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Pachacuti
World Overturned
Lori Eshleman
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2015

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Pacific Tremors
Richard Stern
Northwestern University Press, 2007
Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.
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Pacific Tremors
Richard Stern
Northwestern University Press, 2001
Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside, they face their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is just a business powered by money and celebrity. While Spear is consoled and comforted by his granddaughter, Keneret centers his comeback film on Leet de Loor, a stunning but painfully wooden "actress" he discovers in Fiji.
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The Packhorseman
Charles Hudson
University of Alabama Press, 2009
In April 1735, twenty-year-old William MacGregor, possessing little more than a bottle of Scotch whiskey and a set of Shakespeare’s plays, arrives in Charles Town, South Carolina, to make his fortune in the New World. The Scottish Highlands, while dear to his heart, were in steep economic decline and hopelessly entangled in dangerous political intrigue. With an uncle in Carolina, the long ocean voyage seemed his best chance for a new start. He soon discovers that the Jacobite politics of Scotland extend to Carolina, and when his mouth gets him in trouble with the Charles Town locals, dimming his employment opportunities, he seizes the one option still open for him and takes a job as a frontier packhorseman.
 
Soon young MacGregor is on the Cherokee trail to Indian country, where he settles in as a novice in the deerskin trade. Along the way William learns not only the arts of managing a pack train and trading with the Indians, but of reading the land and negotiating cultural differences with the Cherokee—whose clan system is much different from the Scottish clans of his homeland. William also learns that the Scottish enlightenment he so admires has not made much headway in the Carolina backcountry, where the real challenges are to survive, day to day, during the tense times after the Yamasee War and to remember that while in Indian country . . . it is their country.
 
A scholar of the native Southeast, Charles Hudson has turned his hand to this work of historical fiction, bringing to life the packhorsemen, Indian traders, and southeastern Indians of the early 18th-century Carolina. With a comfortable and engaging style, Hudson peoples the Carolina frontier with believable characters, all caught up in a life and time that is historically well-documented but little-known to modern popular readers.
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Paint
Grace Tiffany
Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2013

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The Painted Canoe
Anthony Winkler
University of Chicago Press, 1989
"You learn dat dis world don't love negar! And negar don't make for dis world!" Zachariah's mother warned him when he was still a boy. Yet, poor and abominably ugly, the Jamaican fisherman grasps lovingly for life, though the worst forces of nature conspire against him. Washed far out to sea in the night, Zachariah is attacked by a hammerhead shark, scorched by the Caribbean sun, hurled about by the sea which both frightens and entices him, and confused by his own encroaching madness. In a rare weave of humor and sadness, Zachariah forces himself to reflect on his life and the strangeness of chance, on anything but his place as a small man in a fragile boat in the boundless sea.

Still on land are the villagers, the woman, and the sons who comprise life for Zachariah. While he struggles with the forces of nature, the natural faith of the villagers encounters the incapacity for belief of the troubled English doctor. As the superstitions and certainties of Jamaican life and the consequences of science meet, Winkler reveals a rich understanding of the precarious balance between thought and reality, between the coincidental and the miraculous.

"This is one of those rare novels that announces its presence with such modest grace that the size of its ambition and accomplishments steals gently into the consciousness."—Michael Thelwell, Washington Post Book World

"Mr. Winkler deftly unfurls his exquisitely written story, which is redolent of the colorful patois and chaotic flavor of rural Jamaican culture."—Bob Allen, Baltimore Sun
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Pale Horse
A Novel of Revolutionary Russia
Boris Savinkov
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019
Pale Horse is a thinly disguised retelling of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich. Written in the form of a diary by the leader of a group of five revolutionaries, the novel provides a straightforward and clinical account of the assassination and contains daring and vivid descriptions of the revolutionary underground and political conspiracy. Savinkov gives free reign to his dramatic impulses, the “inner feelings” of the conspirators, and the moral dimension of the plot. The book caused an immediate sensation both in Russia and abroad. Translated from Russian by Michael Katz, Pale Horseexplores the psychological basis of terrorism and political adventurism.
 
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THE PALE LIGHT OF SUNSET
SCATTERSHOTS AND HALLUCINATIONS IN AN IMAGINED LIFE
Lee Maynard
West Virginia University Press, 2009
Real people don’t run away from. . .But real people can run away to. . .
 
In 1936, a child is born in the mountains of West Virginia. In 2005, he scatters his past into a deep canyon of rock. The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life illuminates the journey of this boy, a constant tourist and visitor, who travels everywhere, yet belongs nowhere. Through tales of swarming hornets and swinging bullies, love affairs with the land and its people, and near death by frostbite and heat stroke, the absurd hilarity and clear, tender voice found within this story navigates a surreal road paved by the experiences of one man.
 
Author of nationally acclaimed and locally banned novels Crum and Screaming with the Cannibals, Lee Maynard details an imaginative account of his journey through seventy years of hard living—from West Virginia, to Mexico, the Arctic Circle, and beyond. Scattered and hallucinated, The Pale Light of Sunset grants a long-awaited glimpse into the bent condition of the Maynard brain.
 
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Paper Sons and Daughters
Growing up Chinese in South Africa
Ufrieda Ho
Ohio University Press, 2011
Ufrieda Ho’s compelling memoir describes with intimate detail what it was like to come of age in the marginalized Chinese community of Johannesburg during the apartheid era of the 1970s and 1980s. The Chinese were mostly ignored, as Ho describes it, relegated to certain neighborhoods and certain jobs, living in a kind of gray zone between the blacks and the whites. As long as they adhered to these rules, they were left alone. Ho describes the separate journeys her parents took before they knew one another, each leaving China and Hong Kong around the early 1960s, arriving in South Africa as illegal immigrants. Her father eventually became a so-called “fahfee man,” running a small-time numbers game in the black townships, one of the few opportunities available to him at that time. In loving detail, Ho describes her father’s work habits: the often mysterious selection of numbers at the kitchen table, the carefully-kept account ledgers, and especially the daily drives into the townships, where he conducted business on street corners from the seat of his car. Sometimes Ufrieda accompanied him on these township visits, offering her an illuminating perspective into a stratified society. Poignantly, it was on such a visit that her father—who is very much a central figure in Ho’s memoir—met with a tragic end. In many ways, life for the Chinese in South Africa was self-contained. Working hard, minding the rules, and avoiding confrontations, they were able to follow traditional Chinese ways. But for Ufrieda, who was born in South Africa, influences from the surrounding culture crept into her life, as did a political awakening. Paper Sons and Daughters is a wonderfully told family history that will resonate with anyone having an interest in the experiences of Chinese immigrants, or perhaps any immigrants, the world over.
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Papi
A Novel
Rita Indiana
University of Chicago Press, 2016
“Papi’s there, around any corner,” says the eight-year-old girl at the heart of Papi. “But you can’t sit down and wait for him cuz that’s a longer and more painful death.” Living in Santo Domingo, she waits for her father to come back from the United States and lavish her with the glorious rewards of his fame and fortune—shiny new cars and polo shirts, gold chains and Nikes. But when Papi does come back, he turns out to be more “like Jason, the guy from Friday the 13th," than a prince. Papi is a drug dealer, a man who is clearly unreliable and dangerous but nevertheless makes his daughter feel powerful and wholly, terrifyingly alive.

Drawing on her memories of a childhood split between Santo Domingo and visits with her father amid the luxuries of the United States, Rita Indiana mixes satire with a child’s imagination, horror with science fiction, in a swirling tale of a daughter’s love, the lure of crime and machismo, and the violence of the adult world. Expertly translated into English for the first time by Achy Obejas, who renders the rhythmic lyricism of Indiana’s Dominican Spanish in language that propels the book forward with the relentless beat of a merengue, Papi is furious, musical, and full of wit—a passionate, overwhelming, and very human explosion of artistic virtuosity.


 
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Paradise Field
A Novel in Stories
Pamela Ryder
University of Alabama Press, 2017
Interconnected stories depicting the last years of a WWII bomber pilot, his relationship with his daughter as both child and adult, and his drift into infirmity and death.

When life dwindles to its irrevocable conclusion, recollections are illuminated, even unto the grave. Such is the narrative of Paradise Field: A Novel in Stories, whose title is taken from a remote airfield in the American Southwest, and while the father recalls his flying days, his daughter—who nurses the old man—reflects as well.
 
Pamela Ryder’s stories vary in style and perspective, and time lines overlap as death advances and retreats. This unique and shifting narrative explores the complexities of a relationship in which the father—who has been a high-flying outsider—descends into frailty and becomes dependent upon the daughter he has never really known.
 
The opening story, “Interment for Yard and Garden,” begins as a simple handbook for Jewish burial and bereavement, although the narrator cannot help but reveal herself and her motives. From there, the telling begins anew and unfolds chronologically, returning to the adult daughter’s childhood: a family vacation in France, the grotesqueries of the dinner table, the shadowy sightings of a father who has flown away.
 
A final journey takes father and daughter back to the Southwest in search of Paradise Field. Their travels through that desolate landscape foreshadow the father’s ultimate decline, as portrayed in the concluding stories that tell of the uneasy transformation in the bond between them and in the transcendence of his demise. Taken together, the stories in Paradise Field are an eloquent but unsparing depiction of infirmity and death, as well as solace and provocation for anyone who has been left to stand graveside and confront eternity.
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Paradise Misplaced
Book 1 of the Mexican Eden Trilogy
Sylvia Montgomery Shaw
Swedenborg Foundation Publishers, 2012

I knew the secret as a child before anyone else did—that God planted the Garden of Eden just seventy-five kilometers south of Mexico City, near the town of Cuernavaca. He scattered seeds so only the most colorful flowers and the best climbing trees would grow in that semitropical paradise. He filled the stables with the fastest, strongest Arabians; mother’s aviary with more birds than anywhere else in the world. Then he constructed a wall twice as tall as Father and encircled our Eden to keep it safe. We named the garden the Hacienda of San Serafin. I swore that I would spend the rest of my life there, where nothing bad ever happens . . .


Captain Benjamín Nyman Vizcarra, son of the wealthiest man in Mexico, has everything a young man could want. But in the days leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910, he finds himself questioning whether he can support the old regime—and more and more distracted by his brother’s bewitching fiancee, Isabel. Setting out to expose her as a gold-digger, he instead falls deeply in love, setting himself on a path that leads to war, poverty, and alienation from his family.

Accused and convicted of his father’s murder after a fateful late-night encounter, Benjamín faces his inner demons, beginning a process that Swedenborg describes as regeneration. As he plots escape with a fellow prisoner, a Tarahumara Indian known only as El Brujo, he relives his love affair and eventual marriage to Isabel. A new question begins to form: will he run, or will he stay to confront his mistakes and win back the woman he loves?

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Paradise, New York
A Novel
Eileen Pollack
Temple University Press, 2000
We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, in 1970, as a nine-year-old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, Lucy tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt and running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of the season, Lucy battles her grandmother's attempts to sabotage Lucy's success, her parents' superstitious fears of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

Paradise, New York explores the comforts and complexities of American ethnic identity with a charming commitment to laughter and love.
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Paranoia
A Novel
Victor Martinovich
Northwestern University Press, 2013

Immediately banned after it was published, Paranoia is a novel about how dictatorships survive by burrowing into the minds of those they rule, sowing distrust and blurring the boundaries between the state’s and the individual’s autonomy. Although Minsk and Belarus are never mentioned, they are clearly the author’s inspiration for the novel’s setting. The plot focuses on a doomed romance between a young man whose former lover has disappeared and a young woman whose other lover is the minister of state security. The novel evokes classic dissident literature while artfully depicting the post-Soviet, globalized world.

 
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The Parasite
Ferenc Barnás
Seagull Books, 2020
Marked by powerful and evocative prose, Ferenc Barnás’s novel tells the fascinating story of a young man’s journey through his strange obsessions towards possible recovery. The unnamed narrator is the parasite, feeding off others’ ailments, but he is also a host who attracts people with the most peculiar manias. He confesses, almost amiably, his decadent attraction as a young adolescent to illnesses and hospitals. The real descent into his private, hallucinatory hell begins after his first sexual encounter; he becomes a compulsive masturbator, and then a compulsive fornicator. But to his horror, he realizes that casual sex is not casual at all for him—each one-night stand results in insane jealousy: he imagines previous lovers hovering over him every time he makes love to a woman.
 
When he gets to know a woman referred to as L., he thinks his demons may have finally subsided. But when he hears of her past, the jealousy returns. He seeks relief through writing—by weaving an imagined tale of L.’s amorous adventures. What will he do with this strange manuscript, and can it bring him healing?

A breathtaking blend of Dostoevskian visions, episodes of madness, and intellectual fervor, all delivered in precise, lucid prose, The Parasite is a novel that one cannot escape.
 
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ParaSpheres
Edited by Ken E. Keegan and Rusty Morrison
Omnidawn, 2006
With Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist stories by 44 Literary and Genre authors, this anthology follows in the footsteps of Conjunctions 39 (from Bard College, New York), the Fall 2002 issue, which focused on New Wave Fabulist writers.
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Paris, So to Speak
Navid Kermani
Seagull Books, 2022
A romantic novel like no other.

A writer has penned a novel about the great love of his youth. After a public reading, he is approached by a woman he doesn’t recognize—but it’s his lover. He is the author; she, the figure in his novel. The young girl from back then has turned into an interesting and attractive woman—but she’s also married. Soon the situation becomes a little strange: they sit down together, have a glass of wine, talk about French romantic novels, ask each other what one expects of love when one grows older. And all the while her husband is sitting in the next room. How is this going to end? Navid Kermani has written a romantic novel like no other—surprising, witty, profound—and one can barely put it down.
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Parker
Movie Tie-in Edition, Originally Published as "Flashfire"
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2012
There have been many film adaptations of Richard Stark’s novels over the years, but none of them actually featured a protagonist named Parker—and none of them fully captured Parker’s chilling tenacity and laconic anticharm. Here for the first time is the real Parker, played by Jason Statham. Adapted by Black Swan screenwriter John J. McLaughlin, and directed by Taylor Hackford, Parker is sure to both satisfy Stark fans and action-movie lovers. And there couldn’t be a better Parker novel to bring to the silver screen than the fast-paced and stylish Flashfire.
When Flashfire opens, Parker isn’t happy. Three associates have borrowed his money for a job without permission, and he isn’t satisfied to wait and see if they make good. Instead, he vows to kill them all. Tearing across America to take their job out from under them, Parker finds himself in West Palm Beach. There things go sour. While attempting to trick the denizens of Palm Beach into accepting him for one of their own, Parker is gut-shot and forced to rely on a beautiful civilian, played in the film by Jennifer Lopez, for help. But even injured and exhausted, Parker still has his killer instinct, and he shows how unwise—and deadly—it is to cross him. Part heist movie, part unexpected romance, and mostly explosions, Parker brings to life Stark’s hero with verve and violence, while taking viewers on an action-packed adventure they won’t soon forget.
Also starring Michael Chiklis, Nick Nolte, Patti Lupone, and Wendell Pierce, Parker is hitting theaters near you this January. Hard.
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Participatory Composition
Video Culture, Writing, and Electracy
Sarah J. Arroyo
Southern Illinois University Press, 2013

Like. Share. Comment. Subscribe. Embed. Upload. Check in. The commands of the modern online world relentlessly prompt participation and encourage collaboration, connecting people in ways not possible even five years ago. This connectedness no doubt influences college writing courses in both form and content, creating possibilities for investigating new forms of writing and student participation. In this innovative volume, Sarah J. Arroyo argues for a “participatory composition,” inspired by the culture of online video sharing and framed by theorist Gregory Ulmer’s concept of electracy.

Electracy, according to Ulmer, “is to digital media what literacy is to alphabetic writing.” Although electracy can be compared to digital literacy, it is not something shut on and off with the power buttons on computers or mobile devices. Rather, electracy encompasses the cultural, institutional, pedagogical, and ideological implications inherent in the transition from a culture of print literacy to a culture saturated with electronic media, regardless of the presence of actual machines.

Arroyo explores the apparatus of electracy in many of its manifestations while focusing on the participatory practices found in online video culture, particularly on YouTube. Chapters are devoted to questions of subjectivity, definition, authorship, and pedagogy. Utilizing theory and incorporating practical examples from YouTube, classrooms, and other social sites, Arroyo presents accessible and practical approaches for writing instruction. Additionally, she outlines the concept of participatory composition by highlighting how it manifests in online video culture, offers student examples of engagement with the concept, and advocates participatory approaches throughout the book.

Arroyo presents accessible and practical possibilities for teaching and learning that will benefit scholars of rhetoric and composition, media studies, and anyone interested in the cultural and instructional implications of the digital age. 

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The Partisan
A Romance of Revolution
William Gilmore Simms
University of Arkansas Press, 2011
The writings of William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) provide a sweeping fictional portrait of the colonial and antebellum South in all of its regional diversity. Simms's account of the region is more comprehensive than that of any other author of his time; he treats the major intellectual and social issues of the South and depicts the bonds and tensions among all of its inhabitants. By the mid-1840s Simms's novels were so well known that Edgar Allan Poe could call him "the best novelist which this country has, on the whole, produced." The thirteenth volume in the ongoing Arkansas Edition of the works of Simms, The Partisan is the first in order of publication of Simms's Revolutionary War romances. Although Simms took advantage of the novelist's prerogative to invent characters and events for his saga, he did so with a historian's eye, making extensive use of official histories; letters, diaries, and other documents; family traditions; and unpublished and published memoirs. Simms gives human interest to the novel's historical framework with two love triangles, mixing romantic conventions with gritty realism that outlines the four classes of Simms's ideal society. The Partisan is also remarkable among Simms's work for its use of symbols, indicating, perhaps, a new intention for the novel. The result is a satisfying work of literary art enlivened with adventure and humor while remaining true to the history behind it.
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Partisan Wedding
Stories
Stories by Renata Vigano & Translated by Suzanne Branciforte
University of Missouri Press, 1999

A generation of Italian authors dedicated their lives, their works, and their voices to the primary driving force behind twentieth-century narratives of World War II. Renata Viganò was an active member of the Italian Resistance during World War II, and, like many of her male counterparts, she depicted the actions of the brave people who contributed to and participated in the partisan movement. Unlike her counterparts, however, Viganò vividly portrayed the experiences of women, notably women on the front line, in her posthumously published Matrimonio in brigata, here translated for the first time in English as Partisan Wedding.

"If it had not been for them, the women . . . who got used to `men's business,' . . . the partisan army would have lost a vital, necessary force." The women in Partisan Wedding joined the struggle for many reasons; some for their husbands, others for their fathers, brothers, or sons; some for a sense of justice and the desire to do what was right. Whatever the cause, Viganò demonstrates that women maintained the ability to nurture and to care, to preserve their female qualities in the face of war.

Because of her own role as a partisan, the stories in Partisan Wedding are based on Viganò's personal experiences. Two stories in the collection are specifically autobiographical: "Acquitted" and "My Resistance." Relating her own plight to find her husband, a partisan commander, after his sudden arrest, "Acquitted" aptly conveys Viganò's struggle to maintain her strength in the face of complete helplessness. "My Resistance" is a personal account of her own experiences during the war and the women she met along the way.

Partisan Wedding is an invaluable contribution to the literature of the Second World War, completing the picture of those involved in the struggle for freedom. Viganò's remarkable prose, equally beautiful and terrible in its description of the minute details of human suffering and sacrifice, opens a window to a world that has rarely been seen, and a world not easily forgotten.

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Parts of a World
A Novel
A. G. Mojtabai
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Two decades into his career, Tom Limbeck, a New York City social worker, is leading an orderly, utterly prosaic life. He is, by self-description, “a poor man’s psychiatrist,” dedicated to helping his clients see things rationally, the better to confront the real world. He works in an office beset by budgetary difficulties and driven to solutions suited only to the bureaucracy. 

Tom’s life changes when he takes on the case of Michael, who is known as “Saint Francis of the Dumpster” for his peaceful disposition and practice of eating from garbage cans. Tom is at first haunted by, then obsessed with, this uncommunicative young man who holds a precious secret which causes him to risk his survival by living on the street. Tom is determined to discover and expose Michael’s secret (“his faith/his delusion”) as a necessary first step before any treatment can begin. Tom cannot reason his way out of his own obsession when he finds himself bending the rules, abandoning therapeutic norms and, before long, stalking his client. Parts of a World is a book about doubt—doubt, faith, and delusion. 
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Party Girls
Diane Goodman
Autumn House Press, 2011
Goodman explores class, community, and culture through the lens of a party.
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Passage to Dusk
By Rashid al-Daif
University of Texas Press, 2001

Passage to Dusk deals with the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s in a postmodern, poetic style. The narrative focuses on the deranged, destabilized, confused, and hyper-perceptive state of mind created by living on the scene through a lengthy war. The story is filled with details that transcend the willed narcissism of the main character, while giving clues to the culture of the time. It is excellent fiction, written in a surrealistic mode, but faithful to the characters of the people of Lebanon, their behavior during the war, and their contradictions. Issues of gender and identity are acutely portrayed against Lebanon's shifting national landscape.

The English-language reader has not been much exposed to Lebanese literature in translation, and Rashid al-Daif is one of Lebanon's leading writers. He has been translated into eight languages, including French, German, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. Translator Nirvana Tanoukhi manages to preserve Daif's unusual, moving, and at times humorous style in her English rendition.

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Passage to the Plaza
Sahar Khalifeh
Seagull Books, 2020
In Bab Al-Saha, a quarter of Nablus, Palestine, sits a house of ill repute. In it lives Nuzha, a young woman ostracized from and shamed by her community. When the Intifada breaks out, Nuzha’s abode unexpectedly becomes a sanctuary for those in the quarter: Hussam, an injured resistance fighter; Samar, a university researcher exploring the impact of the Intifada on women’s lives; and Sitt Zakia, the pious midwife.
 
In the furnace of conflict at the heart of the 1987 Intifada, notions of freedom, love, respectability, nationhood, the rights of women, and Palestinian identity—both among the reluctant residents of the house and the inhabitants of the quarter at large—will be melted and re-forged. Vividly recounted through the eyes of its female protagonists, Passage to the Plaza is a groundbreaking story that shatters the myth of a uniform gendered experience of conflict.
 
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Passes Through
Rob Stephenson
University of Alabama Press, 2010
A fictional meditation on time and experience—part journal, part meditation, part dreamscape
 
In language that is frank and uncompromising, Rob Stephenson’s debut novel, Passes Through, moves forward in a rare and daring manner. Part journal, part meditation on aesthetics, part dreamscape, Passes Through investigates experience, identity, beauty, and sexuality, while provocatively complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagination versus observation. It is a narrative of and about language, a narrative of and about narrative. 
 
Can we truly experience the present, the novel asks? No, we cannot, Passes Through suggests again and again. Stephenson throws to the wayside all of the traditional elements of fiction and in doing so composes a sort of musical composition of obsessive consciousness and selfhood’s slippage. This haunting novel never takes the easy route and baffles and confounds on its way toward a stunning yet inevitable finale.
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The Passing of Peregrinus. The Runaways. Toxaris or Friendship. The Dance. Lexiphanes. The Eunuch. Astrology. The Mistaken Critic. The Parliament of the Gods. The Tyrannicide. Disowned
Lucian
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s satirist supreme.

Lucian (ca. AD 120–190), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful traveling lecturer before settling in Athens and developing his original brand of satire. Late in life he fell on hard times and accepted an official post in Egypt.

Although notable for the Attic purity and elegance of his Greek and his literary versatility, Lucian is chiefly famed for the lively, cynical wit of the humorous dialogues in which he satirizes human folly, superstition, and hypocrisy. His aim was to amuse rather than to instruct. Among his best works are A True Story (the tallest of tall tales about a voyage to the moon), Dialogues of the Gods (a "reductio ad absurdum" of traditional mythology), Dialogues of the Dead (on the vanity of human wishes), Philosophies for Sale (great philosophers of the past are auctioned off as slaves), The Fisherman (the degeneracy of modern philosophers), The Carousal or Symposium (philosophers misbehave at a party), Timon (the problems of being rich), Twice Accused (Lucian's defense of his literary career) and (if by Lucian) The Ass (the amusing adventures of a man who is turned into an ass).

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Lucian is in eight volumes.

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The Past Leads a Life of Its Own
Wayne Fields
University of Chicago Press, 1997
The Past Leads a Life of Its Own is a compelling collection of stories centered around one boy's childhood in the rural midwest in the 1950s, his love of nature, his family, and their often nomadic existence.

"Going through these pages quickly would be like chug-a-lugging a jar of honey fresh from the comb, or wolfing down a slow-cured, hickory-smoked country ham. It is a rich and complexly flavored work of fiction, a book to be savored."—Harper Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Set against the rhythms of nature, Fields's 16 luminous, interrelated stories celebrate a boy's coming-of-age. . . . The beauty of these deeply felt stories lies in their spare, ear-perfect language and in quiet epiphanies."—Publishers Weekly

"[A] beautifully subtle work. . . . Here are a series of vignettes, each capturing some moment in nature, poetic and ethereal. . . . [They] are like stones skipping on water, capturing the struggles of a family leaving one way of life behind for another, Fields remembers the feeling of a time and a place gone forever."—Library Journal
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Past Titan Rock
Journeys into an Appalachian Valley
Ellesa Clay High
West Virginia University Press, 2021
A classic book about Appalachian life and music, now updated with new material.

Past Titan Rock, a winner of the Appalachian Award for Literature, is available in a new edition as part of the series Sounding Appalachia, with an introduction by series editor Travis D. Stimeling.

In 1977 Ellesa Clay High thought she would spend an afternoon interviewing Lily May Ledford, best known as the lead performer of an all-female string band that began playing on the radio in the 1930s. That meeting began an unexpected journey leading into the mountains of eastern Kentucky and a hundred years into the past. Set in Red River Gorge, an area of steep ridges and box canyons, Past Titan Rock is a multigenre, multivocal re-creation of life in that region. With Ledford’s guidance, High traveled and lived in the gorge, visiting with people who could remember life there before the Works Progress Administration built roads across the ridges and into the valleys during the New Deal. What emerges through a unique combination of personal essay, oral history, and short fiction is a portrait of a mountain culture rich in custom, oral tradition, and song. Past Titan Rock demonstrates the depth of community ties in the Red River Gorge and raises important questions about how to resist destructive forces today.
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The Paternity Test
A Novel
Michael Lowenthal
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Pat Faunce yearns for more than his carefree New York life and his open relationship with Stu, an airline pilot. Above all, he wants to be a father. He persuades a reluctant Stu to move to Cape Cod, where they enlist Debora, a charismatic Brazilian immigrant, as a surrogate mother. But the men's attempt to have a child creates new emotional complications—with Stu's parents and sister, with Debora and her husband, and with each other. Building to a harrowing conclusion, this fearless, darkly funny novel asks whether making a new family is worth risking the one you have.
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The Path and the Gate
Mormon Short Fiction
Andrew Hall
Signature Books, 2023
The Book of Mormon prophet Nephi describes the journey to eternal life as going through a gate of ordinances and traveling a “straight and narrow path.” Twenty-three authors took that gospel roadmap passage as a prompt to write “a Mormon story.” They responded with a surprisingly wide range of realistic and fantastic tales. Many are human reactions to unexpected steps on the path: a lifetime of faith in a patriarchal blessing’s unfulfilled promise, a survivor of violence calling a divided community to repentance, a baptism gone very wrong, and spiritual gifts that extend far beyond the apostle Paul’s list. The characters stretch from wayward bishops and helpful home teachers to cyber-­Seventies searching for lost sheep in the metaverse, with settings from the slums of Mumbai to a heaven that turns out to be more difficult than expected. Some characters reject the path’s restrictions and expectations, while others can second the reported words of J. Golden Kimball, “I may not always walk the straight and narrow, but I sure in hell try to cross it as often as I can.”
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The Pathfinder
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press, 2014

In 1831, James Fenimore Cooper told his publisher that he wanted to write a story set on Lake Ontario. The book was accepted, but with no hint that it would feature Natty Bumppo from the well-established Leather-Stocking Tales. The Pathfinder (1840) revisits Natty’s military service, extending a story begun in The Last of the Mohicans, and introduces the complications of love against the backdrop of the French and Indian War. Wayne Franklin’s introduction describes the personal and financial circumstances that led to Cooper’s resurrection of his most popular character, underscoring the author’s aim to offer Natty as a “Pathfinder” for a nation he feared had lost its moral bearings.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the text of The Pathfinder from The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (State University of New York Press).

Since 1959 The John Harvard Library has been instrumental in publishing essential American writings in authoritative editions.

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Pathologies
The Downfall of Johan van Vere de With
Jacob Isräel de Haan
Seagull Books, 2024
One of the first novels to openly explore gay love and eroticism, Pathologies is a lost classic that is now translated into English for the first time.
 
At the start of the twentieth century, Jewish anti-Zionist Jacob Israël de Haan led an eventful life as a poet, journalist, teacher, and lawyer in the Netherlands. His autobiographical novella Pipelines caused a storm of controversy in 1904 with its portrayal of a subject that was considered scandalous at the time—a romantic relationship between two young men. He lost his teaching job, and the entire print run was pulped.
 
In his iconic 1908 novel Pathologies, he once again openly and radically explored the topic of homosexuality. The story centers around adolescent Johan, who lives a secluded life with his father and their elderly housekeeper in a large house. For a while, Johan has been plagued by erotic fantasies about his classmates. When, to make matters worse, he finds himself feeling attracted to his father—first in a dream, and then in real life—he grows desperate. Johan moves out, finding room and board with an older married couple in Haarlem, where he meets René, a young confident artist. Johan falls head-over-heels in love, and the two men enter a sadomasochistic relationship that soon begins to spiral out of control.
 
Johan is one of world literature’s most tragic, troubled young heroes, at par with Goethe’s Werther and Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. His struggle to come to terms with his fantasies and desires—rife with taboos that continue to resonate today—forms the beating heart of this daring novel. Written in De Haan’s precise, lyrical prose, Pathologies has lost none of its force more than a century after it was first published.
 
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Peltse and Pentameron
Volodymyr Dibrova
Northwestern University Press, 1996
In these two novellas, Volodymyr Dibrova tells the story of how the Soviet system was sustained by individuals who never truly believed in it, but simply lacked the courage to oppose it.

Peltse portrays the formation of an average apparatchik. Both funny and alarming, it provides a psychological portrait of an individual trapped in a system he simultaneously dislikes and depends upon for survival. Pentameron tells the story of one day in the life of five colleagues at a Soviet research institute. Each is dissatisfied, yet all are trapped in and by a system that has taken away their ability to act decisively.
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Peony Red
A Case for Milena Lukin
Christian Schünemann and Jelena Volic
Haus Publishing, 2018
In the Balkans, there is a saying: only where the ground was once soaked with blood will the peony bloom with its full, dizzying red.
            When a young couple is murdered in their home in Kosovo, police are perplexed: there seems to be no motive. But when Milena Lukin’s uncle realizes that the murdered woman was his first love, his niece decides to investigate. All too soon, she is embroiled in the twisted world of Balkan politics, where the past always weighs heavy on the present, and nowhere more so than in her hometown of Belgrade. Old prejudices and new hatreds, merciless profiteers and mendacious politicians—all come together to try to keep Lukin from finding the truth.
            A fast-paced, deftly told thriller Peony Red drops readers into the murky Balkan underworld. Fortunately, in Milena Lukin, they have a strong, capable, no-nonsense guide, one whose adventures will always keep the pages turning. 
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The People from Heaven
John Sanford
University of Illinois Press, 1996
An extraordinary novel, told partly in verse, The People from Heaven takes place in 1943 in Warrensburg, New York, where Eli Bishop, a white shopkeeper, initiates a reign of terror on the populace following his rape of America Smith, a black woman. The author, John Sanford, is considered by many to be one of the finest little-known writers of the twentieth century. In his introduction, Alan Wald provides an overview of Sanford's career, his art, and his politics.
 
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People Of The Valley
A Novel
Frank Waters
Ohio University Press, 1941

One of Frank Waters’s most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.

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The Perfect Murder
A Study in Detection
David Lehman
University of Michigan Press, 2000
In this lively, enjoyable look at the best American and British detective fiction, David Lehman investigates the mystery of mysteries: the profound satisfactions we get from evil, disorder, mayhem, and deception--that we know will be put right by the last page.
As Lehman shows, the detective story draws deeply from ancient storytelling traditions. The mystery's conventions--the locked room, the clue "hidden" in plain sight, the diabolical double, the villainous least likely subject--work on us as childhood fairy tales do; they prey upon our darkest fears, taking us to the brink of the unbearable before restoring a comforting sense of order. The myth of Oedipus, for example, contains the essential elements of a whodunit, with the twist that the murderer the detective pursues is himself.
With their wisecracking gumshoe heroes, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler fashioned an existential romance out of the detective novel. More recent writers such as Ross MacDonald, P. D. James, and Ruth Rendell have raised the genre to a new level of psychological sophistication. Yet the form evolves still, and Lehman guides us to the epistemological riddles of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, who challenge the notion of a knowable truth. Originally published in 1989, this new edition features an additional chapter on the mystery novels of the 1990s.
"A lively study of the development and varieties of the detective story since Poe, its relations with other forms high and low, and the latter-day appropriation of its techniques by such writers as Borges and Eco. . . . A thoroughly intelligent and readable book." --Richard Wilbur, Pulitzer-Prize winning poet
David Lehman is the series editor of both the The Best American Poetry, published by Scribner, and the Poets on Poetry series published by the University of Michigan Press. He is a former Guggenheim Fellow in poetry, a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the author of several books of criticism and collections of poems.
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A Perfect Vacuum
Stanislaw Lem
Northwestern University Press, 1999
In A Perfect Vacuum, Stanislaw Lem presents a collection of book reviews of nonexistent works of literature--works that, in many cases, could not possibly be written. Embracing postmodernism's "games for games' sake" ethos, Lem joins the contest with hilarious and grotesque results, lampooning the movement's self-indulgence and exploiting its mannerisms.

Beginning with a review of his own book, Lem moves on to tackles (or create pastiches of) the French new novel, James Joyce, pornography, authorless writing, and Dostoevsky, while at the same time ranging across scientific topics, from cosmology to the pervasiveness of computers. The result is a metafictional tour de force by one of the world's most popular writers.
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Perfection in Bad Axe
Stories
Stories by Craig Bernthal
University of Missouri Press, 2003

You could find out anything at Jim's, and Larry and I liked to be in the know. Information (not gossip) was passed back and forth constantly. Did you hear about the four couples engaged in "wife- swapping" in town? The mechanics and gas pumpers at Jim's could fill you in. Were you interested in the last time the Baptist minister beat his wife? Who your cute French teacher slept with a couple nights ago? Jim's had the answers. The place held another attraction for me: if you were under twenty-one and wanting some liquor for Friday night, Jim's son, Jimmy the Bomb, just out of the Marine Corps, had no problem picking up a bottle or two for you at the liquor store on the east side of town.

Set mainly in the Midwest, these tales are inhabited by ordinary, decent people who, often to their surprise, find joy and meaning under difficult circumstances. Many of the stories depict isolated moments of perfection in a world that routinely forces its imperfections on us. A teenager wrestles with guilt over an accident he caused in “Perfection in Bad Axe.” In “A Knight Pursued,” a young prosecuting attorney confronts on the same day his first autopsy and his wife’s unexpected desire to have a baby. A devout, hardworking business owner is drawn into a lawsuit that threatens his marriage and leads him to question his most deeply felt principles. “Center of Gravity” finds a middle-aged law professor overcome by his chaotic life and searching for a degree of peace. These are the finely developed characters of Bernthal’s stories—people we recognize, but who never seem overly familiar. Interesting, substantial, and utterly engrossing, each one could be just like any one of us, an ordinary Jane or Joe, trying to maintain or find order in a life sometimes filled with disorder.

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Performance Art
Stories
David Kranes
University of Nevada Press, 2021
Part of our socialization is the urge to perform. We perform images of ourselves for others. For some, the urge is so great and the talent sufficient that we become performers. Performance Art is a series of short stories about performers and performances that are extreme—fire-eaters, knife-throwers, stand-up comedians, escape-artists, weight-loss artists—why we watch them, and why they do what they do. David Kranes dives into the inner lives of these risk-takers, exploring the allures and the costs of “performance.”  His characters are unpredictable, quirky, and sometimes bizarre, but Kranes also reveals their humanity and insecurities. The result is a collection that is engagingly unique, sometimes comical, ironic, heart-tugging, and full of unexpected insights and delights.
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Peripheries
A Journal of Word, Image, and Sound, No. 6
Sherah Bloor
Harvard University Press, 2024
Peripheries, No. 6, spans the senses with music, choreography, painting, sculpture, archival material, short stories, and poetry by Victoria Chang, Angie Estes, Aracelis Girmay, Joanna Klink, Alice Oswald, Rowan Ricardo Philips, Tracy K. Smith, and many more. The journal also includes a special folio, “Anti-Letters,” which comprises the “personal” writings—ephemera, letters, lists, notes, recordings, etc.—of poets such as Cody-Rose Clevidence, Jill Magi, and Jane Miller, among others. The issue also features a review by Tawanda Mulalu, creative nonfiction from Jackie Wang, a mixed media collaboration between Sharon Olds and Sam Messer, a David Grubbs composition with an accompaniment by Susan Howe, and an excerpt from a book-length poem by Geoffrey Nutter.
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Permanent Visitors
Kevin Moffett
University of Iowa Press, 2006
Settled amid the seasonal amusements and condominium-lined beaches of the Florida coast, the characters who inhabit Kevin Moffett’s award-winning stories reach out of their lives to find that something unexpected and mysterious has replaced what used to be familiar.Some are stalled in the present, alone or lonely, bemused by mortality and disappointment. Some move toward the future heartened by what they learn from those around them--a tattoo artist, an invented medicine man, zoo animals, strangers, fellow outsiders. Deftly rendered, these stories abound with oddness and grace.In “Tattooizm,” included in The Best American Short Stories 2006, a young woman struggles with a promise that her boyfriend is determined to make her keep. In the Nelson Algren Award–winning “Space,” a reluctantly undertaken errand forces a young man to finally confront the death of his mother. And in “The Medicine Man,” hailed by the Times (U.K.) as “perfectly pitched and perfectly written,” a man recounts his manic attachment to his sister.Moffett’s closely observed stories are candid and complex, funny and moving. The world of Permanent Visitors is an idiosyncratic and generous one, its inhabitants searching for constancy in a place crowded with contradiction.
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The Perp Walk
Jim Ray Daniels
Michigan State University Press, 2019
In The Perp Walk, his latest collection of linked stories, Daniels maps out the emotional capitals and potholes of coming of age in a blue-collar town in the Great Lakes State, though it could be any state where people work hard, play hard, and aren’t paid nearly enough for their efforts. Alternating flash fiction pieces with longer narratives, Daniels captures both the shooting stars and the constellations that build into earned insights and honest reflections. Sometimes we need both the long version of the short version and the short version of the long version, he suggests. Daniels invites his readers to settle on some truth in between the versions. Humor and heartbreak. Coming to terms, coming of age, or just plain aging. U-Haul trucks full of bad behavior and messy goodbyes. In Daniels’s work, the check is always in the mail but somehow never arrives, and honor is more than a certificate—it’s something we strive for, even while doing our various perp walks through life. Compromises are made, as they must be. Sometimes we get what we want for just a second or two, but for these characters, that has to be enough happiness to live on.
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Personae
A Novel
Sergio De La Pava
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Sergio De La Pava’s A Naked Singularity was one of the most highly praised debut novels in decades. The Wall Street Journal called it “a propulsive, mind-bending experience,” and named it one of the ten best books of the year. The Toronto Star did the same, calling it “a great American novel: large, ambitious, and full of talk.” In Slate, Paul Ford proclaimed,“It’s a fine thing for an author to bring forth something so unapologetically maximalist.”
 
This book is nothing like that one. Just look at it: A Naked Singularity was a brick of a book, 678 pages, and this one’s slim--lean and focused. A Naked Singularity locked us into the unforgettable voice of its protagonist, Casi, while Personae shimmers and shifts among different perspectives, locations, and narrative techniques.

But sharp readers will quickly see that the two books are the work of the same hand. The sheer energy of De La Pava’s sentences, his eye for absurd humor, his commitment to the idea of justice--all will be familiar here as they carry us from the tale of an obsessive, damaged psychic detective consumed by a murder case, into a Sartrean drama that raises questions (and jokes) about responsibility, fate, death, and more. And when De La Pava eventually returns us to the investigation, this time seen from the other side, the lives and deaths bound up in it feel all the more real, and moving, even as solid answers slip away into mist.

Shelf Awareness
declared that A Naked Singularity "heralded the arrival of a tremendous talent." In some ways, despite its brevity, Personae is even more surprising and challenging--and, in its ambition and fierce intelligence, it’s proof that Sergio De La Pava is here to stay.

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Personality Plus
Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock
Edna Ferber
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Edna Ferber, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Show Boat and Giant, achieved her first great success with a series of stories featuring Emma McChesney: a smart, stylish, divorced mother who in a mere twelve years rose from stenographer to traveling sales representative to business manager and partner of the T. A. Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.
 
In this second of three volumes chronicling the travels and trials of Emma McChesney, the plucky heroine trades in her traveling bag and coach tickets for an office and a position a T. A. Buck Jr.'s business partner. Along with this well-earned promotion comes the home–-with a fireplace–-that she had longed for during her ten years on the road.      
 
Her dashing son Jock, now twenty-one, has just entered the business world himself with the Berg, Shriner Advertising company. His colleagues believe that with his heritage he "ought to be able to sell ice to an eskimo." Indeed, Jock dazzles them with his keen business sense and exemplary work ethic, but goes overboard on the charm and ends up alienating clients, unnerving his boss, and even patronizing his business-savvy mother. When his company takes on the challenge of  creating a zippy advertising campaign for T. A. Buck's no-frills petticoats, Jock comes through, but not without a reminder that mother always knows best.
 
In this bracingly modern novel, first published in 1914, Ferber contrasts the virtues of talent with those of experience to provide a fresh, readable, and smartly entertaining contest between a mother and her adult son.
 
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Persuasion
An Annotated Edition
Jane Austen
Harvard University Press, 2011

Published posthumously with Northanger Abbey in 1817, Persuasion crowns Jane Austen’s remarkable career. It is her most passionate and introspective love story. This richly illustrated and annotated edition brings her last completed novel to life with previously unmatched vitality. In the same format that so rewarded readers of Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, it offers running commentary on the novel (conveniently placed alongside Austen’s text) to explain difficult words, allusions, and contexts, while bringing together critical observations and scholarship for an enhanced reading experience. The abundance of color illustrations allows the reader to see the characters, locations, clothing, and carriages of the novel, as well as the larger political and historical events that shape its action.

In his Introduction, distinguished scholar Robert Morrison examines the broken engagement between Anne Elliot and Frederick Wentworth, and the ways in which they wander from one another even as their enduring feelings draw them steadily back together. His notes constitute the most sustained critical commentary ever brought to bear on the novel and explicate its central conflicts as well as its relationship to Austen’s other works, and to those of her major contemporaries, including Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and Maria Edgeworth.

Specialists, Janeites, and first-time readers alike will treasure this annotated and beautifully illustrated edition, which does justice to the elegance and depth of Jane Austen’s time-bound and timeless story of loneliness, missed opportunities, and abiding love.

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Perverzion
Yuri Andrukhovych
Northwestern University Press, 2005
What was the fate of Stanislav Perfetsky—poet, provocateur, and hero of Ukrainian underground culture? Evidence points to suicide. But some whisper murder. Some suggest the grand Eastern European tradition of coerced suicide. It may even be related to the religious cult ceremony he happened upon in Munich . . . or that job as a dancer in a strip club for older women.

Or, then again, it may not.

Perverzion constructs Perfetsky's final days using a mishmash of relics, from official documents to recorded interviews to scraps of paper. Perfetsky, the personification of the Ukrainian artistic superman—he used his masterful musicianship in a collaboration with Elton John during the pop star's secret sojourn in Ukraine—is bound for Venice to participate in a seminar to save the world from absurdity. On the way he becomes a Ukrainian Orpheus descending into the decadence of the West, navigating through surrealistic adventures and no less surrealistic seminar topics as he charges head up (and pants down) toward his fate.
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The Pet Thief
Kassten Alonso
University of Alabama Press, 2013
The Pet Thief is a dystopian fable of science, rebellion, humankind’s inhumanity, and the struggle for identity and survival in a post-human world.
 
When scientists, the government, and venture capitalists conspire to hybridize humans with animals—cats, specifically—for organ harvesting, drug testing, and military applications, the experiment is an irredeemable failure, producing human-like beings with uncanny abilities who are nonetheless fundamentally defective.

Oboy and his mentor/tormentor Freda are two wayward hybrids, “cat people,” who have escaped with others to the depths of a rundown European city being leveled for reconstruction. They are members of a street gang led by an ominous leader called Swan.

Oboy is unable to think or speak except in mimicry, but he is a physical savant, which serves Freda’s mission. Enraged at what has been done to her, Freda wants to “rescue” every pet she can. When Oboy returns with a human baby after his first solo outing, their world and the truths of their existence come unraveled.

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Peter Never Came
Ashley Cowger
Autumn House Press, 2011
The characters in Ashley Cowger's short stories learn to accept the fear, the regret, and the beauty of growing up in a world where Peter Pan will never come. The lives portrayed here are firmly planted in reality, a place where dreams loom only as hope on a farway horizon.
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Phalaris. Hippias or The Bath. Dionysus. Heracles. Amber or The Swans. The Fly. Nigrinus. Demonax. The Hall. My Native Land. Octogenarians. A True Story. Slander. The Consonants at Law. The Carousal (Symposium) or The Lapiths
Lucian
Harvard University Press

Antiquity’s satirist supreme.

Lucian (ca. AD 120–190), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful traveling lecturer before settling in Athens and developing his original brand of satire. Late in life he fell on hard times and accepted an official post in Egypt.

Although notable for the Attic purity and elegance of his Greek and his literary versatility, Lucian is chiefly famed for the lively, cynical wit of the humorous dialogues in which he satirizes human folly, superstition, and hypocrisy. His aim was to amuse rather than to instruct. Among his best works are A True Story (the tallest of tall tales about a voyage to the moon), Dialogues of the Gods (a "reductio ad absurdum" of traditional mythology), Dialogues of the Dead (on the vanity of human wishes), Philosophies for Sale (great philosophers of the past are auctioned off as slaves), The Fisherman (the degeneracy of modern philosophers), The Carousal or Symposium (philosophers misbehave at a party), Timon (the problems of being rich), Twice Accused (Lucian's defense of his literary career) and (if by Lucian) The Ass (the amusing adventures of a man who is turned into an ass).

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Lucian is in eight volumes.

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The Phantom of the Temple
A Judge Dee Mystery
Robert van Gulik
University of Chicago Press, 1966
Judge Dee presided over his imperial Chinese court with a unique brand of Confucian justice. A near mythic figure in China, he distinguished himself as a tribunal magistrate, inquisitor, and public avenger. Long after his death, accounts of his exploits were celebrated in Chinese folklore, and later immortalized by Robert van Gulik in his electrifying mysteries.

In The Phantom of the Temple, three separate puzzles—the disappearance of a wealthy merchant's daughter, twenty missing bars of gold, and a decapitated corpse—are pieced together by the clever judge to solve three murders and one complex, gruesome plot.
 
“Judge Dee belongs in that select group of fictional detectives headed by the renowned Sherlock Holmes. I assure you it is a compliment not given frivolously.”—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

Robert Van Gulik (1910-67) was a Dutch diplomat and an authority on Chinese history and culture. He drew his plots from the whole body of Chinese literature, especially from the popular detective novels that first appeared in the seventeenth century.
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The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
Floyd Skloot
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
On a street in Dorchester, England, there is a gateway between real and imagined lives. A plaque identifies a Barclays Bank building as “lived in by the Mayor of Casterbridge in Thomas Hardy’s story of that name written in 1885.”
In this imaginative novel, worlds continue to collide as Floyd, an American writer recovering from a devastating neuro-viral attack, and his wife, Beverly, immerse themselves in Hardy’s world. While pondering the enigma of a fictional character living in a factual building, Floyd is approached by Hardy himself—despite his death in 1928.
            This phantom—possibly conjured out of Floyd’s damaged brain—tasks the Americans with finding out what Hardy missed in love. Embarking on their quest, they visit Hardy’s birthplace, home, and grave, exploring the Dorset landscape and the famous novels with their themes of tormented love. Peering into the Victorian past, they slowly dismantle the clutter of screens that Hardy placed around his private life, even as their own love story unfolds, filled with healing and hope.
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Photographic Memories
Selected Essays, Playlets, and Stories
Willy Conley
Gallaudet University Press, 2023
Photographic Memories is an anthology of essays, playlets, and short fiction by writer and photographer Willy Conley. The pieces in this collection are grounded in Deaf experiences, a hallmark of Conley’s work. Written from the unique perspective of a Deaf artist who navigates between the Deaf and hearing worlds, Conley depicts a variety of topics, settings, and characters: a day in the life of a traveling Deaf theater company, a nail salon, a baseball player trying to go pro. Conley also addresses critical issues at the heart of his Deaf identity, such as creating professional opportunities for Deaf theater artists, the need for better standards in sign language interpreting, and ableism.

Original photographs taken by the author accompany his writings and invite the reader to contemplate the often-blurred lines between reality and memory.
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The Physics of Imaginary Objects
Tina May Hall
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010

Winner of the 2010 Drue Heinz Literature Prize

The Physics of Imaginary Objects,  in fifteen stories and a novella, offers a very different kind of short fiction, blending story with verse to evoke fantasy, allegory, metaphor, love, body, mind, and nearly every sensory perception. Weaving in and out of the space that connects life and death in mysterious ways, these texts use carefully honed language that suggests a newfound spirituality.

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The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860
Volume Nine, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1987
In this new edition of The Piazza Tales, the editors of the acclaimed Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville have used the original magazine versions for five of the six stories in order to present the most accurate tests of these works. Here, in such famous stories as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," we find Melville's imagination and style at its best. Of the less well known tales, the humor in "The Piazza" and "The Lightning-Rod Man," and the gothic horror of "The Bell Tower," command attention as well. Whether in the exotic Galapagos or the more familiar climes of Wall Street or a Massachusetts farmhouse, Melville's power and imagination transport the reader into his unique worlds.

This scholarly edition presents texts as close to the author's intentions as surviving evidence permits. Based on surviving manuscripts, on original newspaper and magazine printings, and on collations of magazine printings with the book of editions of The Piazza Tales, the text incorporates over 800 emendations by the editors and over 200 from later printings during Melville's lifetime.

This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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The Piazza Tales
Volume Nine
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1996
In this new edition of The Piazza Tales, the editors of the acclaimed Northwestern-Newberry Edition of the Writings of Herman Melville have used the original magazine versions for five of the six stories in order to present the most accurate tests of these works. Here, in such famous stories as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," we find Melville's imagination and style at its best. Of the less well-known tales, the humor in "The Piazza" and "The Lightning-Rod Man," and the gothic horror of "The Bell Tower," command attention as well. Whether in the exotic Galapagos or the more familiar climes of Wall Street or a Massachusetts farmhouse, Melville's power and imagination transport the reader into his unique worlds.

This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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The Pictograph Murders
P. G. Karamasines
Signature Books, 2004
 Alex McKelvey longs to fit in. She doesn’t realize that her earth-mother style—the connections she feels toward the earth and to a certain eerie pictograph panel—sets her off from the crowd. Wanting only to enjoy the beauty of the Utah desert, she packs up her gear and her Siberian husky, Kit, and joins an archaeological dig. But when the site’s owner vanishes, forces combine to sweep up Alex and Kit in a whirlwind of pot hunting, witchcraft, and murder. Who is that stranger who suddenly appears, styling himself on the folklore figure Coyote? His ability to draw the best—and the worst—from Alex leads her to the dismaying discovery that the villain she seeks is closer at hand than she had thought.
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Picture Books for Children
Fiction, Folktales, and Poetry
Mary Northrup
American Library Association, 2012

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The Picture of Dorian Gray
An Annotated, Uncensored Edition
Oscar Wilde
Harvard University Press, 2011

The Picture of Dorian Gray altered the way Victorians understood the world they inhabited. It heralded the end of a repressive Victorianism, and after its publication, literature had—in the words of biographer Richard Ellmann—“a different look.” Yet the Dorian Gray that Victorians never knew was even more daring than the novel the British press condemned as “vulgar,” “unclean,” “poisonous,” “discreditable,” and “a sham.” Now, more than 120 years after Wilde handed it over to his publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, Wilde’s uncensored typescript is published for the first time, in an annotated, extensively illustrated edition.

The novel’s first editor, J. M. Stoddart, excised material—especially homosexual content—he thought would offend his readers’ sensibilities. When Wilde enlarged the novel for the 1891 edition, he responded to his critics by further toning down its “immoral” elements. The differences between the text Wilde submitted to Lippincott and published versions of the novel have until now been evident to only the handful of scholars who have examined Wilde's typescript.

Wilde famously said that Dorian Gray “contains much of me”: Basil Hallward is “what I think I am,” Lord Henry “what the world thinks me,” and “Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.” Wilde’s comment suggests a backward glance to a Greek or Dorian Age, but also a forward-looking view to a more permissive time than his own, which saw Wilde sentenced to two years’ hard labor for gross indecency. The appearance of Wilde’s uncensored text is cause for celebration.

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Pictures from an Institution
A Comedy
Randall Jarrell
University of Chicago Press, 2010

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire—and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker’s razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College—mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself. 
 

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The Pied Piper
Viktor Dyk
Karolinum Press, 2018
For The Pied Piper, Czech writer Viktor Dyk found his muse in the much retold medieval Saxon legend of the villainous, pipe-playing rat-catcher. Dyk uses the tale as a loose frame for his story of a mysterious wanderer, outcast, and would-be revolutionary—a dreamer typical of fin de siècle Czech literature who serves Dyk as a timely expression of the conflict between the petty concerns of bourgeois nineteenth-century society and the coming artistic generation. Impeccably rendered into English by Mark Corner, The Pied Piper retains the beautiful style of Dyk’s original Czech. The inspiration for several theatrical and film adaptations, including a noted animated work from critically acclaimed director Jiří Barta, Dyk’s classical novella is given new life by Corner’s translation, proving that the piper is open to new interpretations still.
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Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Volume Seven
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1995
Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, Pierre has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Ulysses. None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

When Pierre Glendinning's lifelong desire for a sister is seemingly realized on the eve of his marriage, his world is suddenly turned upside down, for he must choose between acknowledging his illegitimate half-sister or perpetuating his unsullied family legacy. Melville unfolds the story of an idealistic young man whose steadfast beliefs lead him to destroy his world and himself.
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Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Volume Seven, Scholarly Edition
Herman Melville
Northwestern University Press, 1971
Initially dismissed as "a dead failure" and "a bad book," and declined by Melville's British publisher, Pierre, or The Ambiguities has since struck critics as modern in its psychological probings and literary technique--fit, as Carl Van Vechten said in 1922, to be ranked with The Golden Bowl, Women in Love, and Ulysses. None of Melville's other "secondary" works has so regularly been acknowledged by its most thorough critics as a work of genuine grandeur, however flawed.

This scholarly edition aims to present a text as close to the author's intention as the surviving evidence permits. Based on collations of the two issues and the two impressions of the single edition publishing in Melville's lifetime, it incorporates necessary emendations made by the series editors. This text of Pierre is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).
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Pike's Peak
A Mining Saga
Frank Waters
Ohio University Press, 1987
During the fabulous reign of Colorado Silver, innumerable prospectors passed by Pike’s Peak on their way to the silver strikes at Leadville, Aspen, and the boom camps in the Saguache, Sangre de Cristo, and San Juan mountain. Then, in 1890, a carpenter named Winfield Scott Stratton discovered gold along Cripple Creek. By 1900, this six square mile area on the south slope of Pike’s Peak supported 475 mines and led the world in gold production. Against this backdrop of frenzied mining and gold fever, Pike’s Peak tells the story of Joseph Rogier, a man who seeks and finds his fortune in Colorado, and then loses everything in pursuit of something more important.

Arriving in Colorado Springs in the 1870s, Rogier becomes a successful contractor and builder and helps to raise a little mountain town into the Saratoga of the west. He rears a large family and scoffs at the “alfalfa miners” chasing silver strikes everywhere. But with the discovery of gold at nearby Cripple Creek, Rogier is shaken and methodically squanders his prosperous business and all his property attempting to reach the “great gold heart” of Pike’s Peak.

Waters’ is a psychologically modern novel whose universal theme is expressed on the grand scale of the opening of a territory. It is both a marvelously colorful and detailed account of the days when Colorado boomed and Denver became a big town, and an allegory of one man's furious pursuit of the truth within himself.
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Pilgrims 2.0
A Novel
Lindsey Harding
Acre Books, 2023
A novel following four passengers on a luxury cruise line that promises complete reinvention through plastic surgery.

PILGRIM, Canterbury Cruise Line’s flagship, promises its passengers not just a luxurious fortnight away but the opportunity for reinvention. This extraordinary journey is made possible by the captain and visionary plastic surgeon Dr. Walter Heston, by the vessel’s self-learning artificial intelligence called BECCA, and an all-male crew of room stewards, deck hands, technicians, and cosmetic practitioners.

Pilgrims 2.0 begins on the eve of Cruise #52 and follows four women eager for transformation. Meet Bianca, the aging athlete determined to resume the competitive tennis career that motherhood sidelined. Meet Nicole, whose mommy makeover will mean she can stop hiding herself, and her debt, from her husband. Meet Lyla, an infertile maternity-ward nurse desperate to experience pregnancy, and Annalie, who wants only to stop seeing her dead twin every time she looks in the mirror. At the center of the story is Dr. Heston himself, driven to do with bodies what his late wife, Rebecca, could do with computer code—make the impossible, possible.

But “excursions” like these aren’t always smooth sailing—especially on this voyage, where the hopes, histories, and obsessions of clients and crew members collide. When a disruptive crewman’s pranks turn dangerous, it becomes clear that some of those who embarked won’t return to the Port of Los Angeles—at least not fully, at least not as themselves, and maybe not with their lives.
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The Pillows
Benny Andersen
Northwestern University Press, 1983
A collection of 16 uniquely funny short stories by acclaimed Danish poet Benny Andersen. 
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PINNICK KINNICK HILL
AN AMERICAN STORY
By G. W. González, Edited by Mark Brazaitis, with a Preface by Suronda González, with a Spanish translation Las colinas sueñan en español by Daniel Ferreras
West Virginia University Press, 2006

Nearly a century ago, hundreds of families journeyed from Spain to the United States, to search for a better life in the growing zinc-industry towns of Harrison County, West Virginia. As they created a new culture and a new home in this strange land, they added another thread to the rich fabric of our nation. Writing from his perspective as a first-generation son of this immigrant community, González recounts his childhood memories of his neighborhood, where these immigrants raised their families, worked in the often insufferable conditions of the zinc factories, and celebrated "romerias" and feast days with their neighbors.

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Pins and Needles
Stories
Karen Brown
University of Massachusetts Press, 2007
In Pins and Needles, Karen Brown explores love and loss between mother and child, husband and wife, close friends, and virtual strangers. In many of these stories, Brown shows how love emerges as infidelity—incongruous and disruptive, threatening the stability of daily life.

In "She Fell to Her Knees," Nell inherits the neglected house in which her mother died years before, and begins an affair with the neighbor. The narrator of "Apparitions," who has recently returned the blind grandson she was raising to the care of his mother, invites a confused young man into her home. In "The Ropewalk," a bartender haunted by her abandonment of her own child aids a customer in a struggle for custody of her daughters. A pregnant teenager in "Unction" comes to accept the reality of her situation while working a summer job counting parts in a bookbinding machine shop. Annie, the young mother with a tragic past in "Pins and Needles," leaves her infant daughter to go on an errand in a snowstorm, and picks up a boy she doesn't know.

What remains a constant in these stories is the tangible presence of the natural world. Each story moves toward the moment in which its characters, navigating loss, learn acceptance. Like the single mother in "Destiny," they see their lives happen—"all around, just then, forever.
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The Pioneers
James Fenimore Cooper
Harvard University Press, 2011

With The Pioneers (1823), Cooper initiated his series of elegiac romances of frontier life and introduced the world to Natty Bumppo (or Leather-stocking). Set in 1793 in New York State, the novel depicts an aging Leather-stocking negotiating his way in a restlessly expanding society. In his introduction, Robert Daly argues for the novel’s increasing relevance: we live in a similarly complex society as Cooper’s frontier world, faced with the same questions about the limits of individualism, the need for voluntary cooperation, and stewardship of the environment.

The John Harvard Library edition reproduces the authoritative text of The Pioneers in the The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, published by the State University of New York Press.

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Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp
An Interview-Novel with Questions Asked and Answers Recorded by László Szigeti
Bohumil Hrabal
Karolinum Press, 2008
Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914–97) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point, he quickly made his mark on the Czech literary scene; by his death he was ranked with Jaroslav Hašek, Karel Capek, and Milan Kundera as among the nation’s greatest twentieth-century writers. Known for writing about political questions with humor and vivid expressiveness, Hrabal also was given to experimentation—his early novel Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, for example, consists of a single extended sentence.
Pirouettes on a Postage Stamp carried Hrabal’s experimentation to the field of autobiography. On its surface a verbatim record of an oral interview conducted by Hungarian journalist László Szigeti, the book confuses and confounds with false starts, digressions, and philosophical asides. Yet despite all the games and distractions, Hrabal’s personality shines through, compelling and unforgettable, making Pirouette on a Postage Stamp an unexpected treat for any lover of Czech literature. 
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The Pistol
James Jones
University of Chicago Press, 2003
As bombs begin to fall on Pearl Harbor, nineteen-year-old PFC Richard Mask is wearing a pistol, a .45 caliber automatic that makes him feel connected to the army of the Wild West and Custer's Cavalry. In the chaos of his first days and weeks of the war, as Mask and his company move from Schofield Barracks to the beaches of Oahu, then to a remote mountain pass, a struggle over the pistol dominates this novella's action, providing the pathos and savagery of the story.
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Pixel
Krisztina Tóth
Seagull Books, 2018
Like stars in the sky, pixels may seem like tiny, individual points. But, when viewed from a distance, they can create elaborate images. Each pixel contributes to this array, but no individual point can create the whole. The thirty stories that comprise Krisztina Tóth’s book similarly produce an interconnected web. While each tale of love, loss, and failed self-determination narrates the sensuousness of an individual’s life, together, the thirty stories tell a more complicated tale of relationships. Circumstances that appear unrelated may converge in harmony or in heartbreak, just as the events that loom largest may fail to produce a longed-for outcome. These threads often determine the course of lives in unpredictable ways—sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, but rarely in the ways we originally anticipated.
 
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A Place between Stations
Stories
Stories by Stepanie Allen
University of Missouri Press, 2003

Selma detests my small considerations of strangers. When she catches me nodding at the panhandlers she ignores, or opening doors for women I don't know, she says nothing, but holds herself tall and aloof. She is doing it for the both of us. She is compensating for what she believes is a weakness in her husband that, even in this day and age, a black man still cannot afford. And she may be right. But at this stage of my life I feel not so much black or male, middle-aged or well-to-do or professional, as incomplete. I am son to my father, father to my boys, husband to my unhappy wife, but somehow more lost than found in the mix.

A Place between Stations explores the lives of African American characters against the ever-present backdrop of race, but with the myriad complexities of individual minds and souls in the foreground.
Two college students, bound by an intense but uneasy friendship, take an increasingly dangerous road trip through Florida. A widow faces her doubts about her long-dead husband by reliving an odd series of train rides she took along the Hudson River shoreline in the 1950s. An angry, fatherless girl roams a city at night, searching for an escape from the ambiguities of childhood. George Mattie, loner and reluctant guide, leads a misfit nineteenth-century circus caravan on an ill-fated journey through the northern Connecticut woods. In A Place between Stations, Stephanie Allen enlarges contemporary notions of what African American lives can be. Varied, to the point, and beautifully composed, this collection will appeal to all audiences.
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A Place Called Milagro de la Paz
Manlio Argueta, translated from the Spanish by Michael B. Miller
Northwestern University Press, 2000
This remarkable novel continues the saga of life among the common people in El Salvador begun with One Day of Life. A Place Called Milagro de la Paz tells the story of the courage and strength of two women, a single mother and her daughter, who have to overcome the trauma of the murder of the mother's older daughter and survive in an atmosphere of bitter poverty. The book is filled, however, with magical, lyric moments of love and hope, especially surrounding the figure of a strange young girl with butterflies in her hair who appears suddenly and adopts the family. The tiny family group bravely preserves traditional values in spite of fear and repression.
 
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A Place Called Sweet Shrub
The Second Novel in a Trilogy
Jane Roberts Wood
University of North Texas Press, 2000
Together for the first time as a classic Texas trilogy: The Train to Estelline A Place Called Sweet Shrub Dance a Little Longer The Lucinda "Lucy" Richards trilogy, spanning the years from 1911 to the 1930s, has everything good books should have: a variety of landscapes, characters of all ages and social classes, an overall tenderness that never lapses into sentimentality, and a sense of the comic amidst the tragic. Lucy is feisty, funny, and completely open-armed about life. Josh passionately confronts danger and greed and prejudice with courage and humor and, sometimes, with bare fists. Even the minor characters are so rife with color that you first turn the pages quickly to see what they will do next and, then, you turn them slowly so as to savor each page of this remarkable trilogy. A Place Called Sweet Shrub : In 1915 it has been three years since Lucy Richards left her teaching post in West Texas and returned home where she is busy being indispensable to her eccentric mother, keeping her Aunt Catherine comfortable, and taking on many of the chores her very pregnant sister no longer feels up to. She decides to choose a husband from the local beaus, but none of them stand a chance when handsome, irreverent Josh Arnold comes to town. The newlyweds move to the sleepy hamlet of Sweet Shrub, Arkansas, where they are soon caught up in the lives of their neighbors and discover that the surface tranquillity of the town hides simmering tensions and unrest that will inevitably result in tragedy.
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The Place of Stones
A Novel
Ali Hosseini
Northwestern University Press, 2017
Finalist, 2018 John Gardner Fiction prize

The Place of Stones is Ali Hosseini’s newly translated first novel, his second book to appear in English. In it, he paints a vivid portrait of Sangriz, a village in the southern part of Iran where life has been disrupted by industrialization and the revolution of 1979.

Haydar and Jamal are best friends, and their families have always made their living from the land in the foothills of Iran’s Zagros Mountains. Haydar is a dreamer who searches the hills for an ancient treasure called the Black Globe. Jamal is in love with Haydar’s sister, Golandam, and he attempts to accommodate himself to modernization as a way to create a better life for the two of them. The rapacious conversion of farmland to brick factories draws the trio into escalating conflict with the village landlord.

As Jamal, Haydar, and their families confront land reform, industrialization, revolution, and war, their lives are pulled forcefully toward the explosive events that will change them all. In masterfully crafted prose that never sinks into sentimentality, The Place of Stones illuminates how a lost past continues to shape the present.
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A Place Remote
Stories
Gwen Goodkin
West Virginia University Press, 2020
From farm to factory, alcoholism to war wounds, friendship to betrayal, the stories in A Place Remote take us intimately into the hearts of people from all walks of life in a rural Ohio town. Whether they stay in their town or leave for distant places, these characters come to realize no one is immune to the fictions people tell others—and themselves—to survive.

In each of these ten stories, Gwen Goodkin forces her characters to face the dramatic events of life head-on—some events happen in a moment, while others are the fallout of years or decades of turning away. A boy is confronted by the cost of the family farm, an optometrist careens toward an explosive mental disaster, a mourning teen protects his sister, lifelong friends have an emotional confrontation over an heirloom, and a high school student travels to Germany to find his voice and, finally, a moment of long-awaited redemption.
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Plain of Jars
and Other Stories
Geary Hobson
Michigan State University Press, 2011

In the opening story of Geary Hobson’s riveting new collection, Plain of Jars, a young private confides to his friend that he’s trying to leave the Marine Corps. “I am not doing this just because I find the Marine Corps too tough,” Warren Needham says, but because violence is contradictory to his faith. The story’s surprising climax, however, reveals a different side of Needham’s contradictory nature. It’s this acute understanding of conflict that characterizes Plain of Jars, a book populated by bullies, men in combat, abusive spouses, and Native Americans seeking a sense of personal identity in an environment where conformity is law. The U.S. Marine Corps sets the stage for a number of these stories, whose protagonists combat racism, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and the looming reality of the Vietnam War. With pitch perfect dialogue and a sense of the unexpected, Plain of Jars tests the depths of complex lives.

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Platero and I
By Juan Ramón Jiménez
University of Texas Press, 1957

This lyric portrait of life—and the little donkey, Platero—in a remote Andalusian village is the masterpiece of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Spanish poet awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize for Literature.

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Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet
Ten Queer Stories
Cui Zi'en. Edited and with an introduction by Petrus Liu and Lisa Rofel
Duke University Press, 2024
Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet is the first English-language collection of short stories by Cui Zi’en, China’s most famous and controversial queer filmmaker, writer, scholar, and LGBTQ rights activist. Drawing on his own experiences growing up in socialist and postsocialist China, Cui presents ten queer coming-of-age stories of young boys and men as they explore their sexuality and desires. From a surreal fairytale depicting a ragtag crew of neighborhood boys in the throes of sexual awakening to a chronicle of the gender-bending and homoerotic entanglements of university students to romantic love triangle erotica to a story that examines teacher-student love and the norms of sex and age, Cui centers queer sexuality as a core part of human experience. Richly imaginative and vividly written, Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet portrays the emergence of queer cultures in postsocialist China while foregrounding the commitments to one’s erotic and passionate attractions even as they lead to cultural transgressions. This volume includes a preface by and an interview with the author.
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Playing from Memory
David Milofsky
University Press of Colorado, 1999
Playing From Memory is a deeply moving, compassionate novel about the power of marriage to survive under stress, a love story that tells of a musician's courageous battle against a degenerative illness and his wife's struggle to face the end of their life together.

Ben Seidler, an intense, passionately committed violist, is at the height of his career as a member of the Casa Bella Quartet, one of the foremost string quartets in the nation. His gifts as a concert artist had always been intuitive, but love did not come so easily. It took determination to win the hand of his wife, Dory, who was reluctant to set aside her ambitions of becoming an artist.

Their marriage is at once complex and ordinary, balancing the rigors of long rehearsal sessions against the daily round of family life with their two sons. Then suddenly the rhythm of their lives is shattered when Ben falls victim to multiple sclerosis. Stubbornly independent, Ben refuses to rely on others until necessity forces him to see that there are things beyond his control. Through a new closeness with his aging father, his older son, and, most importantly, Dory, he learns to accept help and to appreciate human frailty and affection.

As Ben's health declines, Dory is forced to resume her career and compete in a world dominated by men, and to re-examine her feelings and commitment to her husband. As their lives change, so does their marriage, and Ben and Dory forge a new kind of love, a fierce love that sustains them through everything.

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The Plays of David Garrick, Volume 3
Garrick's Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744 - 1756
Edited by Harry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann
Southern Illinois University Press, 1981

David Garrick’s accomplishments as an actor, manager, and theatrical innovator brought him great fame and fortune, and his ideas influenced not only his own age but succeeding ages as well. Yet as a playwright, a part of the elegant combination of talents that was David Garrick, he has never achieved the critical reputation he richly deserves, in main because of the unavailability of texts and the lack of proper assessment of the historic importance of his plays in the English theatre.

This first complete edition makes available to scholars and students all the plays of Gar­rick in well edited texts, with commentary and notes.

Contents: Macbeth. A Tragedy, 1744; Romeo and Juliet, 1748; The Fairies. An Opera, 1755; Catherine and Petruchio. A Comedy, 1756; Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral, 1756; The Tem­pest. An Opera, 1756; and King Lear. A Tragedy, 1756.

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The Pleasant Nights
Giovan Straparola
Iter Press, 2015

In Giovan Francesco Straparola’s The Pleasant Nights, a group of men and women gather together in a villa on the Venetian island of Murano during Carnival to sing songs, tell tales, and solve riddles. A sixteenth-century bestseller, The Pleasant Nights is today a fundamental text for European folk and fairy tale studies, for alongside triumphal and tragic love stories, comical tales of practical jokes, and accounts of witty retorts, Straparola (1480? – 1557?) placed some of the first fairy tales printed in Europe. Straparola’s eloquent female narrators and the fairy tales they recount became a model for a generation of French women writers in Parisian salons, who used the fairy tale to interrogate the gender norms of their day. This book presents the first new and complete English translation of Straparola’s tales and riddles to be published since the nineteenth century.

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The Pleasure Marriage
A Novel
Tahar Ben Jelloun; Translated from the French by Rita S. Nezami
Northwestern University Press, 2021
In The Pleasure Marriage, Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the epic story of a romance that explores desire and the intolerance for interracial marriage in Moroccan society. Amir is a prosperous merchant based in Fez, where he has a wife and four children. On one of his annual business trips to Senegal, he enters into a “pleasure marriage”—a temporary union permitted by Islamic law—with the alluring Nabou. Overcome by her passion and sensuality, he falls in love, with repercussions for three generations scarred by racism, immigration, and deportation.
 
Nabou returns to Fez as Amir’s second wife, weathering the jealous cruelty of Lalla Fatma, his first partner. Isolated within her new home, Nabou gives birth to twin sons, one black and one white, who come of age on the opposite sides of racial, social, and political chasms and who chart vastly different courses. The Pleasure Marriage showcases Ben Jelloun’s mastery of metaphor and lyrical narrative as he continues to take us into the worlds of Moroccan culture through his exquisite language and literary genius.
 
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The Pledge
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Set in a small town in Switzerland, The Pledge centers around the murder of a young girl and the detective who promises the victim’s mother he will find the perpetrator. After deciding the wrong man has been arrested for the crime, the detective lays a trap for the real killer—with all the patience of a master fisherman. But cruel turns of plot conspire to make him pay dearly for his pledge. Here Friedrich Dürrenmatt conveys his brilliant ear for dialogue and a devastating sense of timing and suspense. Joel Agee’s skilled translation effectively captures the various voices in the original, as well as its chilling conclusion.

One of Dürrenmatt’s most diabolically imagined and constructed novels, The Pledge was adapted for the screen in 2000 in a film directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

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Plotting History
The Russian Historical Novel in the Imperial Age
Dan Ungurianu
University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Balanced precariously between fact and fiction, the historical novel is often viewed with suspicion. Some have attacked it as a mongrel form, a “bastard son” born of “history’s flagrant adultery with imagination.” Yet it includes some of the most celebrated achievements of Russian literature, with Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, and scores of other writers contributing to this tradition.
    Dan Ungurianu’s Plotting History traces the development of the Russian historical novel from its inception in the romantic era to the emergence of Modernism on the eve of the Revolution. Organized historically and thematically, the study is focused on the cultural paradigms that shaped the evolution of the genre and are reflected in masterpieces such as The Captain’s Daughter and War and Peace. Ungurianu examines the variety of approaches by which Russian writers combined fact with fiction and explores the range of subjects that inspired the Russian historical imagination.

Outstanding Academic Title, Choice Magazine

“Ungurianu has produced a most valuable work for literary scholars.”—Andrew M. Drozd, Slavic and East European Journal

“[Ungurianu’s] overwhelming knowledge, impeccable documentation, erudite notes, and valuable addenda make for a treasure house of information and keen analysis. . . . Essential.”—Choice

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Ploughshares into Swords
Vladislav Vancura
Karolinum Press, 2021
The first English-language translation of a classic Czech antiwar novel written in the wake of WWI.
 
Originally published in 1925, Ploughshares into Swords is an expressionist antiwar novel in which Vladislav Vančura tells the story of the denizens of the Ouhrov estate in language as baroque as the manor that ties them all together. The fragmented narrative introduces the reader to such characters as Baron Danowitz, his sons, his French concubine, the farmhand František Hora, and the mentally disabled murderer Řeka in the autumn of 1913, before revealing their fates during World War I. Ranging from the peaceful farmlands of Bohemia to the battlefields of Galicia, taking in the pubs of Budapest and the hospitals of Krakow, the novel constitutes an unsentimental and naturalistic approach to the war that created Czechoslovakia. Ploughshares into Swords is a stunning novel by one of Czech literature’s most important writers. This modernist masterpiece, reminiscent of the work of Isaac Babel and William Faulkner, is now available in English for the very first time.
 
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Plum Wine
A Novel
Angela Davis-Gardner
University of Wisconsin Press, 2006

    Barbara Jefferson, a young American teaching in Tokyo in the 1960s, is set on a life-changing quest when her Japanese surrogate mother, Michi, dies, leaving her a tansu of homemade plum wines wrapped in rice paper. Within the papers Barbara discovers writings in Japanese calligraphy that comprise a startling personal narrative. With the help of her translator, Seiji Okada, Barbara begins to unravel the mysteries of Michi's life, a story that begins in the early twentieth century and continues through World War II and its aftermath.
     As Barbara and Seiji translate the plum wine papers they form an intimate bond, with Michi a ghostly third in what becomes an increasingly uneasy triangle. Barbara is deeply affected by the revelation that Michi and Seiji are hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima, and even harder for her to understand are the devastating psychological effects wrought by war. Plum Wine examines human relationships, cultural differences, and the irreparable consequences of war in a story that is both original and timeless.

2007 A Notable Fiction Book of 2007, selected by the Kiriyama Prize Committee
 
Winner, Fiction Award, Southern Independent Bookstore Alliance
 
Notable Fiction, Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize
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Plunder Squad
A Parker Novel
Richard Stark
University of Chicago Press, 2010

“Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left.” When a job looks like amateur hour, Parker walks away. But even a squad of seasoned professionals can’t guarantee against human error in a high-risk scam. Can an art dealer with issues unload a truck of paintings with Parker’s aid? Or will the heist end up too much of a human interest story, as luck runs out before Parker can get in on the score?

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The Poetry of Indifference
From the Romantics to the Rubaiyat
Erik Irving Gray
University of Massachusetts Press, 2005
Indifference is a common, even indispensable element of human experience. But it is rare in poetry, which is traditionally defined by its direct opposition to indifference—by its heightened emotion, consciousness, and effort. This definition applies especially to English poets of the nineteenth century, heirs to an age that predicated aesthetics on moral sentiment or feeling. Yet it was in this period, Erik Gray argues, that a concentrated strain
of poetic indifference began to emerge.

The Poetry of Indifference analyzes nineteenth-century works by Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald, among others—works that do not merely declare themselves to be indifferent but formally enact the indifference they describe. Each poem consciously disregards some aspect of poetry that is usually considered to be crucial or definitive, even at the risk of seeming "indifferent" in the sense of "mediocre." Such gestures discourage critical attention, since the poetry of indifference refuses to make claims for itself.

This is particularly true of FitzGerald's Rubáiyát, one of the most popular poems of the nineteenth century, but one that recent critics have almost entirely ignored. In concentrating on this underexplored mode of poetry, Gray not only traces a major shift in recent literary history, from a Romantic poetics of sympathy to a Modernist poetics of alienation, but also considers how this literature can help us understand the sometimes embarrassing but unavoidable presence of indifference in our lives.
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Poets and Murder
A Judge Dee Mystery
Robert van Gulik
University of Chicago Press, 1968
Judge Dee, the master detective of seventh-century China, sets out to solve a puzzling double murder and discovers complex passions lurking beneath the placid surface of academic life. A mild-mannered student is rumored to have been slain by a fox-demon, while a young dancer meets her death as she dresses to perform for the magistrate's illustrious dinner guests—an obese Zen monk revered for his calligraphy, a beautiful poetess accused of murder, and the past president of the imperial academy. To connect the present crimes with betrayals and adulteries from decades past, the clever judge must visit a high-class brothel and the haunted shrine of the Black Fox. From the moment the young scholar is found dead on the eve of the Autumn Festival, the pace never lets up.

"The China of old, in Mr. van Gulik's skilled hands, comes vividly alive again."—Allen J. Hubin, New York Times Book Review

"If you have not yet discovered Judge Dee, I envy you that initial pleasure. . . . For the magistrate of Poo-yang belongs in that select group headed by Sherlock Holmes."—Robert Kirsch, Los Angeles Times

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A Poet’s Prose
Selected Writings Of Louise Bogan
Louise Bogan
Ohio University Press, 2005

Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897–1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.

Louise Bogan was poetry reviewer for the New Yorker for thirty-eight years, and her criticism was remarkable for its range and effect. Bogan was responsible for the revival of interest in Henry James and was one of the first American critics to notice and review W. H. Auden. She remained intellectually and emotionally responsive to writers as different from one another as Caitlin Thomas, Dorothy Richardson, W. B. Yeats, André Gide, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Bogan’s short stories appeared regularly in magazines during the 1930s, penetrating the social habits of the city as well as the loneliness there. The autobiographical element in her fiction and journals, never entirely confessional, spurred some of her finest writing. The distinguished poet and critic Mary Kinzie provides in A Poet’s Prose a selection of Bogan's best criticism, prose meditations, letters, journal entries, autobiographical essays, and published and unpublished fiction.

Louise Bogan won the Bollingen Prize in 1954 for her collected poems. She is the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Elizabeth Frank, Louise Bogan: A Portrait.

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Points of Honor
Short Stories of the Great War by a US Combat Marine
Thomas Boyd, Edited and with an Introduction by Steven Trout
University of Alabama Press, 2018
A masterwork of World War I short stories portraying the experiences of Marines in battle.
 
Points of Honor: Short Stories of the Great War by a US Combat Marine is based on author Thomas Alexander Boyd’s personal experiences as an enlisted Marine. First published in 1925 and long out of print, this edition rescues from obscurity a vivid, kaleidoscopic vision of American soldiers, US Marines mostly, serving in a global conflict a century ago. It is a true forgotten masterpiece of World War I literature.
 
The stories in Points of Honor deal almost entirely with Marines in the midst of battle—or faced with the consequences of military violence. The eleven stories in this collection offer a panoramic view of war experience and its aftermath, what Boyd described as “a mass of more human happenings.” The themes are often antiheroic: dehumanization, pettiness, betrayal by loved ones at home, and the cruelty of military justice. But Boyd’s vision also accommodates courage and loyalty. Like all great works of war literature, this collection underscores the central paradox of armed conflict—its ability to bring out both the best and worst in human beings.
 
This reissue of Points of Honor is edited, annotated, and introduced by Steven Trout. Trout provides an overview of Thomas Boyd’s war experience and writing career and situates the stories within the broader context of World War I American literature.
 
Points of Honor received strong reviews at the time of its initial publication and remains an overwhelming reading experience today. While each of the stories is a freestanding work of art, when read together they carry the force of a novel.
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Points of the Compass
Stories
Sahar Tawfiq
University of Arkansas Press, 1995
This collection of short stories, recipient of a 1994 University of Arkansas Press Award for Arabic Literature in Translation, presents one of Egypt’s most innovative contemporary fiction writers. In her first collection published in English, Sahar Tawfiq explores the consciousnesses of young women alienated from their surroundings in today’s rapidly changing Egyptian society. In questioning the place of long-powerful myths and beliefs, she is in the forefront of writers examining the legacy of the Pharaohs as it permeates current Egyptian identities and practices, especially in the countryside. Her characters are shaped by journeys through modern social and economic trials and the ageless troubles of the human spirit and heart.
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Polinka Saks and The Story of Aleksei
Aleksandr Druzhinin
Northwestern University Press, 1992
This volume offers two of Druzhinin's essential works in their first English translations. Polinka Saks, his most essential short novel, is an epistolary tale of a romantic triangle involving an older man, his young wife, and a dashing young prince. The husband attempts to introduce his wife to literature, art, and music, but his efforts run counter to the dominant trend of society, which "forces women to become little children." The wife falls victim to the prince and realizes too late the value of the education provided by her husband.

A far different tale, The Story of Aleksei Dmitrich is a complex social and psychological study of poverty, family disharmony, precocious children, and destructive self-sacrifice.
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Politicizing Magic
An Anthology of Russian and Soviet Fairy Tales
Balina/Goscilo/Lipovetsky
Northwestern University Press, 2005
A compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that show how the Russian fairy tale acquired political and historical meanings during the Soviet era

We were born to make fairy tales come true. As one of Stalinism's more memorable slogans, this one suggests that the fairy tale figured in Soviet culture as far more than a category of children's literature. How much more-and how cannily Russian fairy tales reflect and interpret Soviet culture, especially in its utopian ambitions-becomes clear for the first time in Politicizing Magic, a compendium of folkloric, literary, and critical texts that demonstrate the degree to which ancient fairy-tale fantasies acquired political and historical meanings during the catastrophic twentieth century.
Introducing Western readers to the most representative texts of Russian folkloric and literary tales, this book documents a rich exploration of this colorful genre through all periods of Soviet literary production (1920-1985) by authors with varied political and aesthetic allegiances. Here are traditional Russian folkloric tales and transformations of these tales that, adopting the didacticism of Soviet ideology, proved significant for the official discourse of Socialist Realism. Here, too, are narratives produced during the same era that use the fairy-tale paradigm as a deconstructive device aimed at the very underpinnings of the Soviet system. The editors' introductory essays acquaint readers with the fairy-tale paradigm and the permutations it underwent within the utopian dream of Soviet culture, deftly placing each-from traditional folklore to fairy tales of Socialist Realism, to real-life events recast as fairy tales for ironic effect-in its literary, historical, and political context.
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Politics and History in William Golding
The World Turned Upside Down
Paul Crawford
University of Missouri Press, 2002
Politics and History in William Golding provides a much needed politicized and historicized reading of William Golding’s novels as a counter to previous, universalizing criticism. Paul Crawford argues that an understanding of fantastic and carnivalesque modes in Golding’s work is vital if we are to appreciate fully his interrogation of twentieth-century life.
            Golding’s early satirical novels question English constructions of national identity in opposition to Nazism and the “totalitarian personality.” For Crawford, Golding can and must be studied in the wider European tradition of “literature of atrocity.” His early novels, especially Lord of the Flies, are preoccupied with atrocity, whereas the later work betrays a greater concern for the status of language and literature.
In Golding’s later fiction, such as Darkness Visible, the fantastic and carnivalesque are used in an increasingly nonsatirical manner to complement first modernist and then postmodernist self-consciousness and indeterminacy. Even his critique of class and religious authority, which carries through all of his fiction, gives way to more lighthearted productions—a symptom of which is his crude, absurd attack against the English literary industry in The Paper Men. This reduction of satire marks a decline in Golding’s political commitment and the production of more complex and arguably less satisfying novels.
            The fantastic and carnivalesque are foundational to both the satirical and nonsatirical approaches that mark Golding’s early and late fiction. No previous study has analyzed this structure that is so central to his work. Politics and History in William Golding examines this writer’s work more fully than it has been studied within the convoluted context of the last half of the twentieth century. Crawford directly links Golding’s various deployments of the fantastic and carnivalesque to historical, political, and social change.
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Pop
An Illustrated Novel
Robert Gipe
Ohio University Press, 2024
Set in the run-up and aftermath of the 2016 election, Pop brings the Canard County trilogy to a close as Dawn, the young narrator of Gipe’s first novel, Trampoline, is now the mother of the seventeen-year-old Nicolette. Whereas Dawn has become increasingly agoraphobic as the internet persuades her the world is descending into chaos, Nicolette narrates an Appalachia where young people start businesses rooted in local food culture and work to build community. But Nicolette’s precocious rise in the regional culinary scene is interrupted when her policeman cousin violently assaults her, setting in motion a chain of events that threaten to destroy the family—and Canard County in the process. In the tradition of Gipe’s first two novels, Pop’s Appalachia is full of clear-eyed, caring, creative, and complicated people struggling to hang on to what is best about their world and reject what is not. Their adventures reflect an Appalachia that is overrun by outside commentators looking for stories to tell about the region—sometimes positive, sometimes negative, but almost always oversimplified.
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Pornography, the Theory
What Utilitarianism Did to Action
Frances Ferguson
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Pornography first developed in western Europe during the late eighteenth century in tandem with the rise of utilitarianism, the philosophical position that stresses the importance of something's usefulness over its essence. Through incisive readings of Sade, Flaubert, Lawrence, and Bret Easton Ellis, Frances Ferguson here shows how pornography—like utilitarian social structures—diverts our attention from individual identities to actions and renders more clearly the social value of such actions through concrete literary representations.
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