Literary Anthology

For the past five years, this anthology has stirred reactions around the globe, exciting readers, critics, and publishers alike. Bringing new names and work of European writers to an international audience has shown the vitality of writing from Europe at a time when the number of translations has dramatically shrunk in the United States and England, thereby depriving readers of access to some of the best writing being done in the world today. As in past volumes, special attention is paid to writers from the smaller countries who are usually overlooked (Albania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Croatia, Serbia, Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia, and many others) in favor of the major languages. This tradition continues with the present volume. With a preface by the internationally known Enrique Vila-Matas, "Best European Fiction 2015" takes it place among the first five volumes in bringing important voices to the English-speaking world.

"Absolutely wonderful; a marvelous journey which meanders through some of the most formative literature, non-fiction, and poetry to come out of the United States." -- The Literary Sisters
At the end of the Civil War, another long and arduous struggle began as the nation attempted to reunite. Literature offered a path toward solidarity, and this concise anthology surveys the writings of major American authors from the war's end to the dawn of the Jazz Age.
Featured works include those of Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, and other poets. Mark Twain is prominently represented among the storytellers, along with Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Three short novels appear in their entirety: Daisy Miller by Henry James, The Call of the Wild by Jack London, and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. Speeches by Sitting Bull and Theodore Roosevelt, memoirs by Booker T. Washington and Helen Keller, and many other selections recapture a vibrant era in American literature. Informative introductory notes supplement the authoritative texts.

In between is a grand cavalcade of superbly crafted fiction by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Djuna Barnes, Susan Glaspell and Edith Wharton. Brief biographies of each of the writers are included.

Our finest essayists discuss six centuries of literary genius.

Genius is one of those words upon which the world has agreed to form no clear consensus, Joseph Epstein tells us in his introduction. How then shall we define literary genius? In this collection, twenty-five contemporary authors endeavor to answer that question by considering twenty-five classic writers and their enduring works.

We learn that, more important than mere originality or creativity, it is the ability to make us experience the world in new ways that sets these writers apart. My task, Joseph Conrad wrote, is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel--it is above all to make you see. That--and no more, and it is everything.

Wood-engraved portraits and illustrations by renowned artist Barry Moser accompany each essay.

Contents:
1. Tom Shippey on Geoffrey Chaucer
2. Lois Potter on William Shakespeare
3. Reynolds Price on John Milton
4. Anthony Hecht on Alexander Pope
5. David Bromwich on Samuel Johnson
6. David Womersley on Edward Gibbon
7. Dan Jacobson on William Wordsworth
8. Hilary Mantel on Jane Austen
9. Frederick Raphael on William Hazlitt
10. Evan Boland on John Keats
11. Daniel Mark Epstein on Nathaniel Hawthorne
12. A. N. Wilson on Charles Dickens
13. Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman
14. William Pritchard on Herman Melville
15. Paula Marantz Cohen on George Eliot
16. Bruce Floyd on Emily Dickinson
17. David Carkeet on Mark Twain
18. Joseph Epstein on Henry James
19. Elizabeth Lowry on Joseph Conrad
20. Stephen Cox on Willa Cather
21. Robert Pack on Robert Frost
22. Joseph Blotner on William Faulkner
23. John Gross on James Joyce
24. John Simon on T.S. Eliot
25. James L. W. West III on Ernest Hemingway

Joseph Epstein, from his introduction: Literary genius comes in many varieties. Some literary geniuses seem natural (Charles Dickens, Mark Twain), others cultivated (George Eliot, Henry James). Some are prolific (Wordsworth, Whitman), some are more carefully concentrated (Jane Austen, T. S. Eliot). Some literary geniuses are stimulated by the difficult (Alexander Pope, John Milton). Some require absolute originality -- entailing the need to invent their own style -- to convey their vision (James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway). Some have perfected a form (Pope, the heroic couplet), some have tried to kill off a genre (Joyce, the novel). Not some but all literary geniuses can be read again and again, down through the generations. As Hilary Mantel, in her essay on Jane Austen, writes: 'Surely this is the definition of genius in a writer: the capacity to make a text that can give and give, a text that is never fully read, a text that goes on multiplying meanings.' Timelessness this is called, and it is another of the hallmarks of literary genius.

Joseph Epstein is the author of nineteen books, most recently In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage. For more than twenty years he was editor of The American Scholar. A contributor to The New Yorker, Commentary, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, and other magazines, he also taught for many years in the English Department at Northwestern University.

Barry Moser is an illustrator, author, and designer whose work appears in museums and libraries around the world. He has published nearly three hundred titles, including Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which won the American Book Award in 1983. In 1991 he won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for his collaboration with Cynthia Rylant, Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds. A member of the National Academy of Design, he has served on the faculty of Rhode Island School of Design and is currently on the faculty of Smith College.

McSweeney's 26 comes in three parts: two small, oblong books of stories by writers large and small (John Brandon, Amanda Davis, Uzodinma Iweala, and eight more), set in regions near and far (Kazakhstan, Bosnia, Spain, Arkansas), and a third book, Where to Invade Next, edited by Stephen Elliott and inspired by actual Pentagon documents, which seeks to give a picture of just how our government could create a rationale for its next round of wars. Read them one at a time, or all at once, but know that this one's got it all--whirlwind visions of the world of today, and dead-serious essays about which parts of it the United States might soon be confronting.

In 1957--long before colleges awarded degrees in creative nonfiction and back when newspaper writing's reputation was tainted by the fish it wrapped--Princeton began honoring talented literary journalists. Since then, fifty-nine of the finest, most dedicated, and most decorated nonfiction writers have held the Ferris and McGraw professorships. This monumental volume harbors their favorite and often most influential works. Each contribution is rewarding reading, and collectively the selections validate journalism's ascent into the esteem of the academy and the reading public.

Necessarily eclectic and delightfully idiosyncratic, the fifty-nine pieces are long and short, political and personal, comic and deadly serious. Students will be provoked by William Greider's pointed critique of the democracy industry, eerily entertained by Leslie Cockburn's fraternization with the Cali cartel, inspired by David K. Shipler's thoughts on race, unsettled by Haynes Johnson's account of Bay of Pigs survivors, and moved by Lucinda Frank's essay on a mother fighting to save a child born with birth defects. Many of the essays are finely crafted portraits: Charlotte Grimes's biography of her grandmother, Blair Clark's obituary for Robert Lowell, and Jane Kramer's affecting story of a woman hero of the French Resistance.

Other contributions to savor include Harrison Salisbury on the siege of Leningrad, Landon Jones on the 1950s, Christopher Wren on Soviet mountaineering, James Gleick on technology, Gloria Emerson on Vietnam, Gina Kolata on Fermat's last theorem, and Roger Mudd on the media. Whether approached chronologically, thematically, randomly, or, as the editors order them, more intuitively, each suggests a perfect evening reading.

Designed for students as well as general readers, The Princeton Anthology of Writing splendidly attests to the elegance, eloquence, and endurance of fine nonfiction.

Each of these authors writes of what he or she knows best, of what is in their blood: the traditions of their cultures and the wounds of their hearts. From bestselling authors such as Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday, to new voices such as Diane Glancy and Gloria Bird, the result is a brilliant anthology resonant with feeling and color, as distinctive as the rhythms of a stomp dance, as enduring as stories passed from generation to generation with love.

Editor Craig Lesley vividly captures the struggle of Native Americans who hope to preserve the wisdom of their anscestors in the face of a white world. Their writing reverberates with a sense of place, generational family loyalty, with the poverty and despair of the present, the power of old beliefs and the resiliency of a yet proud people.