Sometimes it's possible to pick up a book and hear the words being spoken by the characters as if you were sitting across the table from them. This is the sensation you'll have as you read through The Handywoman Stories by Lenore McComas Coberly.
Whether the story describes the civil defense preparations of a small West Virginia town in World War II, the same town years later dealing with an influx of hippies, or the return of a woman to her roots after decades up north, the voices are convincing and true. “I nearly got kicked in the head by a cow before I learned that if you use your full strength pulling milk, you won’t get much milk,” says one. “To see Zevelda the way she was that Sunday is, well, not something you're very likely to see,” says another.
The Handywoman Stories themselves are driven by characters shaped by the place they have lived most all of their lives. They deal with economic depression, mine and war deaths, the arrogance of community leaders, and what might have been, but was not, a stultifying environment. Their tools are astonishing resourcefulness, steadfast friendship, and always humor.
Lenore McComas Coberly has woven together a bittersweet community of strong Appalachian women and men in this remarkable collection. Moving and joyful, these stories are made from the stuff of life.
These 16 essays from the fifth annual J.Lloyd Eaton Conference at the University of California, Riverside, seek to come to grips with science fiction’s core, the core at which “science must ultimately seem to outweigh the fiction.”
Never before has hard SF been the topic of such extended discussion by such qualified people. The dialogue constitutes new (and potentially shocking to a traditional literary critic) modes of literary criticism, modes that take into account the impact of scientific speculation and method on our culture and on the ways our culture invents stories and myths.
Essayists include writer/scientist professors Robert L. Forward, David Brin, and Gregory Benford. Noted critics and writers with scientific backgrounds or interests include: James Gunn, Frank McConnell, George Guffey, John Huntington, Paul Carter, Patricia Warrick, Paul Alkon, Robert M. Philmus, David Clayton, Eric S. Rabkin, Herbert Sussman, Michael Collings, and George E. Slusser.
“A kind of homemade book—imperfect like a handmade thing, a prize. It’s a galloping, spontaneous book, on occasion within whooping distance of that greatest and sweetest of country books, Ivan Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook.” —Edward Hoagland, New York Times Book Review
“His subjects are trees and brush, hired help, fences, soil, armadillos and other wildlife, flood and drought, local history, sheep and goats . . . and they come to us reshaped and reenlivened by his agreeably individual (and sometimes cranky) notions.” —New Yorker
“If Goodbye to a River was in some sense Graves’s Odyssey, this book is his [version of Hesiod’s] Works and Days. It is partly a book about work, partly a book about nature, but mostly a book about belonging. In the end John Graves has learned to belong to his patch of land so thoroughly that at moments he can sense in himself a unity with medieval peasants and Sumerian farmers, working with their fields by the Tigris.” —Larry McMurtry, Washington Post Book World
“Hard Scrabble is hard pastoral of the kind we have learned to recognize in Wordsworth, Frost, Hemingway, and Faulkner. It celebrates life in accommodation with a piece of the ‘given’ creation, a recalcitrant four hundred or so acres of Texas cedar brake, old field, and creek bottom, which will require of any genuine resident all the character he can muster.” —Southwest Review
Brothers Anton and Tolik reunite at their family home to bury their recently deceased mother. An otherwise natural ritual unfolds under extraordinary circumstances: their house is on the front line of a war ignited by Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Isolated without power or running water, the brothers’ best hope for success and survival lies in the declared cease fire—the harvest truce. But such hopes are swiftly dashed, as it becomes apparent that the conflagration of war will not abate.
With echoes of Waiting for Godot, Serhiy Zhadan’s A Harvest Truce stages a tragicomedy in which the commonplace experiences of death, birth, and the cycles of life marked by the practices of growing and harvesting food are rendered futile and farcical in the wake of the indifferent juggernaut of war.
The seventeenth-century Hindi classic treasured for its subtle and beautiful portrayal of divine and erotic love’s pleasures and sorrows.
The seven hundred poems of the Hindi poet Biharilal’s Satsai weave amorous narratives of the god Krishna and the goddess Radha with archetypal hero and heroine motifs that bridge divine and worldly love. He Spoke of Love brims with romantic rivalries, clandestine trysts, and the bittersweet sorrow of separated lovers. This new translation presents four hundred couplets from the enduring seventeenth-century classic, showcasing the poet’s ingenuity and virtuosity.
Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway's patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries.
A miscellany of learned literature from Alexandria and beyond.
This volume presents a selection of Hellenistic prose and poetry, ranging chronologically from Philitas of Cos through Alexander of Aetolia and Hermesianax of Colophon to Euphorion of Chalcis and Parthenius of Nicaea, whose mythography Sufferings in Love is the major work in the collection. Knowledge of many of these texts has been increased by papyrological discoveries in the last century, yet few of them have appeared in English translation before now. Taken together, these works represent the geographic and stylistic range of a rich and inventive period in Classical literature.
Henry Adams has been called an indispensable figure in American thought. Although he famously “took his own life” in the autobiographical Education of Henry Adams, his letters—more intimate and unbuttoned, though hardly unselfconscious—are themselves indispensable for an understanding of the man and his times.
This selection, the first based on the authoritative 6-volume Letters, represents every major private and public event in Adams’s life from 1858 to 1918 and confirms his reputation as one of the greatest letter writers of his time. Adams knew everyone who was anyone and went almost everywhere, and—true to the Adams family tradition—recorded it all. These letters to an array of correspondents from American presidents to Henry James to 5-year-old honorary nieces reveal Adams’s passion for politics and disdain for politicians, his snobbish delight in society and sincere affection for friends, his pose of dilettantism and his serious ambitions as writer and historian, his devastation at his wife’s suicide and his acquiescence in the role of Elizabeth Cameron’s “tame cat,” his wicked humor at others’ expense and his own reflexive self-depreciation.
This volume allows the reader to experience 19th-century America through the eyes of an observer on whom very little was lost, and to make the acquaintance of one of the more interesting personalities in American letters. As Ernest Samuels says in his introduction, “The letters lift the veil of old-age disenchantment that obscures the Education and exhibit Adams as perhaps the most brilliant letter writer of his time. What most engages one in the long course of his correspondence is the tireless range of his intellectual curiosity, his passionate effort to understand the politics, the science, and the human society of the world as it changed around him… It is as literature of a high order that his letters can finally be read.”
Sir John Herschel, one of the founders of Southern Hemisphere astronomy, was a man of extraordinarily wide interests. He made contributions to botany, geology, and ornithology, as well as to astronomy, chemistry, and mathematics. Throughout his scientific career he kept a diary, recording his public and private life. The diaries from 1834 to 1838, years he spent making astronomical observations at the Cape of Good Hope, are reproduced in this book and prove to be much more than an ordinary scientist’s logbook. They present personal and social history, literary commentaries, the results of close observations of nature and numerous scientific experiments, the excitement of travel, political intrigues, gossip, and philosophical reflections—all interpreted through an alert and versatile mind. In the present transcription, the material has been enriched with selected correspondence of Sir John and his wife Lady Herschel (née Margaret Brodie Stewart).
Sir John devoted his working time at the Cape primarily to a systematic observation of the southern sky, complementing his earlier “sweeping” of the northern sky at Slough, England. He later became one of the founders of photography, but at the Cape he used a simple optical device, the camera lucida, in the production of numerous landscape drawings. Many of these, along with reproductions of sketches contained in the diaries and botanical drawings made by Sir John and Lady Herschel, are used to illustrate this book. Sir John was also a leading figure in the foundation of the educational system of the Cape and a supporter of exploratory expeditions into the interior.
As the son of Sir William Herschel, in his day the most famous British astronomer and the discoverer of the planet Uranus, Sir John was already celebrated when he arrived from England. Every individual of note, resident at the Cape or visiting, went to see him. He was supported in his work by his wife, who ran an enormous establishment and bore a huge family, but who nevertheless found time to travel in the country around the western Cape with him and to assist in his observations.
The diaries and letters are supplemented by especially valuable editorial notes that provide much needed and highly interesting information concerning persons and events mentioned and described by Sir John. All the original manuscript material used in this volume is archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Sir John’s camera lucida drawings are from the South African Public Library in Cape Town.
Highlights in the History of the American Press was first published in 1954. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The articles collected in this volume present a vivid panorama of American journalistic history from its antecedents in the English ballad singers to the press giants of modern times. Since there is probably no single force that has played a greater role in the history of America than its newspapers, the history of journalism tells, in large measure, the story of this country's political, social, and economic development. Therefore, this book of readings offers much to the students of the American scene, past and present, whether they are general readers or specialists in journalism, history, American studies, or any of the social sciences.
The 27 articles included here have been chosen particularly for their readability and authenticity. They are by many different writers and are from a wide variety of periodicals published over the past 100 years. They are arranged according to six historical periods, covering the rise of the English press, the Colonial press, the nationalistic press of Revolutionary times, the popular press of the Jacksonian democracy, the transition press following the Civil War, and the modern era of mass circulation. An introductory essay for each group of articles places the individual studies in historical perspective and examines briefly the journalistic events not covered in detail by the articles themselves. The article authors include such notable names in American letters as Gamaliel Bradford, Will Irwin, William Allen White, John Dos Passos, and Henry F. Pringle.
The coherent presentation of this diverse material should help anyone interested in the American newspaper get a better view of its broad scope, its lively color, and its profound influence on the course of history.
March of the emperors.
The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.
While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.
The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.
This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.
March of the emperors.
The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.
While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.
The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.
This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.
March of the emperors.
The Historia Augusta is a biographical work roughly following the model of the imperial biographer Suetonius (LCL 31, 38) and covering the lives of the Roman emperors from Hadrian (r. 117–138) to Carinus (r. 283–285), with a lacuna between the lives of the Gordians and the Valerians. Although the work comes down to us as a collection of thirty books written by six different authors, it is now generally considered to be the creation of a single individual writing under several pseudonyms no earlier than the late fourth century. It is a thoroughly enigmatic work whose origins, nature, and purpose remain obscure; the very beginning of the life of Hadrian is lost, and with it any general introduction that may have existed.
While the Historia Augusta is our most detailed surviving source for the second and third centuries, often providing details beyond the Greek accounts, it is not a trustworthy source for historical information: too many of the details are anachronistic, unsupported, or preposterous, or contradicted internally or by better sources, and many documents, speeches, acclamations, and inscriptions that it quotes or cites are entirely fictional.
The Historia Augusta nevertheless has its attractions: for the connoisseur of biography the author provides plenty of wordplay, puns, allusions, literary games, and mock-scholarly digressions, and for the casual reader he offers vivid characterizations of emperors both good and bad.
This revision of the original Loeb edition by David Magie offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.
A literary cabinet of curiosities.
Aelian’s Historical Miscellany is a pleasurable example of light reading for Romans of the early third century. Offering engaging anecdotes about historical figures, retellings of legendary events, and enjoyable descriptive pieces—in sum: amusement, information, and variety—Aelian’s collection of nuggets and narratives could be enjoyed by a wide reading public. A rather similar book had been published in Latin in the previous century by Aulus Gellius; Aelian is a late, perhaps the last, representative of what had been a very popular genre.
Here then are anecdotes about the famous Greek philosophers, poets, historians, and playwrights; myths instructively retold; moralizing tales about heroes and rulers, athletes and wise men; reports about styles in dress, food and drink, lovers, gift-giving practices, entertainments, religious beliefs and death customs; and comments on Greek painting. Some of the information is not preserved in any other source. Underlying it all are Aelian’s Stoic ideals as well as this Roman’s great admiration for the culture of the Greeks (whose language he borrowed for his writings).
The Historical Miscellany is now added to the Loeb Classical Library, the Greek text facing a skillful and helpfully annotated new translation by Nigel Wilson. In his trenchant Introduction he discusses the literary genre of Aelian’s miscellany, its style and historical setting.
Naturalist and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore meditates on connection and separation in these twenty-one elegant, probing essays. Using the metaphor of holdfasts—the structures that attach seaweed to rocks with a grip strong enough to withstand winter gales—she examines our connections to our own bedrock.
“When people lock themselves in their houses at night and seal the windows shut to keep out storms, it is possible to forget, sometimes for years and years, that human beings are part of the natural world,” she writes. Holdfast passionately reclaims an awareness of the natural world, exploring the sense of belonging fostered by the communal howls of wolves; the inevitability of losing children to their own lives; the fear of bears and love of storms; the sublimity of life and longing in the creatures of the sea; her agonizing decision when facing her father’s bone-deep pain. As Moore travels philosophically and geographically—from Oregon’s shores to Alaska’s islands—she leaves no doubt of her virtuosity and range.
The new afterword is an important statement on the new responsibilities of nature writers as the world faces the consequences of climate change.
William Notter’s stunning collection Holding Everything Down explores the everyday struggles, triumphs, and desires of rural Americans. With disarming humor and remarkable honesty, Notter delves into the most personal longings of those who inhabit America’s countrysides: places bound by secrets and ghosts, where joy is discovered in the most unlikely of locations, and even the land itself has a story to tell. These highly accessible poems traverse the world of weekend rodeos, lonely highways, and windswept battlefields; they follow the twin paths of addiction and obsession, and the trials of newfound sobriety. Connections are forged beneath weathered ceilings, and love can be found over a plate of barbecue. Also explored are the depths of humanity’s relationship with nature and freedom, be it the smell of freshly threshed wheat, the purple thunderheads of an approaching storm, or a sunset viewed from Mississippi’s highest peak.
From the muddy deltas of the deep South to the crags of the Big Horn Mountains, Notter’s deeply candid portraits transcend stereotypes to expose an often unseen side of Americana. Hairdresser or handyman, rodeo rider or rancher’s wife, each voice ultimately echoes with the most human of experiences, unveiling the common threads that bind us to our world and to each other.
At the height of the Nazi extermination campaign in the Warsaw Ghetto, a young Jewish woman, Irena, seeks the protection of her former lover, a young architect, Jan Malecki. By taking her in, he puts his own life and the safety of his family at risk. Over a four-day period, Tuesday through Friday of Holy Week 1943, as Irena becomes increasingly traumatized by her situation, Malecki questions his decision to shelter Irena in the apartment where Malecki, his pregnant wife, and his younger brother reside. Added to his dilemma is the broader context of Poles’ attitudes toward the “Jewish question” and the plight of the Jews locked in the ghetto during the final moments of its existence.
Few fictional works dealing with the war have been written so close in time to the events that inspired them. No other Polish novel treats the range of Polish attitudes toward the Jews with such unflinching honesty.
Jerzy Andrzejewski’s Holy Week (Wielki Tydzien, 1945), one of the significant literary works to be published immediately following the Second World War, now appears in English for the first time.
This translation of Andrzejewski’s Holy Week began as a group project in an advanced Polish language course at the University of Pittsburgh. Class members Daniel M. Pennell, Anna M. Poukish, and Matthew J. Russin contributed to the translation; the instructor, Oscar E. Swan, was responsible for the overall accuracy and stylistic unity of the translation as well as for the biographical and critical notes and essays.
Carl Lavin was a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Canton, Ohio, native was eighteen when he enlisted, a decision that would take him with the US Army from training across the United States and Britain to combat with the 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. Home Front to Battlefront is the tale of a foot soldier who finds himself thrust into a world where he and his unit grapple with the horrors of combat, the idiocies of bureaucracy, and the oddities of life back home—all in the same day. The book is based on Carl’s personal letters, his recollections and those of the people he served beside, official military history, private papers, and more.
Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier’s experience to the broader literature on World War II. Lavin’s adventures, in turn disarming and sobering, will appeal to general readers, veterans, educators, and students of the war. As a history, the book offers insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military, from enlistment to training through overseas deployment. As a biography, it reflects the emotions and the role of the individual in a total war effort that is all too often thought of as a machine war in which human soldiers were merely interchangeable cogs.
Carl Lavin was a high school senior when Pearl Harbor was attacked. The Canton, Ohio, native was eighteen when he enlisted, a decision that would take him with the US Army from training across the United States and Britain to combat with the 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Bulge. Home Front to Battlefront is the tale of a foot soldier who finds himself thrust into a world where he and his unit grapple with the horrors of combat, the idiocies of bureaucracy, and the oddities of life back home—all in the same day. The book is based on Carl’s personal letters, his recollections and those of the people he served beside, official military history, private papers, and more.
Home Front to Battlefront contributes the rich details of one soldier’s experience to the broader literature on World War II. Lavin’s adventures, in turn disarming and sobering, will appeal to general readers, veterans, educators, and students of the war. As a history, the book offers insight into the wartime career of a Jewish Ohioan in the military, from enlistment to training through overseas deployment. As a biography, it reflects the emotions and the role of the individual in a total war effort that is all too often thought of as a machine war in which human soldiers were merely interchangeable cogs.
Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss were consummate collectors and patrons. After purchasing Dumbarton Oaks in 1920, they significantly redesigned the house and its interiors, built important new structures, added over fifty acres of planned gardens, hosted important musical evenings and intellectual discussions in their Music Room, and acquired a world-class art collection and library.
The illustrated essays in this volume reveal how the Blisses’ wide-ranging interests in art, music, gardens, architecture, and interior design resulted in the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Their collections of Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art and rare garden books and drawings are examined by Robert Nelson, Julie Jones, and Therese O’Malley, respectively. James Carder provides the Blisses’ biography and discusses their patronage of various architects, including Philip Johnson, and the interior designer Armand Albert Rateau. The Blisses’ collaboration with Beatrix Farrand on the creation of the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens is recounted by Robin Karson, and their commission of Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto and its premiere by Nadia Boulanger is examined by Jeanice Brooks. The volume demonstrates that every aspect of the Blisses’ collecting and patronage had a place in the creation of what they came to call their “home of the humanities.”
The prestigious Hopwood Creative Writing Awards were established in 1931 from a bequest of the will of Avery Hopwood, a University of Michigan graduate and one of the most popular and successful dramatists of his time. Hopwood left one-fifth of his estate to his alma mater, an endowment that now awards approximately $135,000 each year in prize money. Annual awards are offered to both undergraduate and graduate students in drama, screenplay, nonfiction, novel, short fiction, and poetry. Among the program's most famous recipients are Robert Hayden, Arthur Miller, Frank O'Hara, and Marge Piercy.
In addition to the prize ceremony, the Hopwood Awards are celebrated each year with a lecture delivered by a prominent literary figure. Past Hopwood speakers include such luminaries as Saul Bellow, Richard Ford, Louise Glück, Nadine Gordimer, Robert Hass, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Crowe Ransom. Their speeches have been collected in five previous volumes published by the University of Michigan Press over the past half-century: The Writer and His Craft: The Hopwood Lectures 1932-1952, edited by Roy W. Cowden; To The Young Writer: Hopwood Lectures, Second Series, edited by A. L. Bader; The Writer's Craft, edited by Robert A. Martin; Speaking of Writing: Selected Hopwood Lectures, edited by Nicholas Delbanco; and The Writing Life: The Hopwood Lectures, Fifth Series, edited by Nicholas Delbanco.
The present collection contains the ten lectures delivered since the last publication and includes work by Andrea Barrett, Charles Baxter, Mary Gordon, Donald Hall, Richard Howard, Lawrence Kasdan, Susan Orlean, Susan Stamberg, and Edmund White. The tenth lecture was delivered in spring 2008 by Charles Johnson.
Nicholas Delbanco is Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English Language and Literature and Chair of the Hopwood Committee. Delbanco is the author of twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, Spring and Fall: A Novel. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. In addition to directing the MFA Program and the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, he has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Best known for Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916), Horace Kephart’s keen interest in exploring and documenting the great outdoors would lead him not only to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, but also to become the most significant writer about the Great Smoky Mountains in the early twentieth century.
Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzell, Horace Kephart: Writings extends past Kephart’s two well-read works of the early 1900s and dives into his correspondence with friends across the globe, articles and columns in national magazines, unpublished manuscripts, journal entries, and fiction in order to shed some deserved light on Kephart’s classic image as a storyteller and practical guide to the Smokies. The book is divided into thematic subsections that call attention to the variety in Kephart’s writings, its nine chapters featuring Kephart’s works on camping and woodcraft, guns, southern Appalachian culture, fiction, the Cherokee, scouting, and the park and Appalachian trail. Each chapter is accompanied by an introductory essay by a notable Appalachian scholar providing context and background to the included works.
Written for scholars interested in Appalachian culture and history, followers of the modern outdoor movement, students enamored of the Great Smoky Mountains, and general readers alike, Horace Kephart: Writings gathers a plethora of little-known and rarely seen material that illustrates the diversity and richness found in Kephart’s work.
With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.
Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.
With an introduction by Allison Pease, this new edition of House of Incest is a lyrical journey into the subconscious mind of one of the most celebrated feminist writers of the twentieth-century.
Originally published in 1936, House of Incest is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires she cannot bear to let go. The incest Nin depicts is a metaphor—a selfish love wherein a woman can appreciate only qualities in a lover that are similar to her own. Through a descriptive exploration of romances and attractions between women, between a sister and her beloved brother, and with a Christ-like man, Nin’s narrator discovers what she thinks is truth: that a woman’s most perfect love is of herself. At first, this self-love seems ideal because it is attainable without fear and risk of heartbreak. But in time, the narrator’s chosen isolation and self-possessed anguish give way to a visceral nightmare from which she is unable to wake.
Laurence Gonzales began his successful publishing career in 1989 with the publication of The Still Point and later The Hero’s Apprentice (1994), both with the University of Arkansas Press. From these collections of essays he went on to write for renowned magazines in addition to publishing several books, including the best selling Deep Survival. His journalism garnered two National Magazine Awards, and his latest nonfiction book, Surviving Survival, was named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2012.
This new collection of essays shows us the sometimes hair-raising, sometimes heart-wrenching writing that Gonzales has become known for. This “compelling and trustworthy guide” (Booklist) takes us from a maximum-security prison to a cancer ward, from a mental institution to the World Trade Center. Among the essays included is “Marion Prison,” a National Magazine Award finalist, with its intimate view inside the most maximum security prison in America. “House of Pain” takes the reader into the life of a brain surgeon at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital, a grim world that few ever see. “Rites of Spring,” another National Magazine Award finalist, follows Gonzales and his wife on their journey through cancer, not once, but twice.
Other stories venture above the Arctic Circle, flying deep into the Alaskan wilderness among grizzly bears and trumpeter swans; explore aerobatics in high-performance aircraft; and eulogize Memphis and Miami as American cities that mourn their fates in uniquely different ways.
“A searing memoir about growing up behind the Iron Curtain, motherhood, addiction, and finding sustenance in the natural world.” —Kirkus
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.
Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.
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