Essays Books

Book SynopsisThis volume brings together a range of prominent and emerging voices within American and European Islamic studies to share the latest developments on Muhammad Iqbal thought's. They re-examine the ideas that lie at the heart of Iqbal's own thought: religion, science, metaphysics, nationalism and religious identity.

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Book SynopsisRepresenting a profound engagement with the work of Samuel Beckett, this volume gathers the very best of Stan Gontarski's Beckett criticism on practical, theoretical and critical levels.

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Book SynopsisThis exciting collection of original essays critically assesses the significance of locality in Shakespearean plays.Trade Review"In Charlotte Bront 's Shirley, the ruthless mill owner learns his disastrous industrial strategy from Coriolanus. The excellent contributors to Shakespeare in the North expand this fruitfully antagonistic relationship, placing England's national poet to the north of traditional Shakrespeare centres of culture and replacing Stratford, London, Arden and Windsor with Blackpool, Edinburgh, Northumberland and Tyneside." -Emma Smith, University of Oxford

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Book SynopsisAn edited collection of interdisciplinary essays on the work of Elizabeth Robins Pennell, American-born, London-based journalist, author, and aesthete who published (or co-published) over twenty books and a thousand periodical articles between the early 1880s and 1930.Trade Review"This is an outstanding collection, which stands out for its thoughtful range of topics, theoretically informed investigations and uniformly high quality of analysis. Well-chosen and excellently developed, the articles create an arc exploring Pennell's life and work, making this collection soar above what one might expect." -Talia Schaffer, Queens College, CUNY

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Book SynopsisThis book celebrates the centennial of Bliss's publication by offering new readings of some of Mansfield's most well-known stories.

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Book SynopsisA collection of thought-provoking essays spanning thirty-five years of Alison Light's work.

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Book SynopsisEver since the term creative nonfiction first came into widespread use, memoirists and journalists, essayists and fiction writers have faced off over where the border between fact and fiction lies. An early and influential book on questions of form in creative nonfiction, Bending Genre asks not where the boundaries between the genres should be drawn, but what happens when you push the line. The expanded second edition doubles the first edition with 23 new essays that broaden the exploration of hybridity, structure, unconventionality, and resistance in creative nonfiction, pushing the conversation forward in diverse and exciting ways.Written for writers and students of creative writing, this collection brings together perspectives from leading writers of creative nonfiction, including Michael Martone, Brenda Miller, Ander Monson, David Shields, Kazim Ali--and in the new edition--Catina Bacote, Ira Sukrungruang, Ingrid Horrocks, Elena Passarello, and Aviya Kushner. Each writer''s Trade ReviewCome for talk of the essay in all its formal wildness. Stay for a consideration of the form’s power and politics of resistance. Even deeper and more expansive than its first edition, Bending Genre 2.0 is essential reading for serious students, teachers, and writers of nonfiction. * Julija Šukys, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Missouri, USA, and author of Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter’s Reckoning (2017) *As creative nonfiction continues to break new ground, Bending Genre gives writers and readers a marvelous map to new literary terrain, as charted by some of the form’s most interesting cartographers and practitioners. By turns earnest, argumentative, lyric, playful, and provocative, the authors of these pieces explore nonfiction forms as refuge, as rebellion, as intellectual practice, as erotics and aesthetics, as mode of making, and as liberating community. Encouraging exploration and seeded with compelling readings of familiar and less familiar texts, Bending Genre is suggestive rather than scholarly, offering a mode of making and a gloss on the meanings made by this rich, shifting, wonderfully hard to define literary playground that we call creative nonfiction. * E. J. Levy, Associate Professor, Colorado State University, USA *Bending Genre is published into a landscape that has changed so much in the past ten years and will change even more in the next decades, and the essays that are the most convincing are those advocating that we cross, bend and break genre open in more disruptive ways – as writers and readers – and use our creative-critical powers to undo systems that have not been serving us. This book provides a solid anchor for thinking into genre-bending writing, and if readers supplement this text with the reading of many and diverse contemporary hybrid texts, they will experience first-hand how hot genre-bending writing can make their brains, how spacious it can make a heart. * Elizabeth Reeder, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Glasgow, UK, and author of microbursts (2021) *Bending Genre is an exciting anthology of contemporary nonfiction that shifts the focus from ethical questions about ‘truthtelling’ to aesthetic questions about form. The contributors make up a who’s-who of distinguished and new writers who have been enlivening the conversation about formal range in nonfiction for the past decade. What happens when writers ‘push the line,’ the editors ask, in terms of what defines genre? Oddball and exploratory, reflective and transgressive, musical and mindful, these essays brilliantly lay out the trail. * Alison Hawthorne Deming, Professor and Director of Creative Writing Program, University of Arizona, US [about the 1st edition] *What a wonderful and needed anthology! The essay has always created itself by doing battle with its adjectives: formal, informal, personal, genteel, modern(ist). Now, just as we were getting comfortable—too comfortable—with lyrical, this anthology arrives to unsettle us again with a slew of new adjectives: queer, bent, bending, monstrous, hybrid, impertinent, fluid, transgressive, anarchic, faked, diabolic, mis-shelved, Dionysian, blissful, puzzling, vertiginous, saturated, unboxed. And then, when our heads are beginning to explode with the centrifugal force of these adjectives, Bending Genre pulls us back with an equally wondrous and innovative set of formal possibilities – creative nonfiction as video game, false document, encyclopedia, autogeography, murder mystery, sepia-tone picture, Play-Doh construction, train trip, user of white space, questionnaire, or the genre that dare not speak its name. I will adopt this book for my classes. It’s time to shake things up. * Ned Stuckey-French, Director, Program in Publishing & Editing, Florida State University, USA, and Book Review Editor for Fourth Genre [about the 1st edition] *Opens up via several essays by some of the best current practitioners and theorists of the essay-writing craft...The essays of Part II, 'Structures', offer numerous examples and ideas of shaping organizational frameworks for the essay...an excellent job discussing the uses of story, elements,montage, white spaces, lack of closure, etymology, and metaphor...I would recommend this collection to all serious writers. * Heidi Czerwiec, Rain Taxi [about the 1st edition] *A wonderfully queer enterprise. Collectively, it is not entirely criticism; not entirely creative writing. Singer and Walker collate the essays to destabilize the reader's assumptions and expectations of the text--and they do so successfully...Perplexing and intellectually stimulating, Bending Genre and all the questions it raises continues the discussion outside of the text. What is particularly noteworthy of Singer and Walker is that their project--much in vein of "queer" and of the notion that writing, like critical thinking, is interminable--remains alive online. They have harnessed the powers of new media to keep the discussion going, both on Facebook as well as the project's website. * Marcie Bianco, LambdaLiterary.org [about the 1st edition] *Table of ContentsIntroduction to the Second Edition I. Hybrids 1. Why Some Hybrids Work and Others Don’t, Lia Purpura 2. Queering the Essay, David Lazar 3. The Everbent Genre, Patrick Madden 4. Don’t Let Those Damn Genres Cross You Ever Again!, Lawrence Sutin 5. Genre-Queer: Notes Against Generic Binaries, Kazim Ali 6. On the EEO Genre Sheet, Jenny Boully 7. Reading Samuel R. Delany, T Clutch Fleischmann 8. Beautiful Muddied Waters: On Genre and Veracity, Sean Prentiss 9. Listening for the Sound, Sejal Shah 10. Split Tone, Lee Martin 11. Lyrebirds in the Impasse, David Carlin 12. Headiness, Karen Brennan 13. What's in Your Purse?: Essays Through the Eyes of a Character Actor, Elaine Passarello 14. Propositions; Provocations: Inventions, Mary Capello II. Structures 15. On Scaffolding, Hermit Crabs, and the Real False Document, Margot Singer 16. Text Adventure, Ander Monson 17. Adventures in the Reference Section, Kevin Haworth 18. Meeting the Ancestor on the Road, Tina Makereti 19. Autogeographies, Barrie Jean Borich 20. Dissolving Genre: Writ with Water, Ingrid Horrocks 21. “Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!”: Courage and Creative Nonfiction, Brenda Miller 22. Traumatized Time, David McGlynn 23. Escapology, Justin Hocking 24. Play-Doh Fun Factory Poetics, Wayne Koestenbaum 25. A Sequence of Thoughts Without Any Kind of Order, Ira Sukrungruang 26. My Mistake, Nicole Walker III. Unconventions 27. On Convention, Margot Singer 28. Losing Language, Camille Dungy 29. What the Bottles Know, Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas 30. 44 Tattoos, David Shields 31. Creative Exposition—Anther Way that Nonfiction Writing Can Be Good, Dave Madden 32. This Photograph is Evidence of You, Lawrence Lacambra Ypil 33. Ostrakons at Amphipolis, Postcards from Chicago: Thucydides and the Invention and Deployment of Lyric History, Michael Martone 34. On Fragmentation, Steve Fellner 35. Single Mindedness and Whole Heartedness in the Essay Writing Workshop: An Essay in Many Parts, Jenn Ashworth 36. Positively Negative, Dinty W. Moore 37. Study Questions for the Essay at Hand: A Speculative Essay, Robin Hemley 38. A Brief History of Disquiet, Deficit & Disbelief by FeiMan, Xu Xi 39. The Inclusivity of Metaphor, Nicole Walker IV. Resistances 40. The Funk of Defiance, the Freedom of Refusal, Catina Bacote 41. The Essay as Resistance, Aviya Kushner 42. Prepositioning Resistance, Queerly Francesca Rendle-Short 43. Exposition as Resistance: Tell Me the Moon Is Shining, Matthew Batt 44. The Lyric Essay as a Mode of Resistance, LaTanya McQueen 45. It Is What It Is, Eula Biss 46. How It Is: Writing Towards Wonder, Jessica Hendry Nelson 47. On Not Being Able to Write It, Wendy Rawlings 48. Hermes Goes to College, Michael Martone 49. The Convex View, Karen Lloyd 50. The Moral Map, Stephanie Elizondo Griest

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Book SynopsisThe sixth and final instalment in this series of small, inspirational books from the editors of O, the Oprah Magazine, O's Little Guide to the Big Questions is a collection of thought-provoking stories and essays on the wisdom to be gleaned from asking (and answering) life’s biggest questions. With contributions from Gloria Steinem, Rita Wilson and many more inspirational writers and artists, this stunning collection will help you find your route personal happiness.What matters most? What is my purpose? When is the right time to make a change? Who is most important to me? Asking (and answering) the big questions can be terrifying – but it is the only way to put yourself on the path towards living your best life. Big questions can be forces of empowerment, motivation and clarification. The editors at O, The Oprah Magazine have combed through the magazine’s extensive archives to assemble O’s Little Guide to the Big Questions, a collection of stirring, motivating, thought-provoking pieces from great writers and celebrated thinkers, that offers wise guidance and inspiration to anyone feeling lost or in need of a reset.Table of ContentsUnit - One: How Do I Live a Full Life? Chapter - 1: An Education, Amy Maclin Chapter - 2: Facing Down Fear, Michelle Wildgen Chapter - 3: Small House, Big World, David McGlynn Chapter - 4: Walk Away, Elissa Schappell Chapter - 5: Slipping Past Borders, Katherine Russell Rich Unit - Two: What About Love? Chapter - 1: Double Jeopardy, Rita Wilson Chapter - 2: Strings Attached, April Wilder Chapter - 3: Divorce Dreams, Ellen Tien Chapter - 4: The Halfway House, Jessica Ciencin Henriquez Chapter - 5: Meant to Be, Julie Orringer Unit - Three: Can I Handle the Hard Times? Chapter - 1: Feel Your Feelings, Katie Arnold-Ratliff Chapter - 2: Not to Look Away, Marie Howe Chapter - 3: You Can See, Thich Nhat Hanh Chapter - 4: My Mother's Daughter, Bonnie Jo Campbell Chapter - 5: Come What May, Joan Silber Unit - Four: What Really Matters? Chapter - 1: Yes and No, Valerie Monroe Chapter - 2: Finders, Keepers, Hoarders, Weepers, Michelle Bertsos Chapter - 3: Give Yourself a Happiness Raise, Margarita Bertsos Chapter - 4: Sweet Charity, Catherine Newman Chapter - 5: Helpfulness, Gloria Steinem Chapter - 6: Thanks for the Memories, Alice McDermott Unit - Five: What Does It All Mean? Chapter - 1: Vision, Kate Braestrup Chapter - 2: My Mother's Journals, Terry Tempest Williams Chapter - 3: Blinded by the Light, Martha Beck Chapter - 4: Cooper's Heart, Rebecca Gummere Chapter - 5: The Point, Barbara Ehrenreich

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Book Synopsis'Hough's conversational prose reads like the voice of a blues singer, taking breaks between songs to narrate her heartbreak in verse, cajoling her audience to laugh to keep from crying' - The New York Times'Hough's writing will break your heart' - Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women'Each one told with the wit of David Sedaris, and the insight of Joan Didion' - Telegraph 'This moving account of resilience and hard-earned agency brims with a fresh originality' - Publishers WeeklySearing and extremely personal essays from the heart of working-class America, shot through with the darkest elements the country can manifest - cults, homelessness, and hunger - while discovering light and humor in unexpected corners.As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the U.S. Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond "The Family."Along the way, she's loaded up her car and started over, trading one life for the next. Here, as she sweeps through the underbelly of America--relying on friends, family, and strangers alike--she begins to excavate a new identity even as her past continues to trail her and color her world, relationships, and perceptions of self.At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one's past when carving out a future.Trade ReviewLauren Hough's extraordinary essay collection Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing is as powerful as it is poignant. So many moments in this exceptionally crafted essays brought me to tears and before long I would find myself laughing as Hough wielded her razor sharp wit. This is one of those rare books that will instantly become part of the literary canon and the world of letters will be better for it. * Roxane Gay, author of Difficult Women *Lauren Hough's Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing is so brilliant, so humane and pissed off and hysterically funny and thought-provoking, and so beautifully written it's hard to describe except to say that it's a book that is going to mean a lot to a lot of people, and it might cause some fights, and you better read it so you can have the pleasure of reading it and the pleasure of talking about it with everyone. * Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway *Lauren Hough is the best new voice I've read in years: fiercely honest, funny, brazen, and unrepentant. * Heather Havrilesky, Ask Polly columnist and author of What If This Were Enough? *Hough's direct, no bullshit manner will have you laughing and nodding your head in agreement. If you are a fan of memoir and books about moving through life overcoming any obstacle in your way or, if, like me, you love reading about strong queer people - then this book is for you! * Christina Pascucci-Ciampa, Boston Magazine *[Leaving Isn't the Hardest Thing] is a killer debut, as riveting for its content as it is for its captivating style. * BookPage, '2021 preview: Most anticipated nonfiction' *These essays mine [Hough's] eclectic, fascinating life and her efforts to create her own identity. Plus, she's a fabulous writer. * Deborah Dundas, The Toronto Star *An edgy and unapologetic memoir in essays. * Kirkus Reviews *This moving account of resilience and hard-earned agency brims with a fresh originality. * Publishers Weekly *Each one told with the wit of David Sedaris, and the insight of Joan Didion * Telegraph *Hough's conversational prose reads like the voice of a blues singer, taking breaks between songs to narrate her heartbreak in verse, cajoling her audience to laugh to keep from crying * The New York Times *

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Book SynopsisFrom the award-winning author of On Fragile Waves comes an inspirational, surprising guide to creation and creativity, and how both bring us closer to God.   Centuries ago, sound theology and good fiction were friends and not strangers. Decades ago, authors strove not for self-expression and self-disclosure but for a mastery of craft and language and books that transformed the reader with wisdom and love. In more recent years, the old ideals have been exchanged for lesser ones.   Few guides to writing, which tend to focus on mechanics, point of view, and plot, address the more important matters of meaning, depth, and heart. But it is the latter qualities that make a book a blessing and gift to both writer and reader. Like Christ’s invitation to follow, they demand a risk and sacrifice of the self and all it holds dear. Writers from George MacDonald to James Baldwin understood this, but in recent years this understanding has been los

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Book SynopsisConfronting the dilemmas of modernist and postmodernist thought, Roger Kimball in this new collection of his work explores the literary and philosophical underpinnings of modernity as well as the state of our culture today. Experiments Against Reality displays the sophistication, breadth of knowledge, and clarity of argument that have made Mr. Kimball one of the most trenchant critics of our contemporary culture. He begins by considering the influential poet and theorist T. E. Hulme, and shows how the work of Eliot, Auden, Wallace Stevens, Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, and others can be seen as efforts to articulate a convincing alternative to the intellectual and spiritual desolations of the age. Turning to the philosophical tradition, Mr. Kimball suggests how figures from Mill and Nietzsche to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, and Roger Scruton have addressed — or in many cases evaded — the defining moral imperatives of modernity. Finally he steps back to consider more generally the career of contemporary culture — the trivializing nature of the contemporary art world; the academic attack on historical truth and scientific rationality; the fate of the "two cultures" controversy. "Enlightenment," Mr. Kimball writes, "sought to emancipate man by liberating reason and battling against superstition. But reason liberated entirely from tradition has turned out to be rancorous and hubristic — in short, something irrational." Experiments Against Reality offers continuing evidence of Mr. Kimball's stature as one of our most important cultural critics.Trade ReviewWill be required reading for those who want a significant perspective on how and why our contemporary culture got to be the way it is. -- Frederick MorganStylish, richly allusive, and immensely readable...an invaluable collection. -- John GrossOne of the most candid and perceptive critics of American culture. -- Gertrude Himmelfarb * Times Literary Supplement *A model of investigative advocacy of argumentation, principles, and responsibility...a superb performance. -- Robert McDowell * The Hudson Review *A scathing critic but one whose tirades are usually justified...his intellectual rigor is refreshing. -- Catherine Saint Louis * The New York Times *His position is conservative but not reactionary, humanistic but not populist, fresh but never trendy. * John Simon *A book you will relish and applaud. Roger Kimball's essays on recent poets and thinkers...are as wise as they are elegantly written. -- Martin Gardner

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Book SynopsisA collection of essays presenting cutting-edge research on the history of Africa and Afrcan Diasporas.

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Book SynopsisSee The Arrow of God and other writings of Chinua Achebe in a new light.

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Book SynopsisThis is the Place is a collection of essays exploring home, from a diverse collection of writers. Home is a loaded word, and a complex idea for most of us: it's a place that can be safe, sentimental, difficult, nourishing, war-torn, or long-lost. It's a place to escape and a place to create. I believe that The essays cover topics like the bonds we form with our stuff, the smells and sounds we crave, the people and plants we cultivate, the qualities that develop because we hail from one place or another. Home and family topics that are toothsome, they are hot and present in our rapidly shifting world of self-definition; Wherever I'm With You touches on the many ways that home impacts the rest of our lives, with so many angles for reader interest and media coverage.

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Book SynopsisThe second volume of the Library of America's definitive selection of Wendell Berry's nonfiction writings.

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Book SynopsisThe indispensible writings of the modern-day Thoreau.

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Book SynopsisAn illuminating anthology about translating and translators from Lynne Sharon Schwartz.An illuminating anthology about translating and translators from Lynne Sharon Schwartz.

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Book SynopsisThis book scrutinizes the genre of the author-as-character with respect to three broad issues–authorship, the posthumous, and cultural revisionism–that arise in reading such works from a contemporary perspective. Late twentieth-century fiction 'postmodernizes' romantic and modern authors not only to understand them better, but also to understand itself in relation to a past (literary tradition, aesthetic paradigms, cultural formations, etc.) that has not really passed. Penelope Fitzgerald's 'The Blue Flower', Peter Ackroyd's 'The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and Chatterton', Peter Carey's 'Jack Maggs', Michael Cunningham's 'The Hours', Colm Toibin's 'The Master', and Geoff Dyer's 'Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence - 'the mighty dead' (Harold Bloom) are brought back to life, reanimated and bodied forth in new textual bodies that project a postmodern understanding of the author as a historically and culturally contingent subjectivity constructed along the lines of gender, sexual orientation, class, and nationality.

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Book SynopsisThe Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to reimagine our homes, work, relationships and adapt to a new way of life - one with far fewer possibilities for interaction. And yet, in this period of intense isolation, we've faced dilemmas which are nearly universal. How to love, to care for aging parents, to find a home, attend to a planet in flux, fight for justice. This vast range of experiences is captured by our greatest storytellers, essayists and poets in Freeman's: Change.Some pieces explore the small moments that serve as new routines in a life lived at home, as in Joshua Bennett's essay, where a Coltrane playlist sets the stage for early morning dances with his newborn son. Sometimes, it's the absence of change that drives us to the edge. In Lina Mounzer's 'The Gamble,' a father's incessant hope for a better life festers and sinks the whole family after they leave Lebanon during the Civil War. And in 'Final Days,' Sayaka Murata imagines a future without aging, where people must choose how and when they want to die, consulting guidebooks like Let's Die Naturally! Super Deaths for Adults & The Best Spots.With new writing from Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Zahia Rahman, Yoko Ogawa, Yasmine El Rashidi, Lina Meruane and Aleksandar Hemon, and featuring work from never-before-published writers like Elizabeth Ayre, Freeman's: Change opens a window into the many-sided ways we adapt.Trade ReviewThere's an illustrious new literary journal in town . . . [with] fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by new voices and literary heavyweights. * Vogue.com *A terrific anthology . . . Sure to become a classic in years to come. * San Francisco Chronicle *Freeman draws from a global cache of talent . . . An expansive reading experience. * Kirkus Reviews *Freeman's is fresh, provocative, engrossing. * bbc.co.uk *

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Book SynopsisDay by day, tweet by tweet, it often feels like our world is run on hate. Invective. Cruelty and sadism. But is it possible the greatest and most powerful force is love? In the newest issue of this acclaimed series, Freeman's Love asks this question, bringing together literary heavyweights like Richard Russo, Anne Carson, Sandra Cisneros, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Tommy Orange and Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk alongside emerging writers such as Andres Felipe Solano and Semezdin Mehmedinovic.Together, the pieces comprise a stunning exploration of the complexities of love, tracing it from its earliest stirrings, to the forbidden places where it emerges against reason, to loss so deep it changes the color of perception. In a time of contentiousness and flagrant abuse, this issue promises what only love can bring: a balm of complexity and warmth.Table of Contents1: Introduction: John Freeman 2: Seven Shorts: Maaza Mengiste, Daniel Mendelsohn, Anne Carson, Mariana Enriquez, An Yu, Tommy Orange, Matt Sumell 3: "Heaven with a Capital H" / Mieko Kawakami 4: Postcard from New Mexico / Deborah Levy 5: Snowflake / Semezdin Mehmedinovic´ 6: Stone Love / Louise Erdrich 7: The Snowman / Daisy Johnson 8: Poet's Biography / Valzhyna Mort 9: Apples / Gunnhild Øyehaug 10: Exploding Cigar of Love / Sandra Cisneros 11: On a Stone Pillow / Haruki Murakami 12: How to Manage / Niels Fredrik Dahl 13: Good People / Richard Russo 14: High Fidelity / Robin Coste Lewis 15: Seams / Olga Tokarczuk 16: swan / Andrew McMillan 17: Contributor Notes 18: About the Editor

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Book SynopsisFrance and the United States have long shared a special relationship, defined both by occasional puzzlement and endless fascination. François Busnel, one of France's most prominent literary critics, seeks to bridge this gap with America, his journal of literature and politics, launched in the wake of the 2016 election and now available to English readers for the first time. In this collection of pieces from the magazine, Alain Mabanckou sketches the outlines of his Los Angeles, where he finds a sense of belonging far from his home country of the Republic of the Congo. Leïla Slimani considers the ways #MeToo is shaping a new discourse of consent on college campuses. Philippe Besson travels through the American heartland, driving from Chicago to New Orleans. Featuring interviews with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Louise Erdrich and original work in English by Richard Powers and Colum McCann, America celebrates the enduring relationship between France and the United States and offers a testament to the essential power of literature to unite in times of division.Trade ReviewA kaleidoscopic reading list of a divided nation. * Columbia Journalism Review *Lucid and humanist, a political literary magazine in which today's most prestigious writers witness, each in their own ways, a disillusioned country. * L’Expres *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Francois Busnel 1: Los Angeles by Alain Mabanckou 2: From Chicago to New Orleans by Philippe Besson 3: Orange Is the New Black by Richard Powers 4: The Outskirts of the City by Marie Darrieussecq 5: The Yellowstone Chronicles by Joël Dicker 6: Hitchhiking along the Border by Sylvain Prudhomme 7: Four Letters from America by Laura Kasischke 8: Chocolate-Colored Washington by Abdourahman Waberi 9: Trans-America by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich 10: A Hat in Manhattan by Francois Busnel 11: Miss Gulliver in America by Leïla Slimani 12: The Home(less) of the Free and the Brave by Lee Stringer 13: Will Evangelicals Save Trump? by Philippe Coste 14: Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Yann Perreau 15: We Must Fight for Our Memory, an interview with Louise Erdrich 16: Among the Amish by Philippe Claudel 17: Las Vegas by Alice Zeniter 18: A Call to Young Writers on the Eve of the Trump Presidency by Colum McCann

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Book SynopsisFrom the voices of protesters to the encroachment of a new fascism, everywhere we look power is revealed. Spouse to spouse, soldier to citizen, looker to gazed upon, power is never static: it is either demonstrated or deployed. Its hoarding is itself a demonstration. This thought-provoking issue of the acclaimed literary annual Freeman's explores who gets to say what matters in a time of social upheaval.Many of the writers are women. Margaret Atwood posits it is time to update the gender of werewolf narratives. Aminatta Forna shatters the silences which supposedly ensured her safety as a woman of colour walking in public space. Power must often be seized. The narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's short story finally wrenches control of the family's finances from her husband only to make a fatal mistake. Meanwhile the hero of Tahmima Anam's story achieves freedom by selling bull semen. Australian novelist Josephine Rowe recalls a gallery attendee trying to take what was not offered when she worked as a life-drawing model. Violence often results from power imbalances - Booker Prize winner Ben Okri watches power stripped from the residents of Grenfell Tower by ferocious neglect. But not all power must wreak damage. Barry Lopez remembers fourteen glimpses of power, from the moment he hitched a ride on a cargo plan in Korea to the glare he received from a bear traveling with her cubs in the woods, asking - do you plan me harm?Featuring work from brand new writers Nicole Im, Jaime Cortez and Nimmi Gowrinathan, as well as from some of the world's best storytellers, including US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani, and Turkish novelist Elif Shafak, Freeman's: Power escapes from the headlines of today and burrows into the heart of the issue.Trade ReviewFrom the abstract to the literal, there is no shortage of provocative, thoughtful pieces here. * Publishers Weekly *A new literary journal that's sure to become a classic in years to come. * San Francisco Chronicle *There's an illustrious new literary journal in town... * Vogue.com *Freeman's is fresh, provocative, engrossing... * BBC.com *Freeman draws from a global cache of talent...An expansive reading experience. * Kirkus Reviews *John Freeman is a literary bowerbird; he has an eye for treasure...He certainly excels at the art of collection, particularly when he looks beyond the big names. * The Australian *

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Book SynopsisNew and selected writing from the beloved New Yorker short story writer, Lore Segal.

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Book SynopsisA sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice.Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others'' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers.Briallen Hopper''s Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary--friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green''s The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O''Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you''ve never seen it!).Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.

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Book SynopsisIn his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

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Book Synopsis

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