Search results for ""The Library of America""

There are a brilliant array of contemporary voices here as well, spinning out the tapestry of Latino poetry in daring new directions. Taking the measure of this current renaissance, the anthology culminates with the most comprehensive survey of twenty-first century Latino poetry yet published. Featured poets include: Jose Marti, Julia de Burgos, Sandra Cisneros, Pedro Pietri, Juan Felipe Herrera, Jaime Manrique, Javier Zamora, Aracelis Girmay, Natalie Diaz, and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limon.

Read more less

In celebration of the Tennessee Williams centennial in 2011, The Library of America presents its acclaimed two-volume edition of his plays in a collector's boxed set. Gathering thirty-two works written from the 1930s to the 1980s, this collection contains all the essential dramatic works of the playwright who transformed the American stage. The first volume opens with the rediscovered early plays, Spring Storm and Not About Nightingales, and contains such classics as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Rose Tattoo, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, as well as a selection of one acts. The second volume includes Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, Period of Adjustment, The Night of the Iguana, The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Out Cry, and A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur.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.

Read more less

A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. Unfazed by lawsuits, the ire of J. Edgar Hoover''s FBI, and the dull-witted scorn of critics and scolds unwilling to get the joke, MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America''s newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and ''zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day. Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine''s impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD''s significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Art Spiegelman reflects on how he ''couldn''t learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents - but I learned al

Read more less

James Agee brought to bear all his moral energy, slashing wit, and boundless curiosity in the criticism and journalism that established him as one of the commanding literary voices of America at mid-century. In 1944 W. H. Auden called Agee’s film reviews for The Nation “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today.” Those columns, along with much of the movie criticism that Agee wrote for Time through most of the 1940s, were collected posthumously in Agee on Film: Reviews and Comments, undoubtedly the most influential writings on film by an American. This Library of America volume supplements the classic pieces from Agee on Film with previously uncollected writings on Ingrid Bergman, the Marx Brothers, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, Vittorio De Sica’s Shoeshine, and a wealth of other cinematic subjects. Whether reviewing a Judy Garland musical or a wartime documentary, assessing the impact of Italian neorealism or railing against the compromises in a Hollywood adaptation of Hemingway, Agee always wrote of movies as a pervasive, profoundly significant part of modern life, a new art whose classics (Chaplin, Dovzhenko, Vigo) he revered and whose betrayal in the interests of commerce or propaganda he often deplored. If his frequent disappointments could be registered in acid tones, his enthusiasms were expressed with passionate eloquence. Agee’s own work as a screenwriter is represented by his script for Charles Laughton’s unique and haunting masterpiece of Southern gothic, The Night of the Hunter, adapted from the novel by Davis Grubb. This collection also includes examples of Agee’s masterfully probing reporting for Fortune—on subjects as diverse as the Tennessee Valley Authority, commercial orchids, and cockfighting—and a sampling of his literary reviews, among them appreciations of William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, S. J. Perelman, and William Carlos Williams.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.

Read more less

As we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together for the first time two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience. In ''Resistance to Civil Government'' (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a ''higher law.'' In ''Civil Disobedience'' (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger

Read more less