Essays Books

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisFor two decades, essayist John D''Agata has been exploring the contours of the essay through a series of innovative, informative, and expansive anthologies that have become foundational texts in the study of the genre. The breakthrough first volume, The Next American Essay, highlighted major work from 1974 to 2003, while the second, The Lost Origins of the Essay, showcased the essay''s ancient and international forebears. Now, with The Making of the American Essay, D''Agata concludes his monumental tour of this inexhaustible form, with selections ranging from Anne Bradstreet''s secular prayers to Washington Irving''s satires, Emily Dickinson''s love letters to Kenneth Goldsmith''s catalogues, Gertrude Stein''s portraits to James Baldwin''s and Norman Mailer''s meditations on boxing.Across the anthologies, D''Agata''s introductions to each selection-intimate and brilliantly provocative throughout-serve as an extended treatise, collectively forming the backbone of the trilogy. He uncovers new stories in the American essay''s past, and shows us that some of the most fiercely daring writers in the American literary canon have turned to the essay in order to produce our culture''s most exhilarating art.The Making of the American Essay offers the essay at its most varied, unique, and imaginative best, proving that the impulse to make essays in America is as old and as original as the nation itself.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisA complete text of this key document in the history of Western racial thought. The book includes a substantial biography of Gregoire and an analysis of the historical context in which he wrote and the impact of his work.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCombining interviews and personal narrative, the author presents a portrait of the turbulent history of Peru, starting in 1983 when the Shining Path guerillas plunged the country into crisis. She explores why so many Peruvian women felt compelled to join the terrorists.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis historic novel about blackface minstrels explores below the surface. Eric Lott, writing for African American Review, described it as ""A novel of ideas devoted to exploring the complex fate of black and white Americans caught, as ever, in a racial history they can neither surmount nor escape"".

Read more less

Book SynopsisAlone among important American writers, Ambrose Bierce fought for four years in the Civil War. The writings he produced about that conflict comprise a body of work unique in merican literature. This volume gathers virtually everything Bierce wrote about the war, from letters composed on the field of battle to maps he drew as a topographical engineer, from his masterful short stories to his final bittersweet ruminations before he disappeared into Mexico in 1914. The collection is organized chronologically, following Bierce's participation in a wide range of battles, from the early skirmishes in the West Virginia mountains to the bloodbaths at Shiloh and Chickamauga and his near fatal wounding at Kennesaw Mountain. His overlapping accounts of these events provide a clear and compelling record of the sights and sounds of the battlefield, the psychological traumas the war induced in its soldiers, and the memories that would haunt survivors for the rest of their lives. In prose that anticipates the work of Ernest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien, Bierce's writings unflinchingly tell the truth about the war. The volume includes a biographical introduction and comprehensive notes on all the writings and is suitable for classroom adoption and general readers alike.

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book Synopsis

Read more less

Book SynopsisFrederic Raphael, the English novelist, screenwriter, and man of letters, and Joseph Epstein, the American essayist, short-story writer, and literary critic, exchanged e-mails sporadically over the years, usually commenting on each other’s various writings. Then one day in 2009, Raphael wrote to Epstein to suggest that, since they enjoyed a benevolence toward each other unusual among literary men, they begin an exchange of e-mail correspondence on a regular basis. His thought was that, at the end of a year or so, the result might be an interesting book. Epstein, who had long admired Raphael’s writing, agreed. The two men had never met, nor had they even spoken over the phone. Their friendship was conducted entirely online. Each week they exchanged e-mails of roughly 2,000 words. They discovered a great many things about each other they hadn’t previously known. They shared, for example, a common birthplace in Chicago, where Raphael was born, though his family moved to England in 1938, and his education after that was exclusively English. Each man belongs to that dolorous fraternity of those who have buried a child. Their literary tastes vary, though not widely, since both grew up admiring the great modernist writers and both had an enduring love for Greek and Roman culture. Both men share a fundamental agreement about what, in artistic and intellectual realms, is serious. Raphael and Epstein are artists who happen also to be intellectuals. The result is that few subjects are off limits to them. They are of an age when they have long ceased to worry about their reputations. Wherever else they may look, it is not over their shoulders. Candor reinforced by comedy is the reigning note of Where Were We? as it was of Distant Intimacy, their earlier volume of e-mail correspondence. Writing about other writers, actors, politics, the movies, intellectual fashions, the writing life, and much else, both men say precisely what they think, and say it in high style. Readers may or may not agree with their strong views, but they will never find their thoughts other than fascinating.

Read more less

Book SynopsisWhen Emerson died in 1882 he was the most famous public intellectual in America. Yet his most remarkable literary creation--his journals--remained unpublished. Begun when he was a precocious Harvard junior of 16 and continued without significant lapse for almost 60 years, Emerson's journals were his life's work. They were the starting point for virtually everything in his celebrated essays, lectures, and poems. It would be a hundred years after his death before these intimate records would appear in print in their entirety, and they are still, at over three million words, among the least known and least available of Emerson's writings. With Selected Journals 1820-1842 and its companion volume Selected Journals 1841-1877, The Library of America presents the most ample and comprehensive nonspecialist edition of Emerson's great work ever published--one that retains the original order in which he composed his thoughts and preserves the dramatic range of his unique style in long, uninterrupted passages, but without the daunting critical apparatus of the 16-volume scholarly edition. Each volume includes a 16-page portfolio of images of Emerson and his contemporaries, a note on the selections, extensive notes, biographical sketches, a chronology, and an index. This volume begins with Emerson's first journal entry, on January 25, 1820, in a homemade booklet he titled The Wide World, and follows him through his early years at Harvard College and the Divinity School, his ordination as a Unitarian minister, his marriage to Ellen Tucker and her untimely death, his fateful decision to leave the ministry, and his travels in England and on the Continent. It offers an irreplaceable perspective on the intellectual currents of the day--the emergence of Transcendentalism; the furor over Emerson's "Divinity School Address"; the founding of The Dial; experiments in communal living at Fruitlands and Brook Farm--and intimate sketches of Emerson's friends and contemporaries, including Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.Trade Review“In his journals, Emerson focused on a wide range of topics, from moral truth to domestic gossip, from Concord to European travels, from solitude to democracy, slavery, and the US economy. His frame of reference oscillates between nature and human character (of both historical figures and his contemporaries). Both history and autobiography, these volumes are captivating. Highly recommended.” —Choice

Read more less

Book SynopsisSherman Alexie is, by many accounts, the most widely read American Indian writer in the United States and likely in the world. A literary polymath, Alexie's nineteen published books span a variety of genres and include his most recent National Book Award-winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.Now, for the first time, a volume of critical essays is devoted to Alexie's work both in print and on the big screen. Editors Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush have assembled twelve leading scholars of American Indian literature to provide new perspectives on a writer with his finger on the pulse of America.Interdisciplinary in their approach to Alexie's work, these essays cover the writer's entire career, and are insightful and accessible to scholars and lay readers alike. This volume is a worthy companion to the work of one of our nations's most recognized contemporary voices.Trade Review"The bar is raised. I believe this work will be seen as a role model for literary criticism of Native American fiction, poetry, and film."—Simon Ortiz, poet and professor of English at Arizona State University "An important and timely work.... This volume sets a high standard of scholarship for those committed to grappling with the broader complexities of Alexie's life and work. The collaborative tenor of the project is particularly refreshing, because it invites scholars to converse across disciplines in order to keep pace with an iconic writer whose literary reputation now extends far beyond the Pacific Northwest."—Pacific Northwest Quarterly "An exciting addition to the growing body of scholarship on Sherman Alexie's work. The extensive bibliography of work by and about Alexie that appears at the end of this collection alone makes this book an invaluable resource for scholars and future scholars of Alexie's work."—Studies in American Indian LiteraturesTable of ContentsEdited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, eds., Sherman A Collection of Critical EssaysAlexie:ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: “Imagination Turns Every Word into a Bottle Rocket”: An Introduction to Sherman Alexie Jeff BerglundDancing That Way, Things Began to Change: The Ghost Dance as Pantribal Metaphor in Sherman Alexie’s Writing Lisa Tatonetti“Survival = Anger x Imagination”: Sherman Alexie’s Dark Humor Philip Heldrich“An Extreme Need to Tell the Truth”: Silence and Language in Sherman Alexie’s “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire” Elizabeth ArchuletaRock and Roll, Redskins, and Blues in Sherman Alexie’s Work P. Jane HafenThis Is What It Means to Say Reservation Cinema: Making Cinematic Indians in Smoke Signals James H. CoxNative Sensibility and the Significance of Women in Smoke Signals Angelica LawsonThe Distinctive Sonority of Sherman Alexie’s Indigenous Poetics Susan Berry Brill de RamÍrezThe Poetics of Tribalism in Sherman Alexie’s The Summer of Black Widows Nancy J. PetersonSherman Alexie’s Challenge to the Academy’s Teaching of Native American Literature, Non-Native Writers, and Critics Patrice Hollrah“Indians Do Not Live in Cities, They Only Reside There”: Captivity and the Urban Wilderness in Indian Killer Meredith JamesIndigenous Liaisons: Sex/Gender Variability, Indianness, and Intimacy in Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World Stephen F. EvansSherman Alexie’s Transformation of “Ten Little Indians” Margaret O’ShaughnesseyHealing the Soul Wound in Flight and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Jan JohnsonThe Business of Writing: Sherman Alexie’s Meditations on Authorship Jeff BerglundContributorsBibliographyIndex

Read more less

Book SynopsisPhilip Garrison says his book of essays is “in praise of mixed feelings,” particularly the mixed feelings he and his neighbors have toward the places they came from. His neighborhood is the Columbia Plateau, one of many North American nodes of immigration. Following a meandering, though purposeful trail, Garrison catches hillbillies and newer Mexican arrivalsin ambiguous, wary encounters on a set four hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of Native American displacement. Garrison is the product of the earlier surge of new arrivals: from the 1930s to the1970s, those he calls hillbillies left such mid-nation states as Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the Dakotas for the West. The more recent wave, from 1990 to 2010, came mostly from the central plateauof Mexico. These are folks with whom Garrison communes in multiple ways. Anecdotes from sources as varied as pioneer diaries, railroad promotions,family Bibles, Wikipedia, and local gossip “portray the region's immigration as a kind of identity makeover, one that takes the form first of breakdown, then of reassembly, and finally of renewal.” Garrison’s mixof slangy memoir and anthropological field notes shines light on the human condition in today’s West.Trade Review“Garrison bears witness in vivid prose to the seemingly mundane, and in doing so he makes the mundane become provocative. This is a book I could read over and over and each time find new insights into the human condition.” —Ken Lamberton, author of Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist’s Observations from Prison "Garrison sets up vivid and powerful contrasts and comparisons, snapshots of farflung cultures, mexicano/hillbilly, fragmented, then cohering—or beginning to cohere—in novel ways. An important, deeply knowledgeable portrait of time and place.” —C. M. Mayo, author of Metaphysical Odyssey into the Mexican Revolution Table of ContentsPreface PART ONE. Identity Theft Life and Times Testimonio 1 Before Long, in a While Testimonio 2 Dear Tucker Testimonio 3 Aguas Testimonio 4 Somewhere Nobody Else Wanted to Live Testimonio 5 PART TWO. What You Hear Secondhand Testimonio 6 Hearsay Testimonio 7 Anniversaries Testimonio 8 Uncle Lou versus the Nineteenth Century Testimonio 9 Fire and Elephants Testimonio 10 PART THREE. What Emerges from the Husk Testimonio 11 Letter from Manastash Creek Testimonio 12 Casta Testimonio 13 Everyone Agrees Testimonio 14 Letter from Millpond Manor Testimonio 15 El Chacuaco

Read more less

Book SynopsisMoving through the settings of her life—red rock canyons, aspen forests, mountains, and cities—Jana Richman probes the depths of her internal landscape and asks how we can find stillness in our noisy world. In essays both personal and profoundly universal, Richman eschews quick and easy answers for quiet reflections on the questions: In a culture demanding that every voice be heard, how do we make sense of the resulting roar? Where do we seek solace when the last quiet places are sacrificed to human hubris? How do we shed the angst thrust upon us to create lives of peace?In these wide-ranging personal essays, Richman travels interior roads through fear, kindness, ignorance, darkness, wildness, compassion, solitude, loneliness, and more—always asking how external geography informs our internal geography. From the monsoonal rains in the carved slot canyons of the Escalante to the eroticism of dirt on skin in a remote slice of the Grand Canyon; from the defiance of academic authority to the curled, arthritic fingers of her mother and grandmothers, Richman sinks into the realities that make us human and fallible and blessed.Inspired by masters of the traditional personal essay such as E.B. White and M.F.K. Fisher, Richman adds a unique, deeply intimate—and often humorous—voice to the concurrence of human experience. Like a desert stream, human meaning meanders before coming to rest. Richman’s authentic voice illuminates the place where internal and external landscapes merge into meaning. Time with these genuine, inclusive pieces is time well spent.Trade Review“Imagine a 21st-century Desert Solitaire written by a woman. By a sixth-generation Mormon. By a writer who feels just as solitary as Edward Abbey but who also is fully embedded in emotional partnership with her husband. In essays keen with intelligence, raw with self-revelation, and lush with close and true observation of her home landscape, Jana Richman explores ‘the life I want to live versus the life I’m supposed to live.’” —Stephen Trimble, author of Bargaining for Eden and editor of Red Rock Stories “Effortless prose that pulls the reader forward, with engaging turns of phrase on almost every page, often with a smiling sense of humor. This book is a real pleasure to read.” —Thomas L. Fleischner, author of Singing Stone: A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons and editor of Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays On Wildness and Wellness

Read more less

Book SynopsisOne of the most incredible stories in American history is that of Frederick Douglass, the man who escaped from slavery and rose to become one of the most celebrated and eloquent orators, writers, and public figures in the world. He first committed his story to writing in his 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Over the course of his life, he would expand on his story considerably, writing two other autobiographies, My Bondage and My Freedom and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, as well as innumerable newspaper articles and editorials and orations.As valuable as these writings are in illuminating the man, the story Douglass told in 1845 has become rather too easy to tell, obscuring as much as it reveals. Less a living presence than an inspiring tale, Frederick Douglass remains relatively unknown even to many of those who celebrate his achievements. Douglass in His Own Time offers an introduction to Douglass the man by those who knew him. The book includes a broad range of writings, some intended for public viewing and some private correspondence, all of which contend with Douglass’s tremendous power over the written and spoken word, his amazing presence before crowds, his ability to improvise, to entertain, to instruct, to inspire—indeed, to change lives through his eloquent appeals to righteous self-awareness and social justice. In approaching Douglass through the biographical sketches, memoirs, letters, editorials, and other articles about him, readers will encounter the complexity of a life lived on a very public stage, the story of an extraordinary black man in an insistently white world.

Read more less

Book SynopsisIn this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works-among others, Chekhov's story "The Kiss," The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.

Read more less

Book SynopsisCreative non-fiction writers wrestle constantly with the boundaries of creative license - what to reveal, when to reveal it, and how best to do it. While the truth inspire us to make confident assertions, secrets, lies, and half-truths inspire us to delve further into our own writing to discover the heart of the story.The pieces in this collection feature essayists who do this type of detective work. Each essay contains a secret, lie, or half-truth - some of these are revealed by the author, but others remain buried. Ranging from the deep family secret to the little white lie, from the shocking to the humourous, and from the straightforward revelation to the slanted half-truth, these essays ask us to appreciate the magnitude of keeping a secret. They also ask us to consider the obstacles writers must overcome if they want to write about secrets in their own lives and the lives of others.In short interviews following each essay the contributors discuss craft, ethics, creativity, and how they eventually decided to reveal - or not reveal - a secret.

Read more less

Book SynopsisAn American Orwell for the age of Trump, Roy Scranton faces the unpleasant facts of our day with fierce insight and harrowing honesty.

Read more less