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Fiction
Guayasamín is one of the last crusaders of imaginismo. He is a creator of humanity in its broadest sense, of the living and historical imagination. His universe is sustaining although it threatens us like a cosmic disaster. Think before approaching his painting because it will not be easy to withdraw.--Pablo Neruda
To paint is to pray. To paint is to scream.--Oswaldo Guayasamín
In this breathtakingly beautiful book, excerpts from Pablo Neruda's Canto General are illustrated by Oswaldo Guayasamín's powerful work, bringing to life the battles, defeats, victories, and heroes of Latin America's history of resistance.
After their paths first crossed in Mexico, the Chilean poet and indigenous Ecuadoran painter developed a lifelong friendship based on mutual admiration, profound affection, and political solidarity.
With Spanish and English text throughout, this book by two of Latin America's most beloved artists is a captivating, reasonably priced book for the holidays.
Pablo Neruda is one of Latin America's best-loved poets, his most famous work being Canto General. Born in Chile, and widely respected for his outspoken political views, he died days after the coup against the popularly elected Allende government in September 1973.
Oswaldo Guayasamín is generally considered Diego Rivera's successor as Latin America's most prominent painter. Deemed an expressionist, with evident indigenous roots, the humanist spirit of Guayasamín´s work reflects the pain and misery endured by much of humanity during the last century, but at the same time conveys a sense of human dignity and great tenderness. He died in 1999.
Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945.
Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy for the imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger, and some from the suburbs of the 1980s, are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.Mary Oliver's most acclaimed volume of poetry, American Primitive contains fifty visionary poems about nature, the humanity in love, and the wilderness of America, both within our bodies and outside.
"American Primitive enchants me with the purity of its lyric voice, the loving freshness of its perceptions, and the singular glow of a spiritual life brightening the pages." -- Stanley Kunitz
"These poems are natural growths out of a loam of perception and feeling, and instinctive skill with language makes them seem effortless. Reading them is a sensual delight." -- May Swenson
- a reader's guide to significant topics and themes in the poems;
- Smyth-sewn binding and flexible, leatherette covers; and
- a ribbon page-marker.
At each step of this journey through American cultural history, Louis Menand has an original point to make: he explains the real significance of William James's nervous breakdown, and of the anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot's writing. He reveals the reasons for the remarkable commercial successes of William Shawn's New Yorker and William Paley's CBS. He uncovers the connection between Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, between the atom bomb and the Scholastic Aptitude Test. He locates the importance of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, Christopher Lasch, and Rolling Stone magazine. And he lends an ear to Al Gore in the White House as the Starr Report is finally presented to the public.
Like his critically acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club, American Studies is intellectual and cultural history at its best: game and detached, with a strong curiosity about the political underpinnings of ideas and about the reasons successful ideas insinuate themselves into the culture at large. From one of our leading thinkers and critics, known both for his "sly wit and reportorial high-jinks [and] clarity and rigor" (The Nation), these essays are incisive, surprising, and impossible to put down.In this stunning collection, Joy Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where the Mvskoke people, including her own ancestors, were forcibly displaced. From her memory of her mother's death, to her beginnings in the Native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo's personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings.
Describing Americus as "part documentary, part public pillow-talk, part personal epica descant, a canto unsung, a banal history, a true fiction, lyric and political," Ferlinghetti combines "universal texts, snatches of song, words or phrases, murmuring of love or hate, from Lotte Lenya to the latest soul singer, sayings and shibboleths from Yogi Berra to the National Anthem, the Gettysburg Address or the Ginsberg Address, that haunt our nocturnal imagination." This book is a wake-up call that breaks new ground in the grand tradition of Whitman, W.C. Williams, Charles Olson, and Ezra Pound, as Ferlinghetti cruises our literary and political landscapes, past and present, to create an autobiography of American consciousness.
Here, Robert Wolf offers a collective autobiography of the American heartland written for the most part by everyday men and women without literary ambition. Focusing on the second half of the twentieth century, this collection of essays, short stories, poems, and memoirs--woven together with Wolf's introductory notes--is the culmination of nine years of Free River Press writing workshops conducted by Wolf for the purpose of documenting contemporary American life.
The volume includes work from homeless men and women from Tennessee, small farmers in rural Iowa, residents of Midwestern small towns, the Mississippi Delta, and river communities on the Mississippi. These first-person, eyewitness accounts offer glimpses of daily life: the farmers' struggles against large corporations; poetic meditations on life in the streets, on the road, and in prison; tall tales of river town saloons; and the social rituals of cooking, town hall and party phone lines across America's small towns. Among many narratives, American Mosaic gives us the ruminations of a homeless woman over a martini in El Gilbert's poem "Drunk," descriptions of hearty, communal meals during the July harvest in Clara Leppert's piece "Meals for Threshers," a picture of the goings-on in a West Helena, Arkansas juke joint with Chris Crawford's essay "Lucky Lacey," and the reminiscences of a former Mississippi River towboat captain in Jack Libby's "The Midnight Watch Change."
Together, these diverse stories comprise panels of a literary mural of America. American Mosaic is a compelling testament to regional and local American voices and folkways which are fast disappearing through the relentless push towards a global economy and culture.
"All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book," Michael Dirda's steelworker father used to complain, worried about his son's passion for reading. In "An Open Book," one of the most delightful memoirs to emerge in years, the acclaimed literary journalist Michael Dirda re-creates his boyhood in rust-belt Ohio, first in the working-class town of Lorain, then at Oberlin College. In addition to his colorful family and friends, "An Open Book" also features the great writers and fictional characters who fueled Dirda's imagination: from Green Lantern to Sherlock Holmes, from Candy to Proust. The result is an affectionate homage to small-town America summer jobs, school fights, sweepstakes contests, and first dates as well as a paean to what could arguably be called the last great age of reading. "Dirda is a superb literary essayist." Harold Bloom "Michael Dirda's memoir no surprise to me is so good that I went up to the attic meaning to send him one of my antique Big Little books as a salute to excellence...A great job. I'll be buying "An Open Book" for my children and grandchildren." Russell Baker, author of "Growing Up" "Here, in "An Open Book," is the show and tell of a wonderful American story, everything coming together in the immemorial dance of literature and memory, of history and gossip, and of the deeply felt, bittersweet story (his own) of a young life. Read it and rejoice." George Garrett "A lovely, unapologetically nostalgic remembrance of growing up in a more innocent America, but it is also the touching story of one person's lifelong love affair with words." June Sawyer, "San Francisco Chronicle" "Dirda inhabits each book he reads. Inhabits it and makes a space alongside it for us to join him....He is a rare treasure." James Sallis, "Boston Sunday Globe""
Our most revered critic returns to his signature theme
"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is "a critical self-portrait," a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?
Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets--Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane--as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, TheAnatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be.
"Dinesen's stories are the work of a writer with a powerful imagination and a shrewd intelligence." --The New York Times Book Review
In the classic "Babette's Feast," a mysterious Frenchwoman prepares sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In "The Immortal Story," a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors' tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella Ehrengard, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and rakish artist.
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika "Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork...Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions--power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world--are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever." -Linda Winer, Newsday "A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times "A victory for theater, for the transforming power of the imagination to turn devastation into beauty." - John Lahr, New Yorker "An enormously impressive work of the imagination and intellect, a towering example of what theater stretched to its full potential can achieve." -Philadelphia Inquirer "Angels in America is the finest drama of our time, speaking to us of an entire era of life and death as no other play within memory. It ranks as nothing less than one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century." - John Heilpern, New York Observer "Some playwrights want to change the world. Some want to revolutionize theater. Tony Kushner is that rarity of rarities: a writer who has the promise to do both." -New York Times This new edition of Tony Kushner's masterpiece is published with the author's recent changes and a new introduction in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of its original production. One of the most honored American plays in history, Angels in America was awarded two Tony Awards for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was made into an Emmy Award-winning HBO film directed by Mike Nichols. This two-part epic, subtitled "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes," has received hundreds of performances worldwide in more than twenty-six languages. Tony Kushner's plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Brown; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Cornelle; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols's film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg's Munich and Lincoln. His books include The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to the Present; Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak; and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, co-edited with Alisa Solomon.
Among many honors, Kushner is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards, three Obie Awards, two Evening Standard Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award, two Oscar nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.
Winner of the World Fantasy Award for best short story collection, this volume by one of the most acclaimed authors of the twentieth century takes an intense look at how the specter of death haunts everyday life. Seventeen astonishing tales include the Hugo Award-winning novelette Paladin of the Lost Hour and Soft Monkey, winner of the 1988 Edgar Allan Poe Award for short story fiction. This edition includes a new Introduction by actor/comedian Patton Oswalt.
Harlan Ellison has written and published 120 books and has been lauded by sources as impressive as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, which noted, It is long past time to call Harlan Ellison the twentieth-century Mark Twain. His name is a Registered Trademark and impassioned praise comes to him from Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and Dean Koontz. Online (harlanellisonbooks.com) and a laudatory YouTube site put up by Ellison's celebrity friends has over 1,000,000 hits on his Pay the Writer shout-out. You could look him up: he can't break those shackles.






























