BiblioVault - Books about Literary collections

The Terra Incognita Reader

Early Writings from the Great Smoky Mountains

Anne Bridges

University of Tennessee Press, 2019

This reader is an essential companion to Terra Incognita: An Annotated Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544-1934 and represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the Smokies and the region at large. Anne Bridges, Ken Wise, and Russell Clement have selected some of the best pieces from a rich repository of literature written about the Smokies prior to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.

Based on years of research, the diaries, memoirs, literature, and journalism collected here shed light on various historical and cultural aspects of the Great Smokies, from Smoky Mountain folkways and religion, to the Civil War era and the Cherokee Indians. All together, the writings pay tribute to the diverse inhabitants of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Each section gathers writings under a single topic heading and progresses chronologically. The readings can thus be taken to document the slow progression of change up until the eve of the large-scale disruptions that would be wrought by the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. This reader represents a significant contribution to scholarship on the Smokies and the region at large.

[more]

Thomas Wolfe's Civil War

Thomas Wolfe

University of Alabama Press, 2004

An anthology of Thomas Wolfe’s short stories, novel excerpts, and plays illuminating the Civil War

This collection of Thomas Wolfe’s writings demonstrates the centrality of the Civil War to Wolfe’s literary concerns and identity. From Look Homeward, Angel to The Hill Beyond and The Web and the Rock, Wolfe perpetually returned to the themes of loss, dissolution, sorrow, and romance engendered in the minds of many southerners by the Civil War and its lingering aftermath. His characters reflect time and again on Civil War heroes and dwell on ghostlike memories handed down by their mothers, fathers, and grandfathers. Wolfe and his protagonists compare their contemporary southern landscape to visions they have conjured of its appearance before and during the war, thereby merging the past with the present in an intense way. Ultimately, Wolfe’s prose style—incantatory and rhapsodic—is designed to evoke the national tragedy on an emotional level.

Selections of Wolfe’s writings in this collection include short stories ("Chickamauga," "Four Lost Men," "The Plumed Knight"), excerpts from his novels (O Lost, the restored version of Look Homeward, Angel, The Hills Beyond, and Of Time and the River) and a play, Mannerhouse, edited and introduced by David Madden. Madden, who makes the provocative claim that everything a southern writer writes derives from the Civil War experience, also highlights many issues essential to understanding Wolfe’s absorption with the Civil War.

[more]

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

Ben Hecht

University of Chicago Press, 1992

In 1921, Ben Hecht wrote a column for the Chicago Daily News that his editor called “journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature.” Hecht’s collection of sixty-four of these pieces, illustrated with striking pen drawings by Herman Rosse, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age, updated with a new Introduction for the twenty-first century. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity.

“The hardboiled audacity and wit that became Hecht’s signature as Hollywood’s most celebrated screen-writer are conspicuous in these vignettes. Most of them are comic and sardonic, some strike muted tragic or somber atmospheric notes. . . . The best are timeless character sketches that have taken on an added interest as shards of social history.”—L. S. Klepp, Voice Literary Supplement

[more]

A Thousand Cranes for India

Reclaiming Plurality Amid Hatred

Edited by Pallavi Aiyar

Seagull Books, 2020

In Japan there is a legend that anyone who folds one thousand paper cranes will have their wishes realized. But folding cranes, and the meditative, solemn care that it involves, has come to mean more than just an exercise in wish making. Origami cranes have become a symbol of renewal, atonement, and warning. Their symbolism may have emerged out of Japan’s particular mythology and history, but they do not belong to any one nation. The crane is a migratory bird that crosses borders and makes its home with scant regard to the blood-soaked lines that humans have drawn on maps.

This anthology uses origami cranes as a way for some of India’s best-known writers, poets, and artists to form a shared civic space for a conversation about the fault lines in India at a time of darkness. The twenty-three pieces collected here encompass reportage, stories, poems, memoir, and polemic—the kind of complex and enriching diversity that India demands and deserves. The paper crane becomes a motif of connection, beauty, and reclamation in an otherwise degraded country, enabling those who fight with words to become the best army they can be.

[more]

Three Spanish Querelle Texts

Grisel and Mirabella, The Slander against Women, and The Defense of Ladies against Slanderers

Pere Torrellas and Juan de Flores

Iter Press, 2013

This bilingual edition of the Three Spanish Querelle Texts is very well-conceived and will attract a wide audience among specialists and non-specialists alike. Francomano provides the first modern English translations of texts that enjoyed European-wide celebrity in the early sixteenth century. Her introduction is the best available summary of our knowledge about Torrellas’ two texts and Flores’ Grisel y Mirabella. Her translations are more readable than the Spanish texts, dividing Flores’ elaborate, rambling sentences into more comprehensible discourse. She often captures the tone of ambiguous or mock sincerity in the pleadings of both Flores’ and Torrellas’ characters. Francomano has a special sensitivity to the ludic quality of these discourses which helps readers appreciate their expression of “male anxiety” and “female agency” in the gender politics of their era.

[more]