of Thoreau only as a man alone observing nature, but the author of \"Civil Disobedience,\" before enjoying his day of huckleberry picking, spent a night in jail rather than pay taxes to a government guilty of ignoring the higher laws of nature. This vast and varied collection, arranged chronologically, includes many seminal names, such as John Muir, Rachel Carson, and Wendell Berry, and some that are less well known or unexpected, like Benton MacKaye, Caroline Henderson, P. T. Barnum, and Philip K. Dick. Most of the selections derive from longer prose works, but there is also a smattering of poems, song lyrics, and cartoons. Although the heft of the volume might scare away some teens, others may realize that they could easily read bits and pieces, and that they would benefit greatly by any amount of time spent in these pages. Numerous photographs, many in full color, are included.-Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library,CA

\n\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 4 }, "66": { "wears.id": 66, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 66, "wears.title": "Best Poems of the English Language: From Chaucer Through Robert Frost", "wears.author": "Harold Bloom", "wears.author_bio": "

One of our most popular, respected, and controversial literary critics, Yale University professor Harold Bloom s books about, variously, Shakespeare, the Bible, and the classic literature are as erudite as they are accessible.

", "wears.authors": "Harold Bloom", "wears.title_slug": "best-poems-of-the-english-language", "wears.author_slug": "harold-bloom", "wears.isbn13": 9780060540425, "wears.isbn10": 60540427, "wears.price": "$15.79", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "HarperCollins Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "August 2007", "wears.edition": "Reprint", "wears.subjects": "Poetry, American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies, English, Irish, & Scottish Poetry", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1008, "wears.dimensions": "6.10 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.80 (d)", "wears.overview": "

This comprehensive anthology attempts to give the common reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The book features a large introductory essay by Harold Bloom called \"The Art of Reading Poetry,\" which presents his critical reflections of more than half a century devoted to the reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves most. In the case of all major poets in the language, this volume offers either the entire range of what is most valuable in their work, or vital selections that illuminate each figure's contribution. There are also headnotes by Harold Bloom to every poet in the volume as well as to the most important individual poems. Much more than any other anthology ever gathered, this book provides readers who desire the pleasures of a sublime art with very nearly everything they need in a single volume. It also is regarded as his final meditation upon all those who have formed his mind.

", "wears.excerpt": "The Best Poems of the English Language
\nFrom Chaucer Through Robert Frost \n

Chapter One

The Art of Reading Poetry

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a trope (\"turning\") or figure. A common dictionary equivalent for \"figurative language\" is \"metaphorical,\" but a metaphor actually is a highly specific figure, or turning from the literal. Kenneth Burke, a profound student of rhetoric, or the language of figures, distinguished four fundamental tropes: irony, synecdoche, metonymy, and metaphor. As Burke tells us, irony commits those who employ it to issues of presence and absence, since they are saying one thing while meaning something so different that it can be the precise opposite. We learn to wince when Hamlet says: \"I humbly thank you\" or its equivalent, since the prince generally is neither humble nor grateful.

We now commonly call synecdoche \"symbol,\" since the figurative substitution of a part for a whole also suggests that incompletion in which something within the poem stands for something outside it. Poets frequently identify more with one trope than with the others. Among major American poets, Robert Frost (despite his mass reputation) favors irony, while Walt Whitman is the great master of synecdoche.

In metonymy, contiguity replaces resemblance, since the name or prime aspect of anything is sufficient to indicate it, provided it is near in space to what serves as substitute. Childe Roland, in Browning's remarkable monologue, is represented at the very end by the \"slug-horn\" ortrumpet upon which he dauntlessly blows: \"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.\"

Metaphor proper transfers the ordinary associations of one word to another, as when Hart Crane beautifully writes \"peonies with pony manes,\" enhancing his metaphor by the pun between \"peonies\" and \"pony.\" Or again Crane, most intensely metaphorical of poets, refers to the Brooklyn Bridge's curve as its \"leap,\" and then goes on to call the bridge both harp and altar.

Figurations or tropes create meaning, which could not exist without them, and this making of meaning is largest in authentic poetry, where an excess or overflow emanates from figurative language, and brings about a condition of newness. Owen Barfield's Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning is one of the best guides to this process, when he traces part of the poetic history of the English word \"ruin.\"

The Latin verb ruo, meaning \"rush\" or \"collapse,\" led to the substantive ruina for what had fallen. Chaucer, equally at home in French and English, helped to domesticate \"ruin\" as \"a falling\":

Min is the ruine of the highe halles,
\n The falling of the towers and of the walles.

One feels the chill of that, the voice being Saturn's or time's in \"The Knight's Tale.\" Chaucer's disciple Edmund Spenser, has the haunting line:

The old ruines of a broken tower

My last selection in this book is Hart Crane's magnificent death ode, \"The Broken Tower,\" in which Spenser's line reverberates. Barfield emphasizes Shakespeare's magnificence in the employment of \"ruin,\" citing \"Bare ruin'd choirs where late the sweet birds sang\" from Sonnet 73, and the description of Cleopatra's effect upon her lover: \"The noble ruin of her magic, Antony.\" I myself find even stronger the blind Gloucester's piercing outcry when he confronts the mad King Lear (IV, VI, 134135):

O ruin'd piece of nature! This great world
\n Shall so wear out to nought.

Once Barfield sets one searching, the figurative power of \"ruined\" seems endless. Worthy of Shakespeare himself is John Donne, in his \"A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day,\" where love resurrects the poet to his ruin:

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
\n At the next world, that is, at the next spring:
\n For I am every dead thing,
\n In whom love wrought new alchemy.
\n For his art did express
\n A quintessence even from nothingness,
\n From dull privations, and lean emptiness
\n He ruined me, and I am re-begot
\n Of absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

Barfield invokes what he rightly calls Milton's \"terrific phrase\": \"Hell saw / Heaven ruining from Heaven,\" and then traces Wordsworth's allusive return to Milton. Rather than add further instances, I note Barfield's insight, that the figurative power of \"ruin\" depends upon restoring its original sense of movement, of rushing toward a collapse. One of the secrets of poetic rhetoric in English is to romance the etonym (as it were), to renew what Walter Pater called the \"finer edges\" of words.

\nThe Best Poems of the English Language
\nFrom Chaucer Through Robert Frost. Copyright © by Harold Bloom. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 5 }, "67": { "wears.id": 67, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 67, "wears.title": "Humor Me: An Anthology of Funny Contemporary Writing (Plus Some Great Old Stuff Too)", "wears.author": "Ian Frazier", "wears.author_bio": "

Ian Frazier is the author of many books, including Great Plains, On the Rez, Coyote v. Acme, Dating Your Mom, and, most recently, Travels in Siberia. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has twice won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

", "wears.authors": "Ian Frazier", "wears.title_slug": "humor-me", "wears.author_slug": "ian-frazier", "wears.isbn13": 9780061728945, "wears.isbn10": 61728942, "wears.price": "$25.99", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "HarperCollins Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "May 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Humor, General", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Humor Me is a literary cavalcade of contemporary American funnymen—and funnywomen—of the page. Selected by the renowned humor-ist Ian Frazier and featuring more than fifty pieces of the greatest comic writing of our time, the book includes such masters of the form as Roy Blount, Jr., Bruce Jay Friedman, Veronica Geng, Jack Handey, Garrison Keillor, Steve Martin, and Calvin Trillin, as well as work by newer comic stars like Andy Borowitz, Larry Doyle, Simon Rich, George Saunders, and David Sedaris.

The pieces were published in the past thirty years in such popular magazines as The New Yorker, McSweeney's, The Atlantic, National Lampoon, and Outside. But the book also includes a handful of older comic masterpieces that nobody in need of a laugh should ever be without, among them classics by Bret Harte, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Barthelme, and Mark Twain.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "68": { "wears.id": 68, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 68, "wears.title": "Coming of Age in America: A Multicultural Anthology", "wears.author": "Mary Frosch", "wears.author_bio": "

Mary Frosch is also the editor of Coming of Age Around the World (The New Press). As a teacher at The Spence School she designed a world literature curriculum and helped implement the multicultural literature program. She divides her time between New York City and Santa Monica, California. Gary Soto is the author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry. Winner of numerous prizes, including the 1985 National Book Award and a prize from the Academy of American Poets, Soto lives in Northern California.

", "wears.authors": "Mary Frosch, Gary Soto", "wears.title_slug": "coming-of-age-in-america", "wears.author_slug": "mary-frosch", "wears.isbn13": 9781565841475, "wears.isbn10": 1565841476, "wears.price": "$16.41", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "New Press, The", "wears.pubdate": "September 2007", "wears.edition": "Reprint", "wears.subjects": "Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, Ethnic & Minority Studies - United States", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 288, "wears.dimensions": "5.58 (w) x 8.28 (h) x 0.73 (d)", "wears.overview": "The acne and ecstasy of adolescence, a multicultural collection of short stories and fiction excerpts that Library Journal calls \"wonderfully diverse from the standard fare.\"
\n
\nBy turns touching and hilarious, the classic Coming of Age in America gathers together writers from fifteen different ethnic groups who, through their fiction, explore the terrain we all traverse as we come of age, no matter our race, ethnicity, gender, or class.
\n
\nWith over twenty short stories and fiction excerpts by noted authors such as Julia Alvarez and Frank Chin, Dorothy Allison and Adam Schwartz, Reginald McNight and Tobias Wolff, Coming of Age in America shows that our common experiences are more binding than our differences are divisive. Since its initial publication in 1994, Coming of Age in America has evolved from a groundbreaking collection of underrepresented voices into a timeless album of unforgettable literature. Its editor, Mary Frosch, has since created a series of celebrated anthologies, including Coming of Age Around the World and the forthcoming Coming of Age in the 21st Century. A wonderfully readable collection, this is a marvelous resource for those looking for stories that illustrate the convergence of cultural experience and literature.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The acne and ecstasy of adolescence, a multicultural collection of short stories and fiction excerpts that Library Journal calls \"wonderfully diverse from the standard fare.\"

By turns touching and hilarious, the classic Coming of Age in America gathers together writers from fifteen different ethnic groups who, through their fiction, explore the terrain we all traverse as we come of age, no matter our race, ethnicity, gender, or class.

With over twenty short stories and fiction excerpts by noted authors such as Julia Alvarez and Frank Chin, Dorothy Allison and Adam Schwartz, Reginald McNight and Tobias Wolff, Coming of Age in America shows that our common experiences are more binding than our differences are divisive. Since its initial publication in 1994, Coming of Age in America has evolved from a groundbreaking collection of underrepresented voices into a timeless album of unforgettable literature. Its editor, Mary Frosch, has since created a series of celebrated anthologies, including Coming of Age Around the World and the forthcoming Coming of Age in the 21st Century. A wonderfully readable collection, this is a marvelous resource for those looking for stories that illustrate the convergence of cultural experience and literature.

Library Journal

The 20-odd short stories and novel excerpts comprising this book are all previously published works, several from critically acclaimed authors like Tobias Wolff, Paule Marshall, and National Book Award finalist Dorothy Allison. Evocative of triumphs and tribulations we all experience during adolescence, this anthology shares needed perspectives that are wonderfully diverse from the standard fare that young adults are most often encouraged to digest. For a tiny, tempting sampling, try this beautiful description from ``Marigolds,'' Eugenia Collier's award-winning story: ``Memory is an abstract painting-it does not present things as they are but rather as they feel.'' This collection goes one better on Collier's metaphor for memory, presenting the coming-of-age years as they are and as they feel.-Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

", "wears.toc": "

	Foreword
	Preface
	Acknowledgments
	The Jacket	3
	The Neighborhood	7
	The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas	17
	The Body Politic	32
	The Wrong Lunch Line	52
	Jump or Dive	58
	from Bastard Out of Carolina	75
	Where Is It Written?	82
	Summer Water and Shirley	100
	Judgment Day	111
	from The Floating World	122
	Yes, Young Daddy	139
	Going to School	154
	A Spell of Kona Weather	166
	What Means Switch	175
	from This Boy's Life	197
	Eyes and Teeth	212
	A Bag of Oranges	216
	from How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents	226
	from Davita's Harp	239
	Marigolds	254
	Suggestions for Further Reading	265
	Biographical Notes	267
	Permissions Acknowledgments	272

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Library Journal

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "69": { "wears.id": 69, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 69, "wears.title": "Three African-American Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass", "wears.author": "Booker T. Washington", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, W. E. Du Bois", "wears.title_slug": "three-african-american-classics", "wears.author_slug": "booker-t-washington", "wears.isbn13": 9780486457574, "wears.isbn10": 486457575, "wears.price": "$6.63", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Dover Publications", "wears.pubdate": "February 2007", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Teachers - General & Miscellaneous - Biography, Slavery - Social Sciences, Civil Rights - Movements & Figures, Historical Biography - United States - 19th Century, Civil Rights - African American History, Abolitionists - Biography, Slavery & Abolitionism", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 448, "wears.dimensions": "5.20 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 1.00 (d)", "wears.overview": "Essential reading for students of African-American history, this collection represents three highly influential leaders. Washington and Douglass, both born into slavery, recount their rise from bondage to international recognition. Du Bois' landmark essays counsel a more aggressive approach to the civil rights movement.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Essential reading for students of African-American history, this collection represents three highly influential leaders. Washington and Douglass, both born into slavery, recount their rise from bondage to international recognition. Du Bois' landmark essays counsel a more aggressive approach to the civil rights movement.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "70": { "wears.id": 70, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 70, "wears.title": "100 Best African American Poems with CD", "wears.author": "Nikki Giovanni", "wears.author_bio": "

Poet, activist, mother, and professor, Nikki Giovanni is a three-time NAACP Image Award winner and the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, and holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry. The author of twenty-seven books and a Grammy nominee for The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, she is the University Distinguished Professor/English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, and an Oprah Living Legend.

", "wears.authors": "Nikki Giovanni", "wears.title_slug": "100-best-african-american-poems-with-cd", "wears.author_slug": "nikki-giovanni", "wears.isbn13": 9781402221118, "wears.isbn10": 1402221118, "wears.price": "$18.39", "wears.format": "Other Format", "wears.publisher": "Sourcebooks, Incorporated", "wears.pubdate": "November 2010", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 256, "wears.dimensions": "8.40 (w) x 11.66 (h) x 0.94 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Hear voices contemporary and classic as selected by New York Times bestselling author Nikki Giovanni

Award-winning poet and writer Nikki Giovanni takes on the impossible task of selecting the 100 best African American works from classic and contemporary poets. Out of necessity, Giovanni admits she cheats a little, selecting a larger, less round number.

The result is this startlingly vibrant collection that spans from historic to modern, from structured to freeform, and reflects the rich roots and visionary future of African American verse. These magnetic poems are an exciting mix of most-loved classics and daring new writing. From Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes to Tupac Shakur, Natasha Trethewey, and many others, the voice of a culture comes through in this collection, one that is as talented, diverse, and varied as its people.

African American poems are like all other poems: beautiful, loving, provocative, thoughtful, and all those other adjectives I can think of. Poems know no boundaries. They, like all Earth citizens, were born in some country, grew up on some culture, then in their blooming became citizens of the Universe. Poems fly from heart to heart, head to head, to whisper a dream, to share a condolence, to congratulate, and to vow forever. The poems are true. They are translated and they are celebrated. They are sung, they are recited, they are delightful. They are neglected. They are forgotten. They are put away. Even in their fallow periods they sprout images. And fight to be revived. And spring back to life with a bit of sunshine and caring.
\n -Nikki Giovanni

Read

Gwendolyn Brooks
Kwame Alexander
Tupac Shakur
Langston Hughes
Mari Evans
Kevin Young
Asha Bandele
Amiri Baraka

Hear

Ruby Dee
Novella Nelson
Nikki Giovanni
Elizabeth Alexander
Marilyn Nelson
Sonia Sanchez

And many, many, more

Nikki Giovanni is an award-winning poet, writer, and activist. She is the author of more than two dozen books for adults and children, including Bicycles, Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Racism 101, Blues: For All the Changes, and Love Poems. Her children's book-plus-audio compilation Hip Hop Speaks to Children was awarded the NAACP Image Award. Her children's book Rosa, a picture-book retelling of the Rosa Parks story, was a Caldecott Honor Book and winner of the Coretta Scott King Award. Both books were New York Times bestsellers. Nikki is a Grammy nominee for her spoken-word album The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She has been voted Woman of the Year by Essence, Mademoiselle, and Ladies' Home Journal. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where she teaches writing and literature.

", "wears.excerpt": "

From the Introduction:

Poems are like clouds on a June morning or two scoops of chocolate ice cream on a sugar cone in August...something everyone can enjoy. Or maybe poems are your cold feet in December on your lover's back...he is in agony but he lets your feet stay...something like that requires a bit of love. Or could it be that poems are exactly like Santa Claus...the promise, the hope, the excitement of a reward, no matter how small, for a good deed done...or a mean deed from which we refrained. The promise of tomorrow. I don't know. It seems that poems are essential. Like football to Fall, baseball to Spring, tennis to Summer, love Anytime. Something you don't think too much about until it is in Season. Then you deliciously anticipate the perfection. African American poems are like all other poems: beautiful, loving, provocative, thoughtful, and all those other adjectives I can think of.

Poems know no boundaries. They, like all Earth citizens, were born in some country, grew up on some culture, then in their blooming became citizens of the Universe. Poems fly from heart to heart, head to head, to whisper a dream, to share a condolence, to congratulate, and to vow forever. The poems are true. They are translated and they are celebrated. They are sung, they are recited, they are delightful. They are neglected. They are forgotten. They are put away. Even in their fallow periods they sprout images. And fight to be revived. And spring back to life with a bit of sunshine and caring.

These poems, this book, admit I cheated. The idea of this and no more would simply not work for me. I needed these plus those. My mother's favorite poem by Robert Hayden, plus James Weldon Johnson beginning a world that included the longing of the unfree for a loving God. My own fun \"Ego Tripping\" reaching to embrace Margaret Walker's \"For My People.\" \"Train Rides\" and \"Nikki-Rosa\" read by old and loving friends. But also the newness: Novella Nelson lending that sultry voice to the youngsters; Ruby Dee bringing her brilliance to the Gwendolyn Brooks cycle. My Virginia Tech Family wanted to participate: our president Dr. Charles Steger reading \"The Negro Speaks of Rivers,\" recognizing all our souls \"have grown deep like the rivers.\" We celebrate our Hips; we See A Negro Lady at a birthday celebration. Our friends from James Madison University and West Virginia University came to celebrate poetry with us, too. I love these poems so much. The only other thing I would have loved is Caroline Kennedy reading \"A Clean Slate.\"

At the end of a loving day of laughter in Jeff Dalton's studio, when Clinton's makeup had taken forty years off some of us and twenty-five off others, we all came together with one last great cry: the Dean of our College; the Director of Honors; young, old, professional, professor, and recited in one great voice \"We Real Cool.\" Yeah. We are. This book says Poetry Is For Everyone. What a Treat to be Snowbound with The 100* Best African American Poems (*but I cheated).

I did cheat.
\n It's true.
\n But I did not lie.

Nikki Giovanni Poet
\n 12 December 2009

", "wears.synopsis": "

Award-winning poet and writer Nikki Giovanni takes on the difficult task of selecting the 100 best African-American works from classic and contemporary poets.

", "wears.toc": "

Dedication: The Aunt: xxi — Track 1
Mari Evans

1. For My People: 1 — Track 2
Margaret Walker

2. Leroy: 3
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

3. Ars Poetica: Nov. 7, 2008: 4
L. Lamar Wilson

4. Ka'Ba: 8
Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

5. When You Have Forgotten Sunday: The Love Story: 9 — Track 3
Gwendolyn Brooks

6.
The Sermon on the Warpland: 11 — Track 4
Gwendolyn Brooks We Real Cool: 12 — Track 5
Gwendolyn Brooks

7.
Jazz Baby Is It In You: 13
Antoine Harris
\"I Fade Into the Night\": 14
Adam Daniel

8. Old Lem: 15 — Track 6
Sterling A. Brown

9. I Am Accuse of Tending to the Past: 17 — Track 7
Lucille Clifton

10. I Am A Black Woman: 18 — Track 8
Mari Evans

11. Who Can Be Born Black?: 20 — Track 9
Mari Evans

12. Nikka-Rosa:21 — Track 10
Nikki Giovanni

13. Knoxville, Tennessee: 23 — Track 11
Nikki Giovanni

14. The Dry Spell: 24 — Track 12
Kevin Young

15. Those Winter Sundays: 26 — Tracks 13 & 14
Robert Hayden

16. Frederic Douglass: 27
Robert Hayden

17. The Negro Speaks of Rivers: 28 — Track 15
Langston Hughes

18. Choosing the Blues: 29
Angela Jackson

19. My Father's Love Letters: 30
Yusef Komunyakaa

20. The Creation: 32 — Track 16
James Weldon Johnson

21. A Negro Love Song: 36
Paul Laurence Dunbar

22. Lift Every Voice and Sing: 37
James Weldon Johnson

23. Go Down Death: 39
James Weldon Johnson

24. Between Ourselves: 42
Audre Lorde

25. The Union of Two: 45
Haki R. Madhubuti

26. Ballad of Birmingham: 46
Dudley Randall

27. A Poem to Complement Other Poems: 48
Haki R. Madhubuti

28. No Images: 51
Waring Cuney

29. Between the World and Me: 52
Richard Wright

30. Theme for English B: 54
Langston Hughes

31. Harlem Suite
Easy Boogie: 56
Langston Hughes Dream Boogie: 57
Langston Hughes Dream Boogie: Variation: 58
Langston Hughes Harlem: 58
Langston Hughes Good Morning: 59
Langston Hughes Same in Blues: 60
Langston Hughes Island: 61
Langston Hughes

32. The Blue Terrance: 62
Terrance Hayes

33.
The Mother: 64 — Track 17
Gwendolyn Brooks A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon: 66
Gwendolyn Brooks — Track 18
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till: 72
Gwendolyn Brooks A Sunset of the City: 73 — Track 19
Gwendolyn Brooks

34. Things I Carried Coming to the World: 75
Remica L. Bingham

35. Topography: 77
Remica L. Bingham

36. Beneath Me: 79
Jericho Brown

37. Autobiography: 80
Jericho Brown

38. Parable of the Sower: 82
Pamela Sneed

39. Heritage: 86
Countee Cullen

40. Yet I Do Marvel: 91 — Track 20
Countee Cullen

41. Incident: 92 — Track 21
Countee Cullen

42. We Wear the Mask: 93 — Track 22
Paul Laurence Dunbar

43. Triple: 94
Georgia Douglas Johnson

44. The Heart of a Woman: 95 — Track 23
Georgia Douglas Johnson

45. Woman With Flower: 96
Naomi Long Madgett

46. The Idea of Ancestry: 97
Etheridge Knight

47. Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat: 99
Larry Neal

48. Cleaning: 105
Camille T. Dungy

49. Boston Year: 106 — Track 24
Elizabeth Alexander

50. She Wears Red: 107
Jackie Warren-Moore

51. Commercial Break: Road-Runner, Uneasy: 110
Tim Seibles

52. Before Making Love: 114
Toi Derricotte

53. Be-Bop: 115
Sterling Plumpp

54. Personal Letter No. 3: 116 — Track 25
Sonia Sanchez

55. Poem at Thirty: 117 — Track 26
Sonia Sanchez

56. A Poem for Sterling Brown: 118 — Track 27
Sonia Sanchez

57. Marchers Headed for Washington, Baltimore, 1963: 120
Remica L. Bingham

58. And Yeah...This is a Love Poem: 123
Nikki Giovanni

59. The Carousel: 123
Gloria C. Oden

60. Only Everything I Own: 127
Patricia Smith

61. Lot's Daughter Dreams of Her Mother: 128 — Track 28
Opal Moore

62. The Girlfriend's Train: 131
Nikky Finney

63. Back from the Arms of Big Mama: 136
Afaa Michael Weaver

64. Mama's Promise: 139 — Track 29
Marilyn Nelson

65. Bop: A Whistling Man: 142
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

66. Homage to My Hips: 144 — Track 30
Lucille Clifton

67. Train Ride: 145
Kwame Dawes

68. Train Rides: 148 — Track 31
Nikki Giovanni

69. A Great Grandaddy Speaks: 153
Lamonte B. Steptoe

70. Eddie Priest's Barbershop & Notary: 154
Kevin Young

71. View of the Library of Congress From Paul Laurence Dunbar High School: 156
Thomas Sayers Ellis

72. Drapery Factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956: 159 — Track 32
Natasha Trethewey

73. Some Kind of Crazy: 161
Major Jackson

74. From: 163
A. Van Jordan

75. Freedom Candy: 165
E. Ethelbert Miller

76. The Supremes: 167
Cornelius Eady

77. Jazz Suite
Nikki Save Me: 169
Michael Scott
\"Nikki, If You Were a Song...\": 170 — Track 33
Kwame Alexander Haiku: 170
DJ Renegade Untitled: 170
Nadir Lasana Bomani
\"I Wish I Could've Seen It...\": 171
Leodis McCray

78. That Some Mo': 174
DJ Renegade

79. Sometime in the Summer There's October: 175
Kwame Alexander

80. Dancing Naked on the Floor: 178
Kwame Alexander

81. Harriet Tubman's Email 2 Master: 180
Truth Thomas

82. A River That Flows Forever: 181 — Track 34
Tupac Shakur

83. The Rose that Grew from Concrete: 181 — Track 34
Tupac Shakur

84. Rochelle: 182
Reuben Jackson

85. All Their Stanzas Look Alike: 183
Thomas Sayers Ellis

86. From the Center to the Edge: 185
Asha Bandele

87. The Subtle Art of Breathing: 187
Asha Bandele

88. Southern University, 1963: 192
Kevin Young

89. Poetry Should Ride the Bus: 195
Ruth Forman

90. Blues for Spring: 197
Colleen J. McElroy

91. The Bicycle Wizard: 198
Sharon Strange

92. Bicycles: 199
Nikki Giovanni

93. A Clean Slate: 200
Fred D'Aguiar

94. Song Through the Wall: 201
Akua Lezli Hope

95. A Seat Saved: 203
Shana Yarborough

96. Sunday Greens: 205
Rita Dove

97. The Untitled Superhero Poem: 206
Tonya Maria Matthews

98. Mercy Killing: 209 — Track 35
Remica L. Bingham

99. If You Saw a Negro Lady: 210
June Jordan

100. Ego Tripping (There May Be a Reason Why): 212 — Track 36
Nikki Giovanni

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

In this multimedia anthology, editor Nikki Giovanni brings together the words and sounds of one hundred superlative African American poems from Phillis Wheatley to the present. This book and CD package can be beginning of a lifetime's conversation with inspiring poetry.

\n\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 6 }, "71": { "wears.id": 71, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 71, "wears.title": "Six American Poets: An Anthology", "wears.author": "Joel Conarroe", "wears.author_bio": "

The author of books and essays about American poetry and fiction and the editor Six American Poets, Joel Conarroe is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which awards fellowships to artists and scholars. He has previously served as chairman of the English department and dean of arts and sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and as executive director fo the Modern Language Association. He has earned degrees from Davidson College, Cornell University, and New York University, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by several institutions.

", "wears.authors": "Joel Conarroe", "wears.title_slug": "six-american-poets", "wears.author_slug": "joel-conarroe", "wears.isbn13": 9780679745259, "wears.isbn10": 679745254, "wears.price": "$12.24", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "December 1993", "wears.edition": "1st Vintage Books ed", "wears.subjects": "Poetry, American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 320, "wears.dimensions": "5.17 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.65 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Here are the most enduring works of six great American poets, collected in a single authoritative volume. From the overflowing pantheism of Walt Whitman to the exquisite precision of Emily Dickinson; from the democratic clarity of William Carlos Williams to the cerebral luxuriance of Wallace Stevens; and from Robert Frost's deceptively homespun dramatic monologues to Langston Hughes's exuberant jazz-age lyrics, this anthology presents the best work of six makers of the modern American poetic tradition. Six American Poets includes 247 poems, among them such famous masterpieces as \"I Hear America Singing,\" \"The Idea of Order at Key West,\" \"The Dance,\" and \"Mending Wall,\" as well as lesser-known works. With perceptive introductory essays by the distinguished scholar Joel Conarroe and selections that capture the distinctive voices and visions of its authors, this volume is an invaluable addition to any poetry library.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Here are the most enduring works of six great American poets, collected in a single authoritative volume. From the overflowing pantheism of Walt Whitman to the exquisite precision of Emily Dickinson; from the democratic clarity of William Carlos Williams to the cerebral luxuriance of Wallace Stevens; and from Robert Frost's deceptively homespun dramatic monologues to Langston Hughes's exuberant jazz-age lyrics, this anthology presents the best work of six makers of the modern American poetic tradition. Six American Poets includes 247 poems, among them such famous masterpieces as "I Hear America Singing," "The Idea of Order at Key West," "The Dance," and "Mending Wall," as well as lesser-known works. With perceptive introductory essays by the distinguished scholar Joel Conarroe and selections that capture the distinctive voices and visions of its authors, this volume is an invaluable addition to any poetry library.

Publishers Weekly

A collection of famous and lesser-known poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Williams, Stevens, Frost and Hughes. (Dec.)

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly\n

A collection of famous and lesser-known poems by Whitman, Dickinson, Williams, Stevens, Frost and Hughes. (Dec.)\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

Unlike most recent anthologies of American poetry--which, because they are directed largely at an audience of other poets, strive frantically to be as inclusive as possible--Conarroe's selection aims at ``the general reader interested in being introduced, in an unhurried way, to some major voices.'' Selections are from America's greatest and most representative poets: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes. Though one may cavil at particular omissions or inclusions, especially the practice of excerpting Whitman's ``Song of Myself,'' Conarroe's anthology is a superb introduction to the pleasures of poetry for the general reader. The fine introduction and prefaces provide added assistance to those who, starting here, will doubtlessly want to continue ex ploring poetry. Highly recommended. BOMC selection.-- Frank J. Lepkowski, Oakland Univ., Rochester, Mich.\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "72": { "wears.id": 72, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 72, "wears.title": "Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English", "wears.author": "Sandra M. Gilbert", "wears.author_bio": "

Sandra M. Gilbert is the author of numerous volumes of criticism and poetry, as well as a memoir. She is coeditor (with Susan Gubar) of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. A Distinguished Professor of English emerita at the University of California, Davis, she lives in Berkeley, California.

Susan Gubar (Ph.D. University of Iowa) is a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University, where she has won numerous teaching awards, most recently the Faculty Mentor Award from the Indiana University Graduate and Professional Student Organization. In addition to her critical collaboration with Sandra Gilbert, she is the author of Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (1997), Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (2000), Poetry After Auschwitz: Remembering What One Never Knew (2003), and Rooms of Our Own (2006), and editor of the first annotated edition of Woolf's A Room of One's Own (2005).

", "wears.authors": "Sandra M. Gilbert (Editor), Norton, Susan Gubar, Susan Gubar", "wears.title_slug": "norton-anthology-of-literature-by-women", "wears.author_slug": "sandra-m-gilbert", "wears.isbn13": 9780393930153, "wears.isbn10": 393930157, "wears.price": "$70.64", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "February 2007", "wears.edition": "3rd Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2452, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 3.30 (d)", "wears.overview": "Long the standard teaching anthology, the landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women has introduced generations of readers to the rich variety of women’s writing in English. Now, the much-anticipated Third Edition responds to the wealth of writing by women across the globe with the inclusion of 61 new authors (219 in all) whose diverse works span six centuries. A more flexible two-volume format and a versatile new companion reader make the Third Edition an even better teaching tool.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Long the standard teaching anthology, the landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women has introduced generations of readers to the rich variety of women’s writing in English.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "73": { "wears.id": 73, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 73, "wears.title": "Multicultural Children's Literature: Through the Eyes of Many Children", "wears.author": "Donna E. Norton", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Donna E. Norton", "wears.title_slug": "multicultural-childrens-literature", "wears.author_slug": "donna-e-norton", "wears.isbn13": 9780135145289, "wears.isbn10": 135145287, "wears.price": "$46.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Prentice Hall", "wears.pubdate": "March 2008", "wears.edition": "3rd Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism, Children's Literature", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This book includes both a large source for and section on how to use multicultural literature with students, as well as the latest in research and issues related to the topic. The materials noted in the book are both authentic and non-stereotyped. The book develops techniques that encourage higher thought processes, helping adults evaluate literature to determine authenticity and an understanding of the various cultures.

", "wears.toc": "

1. Introduction to Multicultural Literature

Developing a Study of Multicultural Literature

Availability of High Quality Multicultural Literature

2. African American Literature

Issues Related to African American Literature

Changing Availability of Quality Literature

Authors Who Write and Illustrate African American Literature

Traditional Literature

Historical Nonfiction and Fiction

African American Poetry

Involving Children with African American Literature

3. Native American Literature

Authors Who Write and Illustrate Native American Literature

Issues Related to Native American Literature

Traditional Literature

Historical Nonfiction and Fiction

Native American Poetry

Contemporary Realistic Fiction

Nonfiction Informational Books

Involving Children with Native American Literature

4. Latino Literature

Historical Perspectives

Authors Who Write and Illustrate Latino Literature

Values in Latino Culture

Folklore

Historical Nonfiction and Fiction

Contemporary Realistic Fiction and Nonfiction

Involving Children with Latino Literature

5. Asian Literature

Values That Are Part of the Cultures

Concerns Over Stereotypes in Literature from the Past

Asian Folklore

Early History of the People and the Culture

Poetry

Contemporary Literature with Asian Roots

Involving Children with Asian Literature

Visualizing Chinese Art

Writing Connections with Asian Literature

6. Jewish Literature

What Does It Mean to Be Jewish?

Folklore and Ancient Stories of the Jewish People

Early History of the Jewish People

Applying Knowledge Gained About Jewish Folklore

Years of Emigration and Immigration

The Holocaust in Children's and Young Adult Literature

Jewish Poetry

Contemporary Jewish Literature

Involving Children with Jewish Literature

7. Middle Eastern Literature

Historical Perspectives

Authors Who Write and Illustrate Middle Eastern Literature

Values Identified in the Culture and Literature

Folklore and Ancient Stories from the Middle East

Early History

Contemporary Literature with Middle Eastern Roots

Involving Children with Middle Eastern Literature

Visualizing Middle Eastern Art

Writing Connections with Middle Eastern Literature

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "74": { "wears.id": 74, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 74, "wears.title": "The Voice That Is Great within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century", "wears.author": "Hayden Carruth", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Hayden Carruth, Susan Kagen Podell", "wears.title_slug": "the-voice-that-is-great-within-us", "wears.author_slug": "hayden-carruth", "wears.isbn13": 9780553262636, "wears.isbn10": 553262637, "wears.price": "$8.40", "wears.format": "Mass Market Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Random House Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "September 1983", "wears.edition": "Reprint", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 768, "wears.dimensions": "4.15 (w) x 6.85 (h) x 1.25 (d)", "wears.overview": "This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period--Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks among them--along with short biographies of each.", "wears.excerpt": "ROBERT FROST (1875-1963)\n

Born in San Francisco, Frost moved to New England ten years later upon the death of his father, and in effect remained there the rest of his life, becoming the New Englander par excellence of his age. Yet his early life was not notably successful. Twice interrupted in attempts to secure a college degree, he farmed for a while in New Hampshire, worked as a mill hand, a schoolteacher, a newspaperman. His first poem was published in 1894; but during the next twenty years his work was consistently rejected by American editors.

Finally, discouraged but still determined, Frost went to England in 1912, and there won the support of influential poets and critics, including Ezra Pound. His first two books, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were published in London. In 1915 he returned to America. Thereafter his success was unquestioned: he won many honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and became not only the most popular serious poet in the country but one of the most generally respected among fellow writers. Frost's poetic practice was based on what he called \"sentence sounds,\" the natural tones and rhythms of speech cast loosely against standard poetic forms. Conventional as it may seem today, it was a new departure in its time, making Frost a distinctly modern poet. Similarly his combination of Emersonian spiritual aspiration with back-country Yankee pragmatism placed him squarely among his contemporaries, to whom his metaphysically probing Iyrics and narratives, sometimes cynical or playful but often genuinely anguished, spoke with force. These factors, together with his superb poetic gift, make him dominant in the American tradition, a figure with whom younger poets, even the most rebellious, must come to terms.

Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1949 ff.

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
\nThat sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
\nAnd spills the upper boulders in the sun;
\nAnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
\nThe work of hunters is another thing:
\nI have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
\nBut they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
\nTo please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
\nNo one has seen them made or heard them made,
\nBut at spring mending-time we find them there.
\nI let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
\nAnd on a day we meet to walk the line And set the wall between us once again.
\nWe keep the wall between us as we go.
\nTo each the boulders that have fallen to each.
\nAnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls We have to use a spell to make them balance:
\n'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
\nWe wear our fingers rough with handling them.
\nOh, just another kind of outdoor game,
\nOne on a side. It comes to little more:
\nThere where it is we do not need the wall:
\nHe is all pine and I am apple orchard.
\nMy apple trees will never get across And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
\nHe only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
\nSpring is the mischief in me, and I wonder If I could put a notion in his head:
\n'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
\nBefore I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out,
\nAnd to whom I was like to give offense.
\nSomething there is that doesn't love a wall That wants it down.' I could say 'E1ves' to him,
\nBut it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather He said it for himself. I see him there Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
\nHe moves in darkness as it seems to me,
\nNot of woods only and the shade of trees.
\nHe will not go behind his father's saying,
\nAnd he likes having thought of it so well He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)

The son of Swedish immigrants, Sandburg grew up in Galesburg, Ill., a railroad town, where he attended school until he was thirteen, then dropped out and wandered for years through the West and Midwest, working at varied jobs. He served in the Spanish-American War and for a while attended college. Finally he settled in Milwaukee, where he married, became a Socialist and a newspaperman, and began devoting himself seriously to poetry. In 1913 he moved to Chicago. Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry, gave his work a prominent place in her magazine, where it attracted attention for its robust and Whitmanesque freedom. Two books, Chicago Poetry (1916) and Cornhuskers (1918), assured his reputation. During the twenties and thirties Sandburg toured widely, lecturing, reading his poems, singing and collecting folk songs, playing his guitar. His two collections, The American Songbag (1927) and The New American Songbag (1950), are important contributions to folklore. At the same time he became deeply interested in the life and achievement of Abraham Lincoln, and spent many years in producing a multi-volume biography. In addition his works include several first-rate books for children (the Rootabaga series), novels, autobiographies, screen plays, and much journalism. Sandburg's poetry was scorned during his middle and later life by the European-oriented critics of the time, and in part rightly so; he wrote too much and too facilely. But some of his early poems have a fresh vision and incantatory vigor that remain firm. In style, attitude, and temperament, he was closer to the young poets of today than most of them recognize.

Complete Poems. Harcourt, Brace, 1950.

CHICAGO

Hog Butcher for the World,
\nTool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
\nPlayer with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling,
\nCity of the Big Shoulders:
\nThey tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps hiring the farm boys.
\nAnd they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
\nAnd they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
\nAnd having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
\nCome and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
\nFlinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
\nFierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
\nBareheaded,
\nShoveling,
\nWrecking,
\nPlanning,
\nBuilding, breaking, rebuilding,
\nUnder the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
\nUnder the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,
\nLaughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
\nBragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,
\nLaughing!
\nLaughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)

Stevens determined, early in life, to create a life-style that would accommodate his first vocation, poetry. The course he chose would have seemed paradoxical to many, but not to him. He studied law, entered the insurance business at Hartford, Conn., and spent a number of years working upward to an executive position and a life of affluence. Consequently his first book, Harmonium (1923), did not appear until he was forty-three years old; but then it made an immediate hit. Many of its poems became favorites: \"Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores,\" \"Sunday Morning,\" \"The Emperor of Ice-Cream,\" \"Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,\" \"Sea Surface Full of Clouds,\" etc. They were as exotic as their titles; full of tropical imagery and unusual diction, armored in brilliant stylized rhetoric; but despite their ornamentation they dealt with disturbing themes, particularly man's attempt to find, or create, meaning in a universe from which the spiritual rationale had apparently departed. For Stevens, the way lay through aesthetic experience; yet he was never merely willing to substitute art for reality. The real world, he insisted, was the \"necessary angel\" who announced to imaginative man the plenitude of hie. As his books succeeded one another, perceptive readers saw that although the famous stylization of the early poems had moderated, the new work was more exact, better integrated, and more profoundly felt. Indeed some of Stevens's most moving poems, written in his last years, were not published until after his death, in a volume which also contains bis \"Adagia\", brilliant prose aphorisms and philosophical aperçus. No other poetry of the twentieth century has been more consistently, flawlessly individual; none has been more attractive; none has been harder to imitate. Hence the influence of Stevens on younger poets, though pervasive, has been indirect.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Knopf, 1954.
\nOpus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. Knopf, 1957.
\nThe Necessary Angel. (Essays.) Knopf, 1951.
\nSelected Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed Holly Stevens. Knopf, 1966.

THE HOUSE WAS QUIET AND THE WORLD WAS CALM

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
\nThe reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
\nThe house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
\nExcept that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
\nThe house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
\nThe access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
\nIn which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself Is the reader leasing late and reading there.

\"Mending Wall\" by Robert Frost. From Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Copyright © 1916, 1923 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. Copyright © 1936, 1942 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1964 by Leslie Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

\"The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm\" by Wallace Stevens. From The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1942, 1947 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

", "wears.synopsis": "

This famous anthology includes the works of more than 130 major American poets of the modern period--Robert Frost, Paul Goodman, Carl Sandburg and Gwendolyn Brooks among them--along with short biographies of each.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "75": { "wears.id": 75, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 75, "wears.title": "Poems That Touch the Heart", "wears.author": "A.L. Alexander", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "A.L. Alexander, A. L. Alexander (Introduction), A. L. Alexander", "wears.title_slug": "poems-that-touch-the-heart", "wears.author_slug": "a-l-alexander", "wears.isbn13": 9780385044011, "wears.isbn10": 385044011, "wears.price": "$14.99", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "October 1984", "wears.edition": "ENLARGED", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies, Inspirational & Religious Poetry - General & Miscellaneous", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 464, "wears.dimensions": "5.79 (w) x 8.54 (h) x 1.55 (d)", "wears.overview": "

With over 650,000 copies in print, Poems That Touch The Heart is America's most popular collection of inspirational verse.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "76": { "wears.id": 76, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 76, "wears.title": "I Thought My Father Was God: And Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project", "wears.author": "Paul Auster", "wears.author_bio": "

Paul Auster's unique novels are often like Chinese boxes, continually opening further to reveal new layers. He approaches his writing as he has approached his life, to an extent: as something of a nomad in a perpetually changing, mysterious landscape.

", "wears.authors": "Paul Auster, Nelly Reifler", "wears.title_slug": "i-thought-my-father-was-god", "wears.author_slug": "paul-auster", "wears.isbn13": 9780312421007, "wears.isbn10": 312421001, "wears.price": "$12.29", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Picador", "wears.pubdate": "September 2002", "wears.edition": "REV", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, Historical Biography - United States - General & Miscellaneous, World History - General & Miscellaneous, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 416, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.31 (h) x 0.76 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The true-life stories in this unique collection provide \"a window into the American mind and heart\" (The Daily News). One hundred and eighty voices - male and female, young and old, from all walks of life and all over the country - talk intimately to the reader. Combining great humor and pathos this remarkable selection of stories from the thousands submitted to NPR's Weekend All Things Considered National Story Project gives the reader a glimpse of America's soul in all its diversity.

", "wears.excerpt": "

I told the listeners that I was looking for stories. The stories had to be true, and they had to be short, but there would be no restrictions as to subject matter or style. What interested me most, I said, were stories that defied our expectations of the world, anecdotes that revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives, in our family histories, in our minds and bodies, in our souls . . . I was hoping to put together an archive of facts, a museum of American reality.

More than ever, I have come to appreciate how deeply and passionately most of us live within ourselves. Our attachments are ferocious. Our loves overwhelm us, define us, obliterate the boundaries between ourselves and others. —from the Prologue

So there was Mr. Bernhauser yelling at us to get the hell out of his tree, and my father asked him what the problem was. Mr. Bernhauser took a deep breath and launched into a diatribe about thieving kids, breakers of rules, takers of fruit, and monsters in general. I guess my father had had enough, for the next thing he did was shout at Mr. Bernhauser and tell him to drop dead. Mr. Bernhauser stopped screaming, looked at my father, turned bright red, then purple, grabbed his chest, turned gray, and slowly folded to the ground. I thought my father was God. That he could yell at a miserable old man and make him die on command was beyond my comprehension. —Robert Winnie Bonners Ferry, Idaho

", "wears.synopsis": "

A truly captivating collection of 180 real stories written by NPR radio listeners—stories that, in editor Paul Auster's words, defy \"our expectations about the world and reveal[ed] the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives.\"

Annotation © Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Magazine

Two years ago, on National Public Radio's \"Weekend All Things Considered,\" Auster introduced the National Story Project. In an attempt \"to put together an archive of facts, a museum of American reality,\" he welcomed anyone to submit a story, following two rules: it must be true and it must be short. This book collects 179 stories-Auster calls them \"reports from the frontlines of personal experience\"-picked from over 4,000 entries. There is the unassuming yet beautiful portrait of a summer afternoon in a 1960s Manhattan neighborhood; the story of a man given leave after fifteen years in prison to attend his grandmother's funeral; and a homeless woman's account of her living situation. There are impossible coincidences, eerie omens and visions, and tales of love and war and family and death.
Ted Waitt

", "wears.toc": "

	Introduction
	The Chicken	3
	Rascal	4
	The Yellow Butterfly	6
	Python	7
	Pooh	9
	New York Stray	11
	Pork Chop	12
	B	14
	Two Loves	16
	Rabbit Story	17
	Carolina	19
	Andy and the Snake	21
	Blue Skies	24
	Exposure	25
	Vertigo	27
	Star and Chain	33
	Radio Gypsy	34
	A Bicycle Story	36
	Grandmother's China	39
	The Bass	41
	Mother's Watch	44
	Case Closed	46
	The Photo	47
	MS. Found in an Attic	49
	Tempo Primo	50
	A Lesson Not Learned	52
	A Family Christmas	52
	My Rocking Chair	55
	The Unicycle	57
	Moccasins	59
	The Striped Pen	61
	The Doll	63
	The Videotape	66
	The Purse	68
	A Gift of Gold	70
	Rainout	75
	Isolation	76
	Connections	78
	The Wednesday Before Christmas	80
	How My Father Lost His Job	82
	Danny Kowalski	85
	Revenge	87
	Chris	89
	Put Your Little Foot	92
	Aunt Myrtle	95
	American Odyssey	97
	A Plate of Peas	99
	Wash Guilt	101
	Double Sadness	103
	A Picture of Life	106
	Margie	109
	One Thousand Dollars	111
	Taking Leave	114
	Act of Memory	120
	Bicoastal	125
	A Felt Fedora	126
	Man vs. coat	127
	That's Entertainment	128
	The Cake	129
	Riding With Andy	131
	Sophisticated Lady	132
	My First Day in Priest Clothes	133
	Jewish Cowboy	134
	How to Win Friends and Influence People	135
	Your Father Has the Hay Fever	136
	Lee Ann and Holly Ann	139
	Why I Am Antifur	140
	Airport Story	142
	Tears and Flapdoodle	144
	The Club Car	146
	Bronx Cheer	148
	One Day in Higley	150
	Dancing on Seventy-fourth Street	153
	A Conversation with Bill	154
	Greyhounding	156
	A Little Story about New York	159
	My Mistake	162
	No Forwarding Address	164
	The New Girl	165
	The Iceman of Market Street	168
	Me and the Babe	171
	Lives of the Poets	172
	Land of the Lost	173
	Rainbow	175
	Rescued by God	177
	My Story	179
	Small World	183
	Christmas Morning, 1949	186
	Brooklyn Roberts	188
	$1,380 per Night, Double Occupancy	190
	A Shot in the Light	195
	Snow	202
	The Fastest Man in the Union Army	207
	Christmas, 1862	208
	Mount Grappa	210
	Savenay	212
	Fifty Years Later	213
	He Was the Same Age as My Sister	214
	Betting on Uncle Louie	216
	The Ten-Goal Player	218
	The Last Hand	220
	August 1945	222
	One Autumn Afternoon	224
	I Thought My Father Was God	226
	The Celebration	228
	Christmas, 1945	230
	A Trunk Full of Memories	232
	A Walk in the Sun	235
	A Shot in the Dark	237
	Confessions of a Mouseketeer	239
	Forever	241
	Utah, 1975	243
	What If?	247
	The Mysteries of Tortellini	249
	An Involuntary Assistant	251
	The Plot	253
	Mathematical Aphrodisiac	255
	Table for Two	257
	Suzy's Choosy	259
	Top Button	260
	Lace Gloves	262
	Susan's Greetings	263
	Edith	264
	Souls Fly Away	267
	Awaiting Delivery	269
	The Day Paul and I Flew the Kite	270
	A Lesson in Love	272
	Ballerina	274
	The Fortune Cookie	276
	Ashes	279
	Harrisburg	281
	Something to Think About	283
	Good Night	285
	Charlie the Tree Killer	287
	Dead Man's Bluff	288
	My Best Friend	290
	I Didn't Know	291
	Cardiac Arrests	293
	Grandmother's Funeral	294
	High Street	296
	A Failed Execution	297
	The Ghost	299
	Heart Surgery	301
	The Crying Place	302
	Lee	303
	South Dakota	305
	Connecting with Phil	308
	The Letter	310
	Dress Rehearsal	312
	The Anonymous Deciding Factor	315
	4:05 a.m	319
	In the Middle of the Night	320
	Blood	321
	T321 Interpretation of Dreams	322
	Half-Ball	323
	Friday Night	325
	Farrell	327
	\"Jill\"	329
	D-day	330
	The Wall	331
	Heaven	333
	My Father's Dream	335
	Parallel Lives	337
	Anna May	340
	Long Time Gone	342
	Sewing Lessons	347
	Sunday Drive	350
	Mayonnaise Sandwiches	354
	Seaside	355
	After a Long Winter	358
	Martini with a Twist	359
	Nowhere	362
	Where in the World Is Era Rose Rodosta?	363
	Peter	365
	Early Arithmetic	368
	Reflections on a Hubcap	371
	Homeless in Prescott	373
	Being There	376
	An Average Sadness	378
	Index of Authors	381

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From Barnes & Noble

Famed author Paul Auster presents 180 of the \"true tales\" from National Public Radio's monthly National Story Project series. The vividly personal biographies come from men and women of every conceivable background and cover more than 40 U.S. states. The accounts are short but powerful; they include everything from amusing misunderstandings to heartbreakingly tragic moments. The result is nothing less than what Auster himself describes as \"an archive of facts, a museum of American reality.\"\n\n

\n\n

From the Publisher

“A powerful book, one in which strangers share with you their darkest secrets, their happiest memories, their fears, their regrets. To read these essays is to look into hearts, to see life from other viewpoints, to live vicariously.” —The Boston Globe

“Unforgettable testimonials of human resilience. Moving and amusing dispatches from across America.” —Us Weekly (starred review)

“Human foibles and frailties, laughter and tears...We are all hearing—and telling—stories all the time, especially now, in these days when life itself seems so fragile and precious. But Paul Auster’s wonderful efforts, choosing these fine stories, have given us a timely and invaluable reminder of what it means to listen—to really listen—to America talking.” —The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“Finally, a bathroom book worthy of Pulitzer consideration: the one-to-three-page stories gathered in this astonishing, addictive collection are absolute gems.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“It is difficult to think of another book published this year, and probably any book to be published next year, that is so simple and so obvious, so excellent in intention and so elegant in its execution, and which displays such wisdom and such knowledge of human life in all its varieties. It is also difficult to think of a book that is so stark a reminder that human experience can be horrid and utterly unbelievable, and which therefore answers so precisely to our current needs and circumstances.”—The Guardian (UK)

“As this collection ably proves, we all shape experience into stories, and Auster has done a storyteller’s job himself of grouping these pieces effectively. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Like no other book I have read in years, this one restored my belief in Americans and the American experience.” —Philip Levine, Ploughshares

\n\n\n

From The Critics

\n\n

Publishers Weekly

This is a moving collection of stories that realizes the audio format's best possibilities. Culled from a collaboration between novelist Auster (Leviathan) and National Public Radio's All Things Considered, these slices of the American experience are real-life tales from people all over the country on a range of subjects. Since Auster himself selected the stories, it's no surprise that they echo his own approach while reading them: comfortable and emotive, with dexterous use of the power of understatement. Auster's tone is engaging, if a bit mellow, but what comes across more than anything is his genuine concern for the stories themselves and his belief in their merits. He keeps his dramatization to a minimum in order to let those merits shine through, and the recording is sure to leave listeners alternately smiling, nostalgic or melancholic. Even if a particular piece doesn't strike a chord, listeners won't be disappointed for long, as one of the production's finer points is its variety. Each tale lasts only a few minutes, but many of the images linger much longer. And because the stories were originally intended for radio, this is one instance where the audio is preferred over the print version. Based on the Holt hardcover (Forecasts, June 4, 2001). (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

In 2001, when NPR asked Auster to become a regular storyteller on Weekend All Things Considered, he wasn't interested. Then his wife suggested that he ask people to send him their stories to read on the air, and a few months later the National Story Project with was born. From some 4000 stories, Auster has selected 179, grouping them in loose categories: animals, objects, families, slapstick, strangers, war, love, death, dreams, and meditations. All are short, all are true, and they can be sad, hilarious, or both at the same time. In the title piece, Robert Winnie's father tells someone to drop dead and he does! In another, a grandson who has made his grandmother furious hears his grandfather tell him, \"You are my revenge.\" Others tell of impossible coincidences, difficult lives, and wonderful comebacks. As this collection ably proves, we all shape experience into stories, and Auster has done a storyteller's job himself of grouping the pieces effectively. Highly recommended for public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/01.] Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., Westminster, CO Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

\n\n

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Auster was on the verge of saying no to an offer to tell his own stories on the air when a chance remark by his wife changed the complexion and ultimately the direction of a National Public Radio project. She suggested that listeners be invited to make submissions. With that, the remarkable National Story Project was born. The rules were relatively simple; the stories had to be true and they had to be short. Four thousand people sent in their work. After just a few months, it became evident to Auster that too many good stories were coming in and that a book would be necessary to do justice to the project. He chose what he considered to be the best-179 pieces, written by individuals ranging in age from 20 to 90, from all walks of life, and touching on everything from the amazing to the poignant. Readers will turn pages to see if the next story is just as memorable as the one before, and it is. This is a wonderful book about some incredible people, to enjoy and to share with others.-Peggy Bercher, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.\n\n

\n\n

Kirkus Reviews

A collection of vignettes from the American stew pot, written for broadcast on National Public Radio by men and women from every racial, cultural, and economic stratum. Auster, who proposed the National Story Project in 1999 and has been reading the results on NPR ever since, has received more than 4,000 submissions since the project began. He culled 179 of them for this volume, few more than two or three pages long, some as brief as half a page. Placing no limits on subject matter, Auster asked his listeners only for anecdotes that \"revealed the mysterious and unknowable forces at work in our lives.\" What he got were tales ranging from spectral apparitions in the bedroom to painful custody trials, with a preponderant emphasis on childhood memories. The collection he shaped from this material encompasses the comic and the tragic, the absurd and the surreal, the mundane and the ethereal. The title story, for instance, recounts a bizarre incident from the writer's youth, when his father in a burst of justifiable irritation told a cranky neighbor to \"drop dead\"-and the neighbor did. \"The Chicken,\" which opens the collection, is a provocative six-sentence tale about a bird's adventure on the streets of Portland, Oregon. The volume is divided somewhat arbitrarily into 10 chapters, beginning with \"Animals\" and concluding with \"Meditations\"; \"War,\" \"Death,\" \"Love,\" and \"Slapstick\" fall in between. The prose can be awkward, pretentious, or occasionally elegant, but for the most part it's simple and direct. \"A Shot in the Light,\" for instance, relates the story of a man who was shot four times by a stranded motorist he had befriended. Victim and shooter survive, and the piece shows forgivenesson both sides, but the author makes no attempt to relate the incident to larger religious or political themes. Bedside fodder for general readers and a bonanza for fiction writers looking for core stories to launch a novel. Author tour\n\n

\n\n

Sunday Oklahoman

“A wonderful story collection...and something that would make a great gift for the holidays.”\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 7 }, "77": { "wears.id": 77, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 77, "wears.title": "Listening For God Rdr Vol 4", "wears.author": "Paula J. Carlson", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Paula J. Carlson (Editor), Peter S. Hawkins", "wears.title_slug": "listening-for-god-rdr-vol-4", "wears.author_slug": "paula-j-carlson", "wears.isbn13": 9780806645773, "wears.isbn10": 806645776, "wears.price": "$13.43", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Augsburg Fortress, Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "January 2003", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Faith, Literature Anthologies - General & Miscellaneous, General & Miscellaneous Christian Life, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 164, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.35 (d)", "wears.overview": "This resource helps adults explore the issues of discipleship and theology through guided interaction from selections of American literature. Listening for God includes excerpts from the works of eight contemporary American authors supplemented by author profiles, and discussion and reflection questions. \n

Included are selections from:

James Baldwin Sue Miller Robert Olen Butler Doris Betts Michael Malone Allegra Goodman Alice Elliott Dark Kent Haruf

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Where do you listen for God? In this new collection of stories and essays, the challenge is to pay attention everywhere. Listening for God is a resource intended to help readers investigate how life and faith merge in surprising ways and places. Contemporary American literature may not be the most predictable place to listen for God, but it may well turn out to be among the most rewarding.

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction

1. John Cheever

The Five-Forty-Eight

2. Mary Gordon

Mrs. Cassidy's Last Year

3. Wendell Berry

Pray without Ceasing

4. Oscar Hijuelos

Christmas 1967

5. Reynolds Price

Long Night

6. Louis Erdrich

Satan: Hijacker of a Planet

7. Tess Gallagher

The Woman Who Prayed

8. Tillie Olsen

O Yes

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "78": { "wears.id": 78, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 78, "wears.title": "The American Tradition in Literature (concise) book alone", "wears.author": "George Perkins", "wears.author_bio": "

George Perkins is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University and an Associate Editor of

Narrative. He holds degrees from Tufts and Duke universities and received his Ph.D. from Cornell.

He has been a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Newcastle in Australia and has held a Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to Newcastle and Edinburgh, he has taught at Washington University, Baldwin-Wallace College and Fairleigh Dickinson University. His books include THE THEORY OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL, REALISTIC AMERICAN SHORT FICTION, AMERICAN POETIC THEORY, THE HARPER HANDBOOK TO LITERATURE (with Northrup Frye and Sheridan Baker), THE PRACTICAL

IMAGINATION (with Frye, Baker and Barbara Perkins), BENET'S READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN LITERATURE (with Barbara Perkins), KALEIDOSCOPE: Stories of the American

Experience (with Barbara Perkins), WOMEN'S WORK; An Anthology of American Literature (with

Barbara Perkins and Robyn Warhol), and THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, 9TH edition

(with Barbara Perkins).

Barbara Perkins is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Toledo and Associate Editor of Narrative. Since its founding, she has served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and has taught at Baldwin-Wallace College, The University of Pennsylvania, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Eastern Michigan University, and the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has contributed essays to several reference works including CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS, GREAT WRITERS OF THE ENLGISH LANGUAGE, and THE WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA. Her books include CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE (with George Perkins), BENET'S READER'S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF

AMERICAN LITERATURE (with George Perkins and Phillip Leininger), KALEIDOSCIPE: Stories

Of the American Experience (with George Perkins), WOMEN'S WORK: An Anthology of American Literature (with George Perkins and Robyn Warhol) and THE AMERICAN TRADITION IN LITERATURE, 9th edition (with George Perkins).

", "wears.authors": "George Perkins, Barbara Perkins", "wears.title_slug": "the-american-tradition-in-literature", "wears.author_slug": "george-perkins", "wears.isbn13": 9780073384894, "wears.isbn10": 73384895, "wears.price": "$106.79", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "McGraw-Hill Companies, The", "wears.pubdate": "November 2008", "wears.edition": "12nd Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2352, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 2.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Widely known as the anthology that best unites tradition with innovation, The American Tradition in Literature is proud to enter its fifth decade of leadership among textbook anthologies of American literature.

Each volume continues to offer a flexible organization, with literary merit as the guiding principle of selection. The new photos and illustrations illuminate the texts and literary/historical timelines help students put works in context.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

List of Illustrations

Preface

EXPLORATION AND THE COLONIES, 1492–1791

Virginia and the South

New England

Timeline: Exploration and the Colonies

NATIVES AND EXPLORERS

NATIVE LITERATURE: THE ORAL TRADITION

The Chiefs Daughters

Coyote and Bear

Twelfth Song of the Thunder

The Corn Grows Up

At the Time of the White Dawn

Snake the Cause

The Weaver’s Lamentation

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451-1506)

[Report of the First Voyage]

GIOVANNI DA VERRAZZANO (1485?-1528)

From Verrazzano’s Voyage: 1524

ALVAR NUEZ CABEZA DE VACA (c1490-c1557)

From Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca

Chapter 12: The Indians Bring Us Food

Chapter 16: The Christians Leave the Island of Malhado

RICHARD HAKLUYT (1552-1616)

The Famous Voyage of Sir Francis Drake

[Nova Albion]

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN (c1567-1635)

From Voyages of Samuel de Champlain: The Voyage of 1604–1607

THE COLONIES

JOHN SMITH (1580-1631)

From The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles

The Third Book. The Proceedings and Accidents of the English Colony in Virginia

Chapter II: What Happened till the First Supply

The Fourth Book: The Proceedings of the English after the Alteration of the Government Of Virginia

John Smith's Relation to Queen Anne of Pocahontas (1616)

WILLIAM BRADFORD (1590-1657)

From Of Plymouth Plantation, Book I

Chapter IX: Of their Voyage, and how they Passed the Sea; and of their Safe Arrival at Cape Cod

Chapter X: Showing How they Sought out a place of Habitation; and What Befell them Thereabout

From Of Plymouth Plantation, Book II

[The Mayflower Compact (1620)]

[Compact with the Indians]

[First Thanksgiving]

[Narragansett Challenge]

[Thomas Morton of Merrymount

JOHN WINTHROP (1588-1649)

From A Model of Christian Charity

PURITANISM

ANNE BRADSTREET (1612?-1672)

The Prologue

The Flesh and the Spirit

The Author to Her Book

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

To My Dear and Loving Husband

A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment

In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Who Deceased August, 1665 Being a Year and a Half Old

Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666

MARY ROWLANDSON (1636?–1711?)

From A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson

EDWARD TAYLOR (1642?-1729)

The Preface

Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children

Huswifery

Meditation 8, First Series

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

CROSSCURRENTS: PURITANS, INDIANS, AND WITCHCRAFT

COTTON MATHER (1663-1728)

*[Indian Powaws and Witchcraft]

*MARY TOWNE EASTY (1634?-1692)

[The Petition of Mary Towne Easty]

SAMUEL SEWALL (1652-1730)

*[A Witchcraft Judge’s Confession of Guilt]

COTTON MATHER (1663-1728)

From The Wonders of the Invisible World

Enchantments Encountered

The Trial of Bridget Bishop

A Third Curiosity

THE SOUTH AND THE MIDDLE COLONIES

WILLIAM BYRD (1674-1744)

FromThe History of the Dividing Line

[Indian Neighbors]

JOHN WOOLMAN (1720-1772)

From The Journal of John Woolman

1720-1742 [Early Years]

1757 [Evidence of Divine Truth], [Slavery]

1755-1758 [Taxes and Wars]

ST. JEAN DE CREVÈCOEUR (1735-1813)

From Letters from an American Farmer:

What Is an American?

REASON AND REVOLUTION

The Enlightenment and the Spirit of Rationalism

From Neoclassical to Romantic Literature

Timeline: Reason and Revolution

JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703-1758)

Sarah Pierrepont

From A Divine and Supernatural Light

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Personal Narrative

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706-1790)

From The Autobiography

From Poor Richard's Almanack

Preface to Poor Richard, 1733

The Way to Wealth: Preface to Poor Richard, 1758

*The Speech of Polly Baker

THOMAS PAINE (1737-1809)

From Common Sense

Thoughts on the Present State of American Affairs

The American Crisis

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1737-1809)

The Declaration of Independence

First Inaugural Address

FromNotes on the State of Virginia

[A Southerner on Slavery]

[Speech of Logan]

Letter to John Adams

[The True Aristocracy]

OLAUDAH EQUIANO (1745?-1797?)

From The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

Chapter II: [Horrors of a Slave Ship]

Chapter III: [Travels to Various Countries]

Chapter VII: [He Purchases his Freedom]

PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1754?-1784)

To the University of Cambridge, in New-England

On Being Brought from Africa to America

On the Death of the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield

An Hymn to the Evening

To S.M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works

To His Excellency General Washington

PHILIP FRENEAU (1752-1832)

To the Memory of the Brave Americans

The Wild Honey Suckle

The Indian Burying Ground

On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature

CROSSCURRENTS: NATURE AND THE ENVIRONMENT IN A NEW WORLD

FRANCIS HIGGINSON (1586-1630)

From New England’s Plantation

WILLIAM BARTRAM (1739-1832)

From Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida

[Indian Corn, Green Meadows, and Strawberry Fields]

JOHN JAMES AUDUBON (1785-1893)

From The Ornithological Biography

Kentucky Sports

FRANCIS PARKMAN (1823-1893)

From The Oregon Trail

Chapter VII: The Buffalo

THE ROMANTIC TEMPER, 1800-1870

Regional Influences

Nature and the Land

The Original Native Americans

Timeline: The Romantic Temper

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783-1859)

From The Sketch Book

Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851)

From The Pioneers

Chapter XXII [Pigeons]

From The Prairie

Chapter XXXIX [Death of a Hero]

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794-1878)

Thanatopsis

The Yellow Violet

To a Waterfowl

A Forest Hymn

To the Fringed Gentian

The Prairies

The Death of Lincoln

RED JACKET (c. 1752–1830)

[The Great Spirit Has Made Us All]

CROSSCURRENTS: ROMANTICISM AND THE AMERICAN INDIAN

JANE JOHNSTON SCHOOLCRAFT [BAMEWAWAGEZHIKAQUAY] (1800-1842)

Invocation: To My Maternal Grandfather on Hearing of His Descent from Chippewa Ancestors Misrepresented

ROMANTICISM AT MID-CENTURY

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

Romance

Sonnet--To Science

Lenore

The Sleeper

Israfel

To Helen

The City in the Sea

Sonnet--Silence

The Raven

Ulalume

Annabel Lee

Ligeia

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Purloined Letter

The Cask of Amontillado

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)

My Kinsman, Major Molineux

Young Goodman Brown

The Minister's Black Veil

The Birthmark

Rappaccini's Daughter

Ethan Brand

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)

Bartleby the Scrivener

The Portent

The Maldive Shark

Billy Budd, Sailor

TRANSCENDENTALISM

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Nature

The American Scholar

The Divinity School Address

Self-Reliance

The Over-Soul

Concord Hymn

Each and All

The Rhodora

Hamatreya

Fable

Brahma

Days

MARGARET FULLER (1810-1850)

From Woman in the Nineteenth Century

CROSSCURRENTS: TRANSCENDENTALISM, WOMEN, AND SOCIAL IDEALS

ELIZABETH PEABODY (1804–1894)

[Labor, Wages, and Leisure]

CHARLES DICKENS (1812–1870)

From American Notes

[The Mill Girls of Lowell]

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1815–1902)

Declaration of Sentiments [Seneca Falls, 1848]

SOJOURNER TRUTH (c. 1797–1883)

[Ar’n’t I a Woman?]

FANNY FERN (1811–1872)

Aunt Hetty on Matrimony

The Working-Girls of New York

HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862)

From Walden

Economy

Where I Lived, and What I Lived for

Brute Neighbors

Conclusion

Civil Disobedience

THE HUMANITARIAN SENSIBILITY AND THE INEVITABLE CONFLICT, 1800-1870

Democracy and Social Reform

Inevitable Conflict

Timeline: The Humanitarian Sensibility and the Inevitable Conflict

CROSSCURRENTS: SLAVERY, THE SLAVE TRADE, AND THE CIVIL WAR

BRITON HAMMON (fl. 1760)

From Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man

WILLIAM CUSHING (1732–1810)

[Slavery Inconsistent with Our Conduct and Constitution]

ALEXANDER FALCONBRIDGE (1760-1792)

From An Account of the Slave Trade, on the Coast of Africa

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882)

The Witnesses

LYDIA MARIA CHILD (1802–1880)

[Reply to Margaretta Mason]

SARAH MORGAN (1842–1909)

From The Civil War Diary of Sarah Morgan

SARAH MORGAN BRYAN PIATT (1836-1919)

Army of Occupation

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807-1882)

The Arsenal at Springfield

From The Song of Hiawatha

III. Hiawatha's Childhood

IV. Hiawatha and Mudjekeewis

V. Hiawatha's Fasting

VII. Hiawatha's Sailing

XXI. The White Man's Foot

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

My Lost Youth

Divina Commedia

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The Cross of Snow

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807-1892)

Massachusetts to Virginia

First-Day Thoughts

Telling the Bees

Laus Deo

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES (1809-1894)

Old Ironsides

The Last Leaf

My Aunt

The Chambered Nautilus

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865)

Reply to Horace Greeley

Address at the Dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery

Second Inaugural Address

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811-1896)

From Uncle Tom's Cabin

Chapter VII: The Mother's Struggle

HARRIET JACOBS (1813-1897)

FromIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Chapter VI: The Jealous Mistress

Chapter XVII: The Flight

Chapter XVIII: Months of Peril

Chapter XIX: The Children Sold

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1817?-1895)

From Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Chapter I [Birth]

Chapter VII [Learning to Read and Write].

Chapter X [Mr. Covey]

CROSSCURRENTS: FAITH AND CRISIS

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1981)

From Moby-Dick, or The Whale

SARAH MORGAN BRYAN PIATT (1836-1919)

No Help

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

338 [I know that He exists]

376 [Of course—I prayed--]

AN AGE OF EXPANSION, 1865-1910

From Romanticism to Realism

Regionalism

The Gilded Age

Timeline: An Age of Expansion

PIONEERS OF A NEW POETRY

WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass

Song of Myself

Once I Pass'd Through a Populous City

Facing West from California's Shores

For You O Democracy

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-oak Growing

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

The Dalliance of the Eagles

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

The Wound-Dresser

Reconciliation

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

There Was a Child Went Forth

To a Common Prostitute

The Sleepers

A Noiseless Patient Spider

To a Locomotive in Winter

Good-bye My Fancy!

EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)

49 [I never lost as much but twice]

67 [Success is counted sweetest]

130 [These are the days when Birds come back -- ]

214 [I taste a liquor never brewed -- ]

241 [I like a look of Agony]

249 [Wild Nights -- Wild Nights!]

252 [I can wade Grief -- ]

258 [There's a certain Slant of light]

280 [I felt a Funeral, in my Brain]

285 [The Robin's my Criterion for Tune -- ]

288 [I'm Nobody! Who are you?]

290 [Of Bronze -- and Blaze -- ]

303 [The Soul selects her own Society -- ]

320 [We play at Paste -- ]

324 [Some keep the Sabbath going to Church]

328 [A Bird came down the Walk -- ]

341 [After great pain, a formal feeling comes -- ]

401 [What Soft -- Cherubic Creatures -- ]

435 [Much Madness is divinest Sense -- ]

441 [This is my letter to the World]

448 [This was a Poet -- It is That]

449 [I died for Beauty -- but was scarce]

465 [I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died -- ]

511 [If you were coming in the Fall]

556 [The Brain, within its Groove]

579 [I had been hungry, all the Years -- ]

581 [I found the works to every thought]

585 [I like to see it lap the Miles -- ]

632 [The Brain -- is wider than the sky -- ]

636 [The Way I read a Letter's -- this -- ]

640 [I cannot live with You -- ]

650 [Pain -- Has a Element of Blank -- ]

657 [I dwell in Possibility -- ]

701 [A Thought went up my mind today--]

712 [Because I could not stop for Death -- ]

732 [She rose to His Requirement -- dropt]

754 [My Life had stood -- a Loaded Gun -- ]

816 [A Death blow is a Life blow to Some]

823 [Not what We did, shall be the test]

986 [A narrow Fellow in the Grass]

1052 [I never saw a Moor -- ]

1078 [The Bustle in a House]

1082 [Revolution is the Pod]

1100 [The last Night that She lived]

1129 [Tell all the Truth but tell it slant -- ]

1207 [He preached upon Breadth till it argued him narrow -- ]

1263 [There is no Frigate like a Book]

1304 [Not with a Club, the Heart is broken]

1463 [A Route of Evanescence]

1540 [As imperceptibly as Grief]

1587 [He ate and drank the precious Words -- ]

1624 [Apparently with no surprise]

1732 [My life closed twice before its close -- ]

1760 [Elysium is as far as to]

Letters

[To Recipient Unknown, about 1858]

[To Recipient Unknown, about 1861]

[To Recipient Unknown, early 1862?]

[To T. W. Higginson, 15 April 1862]

[To T. W. Higginson, 25 April 1862]

[To T. W. Higginson, 7 June 1862]

[To T. W. Higginson, July 1862]

[To T. W. Higginson, August 1862]

CROSSCURRENTS: FREEDOM IN THE GILDED AGE

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

From Democratic Vistas

HENRY ADAMS (1838–1918)

From The Education of Henry Adams

Chapter XVII: President Grant

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844–1925)

From The Freedman’s Case in Equity

[The Perpetual Alien]

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856–1915)

From Up from Slavery

[The Struggle for an Education]

REALISM AND NATURALISM, 1880-1920

Realism

Spiritual Unrest

Naturalism

Timeline: The Turn of the Century

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

From Roughing It

[When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree]

From Life on the Mississippi

The Boy's Ambition

[A Mississippi Cub-Pilot]

How to Tell a Story

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920)

Editha

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

Daisy Miller

The Real Thing

The Beast in the Jungle

BRET HARTE (1836-1902)

The Outcasts of Poker Flat

RED CLOUD (c. 1822-1909)

[All I Want Is Peace and Justice]

SARAH WINNEMUCCA HOPKINS (1844-1894)

From Life among the Piutes

Chapter 1: First Meeting of Piutes and Whites

HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

The Dynamo and the Virgin

SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909)

A White Heron

KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904)

The Awakening

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1852-1930)

The Revolt of \"Mother\"

CHARLES W. CHESTNUTT (1858-1932)

The Passing of Grandison

CROSSCURRENTS: PROSPERITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY

ANDREW CARNEGIE (1835–1919)

Wealth

STEPHEN CRANE (1871–1900)

The Trees in the Garden Rained Flowers

WILLIAM VAUGHAN MOODY (1869–1910)

Gloucester Moors

On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines

ZITKALA-SA (1876–1938)

Retrospection

W. E. B. DUBOIS (1868–1963)

From The Souls of Black Folk

Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)

The Yellow Wallpaper

FRANK NORRIS (1870-1902)

A Plea for Romantic Fiction

STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)

Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind

The Wayfarer

A Man Said to the Universe

The Open Boat

EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937)

Roman Fever

THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)

The Second Choice

JACK LONDON (1876-1916)

To Build a Fire

LITERARY RENAISSANCE, 1910-1930

Twentieth-Century Renaissance

Poetry between the Wars

Timeline: Literary Renaissance

NEW DIRECTIONS: FIRST WAVE

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869-1935)

Luke Havergal

Richard Cory

Miniver Cheevy

Mr. Flood's Party

The Mill

Firelight

New England

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947)

Neighbour Rosicky

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

The Tuft of Flowers

Mending Wall

Home Burial

After Apple-Picking

The Wood-Pile

The Road Not Taken

The Oven Bird

Birches

The Hill Wife

The Ax-Helve

The Grindstone

The Witch of Coös

Fire and Ice

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Desert Places

Design

Come In

Directive

CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)

Chicago

Fog

Nocturne in a Deserted Brickyard

Monotone

Gone

A Fence

Grass

Southern Pacific

Washerwoman

SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941)

The Book of the Grotesque

Adventure

SUSAN GLASPELL (1876?-1948)

*Trifles

EZRA POUND (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

From The Cantos

I: [And then went down to the ship]

XIII: [Kung walked]

LXXXI: [What thou lovest well remains]

CXVI: [Came Neptunus]

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Gerontion

The Waste Land

The Hollow Men

AMY LOWELL (1874-1925)

Patterns

A Decade

ELINOR WYLIE (1885-1928)

Wild Peaches

Sanctuary

Prophecy

Let No Charitable Hope

O Virtuous Light

H.D. (HILDA DOOLITTLE) (1886-1961)

Heat

Heliodora

Lethe

Sigil

POETS OF IDEA AND ORDER

WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

Sunday Morning

Anecdote of the Jar

The Snow Man

Bantams in Pine-Woods

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

To the One of Fictive Music

The Idea of Order at Key West

A Postcard from the Volcano

Of Modern Poetry

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

The Plain Sense of Things

Of Mere Being

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)

The Young Housewife

Tract

To Mark Anthony in Heaven

Portrait of a Lady

Queen-Anne's-Lace

The Great Figure

Spring and All

The Red Wheelbarrow

This Is Just to Say

A Sort of a Song

The Dance

The Ivy Crown

MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)

Poetry

In the Days of Prismatic Color

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish

No Swan So Fine

A Jelly-Fish

HART CRANE (1899-1932)

From The Bridge

To Brooklyn Bridge

Van Winkle

The River

The Tunnel

A LITERATURE OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CHANGE, 1920-1945

Drama and Social Change

Primitivism

The Roaring Twenties and the Lost Generation

The Harlem Renaissance

Depression and Totalitarian Menace

Timeline: A Literature of Social and Cultural Change

EUGENE O'NEILL (1888-1953)

The Hairy Ape

ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887-1962)

To the Stone-Cutters

Shine, Perishing Republic

The Purse-Seine

CLAUDE MCKAY (1889-1948)

The Harlem Dancer

Harlem Shadows

America

Outcast

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892-1950)

First Fig

[I Shall Go Back Again to the Bleak Shore]

[What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and Why ]

Justice Denied in Massachusetts

[This Beast That Rends Me in the Sight of All ]

[Love Is Not All: It Is Not Meat Nor Drink]

[Those Hours When Happy Hours Were My Estate]

[I Will Put Chaos into Fourteen Lines]

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894-1962)

Thy Fingers Make Early Flowers Of

When God Lets My Body Be

In Just-

Buffalo Bill's

My Sweet Old Etcetera

I Sing of Olaf Glad and Big

Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond

Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town

My Father Moved through Dooms of Love

Up into the Silence the Green

Plato Told

When Serpents Bargain for the Right to Squirm

I Thank You God

CROSSCURRENTS: THE JAZZ AGE AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871–1938)

[Negro Dialect]

PAUL ROBESON

Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays

LANGSTON HUGHES

When the Negro Was in Vogue

ST JAMES INFIRMARY BLUES

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The Weary Blues

Song for a Dark Girl

Trumpet Player

Dream Boogie

Harlem

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

Babylon Revisited

JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)

FromThe 42nd Parallel

Big Bill

From 1919

The House of Morgan

The Body of An American

From The Big Money

Newsreel LXVI

The Camera Eye (50)

Vag

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

That Evening Sun

Barn Burning

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Big Two-Hearted River: Part I

Big Two-Hearted River: Part II

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890-1980)

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960)

From Black Boy

[A Five Dollar Fight]

THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH

Postwar Drama

Postwar Poetry

Postwar Fiction

Multiculturalism

The Postmodern Impulse

Timeline: The Second World War and Its Aftermath

DRAMA

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)

The Glass Menagerie

CROSSCURRENTS: THE AGE OF ANXIETY: THE BEAT GENERATION AND SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

JACK KEROUAC

From On the Road

JOHN CLELLON HOLMES (1926–1988)

From The Philosophy of the Beat Generation

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER (1890–1969)

[The Military Industrial Complex]

RACHEL CARSON (1904–1964)

From Silent Spring

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR (1929–1968)

I Have a Dream

POETRY

THEODORE ROETHKE (1908-1963)

Open House

Cuttings (later)

My Papa's Waltz

Elegy for Jane

The Waking

I Knew a Woman

The Far Field

Wish for a Young Wife

In a Dark Time

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-1979)

The Fish

At the Fishhouses

Questions of Travel

Sestina

In the Waiting Room

One Art

CZESLAW MILOSZ (1911-2004)

Campo dei Fiori

Fear

Café

In Warsaw

Ars Poetica?

To Raja Rao

With Her

ROBERT HAYDEN (1913–1980)

Tour 5

Those Winter Sundays

Year of the Child

JOHN BERRYMAN (1914-1972)

1: [Huffy Henry hid the day]

4: [Filling her compact & delicious body]

14: [Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so]

29: [There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart]

76: [Henry's Confession]

145: [Also I love him: me he's done no wrong]

153: [I'm cross with god who has wrecked this generation]

384: [The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done]

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000)

a song in the front yard

The Bean Eaters

We Real Cool

The Lovers of the Poor

ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)

Waking in the Blue

Skunk Hour

The Neo-Classical Urn

For the Union Dead

Reading Myself

Epilogue

DENISE LEVERTOV (1923- )

The Third Dimension

To the Snake

The Willows of Massachusetts

ROBERT BLY (1926- )

Driving toward the Lac Qui Parle River

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

Watering the Horse

The Executive's Death

Looking at New-Fallen Snow from a Train

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)

Howl

America

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)

Morning Song

The Applicant

Daddy

Lady Lazarus

Death & Co

Mystic

AMIRI BARAKA (1934- )

In Memory of Radio

An Agony. As Now.

PROSE

EUDORA WELTY (1909- )

A Memory

VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977)

From Pnin

Chapter Five [Pnin at the Pines]

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER (1904-1991)

Gimpel the Fool

JOHN CHEEVER (1912-1982)

The Swimmer

RALPH ELLISON (1914- )

From Invisible Man

Chapter 1 [Battle Royal]

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-1986)

The Mourners

SAUL BELLOW (1915- )

A Silver Dish

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987)

Sonny's Blues

FLANNERY O'CONNOR (1925-1964)

Good Country People

JOHN BARTH (1930- )

Lost in the Funhouse

JOHN UPDIKE (1932- )

Separating

PHILIP ROTH (1933- )

The Conversion of the Jews

THOMAS PYNCHON (1937- )

Entropy

A CENTURY ENDS AND A NEW MILLENNIUM BEGINS, 1975 to Present

Drama

Poetry

Fiction

Multiculturalism

Timeline: A Century Ends and a New Millennium Begins

CROSSCURRENTS: WHAT IS AN AMERICAN? FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY

BOB DYLAN

Masters of War

NORMAN MAILER (1923-2007)

From Armies of the Night

BETTY FRIEDAN

The Problem that Has No Name

TIM O’BRIEN (1946- )

The Things They Didn’t Know

AL GORE (1948- )

From An Inconvenient Truth

POETRY

JAMES WRIGHT

A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard's Shack

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In Terror of Hospital Bills

Two Postures Beside a Fire

JAMES MERRILL (1926-1995)

A Timepiece

Charles on Fire

The Broken Home

JOHN ASHBERY (1927- )

Some Trees

The Painter

Crazy Weather

At North Farm

Down by the Station, Early in the Morning

ANNE SEXTON

Her Kind

The Farmer's Wife

The Truth the Dead Know

With Mercy for the Greedy

ADRIENNE RICH

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

Living in Sin

Diving into the Wreck

For the Dead

GARY SNYDER

The Late Snow & Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-four

Riprap

Not Leaving the House

Axe Handles

MARY OLIVER

In Blackwater Woods

The Ponds

Picking Blueberries, Austerlitz, New York, 1957.

Early Morning, New Hampshire

JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-1996)

From Lullaby of Cape Cod

IV [The change of Empires is intimately tied]

Belfast Tune

A Song

To My Daughter

SIMON ORTIZ

Vision Shadows

Poems from the Veterans Hospital

From From Sand Creek

RITA DOVE

Dusting

Roast Possum

CATHY SONG

Picture Bride

Immaculate Lives

PROSE

JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938- )

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

TONI MORRISON

From Sula

1992

RAYMOND CARVER

A Small, Good Thing

BOBBIE ANN MASON

Shiloh

BHARATI MUKHERJEE (1940- )

The Management of Grief

ALICE WALKER

Everyday Use

TIM O'BRIEN

From Going After Cacciato

Night March

ANN BEATTIE

Janus

AMY TAN

Half and Half

LOUISE ERDRICH

The Red Convertible

SANDRA CISNEROS

Woman Hollering Creek

SHERMAN ALEXIE

What You Pawn I Will Redeem

JHUMPA LAHIRI

The Third and Final Continent

EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Seven

Historical-Literary Timeline

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "79": { "wears.id": 79, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 79, "wears.title": "Approaching Literature: Writing, Reading, Thinking", "wears.author": "Peter Schakel", "wears.author_bio": "

PETER SCHAKEL is Peter C. and Emajean Cook Professor of English at Hope College. He is author of The Poetry of Jonathan Swift (1978) and four books on C.S. Lewis, including Imagination and the Arts in C.S. Lewis (2002) and The Way into Narnia: A Reader's Guide (2005). He is also editor of Critical Approaches to Teaching Swift (1992) and The Longing for a Form: Essays and Fiction on C.S. Lewis (1977); coeditor with Charles A. Huttar of Word and Story in C.S. Lewis (1991) and The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams (1996). For Bedford/St. Martin's, with Jack Ridl he co-edited Approaching Poetry (1997) and 250 Poems (2003), and he is coeditor with Janet Gardner, Beverley Lawn, and Jack Ridl of Literature: a Portable Anthology (2004).

JACK RIDL is Professor Emeritus of English at Hope College where he taught courses in literature, essay writing, poetry writing, and the nature of poetry for thirty-five years. He has published six volumes of poetry and more than 200 poems in some fifty literary magazines; his most recent collection, Broken Symmetry, was selected by the Society of Midland Authors as one of the two best volumes of poetry published in 2006. His chapbook Against Elegies received the 2001 Letterpress Award from the Center for Book Arts. His recognitions for teaching excellence include the Hope Outstanding Professor-Educator award at Hope College for 1976, the Michigan Teacher of the Year award from the Carnegie Foundation in 1996, and the Favorite Faculty/Staff Member award at Hope College in 2003. For Bedford/St. Martin's, with Peter Schakel he co-edited Approaching Poetry (1997) and 250 Poems (2003); and he is coeditor with Janet Gardner, Beverley Lawn, and Peter Schakel of Literature: a Portable Anthology (2004).

", "wears.authors": "Peter Schakel, Jack Ridl", "wears.title_slug": "approaching-literature", "wears.author_slug": "peter-schakel", "wears.isbn13": 9780312452834, "wears.isbn10": 312452837, "wears.price": "$48.94", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Bedford/St. Martin's", "wears.pubdate": "December 2007", "wears.edition": "2nd Edition", "wears.subjects": "Nonfiction Writing - General & Miscellaneous, English Language Readers, Student Life - College Guides, Rhetoric - English Language, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1696, "wears.dimensions": "6.53 (w) x 9.26 (h) x 1.69 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Developed by authors with more than 50 years of teaching experience between them, Approaching Literature has been designed as a true alternative to more traditional literature anthologies. The authors conceived this anthology with three principles in mind: (1) that exposing students to the widest array of literature can help every one find common ground with that literature; (2) that contemporary literary works can serve as entry points to reading and appreciating the canonical literature that students often find unfamiliar, intimidating, and sometimes irrelevant; and (3) that the instruction in reading and writing about literature should be accessible and jargon-free to all students, not just potential English majors. With its streamlined and student-friendly instructional text, and its ongoing commitment to showcasing the most engaging and diverse literary works publishing right now, Approaching Literature is built from the ground up with today's students in mind.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

PART I. APPROACHING LITERATURE

1. Reading Literature: Taking Part in a Process

Sherman Alexie, Superman and Me

The Nature of Reading

Active Reading

CHECKLIST on Active Reading

Julia Alvarez, Daughter of Invention

2. Writing in Response to Literature: Entering the Conversation

Alice Walker, The Flowers

Writing in the Margins

Journal Writing

Discussing Literature

TIPS for Effective Journal Writing

TIPS for Participating in Class Discussions

Writing Essay Examination Answers

Writing Short Papers

TIPS for Writing a Short Paper

Writing Research Papers

Writing Papers in Other Formats

Composing in Other Art Forms

PART II. APPROACHING FICTION

3. Reading Fiction: Responding to the Real World of Stories

What Is Fiction?

Why Read Fiction?

Active Reading: Fiction

Rereading Fiction

4. Plot and Characters: Watching What Happens, to Whom

Reading for Plot

Dagoberto Gilb, Love in L.A.

Reading for Characters

CHECKLIST for Reading About Plot and Character

Further Reading

Louise Erdrich, The Red Convertible

Joyce Carol Oates, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Responding Through Writing

Writing About Plot and Character

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing About Plot and Character

Writing About Connnections

\"Love and the City\": Realizing Relationships in Dagoberto Gilb’s Love in L.A. and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

\"My Brother’s Keeper\": Supportive Siblings in Louise Erdrich’s The Red Convertible and James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues

\"Good Men Are Hard to Find\": Encounters with Evil in Joyce Carol Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? and Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

5. Point of View and Theme: Being Alert to Angles, Open to Insights

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Reading for Narrator

Reading for Point of View

Theme

CHECKLIST for Reading about Point of View and Theme

Further Reading

Alice Walker, Everyday Use

*George Saunders, The End of FIRPO in the World

Approaching Graphic Fiction

*Lynda Barry, Today’s Demon: Magic

Responding Through Writing

Writing About Point of View and Theme

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Point of View and Theme

Writing About Connections

\"Staring Out Front Windows\": Seeking Escape in Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and James Joyce’s Araby

\"Can You Come Home Again?\": The Difficulty of Returning in Alice Walker’s Everyday Use and Monica Ali’s Dinner with Dr. Azad

\"States of Mind That Matter\": Approaching Death in George Saunders’s The End of FIRPO in the World and Katherine Anne Porter’s The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

6. Setting and Symbol: Meeting Meaning in Places and Objects

Setting

Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants

Reading for Symbols

Reading for Allegory

CHECKLIST for Reading about Setting and Symbol

Further Reading

Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried

*Edward P. Jones, Bad Neighbors

*Joe Sacco, Complacency Kills

Writing About Symbol and Setting

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Setting and Symbol

Writing About Connections

\"Secrets of the Heart\": Keeping Hope Alive in Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and David Means’s The Secret Goldfish

\"Dying a Good Death\": Struggles Over What Matters in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and Yiyun Li’s Persimmons

\"‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’\": Nature vs. Nurture in Edward P. Jones’s Bad Neighbors and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

7. Style, Tone, and Irony: Attending to Expression and Attitude

Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

Reading for Style

Reading for Tone

Reading for Irony

CHECKLIST on Reading about Style, Tone, and Irony

Further Reading

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

*Katherine Min, Courting a Monk

Responding Through Writing

Writing About Style, Tone and Irony

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Style, Tone, and Irony

Writing About Connections

\"Time for a Change\": Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter

\"Learning Out of School\": Personal Maturity in Toni Cade Bambara’s The Lesson and John Updike’s A & P

\"‘Gather Ye Rosebuds’\": Looking for Love in Katherine Min’s Courting a Monk and William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

8. Writing about Fiction: Applying What You’ve Learned

Topics

TIPS for Writing Compare and Contrast Papers

Development

TIPS for Writing Social and Cultural Criticism

A Student Writer at Work: Alicia Abood on the Writing Process

Student Paper: Alicia Abood, \"Clips of Language: The Effect of Diction in Dagoberto Gilb’s ‘Love in L.A.’\"

9. An Author in Depth: Sherman Alexie: Exploring One Writer’s World

Sherman Alexie, This is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona

Sherman Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

*Sherman Alexie, Somebody Kept Saying Powwow

Tomson Highway, Interview with Sherman Alexie

*Ase Nygren, A World of Story-Smoke: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie

Joseph L. Coulombe, The Approximate Size of His Favorite Humor: Sherman Alexie’s Comic Connections and Disconnections in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

*Jerome Denuccio, Slow Dancing with Skeletons: Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

*James Cox, Muting White Noise: The Subversion of Popular Culture Narratives of Conquest in Sherman Alexie’s Fiction

10. A Collection of Stories: Visiting a Variety of Vistas

*Monica Ali, Dinner with Dr. Azad

Isabel Allende (Chile), And of Clay Are We Created

James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

*Melissa Bank, The Wonder Spot

*Raymond Carver, What We Talk about When We Talk about Love

*Judith Ortiz Cofer, American History

Ralph Ellison, Battle Royal

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Zora Neale Hurston, Sweat

*James Joyce, Araby

Jamaica Kincaid, Girl

*Jhumpa Lahiri, A Temporary Matter

*Yiyun Li, Persimmons

Gabriel Garc’a Marquez (Columbia), A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

*David Means, The Secret Goldfish

*Ana Menendez, Her Mother’s House

Toni Morrison, Recitatif

*Haruki Murakami, Birthday Girl

Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find

Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing

Edgar Allen Poe, The Cask of Amontillado

Katherine Anne Porter, The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Nahid Rachlin, Departures

Salman Rushdie (India), The Prophet’s Hair

Leslie Marmon Silko, The Man to Send Rain Clouds

*Zadie Smith, The Girl with Bangs

*John Steinbeck, The Chrysanthemums

Amy Tan, Two Kinds

John Updike, A & P

Helena Mar’a Viramontes, The Moths

PART III. APPROACHING POETRY

11. Reading Poetry: Realizing the Richness in Poems

What Is Poetry?

Why Read Poetry?

Active Reading: Poetry

Rereading Poetry

12. Words and Images: Seizing on Sense and Sight

Denotation

Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays

Connotation

Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters

Images

Maxine Kumin, The Sound of Night

William Carlos Williams, The Red Wheelbarrow

CHECKLIST on Reading for Words and Images

Further Reading

Allison Joseph, On Being Told I Don’t Speak like a Black Person

*Robert Bly, Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

Jonathan Swift, A Description of the Morning

Garrett Kaoru Hongo, Yellow Light

Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking

Anita Endrezze, The Girl Who Loved the Sky

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Words and Images

Writing About Connections

\"Autumn Leaves\": The Changing Seasons of Life in Robert Frost’s After Apple-Picking and Joseph Awad’s Autumnal

\"Seeing the City\": The Contrasting Perspectives of Jonathan Swift’s A Description of the Morning and Cheryl Savageau’s Bones — A City Poem

\"Impermanence’s Permanence\": Anita Endrezze’s The Girl Who Loved the Sky and Edmund Spenser’s One day I wrote her name upon the strand

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

13. Voice, Tone, and Sound: Hearing for How Sense Is Said

Voice

Li-young Lee, Eating Alone

Charles Bukowski, my old man

Dramatic Monologue

Tone

Theodore Roethke, My Papa’s Waltz

Irony

Marge Piercy, Barbie Doll

Sound

Sekou Sundiata, Blink Your Eyes

CHECKLIST on Reading for Voice, Tone, and Sound

Further Reading

Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est

Yosef Komunyakaa, Facing It

Richard Garcia, Why I Left the Church

*Billy Collins, Consolation

Robert Browning, My Last Duchess

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Voice, Tone, and Sound

Writing About Connections

\"All the Comforts of Home\": Contrasting Spirits of Adventure in Billy Collins’s Consolation and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses

\"Arms and the Man\": War without Glory in Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est and Vievee Francis’s Private Smith’s Primer

\"Dancing with the Dark\": Movement and Memory in Theodore Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz and Cornelius Eady’s My Mother, If She Had Won Free Dance Lessons

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

14. Form and Type: Delighting in Design

Lines

Gwendolyn Brooks, We Real Cool

Stanzas

Countee Cullen, Incident

Sonnets

William Shakespeare, That time of year thou mayst in me behold

Claude McKay, If we must die

Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur

Helene Johnson, Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem

Blank Verse and Couplets

Free Verse

Leslie Marmon Silko, Prayer to the Pacific

Internal Form

CHECKLIST on Reading for Form and Type

Further Reading

James Wright, A Blessing

Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses

William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree

*Robert Herrick, To Daffodils

David Mura, Grandfather-in-law

*Elizabeth Bishop, Sestina

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Form and Type

Writing About Connections

\"Amazing Grace\": Being Blessed from within and from without in James Wright’s A Blessing and Galway Kinnell’s Saint Francis and the Sow

\"‘Which thou must leave ere long’\": Approaching Separation in Elizabeth Bishop’s Sestina and William Shakespeare’s That time of year thou mayst in me behold

\"The Solace of Solitude\": Place and Peace in W. B.Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree and Lorine Niedecker’s My Life by Water

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

15. Figurative Language: Wondering What This Has to Do with That

Simile

Julie Moulds, From Wedding Iva

Langston Hughes, Harlem

Metaphor

Dennis Brutus, Nightsong: City

Personification

Angelina Weld Grimke, A Winter Twilight

Metonymy And Synecdoche

Edwin Arlington Robinson, Richard Cory

Two Other Observations about Figures

William Stafford, Traveling through the Dark

CHECKLIST on Reading for Figurative Language

Further Reading

John Keats, To Autumn

*Mary Oliver, First Snow

Judith Ortiz Cofer, Cold as Heaven

Geoffrey Hill, In Memory Of Jane Fraser

Julia Alvarez, How I Learned to Sweep

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Figurative Language

Writing About Connections

\"Innocence and Experience\": Confrontations with Evil in Julia Alvarez’s How I Learned to Sweep and William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper

\"A Joyful Melancholy\": Nature and Beauty in Mary Oliver’s First Snow and William Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

\"Knowing Deep the Seasons\": Antitheses of Life in John Keats’s To Autumn and William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

16. Rhythm and Meter: Feeling the Beat, the Flux, and the Flow

Rhythm

e. e. cummings, Buffalo Bill’s

Meter

Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask

CHECKLIST on Reading for Rhythm and Meter

Further Reading

Lucille Clifton, at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989

Lorna Dee Cervantes, Freeway 280

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Small Vases From Hebron

A. K. Ramanujan, Self-portrait

Emily Dickinson, I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Sylvia Plath, Metaphors

Georgia Douglas Johnson, Wishes

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Rhythm and Meter

Writing About Connections

\"Grief beyond Grief\": Dealing with Death in Ben Jonson’s On My First Son and Michael S. Harper’s Nightmare Begins Responsibility

\"Remembering the Unremembered\": The Language of Preservation in Lucille Clifton’s at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989 and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

\"On the Road Again\": The Search for Self in Lorna Dee Cervante’s Freeway 280 and Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

17. Writing about Poetry: Applying What You’ve Learned

Topics

Development

A Student Writer at Work: Dan Carter on the Writing Process

Student Paper: Dan Carter, ÒA Slant on the Standard Love SonnetÓ

18. A Theme in Depth: Explicating the Everyday

*Julia Alvarez, Ironing Their Clothes

*Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Bench in Aix-en-Provence

*Lucille Clifton, Cutting Greens

*Billy Collins, Days

*Emily Dickinson, I heard a Fly buzz

Rita Dove, The Satisfaction Coal Company

Robert Frost, Mending Wall

*Christopher Gilbert, Touching

*Ben Jonson, Inviting a Friend to Supper

*Ted Kooser, Applesauce

*Li-Young Lee, Braiding

*Denise Levertov, The Acolyte

*Pablo Neruda (Chile), Ode to French Fires

Naomi Shihab Nye, The Small Vases from Hebron

Simon Ortiz, Speaking

*Jack Ridl, Love Poem

*Len Roberts, At the Train Tracks

*William Stafford, Notice What This Poem Is Not Doing

*Mary Tallmountain, Peeling Pippins

*Nancy Willard, The Potato Picker

*William Carlos Williams, The Is Just to Say

*William Wordsworth, I wandered lonely as a cloud

*Jeff Gundy, A Review of Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser

*Sarah Jensen, A Review of Broken Symmetry by Jack Ridl

*William Stafford, The Importance of the Trivial

*Louis Simpson, from Important and Unimportant Poems

*Bill Moyers, An Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye

*Ted Kooser, Out of the Ordinary

*Paul Lake, The Malady of the Quotidian

*Donna A. Rohrer, William Carlos Williams’s Poetics: Turning the Ordinary into the Beautiful

19. A Collection of Poems: Valuing a Variety of Voices

Ai, Why Can’t I Leave You?

Agha Shahid Ali, I Dream It Is Afternoon When I Return To Delhi

Anonymous, Sir Patrick Spens

*Margaret Atwood, True Stories

W. H. Auden, MusŽe Des Beaux Arts

Joseph Awad, Autumnal

Jimmy Santiago Baca, Family Ties

Jim Barnes, Return To La Plata, Missouri

Gerald Barrax, Dara

Elizabeth Bishop, In the Waiting Room

William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper

Peter Blue Cloud, Rattle

Eavan Boland, The Pomegranate

Anne Bradstreet, To My Dear and Loving Husband

Sterling Brown, Riverbank Blues

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways

*Anthony Butts, Ferris Wheel

*Ana Castillo, I Heard the Cries of Two Hundred Children

Sandra Castillo, Exile

Rosemary Catacalos, David Talam‡ntez on the Last Day of Second Grade

*Tina Chang, Origin & Ash

Marilyn Chin, Turtle Soup

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

Jayne Cortez, Into This Time

Victor Hernandez Cruz, Problems with Hurricanes

e. e. cummings, in Just —

Keki N. Daruwalla, Pestilence

Toi Derricotte, A Note on My Son’s Face

Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for death

Emily Dickinson, Much Madness is divinest Sense

Ana Doina, The Extinct Homeland — A Conversation with Czeslaw Milosz

*John Donne, Death, be not proud

Mark Doty, Tiara

Cornelius Eady, My Mother, If She Had Won Free Dance Lessons

T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Louise Erdrich, A Love Medicine

Mart’n Espada, The Saint Vincent de Paul Food Pantry Stomp

Sandra Mar’a Esteves, A la Mujer Borrinque–a

Carolyn Forche, The Colonel

*Vievee Francis, Private Smith’s Primer

Allen Ginsburg, A Supermarket in California

Nikki Giovanni, Nikka-Rosa

Ray Gonzalez, Praise the Tortilla, Praise the Menudo, Praise the Chorizo

Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Kimiko Hahn, Mother’s Mother

*Donald Hall, The Names of Horses

Michael S. Harper, Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Samuel Hazo, For Fawzi in Jerusalem

Seamus Heaney, Digging

George Herbert, The Pulley

David Hernandez, The Butterfly Effect

Robert Herrick, To the Virgins to Make Much of Time

Linda Hogan, The History Of Red

A. E. Housman, To an Athlete Dying Young

*Langston Hughes, Theme for English B

Lawson Fusao Inada, Plucking Out a Rhythm

*Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, Outlandish Blues (The Movie)

Ben Jonson, On My First Son

*A. Van Jordan, From

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn

*Jane Kenyon, From Room to Room

Galway Kinnell, Saint Francis and the Sow

Etheridge Knight, Hard Rock Returns to Prison from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane

*Stanley Kunitz, Father and Son

*Gerry La Femina, The Sound a Body Makes

Li-young Lee, Visions and Interpretations

Philip Levine, What Work Is

*Timothy Liu, The Garden

Audre Lorde, Hanging Fire

Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

*Medbh McGuckian, On Ballycastle Beach

Heather McHugh, What He Thought

Claude McKay, America

Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

Orlando Ricardo Menes, Letter to Mirta Y‡–ez

John Milton, When I consider how my light is spent

Janice Mirikitani, For a Daughter Who Leaves

Marianne Moore, Poetry

Robert Morgan, Mountain Bride

*Thylias Moss, The Lynching

Duane Niatum, First Spring

*Lorine Niedecker, My Life by Water

Dwight Okita, In Response to Executive Order 9066

*William Olsen, The Fold-Out Atlas of the Human Body: A Three-Dimensional Book for Readers of All Ages

Michael Ondaatje, Biography

Ricadro Pau-llosa, Years of Exile

Gustavo Perez Firmat, Jose Conseco Breaks Our Hearts Again

*Lucy Perillo, Air Guitar

*Carl Phillips, To the Tune of a Small, Repeatable, and Passing Kindness

Wang Ping, Opening the Face

Robert Pinsky, Shirt

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

Sir Walter Raleigh, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

Dudley Randall, Ballad of Birmingham

*Mary Ruefle, Naked Ladies

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

Alberto R’os, Nani

Wendy Rose, Loo-wit

Sonia Sanchez, An Anthem

Cheryl Savageau, Bones — A City Poem

Vijay Seshadri, The Refugee

*William Shakespeare, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

*Charles Simic, Classic Ballroom Dances

Cathy Song, Girl Powdering Her Neck

Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin

Edmund Spenser, One day I wrote her name upon the strand

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream

*Mark Strand, Eating Poetry

*Virgil Su‡rez, Tea Leaves, Caracoles, Coffee Beans

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

Jean Toomer, Face

Quincy Troupe, Poem for the Root Doctor of Rock ’n’ Roll

Gerald Vizenor, Shaman Breaks

Derek Walcott, Sea Grapes

James Welch, Christmas Comes to Moccasin Flat

*Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Becoming Ebony

Roberta Hill Whiteman, The White Land

Walt Whitman, From Song of Myself

Richard Wilbur, Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

William Carlos Williams, Spring and All

Nellie Wong, Grandmother’s Song

*William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

Sir Thomas Wyatt, They flee from me

John Yau, Chinese Villanelle

William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

Al Young, A Dance for Ma Rainy

Ray A. Young Bear, Green Threatening Clouds

Reading Poems in Translation

Poems in Translation

Anna Akhmatova (Russia), Song of the Last Meeting

Yehuda Amichai (Israel), Wildpeace

Reza Baraheni (Iran), Autumn in Tehran

Jorge Luis Borges (Argentina), The Other Tiger

Julia De Burgos (Puerto Rico), Returning

Bei Dao (China), Night: Theme and Variations

Faiz Ahmed Faiz (Pakistan), A Prison Daybreak

Nazim Hikmet (Turkey), Letters from a Man in Solitary

Miroslav Holub (Czech Republic), Elementary School Field Trip to the Dinosaur Exhibit

Taslima Nasrin (Bangladesh), Things Cheaply Had

Pablo Neruda (Chile), The Dead Woman

Octavio Paz (Mexico), The Street

Dahlia Ravikovitch (Israel), Clockwork Doll

Masaoka Siki (Japan), Haiku

Wislawa Szymborska (Poland), On Death, without Exaggeration

Xu Gang (China), Red Azalea on the Cliff

PART IV. APPROACHING DRAMA

20. Reading Drama: Participating in a Playful Pretence

What Is Drama?

Why Read Drama?

Active Reading: Drama

Rereading Drama

21. Character, Conflict, and Dramatic Action: Thinking about Who Does What to Whom and Why

*Kelly Stuart, The New New

Character

Dialogue

Conflict

Dramatic Action

CHECKLIST for Reading about Character, Conflict, and Dramatic Action

Further Reading

*Cusi Cram, West of Stupid

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Character, Conflict, and Dramatic Action

Writing About Connections

\"Souls for Sale\": The Cost of Devaluing Values in Kelly Stuart’s The New New and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

\"Death Draws Near\": The Imminence of Mortality in Cusi Cram’s West of Stupid and David Henry Hwang’s As the Crow Flies

\"Spinning Out of Control\": The Search for Meaning in John Guare’s Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

22. Setting and Structure: Examining Where, When, and How It Happens

Setting

Susan Glaspell, Trifles

Structure

CHECKLIST for Reading about Setting and Structure

Further Reading

David Ives, Sure Thing

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Setting and Structure

Writing About Connections

\"By a Higher Standard\": The Conflict of Law and Justice in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles and Sophocles’s Antigone

\"Living on a smile and a handshake\": Seling Yourself in David Ive’s Sure Thing and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

\"Serving Time in Invisible Prisons\": Social Entrapments in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House and August Wilson’s Fences

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

23. Theaters and Their Influence: Imagining the Impact of Stage and Space

The Greek Theater

The Elizabethan Theater

The Modern Theater

The Contemporary Theater

CHECKLIST for Reading about Theaters and Their Influence

Further Reading

David Henry Hwang, As the Crow Flies

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Theaters and Their Influence

Writing About Connections

\"I Gotta Be Me\": Identity and Inter-relationships in John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth: A Savage Comedy and David Ive’s Sure Thing

\"Dogs Eating Dogs\": The Dramatic Depiction of Racial Oppression in John Leguizamo’s Mambo Mouth: A Savage Comedy and Suzan-Lori Park’s Topdog/Underdog

\"Fathers and Sons\": Familial Conflict in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and August Wilson’s Fences

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

24. Dramatic Types and Their Effects: Getting into Genres

Tragedy

Comedy

Three Other Dramatic Types

CHECKLIST on Reading about Dramatic Types and Their Effects

Further Reading

John Leguizamo, From Mambo Mouth: A Savage Comedy

Responding Through Writing

Journal Entries

Literary Analysis Papers

Comparison-Contrast Papers

TIPS on Writing about Dramatic Types and Their Effects

Writing About Connections

\"The Haunted Heart\": The Presence and Significance of Ghosts in David Henry Hwang’s As the Crow Flies and William Shakespeare’s Hamlet

\"A House Divided\": Tyranny vs. Freedom in a Tragedy — Sophocle’s Antigone — and a Problem Play — Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House

\"Everyone Loses\": The Games People Play in Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman

Writing Research Papers

Composing in Other Art Forms

25. Writing about Drama: Applying What You’ve Learned

Topics

Development

A Student Writer at Work: Julian Hinson on the Writing Process

Student Paper: Julian Hinson, ÒWhen the New is Old in The New NewÓ

26. A Form in Depth: August Wilson’s Fences: Wrestling with One Writer’s Work

August Wilson, Fences

*Reviews and Photos of Fences

*Lloyd Richards, Fences: Introduction

*Clive Barnes, Fiery Fences [a Review*

*Frank Rich, Family Ties in Wilson’s Fences

*Bonnie Lyons, An Interview with August Wilson

*Miles Marshall Lewis, Miles Marshall Lewis Talks with August Wilson

*Missy Dehn Kubitschek, August Wilson’s Gender Lesson

*Harry J. Elam, Jr., August Wilson

*Suson Koprince, Baseball as History and Myth in August Wilson’s Fences

27. A Collection of Plays: Viewing from a Variety of Vantage Points

*Sophocles, Antigone

*William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

*Suzan-Lori Parks, Topdog/Underdog

*John Guare, Woman at a Threshold, Beckoning

Responding Through Writing

Papers Using No Outside Sources

Papers Using Limited Outside Sources

Papers Involving Further Research

PART V. APPROACHING LITERARY RESEARCH

28. Reading Critical Essays: Listening to the Larger Conversation

What Are Critical Essays?

Why Read Critical Essays?

Active Reading: Critical Essays

Sample Essay

Susan Farrell, \"Fight vs. Flight: A Re-evaluation of Dee in Alice Walker’s ‘Everyday Use’\"

Rereading Critical Essays

29. Writing a Literary Research Paper: Incorporating the Larger Conversation

Topics

Types of Research and Sources

Conducting Research on Contemporary Literature

Finding Sources and Creating a Working Bibliography

Research on Contemporary Literature

Evaluating Sources

Taking Notes

Developing Your Paper and Thesis

Incorporating Sources

Avoiding Plagiarism

Documention Sources: MLA Style

Preparing a Works Cited Page

A Student Writer at Work: Kristina Martinez on the Research Process

Student Paper: Kristina Martinez, \"The Structure of Story in Toni Morrison’s ‘Recitatif’\"

Biographical Sketches

Appendix on Scansion

Approaching Critical Theory

Glossary of Literary Terms

Index of Authors and Titles

* new to this edition

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", "wears.authors": "Arnold Krupat (Editor), Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor), Mary Loeffelholz (Editor), Philip F. Gura (Editor), Bruce Michelson", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-american-literature", "wears.author_slug": "arnold-krupat", "wears.isbn13": 9780393927412, "wears.isbn10": 393927415, "wears.price": "$37.77", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "April 2007", "wears.edition": "7th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1094, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.40 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Under Nina Baym’s direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "81": { "wears.id": 81, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 81, "wears.title": "American Fantastic Tales Boxed Set", "wears.author": "Peter Straub", "wears.author_bio": "

PETER STRAUB is the New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels. Two of his most recent, Lost Boy Lost Girl and In the Night Room, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "Peter Straub", "wears.title_slug": "american-fantastic-tales-boxed-set", "wears.author_slug": "peter-straub", "wears.isbn13": 9781598530599, "wears.isbn10": 1598530593, "wears.price": "$49.42", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Library of America", "wears.pubdate": "October 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Fiction, American Literature Anthologies, Fiction Subjects", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1500, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.60 (h) x 2.80 (d)", "wears.overview": "From its beginning, American literature teems with tales of horror, hauntings, terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, and their literary successors, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes.\n

Peter Straub, a contemporary master of literary horror and fantasy, offers an authoritative and diverse gathering of stories calculated to unsettle and delight, in styles ranging from the exquisitely insinuating speculations of Henry James's \"The Jolly Corner\" to the nightmarish post-apocalyptic savagery of Harlan Ellison's \"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.\" Ghostly narratives of the Edwardian era, lurid classics from the pulp heyday of Weird Tales, latter-day masterpieces by Shirley Jackson, Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Steven Millhauser: over 80 stories in all, with a generous selection of contemporary authors who continue to push the genre in new and startling directions.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

From its beginning, American literature teems with tales of horror, hauntings, terrifying obsessions and gruesome incursions, of the uncanny ways in which ordinary reality can be breached and subverted by the unknown and the irrational. In the tales of Irving, Poe, and Hawthorne, and their literary successors, the bright prospects of the New World face an uneasy reckoning with the forces of darkness. As this pathbreaking two-volume anthology demonstrates, it is a tradition with many unexpected detours and hidden chambers, and one that continues to evolve, finding new forms and new themes.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 8 }, "82": { "wears.id": 82, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 82, "wears.title": "Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry", "wears.author": "Maria Mazziotti Gillan", "wears.author_bio": "

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an awardwinning poet and instructor whose volumes of poetry include Where I Come From, Things My Mother Told Me, and What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009. Her work has been appeared in a number of publications, including Boderlands, Prairie Schooner, Los Angeles Review, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times. She is the director of the creative writing program at Binghampton University—State University of New York and the executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.

Jennifer Gillan is a professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University. Her other books include Television & New Media: Must-Click TV, Understanding Reality TV, and Identity Lessons, coedited with Maria Mazziotti Gillan.

", "wears.authors": "Maria Mazziotti Gillan (Editor), Jennifer Gillan", "wears.title_slug": "unsettling-america", "wears.author_slug": "maria-mazziotti-gillan", "wears.isbn13": 9780140237788, "wears.isbn10": "014023778X", "wears.price": "$16.16", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "November 1994", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 432, "wears.dimensions": "6.02 (w) x 8.96 (h) x 0.94 (d)", "wears.overview": "

A multicultural array of poets explore what it is means to be American

This powerful and moving collection of poems stretches across the boundaries of skin color, language, ethnicity, and religion to give voice to the lives and experiences of ethnic Americans. With extraordinary honesty, dignity, and insight, these poems address common themes of assimilation, communication, and self-perception. In recording everyday life in our many American cultures, they displace the myths and stereotypes that pervade our culture.

Unsettling America includes work by:
\n
\n Amiri Baraka Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Rita Dove Louise Erdich Jessica Hagedorn Joy Harjo Garrett Hongo Li-Young Lee Pat Mora Naomi Shihab Nye Marye Percy Ishmael Reed Alberto Rios Ntozake Shange Gary Soto Lawrence Ferlinghetti Nellie Wong David Hernandez Mary TallMountain
\n
\n ...and many more.

\n\n\n

With extraordinary honesty, dignity, and insight, an impressive array of poets displace the myths and stereotypes that pervade our culture. The first multicultural poetry anthology to give voice to the lives and experiences of ethnic Americans.\n

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

Unsettling America Acknowledgments Introductions

Uprooting
\n Nellie Wong
\n Where is My Country?
\n Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park

Luis J. Rodrigues
\n Heavy Blue Veins We Never Stopped Crossing Borders

Lamont B. Steptoe
\n Wired In Such a Boat of Land

Jimmy Santiago Baca
\n Immigrants in Our Own Land

Marylin Chin
\n We Are Americas Now, We Live in the Tundra

Pat Mora
\n Elena

Ruth Lisa Schechter
\n What Were You Patching?

Quincy Troupe
\n In Texas Grass

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
\n The Old Italians Dying

Adrian C. Louis
\n Dust World

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
\n Father from Aisa

Hamod (Sam)
\n from Moving

James Masao Mitsui
\n Katori Maru, October 1920

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
\n Restroom The Brides Come to Yuba City

Yvonne V. Sapia
\n Grandmother, a Caribbean Indian, Described by My Father

Louise Erdrich
\n Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

Gary Soto
\n Braly Street

Joy Harjo
\n The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window

Shalin Hai-Jew
\n Kinged

Mary Jo Bona
\n Dream Poem

Mary Tallmountain
\n The Last Wolf

Gregg Shapiro
\n Tattoo

Lawson Fusao Inada
\n Father of My Father

Justin Vitiello
\n Letter to a Cretan Flute-Maker

David Meltzer
\n What Do I Know of Journey

Carole Bernstien
\n When My Grandmother Said Pussy

Cheryl Clarke
\n 14th Street Was Gutted in 1968

Robert Carnevale
\n Walking by the Cliffside Dyeworks

Pedro Peitro
\n The Old Buildings

Dwight Okita
\n In Response to Executive Order 9066
\n The Nice Thing About Counting Stars

Shirley Kaufman
\n Next Year, in Jerusalem

Philip Levine
\n The Survivor

Lucille Clifton
\n Sam

Performing
\n Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
\n Indian Movie, New Jersey

Louise Erdrich
\n Dear John Wayne

Nellie Wong
\n When I Was Growing Up

Janice Mirikitani
\n Doreen

Safiya Henderson-Holmes
\n Failure of an Invention

Chrystos
\n Today Was a Bad Day Like TB

Jessica Hagedorn
\n Filipino Boogie

Mary TallMountain
\n Indian Blood

Miguel Algarin
\n At the Electronic Frontier

Sherman Alexie
\n Vision (2)
\n Translated from the American

Michael S. Weaver
\n Imitation of Life The Black and White Galaxie Blind Solo

Sandra Mortola Gilbert
\n Mafioso

Barry Seiler
\n Digging in the Streets of Gold

Susan Clements
\n Matinee Deer Cloud

Nellie Wong
\n Can't Tell

Mary Jo Bona
\n Amazone

Patricia Smith
\n Blonde White Women

Mitsuye Yamada
\n Cincinnati American Sun

Arthur L. Clements
\n Why I Don't Speak Italian

Grace Cavalieri
\n The First

Michael Warr
\n Brian on Ice: The El Train Poem Malcolm Is 'Bout More Than Wareing a Cap

Joseph Papaleo
\n American Dream: First Report

Gerald Stern
\n Behaving Like a Jew

Denise Nico Leto
\n The Mary Morelle Show

David Mura
\n To H.N.

Marge Piercy
\n My Rich Uncle, Whom I Only Met Three Times

Yusef Komunyakaa
\n Untitiled Blues

Jennifer Lagier
\n Second Class Citizen

Shalin Hai-Jew
\n Three Gypsies

Patricia Smith from Sweet Daddy What It's Like to Be a Black Girl (for Those of You Who Aren't)

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
\n Starlight Haven Black and White

Jesse F. Garcia
\n Barrio Beato

David Hernandez
\n Welcome

Reuben Jackson
\n Tee Big Chill Variations Albert James

William J. Harris
\n A Daddy Poem

Sonia Sanchez
\n Song No. 3

Lucille Clifton
\n Song at Midnight

Allison Joseph
\n Junior High Dance

June Jordan
\n What Would I Do White?

Jimmy Santiago Baca
\n So Mexicans Are Taking Jobs from Americans

Haki R. Madhubuti
\n Poet: What Ever Happened to Luther?

Adrian C. Louis
\n The Great Wingless Bird

Pat Mora
\n Immigrants Depression Days

Toi Derricotte
\n A Note on My Son's Face Blackbottom

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
\n Lost Name Woman

Martin Espada
\n Coca-Cola and Coco Frio

Naming
\n Pat Mora
\n Senora X No More

Hamod (Sam)
\n Dying with the Wrong Name Leaves

Marilyn Chin
\n How I Got That Name Elegy for Chloe Nguyen

Martin Espada
\n Niggerlips From an Island You Cannot Name

Nellie Wong
\n Mama, Come Back

Enid Dame
\n On the Road to Damascus, Maryland

Felix Stefanile
\n How I Changed My Name, Felice

Janice Mirikitani
\n Jade

Lyn Lifshin
\n Being Jewish in a Small Town

Janice Gould
\n We Exist

Ishmael Reed
\n Jacket Notes

Helen Barolini
\n Having the Wrong Name for Mr. Wright

Dixie Salazar
\n Taking It Back Pinon Nuts

Kimiko Hahn
\n The Hula Skirt, 1959

Julia Lilsella
\n Song of the Third Generation

Amiri Baraka
\n Ka 'Ba Funk Lore

Daniela Gioseffo
\n American SOnnets for My Father

David Hernandez
\n Pigeons

June Jordan
\n A Poem about Intelligence for My Brothers and Sisters

Denise Nico Leto
\n For Talking

Alberto Alvaro Rios
\n The Language of Great-Aunts Nani

Carol Lee Saffioti
\n Espresso

Milton Kessler
\n Secret Love

Mary TallMountain
\n Good Grease

Vittoria Repetto
\n 6th Grade-Our Lady of Pompeii

Claire Kageyama
\n Mama

Michael S. Glaser
\n Preparations for Seder Changing Address Books

Peter Blue Cloud
\n Crazy Horse Monument

Liz Rosenberg from Prose Poems

Giovanna (Janet) Capone
\n In Answer to Their Questions

Luci Tapahonso
\n All I Want

Stanley H. Barkan
\n Two Grandmas

Sandra Maria Esteves
\n South Bronx Testimonials

Dale M. Kushner
\n Grandma in the Shower

Tino Villanueva
\n Haciendo Apenas la Recoleccion

Rachel Guido deVrries
\n On Alabama Ave., Paterson, NJ, 1954

Ntozake Shange
\n From Okra to Greens

Rose Romano
\n But My Blood So I Lost My Temper

Maxine Kumin
\n For My Great-Grandfather: A Message Long Overdue

Alfred Encarnacion
\n Bulosan Listens to a Recording of Robert Johnson

Maryfrances Cusumano Wagner
\n Miss Clement's Second Grade

Lisa Suhair Majaj
\n Recognized Futures

Michael S. Weaver
\n The Left Bank Jazz Society

Naomi Shihab Nye
\n Bllod

Li-Young Lee
\n Mnemonic The Gift

Nikki Giovanni
\n Nikki-Rosa Legacies

James Masao Mitsui
\n Because of My Father's Job

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
\n Yuba City School

Gregory Djanikian
\n How I Learned English

Negotiating
\n Gregory Djanikian
\n In the Elementary School Choir When I First Saw Snow

Gary Soto
\n Black Hair The Elements of San Joaquin Behind Grandma's House

Luis J. Rodriguez
\n Always Running Fire

Gerald Stern
\n The Dancing

Maria Mazziotti Gillan
\n In Memory We Are Walking

Lyn Lifshin
\n I Remember Haifa Being Lovely But

Michael S. Weaver
\n A Black Man's Sonata Improvisation for Piano

Garrett Hongo
\n Winnings

Susan Clements
\n Susans The Reservation

Michael S. Glaser
\n English-Speaking Persons Will Find Translations

Sherman Alexie
\n Crazy Horse Speaks Powwow Polaroid

Cyrus Cassells
\n Soul Make a Path Through Shouting

Safiya Henderson-Holmes
\n The Battle, Over and Over Again

Louis Simpson
\n A Story About Chicken Soup

Yusef Komunyakaa
\n Salt

Adrian C. Louis
\n Something About Being an Indian

Lorna Dee Cervantes
\n Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races

Lamont B. Steptoe
\n Election Time

Daniela Gioseffi
\n Bicentennial Anti-Poem for Italian-American Women

Lyn Lifshin
\n The Yahrtzeit Light After the Anti-Semitic Calls on a Local Talk Station

Amiri Baraka
\n An Agony, As Now

Dwight Okita
\n Notes for a Poem on Being Asian American

Chrystos
\n Portrait of Assimilation

Stewart Florsheim
\n The Jewish Singles Event

Michael Plama
\n Coming of Age

Laura Boss
\n At the Muclear Rally The Candy Lady

Naomi Shihab Nye
\n My Father and the Figtree

Cherrie Moraga
\n Half-Breed

Shirley Geok-lin-Lim
\n Modern Secrets

Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
\n Grandfather at the Indian Health Clinic

Joseph Bruchac
\n Birdfoot's Granpa

Richard Michelson
\n Undressing Aunt Frieda

William J. Harris
\n Rib Sandwich

Wing Tek Lum
\n Going Home

Miriam Goodman
\n Upkeep

David Hernandez
\n Armitage Shank

Ruth Whitman
\n Laughing Gas

Arthur L. Clements
\n Elegy

Diana Chang
\n Foreign Ways

Robert Viscusi
\n Autobiography

Gloria Anzaldua
\n Horse

Simon J. Ortiz
\n Travels in the South

Grace Cavalieri
\n Grandmother

Maxine Kumin
\n Living Alone with Jesus

Lucia Maria Perillo
\n The Sweaters

Linda Hogan
\n Heritage

Victoria Lena Manyarrows
\n Lakota Sister/Cherokee Mother

Rita Dove
\n Wingfoot Lake

Hamod (Sam)
\n After the Funeral of Assam Hamady

Safiya Henderson-Holmes
\n Friendly Town 1
\n My First Riot: Bronx, NYC

Linda Hogan
\n The Truth Is

Audre Lorde
\n Hanging Fire

Debi Kang Dean
\n In the Way Back

Gloria Anzaldúa
\n Cultures

Re-Envisioning
\n Li-Young Lee
\n I Ask My Mother to Sing

Chrystos
\n I Walk in the History of My People I Have Not Signed a Treaty with the United States Government The Real Indian Leans Against

Lucille Clifton
\n Night Vision In the Inner City

Marilyn Nelson Waniek
\n The House on Moscow Street

Alma Luz Villanueva
\n To Jesus Villanueva, with Love They Didn't Get Me My People Are the COlor of the Earth

Nellie Wong
\n From a Heart of Rice Straw

Diane di Prima
\n April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa

Martin Espada
\n Bully

Joy Harpo
\n Anchorage For Alva Benson, and for Those Who Have Learned to Speak

Wing Tek Lum
\n Chinese Hot Pot

Enid Dame
\n The Seder

Rose Romano
\n The Bucket

Luis J. Rodriguez
\n Speaking with Hands

Michael S. Harper
\n Song: I Want a Witness

Josê Angel Villalongo, Sr.
\n In the Good Old U.S.A.

Victoria Lena Manyarrows
\n Today We Will Not Be Invisible Nor Silent

Quincy Troupe
\n The View from Skates in Berkeley

Shirley Geok-lin Lim
\n I Defy You

Joseph Bruchac
\n Prayer

Alicia Ostriker
\n Lamenting the Inevitable

Kyoko Mori
\n Speaking Through White: For My Mother

Kimberly M. Blaeser
\n Certificate of Live Birth

Pat Mora
\n Cortez'a horse

Jesús Papoleto Meléndez
\n Oye Mundo/Sometimes

E. Ethelbert Miller
\n The Men

Linda Hogan
\n The New Apartment: Minneapolis

Al Young
\n A Dance for Ma Rainey

Jesse F. Garcia
\n I Ain't GOing to Hurry No More

Ray Gonzalez
\n Praise the Tortilla, Praise the Menudo, Praise the Chorizo

Amina Baraka
\n The Last Word

David Hernandez
\n Martin and My Father

Laura Boss
\n My Ringless Fingers on the Steering Wheel Tell the Story

Cyrus Cassells
\n The Women

Luci Tapahonso
\n I Am Singing Now

Safiya Hnderson-Holmes
\n To Hell and Back, with Cake Friendly Town 3

Cathy Song
\n Out of Our Hands

Peter Blue Cloud
\n The Old Man's Lazy

Robert Creeley
\n America

Wendy Rose
\n Naayawva Taawi Story Keeper

Alan Chong Lau
\n The Upside Down Basket

Pat Mora
\n La Migra

Judith Ortiz Cofer
\n What the Gypsy Said to Her Children

Marilyn Chin
\n The Floral Apron

Joy Harjo
\n I Give You Back

Cherrie Moraga
\n For the Color of My Mother

Sonia Sanchez
\n Present Norma An Anthem

Maria Mazziotti Gillan
\n Arturo Public School No. 18: Paterson New Jersey Growing Up Italian

Contributors

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "83": { "wears.id": 83, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 83, "wears.title": "Listening For God Reader, Vol 1", "wears.author": "Paula J. Carlson", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Paula J. Carlson (Editor), Peter S. Hawkins (Editor), Peter S. Hawkins", "wears.title_slug": "listening-for-god-reader-vol-1", "wears.author_slug": "paula-j-carlson", "wears.isbn13": 9780806627151, "wears.isbn10": 806627158, "wears.price": "$13.43", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Augsburg Fortress, Publishers", "wears.pubdate": "August 1994", "wears.edition": "New Edition", "wears.subjects": "Faith, Literature Anthologies - General & Miscellaneous, General & Miscellaneous Christian Life, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 164, "wears.dimensions": "0.35 (w) x 5.50 (h) x 8.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "Never before has a resource touched upon the issues of life and faith in such a personal way. Excellent contemporary literature helps one realize the presence of God in many places and relationships. Each volume of Listening for God includes excerpts from the works of eight contemporary authors, supplemented by author profiles and reflection questions. A Leader Guide, offering suggestions for organizing class time and responding to reflection questions is also available.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction

1. Flannery O'Connor

Revelation

2. Frederick Buechner

The Dwarves in the Stable

3. Patricia Hampl

Chapter 6 from Virgin Time

4. Raymond Carver

A Small Good Thing

5. Annie Dillard

The Deer at Providencia

A Field of Silence

6. Alice Walker

The Welcome Table

7. Garrison Keillor

Exiles

Aprille

8. Richard Rodriguez

Credo

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "84": { "wears.id": 84, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 84, "wears.title": "Concise Anthology of American Literature", "wears.author": "James Leonard", "wears.author_bio": "

JAMES S. LEONARD received his Ph.D. from Brown University, and is Professor of English (and former English Department chair) at The Citadel. He is the editor of Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom (Duke University Press, 1999), coeditor of Authority and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing (Locust Hill Press, 1994) and Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Duke University Press, 1992), and coauthor of The Fluent Mundo: Wallace Stevens and the Structure of Reality

(University of Georgia Press, 1988). He has served as president of the Mark Twain Circle

of America (2010–2012), managing editor of The Mark Twain Annual (since 2004), and editor of the Mark Twain Circular (1987–2008), and is a major contributor to The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Poets and Poetry (Greenwood Press, 2006) and American History Through Literature (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2005).

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN is Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford University. She is the author, editor, or coeditor of over forty books, including the award-winning Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (1993), From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (1988), and Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture (2009), as well as Lighting Out for the Territory (1997), The Oxford Mark Twain (1996), The Historical

Guide to Mark Twain (2002), Mark Twain‘s Book of Animals (2009), The Mark Twain Anthology:Great Writers on his Life and Work (2010), Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts by Mark Twain (2003), People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (with Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky) (1996), Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (with Elaine Hedges)(1994), and Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar (with David Bradley) (2005). She has also published more than eighty articles, essays, or reviews in publications including American Quarterly, American Literature, Journal of American History, American Literary History, and the New York Times Book Review, and has lectured on American literature in Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea,

Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey, the United Kingdom,

and throughout the United States. A member of the first class of women to graduate from Yale College, she stayed on at Yale to earn her M.A. in English and her Ph.D. in American Studies. Before her arrival at Stanford, she directed the Poynter Fellowship

in Journalism at Yale and taught American Studies and English at the University

of Texas at Austin, where she chaired the American Studies Department. She co-founded the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and is a past president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and the American Studies Association.

DAVID BRADLEY earned a BA in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 and a MA in United States Studies at the University of London in 1974. A Professor of English at Temple University from 1976 to 1997, Bradley has been a visiting professor at the San Diego State University, the University of California—San Diego, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Colgate University, the College of William &

Mary, the City College of the City University of New York and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, Austin. He is currently an Associate Professor of Fiction in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Bradley has read and lectured extensively in the United States and also in Japan, Korea, Pakistan, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Australia. He is the author of two novels, South Street (1975) and The Chaneysville Incident (1981) which was awarded the 1982 PEN/Faulkner Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His non-fiction has appeared in Esquire, Redbook, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The New Yorker. A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon

Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts His most recent publication is semi-scholarly: The Essential Writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which he co-edited with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. His current works in progress include a creative non-fiction book, The Bondage Hypothesis: Meditations on Race, History and America, a novel-in-stories, Raystown, and an essay collection: Lunch Bucket Pieces: New and Selected Creative Nonfiction

DANA D. NELSON

received her Ph.D. from Michigan State, and she is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature, 1638–1867 (1992), National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (1998), and Bad for Democracy: How the Presidency Undermines the Power of the People (2008) as well as editor of several reprint editions of nineteenth-century American female writers (including Rebecca Rush, Lydia Maria Child, Fanny Kemble, and Frances Butler Leigh). Her teaching interests include comparative American colonial literatures, developing democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ethnic and minority literatures, women’s literature, and frontier representations in literature. She has served or is serving on numerous editorial boards, including American Literature, Early American Literature, American Literary History, Arizona Quarterly, and American Quarterly. She is an active member of the Modern Language Association and the American Studies Association. She is currently working on a book that studies developing practices and representations of democracy in the late British colonies and the early United States.

JOSEPH CSICSILA is Professor of English Language and Literature at Eastern Michigan University and a specialist in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author and/or editor of five books including Canons by Consensus:

Critical Trends and American Literature Anthologies (2004), which is the first systematic study of American literature textbooks used by college instructors in the past century, Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (2009), and Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain (2010). He has also published numerous articles on such authors as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and William Faulkner. Csicsila has served as the editor of Journal of Narrative Theory and is currently book review editor for The Mark Twain Annual.

", "wears.authors": "James Leonard, David Bradley, George McMichael, Dana Nelson, Shelley Fisher Fishkin", "wears.title_slug": "concise-anthology-of-american-literature", "wears.author_slug": "james-leonard", "wears.isbn13": 9780205763108, "wears.isbn10": 205763103, "wears.price": "$92.38", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Prentice Hall", "wears.pubdate": "January 2010", "wears.edition": "7th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2368, "wears.dimensions": "6.40 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 2.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Student Edition:

After careful thought, your professor assigned McMichael’s Concise Anthology of American Literature, Seventh Edition for your course. This anthology is rich in contextual content, giving you the historical events that influenced the writing of these renowned American authors which leads to a greater understanding of the selections. Well-established authors are joined by a wide array of selections by women and writers of color, including both African Americans and Native Americans.

What’s New in the Seventh Edition:

Artworks and historical photos give greater meaning to historical events and selections, such as an artist’s rendition of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and a photo of Civil War devastation in Charleston, South Carolina.
Twenty new authors, representing diverse cultural backgrounds, increase the number of contemporary authors which is always enjoyable reading.
Eavesdrop into the romance of John and Abigail Adams by reading their romantic letters. Share the trauma of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a young soldier.
Four groundbreaking plays will captivate you and help you understand the role of theater in America through the centuries.
The speeches by legendary leaders, such as Martin Luther King and Booker T. Washington, and have stood the test of time and inspire us today. If you were wishing that you had a copy of President Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address, you’ll find it here.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This consise anthology offers a balanced approach to the enjoyment of reading American literature. Over 20 new authors representing diverse cultural backgrounds allow students to read about unique experiences through the eyes of esteemed writers including Sonia Sanchez, Sherman Alexie, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Frances E.W. Harper. New historical documents, including the romantic letters exchanged by John and Abigail Adams and an account of the Vietnam War through the eyes of a young soldier, provide an understanding for student readers. Four groundbreaking dramas (from the 18^th century: Slaves in Algiers, by Susanna Haswell Rowson; from the 19^th century: The Escape, by William Wells Brown; from the early 20^th century: Trifles, by Susan Glaspell; and from the late 20^th century: Fences, by August Wilson) help students understand the role of theater in America through the centuries. Speeches by Legendary Leaders include Martin Luther King’s unforgettable “I Have a Dream” speech and Booker T. Washington’s historical Atlanta Exposition Address in addition to Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address.

", "wears.toc": "

The Literature of Early America 1

Reading the Historical Context

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (1451–1506)

Letter Describing His First Voyage

THOMAS HARIOT (1560–1621)

FROM A Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia Of the Nature and Manners of the People

JOHN WINTHROP (1588–1649) AND ANNE HUTCHINSON (1591–1643)

FROMThe Examination of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson at the Court at Newton November 1637

THE IROQUOIS LEAGUE

FROM The Constitution of the Five Nations

Literature of Early America

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH (1580–1631)

FROM The General History of Virginia:

The Third Book

Powhatan’s Discourse of Peace and War

WILLIAM BRADFORD (1590–1657),

FROM Of Plymouth Plantation

Chapter I: The Separatist Interpretation of the Reformation in England, 1550–1607

Chapter III: Of Their Settling in Holland, and Their Manner of Living

Chapter IV: Showing the Reasons and Causes of Their Removal

Chapter VII: Of Their Departure from Leyden

Chapter IX: Of Their Voyage

Chapter X: Showing How They Sought Out a Place of Habitation

Chapter XI: The Mayflower Compact

Chapter XII: Narragansett Challenge

Chapter XIV: End of the “Common Course . . .”

Chapter XXIV: Mr. Roger Williams

Chapter XXVIII: The Pequot War

Chapter XXXVI: Wiinslow’s Final Departure

JOHN WINTHROP(1588–1649),

From The Journal of John Winthrop

ANNE BRADSTREET (C. 1612–1672)

The Prologue

Contemplations

The Flesh and the Spirit

The Author to Her Book

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

To My Dear and Loving Husband

A Letter to Her Husband Absent Upon Public Employment

In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet

On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet

[On Deliverance] from Another Sore Fit

Upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666

As Weary Pilgrim

EDWARD TAYLOR (C. 1642–1729)

Prologue

FROM Preparatory Meditations

The Reflexion

Meditation 6 (First Series)

Meditation 8 (First Series)

Meditation 38 (First Series)

Meditation 150 (Second Series)

FROM God’s Determinations

The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended

Upon a Spider Catching a Fly

Huswifery

The Ebb and Flow

A Fig for Thee Oh! Death

SAMUEL SEWALL (1652–1730)

The Selling of Joseph

FROM The Diary of Samuel Sewall

MARY ROWLANDSON (C. 1637–1711)

A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration

WILLIAM BYRD II (1674–1744)

FROM The Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1709–1712

JONATHAN EDWARDS (1703–1758)

Sarah Pierrepont

FROM A Divine and Supernatural Light

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

The Literature of the Eighteenth Century

Reading the Historical Context

CORRESPONDENCE

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams

Abigail Adams to John Adams

John Adams to Abigail Adams

Benjamin Banneker to Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Banneker

THE FEDERALIST/ANTI-FEDERALIST CONTROVERSY

The Federalist No. 1 (Alexander Hamilton)

The Federalist No. 2 (John Jay)

Literature of the Eighteenth Century

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (1706–1790)

FROM The Autobiography

Benjamin Franklin’s Epitaph

FROM The Pennsylvania Gazette

The Witches of Mount Holly

Information to Those Who Would Remove to America

MICHEL-GUILLAUME-JEAN DE CRÈVECOEUR (1735–1813)

FROM Letters from an American Farmer

Letter III (What Is an American?)

Letter IX (Description of Charleston)

THOMAS PAINE (1737–1809)

FROM Common Sense

FROM The American Crisis

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743–1826)

The Declaration of Independence

FROM Notes on the State of Virginia

FROM Query V: Cascades

FROM Query VI: Productions Mineral, Vegetable and Animal

FROM Query XVII: Religion

FROM Query XVIII: Manners

FROM Query XIX: Manufactures

PHILLIS WHEATLEY (1754?–1784)

On Virtue

To the University of Cambridge, in New England

On Being Brought from Africa to America

On Imagination

To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works

To His Excellency General Washington

PHILIP FRENEAU (1752–1832)

The Power of Fancy

The Hurricane

To Sir Toby

The Wild Honey Suckle

The Indian Burying Ground

On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature

WILLIAM BARTRAM (1739–1823)

FROM Travels through North and South Carolina

SUSANNA HASWELL ROWSON (1762–1824)

Slaves in Algiers

RED JACKET (C. 1750-1830)

The Indians Must Worship the Great Spirit in Their Own Way

The Literature of the Early To Mid-Nineteenth Century

Reading the Historical Context

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879)

On the Constitution and the Union

STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS (1813–1861)

FROM Third Joint Debate, at Jonesboro

WOMEN’S RIGHTS CONVENTION, SENECA FALLS, NEW YORK (1848)

Declaration of Sentiments

Literature of the Early To Mid-Nineteenth Century

WASHINGTON IRVING (1783–1859)

FROM The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

The Author’s Account of Himself

Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

BLACK HAWK (1767–1838)

FROM Black Hawk’s Autobiography

WILLIAM APESS (1798–1839)

Eulogy on King Philip

PENINA MOÏSE (1797–1880)

To Persecuted Foreigners

The Mirror and the Echo

To a Lottery Ticket

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789–1851)

Preface to the Leather-Stocking Tales

FROM The Pioneers

FROM The Deerslayer

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (1794–1878)

Thanatopsis

To a Waterfowl

To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe

To the Fringed Gentian

The Prairies

Abraham Lincoln

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809–1849)

Sonnet—To Science

To Helen

The City in the Sea

Sonnet—Silence

Lenore

The Raven

Annabel Lee

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Black Cat

The Purloined Letter

FROM “Twice-Told Tales, by Nathaniel Hawthorne” [A Review]

The Philosophy of Composition

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803–1882)

Nature

Self-Reliance

The Rhodora

Each and All

Concord Hymn

The Problem

Ode

Hamatreya

Give All to Love

Days

Brahma

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS (1806–1867)

January 1, 1828

January 1, 1829

The Lady in the White Dress, I Helped into the Omnibus

MARIA STEWART (1803–1879)

An Address Delivered Before The Afric-American Female

Intelligence Society of America 6

GEORGE MOSES HORTON (1797–1883)

On Liberty and Slavery

The Lover’s Farewell

On Hearing of the Intention of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet’s Freedom

Division of An Estate

Death of an Old Carriage Horse

George Moses Horton, Myself

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (1804–1864)

Young Goodman Brown

The Birth-Mark

Rappaccini’s Daughter

HERMAN MELVILLE (1819–1891)

Bartleby, the Scrivener

Benito Cereno

The Portent

Shiloh

Malvern Hill

A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight

The House-Top

The Swamp Angel

The College Colonel

The Tuft of Kelp

The Maldive Shark

The Berg

Art

Greek Architecture

LYDIA MARIA CHILD (1802–1880)

The Black Saxons

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1818–1895)

FROM Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

HENRY DAVID THOREAU(1817–1862)

Civil Disobedience

FROM Walden

I Economy

II Where I Lived, and What I Lived for

XII Brute Neighbors

XVIII Conclusion

They Who Prepare my Evening Meal Below

On Fields O’er Which the Reaper’s Hand Has Passed

Smoke

Conscience

My Life Has Been the Poem

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806–1870)

Grayling; or “Murder Will Out”

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW (1807–1882)

A Psalm of Life

The Arsenal at Springfield

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER (1807–1892)

The Hunters of Men

The Farewell

Barbara Frietchie

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL(1819–1891)

To the Dandelion

FROM A Fable for Critics

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE (1811–1896), FROM Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Preface

Chapter I In Which the Reader Is Introduced to a Man of Humanity

Chapter VII The Mother’s Struggle

FANNY FERN(1811–1872)

Aunt Hetty on Matrimony

Hints to Young Wives

The Tear of a Wife

Mrs. Adolphus Smith Sporting the “Blue Stocking”

Blackwell’s Island

Blackwell’s Island No. 3

Independence

The Working-Girls of New York

WILLIAM WELLS BROWN (1814–1884)

The Escape

HARRIET ANN JACOBS (1813–1897), FROM Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Chapter I Childhood

Chapter V The Trials of Girlhood

Chapter VI The Jealous Mistress

Chapter X A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life

Chapter XXI The Loophole of Retreat

Chapter XLI Free at Last

JAMES M. WHITFIELD (1822–1871)

America

ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809–1865)

To Horace Greeley

Gettysburg Address

Second Inaugural Address

FRANCES E. W. HARPER (1825–1911)

Bury Me in a Free Land

To the Union Savers of Cleveland

Eliza Harris

The Slave Mother

Learning to Read

Aunt Chloe’s Politics

EMMA LAZARUS (1849–1887)

In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport

The New Colossus

1492

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892) 1

Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass

Song of Myself

FROM Inscriptions

To You

One’s-Self I Sing

When I Read the Book

I Hear America Singing

Poets to Come

FROM Children of Adam

From Pent-Up Aching Rivers

Out of the Rolling Ocean the Crowd

As Adam, Early in the Morning

Once I Pass’d through a Populous City

FROM Calamus

What Think You I take My Pen In Hand?

I saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I Hear It Was Charged Against Me

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

FROM Sea-Drift

Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

FROM By the Roadside

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

The Dalliance of the Eagles

FROM Drum-Taps

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

Bivouac on a Mountain Side

Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night

A sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim

The Wound-Dresser

FROM Memories of President Lincoln

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d

FROM Autumn Rivulets

There Was a Child Went Forth

Sparkles From the Wheel

Passage to India

FROM Whispers of Heavenly Death

A Noiseless Patient Spider

FROM Noon to Starry Night

To a Locomotive in Winter

EMILY DICKINSON (1830–1886)

49 I never lost as much but twice

67 Success is counted sweetest

165 A Wounded Deer—leaps highest

185 “Faith” is a fine invention

210 The thought beneath so slight a film

214 I taste a liquor never brewed

216 Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

241 I like a look of Agony

249 Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

258 There’s a certain Slant of light

280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

303 The Soul selects her own Society

324 Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

328 A Bird came down the Walk

338 I know that He exists

341 After great pain, a formal feeling comes

401 What Soft—Cherubic Creatures

435 Much Madness is divinest Sense

441 This is my letter to the World

449 I died for Beauty—but was scarce

465 I heard a Fly buzz—when I died

520 I started Early—Took my Dog

585 I like to see it lap the Miles

632 The Brain—is wider than the sky

640 I cannot live with You

670 One need not be a Chamber—to be Haunted

709 Publication—is the Auction

712 Because I could not stop for Death

764 Presentiment—is that long Shadow—on the Lawn

976 Death is a Dialogue between

986 A narrow Fellow in the Grass

1052 I never saw a Moor

1078 The Bustle in a House

1129 Tell all the truth but tell it slant

1207 He preached upon “Breadth” till it argued him narrow

1463 A Route of Evanescence

1545 The Bible is an antique Volume

1624 Apparently with no surprise

1670 In Winter in my Room

1732 My life closed twice before its close

1755 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

1760 Elysium is as far as to

Letters to T. W. Higginson

The Literature of the Late Nineteenth Century

Reading the Historical Context

MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS) (1835–1910)

FROM Life on the Mississippi

[Sir Walter Scott and the Southern Character]

ALBION TOURGÉE (1838–1905)

FROM The Invisible Empire

Literature of the Late Nineteenth Century

MARK TWAIN (SAMUEL L. CLEMENS) (1835–1910)

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

Story of the Bad Little Boy

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

A Salutation-Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth

The War-Prayer

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1852–1930)

A New England Nun

CHARLES WADDELL CHESNUTT (1858–1932)

The Goophered Grapevine

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837–1920)

Editha

HENRY JAMES (1843–1916)

Daisy Miller: A Study

The Jolly Corner

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842–1914)

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860–1935)

The Yellow Wall-Paper

KATE CHOPIN (1851–1904)

The Storm

STEPHEN CRANE (1871–1900)

Black riders came from the sea

In the desert

A god in wrath

I saw a man pursuing the horizon

Supposing that I should have the courage

On the horizon the peaks assembled

A man feared that he might find an assassin

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind

A man said to the universe

A man adrift on a slim spar

The Open Boat

FRANK NORRIS(1870–1902)

A Deal in Wheat

JACK LONDON(1876–1916)

The Law of Life

EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937)

The Other Two

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR(1872–1906)

We Wear the Mask

An Ante-Bellum Sermon

When Malindy Sings

The Colored Soldiers

When Dey ‘Listed Colored Soldiers

Sympathy 1

THEODORE DREISER(1871–1945)

The Lost Phoebe

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1900 to 1945)

Reading the Historical Context

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1856–1915)

The Atlanta Exposition Address

Literature of the Twentieth Century

W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963)

FROM The Souls of Black Folk

A Litany of Atlanta

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON(1869–1935)

Richard Cory

Cliff Klingenhagen

Miniver Cheevy

How Annandale Went Out

Eros Turannos

Mr. Flood’s Party

ROBERT FROST(1874–1963)

Mending Wall

Home Burial

After Apple-Picking

The Road Not Taken

An Old Man’s Winter Night

Birches

The Oven Bird

For Once, Then, Something

Fire and Ice

Design

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (ZITKALA SA) (1876–1938)

FROM The School Days of an Indian Girl

CARL SANDBURG(1878–1967)

Chicago

Lost

Graceland

Fog

Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight

WILLA CATHER(1873–1947)

Paul’s Case

ELLEN GLASGOW (1873–1945)

The Shadowy Third

GERTRUDE STEIN(1874–1946)

Susie Asado

Picasso

A Movie

SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876–1941)

I Want to Know Why

JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896–1970)

FROM U.S.A.

Preface

FROM The 42nd Parallel

Proteus 1

FROM 1919

Newsreel XLIII

The Body of an American

FROM The Big Money

Newsreel LXVI

The Camera Eye (50)

FROM U.S.A

Vag

EUGENE O’NEILL(1888–1953)

The Hairy Ape

SUSAN GLASPELL(1876–1948)

Trifles

EZRA POUND(1885–1972)

Portrait d’une Femme

Salutation

A Pact

In a Station of the Metro

The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter

T. S. ELIOT(1888–1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Preludes

Sweeney Among the Nightingales

The Waste Land

Notes on “The Waste Land”

E. E. CUMMINGS(1894–1962)

[in Just-]

[O sweet spontaneous]

[Buffalo Bill’s defunct]

[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]

[All in green went my love riding]

[when god lets my body be]

HART CRANE(1899–1932)

Chaplinesque

At Melville’s Tomb

Voyages

FROM The Bridge

To Brooklyn Bridge

The Harbor Dawn

Van Winkle

EDGAR LEE MASTERS(1868–1950)

FROM Spoon River Anthology

Knowlt Hoheimer

Nellie Clark

Petit, the Poet

Anne Rutledge

Lucinda Matlock

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY(1892–1950)

Spring

First Fig

[I shall forget you presently, my dear]

[Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare]

WALLACE STEVENS(1879–1955)

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

Domination of Black

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

The Snow Man

Anecdote of the Jar

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Idea of Order at Key West

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS(1883–1963)

Con Brio

The Young Housewife

Pastoral

Tract

Danse Russe

El Hombre

To a Solitary Disciple

Queenannslace

Portrait of a Lady

The Widow’s Lament in Springtime

The Red Wheelbarrow

Between Walls

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

MARIANNE MOORE(1887–1972)

The Past Is the Present

To a Steam Roller

The Fish

Poetry

A Graveyard

THE NEW NEGRO(1925)

Fog, by John Matheus

White Houses, by Claude McKay

The Black Finger, by Angelina Grimke

The Road, by Helene Johnson

COUNTÉE CULLEN(1903–1946)

Yet Do I Marvel

For a Lady I Know

Incident

From the Dark Tower

A Brown Girl Dead

Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song

JEAN TOOMER(1894–1967)

FROM Cane

Blood-Burning Moon

ZORA NEALE HURSTON(1891?–1960)

John Redding Goes to Sea

THOMAS WOLFE(1900–1938)

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD(1896–1940)

Winter Dreams

ERNEST HEMINGWAY(1899–1961)

In Another Country

WILLIAM FAULKNER(1897–1962)

Barn Burning

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Aunt Sue’s Stories

Question

The New Moon

Mexican Market Woman

I Too

Dream Boogie

Harlem

JOHN STEINBECK (1902–1968)

The Chrysanthemums

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER(1890–1980)

María Concepción

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1945 to Present)

Reading the Historical Context

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. (1929–1968)

I Have a Dream

JAMES R. MCDONOUGH (1946– )

FROM Platoon Leader

“Just Like You and Me”

BARACK OBAMA (1961– )

Inauguration Speech

Literature of the Twentieth Century

EUDORA WELTY (1909–2001)

Powerhouse

RICHARD WRIGHT(1908–1960)

The Man Who Was Almost a Man

ELIZABETH BISHOP(1911–1979)

A Miracle for Breakfast

The Armadillo

Brazil, January 1, 1502

One Art

ROBERT LOWELL (1917–1977)

Memories of West Street and Lepke

Skunk Hour

For the Union Dead

Will Not Come Back

ANNE SEXTON(1928–1974)

And One for My Dame

The Addict

Rowing

SYLVIA PLATH(1932–1963)

Lady Lazarus

Daddy

W. S. MERWIN (1927– )

Grandfather in the Old Men’s Home

The Drunk in the Furnace

Noah’s Raven

The Dry Stone Mason

Fly

Strawberries

Direction

A. R. AMMONS (1926–2001)

Sight Seed

Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything

The Damned

JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987)

Sonny’s Blues

FLANNERY O’CONNOR(1925–1964)

Good Country People

BERNARD MALAMUD(1914–1986)

The Magic Barrel

SONIA SANCHEZ (1934– )

the final solution/

to blk/record/buyers

Womanhood

BLACK FIRE(1968)

Neon Diaspora, by David Henderson

For the Truth, by Edward Spriggs

“Oh shit a riot!” by Jacques Wakefield

JUNE JORDAN(1936–2002)

Poem About My Rights

Poem for Guatemala

A New Politics of Sexuality

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON (1940– )

No Name Woman

EDWARD ALBEE (1928– )

The Zoo Story

SAUL BELLOW(1915–2005)

A Silver Dish

N. SCOTT MOMADAY (1934– )

FROM The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Arrowmaker

JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938– )

How I Contemplated the World . .

JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON (1943– )

The Faithful

TIM O’BRIEN (1946– )

FROM The Things They Carried

On the Rainy River 2113

AMY TAN (1952– )

FROM The Joy Luck Club

Half and Half

BOBBIE ANN MASON (1940– )

Shiloh

GLORIA NAYLOR (1950– )

FROM The Women of Brewster Place

Lucielia Louise Turner

LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1948– )

The Man to Send Rain Clouds

Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand

GLORIA ANZALDÚA(1942–2004)

FROM Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

The Homeland, Aztlán

LOUISE ERDRICH (1954– )

FROM Love Medicine

The Red Convertible (1974)

TINA HOWE (1937– )

Painting Churches

THOMAS PYNCHON (1937– )

Entropy

AUGUST WILSON(1945–2005)

Fences

SIMON ORTIZ (1941– )

A Designated National Park

Canyon de Chelly

Final Solution: Jobs, Leaving

GEORGE SAUNDERS (1958– )

Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz

SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966– )

Class

Defending Walt Whitman

Reference Works, Bibliographies

Criticism, Literary and Cultural History", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "85": { "wears.id": 85, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 85, "wears.title": "The Heath Anthology of American Literature: Contemporary Period (1945 To The Present), Volume E", "wears.author": "Paul Lauter", "wears.author_bio": "

Paul Lauter is the Smith Professor of Literature at Trinity College. He has served as president of the American Studies Association and is a major figure in the revision of the American literary canon.

Dr. Bryer is an expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald and is president of the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. He was an editor of DEAR SCOTT, DEAREST ZELDA: THE LOVE LETTERS OF F. SCOTT AND ZELDA FITZGERALD (Macmillan).

John Alberti teaches at Northern Kentucky University and has a Ph.D. in American literature from UCLA. His main area of research is multicultural American literature and culture.

Mary Pat Brady is the Director of Latino Studies at Cornell University. Her current work focuses on the emergence of the service economy and the corresponding transformation of Chicana and Latina culture.

", "wears.authors": "Paul Lauter, Richard Yarborough, John Alberti, Mary Pat Brady, Jackson Bryer", "wears.title_slug": "the-heath-anthology-of-american-literature", "wears.author_slug": "paul-lauter", "wears.isbn13": 9780547201801, "wears.isbn10": "054720180X", "wears.price": "$87.49", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Cengage Learning", "wears.pubdate": "March 2009", "wears.edition": "6th Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 3612, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "A best-selling anthology since its first edition, this premier survey of American literature has influenced the manner in which the American literary canon is taught in classrooms across the nation. In response to readers' requests, the editors of the Heath Anthology continue to develop and reinforce its greatest strengths: diverse reading selections and strong ancillaries. With the assistance of more than 200 contributing editors all specialists in particular eras and writers the editors have updated biographical and critical information, as well as added new works of interest to both instructors and students.
\n
\n

The Fourth Edition features writers and selections that highlight the divergent communities and diverse voices constituting the United States, both past and present. Volume 1 takes students from Native American oral literatures up to 1865, including Whitman and Dickinson. Volume 2 (which can be packaged with a free supplement of Whitman and Dickinson works) opens with African American folk tales and regional writers, and includes new sections on the Beat Movement and the Vietnam Conflict.

Full-length texts continue to be integrated throughout the anthology, including The Scarlet Letter in Vol. 1 and The Awakening in Vol. 2.
The textbook web site complements both volumes of the text through a searchable, multimedia timeline with literary, historical, and cultural information; author profile pages; links to other sites for further research; and an online version of the Instructor's Guide.
The Southern literature section includes two short stories by William Faulkner, Dry September and Barn Burning, and an essay by H.L. Mencken, TheSahara of the Bozarts. Coverage of border literature includes the work of novelist María Amparo Ruíz de Burton. In addition, gay and lesbian writers such as Dorothy Allison, James Merrill, and Richard Rodriguez are featured throughout.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Unrivaled diversity and ease of use have made THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME E: CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1945 TO THE PRESENT), 6th Edition a best-selling text since 1989, when the first edition was published. In presenting a more inclusive canon of American literature, THE HEATH ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE: VOLUME E: CONTEMPORARY PERIOD (1945 TO THE PRESENT), 6th Edition continues to balance the traditional, leading names in American literature with lesser-known writers and to build upon the anthology's other strengths: its apparatus and its ancillaries. Available in five volumes for greater flexibility, the 6th Edition offers thematic clusters to stimulate classroom discussions and showcase the treatment of important topics across the genres.

", "wears.toc": "

Preface. CONTEMPORARY PERIOD: 1945 TO THE PRESENT. The \"American Century\": From Victory to Vietnam. Ann Petry (1908-1997). The Witness. Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze. Root Cellar. Big Wind. from The Lost Son: 1. The Flight; 4. The Return; 5. It was beginning winter. from Meditations of an Old Woman: First Meditation; from Fourth Meditation. Elegy. My Papa's Waltz. Eudora Welty (1909-2002). The Wide Net. Charles Olson (1910-1970). The Kingfishers. For Sappho, Bac", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "86": { "wears.id": 86, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 86, "wears.title": "The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader", "wears.author": "David Lewis", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "David Lewis, David Levering Lewis", "wears.title_slug": "the-portable-harlem-renaissance-reader", "wears.author_slug": "david-lewis", "wears.isbn13": 9780140170368, "wears.isbn10": 140170367, "wears.price": "$15.90", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Penguin Group (USA)", "wears.pubdate": "June 1995", "wears.edition": 1, "wears.subjects": "Places - Literary Anthologies, Regional American Anthologies, Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 816, "wears.dimensions": "5.18 (w) x 7.78 (h) x 1.47 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Gathering a representative sampling of the New Negro Movement's most important figures, and providing substantial introductory essays, headnotes, and brief biographical notes, Lewis' volume—organized chronologically—includes the poetry and prose of Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, and others.

\n\n\n

From its beginnings in 1919, with soldiers returning from the Great War, to its sputtering end in 1934, with the Great Depression, the New Negro Movement in arts and letters proclaimed the experience of African American men and women. This magnificent volume features a wealth of fiction and nonfiction works by 45 writers from that exuberant era.\n

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

From its beginnings in 1919, with soldiers returning from the Great War, to its sputtering end in 1934, with the Great Depression, the New Negro Movement in arts and letters ...

Library Journal

Editor Lewis is a noted author of several books, e.g., When Harlem Was in Vogue ( LJ 3/15/81) and, most recently, W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 ( LJ 8/93). This hefty tome features many significant essays, poems, and stories not readily available to all scholars that are drawn from African American journals of the period, including Opportunity, Crisis, and Fire! In his introduction, Lewis carefully explores tension within this arts and letters movement. The collected excerpts of writers like Cullen, Hurston, Hughes, McKay, DuBois, and Wright represent a balance between those Renaissance supporters and writers who ``saw the small cracks in the wall of racism that could, they anticipated, be widened through the production of exemplary racial images'' and those who ``saw art not as politics by other means--civil rights between covers or from a stage or an easel.'' This anthology will balance and enhance any modern American literature collection.-- Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

", "wears.toc": "

Table of Contents Introduction Chronology Part I. Essays and Memoirs Returning Soldiers W. E. B. Du Bois The Migration of the Talented Tenth Carter G. Woodson Gift of the Black Tropics W. A. Domingo Africa for the Africans Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall Emancipation Day Speech On Marcus Garvey Mary White Ovington Black Manhattan James Weldon Johnson The New Negro Alain Locke Jazz at Home Joel A. Rogers Reflections on O'Neill's Plays Paul Robeson The Negro Digs Up His Past Arthur A. Schomburg The Task of Negro Womanhood Elise Johnson McDougald from The Big Sea Langston Hughes When the Negro Was in Vogue Harlem Literati Parties The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain The Negro-Art Hokum George S. Schuyler Criteria of Negro Art W. E. B. Du Bois Critiques of Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven Du Bois J. W. Johnson The Caucasian Storms Harlem Rudolph Fisher Aaron Douglas Chats about the Harlem Renaissance Aaron Douglas Negro Art and America Albert C. Barnes The Negro Takes His Place in American Art Alain Locke The Negro Artist and Modern Art Romare Bearden from Dust Tracks on a Road Zora Neale Hurston from A Long Way from Home Claude McKay The Harlem Intelligentsia The New Negro in Paris La Bourgeoisie Noire E. Franklin Frazier With Langston Hughes in the USSR Louise Thompson Patterson Harlem Runs Wild Claude Mckay Blueprint for Negro Writing Richard Wright The Negro Renaissance and Its Significance Charles S. Johnson Part II. Poetry Song Gwendolyn Bennett Hatred The Day-Breakers Arna Bontemps Golgotha Is a Mountain Southern Road Sterling Brown Odyssey of Big Boy Frankie and Johnny Ma Rainey Long Gone Georgie Grimes Remembering Nat Turner The Young Voice Cries Mae Cowdery The Wayside Well Joseph S. Cotter For a Lady I Know Countee Cullen Incident Harlem Wine Yet Do I Marvel Heritage From the Dark Tower To a Brown Boy Tableau Saturday's Child Two Poets To France Nothing Endures Requiescam The Death Bed Waring Cuney La Vie C'est la Vie Jessie Redmon Fauset Dead Fires The Negro Speaks of Rivers Langston Hughes I, Too America The Weary Blues Jazzonia Mother to Son Negro Mulatto Elevator Boy Red Silk Stockings Ruby Brown Elderly Race Leaders Dream Variation Goodbye, Christ Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria Children of the Sun Fenton Johnson The Banjo Player Let Me Not Lose My Dream Georgia Douglas Johnson Old Black Men Black Woman The Heart of a Woman I Want to Die While You Love Me My Race Helene Johnson A Southern Road Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem Poem The White Witch James Weldon Johnson The Color Sergeant O Black and Unknown Bards Go Down Death The Creation If We Must Die Claude McKay Baptism The White House The Negro's Friend On a Primitive Canoe The Tropics in New York When Dawn Comes to the City The Desolate City The Harlem Dancer St. Isaac's Church, Petrograd Barcelona Lady, Lady Anne Spencer Song of the Son Jean Toomer Georgia Dusk The Blue Meridian Part III. Fiction from The Emperor Jones Eugene O'Neill from Cane Jean Toomer Karintha Fern Bona and Paul Birthright T. S. Stribling from There Is Confusion Jessie Redmon Fauset from Plum Bun from The Fire in the Flint Walter White Wedding Day Gwendolyn Bennett from Home to Harlem Claude McKay Snowstorm in Pittsburgh Spring in Harlem from Banjo Banjo's Ace of Spades from Banana Bottom from Quicksand Nella Larsen from Passing from The Closing Door Angelina Weld Grimke The Typewriter Dorothy West from The Dark Princess W. E. B. Du Bois from The Walls of Jericho Rudolph Fisher from Tropic Death Eric Walrond The Wharf Rats The Yellow One Smoke, Lilies and Jade Richard Bruce Nugent Luani of the Jungles Langston Hughes from Not Without Laughter Thursday Afternoon from The Ways of White Folks Father and Son The Blues I'm Playing Cordelia the Crude Wallace Thurman Harlem: A Forum of Negro Life from The Blacker the Berry...
\n from Infants of the Spring from Black No More George Schuyler from God Sends Sunday Arna Bontemps from Black Thunder from One Way to Heaven Countee Cullen Drenched in Light Zora Neale Hurston Color Struck Jonah's Gourd Vine from Mule-Bone Zora Neale Hurston Langston Hughes Biographical Notes Acknowledgments

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Library Journal

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "87": { "wears.id": 87, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 87, "wears.title": "American Short Stories", "wears.author": "Bert Hitchcock", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Bert Hitchcock", "wears.title_slug": "american-short-stories", "wears.author_slug": "bert-hitchcock", "wears.isbn13": 9780321484895, "wears.isbn10": 321484894, "wears.price": "$76.05", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Longman", "wears.pubdate": "October 2007", "wears.edition": "8th Edition", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 760, "wears.dimensions": "5.90 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

American short stories capture America’s past and present in a unique way. Now you have an opportunity to immerse yourself in the more than two hundred year history of the American short story by taking this course and reading the new eighth edition of American Short Stories. While retaining its historical thrust and chronological organization, the new eighth edition features more contemporary stories and gives increased attention to the social and cultural contexts in which the short fiction of the United States has unfolded.

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN THIS EDITION

An enriched, powerful selection of stories from classic and contemporary authors. Of the sixty selected stories making up this anthology, sixteen are new to the eighth edition and nine are new authors.
A new selection of contemporary stories is given an historical section of their own.
New and improved Suggestions for Discussion and Writing features encourage meaningful class discussion and stimulate writing.
Increased representation of cultural diversity with attention to race, ethnicity, gender, region, and individual social and cultural concerns.
Enhanced Introductions and Headnotes make use of an author’s own words to place the author in relation to his or her time, to other writers, and to American literary history.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

American Short Stories, 8/e is a streamlined anthology that includes \"classic\" works and contemporary stories that are organized chronologically. Of the sixty selected stories making up this anthology, sixteen are new to the eighth edition and nine of the authors are new. Increased attention is given to the social and cultural contexts in which the short fiction of the United States unfolded. The stories represent a wide range of themes and techniques, forms and types, motifs, tones, and issues.

", "wears.toc": "

	The Story of the Captain's Wife, and an Aged Woman	23
	Peter Rugg, The Missing Man	28
	The Legend of Sleepy Hollow	49
	The Horse-Swap	69
	Young Goodman Brown	75
	The Black Cat	85
	The Big Bear of Arkansas	93
	Bartleby, the Scrivener	103
	The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County	129
	The Outcasts of Poker Flat	135
	\"Europe\"	143
	A White Heron	157
	The Passing of Grandison	165
	An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge	192
	The Storm	200
	A New England Nun	205
	The Caballero's Way	215
	The Other Two	224
	The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky	239
	Paul's Case	248
	To Build a Fire	263
	Death in the Woods	275
	A Jury of Her Peers	285
	Silent Snow, Secret Snow	313
	The Grave	326
	The Gilded Six-Bits	331
	A Memorial to the Slain	341
	The Secret Life of Walter Mitty	349
	Blood-Burning Moon	354
	Babylon Revisited	361
	Barn Burning	377
	In Another Country	391
	The Chrysanthemums	396
	Thank You, Ma'm	405
	Big Black Good Man	422
	Petrified Man	433
	A Man in the House	444
	The Swimmer	453
	The Jewbird	462
	Samuel	469
	Children on Their Birthdays	473
	Good Country People	486
	The School	501
	A & P	505
	The Sky Is Gray	511
	Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?	532
	A Girl's Story	545
	What He Was Like	566
	Mazes	570
	Boxes	574
	The Wrath-bearing Tree	584
	Shiloh	591
	Strong Horse Tea	601
	Hunters in the Snow	607
	Fairy Tale	620
	The Things They Carried	627
	Gryphon	640
	Cheers	652
	Fleur	655
	Mericans	665
	In the American Society	667
	Acknowledgments	681
	Index	685

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "88": { "wears.id": 88, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 88, "wears.title": "Great Love Poems", "wears.author": "Shane Weller", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Shane Weller", "wears.title_slug": "great-love-poems", "wears.author_slug": "shane-weller", "wears.isbn13": 9780486272849, "wears.isbn10": 486272842, "wears.price": "$1.99", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Dover Publications", "wears.pubdate": "October 1992", "wears.edition": "Special Value", "wears.subjects": "Poetry, American Literature Anthologies, Anthologies, General & Miscellaneous Poetry, English, Irish, & Scottish Poetry", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 128, "wears.dimensions": "5.12 (w) x 8.34 (h) x 0.32 (d)", "wears.overview": "Treasury of over 150 familiar poems by English and American poets, including a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets, John Donne's \"The Ecstasy,\" William Blake's \"The Garden of Love,\" as well as works by W. B. Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Keats, John Milton, Robert Frost, and many more. Includes 2 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Over 150 familiar works by English and American poets: John Donne's \"The Ecstasy,\" William Blake's \"The Garden of Love,\" as well as poems by Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, many more.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "89": { "wears.id": 89, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 89, "wears.title": "The Harper American Literature, Single Volume Edition", "wears.author": "Donald McQuade", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Donald McQuade, Justin Kaplan, Martha Banta", "wears.title_slug": "the-harper-american-literature-single-volume-edition", "wears.author_slug": "donald-mcquade", "wears.isbn13": 9780321012692, "wears.isbn10": 321012690, "wears.price": "$89.47", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Longman", "wears.pubdate": "December 1998", "wears.edition": "3rd Edition", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 2867, "wears.dimensions": "6.38 (w) x 9.14 (h) x 2.45 (d)", "wears.overview": "A richly diverse gathering of new and familiar voices, on subjects new and old, The Harper Single Volume American Literature takes the reader on a journey through America's literary past and ever-projecting future. Eleven cultural portfolios provide windows into historic moments in our literary past and present; superbly informative and readable period introductions further deepen the reader's understanding of the America from which this literature evolved. Five great plays, an unprecedented wealth of complete works, approximately one hundred carefully chosen black and white images - a collection both deeper and broader than other single volume anthologies. The Harper Single Volume American Literature, Third Edition has it all.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

A richly diverse gathering of new and familiar voices, on subjects new and old, The Harper Single Volume American Literature takes the reader on a journey through America's literary past and ever-projecting future. Eleven cultural portfolios provide windows into historic moments in our literary past and present; superbly informative and readable period introductions further deepen the reader's understanding of the America from which this literature evolved. Five great plays, an unprecedented wealth of complete works, approximately one hundred carefully chosen black and white images - a collection both deeper and broader than other single volume anthologies. The Harper Single Volume American Literature, Third Edition has it all.

", "wears.toc": "

CONTENTS The Literature of the New World. Introduction. The Discoveries of America. Native American Literature<58> First Encounters. How the New World Became America. A Literature of Experience. America and the Pastoral Ideal. Survival and Rebirth. Toward a Pluralistic Culture. Native American Narratives. A Bering Strait Eskimo Creation Account. The Time When There Were No People on the Earth Plain. Seneca Account. The Story Telling Stone. Cultural Portfolio<58> The European Conquest of America. The Saga of the Greenlanders, Anonymous. Michele de Cuneo’s Letter on Columbus’s Second Voyage, Michele de Cuneo. Broken Spears<58> The Aztec Account of Conquest of Mexico, Anonymous. @MAHEADS = The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Díaz. The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, Anonymous. The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Díaz. Letter to the King, Giovanni da Verrazano. The Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado, Pedro de Casteneda. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, Thomas Hariot. The Journal of the First Voyage, October 12, 1492. Michele de Cuneo’s Letter on the Second Voyage, October 28, 1495. Columbus’s Letter to the Sovereigns on the Third Voyage, October 18, 1498. The Narrative of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Letter to Captain John Smith, Powhatan. The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles, Book III, Chapter II <91>Captain Smith’s Captivity<93>, Captain John Smith. From a Description of New England <91>Growing Rich in the New World<93>. The Literature of Colonial America. Introduction. A “Cittyupon a Hill<58>” - New England. The Religious Background. The Voyage; The Landfall. Puritan Beliefs. Puritan Literature. Native Americans. Government Obedience. Women. A “Vale of Plenty” - The South. Southern Intellectual Life. Toward the Revolution<58> the 18th Century. The Enlightenment. Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. Settlers and Skirmishes. Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford. Related Voices. The Life of William Bradford, Esq, Cotton Mather. A Model of Christian Charity, John Winthrop. The Prologue, Anne Bradstreet. The Author to Her Book. Before the Birth of One of Her Children. To My Dear and Loving Husband. In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet. Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House. To My Dear Children. Cultural Portfolio<58> The Witchcraft Trials. Witch Hunting & Witch Trials, C. L’Estrange Ewen. Magnelia Christi Americana, Cotton Mather. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, Samuel Sewall. Anne Hutchinson’s Trial. From The Antinomian Controversy (David D. Hall, ed.). From John Winthrop’s Journal. A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Mary Rowlandson. Related Voices. Hanna Dustan’s Narrative, Cotton Mather. @AHEADS = Cultural Portfolio<58> The Ways of the Native Americans. Book III<58> Of the Indians, Their Religion, Laws, and Customs, in War and Peace, Robert Beverly. A Key Into the Language of America, Roger Williams. History of the Dividing Line, William Byrd. Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson. Preparatory Meditations, Edward Taylor. William Byrd<58> His Secret Diary for the Years 1709-1712, William Byrd. From Personal Narrative, Jonathan Edwards. From Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. The Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin. Poor Richard Improved, 1758. From Information to Those Who Would Remove to America. Native Americans and the Myth of the Noble Savage. From “Of Coaches”, Michel de Montaigne. Of Plymouth Plantation, William Bradford. From Letter to Sir William Ashurst (May 3, 1700), Samuel Sewall. From Letter (1732), General Jeffrey Amherst. From Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. From A Narrative of the Late Massacres in Lancaster County, Benjamin Franklin. From Travels Round the World in the Years 1767-1771, Pierre Marie François de Pages. The Unseen Helpers, Seneca and Cherokee Oral History. Hemp-Carrier. A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian Samson Occom. On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770, Phillis Wheatley. On Being Brought from Africa to America. To S. M. a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works. To His Excellency General Washington. Related Voices. Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787. The Literature of the New Republic, 1776-1836. Introduction. The Literature of Persuasion. Making Thirteen Clocks Tick Together. Cultivating New Meanings. The Quest for Literary Independence. Westward Course of Empire. Printing and the Reading Public. Frontiers of Literature. The Prospects of an American Literature. The Makings of American Literature. European Models and the American Landscape. The Declaration of Independence as Adopted by Congress, Thomas Jefferson. Notes on the State of Virginia. Letter to John Adams<58> <91>March 31, 1776<58> The Passion for Liberty<93>, Abigail Adams. Related Voices. From An Address to the Legislature of New York Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education (1819), Emma Willard. Common Sense, Thomas Paine. The American Crisis. Letters from an American Farmer, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oloudah Equiano, Oloudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa). Cultural Portfolio<58> Slavery, Freedom, and Identity. The Selling of Joseph<58> A Memorial, Samuel Sewall. An Address to the Public; from the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, Benjamin Franklin. Notes on the State of Virginia<58> On the Traits of Blacks, Thomas Jefferson. Black Petitions for Freedom. The American Museum; or, Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, Prose and Poetical (May 1789), Anonymous. From Letter IX<58> Charleston Slave, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. No. 10 <91>James Madison<93> The Federalist. On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country, Philip Freneau. The Wild Honey Suckle. The Indian Burying Ground. On Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man. Native Americans and “Westward the Course of Empire”. “1786”, Thomas Jefferson. July 13, 1787, Northwest Ordinance. “Message to Congress (December 6, 1830)”, President Andrew Jackson. “Indian Wars of the West (1833), Timothy Flint. From Letter to President Martin Van Buren on the removal of the Cherokee Indians (April 23, 1838), Ralph Waldo Emerson. From Review of Francis Parkman’s The California and Oregon Trail 1849), Herman Melville. A Son of the Forest, William Apess. The Sketch Book, Washington Irving. Rip Van Winkle. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Cultural Portfolio<58> Asserting a National Language and Literature. Dissertations on the English Language (1789), Noah Webster. Fable from American Spelling Book. Letters from an American Farmer, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur. From American Language and Literature (1815), Walter Channing. Salmagundi, Second Series. Saturday, August 19, 1820, James Kirke Paulding. Preface to The Leather-stocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper. The Deerslayer. The Pioneers. The Prairie. Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, Sarah and Angelina Grimkè. Related Voices. Sojourner Truth <91>As Reported in The Anti-Slavery Bugle<93>. Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant. To a Waterfowl. The Prairies. The Literature of the American Renaissance, 1836-1865. @AHEADS = Introduction. “Who Reads American Books?” A Revolution in Consciousness. “Incomparable Materials.” An Improving Spirit. “Self-made or Never Made.” Gold Rush. Railroad Iron. Impending Crisis. “Swallow Barn”, John Pendleton Kennedy. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Related Voices. “The Supremacy of Mind over Matter”, George Ripley. Nature. The American Scholar. Related Voices. Air Intllectual declaration of Independence Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell. An Address. Self-Reliance. The Poet. Experience. Concord Hymn. The Rhodora. Each and All. Hamatreya. Days. Cultural Portfolio<58> Nature’s Nation. From Essay on American Scenery, Thomas Cole. From Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson. From Circles. From The Knickerbocker, James Brooks. The Maine Woods, Henry David Thoreau. From The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper. Walden, Henry David Thoreau. Resistance to Civil Government. American Literature, Margaret Fuller. Ligeia, Edgar Allan Poe. The Fall of the House of Usher. The Purloined Letter. The Cask of Amontillado. The Philosophy of Composition. Sonnet - To Science. To Helen. The Raven. Ulalume - A Ballad. Annabel Lee. The Bells. My Kinsman, Major Molineux, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Young Goodman Brown. Wakefield. The Maypole of Merry Mount. The Minister’s Black Veil. Rappacini’s Daughter. Bartleby, The Scrivener<58> A Tale of Wall Street, Herman Melville. The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. Billy Budd, Sailor. Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War. Timoleon, Etc. Massachusetts to Virginia, John Greenleaf Whittier. Ichabod. Skipper Ireson’s Ride. Telling the Bees. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Headnote, Harriet Ann Jacobs. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The Big Bear of Arkansas, Thomas Bangs Thorpe. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, Frederick Douglass. A Diary from Dixie, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut. Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln. Second Inaugural Address. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. Rebecca Harding Davis. Life in the Iron Mills. Related Voices. From Iron Interests of Wheeling, A. W. Campbell. From The Gospel of Wealth, Andrew Carnegie. From Testimony Before the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Education, 1883, John Roach. From Lectures to Young Men, Henry Ward Beecher. Leaves of Grass <91>1891-1892<93>Preface to the 1855 Edition, Walt Whitman. Inscriptions. One’s Self I Sing. I Hear America Singing. Song of Myself. Children of Adam. I Sing the Body Electric. Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City. Facing West from California’s Shores. As Adam Early in the Morning. Calamus. I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing. Here the Frailest Leaves of Me. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry. Sea Drift. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking. As I Ebbed With the Ocean of Life. By the Roadside. When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. Drum-Taps. Cavalry Crossing a Ford. A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest, and the Road Unknown. A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim. The Wound-Dresser. Reconciliation. Memories of President Lincoln. When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Autumn Rivulets. There Was a Child Went Forth. Passage to India. The Sleepers. Whispers of Heavenly Death. A Noiseless Patient Spider. 67<58> <91>Success is counted sweetest<93>, Emily Dickinson. 185<58> <91>“Faith” is a Fine Invention<93>. 214<58> <91>I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed-<93>. 216<58> <91>Safe in the Alabaster Chambers-<93>. 241<58> <91>I Like a Look of Agony<93>. 258<58> <91>There’s a Certain Slant of Light<93>. 280<58> <91>I felt a Funeral, in My Brain<93>. 303<58> <91>The Soul Selects her own Society-<93>. 324<58> <91>Some Keep the Sabbath Going to Church-<93>. 338<58> <91>I Know that He Exists<93>. 341<58> <91>After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes-<93>. 401<58> <91>What Soft-Cherubic Creatures-<93>. 435<58> <91>Much Madness is Divinest Sense-<93>. 441<58> <91>This is My Letter to the World<93>. 448<58> <91>This was a Poet - It is That<93>. 449<58> <91>I Died for Beauty - But was Scarce<93>. 465<58> <91>I Heard a Fly Buzz - When I Died-<93>. 501<58> <91>This World is not Conclusion<93>. 536<58> <91>The Hearts asks Pleasure - First-<93>. 585<58> <91>I Like to See it Lap the Miles-<93>. 632<58> <91>The Brain - is Wider Than the Sky-<93>. 640<58> <91>I Cannot Live with You-<93>. 650<58> <91>Pain - Has an Element of Blank-<93>. 657<58> <91>I Dwell in Possibility-<93>. 709<58> <91>Publication - is the Auction<93>. 712<58> <91>Because I Could Not Stop for Death-<93>. 721<58> <91>Behind Me - Dips Eternity-<93>. 754<58> <91>My Life had Stood - A Loaded Gun-<93>. 764<58> <91>Presentiment - is That Long Shadow - on the Lawn<93>. 986<58> <91>A Narrow Fellow in the Grass<93>. 1052<58> <91>I Never Saw a Moor-<93>. 1071<58> <91>Perception of an Object Costs<93>. 1078<58> <91>The Bustle in a House<93>. 1125<58> <91>Oh Sumptuous Moment<93>. 1129<58> <91>Tell All the Truth But Tell it Slant-<93>. 1463<58> <91>A Route of Evanescence<93>. 1540<58> <91>As Imperceptibly as Grief<93>. 1545<58> <91>The Bible is an Antique Volume-<93>. 1624<58> <91>Apparently with No Surprise<93>. 1651<58> <91>A Word made Flesh is Seldom<93>. 1670<58> <91>In Winter in My Room<93>. 1732<58> <91>My Life Closed Twice Before its Close-<93>. 1755<58> <91>To Make a Prairie it Takes a Clover and One Bee<93>. 1760<58> <91>Elysium is as Far as To<93>. Excerpts from the Letters of Emily Dickinson. The Literature of an Expanding Nation, 1865-1912. Introduction. The Paradox of Peace. Opportunism and Corruption. Exposure and Reform. The Old Order Gives Way. The Writer’s Profession. Getting at “The Real.” Writing About Lives on the Margin. The Writer’s Challenge. What is an “American”? Emerging Feminine Identities. New Words, New Definitions. A Nation Connected. A New Reading Public. Thinking Hard and Writing Well. Cultural Portfolio<58> The New Immigrants. The New Colossus, Emma Lazarus. The American Scene, Henry James. The Rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan. Angel Island, Anonymous. The Biography of a Chinaman, Lee Chew. From Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska. Native American Assimilation and a Reemerging Tradition. From The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), Francis Parkman. From Message to Congress (1867), President Andrew Johnson. From United States v. Lucero (1869) U.S. Supreme Court. From letter to the city officials at Santa Fe, New Mexico (1883), Walt Whitman. From the North American Review (April 1902), Hamlin Garland. From The Bear (1942), William Faulkner. Seattle (1786-1866) Our People are Ebbing Away Like a Rapidly Receding Tide. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1844-1891) Life Among the Piutes. The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Mark Twain. Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses. Corn-Pone Opinions. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. From The American Short Story, William Dean Howells. Editha. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams. The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900). From The Art of Fiction, Henry James. From Preface to The American. From Hawthorne. Daisy Miller. The Diary of Alice James, Alice James. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce. Cultural Portfolio<58> Oral Traditions and Turn-of-the-Century Literature. The Journal of American Folklore, Franz Boas, et al. Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories, Harriet Beecher Stowe. My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s, Marietta Holley (Josiah Allen’s Wife). Eastern European Jewish Oral Tradition. Yiddish Proverbs, Translated by Isadore Goldstick. How to Tell a Story, Mark Twain. The Virginian, Owen Wister. From Sut Lovingood<58> Yarns Spun by a Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool, George Washington Harris. The Rabbit and the Tar Wolf, Cherokee Oral Tradition. Uncle Remus<58> His Songs and His Sayings, Joel Chandler Harris. Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston. Steal Away to Jesus, African American Spirituals. Go Down, Moses. The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Dubois. Ballads and World Songs, John Henry. Cotton Mill Colic. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell. A White Heron, Sarah Orne Jewett. The Awakening, Kate Chopin. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Related Voices. The Great Modern American Stories, William Dean Howells. The Other Two, Edith Wharton. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington. The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. Dubois. Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar. We Wear the Mask. Sympathy. Richard Cory, Edward Arlington Robinson. Miniver Cheevy. Eros Turannos. Mr. Flood’s Party. The Open Boat, Stephen Crane. The Black Riders and Other Lines. He Got a Ride, Theodore Dreiser. To Build a Fire, Jack London. Impressions of an Indian Childhood, Zitkala S´a (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin). School Days. The Literature of a New Century, 1912-1945. Introduction. New World<58> New Writers. The Great War. The Age of Business and Frolic. Racism and Sexism. An Alienated Generation. The Making of American Modernists. From the Crash to the New Deal. Social Criticism and Marxism. The Second World War. The Dawn of Postmodernism. Neighbor Rosicky, Willa Cather. The Mending Wall, Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken. The Oven Bird. After Apple-Picking. Birches. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Once by the Pacific. Desert Places. Design. The Most of It. Directive. Trifles, Susan Keating Glaspell. The Egg, Sherwood Anderson. Chicago, Carl Sandburg. Fog. Cool Tombs. Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Anecdote of the Jar. The Emperor of Ice-Cream. The Idea of Order at Key West. The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain. America and I, Anzia Yezierska. Queen Anne’s Lace, William Carlos Williams. Spring and All. The Red Wheelbarrow. This is Just to Say. The Yachts. The River-Merchant’s Wife<58> A Letter, Ezra Pound. A Pact. In a Station in the Metro. From Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (Life and Contacts). From The Cantos. Sea Rose, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle). Oread. Helen. Boats in a Fog, Robinson Jeffers. Hurt Hawks. Poetry, Marianne Moore. The Fish. A Grave. The Monkeys. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T. S. Eliot. Gerontion. The Waste Land. The Hollow Men. From Tradition and the Individual Talent. The Emperor Jones, Eugene O’Neill. The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Katherine Anne Porter. The Gilded Six-Bits, Zora Neale Hurston. Spunk. <91>Euclid Alone has Looked on Beauty Bare<93>, Edna St. Vincent Millay. <91>Love is Not All; It is Not Meat nor Drink<93>. Cane, Jean Toomer. Cultural Portfolio<58> The Harlem Renaissance. From The New Negro<58> An Interpretation, Alain Locke. God’s Trombones, James Weldon Johnson. From The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain, Langston Hughes. The Heart of a Woman, Georgia Douglas Johnson. Smothered Fires. Motherhood. Sweat, Zora Neale Hurston. Ma Rainey, Sterling A. Brown. Slim in Hell. Remembering Nat Turner. Yet Do I Marvel, Countee Cullen. Incident. Heritage. Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem, Helene Johnson. What Do I Care for Morning. Remember Not. The Big Sea, Langston Hughes. <91>in Just-<93>, E. E. Cummings. <91>the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls<93>. <91>next to god of course america i<93>. <91>my sweet old etcetera<93>. <91>i sing of Olaf glad and big<93>. <91>anyone lived in a pretty how town<93>. <91>what a proud dreamhorse<93>. Winter Dreams, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Spotted Horses, William Faulkner. That Evening Sun. Barn Burning. Cultural Portfolio<58> The Southern Renaissance. From The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe. From The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner. Two Writers’ Beginnings. From Black Boy<58> A Record of Childhood and Youth, Richard Wright. From American Hunger. From A Sweet Devouring, Eudora Welty. Three Poets. Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter, John Crowe Ransom. Piazza Piece. The Equilibrists. Ode to the Confederate Dead, Allen Tate. Bearded Oaks, Robert Penn Warren. Two Collaborations. From You Have Seen Their Faces, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White. From Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee and Walker Evans. Black Tambourine, Hart Crane. Chaplinesque. At Melville’s Tomb. Voyages I, II, III. The Bridge (selection). Soldier’s Home, Ernest Hemingway. The Negro Speaks of Rivers, Langston Hughes. The Weary Blues. I, Too. Dream Boogie. Theme for English B. Long Black Song, Richard Wright. Why I Live at the P.O. , Eudora Welty. The Literature Since Midcentury, 1945- the Present. Introduction. Contemporary Literature. The First Post war Generation. The Second Post war Generation and Vietnam. Cuttings, Theodore Roethke. Cuttings (later). My Papa’s Waltz. The Lost Son. Elegy for Jane. The Waking. The Fish, Elizabeth Bishop. At the Fishhouses. Questions of Travel. Sestina. In the Waiting Room. One Art. The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams. Homage to the Empress of the Blues, Robert Hayden. Those Winter Sundays. A Letter from Phillis Wheatley. Related Voices. A Letter to Obour Tanner, Phillis Wheatley. I Stand Here Ironing, Tillie Olsen. The Battle Royal, Ralph Ellison. The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, Randall Jarrell. The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Memories of West Street and Lepke, Robert Lowell. Skunk Hour. For the Union Dead. History. For John Berryman. Epilogue. From A Street in Bronzeville, Gwendolyn Brooks. Negro Hero. A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi.@AHEADS = Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon. The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmet Till. The Blackstone Rangers. Young Afrikans@MAHEADS = Love Calls Us to the Things of This World, Richard Wilbur. Playboy. The Writer. Cottage Street, 1953. Pleasures, Denise Levertov. The Ache of Marriage. O Taste and See. Where Is the Angel? From The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer. Sonny’s Blues, James Baldwin. Letter to My Nephew on the One-Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation. A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor. From Howl, Allen Ginsburg. A Supermarket in California. America. The Painter, John Ashbery. These Lacustrine Cities. Soonest Mended. Syringa. Landscapeople. Lament for My Brother on a Hayrake, James Wright. A Note Left in Jimmy Leonard’s Shack. At the Executed Murderer’s Grave. Autumn Begins in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio. Lightning Bugs Asleep in the Afternoon. Coming Home, Philip Levine. They Feed the Lion. You Can have It. Her Kind, Anne Sexton. The Truth the Dead Know. Self in 1958. For My Lover, Returning to His Wife. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. Living in Sin, Adrienne Rich. The Knight. Necessities of Life. “I Am in Danger - Sir -.” Trying to Talk with a Man. Diving into the Wreck. Translations. The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message. Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison. Separating, John Updike. Black Rook in Rainy Weather, Sylvia Plath. Daddy. Medusa. Ariel. Lady Lazarus. Death <38> Co. Fever 1030. The Conversion of the Jews, Philip Roth. Black Mother Woman, Audre Lorde. Equinox. Walking Our Boundaries. Afterimages. House Made of Dawn, N. Scott Momaday. From The Priest of the Sun. Ghosts, Mary Oliver. Owls. The Sun. When Death Comes. Thorow, Susan Howe. Dear John, Dear Coltrane, Michael S. Harper. American History. Nightmare Begins Responsibility. Peace on Earth. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Joyce Carol Oates. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver. Shiloh, Bobbie Ann Mason. The Woman Warrior; No Name Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston. Everyday Use, Alice Walker. The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien. Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko. Lullaby. The Geese, Jorie Graham. Over and Over Stitch. Mind. My Garden, My Daylight. Banneker, Rita Dove. Parsley. Roast Possum. Dusting. Mississippi. In a Neutral City. The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas, Reginald McKnight. Lost on September Trail, 1967, Alberto Rios. Mi Abuelo. Nani. The Good Lunch of Oceans. Barbie-Q, Sandra Cisneros. Lulu’s Boys, Louise Erdrich. Lost Sister, Cathy Song. Youngest Daughter. The White Porch. Beauty and Sadness. Mona in the Promised Land, Gish Jen. Angels in America<58> Millennium Approaches, Tony Kushner. Eating Together, Li-Young Lee. Persimmons. The City in Which I Love You. Cultural Portfolio<58> Who Is an American Writer? Terra Incognita, Vladimir Nabokov. Escape from Civilization, Isaac Bashevis Singer. To Robinson Jeffers, Czeslaw Milosz. To the Western World, Louis (Aston Marantz) Simpson. American Poetry. A Far Cry From Africa, Derek Walcott. Preparing for Exile. Old New England. Sarita, Maria Irene Fornes. Happiness, Bharati Mukherjee. Letters from the Ming Dynasty, Joseph Brodsky. May 24, 1980, Girl, Jamaica Kincaid. Letters from the Ming Dynasty, Joseph Brodsky. May 24, 1980, Girl, Jamaica Kincaid.", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "90": { "wears.id": 90, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 90, "wears.title": "The Latino Reader: An American Literary Tradition from 1542 to the Present", "wears.author": "Margarite Fernandez Olmos", "wears.author_bio": "

HAROLD AUGENBRAUM is the executive director of the National BookFoundation. He lives in the Bronx, New York.

", "wears.authors": "Margarite Fernandez Olmos (Editor), Harold Augenbraum", "wears.title_slug": "the-latino-reader", "wears.author_slug": "margarite-fernandez-olmos", "wears.isbn13": 9780395765289, "wears.isbn10": 395765285, "wears.price": "$13.98", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "March 1997", "wears.edition": "None", "wears.subjects": "Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, Hispanic & Latin American Literature Anthologies, Literature Anthologies - General & Miscellaneous", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 528, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.25 (h) x 0.50 (d)", "wears.overview": "

The Latino Reader is the first anthology to present the full history of this important American literary tradition, from the mid-sixteenth century to the present day. Selections include works of history, memoirs, letters, and essays, as well as fiction, poetry, and drama. Adding to the importance of the volume are several selections from rare and little-known texts that have been translated into English for the first time.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Library Journal

The compilers, scholars who have studied and written about the Latino population in the United States, have put together an anthology of literary works dealing with the panorama of Latino writings in the United States. The selections range widely, from Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 description of the South to recent excerpts from Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Mexican American authors. The collection is primarily literary though it does include some historical, autobiographical, and essay excerpts. It offers what would be expected in this type of anthology, with an occasional surprise, such as an excerpt from John Rechy's novel City of Night. Readers will be primarily college and university students, but this will also be of value to smaller public libraries with limited Latino collections. [Editor Augenbraum is a longtime LJ reviewer.-Ed.]-Mark L. Grover, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, Utah

", "wears.toc": "

Introduction: An American Literary Tradition

Editor's Note

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca

The Account [1542/1555]

Inca, Garcilaso de la Vega

Florida [1605]

Gaspar Perez de Villagra

The History of New Mexico [1610]

Fray Mathias Saenz de San Antonio

Lord, If the Shepherd Does Not Hear [1724]

Unknown Author

The Comanches [ca. 1780]

Francisco Palou

The Historic Account of the Life and Apostolic Work of the Venerable Fray Junipero Serra [1787]

Jose Maria Heredia

Niagara [1824]

Eulalia Perez

An Old Woman Remembers [1877]

Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton

The Squatter and the Don [1885]

Jose Marti

A Vindication of Cuba [1889]

Simple Verses [1891]

105

Pachin Marin

108

New York from Within [1892]

108

In the Album of an Unknown Woman [1892]

112

Improvisation [1892]

113

Eusebio Chacon

114

The Son of the Storm [1892]

114

Unknown Author

132

The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez [ca. 1901]

133

Leonor Villegas de Magnon

141

The Rebel [ca. 1920]

142

William Carlos Williams

155

To Elsie [1923]

156

All the Fancy Things [1927]

158

Arthur A. Schomburg

159

Jose Campeche 1752-1809 [1934]

160

Bernardo Vega

165

Memoirs of Bernardo Vega [ca. 1944]

166

Josephina Niggli

173

Mexican Village [1945]

174

Mario Suarez

201

Cuco Goes to a Party [1947]

202

Julia de Burgos

208

Returning [1947]

209

Farewell in Welfare Island [1953]

210

Cleofas Jaramillo

211

Romance of a Little Village Girl [1955]

212

Pedro Juan Soto

220

God in Harlem [1956]

221

Jose Antonio Villarreal

236

Pocho [1959]

237

Americo Paredes

248

The Hammon and the Beans [1963]

248

John Rechy

253

City of Night [1963]

254

Rodolfo \"Corky\" Gonzales

265

I Am Joaquin [1967]

266

Piri Thomas

279

Down These Mean Streets [1967]

280

Victor Hernandez Cruz

285

Today Is a Day of Great Joy [1969]

286

African Things [1973]

287

Alurista

287

el maguey en su desierto [1971]

288

must be the season of the witch [1971]

289

to be fathers once again [1971]

289

Tomas Rivera

290

...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him [1971]

291

Rudolfo Anaya

295

Bless Me, Ultima [1972]

296

Oscar \"Zeta\" Acosta

307

The Revolt of the Cockroach People [1973]

308

Nicholasa Mohr

317

Nilda [1973]

318

Pedro Pietri

328

Puerto Rican Obituary [1973]

329

Miguel Pinero

337

Short Eyes [1974]

338

A Lower East Side Poem [1980]

349

Dolores Prida

351

Beautiful Senoritas [1977]

352

Luis Valdez

364

Zoot Suit [1978]

365

Tato Laviera

378

My Graduation Speech [1979]

379

AmeRican [1985]

380

Sandra Maria Esteves

382

From the Commonwealth [1979]

383

A la Mujer Borrinquena [1980]

384

Lourdes Casal

385

For Ana Veldford [1981]

385

Lorna Dee Cervantes

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

From the Publisher

\"Anthologies of Latino literature abound, and rightly so, but most focus on contemporary authors. Augenbraum and Olmos dig deeper, tracing the roots of this vibrant literary tradition all the way back to the mid-sixteenth century. They have selected strikingly effective works of history, memoirs, letters, essays, poetry, drama, and fiction, including texts translated into English for the first time, creating a broad range of voices and perspectives. The volume begins with Alva Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Account, a chronicle of a disastrous 1527 expedition in the Southwest that is emblematic of all encounters between Spanish conquistadores and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. This powerful piece serves as the anthology's overture, and establishes Latino literature's key cultural and political themes. Other compelling and enlightening offerings include works by William Carlos Williams, a poet whose Puerto Rican heritage has rarely been considered integral to his poetic innovations; novelist John Rechy; Cleofas Jaramillo, a descendent of hispano pioneers; and a host of remarkable Latino writers prominent in decades past but overlooked in recent compilations.\" Booklist, ALA\n\n

\n\n

Library Journal

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "91": { "wears.id": 91, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 91, "wears.title": "Black Nature", "wears.author": "Camille T. Dungy", "wears.author_bio": "

Camille T. Dungy is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. She is the author of two poetry collections, What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison and Suck on the Marrow, and has helped edit two other poetry anthologies.

", "wears.authors": "Camille T. Dungy", "wears.title_slug": "black-nature", "wears.author_slug": "camille-t-dungy", "wears.isbn13": 9780820334318, "wears.isbn10": 820334316, "wears.price": "$14.87", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "University of Georgia Press", "wears.pubdate": "December 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, Poetry - General & Miscellaneous, American Poetry, African American Literature - Literary Criticism, American Literature Anthologies, U.S. & Canadian Poetry - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 432, "wears.dimensions": "6.00 (w) x 8.90 (h) x 1.10 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.

Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry—anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.

Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.

Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

A Friends Fund Publication.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Library Journal

No pleasures are more aesthetic than poetry and nature, so it is only natural that the two should unite. Editor Dungy here merges the worlds in a satisfying compilation that features over 100 poems by 93 African American poets, including celebrated writers June Jordan and Yusef Komunyakaa as well as newer artists like Remica L. Bingham and Indigo Moor. The collection, which is assembled in cycles that beg \"Nature, Be with Us,\" recognizes \"Pest, People Too,\" and recalls \"What the Land Remembers,\" explores a multitude of themes that incorporate the beauty, transformation, and unpredictability of Earth's elements. Though the collection moves away from political and protest poetry, readers will likely appreciate \"Disasters, Natural and Other,\" as the section draws from familiar incidents. James A. Emanuel's \"Emmett Till\" paints a haunting yet wondrous fantasy of his spirit, while Douglas Kearney's historical \"Floodsong 2: Water Moccasin's Spiritual\" has contemporary relevance following Hurricane Katrina. VERDICT Expanding the realm of traditional nature poetry and African American writings, this work will appeal to readers of both genres.—Ashanti White, Univ. of North Carolina at Greensboro\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "92": { "wears.id": 92, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 92, "wears.title": "Anthology of American Literature Volume II", "wears.author": "George McMichael", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "George McMichael, James Leonard, James S. Leonard", "wears.title_slug": "anthology-of-american-literature-volume-ii", "wears.author_slug": "george-mcmichael", "wears.isbn13": 9780132216470, "wears.isbn10": 132216477, "wears.price": "$92.20", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Prentice Hall", "wears.pubdate": "January 2007", "wears.edition": "9th Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Collections", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

This leading, two-volume anthology represents America's literary heritage from the colonial times of William Bradford and Anne Bradstreet to the contemporary era of Saul Bellow and Alice Walker. This anthology is best known for its solid headnotes and introductions as well as a balance approach to selections.

", "wears.toc": "

Preface

About the Editors

The Literature of the Late Nineteenth Century

[NEW] Reading the Historical Context

[NEW] MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

FROM Life on the Mississippi

[Sir Walter Scott and the Southern Character]

[NEW] ALBION TOURGÉE (1838-1905)

FROM The Invisible Empire

[NEW] Reading the Critical Context

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920)

FROM Criticism and Fiction

[The Ideal Grasshopper]

[American Fiction]

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

The Art of Fiction

[NEW] MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences

The Literature of the Late Nineteenth Century

WALT WHITMAN (1819—1892)

Preface to the 1855 Edition of Leaves of Grass

Song of Myself

FROM Inscriptions

To You

One’s-Self I Sing

When I read the book

I Hear America Singing

Poets to Come

FROM Children of Adam

From pent-up aching rivers

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd

As Adam, Early in the Morning

Once I pass’d through a populous city

Facing west from California’s shores

FROM Calamus

In paths untrodden

Scented herbage of my breast

What Think You I take My Pen In Hand?

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing

I hear it was charged against me

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

FROM Sea-Drift

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking

As I ebb’d with the ocean of life

FROM By the Roadside

When I heard the learn’d astronomer

The Dalliance of the Eagles

FROM Drum-Taps

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

Bivouac on a Mountain Side

Vigil strange I kept on the field one night

A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown

A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim

The Wound-Dresser

FROM Memories of President Lincoln

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d

FROM Autumn Rivulets

There was a child went forth

Sparkles from the Wheel

Who Learns My Lesson Complete?

Passage to India

The Sleepers

From Whispers of Heavenly Death

A noiseless patient spider

FROM Noon to Starry Night

To a Locomotive in Winter

FROM Democratic Vistas

EMILY DICKINSON (1830—1886)

49 I never lost as much but twice

67 Success is counted sweetest

125 For each ecstatic instant

130 These are the days when Birds come back

165 A Wounded Deer – leaps highest

185 “Faith” is a fine invention

210 The thought beneath so slight a film

214 I taste a liquor never brewed

216 Safe in their Alabaster Chambers

241 I like a look of Agony

249 Wild Nights–Wild Nights!

258 There’s a certain Slant of light

280 I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

287 A Clock stopped

303 The Soul selects her own Society

324 Some keep the Sabbath going to Church

328 A Bird came down the Walk

338 I know that He exists

341 After great pain, a formal feeling comes

401 What Soft–Cherubic Creatures

414 ’Twas like a Maelstrom, with a notch

435 Much Madness is divinest Sense

441 This is my letter to the World

448 This was a Poet–It is That

449 I died for Beauty–but was scarce

465 I heard a Fly buzz–when I died

510 It was not Death, for I stood up

520 I started Early–Took my Dog

585 I like to see it lap the Miles

613 They shut me up in Prose

632 The Brain–is wider than the sky

640 I cannot live with You

650 Pain–has an Element of Blank

657 I dwell in Possibility

670 One need not be a Chamber–to be Haunted

709 Publication–is the Auction

712 Because I could not stop for Death

732 She rose to His Requirement–dropt

745 Renunciation–is a piercing Virtue

754 My life had stood–a Loaded Gun

764 Presentiment–is that long Shadow–on the Lawn

976 Death is a Dialogue between

986 A narrow Fellow in the Grass

1052 I never saw a Moor

1078 The Bustle in a House

1129 Tell all the truth but tell it slant

1207 He preached upon “Breadth” till it argued him narrow

1463 A Route of Evanescence

1545 The Bible is an antique Volume

1624 Apparently with no surprise

1670 In Winter in my Room

1732 My life closed twice before its close

1755 To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

1760 Elysium is as far as to

Letters to T. W. Higginson

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

[NEW] Story of the Bad Little Boy

[NEW] Disgraceful Persecution of a Boy

[NEW] FROM Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again

[NEW] Sociable Jimmy

[NEW] A True Story

FROM Old Times on the Mississippi

[A Boy Wants to Be a Pilot]

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

[NEW] My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It

[NEW] To the Person Sitting in Darkness

[NEW] The War Prayer

MARY E. WILKINS FREEMAN (1852-1930)

A New England Nun

[NEW] A Mistaken Charity

SARAH ORNE JEWETT (1849-1909)

A White Heron

[NEW] The Town Poor

BRET HARTE (1836-1902)

Tennessee’s Partner

GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844-1925)

Belles Demoiselles Plantation

CHARLES WADDELL CHESNUTT (1858-1932)

The Goophered Grapevine

[NEW] The Wife of His Youth

[NEW] A Metropolitan Experience

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS (1848-1908)

How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox 287

Free Joe and the Rest of the World

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS (1837-1920)

Editha

HENRY JAMES (1843-1916)

Daisy Miller: A Study

The Real Thing

The Beast in the Jungle

AMBROSE BIERCE (1842-1914)

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

[NEW] Chickamauga

CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935)

The Yellow Wall-Paper

[NEW] If I Were a Man

[NEW] The Unnatural Mother

KATE CHOPIN (1851-1904)

The Awakening

[NEW] The Storm

STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900)

Black riders came from the sea

In the desert

A god in wrath

I saw a man pursuing the horizon

Supposing that I should have the courage

On the horizon the peaks assembled

A man feared that he might find an assassin

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind

A man said to the universe

A man adrift on a slim spar

[NEW] The Blue Hotel

The Open Boat

FRANK NORRIS (1870-1902)

A Deal in Wheat

JACK LONDON (1876-1916)

The Law of Life

[NEW] To Build a Fire

[NEW] ANNA JULIA COOPER

Has America a Race Problem...?

FROM A Voice from the South

ABRAHAM CAHAN

The Imported Bridegroom

EDITH WHARTON (1862-1937)

The Other Two

[NEW] PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1871-1906)

The Ingrate

We Wear the Mask

An Ante-Bellum Sermon

When Malindy Sings

The Colored Soldiers

When Dey ‘Listed Colored Soldiers

Sympathy

The Race Question Discussed

The Fourth of July and Race Outrages

THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945)

Free

[NEW] FROM Sister Carrie

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1900 To 1945)

[NEW] Reading the Historical Context

HENRY ADAMS (1838-1918)

FROM The Education of Henry Adams

The Dynamo and the Virgin

[NEW] Reading the Critical Context

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)

Tradition and the Individual Talent

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1900 To 1945)

[NEW] O. HENRY (WILLIAM SYDNEY PORTER) (1862-1910)

A Municipal Report

[NEW] OWEN WISTER (1860-1938)

FROM The Virginian

[NEW] JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871-1938)

Lift Every Voice and Sing

FROM Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868-1963)

FROM The Souls of Black Folk

The Forethought

Of the Black Belt

Of the Passing of the First Born

The After-Thought

FROM The Crisis

[NEW] A Mild Suggestion

[NEW] On Being Crazy

[NEW] A Litany in Atlanta

[NEW] The Comet

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON (1869-1935)

Luke Havergal

Zola

Richard Cory

Cliff Klingenhagen

Miniver Cheevy

How Annandale Went Out

Eros Turannos

Mr. Flood’s Party

ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)

Mending Wall

Home Burial

After Apple-Picking

The Road Not Taken

An Old Man’s Winter Night

Birches

The Oven Bird

For Once, Then, Something

Fire and Ice

Design

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Acquainted with the Night

West-Running Brook

Desert Places

Neither out Far Nor in Deep

Directive

In Winter in the Woods Alone

[NEW] GERTRUDE SIMMONS BONNIN (ZITKALA SA) (1876-1938)

The School Days of an Indian Girl

[NEW] CARL SANDBURG (1878-1967)

Chicago

Lost

Graceland

Fog

Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight

Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind

WILLA CATHER (1873-1947)

A Wagner Matinée

[NEW] Paul’s Case

ELLEN GLASGOW (1873-1945)

The Difference

GERTRUDE STEIN (1874-1946)

FROM Three Lives

The Gentle Lena

Susie Asado

Picasso

A Movie

[NEW] SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941)

FROM Winesburg, Ohio

The Book of the Grotesque

Hands

Mother

Tandy

JOHN DOS PASSOS (1896-1970)

FROM U.S.A.

Preface

FROM The 42^nd Parallel

Proteus

FROM 1919

Newsreel XLIII

The Body of an American

FROM The Big Money

Newsreel LXVI

The Camera Eye (50)

Vag

EUGENE O’NEILL (1888-1953)

The Hairy Ape

SUSAN GLASPELL (1876-1948)

Trifles

[NEW] SINCLAIR LEWIS (1885-1951)

FROM Babbitt

EZRA POUND (1885-1972)

Portrait d'une Femme

Salutation

A Pact

In a Station of the Metro

The River-Merchants Wife: A Letter

FROM Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

I [E.P. Ode pour l’Election de son Sepulchre]

II [The age demanded an image]

III [The tea-rose tea-gown, etc.]

IV [These fought in any case]

V [There died a myriad]

FROM The Cantos

I [And then went down to the ship]

II [Hang it all, Robert Browning]

XLV [With Usura]

LXXXI [What thou lovest well remains]

A Retrospect

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Preludes

Gerontion

The Waste Land

Notes on The Waste Land

Journey of the Magi

E. E. CUMMINGS (1894-1962)

[in Just-]

[O sweet spontaneous]

[Buffalo Bills defunct]

[the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls]

[“next to of course god america I”]

[my sweet old etcetera]

[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]

[r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r]

[anyone lived in a pretty how town]

[pity this busy monster,manunkind]

[when serpents bargain for the right to squirm]

[1(a]

HART CRANE (1899-1932)

Chaplinesque

At Melville’s Tomb

Voyages

FROM The Bridge

To Brooklyn Bridge

Powhatan’s Daughter

The Harbor Dawn

Van Winkle

The River

The Tunnel

Atlantis

[NEW] EDGAR LEE MASTERS (1868-1950)

FROM Spoon River Anthology

Knowlt Hoheimer

Nellie Clark

Petit, the Poet

Anne Rutledge

Lucinda Matlock

[NEW] ANZIA YEZIERSKA (1880-1970)

The Fat of the Land

[NEW] EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892-1950)

Spring

First Fig

[I shall forget you presently, my dear]

[Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare]

WALLACE STEVENS (1879-1955)

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

Sunday Morning

Domination of Black

The Death of a Soldier

Anecdote of the Jar

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

The Idea of Order at Key West

Of Modern Poetry

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

The Plain Sense of Things

Of Mere Being

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883-1963)

Con Brio

The Young Housewife

Pastoral

Tract

Danse Russe

Queen-Anne’s-Lace

Spring and All

To Elsie

The Red Wheelbarrow

At the Ball Game

Between Walls

This Is Just to Say

The Yachts

These

Seafarer

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887-1962)

Boats in a Fog

Hurt Hawks

Shine, Perishing Republic

MARIANNE MOORE (1887-1972)

To a Steam Roller

The Fish

Poetry

No Swan So Fine

The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing

In Distrust of Merits

[NEW] THE NEW NEGRO (1925)

Foreword, by Alain Locke

Vestiges, by Rudolph Fisher

Fog, by John Matheus

Fern, by Jean Toomer

Spunk, by Zora Neale Hurston

Harlem Wine, by Countee Cullen

White Houses, by Claude McKay

I Too, by Langston Hughes

The Black Finger, by Angelina Grimke

The Road, by Helene Johnson

COUNTE CULLEN (1903-1946)

Yet Do I Marvel

For a Lady I Know

Incident

From the Dark Tower

A Brown Girl Dead

Heritage

Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song

JEAN TOOMER (1894-1967)

FROM Cane

Blood-Burning Moon

Cotton Song

Carma

Song of the Son

ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1891-1960)

[NEW] How It Feels to be Colored Me

The Gilded Six-Bits

THOMAS WOLFE (1900-1938)

Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

The Far and the Near

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

[NEW] Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Winter Dreams

ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)

Big Two-Hearted River

WILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-1962)

That Evening Sun

[NEW] Intruder in the Dust

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902-1967)

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

The Weary Blues

Young Gal’s Blues

Note on Commercial Theatre

Dream Boogie

Harlem

Theme for English B

On the Road

JOHN STEINBECK (1902-1968)

[NEW] FROM The Long Valley

The Snake

The Vigilante

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER (1890-1980)

Flowering Judas

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1945 to Present)

[NEW] Reading the Historical Context

[NEW] MARTIN LUTHER KING (1929-1968)

I Have a Dream

[NEW] TIM O’BRIEN (1946—)

FROM The Things They Carried

On the Rainy River

[NEW] DINÉ BAHANE’: THE NAVAJO CREATION STORY

[The Quarrel Between First Man and First Woman]

Reading the Critical Context

The Literature of the Twentieth Century (1945 to Present)

EUDORA WELTY (1909-2001)

[NEW] Powerhouse

RICHARD WRIGHT (1908-1960)

[NEW] FROM Native Son

RALPH ELLISON (1914-1994)

FROM Invisible Man

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983)

The Glass Menagerie

THEODORE ROETHKE (1908-1963)

Dolor

Open House

Cuttings

Cuttings (Later)

Root Cellar

My Papas Waltz

In a Dark Time

RANDALL JARRELL (1914-1965)

Losses

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

A Girl in the Library

In Montecito

ELIZABETH BISHOP (1911-1979)

A Miracle for Breakfast

The Fish

Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance

Visits to St. Elizabeths

Sestina

The Armadillo

Brazil, January 1, 1502

In the Waiting Room

One Art

ROBERT LOWELL (1917-1977)

The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket

Mr. Edwards and the Spider

Memories of West Street and Lepke

Skunk Hour

For the Union Dead

Waking Early Sunday Morning

Will Not Come Back

[NEW] ANN PETRY (1908-1997)

Solo on the Drums

RICHARD WILBUR (1921—)

Marginalia

Lamarck Elaborated

A Hole in the Floor

Trolling for Blues

[NEW] SHIRLEY JACKSON (1916-1965)

The Lottery

[NEW] JOSEPH HELLER (1923-1999)

FROM Catch-22

Major Major Major Major

NORMAN MAILER (1923—)

FROM The Armies of the Night

ALLEN GINSBERG (1926-1997)

Howl

[NEW]Footnote to Howl

A Supermarket in California

America

To Aunt Rose

GARY SNYDER (1930—)

Riprap

[Translation of a Poem by Han-Shan]

Poem Left in Sourdough Mountain Lookout

I Went into the Maverick Bar

Soy Sauce

ADRIENNE RICH (1929—)

At a Bach Concert

Living in Sin

Breakfast in a Bowling Alley in Utica, New York

Divisions of Labor

For This

1999

DENISE LEVERTOV (1923-1997)

Beyond the End

Pure Products

Come into Animal Presence

The Ache of Marriage

O Taste and See

Abel’s Bride

Mad Song

A Hunger

Zeroing in

ANNE SEXTON (1928-1974)

The Farmer’s Wife

Ringing the Bells

And One for My Dame

The Addict

Rowing

SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)

The Bee Meeting

Lady Lazarus

Ariel

Daddy

Fever 103Ú

JAMES DICKEY (1923-1997)

The Lifeguard

Reincarnation (I)

In the Mountain Tent

The Shark’s Parlor

W. S. MERWIN (1927—)

Grandfather in the Old Men’s Home

The Drunk in the Furnace

Noah’s Raven

The Dry Stone Mason

Fly

Strawberries

Direction

A. R. AMMONS (1926-2001)

Sight Seed

Motion Which Disestablishes Organizes Everything

The Damned

JAMES BALDWIN (1924-1987)

Sonny’s Blues

FLANNERY OCONNOR (1925-1964)

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

JOHN UPDIKE (1932—)

[NEW] A & P

PHILIP ROTH (1933—)

The Conversion of the Jews

BERNARD MALAMUD (1914-1986)

The Magic Barrel

TILLIE OLSEN (1913—)

I Stand Here Ironing

TOMÁS RIVERA (1935-1984)

. . . And the Earth Did Not Part

AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) (1934-)

In Memory of Radio

The Bridge

Notes for a Speech

An Agony, As Now

A Poem for Democrats

A Poem for Speculative Hipsters

A Poem Some People Will Have to Understand

A Poem for Half-White College Students

Biography

SONIA SANCHEZ (1934—)

the final solution/

to blk/record/buyers

Womanhood

Masks

Just Don’t Never Give Up on Love

[NEW] BLACK FIRE (1968)

Poem, by James T. Stewart

Neon Diaspora, by David Henderson

when my uncle willie saw, by Carol Freeman

For the Truth, Because It's Necessary, by Edward Spriggs

“Oh shit a riot!” by Jacques Wakefield

RITA DOVE (1952-)

Kentucky, 1833

Adolescence — I

Adolescence — II

Adolescence — III

Banneker

Jiving

The Zeppelin Factory

Under the Viaduct, 1932

Roast Possum

Weathering Out

Daystar

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON (1940—)

No Name Woman

EDWARD ALBEE (1928—)

The Zoo Story

SAUL BELLOW (1915—)

A Silver Dish

KURT VONNEGUT (1922—)

Welcome to the Monkey House

WILLIAM STYRON (1925—)

FROM The Confessions of Nat Turner

N. SCOTT MOMADAY (1934—)

FROM The Way to Rainy Mountain

The Arrowmaker

THOMAS PYNCHON (1937—)

Entropy

JAMES WELCH (1940-2003)

FROM The Death of Jim Loney

JOYCE CAROL OATES (1938—)

How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of

Correction and Began My Life over Again

JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON (1943—-)

The Faithful

ALICE WALKER (1944—)

Everyday Use

[NEW]Burial

AMY TAN (1952—)

FROM The Joy Luck Club

Half and Half

BOBBIE ANN MASON (1940—)

Shiloh

[NEW] DAVID BRADLEY (1950—)

FROM The Chaneysville Incident

197903042100 (Sunday)

GLORIA NAYLOR (1950—)

FROM The Women of Brewster Place

Lucielia Louise Turner

LESLIE MARMON SILKO (1948—)

The Man to Send Rain Clouds

Coyote Holds a Full House in His Hand

RAYMOND CARVER (1938-1988)

Cathedral

DON DELILLO (1936—)

FROM White Noise

[NEW] GLORIA ANZALDÚA (1942-2004)

FROM Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México

JAMAICA KINCAID (1949—)

Girl

Wingless

LOUISE ERDRICH (1954—)

FROM Love Medicine

The Red Convertible

TINA HOWE (1937—-)

Painting Churches

FREDERICK BUSCH (1941-2006)

Bring Your Friends to the Zoo

BILLY COLLINS (1941—)

Winter Syntax

Books

Introduction to Poetry

SIMON ORTIZ (1941—)

A Designated National Park

Canyon de Chelly

Final Solution: Jobs, Leaving

SHERMAN ALEXIE (1966—)

What you Pawn I Will Redeem

Defending Walt Whitman

Reference Works, Bibliographies

Criticism, Literary and Cultural History

Acknowledgements

Index to Authors, Titles, and First Lines", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "93": { "wears.id": 93, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 93, "wears.title": "Best Remembered Poems", "wears.author": "Martin Gardner", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Martin Gardner (Editor), Martin Gardner", "wears.title_slug": "best-remembered-poems", "wears.author_slug": "martin-gardner", "wears.isbn13": 9780486271651, "wears.isbn10": "048627165X", "wears.price": "$5.94", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Dover Publications", "wears.pubdate": "December 1992", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, English Poetry, English & Irish Literature Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 224, "wears.dimensions": "5.40 (w) x 8.45 (h) x 0.45 (d)", "wears.overview": "The 126 poems in this superb collection of 19th- and 20th-century British and American verse range from the impassioned \"Renascence\" of Edna St. Vincent Millay to Edward Lear's whimsical \"The Owl and the Pussycat.\" Famous poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Frost are well-represented, as are less well-known poets. Includes 10 selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative.", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

The 126 poems in this superb collection of 19th- and 20th-century British and American verse range from famous poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson, Whitman, and Frost to less well-known poets.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "94": { "wears.id": 94, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 94, "wears.title": "Nine Plays of the Modern Theater: Waiting for Godot; The Visit; Tango; The Caucasian Chalk Circle; The Balcony; Rhinoceros; American Buffalo; The Birthday Party; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", "wears.author": "Harold Clurman", "wears.author_bio": "", "wears.authors": "Harold Clurman", "wears.title_slug": "nine-plays-of-the-modern-theater", "wears.author_slug": "harold-clurman", "wears.isbn13": 9780802150325, "wears.isbn10": 802150322, "wears.price": "$15.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Grove/Atlantic, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "January 1994", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "English, Scottish, & Welsh Drama, Drama Anthologies, American Drama, English & Irish Literature Anthologies, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 912, "wears.dimensions": "6.10 (w) x 9.20 (h) x 1.70 (d)", "wears.overview": "

This comprehensive volume contains nine of the most important, most indispensable plays of the modern theater. What Harold Clurman has done in this seminal collection is to create for us a portrait of the progress and turmoil of the twentieth century.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "95": { "wears.id": 95, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 95, "wears.title": "The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: The Traditions in English, Vol. 2", "wears.author": "Sandra M. Gilbert", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Sandra M. Gilbert (Editor), Susan Gubar", "wears.title_slug": "the-norton-anthology-of-literature-by-women", "wears.author_slug": "sandra-m-gilbert", "wears.isbn13": 9780393930146, "wears.isbn10": 393930149, "wears.price": "$59.65", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "February 2007", "wears.edition": "3rd Edition", "wears.subjects": "Literary Criticism, Women Authors", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

Long the standard teaching anthology, the landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women has introduced generations of readers to the rich variety of women’s writing in English.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "96": { "wears.id": 96, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 96, "wears.title": "Writing New York: A Literary Anthology", "wears.author": "Phillip Lopate", "wears.author_bio": "

Philip Lopate is the author of Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, The Rug Merchant, Being with Children, and Confessions of Summer. A recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, his works have appeared in Best American Essays, The Paris Review, Pushcart Prize annuals, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is Adams Professor of English at Hofstra University.

", "wears.authors": "Phillip Lopate", "wears.title_slug": "writing-new-york", "wears.author_slug": "phillip-lopate", "wears.isbn13": 9781598530216, "wears.isbn10": 1598530216, "wears.price": "$24.02", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Library of America", "wears.pubdate": "January 2008", "wears.edition": "Expanded", "wears.subjects": "American Literature Anthologies, General & Miscellaneous Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 1050, "wears.dimensions": "6.06 (w) x 9.26 (h) x 1.57 (d)", "wears.overview": "

'Few cities,' writes Phillip Lopate in his introduction to this historic anthology, 'have inspired as much great writing as New York.' Here Lopate and The Library of America present a sweeping literary portrait of the city as seen through the eyes of over a hundred writers. Residents and tourists, novelists and poets, architects, politicians, social reformers, naturalists, humorists-in unexpected and dazzling ways the writers in this volume take on the challenge of capturing New York's enduring spirit, its constantly changing public spectacle, its gossip, amusements, hard-luck stories, and tragedies. This paperback edition includes an expanded introduction and additional selections be Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and Vijay Seshadri, bringing the story up to the present.

", "wears.excerpt": "Chapter One: Washington Irving\n

Washington Irving (1783-1859), America's first successful man of letters, now known primarily for his Hudson Valley tales \"Rip Van Winkle\" and \"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,\" made his initial splash at age twenty-six with a comic, mock-learned, rambling volume, whose full title, A History of New York From the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, indicates the tongue-in-cheek, mythological manner in which Irving clothed his account of his native city's roots. The book pretended to have been written by an aged, bitter codger of Dutch extraction, Diedrich Knickerbocker -- in short, one of history's \"losers.\" Thus began the whole \"Knickerbocker\" tradition, connecting that pseudonym with the city's local legends. Though A History of New York certainly has passages of farce and satire, Irving (who did considerable research) often followed historical events fairly closely. In any case, this first published history of the city attempted to provide the amnesiac, hustling, nineteenth-century port with a founding myth and a past. Its ironic, disenchanted voice set the tone for much New York literature to come.

From A History of New York

The island of Manna-hata, Manhattoes, or as it is vulgarly called Manhattan, having been discovered, as was related in the last chapter; and being unanimously pronounced by the discoverers, the fairest spot in the known world, whereon to build a city, that should surpass all the emporiums of Europe, they immediately returned to Communipaw with the pleasing intelligence. Upon this a considerable colony was forthwith fitted out, who after a prosperous voyage of half an hour,arrived at Manna hata, and having previously purchased the land of the Indians, (a measure almost unparalleled in the annals of discovery and colonization) they settled upon the south-west point of the island, and fortified themselves strongly, by throwing up a mud battery, which they named FORT AMSTERDAM. A number of huts soon sprung up in the neighbourhood, to protect which, they made an enclosure of strong pallisadoes. A creek running from the East river, through what at present is called Whitehall street, and a little inlet from Hudson river to the bowling green formed the original boundaries; as though nature had kindly designated the cradle, in which the embryo of this renowned city was to be nestled. The woods on both sides of the creek were carefully cleared away, as well as from the space of ground now occupied by the bowling green. -- These precautions were taken to protect the fort from either the open attacks or insidious advances of its savage neighbours, who wandered in hordes about the forests and swamps that extended over those tracts of country, at present called broad way, Wall street, William street and Pearl street.

No sooner was the colony once planted, than like a luxuriant vine, it took root and throve amazingly; for it would seem, that this thrice favoured island is like a munificent dung hill, where every thing finds kindly nourishment, and soon shoots up and expands to greatness. The thriving state of the settlement, and the astonishing encrease of houses, gradually awakened the leaders from a profound lethargy, into which they had fallen, after having built their mud fort. They began to think it was high time some plan should be devised, on which the encreasing town should be built; so taking pipe in mouth, and meeting in close divan, they forthwith fell into a profound deliberation on the subject.

At the very outset of the business, an unexpected difference of opinion arose, and I mention it with regret, as being the first internal altercation on record among the new settlers. An ingenious plan was proposed by Mynheer Ten Broek to cut up and intersect the ground by means of canals; after the manner of the most admired cities in Holland; but to this Mynheer Hardenbroek was diametrically opposed; suggesting in place thereof, that they should run out docks and wharves, by means of piles driven into the bottom of the river, on which the town should be built -- By this means said he triumphantly, shall we rescue a considerable space of territory from these immense rivers, and build a city that shall rival Amsterdam, Venice, or any amphibious city in Europe. To this proposition, Ten Broek (or Ten breeches) replied, with a look of as much scorn as he could possibly assume. He cast the utmost censure upon the plan of his antagonist, as being preposterous, and against the very order of things, as he would leave to every true hollander. \"For what,\" said he, \"is a town without canals? -- it is like a body without veins and arteries, and must perish for want of a free circulation of the vital fluid\" -- Tough breeches, on the contrary, retorted with a sarcasm upon his antagonist, who was somewhat of an arid, dry boned habit of body; he remarked that as to the circulation of the blood being necessary to existence, Mynheer Ten breeches was a living contradiction to his own assertion; for every body knew there had not a drop of blood circulated through his wind dried carcass for good ten years, and yet there was not a greater busy body in the whole colony. Personalities have seldom much effect in making converts in argument -- nor have I ever seen a man convinced of error, by being convicted of deformity. At least such was not the case at present. Ten Breeches was very acrimonious in reply, and Tough Breeches, who was a sturdy little man, and never gave up the last word, rejoined with encreasing spirit -- Ten Breeches had the advantage of the greatest volubility, but Tough Breeches had that invaluable coat of mail in argument called obstinacy -- Ten Breeches had, therefore, the most mettle, but Tough Breeches the best bottom -- so that though Ten Breeches made a dreadful clattering about his ears, and battered and belaboured him with hard words and sound arguments, yet Tough Breeches hung on most resolutely to the last. They parted therefore, as is usual in all arguments where both parties are in the right, without coming to any conclusion -- but they hated each other most heartily forever after, and a similar breach with that between the houses of Capulet and Montague, had well nigh ensued between the families of Ten Breeches and Tough Breeches.

I would not fatigue my reader with these dull matters of fact, but that my duty as a faithful historian, requires that I should be particular -- and in truth, as I am now treating of the critical period, when our city, like a young twig, first received the twists and turns, that have since contributed to give it the present picturesque irregularity for which it is celebrated, I cannot be too minute in detailing their first causes.

After the unhappy altercation I have just mentioned, I do not find that any thing further was said on the subject, worthy of being recorded. The council, consisting of the largest and oldest heads in the community, met regularly once a week, to ponder on this momentous subject. -- But either they were deterred by the war of words they had witnessed, or they were naturally averse to the exercise of the tongue, and the consequent exercise of the brains -- certain it is, the most profound silence was maintained -- the question as usual lay on the table -- the members quietly smoked their pipes, making but few laws, without ever enforcing any, and in the mean time the affairs of the settlement went on -- as it pleased God.

As most of the council were but little skilled in the mystery of combining pot hooks and hangers, they determined most judiciously not to puzzle either themselves or posterity, with voluminous records. The secretary however, kept the minutes of each meeting with tolerable precision, in a large vellum folio, fastened with massy brass clasps, with a sight of which I have been politely favoured by my highly respected friends, the Goelets, who have this invaluable relique, at present in their possession. On perusal, however, I do not find much information -- The journal of each meeting consists but of two lines, stating in dutch, that, \"the council sat this day, and smoked twelve pipes, on the affairs of the colony.\" -- By which it appears that the first settlers did not regulate their time by hours, but pipes, in the same manner as they measure distances in Holland at this very time; an admirably exact measurement, as a pipe in the mouth of a genuine dutchman is never liable to those accidents and irregularities, that are continually putting our clocks out of order.

In this manner did the profound council of NEW AMSTERDAM smoke, and doze, and ponder, from week to week, month to month, and year to year, in what manner they should construct their infant settlement -- mean while, the town took care of itself, and like a sturdy brat which is suffered to run about wild, unshackled by clouts and bandages, and other abominations by which your notable nurses and sage old women cripple and disfigure the children of men, encreased so rapidly in strength and magnitude, that before the honest burgomasters had determined upon a plan, it was too late to put it in execution -- whereupon they wisely abandoned the subject altogether.

Grievous, and very much to be commiserated, is the task of the feeling historian, who writes the history of his native land. If it falls to his lot to be the sad recorder of calamity or crime, the mournful page is watered with his tears -- nor can he recal the most prosperous and blissful eras, without a melancholy sigh at the reflection, that they have passed away forever! I know not whether it be owing to an immoderate love for the simplicity of former times, or to a certain tenderness of heart, natural to a sentimental historian; but I candidly confess, I cannot look back on the halcyon days of the city, which I now describe, without a deep dejection of the spirits. With faultering hand I withdraw the curtain of oblivion, which veils the modest merits of our venerable dutch ancestors, and as their revered figures rise to my mental vision, humble myself before the mighty shades.

Such too are my feelings when I revisit the family mansion of the Knickerbockers and spend a lonely hour in the attic chamber, where hang the portraits of my forefathers, shrowded in dust like the forms they represent. With pious reverence do I gaze on the countenances of those renowned burghers, who have preceded me in the steady march of existence -- whose sober and temperate blood now meanders through my veins, flowing slower and slower in its feeble conduits, until its lingering current shall soon be stopped forever!

These, say I to myself, are but frail memorials of the mighty men, who flourished in the days of the patriarchs; but who, alas, have long since mouldered in that tomb, towards which my steps are insensibly and irresistibly hastening! As I pace the darkened chamber and lose myself in melancholy musings, the shadowy images around me, almost seem to steal once more into existence -- their countenances appear for an instant to assume the animation of life -- their eyes to pursue me in every movement! carried away by the delusion of fancy, I almost imagine myself surrounded by the shades of the departed, and holding sweet converse with the worthies of antiquity!

-- Luckless Diedrich! born in a degenerate age -- abandoned to the buffettings of fortune -- a stranger and a weary pilgrim in thy native land; blest with no weeping wife, nor family of helpless children -- but doomed to wander neglected through those crowded streets, and elbowed by foreign upstarts from those fair abodes, where once thine ancestors held sovereign empire. Alas! alas! is then the dutch spirit forever extinct? The days of the patriarchs, have they fled forever? Return -- return sweet days of simplicity and ease -- dawn once more on the lovely island of Manna hata! -- Bear with me my worthy readers, bear with the weakness of my nature -- or rather let us sit down together, indulge the full flow of filial piety, and weep over the memories of our great great grand-fathers.

Having thus gratified those feelings irresistibly awakened by the happy scenes I am describing, I return with more composure to my history.

The town of New Amsterdam, being, as I before mentioned, left to its own course and the fostering care of providence, increased as rapidly in importance, as though it had been burthened with a dozen panniers full of those sage laws, which are usually heaped upon the backs of young cities -- in order to make them grow. The only measure that remains on record of the worthy council, was to build a chapel within the fort, which they dedicated to the great and good St. Nicholas, who immediately took the infant town of New Amsterdam under his peculiar patronage, and has ever since been, and I devoutly hope will ever be, the tutelar saint of this excellent city. I am moreover told, that there is a little legendary book somewhere extant, written in low dutch, which says that the image of this renowned saint, which whilome graced the bowsprit of the Goede Vrouw, was placed in front of this chapel; and the legend further treats of divers miracles wrought by the mighty pipe which the saint held in his mouth; a whiff of which was a sovereign cure for an indigestion, and consequently of great importance in this colony of huge feeders. But as, notwithstanding the most diligent search, I cannot lay my hands upon this little book, I entertain considerable doubt on the subject.

This much is certain, that from the time of the building of this chapel, the town throve with tenfold prosperity, and soon became the metropolis of numerous settlements, and an extensive territory. The province extended on the north, to Fort Aurania or Orange, now known by the name of Albany, situated about 160 miles up the Mohegan or Hudson River. Indeed the province claimed quite to the river St. Lawrence; but this claim was not much insisted on at the time, as the country beyond Fort Aurania was a perfect wilderness, reported to be inhabited by cannibals, and termed Terra Incognita. Various accounts were given of the people of these unknown parts; by some they are described as being of the race of the Acephali, such as Herodotus describes, who have no heads, and carry their eyes in their bellies. Others affirm they were of that race whom father Charlevoix mentions, as having but one leg; adding gravely, that they were exceedingly alert in running. But the most satisfactory account is that given by the reverend Hans Megapolensis, a missionary in these parts, who, in a letter still extant, declares them to be the Mohagues or Mohawks; a nation, according to his description, very loose in their morals, but withal most rare wags. \"For,\" says he, \"if theye can get to bedd with another mans wife, theye thinke it a piece of wit.\" This excellent old gentleman gives moreover very important additional information, about this country of monsters; for he observes, \"theye have plenty of tortoises here, and within land, from two and three to four feet long; some with two heads, very mischievous and addicted to biting.\"

", "wears.synopsis": "

“Few cities,” writes Phillip Lopate in his introduction to this historic anthology, “have inspired as much great writing as New York.” Here Lopate and The Library of America present a sweeping literary portrait of the city as seen through the eyes of over a hundred writers. Residents and tourists, novelists and poets, architects, politicians, social reformers, naturalists, humorists—in unexpected and dazzling ways the writers in this volume take on the challenge of capturing New York's enduring spirit, its constantly changing public spectacle, its gossip, amusements, hard-luck stories, and tragedies. This paperback edition includes an expanded introduction and additional selections be Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, and Vijay Seshadri, bringing the story up to the present.

Ariel Levy

[A] collection of writings by some of the great chroniclers. . .from Edgar Allan Poe to Frank O'Hara. -- New York Magazine

", "wears.toc": "

	Introduction
	from A History of New York	1
	The Stranger at Home; or, a Tour in Broadway	8
	from Domestic Manners of the Americans	16
	from The Journal	20
	from The Dairy	30
	from American Notes for General Circulation	51
	Letters from Staten Island	65
	from Open-Air Musings in the City	74
	from Doings of Gotham	91
	from Satanstoe	107
	Our City Charities	111
	The Eating-Houses	119
	from Life and Writings of Grant Thorburn	127
	Crossing Brooklyn Ferry	138
	The Old Bowery	145
	Bartleby, the Scrivener	153
	from The Diaries	191
	Passage in the Life of an Unpractical Man	241
	from Eight Months in America	250
	Tyrants of the Shop	255
	Personals	257
	Impostors	260
	Experience of a Chinese Journalist	268
	New York Under the Snow	271
	from A Hazard of New Fortunes	278
	The Down Town Back-Alleys	294
	Opium's Varied Dreams	308
	Adventures of a Novelist	313
	Drowned Their Sins	320
	Summer Complaint: The Annual Strike	324
	Whence the Song	327
	A Vanished Seaside Resort	340
	Honest Graft and Dishonest Graft	347
	The Curse of Civil Service Reform	350
	Boredom	355
	from The American Scene	369
	The Duel	382
	from The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man	387
	The Lungs	396
	Gramercy Park	407
	In the Metropolitan Museum	407
	Coney Island	408
	Union Square	408
	Broadway	409
	\"Come Into the Roof Garden, Maud\"	410
	If I should learn	417
	Recuerdo	418
	Coming, Aphrodite!	419
	The Tropics in New York	459
	The Harlem Dancer	460
	New York	461
	from Port of New York	463
	The Finale at the Follies	473
	Thoughts on Leaving New York for New Orleans	476
	Brooklyn Bridge	479
	To Brooklyn Bridge	485
	Exterior Street	487
	from Up to Now	497
	I Go Adventuring	505
	from New York	509
	The Police	518
	Roosevelt and Reform	528
	from The Diaries	538
	from Journey to the End of the Night	554
	West End Avenue	564
	My Lost City	569
	The Background	580
	Only the Dead Know Brooklyn	598
	Sense of Humor	604
	from Black Spring	614
	Millinery District	620
	from Autobiography: New York	621
	from By the Well of Living and Seeing	621
	Apology for Breathing	626
	When the Negro Was In Vogue	632
	Letter to N.Y.	640
	Atheist Hit By Truck	642
	The Television Helps, But Not Very Much	644
	Welcome to the City	648
	The Genial Host	661
	Story in Harlem Slang	680
	As He Seemed to a Hick	687
	It is Sticky in the Subway	690
	Aspects of Robinson	691
	Here Is New York	693
	The Cost of Living	712
	from Red Ribbon on a White Horse	721
	Hell's Kitchen	731
	The Long Furlough	744
	from A Walker in the City	749
	Up in the Old Hotel	756
	from Junky	781
	from Memoirs of Bernardo Vega	785
	A Step Away From Them	803
	The Day Lady Died	805
	Steps	806
	from The Immense Journey	808
	Fiorello H. LaGuardia	810
	Moving Out	820
	from The New York Diary	826
	from The Death and Life of Great American Cities	829
	An Urban Convalescence	834
	The Thirties	837
	The Climate	842
	Minton's	843
	Tourist Eye	846
	from The Fire Next Time	849
	National Cold Storage Company	857
	47th Street	858
	Panic in Brooklyn	859
	The Landmarker	869
	from The Fortunate Pilgrim	880
	A Sunday Kind of Love	898
	Goodbye to All That	904
	The Cafeteria	914
	Lou Stillman	931
	February	934
	Dining Out with Doug and Frank	935
	Mugging	944
	Fourth Floor, Dawn, Up All Night Writing Letters	948
	from Sleepless Nights	949
	from Sketches from Life	960
	The Movies and Other Schools	966
	from Family Installments	976
	from Minor Characters	990
	from The Intellectual Follies	995
	from World's Fair	1006
	New York, 1936	1013
	from The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love	1022
	from Approaching Eye Level	1032

", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Ariel Levy

[A] collection of writings by some of the great chroniclers. . .from Edgar Allan Poe to Frank O'Hara. -- New York Magazine\n\n

\n\n

Garrison Keillor

. . .[An] excellent anthology. . .[where] you get writers who love crowds and writers who hang out alone and brood, the diaries of businessmen and homages to 'the sweet slums of Bohemia and beatnikdom'. . . -- The New York Times Book Review\n\n

", "wears.author_ids": 9 }, "97": { "wears.id": 97, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 97, "wears.title": "The Best American Essays 2009", "wears.author": "Mary Oliver", "wears.author_bio": "

", "wears.authors": "Mary Oliver (Editor), Robert Atwan (Editor), Mary Oliver", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-essays-2009", "wears.author_slug": "mary-oliver", "wears.isbn13": 9781616836863, "wears.isbn10": 1616836865, "wears.price": "", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Houghton Mifflin Harcourt", "wears.pubdate": "October 2009", "wears.edition": "Bargain", "wears.subjects": "", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "98": { "wears.id": 98, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 98, "wears.title": "The Hudson River Valley Reader", "wears.author": "Edward C. Goodman", "wears.author_bio": "

Edward C Goodman is the General Editor of the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals at Columbia University. He edited Carl Sanburg's Abraham Lincoln: The Illustrated Edition and Fire!: The 100 Most Devastating Fires

", "wears.authors": "Edward C. Goodman", "wears.title_slug": "the-hudson-river-valley-reader", "wears.author_slug": "edward-c-goodman", "wears.isbn13": 9781616823764, "wears.isbn10": 1616823763, "wears.price": "", "wears.format": "Hardcover", "wears.publisher": "Cider Mill Press", "wears.pubdate": "March 2009", "wears.edition": "Bargain", "wears.subjects": "", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": "", "wears.dimensions": "", "wears.overview": "", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

2009 marks the 400th Anniversary of the exploration of the Hudson River and it's valley, which was first discovered by Henry Hudson in 1609 while about the ship Half Moon. This literary anthology covers the history and literary heritage of the valley through its many lives.

The book begins with a natural history of the valley, from it's creation, carved out my mighty glaciers between the Catskill and Berkshire mountain ranges all the way to its existing geography.

The second part is a literary homage to the river and the valley including works by John Burroughs, Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper and many others.

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "99": { "wears.id": 99, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 99, "wears.title": "The Best American Poetry 2009", "wears.author": "David Wagoner", "wears.author_bio": "

David Lehman is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry and the author of seven books of poetry, including When a Woman Loves a Man. He lives in New York City.

", "wears.authors": "David Wagoner (Editor), David Lehman", "wears.title_slug": "the-best-american-poetry-2009", "wears.author_slug": "david-wagoner", "wears.isbn13": 9780743299770, "wears.isbn10": 743299779, "wears.price": "$16.00", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group", "wears.pubdate": "September 2009", "wears.edition": "", "wears.subjects": "Poetry Anthologies, American Poetry, American Literature Anthologies", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 240, "wears.dimensions": "5.48 (w) x 8.28 (h) x 0.64 (d)", "wears.overview": "

Award-winning poet David Wagoner and renowned editor David Lehman present the twenty-second edition of the Best American Poetry series—\"a ‘best’ anthology that really lives up to its title\" (Chicago Tribune).

Eagerly anticipated by scholars, students, readers, and poets alike, Scribner’s Best American Poetry series has achieved brand-name status in the literary world, serving as a yearly guide to who’s who in American poetry. Known for his marvelous narrative skill and humane wit, David Wagoner is one of the few poets of his generation to win the universal admiration of his peers. Working in conjunction with series editor David Lehman, Wagoner brings his refreshing eye to this year’s anthology. With new work by established poets, such as Billy Collins, Denise Duhamel, Mark Doty, and Bob Hicok, The Best American Poetry 2009 also features some of tomorrow’s leading luminaries. Readers of all ages and backgrounds will treasure this illuminating collection of modern American verse.

With its high-profile editorship and its generous embrace of American poetry in all its exuberant variety, the Best American Poetry series continues to be, as Robert Pinsky says, \"as good a comprehensive overview of contemporary poetry as there can be.\"

", "wears.excerpt": "
\nForeword
\nby David Lehman
\n

What is a poet? In his \"Defense of Poetry,\" Shelley writes, \"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.\" The solitude and sweet darkness, the emphasis on the unseen, the nightingale as the image of the poet, the listeners entranced but bewildered: how romantic this formulation is -- and how well it fits its author. Matthew Arnold alters the metaphor but retains something of its tone when he calls Shelley \"a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.\" Kierkegaard in Either/Or goes further than either Shelley or Arnold in accentuating the negative. In a passage I've long admired, Kierkegaard identifies the poet as one whose heart is full of anguish but whose lips transform all sighs and groans into beautiful music. Kierkegaard likens the fate of this \"unhappy\" individual to the cruel and unusual punishment meted out by the tyrant Phalaris, whose unfortunate victims, \"slowly roasted by a gentle fire\" in a huge copper bull, let out shrieks that turn into sweet melodies by the time they reach the tyrant's ears. The success of the poet, then, corresponds to the amount of agony endured. Readers clamor for more, for they are aware only of the music and not of the suffering that went into it. The critics, too, stand ready to applaud -- if, that is, the poet's work meets the requirements of the immutable \"laws of aesthetics.\" And here Kierkegaard's parable acquires an extra layer of irony, the better to convey his contempt for critics. \"Why, to be sure,\" he writes, \"a critic resembles a poet as one pea another, the only difference being that he has no anguish in his heart and no music on his lips.\" And therefore, Kierkegaard concludes with a flourish, sooner would he be a swineherd understood by the swine than a poet misunderstood by men.

Kierkegaard's argument proceeds by the logic of his similes -- the sweet music, the barbaric torture, the prosaic peas in the pod, the swineherd as an honorable profession -- and the abrupt tonal shift at the end from sarcasm to defiance. If, as Wallace Stevens asserted, \"poetry is almost incredibly one of the effects of analogy,\" here is a gorgeous example. The passage has the virtue, moreover, of raising questions about the occupational hazards that poets face and about their relation to a world of readers and reviewers.

In one way, at least, Kierkegaard's parable is untrue to the experience of American poets, who rarely have to fend off legions of avid admirers. But the notion that the job of the critic is to find fault with the poetry -- that the aims of criticism and of poetry are opposed -- is still with us or, rather, has returned after a hiatus. It was once erroneously thought that devastating reviews caused John Keats's untimely death in his twenty-sixth year. Lord Byron in Don Juan had Keats and his reviewers in mind when he wrote, \"Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article.\" In reality, however, it was not criticism but consumption that cut short Keats's life.1 Many of us delight in Oscar Wilde's witty paradoxes that blur the identities of artist and critic.2 The critical essays of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden are continuous with their poems and teach us that criticism is a matter not of enforcing the \"laws of aesthetics\" or meting out sentences as a judge might pronounce them in court. Rather, the poet as critic engages with works of literature and enriches our understanding and enjoyment of them. Yet today more than a few commentators seem intent on punishing the authors they review. It has grown into a phenomenon. In the March 2009 issue of Poetry, the critic Jason Guriel defends \"negativity\" as \"the poetry reviewer's natural posture, the default position she assumes before scanning a single line.\" The title of Guriel's piece sums it up: \"Going Negative.\"

The romantic image of the poet as a vulnerable personage in a hostile universe has not gone out of currency. The poet is doomed to go unrecognized and to pay dearly for his music-making powers. The gift of poetry comes not as an unalloyed blessing but as the incidental virtue of a defect or as compensation for a loss, an injury, an ailment, a deficiency. Edmund Wilson coined the phrase that readily comes to mind for this dynamic of compensatory balance: \"the wound and the bow.\" Before it served Wilson as the title of a collection of his essays (1941), the phrase headed his study of the myth of Philoctetes, which the critic took as paradigmatic of the artist's situation. Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles treated the myth in plays; the Philoctetes of Sophocles survives. The hero, who excels even Odysseus at archery, possesses the invincible bow that once belonged to Hercules. Philoctetes joins the Greeks in their assault on Troy but is bitten by a poisonous snake, and the suppurating wound emits so foul an odor that his comrades-in-arms abandon him on the island of Lemnos. There he is stranded for ten miserable years. But when a Trojan prophet is forced to reveal that the Greeks will fail to conquer Troy without the unerring bow of Philoctetes, a platoon is dispatched to reenlist the archer -- who is understandably reluctant to return to the fray -- and to recover his arms by any means necessary. In Sophocles, Philoctetes is cured at Troy. He goes on to kill Paris, the Trojan prince whose abduction of Helen precipitated the epic conflict, and he becomes one of the heroes of the Greek victory. One lesson, according to Wilson, is that \"genius and disease, like strength and mutilation, may be inextricably bound up together.\" In the most speculative and provocative sentence in the essay, Wilson ventures that \"somewhere even in the fortunate Sophocles there had been a sick and raving Philoctetes.\"

1. Not that the critics were blameless. The anonymous reviewer writing for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (August 1818) called Keats's Endymion \"imperturbable driveling idiocy.\" Endymion was supposed to be \"a Greek shepherd loved by a Grecian goddess,\" but in Keats's hands, he was \"merely a young Cockney rhymester.\"

2. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde radically revises Matthew Arnold on the function of criticism. According to Arnold, the endeavor is \"to see the object as in itself it really is.\" According to Wilde, the aim is \"to see the object as in itself it really is not.\"

W. H. Auden's early prose poem, \"Letter to a Wound\" (1931), is a powerful modern statement of the theme: \"You are so quiet these days that I get quite nervous, remove the dressing. I am safe, you are still there.\" Addressing the wound as \"you\" is not merely a grammatical convenience but the vehicle of a linguistic transformation; the ailment becomes an active, willful muse and companion -- albeit one whose traits include \"insane jealousy,\" \"bad manners,\" and a \"passion for spoiling things.\" The letter writer has learned to live with his incurable condition as with a secret partner, an illicit lover. They have even gone through a \"honeymoon stage\" together. \"Thanks to you,\" Auden writes, \"I have come to see a profound significance in relations I never dreamt of considering before, an old lady's affection for a small boy, the Waterhouses and their retriever, the curious bond between Offal and Snig, the partners in the hardware shop in the front.\" The wound is not named, though we read of a visit to a surgeon, who begins a sentence, \"I'm afraid,\" and need not add a word. The particular virtue of this epistolary prose poem is that \"I\" and \"you,\" a pair of pronouns, are raised to the level of a universal duality and are therefore greater than any specific duality that seems appropriate -- whether \"artist\" and \"wound,\" or \"self\" and \"soul,\" or \"ego\" and \"id,\" or \"lover\" and \"beloved.\"

It is difficult not to fall under the spell of Wilson's wound and bow or of the corresponding myth in the Hebraic tradition. In the thirty-second chapter of Genesis, Jacob -- who twice in the past had got the better of his brother Esau, both times by cunning or deceit -- must wrestle with \"a man\" who will not reveal his name and who must flee the scene at daybreak. The struggle takes place on the eve of his first encounter with Esau after many years, in the deep darkness of the night, and it is physical combat of a kind not associated with Jacob. When he fights the angel to a standstill, he receives a blessing and a new name, Israel (because he has \"contended with God and men and has prevailed\"). But he has also suffered a wound \"in the hollow of his thigh\" that causes him to limp thereafter. The story is rich and mysterious in inverse proportion to its length: nine biblical verses. Though each is said to be a source of power, the Hebrew blessing bestowed on Jacob is utterly different from the Greek bow. Yet at bottom we find the familiar dialectic of compensation.

Such myths may console us. The logic of Emerson's essay \"Compensation\" has saved my spirits on many a dismal afternoon. \"The sure years reveal the deep emotional force that underlies all facts,\" Emerson writes. \"The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.\" It is to Emerson's essay that I turn when I need to tamp down the impulses of resentment or envy and reconcile myself to realities. There is wisdom here and truth, a counterargument if not exactly a solution to the problem of evil that Gerard Manley Hopkins stated summarily: \"Why do sinners' ways prosper? And why must / Disappointment all I endeavor end?\"

There is also, however, a danger in the intimate association of genius and illness, especially mental illness, especially at a time when many of us engaged in the discourse of poetry come into contact with ever-increasing numbers of impressionable young people who want to study creative writing. The romantic conception of the poet can lead too easily to self-pity or worse, the glorification of madness and the idealization of the self-inflicted wound. We need to remember that poetry springs from joy as often as from sorrow: the impulse to praise is as strong as the impulse to mourn. Lionel Trilling's essay \"Art and Neurosis\" is a vital corrective to the tendency to assent too readily to propositions obscuring the differences between genius and madness. Trilling accepts the premise that all of us, including \"the fortunate Sophocles,\" are ill; we are all neurotic. In that case, it is not the primal hurt but the ability to rise above it that distinguishes the artist. Poetry is not a matter of divine madness but the product of labor and conscious mind. \"Nothing is so characteristic of the artist as his power of shaping his work, of subjugating his raw material, however aberrant it be from what we call normality,\" Trilling writes. \"What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.\"

My favorite sentence in Kierkegaard's parable is the one in which poets and critics are considered identical except that the latter lack the very qualities -- the anguish in the heart and the music on the lips -- that are definitive of the poet. For many years I resisted Kierkegaard's \"either/ or\" logic. I felt that there needn't be a structural enmity between poetry and criticism. Now I wonder.

The characteristic badness of literary criticism in the 1980s was that it was heavily driven by theory and saddled with an unlovely vocabulary. T. S. Eliot, in \"The Function of Criticism\" (1923), says he \"presumes\" that \"no exponent of criticism\" has \"ever made the preposterous assumption that criticism is an autotelic activity\" -- that is, an activity to be undertaken as an end in itself without connection to a work of literature. Eliot did not figure on post-structuralism and the critic's declaration of independence from the text. If you wanted criticism \"constantly to be confronted with examples of poetry,\" as R. P. Blackmur recommends in \"A Critic's Job of Work,\" you were in for a bad time in the 1980s. The academic critics' disregard of contemporary poetry paralleled the rise of creative writing as a field of study and, partly in consequence, the writing of poetry did not suffer, though from time to time you would hear the tired refrain that poetry -- like God, the novel as a form, and the author altogether -- had died. This shibboleth itself has not perished. Newsweek reports that, despite \"anecdotal evidence that interest in poetry is on the rise,\" statistics show a decline. \"Is an art form dying?\" the magazine asks.3 Donald Hall wrote the definitive response to these premature death notices, \"Death to the Death of Poetry,\" which served as the introduction to The Best American Poetry 1989. Hall's assertion remains valid: \"American poetry survives; it even prevails.\"

3. Marc Bain, \"The End of Verse?\" Newsweek, March 25, 2009.

Poetry criticism at its worst today is mean in spirit and spiteful in intent, as if determined to inflict the wound that will spur the artist to new heights if it does not cripple him or her. Somewhere along the line, the notion took hold that poets were reluctant to write honestly about their peers. But in the absence of critics who are not themselves poets, surely the antidote is not to encourage the habit of rejection without explanation, denunciation without a reasoned argument, and a slam of the gavel in high dudgeon as if a poem were a felony. Hostile criticism, criticism by insult, may have entertainment value, but animus does not guarantee honesty. As one who knows from firsthand experience what a book reviewer faces when writing on deadline, I can tell the real thing when I see it, and the hysterical over-the-top attack is as often as not the product of a pose. Every critic knows it is easier (and more fun) to write a ruthless review rather than a measured one. As a reviewer, you're not human if you don't give vent to your outrage once or twice -- if only to get the impulse out of you. If you have too good a time writing hostile reviews, you'll injure not only your sensibility but your soul. Frank O'Hara felt he had no responsibility to respond to a bad poem. It'll \"slip into oblivion without my help,\" he would say.

William Logan typifies the bilious reviewer of our day. He has attacked, viciously, a great many American poets; I, too, have been the object of his scorn. Logan is the critic as O'Hara defined the species: \"the assassin of my orchards.\" You can rely on him to go for the most wounding gesture. Michael Palmer writes a \"Baudelaire Series\" of poems, for example, and Logan comments, \"Baudelaire would have eaten Mr. Palmer for breakfast, with salt.\" The poems of Australian poet Les Murray seem \"badly translated out of Old Church Slavonic with only a Russian phrase book at hand.\" Reviewing a book by Adrienne Rich is a task that Logan feels he could almost undertake in his sleep. Reading C. K. Williams is \"like watching a dog eat its own vomit.\"

For many years, Logan reserved his barbs for the poets of our time. More recently he has sneered at Emily Dickinson (\"a bloodless recluse\") and condescended to Emerson (\"a mediocre poet\"). And still the New York Times Book Review turned to Logan to review the new edition of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems last summer. Logan's piece began with the observation that O'Hara's death at the age of forty in a freak accident was a \"good career move.\" This is not a particularly original phrase, but in O'Hara's case it is doubly unkind, giving the false impression that he died by his own hand.

Logan's treatment of Langdon Hammer's Library of America edition of Hart Crane's poetry and prose -- which ran in the New York Times Book Review in January 2007 -- provoked among many readers the feeling that here he had gone too far. The piece dwelled on Crane's \"sexual appetites,\" which \"were voracious and involved far too many sailors,\" and included a flip dismissal of Crane's poem \"Chaplinesque\" (a \"dreadful mess\"). The review triggered off a spate of letters that the Times duly printed. Rosanna Warren summed up what many felt: \"Snide biographical snippets about homosexuality and alcoholism are not literary criticism, nor are poems illuminated by sarcastic bons mots ('a Myth of America conceived by Tiffany and executed by Disney,' 'like being stuck in a mawkish medley from Show Boat and Oklahoma!'). Crane's revelatory weaknesses as well as his, yes, genius, deserved a more responsible accounting.\"

Wounded by the outcry, Logan wrote a lengthy defense of himself and his procedures in the October 2008 issue of Poetry. More letters to the editor followed: three pages of them in the December 2008 issue, along with a concluding comment by Logan longer than the combined efforts of the correspondents. For one who routinely seeks to give offense, Logan turns out to be thin-skinned. In the end he falls back on the argument that it is fruitless to argue in matters of taste. \"The problem with taste is, yours is right and everyone else's is wrong,\" Logan writes. Bosh. The real problem is that Logan confuses taste with bias. Using the Romantic poets as an example, he writes: \"You can't stand that ditherer Coleridge, she can't stand that whiner Keats, I can't stand that dry fussbudget Wordsworth, and we all hate Shelley.\" Only someone for whom poets are merely names, abstractions that never had a flesh-and-blood existence, could so gleefully reduce these poets to those epithets. But when Logan returns to \"Chaplinesque,\" Hart Crane's \"hapless little\" poem (and how that unnecessary \"little\" rankles), he gives the game away.

Here is \"Chaplinesque\":

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

To Logan the poem's concluding lines are self-evidently \"embarrassing,\" an adjective he uses twice without substantiation. In the three separate pieces in which Logan brings up the poem, he lazily repeats the same charges, uses the same modifiers: the penultimate stanza of \"Chaplinesque\" is \"hapless and tone deaf,\" the ending is \"schmaltz,\" and the poem as a whole is evidence that the poet was \"star-struck\" by Charlie Chaplin, whose movies inspired Crane.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but a professional critic has the responsibility to develop opinions, not just to state them. Rather than make the effort to see how Crane's poem works as a response to Chaplin's film The Kid, Logan ridicules the \"star-struck\" poet, likening Chaplin then to Angelina Jolie now, a comparison of dubious value that manages to insult everyone including Chaplin, Crane, Angelina Jolie, and the \"seventy-seven American poets\" who, Logan says in his patented blend of self-regard and snarky wit, have written odes to Jolie because Logan wrote that Crane met Chaplin after writing \"Chaplinesque.\"

I do not claim to comprehend \"Chaplinesque\" perfectly, but I believe that the lover of poetry will recognize the genius in this poem before any irritable reaching after paraphrase. Crane's repeated use of the homonym for his first name -- \"We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on\" -- seems to me, for example, well worth pondering in the context of the lines' pronomial ambiguity. The poem's opening stanzas are so rich one wants to say them over and over, to speculate on the idea of the Chaplin persona as an image of the poet, of the \"famished kitten\" as an image of poetry, or to contemplate the remarkable sequence of \"smirk,\" \"thumb,\" and \"squint\" in the third stanza. The finger-in-the-eye slapstick comedy routine has never seemed so threatening, even if we can \"Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb / That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us.\" The poem's ending is particularly memorable. You may not make easy sense of that \"grail of laughter\" created by the moon out of a garbage can in a deserted alley. But this arresting image that fuses the sacred and the profane, sky and slum, will not soon depart from your consciousness. The key phrase here, \"a grail of laughter,\" is a great example of a poetic image that defies logical analysis, for we instinctively grasp it as a figure of the sublime, though we know that a grail cannot be \"of\" laughter in any conventional sense. The laughter is the \"sound of gaiety and quest,\" and \"we\" can see the miracle, behold the grail, because we have heard the cry of the alley cat, and we know that poetry is not simply a grand visionary quest but also something very precious and vulnerable, a kitten in the wilderness.

The critic whose take on \"Chaplinesque\" I'd like to see is Christopher Ricks. Ricks begins his book T. S. Eliot and Prejudice with a reading of the most audacious poetic debut of the twentieth century. You might have thought that \"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock\" would require the critic to digress from a consideration of prejudice, the focal point of Ricks's study of Eliot. Not so. Ricks quotes the uncanny stand-alone couplet that Eliot uses twice: \"In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.\" What have scholars said about the lines? The Oxford don Helen Gardner hears \"high-pitched feminine voices\" that are absurdly inadequate to the \"giant art\" of Michelangelo. Grover Smith says he has \"no doubt\" the women are talking \"tediously and ignorantly.\" To Hugh Kenner, the women are \"trivial.\" John Crowe Ransom, discerning \"contempt\" in Eliot's voice, rephrases the couplet as a rhetorical question about the women: \"How could they have had any inkling of that glory which Michelangelo had put into his marbles and his paintings?\"

Yet, as Ricks observes, nowhere does Eliot tell us how to react to these women entering and leaving the drawing room. He chooses \"talking\" to describe what they are doing when he could as easily have said \"prattling.\" He uses no adjective to denigrate the women, though at his disposal he had those I've already given (\"trivial,\" \"ignorant,\" \"tedious\") and more (\"shallow,\" \"affected,\" \"fashionable\"). Nor does Eliot praise the \"glory\" of Michelangelo's \"giant art\" by way of emphasizing the discrepancy between the women and the object of their conversation. It is a measure of Eliot's subtlety and skill that he disdains such modifiers as would bully a reader into the desired response. But Ricks's larger point is that even redoubtable critics are unaware of \"how much their sense of the lines is incited by prejudice.\"

Ricks's treatment of Eliot illustrates how canny a close reader he is. It may remind us also of the pleasure to be had from such acts of critical acumen. And if, as Wordsworth insisted in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, the giving of pleasure constitutes the poet's first obligation to the reader, may it not be reasonable to expect the critic of poetry to honor this same imperative? Yet what Wordsworth calls the \"grand elementary principle of pleasure\" is missing from discussions of contemporary poetry. Schadenfreude is a poor substitute. True delight accompanies edification when a lover of poetry shows us how to read a poem on its own terms, paying it the respect of careful attention, leaving aside the prejudices of the anathematist, the ideologue, the apostle of received opinion, or the bully on the block.

It may just be that the most appealing alternative to the negativity of contemporary criticism is the selective inclusiveness of a dedicated editor. For thirty-six years David Wagoner edited Poetry Northwest. The value of a supportive editor is incalculable, and Wagoner was among the best. His editorial practice can be seen as an extension of his humane poetics. For more than a half century, he has written about ordinary lives and real landscapes with grace and emotional complexity. A master of the plain style, for whom clarity and directness are cardinal virtues, he is a poet of wisdom and wonder. In their unostentatious way, his poems remind us of what it means to be human. Although we set our sights on the heavens, what we see from the wrong end of the telescope may prove more vital, for it \"shows us just how little the gods see / if they look back.\" Yet like actors in a grand comedy we turn and change, turn and change, \"like young heavenly objects / endlessly reembodied\" with \"wardrobes as various / as the wonders of new stars.\" I am conflating quotations from two poems in Wagoner's latest collection, A Map of the Night, which appeared last year -- the year Wagoner spent reading for The Best American Poetry 2009. He has selected poems from an unprecedented number of print or electronic journals: fifty-six. The poets explore subjects ranging from love and death to God, Freud, the beauty of the matriarchs in Genesis, the animals with which we share the planet, \"the land to the south of our neighbors to the north,\" the movies, and \"The Great American Poem.\" A number of the poets address crises in the body politic: the damaged Mississippi Gulf Coast (\"Liturgy\"), the assassination of Daniel Pearl (\"Forty\"), the massacre at Virginia Tech (\"Ringtone\"). We read about the prospect of a change in government (\"A Sea-Change\") and are confronted with \"A Democratic Vista\" and the assurance that \"Ultimately Justice Directs Them.\"

The biggest political story of 2008, the campaign and election of Barack Obama as president of the United States, sparked great enthusiasm among American poets. No sooner had the election results come in than the speculation began as to whom the incoming administration would tap to read a poem at the inauguration. Only two previous presidents (Kennedy and Clinton) had incorporated a poem in the inaugural proceedings, but everyone was confident that Obama would renew this tradition and everyone was right. Elizabeth Alexander was entrusted with the task. But even after her name was disclosed, the print and broadcast media continued to run stories on the importance of poetry in the national discourse. Perusal of the poems written by U.S. presidents of the past revealed Lincoln to be our best presidential poet. Anecdotes surfaced on Theodore Roosevelt's admiration of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's recognition of Archibald MacLeish's talents as a speechwriter, librarian, and adviser at large. The Associated Press reporter Nancy Benac asked a number of poets to write -- and, where practicable, recite for the camera -- ceremonial poems written with Obama's inauguration in mind. Billy Collins, Yusef Komunyakaa, Alice Walker, Christopher Funkhouser, Amiri Baraka, cowboy poet Ted Newman, Julia Alvarez, Gary Soto, Bob Holman, and I composed poems for the occasion. The results are still accessible via the Internet.

The Internet has multiplied the number of places in which a poem may appear. If it was difficult previously to cover American poetry, even with a company of skillful readers, it is now quite impossible. As David Wagoner notes in his introduction to this year's Best American Poetry, there are more venues for poetry than ever before. Web sites, zines, and blogs have enabled us to close up the lag between the composition and dissemination of any piece of writing. It remains to be seen how this technological advance will affect the nature of the writing itself, although the odds are that it will abet not only the tendency toward informality but also the impulse to buck it by emphasizing new and unusual forms: the abecedarius (or double abecedarius), the lipogram, the use of \"found forms\" such as the index of first lines in the back of a book of poems. Poems in such forms as these have turned up in recent and current volumes of The Best American Poetry, as have, to be sure, sonnets, sestinas, riddles, prose poems, a villanelle, a cento, a blues poem, a pantoum. The rediscovery of old forms and the fabrication of new ones is one notable tendency in contemporary poetry. A second is the growing appeal of the conversational style that David Kirby calls \"ultra talk\": a poem that sounds as natural as talk -- if we could script our talk. After observing that \"every revolution in poetry\" is at base \"a return to common speech,\" T. S. Eliot in \"The Music of Poetry\" (1942) goes on to give the rationale for this sort of \"talk poetry\": \"No poetry, of course, is ever exactly the same speech that the poet talks and hears: but it has to be in such a relation to the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say 'that is how I should talk if I could talk poetry.' \"

In 2008, The Best American Poetry launched our blog, which seemed at first to be an indulgence, then a convenience, before we understood that it could function as a kind of magazine, the contents of which change daily and feature an ever-changing roster of contributing writers and columnists. We post poems and comments on poems but also news, links, photos, illustrations, and prose on any subject that engages the mind of a poet. There are certain recurring features. We like aphorisms (\"There are people who are too intelligent to become authors, but they do not become critics\": W. H. Auden) and brainteasers (\"Lives in winter, / Dies in summer, / And grows with its root upwards\").4 From time to time we have run contests. Mark Strand judged Gerald Greland the winner of the inaugural ode contest we posted a day or two after Barack Obama's electoral victory. Paul Violi judged Frank Osen the winner of the previous year's competition, in which contestants were asked to decipher an anagram and to write an acrostic poem based on the result. I am still marveling at the notion that, in contrast to the strict limitations of space in a print magazine, we can publish 365 poems in a calendar year. And we can do things like monitor the cultural markers on an acclaimed television show.

4. \"When a riddler, using the bold weapon of metaphor, forces us to contemplate an icicle as a plant, it is an imaginative coup; briefly, and in a small way, our sense of the structure of reality is shaken.\" Richard Wilbur, \"The Persistence of Riddles\" in The Catbird's Song: Prose Pieces 1963-1995 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 44.

The spirit of Frank O'Hara hovered over the second season of the TV series Mad Men on AMC in 2008. In the first episode, ad man Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself at a Midtown bar not far from where O'Hara loitered during his lunch hours when he worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. On the barstool next to Draper sits a man with horn-rimmed glasses and curly hair reading O'Hara's Meditations in an Emergency. It is 1962. John F. Kennedy is president. Marilyn Monroe is still alive. Draper asks the man about the book. \"You probably wouldn't like it,\" he is told. But Don buys it, we see him reading it in his office, and as the episode concludes, he mails the book to person or persons unknown and, in a voice-over, recites the fourth and final part of O'Hara's poem \"Mayakovsky\" in Meditations in an Emergency. The unforgettable phrase \"the catastrophe of my personality\" occurs here. The charm of such ironic self-deprecation, which is part of O'Hara's character armor, extends to the voice-over. The last words in \"Mayakovsky\" imply a split in the speaker's personality: \"It may be the coldest day of / the year, what does he think of / that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, / perhaps I am myself again.\" The grammatical fact that, in a narrative, the same person can be either \"I\" or \"he\" turns into an apt metaphor for Don Draper, who bears someone else's name -- he switched identities (we learned in season one) with a fallen comrade in a skirmish during the Korean War.

Meditations in an Emergency returns as the title of the thirteenth and final episode in season two of Mad Men. Marilyn Monroe has died. It is October. President Kennedy is addressing the nation on TV. Virtually all the characters in the show are going through an emergency of one kind or another, while the country as a whole faces the grave emergency that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Unlike radio, which has always been a congenial medium for poems and verse plays, TV and poetry have seemed as irreconcilable as dance and architecture. Not the least of Matthew Weiner's accomplishments is the brilliant way he has used O'Hara's poetry to govern the themes of a dramatic series on TV. Mad Men is a big hit, sales of Meditations in an Emergency continue to climb, and a new generation of readers has fallen in love with the poems of Frank O'Hara.

", "wears.synopsis": "

Publishers Weekly

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly

", "wears.author_ids": 0 }, "100": { "wears.id": 100, "wears.ts": "2025-01-26 06:49:15", "wears.nullid": 100, "wears.title": "Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America", "wears.author": "Robert Shapard", "wears.author_bio": "

Robert Shapard teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Hawaii, and co-edited Flash Fiction Forward.

James Thomas teaches literature and creative writing in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and co-edited Flash Fiction Forward.

Ray Gonzalez is one of America’s foremost authors, scholars, and editors in Latino literature.

", "wears.authors": "Robert Shapard (Editor), James Thomas (Editor), Luisa Valenzuela", "wears.title_slug": "sudden-fiction-latino", "wears.author_slug": "robert-shapard", "wears.isbn13": 9780393336450, "wears.isbn10": "039333645X", "wears.price": "$11.05", "wears.format": "Paperback", "wears.publisher": "Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.", "wears.pubdate": "March 2010", "wears.edition": "Original", "wears.subjects": "Short Story Anthologies, General & Miscellaneous Latin American Literature - Literary Criticism, Peoples & Cultures - American Anthologies, Short Stories - Literary Criticism, Latin American Fiction", "wears.lexile": "", "wears.pages": 336, "wears.dimensions": "5.50 (w) x 8.20 (h) x 0.90 (d)", "wears.overview": "

For readers who love great short-short stories, this bountiful anthology is the best of Latin American and U.S. Latino writers.

Following on the success of the Flash Fiction and Sudden Fiction series, Robert Shapard and James Thomas join with Ray Gonzalez in selecting works that each present a complete story in less than 1,500 words. Luisa Valenzuela, one of Latin America’s most lauded writers, provides the introduction. Readers will delight in finding stars such as Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, and Roberto Bolaño alongside recognized masters like Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, and Jorge Luis Borges. They will discover work from Andrea Saenz, Daniel Alarcón, and Alicita Rodriguez, as well as other writers on the rise.

In Julio Ortega’s “Migrations,” a Peruvian writer explores how immigrant speech and ethnic origins are a force of meaning that evolves beyond language. In “Hair,” by Hilma Contreras, a Caribbean pharmacist is driven mad by a young woman’s luxuriant tresses. These stories stretch from gritty reality to the fantastical in a mix that is moving, challenging, humorous, artful, sometimes political, and altogether spectacular.

", "wears.excerpt": "", "wears.synopsis": "

For readers who love great short-short stories, this bountiful anthology is the best of Latin American and U.S. Latino writers.

Publishers Weekly

After the Sudden Fiction and Flash Fiction anthologies, editors Shapard and Thomas teamed with Gonzalez to create this stunning compilation of short shorts (under 1,500 words) by venerated and emerging Latino writers. In Andrea Saenz's “Everyone's Abuelo Can't Have Ridden with Pancho Villa,” the narrator's Grandma Jefa discredits the family legends while holding fast to her own: a prescient dream about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Luna Calderon writes about Dia de Los Muertos or, as the social studies teacher in her story calls it, “Day Ah Dallas Mare Toes.” In “Imagining Bisbee,” Alicita Rodriguez recounts the making of a ghost town: “Bisbee's inhabitants want to disappear. They use P.O. boxes and first names. They hide under straw mats and melt into the horizon.” In “Miss Clairol,” Helena María Viramontes describes the transformative makeup ritual of a mother: “The only way Champ knows her mother's true hair color is by her roots, which, like death, inevitably rise to the truth.” The spirited mix of writers also includes Junot Díaz, Sandra Cisneros, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges. (Mar.)

", "wears.toc": "", "wears.editorial_reviews": "

Publishers Weekly

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