Essays Books

Book SynopsisRemarkable: a book about borders that makes the reader feel sumptuously free. Peter PomerantsevIn this extraordinary work of narrative reportage, Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies. On holidays in the Red Riviera on the Black Sea, she remembers playing on the beach only miles from a bristling electrified fence whose barbs pointed inward toward the enemy: the citizens of the totalitarian regime.Kassabova discovers a place that has been shaped by successive forces of history: the Soviet and Ottoman empires, and, older still, myth and legend. Her exquisite portraits of fire walkers, smugglers, treasure hunters, botanists, and border guards populate the book. There are also the ragged men and women who have walked across Turkey from Syria and Iraq. But there seem to be nonhuman forces at work here too: This densely forested landscape is rich with curative springs and Thracian tombs, and the tug of the ancient world, of circular time and animism, is never far off.Border is a scintillating, immersive travel narrative that is also a shadow history of the Cold War, a sideways look at the migration crisis troubling Europe, and a deep, witchy descent into interior and exterior geographies.

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Book SynopsisThese first two volumes of a projected five, in preparation for several years, begin a major publishing venture, collecting the complete essays of one of the giants of modern English prose and of social commentary in our time. The first two volumes span the most productive period of Huxley's career. Volume I begins with his essays for Gilbert Murray's Athenaeum and his music essays for the New Westminster Gazette. Volume II continues through the 1920s and includes his controversial essays on India and the empire in "Jesting Pilate." The essays of both volumes range from nuanced assessments of art and architecture to political analyses, history, science, religion, and art, and a newly discovered series on music. Wide-ranging, allusive, and witty, they are informed by the probing skepticism of a highly educated and ironically incisive member of the English upper middle class. Huxley's fascination with the codes and conventions of European culture, his growing apprehensions about the menacing collapse of the European political order, and his awareness of the impact of science and technology on the post-Versailles world of England, France, Germany, and the United States form the basis for his critique. His subjects overlap with the satirical novels he wrote during the period between the wars, culminating in Point Counter Point and Brave New World. At their best, these essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature.Trade ReviewPerusing Volume One, I was struck by the sensitivity and the unerring perception in these unknown reviews, ultimately my most enjoyable reading of the year. -- Robert Craft, conductor and writer on music * Times Literary Supplement, (Books Of The Year, Dec.) *The editors...have done their job with commendable thoroughness. -- P. N. Furbank * Times Literary Supplement *An important and admirable publishing event. * Atlantic Monthly *There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times. * Economist *He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references. -- Christopher Hitchens * Los Angeles Times *To read all the essays in sequence is like being enrolled at the college of your dreams. * The New Yorker *A remarkable publishing event...these volumes return Huxley from our forgetfulness so as to enjoy his fine intelligence, prose and exemplary strengths. -- Jeffrey Hart * The Washington Times *Ultimately my most enjoyable reading of the year. * The Times Library, (London, England) *

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Book SynopsisIn this fifth of six volumes in a major publishing enterprise, Huxley continues to explore the role of science and technology in modern culture, and seeks a final level of foundational Truth that might provide the basis for his growing interest in religious mysticism. His philosophy of history took its final form in this period. At their best, Huxley's essays stand among the finest examples of the genre in modern literature. "A remarkable publishing event...beautifully produced and authoritatively edited."—Jeffrey Hart. "He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references,"—Christopher Hitchens, Los Angeles Times. "There is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times, and of a window on to a stage in the evolution of his mind."—Economist. "You have to marvel at the range of [Huxley’s] interests and the intelligence with which he explores them....What we experience in this high journalism is a man of intelligence, sensibility, and formidable erudition engaging his era and struggling for equilibrium while sharing the widespread perception that something ghastly has happened to European civilization...."—Washington TimesTrade ReviewPerusing Volume One, I was struck by the sensitivity and the unerring perception in these unknown reviews, ultimately my most enjoyable reading of the year. -- Robert Craft, conductor and writer on music * Times Literary Supplement, (Books Of The Year, Dec.) *The editors...have done their job with commendable thoroughness. -- P. N. Furbank * Times Literary Supplement *An important and admirable publishing event. * Atlantic Monthly *Fascinating...a welcome collection. * National Review *Huxley was among the few writers who played with ideas so freely, so gaily, with such virtuosity, that the responsive reader was dazzled and excited. -- Isaiah BerlinA remarkable publishing event...these volumes return Huxley from our forgetfulness so as to enjoy his fine intelligence, prose and exemplary strengths. -- Jeffrey Hart * The Washington Times *His reading was immense, his taste was impeccable, and his ear acute...His place in English literature is unique and is certainly assured. -- T. S. EliotThere is much to enjoy in these volumes...they are important as a document of his times. * Economist *He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references. -- Christopher Hitchens * Los Angeles Times *To read all the essays in sequence is like being enrolled at the college of your dreams. * The New Yorker *

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Book SynopsisCharles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) is a key writer of the revolutionary era and U.S. early republic, known for his landmark novels and other writings in a variety of genres. The Collected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown presents all of Brown’s non-novelistic writings—letters, political pamphlets, fiction, periodical writings, historical writings, and poetry—in a seven-volume scholarly edition. The edition’s volumes are edited to the highest scholarly standards and will bear the seal of the Modern Language Association Committee on Scholarly Editions (MLA-CSE). Letters and Early Epistolary Writings, volume 1 of the series, presents, for the first time, Brown’s complete extant correspondence along with three early epistolary fiction fragments. Brown’s 179 extant letters provide essential context for reading his other works and a wealth of information about his life, family, associates, and the wider cultural life of the revolutionary period and Early Republic. The letters document the interactions of Brown’s intellectual and literary circles in Philadelphia and during his New York years, when his publishing career began in earnest. The correspondence additionally includes exchanges with notables including Thomas Jefferson and Albert Gallatin. The volume's three epistolary fragments are the earliest examples of Brown’s fiction and are transcribed here for the first time in complete and definitive texts. The volume’s historical texts are fully annotated and accompanied by Historical and Textual Essays, as well as other appended materials, including the most complete and accurate information available concerning Brown’s correspondents and family history. The scholarly work informing this volume establishes significant new findings concerning Brown, his family and friends, and the circumstances of his development as a major literary figure of the revolutionary Atlantic world.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments I. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown (1788-1809) II. Early Epistolary Writings A. Henrietta letters (1790 / 1792) B. Godolphin and Ellendale fragments. 1. Godolphin Fragment (1793) 2. Ellendale Fragment (1793) Illustrations Historical Essay Textual Essay Census of the Letters of Charles Brockden Brown Description of Provenance Biographies of Correspondents Genealogy of the Brown and Linn Families Bibliography and Works Cited Index

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Book SynopsisReading 1759 investigates the literary culture of a remarkable year in British and French history, writing, and ideas. Familiar to many as the British “year of victories” during the Seven Years’ War, 1759 was also an important year in the histories of fiction, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. Reading 1759 is the first book to examine together the range of works written and published during this crucial year. Offering broad coverage of the year’s work in writing, these essays examine key works by Johnson, Voltaire, Sterne, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Sarah Fielding, and Christopher Smart, along with such group projects as the Encyclopédie and the literary review journals of the mid-eighteenth century. Organized around a cluster of key topics, the volume reflects the concerns most important to writers themselves in 1759. This was a year of the new and the modern, as writers addressed current issues of empire and ethical conduct, forged new forms of creative expression, and grappled with the nature of originality itself. Texts written and published in 1759 confronted the history of Western colonialism, the problem of prostitution in a civilized society, and the limitations of linguistic expression. Philosophical issues were also important in 1759, not least the thorny question of causation; while, in France, state censorship challenged the Encyclopédie, the central Enlightenment project. Taking into its purview such texts and intellectual developments, Reading 1759 puts the literary culture of this singular, and singularly important, year on the scholarly map. In the process, the volume also provides a self-reflective contribution to the growing body of “annualized” studies that focus on the literary output of specific years.Trade ReviewThis volume offers fine essays devoted to the pivotal year 1759, a time when Britain emerged as a world power to be reckoned with and when the British literary scene exploded with a collateral force. Regan (Queen's Univ., Belfast) divides the collection into six sections, treating the literature of empire and war, sentimentality, authorship, the Enlightenment, the notion of authorial originality, and the "culture of reading." The volume treats major writers, including Samuel Johnson, Voltaire, Diderot, Adam Smith, Edward Young, Oliver Goldsmith, Christopher Smart, David Hume, Laurence Sterne, and Sarah Fielding. Reading 1759 offers a superb, cogent introduction to mid-18th-century literary culture, covering much important ground and opening up new prospects for future investigation. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. * CHOICE *Reading 1759 nevertheless provides interesting insights into a number of notable works and authors and makes a useful contribution to Bucknell University Press’s Transits: Literature, Thought & Culture 1650-1850 transnational eighteenth-century studies series. . . .scholars will find new perspectives on the texts and authors that distinguished 1759’s contributions to literary history. * The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer *Reading 1759 calls attention to an interesting and pivotal moment in British and French history and reading culture by bringing together eleven essays on different aspects of the literature of that year. As Shaun Regan explains in his introduction to the volume, the year 1759 is particularly suited for this kind of cross-disciplinary study because it was the midpoint of the Seven Years’ War and was marked by cultural events such as the public opening of the British Museum, as well as the publication of major literary works by Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Laurence Sterne, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke (1–2). By encompassing the literature of both Britain and France, Reading 1759 invites a more transnational approach to literature that better approximates what readers at the time could have experienced. Regan explains that 'the purpose of the new essays collected together in Reading 1759 is to investigate the literary culture of Britain and France during this remarkable year' (2). Taken as a whole, the volume does this quite well. . . .Reading 1759 offers an overview of major authors and works from this year of literary, historical, and cultural change. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *Table of ContentsContents Acknowledgements Introduction by Shaun Regan I. Writing Empire 1. “What mankind has lost and gained”: Johnson, Rasselas, and Colonialism by James Watt 2.. Voltaire’s Candide as a Global Text: War, Slavery, and Leadership by Simon Davies II. Sentimental Ethics, Luxurious Sexualities 3. Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759: Spectatorship, Duty, and Social Improvement by Nigel Wood 4. “On the soft beds of luxury most kingdoms have expired”: 1759 and the Lives of Prostitutes by Mary Peace III. Authorship and Aesthetics 5. Young, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the Idea of the Author in 1759 by Adam Rounce 6. Towards a New Language: Sublime Aesthetics in Smart’s Jubilate Agno by Rosalind Powell IV. Enlightenment and its Discontents 7. The Encyclopédie in 1759: Crisis and Continuation by Rebecca Ford 8. Lost Cause: Hume, Causation, and Rasselas by James Ward V. Originality and Appropriation 9. Eccentricity, Originality, and the Novel: Tristram Shandy, volumes 1 and 2 by Moyra Haslett 10. Shakespeare’s “Propriety” and the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Novel: Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn by Kate Rumbold VI. Conclusion: Reading 1759 11. Writers, Reviewers, and the Culture of Reading by Shaun Regan Bibliography About the Contributors

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Book SynopsisThe essays in Sam Pickering’s new collection sing with thoughtful observations on life, death, love, and literature. Whether attending a reunion at Sewanee, cruising the Caribbean, wander­ing the streets of Storrs, Connecticut, or rambling through Nova Scotia, Pickering is able to work a quotation, insight, or reminiscence into almost every page. His collection sparks with copious observations from other writers and books that he’s devoured through the years. One of the many joys in Happy Vagrancy is finding a new author or essay hiding in the deep foliage of Pickering’s prose. He delivers his insights with humor, wit, and a keen eye for the ordinary wonders that surround us.Many of the essays touch on death and the dying, and nothing escapes description and fascination whether profound or seemingly less so: the death of a dear friend or two fledgling cardinals blown from a nest in the backyard and now covered with “periwinkle at the corner of the yard.” During a walk down a country lane, the names of flowers, birds, and bugs fill the page. Even in a meadow buzzing with life, there are reminders of our mortality and brief light too soon gone—and they remind us to read, think, and live with gusto and love.

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Book SynopsisBarely noticed upon publication in 1941, writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’s unique chronicle of Alabama sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would enjoy a remarkable revival during the 1960s. Remembering it as a “bible of sorts” for civil rights activists like himself, psychiatrist Robert Coles called it “an eloquent testimony that others had cared, had gone forth to look and hear, and had come back to stand up and address their friends and neighbors and those beyond personal knowing.” The book has remained in print ever since, profoundly affecting subsequent generations of readers. In this collection, seventeen gifted essayists offer provocative new perspectives on the Agee-Evans classic, ranging from personal appreciations to computational analysis, with forays into literary, film, historical, social, and cultural criticism, among other approaches. David Moltke-Hansen examines the political context in which the book was produced, comparing it in particular to the works of Erskine Caldwell and others with more explicit agendas than Agee, while Sarah E. Gardner explores Agee’s position as a southerner in the literary culture of 1930s Manhattan. Contrasting Agee’s text to the uncaptioned Evans photographs that open the book, Jeffrey Couchman discusses how the writer applied a “cinematic eye” to his descriptions of the sharecroppers’ homes and their possessions. In their essays, Hugh Davis, Brent Walker Cline, and David Madden link Agee with earlier writers such as Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, and Melville, while Michael Jacobs considers Agee as a forefather of the “New Journalism” championed by Tom Wolfe. Other contributors explore such disparate topics as Agee’s conception of irony, the conflict of art and nature in the book, and the author’s portrayal of space. Taken together, these artful elucidations of a notoriously difficult but brilliant work provide the most comprehensive and wide-ranging view of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to date.

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Book SynopsisRenowned poet Richard Tillinghast’s wanderlust and restless spirit are nearly as well known as his verses. This book of essays captures that penchant to wander, yet Journeys into the Mind of the World is not merely a compilation of travel stories – it is a book of places. It explores these chosen locations – Ireland, England, India, the Middle East, Tennessee, Hawaii – in a deeper way than would be typical of travel literature, attempting to enter not just the world, but “the mind of the world” – the roots and history of places, their political and cultural history, spiritual, artistic, architectural, and ethnic dimensions.Behind each essay is the presence, curiosity, and intelligence of the author himself, who uses his experience of the places he visits as a way of bringing the reader into the equation. Tillinghast illuminates his travels with a brilliant eye, a friendly soul, and eclectic knowledge of a variety of disparate areas – Civil War history, Venetian architecture, Asian cultures, Irish music, and the ways of out-of-the-way people. This attention to history and cultural embeddedness lends unique perspectives to each essay.At the heart of his journeys are his deep roots in the South, tracing back to his hometown in Tennessee. The book explores not only Tillinghast’s childhood home in Memphis, but even the time before his birth when his mother lived in Paris. Readers will feel a sense of being everywhere at once, in a strange simultaneity, a time and place beyond any map or guidebook.

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Book SynopsisSeveral of these essays focus on the author's dual role as a writer and publisher--the paradoxes of having a deep faith in good writing in an age that sometimes doesn't always seem to embrace it. A few essays are about Philip Brady's status as an aging writer--one about his obsession with pickup basketball at the age of 60, another about how a sudden medical condition causes him to sort out some of his earliest reading. Still other essays are about poetry and the teaching of poetry, particularly to nontraditional students.

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Book SynopsisWith a perfect balance of playfulness, humor, and apology, Philip Brady calls himself a bard. But he explains that, before the title became shrouded in mystery, bards were simply teachers, unknown and poor, who gave literal voice to poems through recitations. Woven throughout these twenty essays is Brady's resistance to the academic expectations and settings of poetic instruction, enabling him to elicit the most authentic and surprising responses from a range of voices. He is motivated by the possibility of poetry expressed in the grittiest of places and takes readers from the rust belts of Ohio, to the far-flung pubs of Ireland, to Zairian classrooms with few books and fidgety lightbulbs. Most of all, he believes that, while bad poetry is a fact of life, good poetry should be studied and learned by heart. Brady doesn't resort to dissecting poems here, though poems-his own and those of many of his masters, from Yeats to Tu Fu-do appear. Instead, the poetic language of his observations seems to fulfill a greater purpose: “Voiced, the poem is transfigured from a printed glyph to sensory language: ephemeral, but with a tensile strength derived from the collective memory that births it. Critics may feel differently, but what matters to a poem is not how many times it is reprinted, but how deeply it penetrates the heart.”These essays are meditations grounded in the author's life as a poet, teacher, publisher, musician, traveler, and organizer. In one, readers encounter non-traditional students who attend class after work and whose lives are already shaped by burden. Brady recognizes the tension between reading poetry as an academic exercise and reading it for its power to endow all people with a broader sense of the self that is informed by both the dead and the living. He celebrates the challenges that his students bring to the classroom by forging headlong into discussions that other instructors would cringe at-as when a student declares that he doesn't like reading old poetry but instead likes greeting-card poems. Brady masterfully turns this potentially deflating moment into one that is both validating and deeply inspiring-for student and reader.

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Book Synopsis

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Book Synopsis

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