The Cambridge Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies
The book provides a detailed analysis of important work in queer and trans studies over the past thirty years. Stretching from early figures (such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Cathy Cohen, Jos矇 Mu簽oz, and Sandy Stone) to the most recent scholarship, it offers a rich account of these fields' major ideas and contributions while indicating how they have evolved. Centering race and empire, the book offers extended discussion of work in Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian American studies as well as engaging the Global South. The Introduction further addresses historical considerations of sexuality and gender identity, and queer and trans temporalities, while also providing a robust account of social and political movements that preceded the emergence of queer and trans studies as scholarly fields. Accessible for those unfamiliar with these areas of study, it is also a great resource for those already working in them.
Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear
For the 100th anniversary of the publication of "Winnie-the-Pooh," Gyles Brandreth chronicles the writing of this beloved classic and the life of its creator, A. A. Milne. Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear tells the remarkable story of A A Milne, a playwright, a bestselling crime writer, poet, polemicist, humorist, and the man who created Winnie-the-Pooh. Gyles Brandreth explores "Winnie-the-Pooh," a bear beloved by millions: his genesis, his life across a hundred years, his special philosophy, and the reasons for his worldwide popularity. Brandreth's book is also the intimate biography of three generations of the fascinating and troubled Milne family, which knew fame and fortune, despising both for a time, but a family that ultimately found a profound reason to be grateful for the riches Pooh brought them. With an extraordinary cast list that includes Elizabeth II and Walt Disney, Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear moves from idyllic childhood games in the English countryside to New York in the 1930s and the love affairs, litigation, and heartrending family rifts that touched the life of one of Britain's most brilliant writers and his most famous creation.
The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky
A goldmine of treasures grant access into this twentieth century modernist poet's extraordinary work. Includes unpublished essays, drama, and poetry that enhances Zukofsky's stature within the revolutionary modernist movement. The American poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) was a master craftsman in a wide range of forms both traditional and invented. He was a crucial bridge between the "high" modernism of Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, Williams, and Moore and various postwar innovative schools. The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky gathers a variety of his works, some long out of print, some never before published, in diverse genres. The centerpieces of this collection are two substantial works--the play Arise, Arise and the pamphlet-length version of First Half of "A"-9--but these texts are complemented by a rich selection of Zukofsky's uncollected poems, translations, and prose works as well as some fascinating musical arrangements of passages from "A." Contextualized by notes and a critical introduction by the editors, The Uncollected Louis Zukofsky is a must-read for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry and poetics.
Letters for the Ages the Great Musicians
A collection of letters written through the ages from musicians of all genres, from Mozart to Elton John. For tens of thousands of years, across various civilisations, our species has been creating music. But what is behind the human fascination with music? This new volume in the Letters for the Ages series explores that question through the personal correspondence of history's most brilliant musical talent, ranging from Hildegaard of Bingen to Amy Winehouse. Spanning from the 12th to the 21st centuries, the letters assembled in this collection combine to delve into musicians' personal relationship with music and the creative process behind their greatest works of art. Witness your musical idols, warm-hearted and compassionate, arrogant and angry, insecure and egocentric, defeated and morose. The letters give a rare insight into the innermost thoughts of these great musicians who have created some of the most recognisable and beautiful music ever heard. But despite the mass of talent within these pages, these letters also provide the realisation that even the most extraordinary music has been created by normal people with everyday worries and preoccupations.
The Book Club Journal
Embrace a new, more community-centered era of book clubs and make reading a shared experience! Book clubs aren't doing stale crackers, cramped living rooms, and stuffy chats anymore. We're getting out of the house and connecting with friends over good food and unforgettable stories. That's why this journal goes where you go--to the coffee shop, the brewery, the bookstore, or the park. It's ready to collect your favorite takes and moments from the meetup. Alternating spreads hold space for your personal thoughts (to share . . . or not) and your questions for the group. From your first impressions to your last, what you're loving to what you're not, and what you've learned to what you're eating while talking about it, this journal has room for it all. Plus, handy trackers let you log your TBR list and see at a glance what you've read, how you felt about it, and how close you are to your goal. Reading should feel like an experience, not homework. By the last page, this journal will be a memento of your adventures. And with room for 100 books, it'll be a page-turner!
The Book of Women's Friendship
As Marilynne Robinson writes in her 1980 novel, Housekeeping, "Having a sister or friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house." Bringing together work by more than 100 writers, The Book of Women's Friendship explores the rich subject of friendship between women from every angle: its particular intensity and miraculous ease, its tendency to wax and wane, its role not only as a comfort and a privilege, but as vital to our health.Friendship has never been more highly debated, and loneliness more prevalent. Yet women's friendships have repeatedly been neglected or minimized in storytelling, fallen by the wayside of male relationships. In the first major anthology dedicated to women's friendship--and the first serious anthology about friendship published in more than three decades--editor Rachel Cooke looks to art to find the words to capture women's platonic love. Compiling selections from novels, poems, diaries, letters, comics, and graphic novels about women's friendship, she places work from a diverse array of artists in conversation across time and place.With excerpts from Jane Austen to Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf, from Dolly Alderton to Sarah Waters, and from Zadie Smith to Meg Wolitzer, The Book of Women's Friendship celebrates and investigates friendship between women, from first encounters to final farewells, from falling out to making up again. This book takes the shape of a human life, beginning with early efforts at friend-making and -breaking in childhood to chance collisions in adulthood. It contemplates (though not for too long) the flip side of friendship, which is not enmity, but loneliness; celebrates solidarity in all its guises; and ends with loss, the moment of goodbye.Warm, clever, and full of some of the most beautiful writing on friendship ever published, The Book of Women's Friendship is also an act of friendship itself, dedicated to Cooke's best friend, in the end becoming a book full of all the lovely, impossible, unsayable things that one friend might be moved to give to another.
The Tower and the Ruin
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth--a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout takes us deep into Tolkien's genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of not only The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion but also lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as Tolkien's poetry and innovative scholarship.Drout, who has spent decades reading, studying, and teaching Tolkien, allows us to understand the author's methods and to embrace his works as never before. With great erudition and sparkling prose, Drout shows us how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from northern Europe, using the subtle qualities of those famous works as inspiration for his own. We also see the process by which he created the complex form of sorrow that is the primary emotional effect of his mature works, a sadness "blessed without bitterness," carefully woven through a tapestry of themes that has resonated with generations of readers.Sweeping and hugely perceptive--and enhanced throughout by Drout's personal reflections on how Tolkien has shaped his own life and relationships--The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew and will come to be seen as an essential work for anyone who has journeyed to Middle-earth.
The Slicks
A keen, ardent celebration of unbridled female ambition in the work of Taylor Swift and Sylvia Plath In The Slicks, Maggie Nelson positions culture-dominating pop superstar Taylor Swift and feminist cult icon Sylvia Plath as twin hosts of the female urge toward wanting hard, working hard, and pouring forth--and as twinned targets of patriarchy's ancient urge to disparage, trivialize, and discipline creative work by women rooted in autobiography and abundance. A buoyant melding of popular culture and literary criticism, The Slicks is a captivating and unexpected assessment of two iconic female artists by one of the most revered and influential critics of her generation.
Selling Out Santa
Christmas is not just a day or a frame of mind as Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn) imparts in Miracle on 34th Street (1947); Christmas is also a vehicle for national mythmaking as an idealising mirror for American cultural and political attitudes of a given moment. Via a case study on Hollywood Christmas films released between 1946 and 1961, A Very Cold War Christmas offers an examination of political pressures on Hollywood in the post-war period and the cultural ramifications of federal involvement in the motion picture industry. As the House Committee on Un-American Activities opened hearings in 1947 and the FBI gathered reports on potential communist subversion in Frank Capra's Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Hollywood executives began to bend to the socially conservative pressures of this post-war moment. Using Christmas films as the core of this investigation to identify and analyse changes within the genre as they relate to and reflect changes in the wider cultural and political moment exposes for film scholars, students, and non-specialists how these federal and external pressures on Hollywood moulded these holiday favourites throughout the 1950s and set the social standard for decades of Christmas releases.
Racial Fictions
A powerful critique of the racial myths that shape our world Drawing on a rich tapestry of historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Hazel V. Carby interrogates our racial fictions, which have been constructed, maintained, and weaponized across centuries to justify systems of domination and exploitation. Traversing temporalities and global boundaries, Racial Fictions reveals the inter-connectedness of America's domestic racial struggles and international colonial ambitions. Carby challenges readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the persistence of white supremacy, the violence embedded in historical memory, and the silencing of marginalized voices. The result is a profound exploration of the intricate and enduring legacies of race, imperialism, and violence in the formation of modern identities and nation-states.
A Shorter Ulysses
This volume is a major event in both the James Joyce and Anthony Burgess literary annals. It not any marks the first publication of Burgess's Shorter Ulysses, which was only recently discovered in the Burgess archives, but also the first republication this century of Burgess's extraordinary musical play Blooms of Dublin, based of course on Ulysses. The play has not been available in print for 38 years. Indeed it was only once performed (but as a radio production) on the centenary of Joyce's birth on February 2nd 1982. Burgess's A Shorter Finnegans Wake, published in 1966, is still much loved and probably enjoyed more than Joyce's full length--and very difficult--novel. A Shorter Ulysses follows the same formula of being both an abridgement of the text (actually quite an intense one) and the provision of comments interspersed within the text. A Shorter Ulysses is introduced by Burgess's biographer and Director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Andrew Biswell. It also contains Burgess's foreword to the BCA edition of Ulysses published in 1981-- a two thousand word piece which manages to capture the very essence of Joyce's masterwork and provides a perfect introduction to the novel, particularly for new readers. So, within these pages, there is a feast for Joyce and Burgess scholars as well as a totally accessible gateway to Ulysses for readers who perhaps have yet to dive into the deep waters of one of the most iconic--and of course controversial--novels of modern times.
Forced by Circumstance
A landmark collection of the work of pioneering Chicana scholar, Norma Alarc籀oacute;n. Forced by Circumstance gathers in one volume foundational essays by, and interviews with one of the most highly esteemed intellectuals in Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Feminist Studies. Reading Alarc籀n's essays-from her early work on Mexican feminist writer Rosario Castellanos to her recent reflections on the carceral state and the political debacle that our contemporary situation presents--not only offers readers a sense of the intellectual trajectory of one of our most important Chicana feminist thinkers but also brings to a new generation of scholars and readers classic essays in Chicana/o Studies, Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, and Literary Studies.
If I Must Die
"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale." This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family. The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. "If I Must Die" is included here, alongside Refaat's other poetry.Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat's closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings
A collection of Edgar Allan Poe's writings, including The Fall of the House of Usher--the inspiration for the Netflix series from Mike Flanagan, the director of The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass! This selection of critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates Poe's intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. "The Fall of the House of Usher" describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In "The Tell Tale Heart", a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Cask of Amontillado" explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Stranger Than Fiction
One of the Washington Post's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024 "Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious." --Louis Menand, The New Yorker "Convincing, idiosyncratic and often felicitous." --Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times Book ReviewA legendary editor's reckoning with the twentieth-century novel and the urgent messages it sends. "How can we live differently?" a young woman urgently demands in Virginia Woolf's novel The Years. It is the 1930s, war and death are in the air, but her question was asked again and again in the course of a century where things changed fast and changed all the time. The century brought world wars, revolutions, automobiles, movies, and the internet, votes for women, death camps. The century brought questions. Novelists in the twentieth century had a question of their own: how can we write a novel as startling and unforeseen as the world we live in? Again and again they did, transforming the novel as the century remade the world. Imagine the history of the twentieth-century novel recounted with the urgency and intimacy of a novel. That's what Edwin Frank, the legendary editor who has run the New York Review Books publishing imprint since its inception, does in Stranger Than Fiction. With penetrating insight and originality, Frank introduces us to books, some famous, some little-known, from the whole course of the century and from around the world. Starting with Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground of 1864, Frank shows how its twitchy, self-undermining, and never-satisfied narrator established a voice that would echo through the coming century. He illuminates the political vision of H. G. Wells's science fiction, Colette and Andre Gide's subversions of traditional gender roles, and Gertrude Stein's untethering of the American sentence. He describes the monumental ambition of books such as Mrs. Dalloway, The Magic Mountain, and The Man Without Qualities to rebuild a world of human possibility upon the ruins of World War I and explores how Japan's Natsume Sōseki and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe broke open European models to reflect their own, distinct histories and experience. Here too are Vasily Grossman, Anna Banti, and Elsa Morante reckoning in specific ways with the traumas of World War II, while later chapters range from Marguerite Yourcenar and V. S. Naipaul to Gabriel Garc穩a M獺rquez and W. G. Sebald. The story as a whole is one of fearless, often reckless exploration, as well as unfathomable desolation. Throughout, we discover the power of the novel to reinvent itself, to find a way for itself, to live differently. Stranger Than Fiction offers a new vision of the history and art of the novel and of a dark and dazzling time in whose light and shadow we still stand.
South Carolina Review:
Volume 46, no. 2 of South Carolina Review is a themed issue on the subject of African American Literature. Angela Naimou and Rhondda Robinson Thomas are guest editors. Contributors include Jennifer L. Barclay, David Borman, Kelly Clasen, Shaila Mehra, Michael Ra-Shon Hall, Kenton Rambsy, Ashley Bourgeois, Maja Milatovic, Akel Ismail Kahera, Susanna Ashton, Meredith McCarroll, Tom Williams, Laura Good, Lenard D. Moore, William Ramsey, Kaneesha Brownlee, Julius Fleming, and Anne Keefe.
Fascist Directive
Fascist Directive reveals changes in Ezra Pound's prose writing resulting from his excitement over Mussolini's use of Italian cultural heritage to build the modern Fascist state. Drawing on archival material and periodical contributions, Catherine E. Paul delves into the work of the most notorious American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
Zen in the Art of Writing
Discover the inimitable genius of Ray Bradbury as he explores the art of writing, the power of creativity, and the timeless appeal of storytelling in this collection of essays that are part masterclass, part memoir, featuring a new introduction by Dan Chaon. In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury's love for his craft shines. With signature wisdom, wit, and verve, Bradbury delves into his prolific writing career, exploring the creation of countless stories, novels, plays, movies, and more that have stood the test of time. Written over a thirty-year period, these inspirational essays insist that there is a "deep well of explosive self-revelation" in all of us waiting to be released through the process of writing. Bradbury's essays illuminate the passion and intellect of one of the most inventive and prolific artists of the 20th century. He reveals how writers can find their own unique path to developing their voice and style. Zen celebrates the art of writing that will delight, impassion, and inspire, but most of all, it celebrates life.
Speculative Insight
Collecting the essays from the first six months of the journal Speculative Insight: A Journal of Space, Magic and Footnotes. Essays range across a wide variety of topics, including Star Trek fandom and what counts as historical fiction, why readers love Murderbot and Joan of Arc as a lady knight. The book also includes a bonus essay by Lisa L Hannett about new motherhood and the lack of mothers in space. Authors include Cheryl Morgan, Joanne Anderton, Kemi Ashing-Giwa, Amy Sjoquist, Tansy Rayner Roberts, Octavia Cade, Liz Barr, Joyce Chng, Celia Lake, Andrew Dana Hudson, Nina Niskanen, and Lisa L Hannett.
Memory
A poet's spacious exploration of time, memory, and art, in homage to Bernadette Mayer. A spiritual homage to Bernadette Mayer's monumental artwork of the same title, Dorothea Lasky's Memory is a cycle of "poet's essays" stirred by two profound questions. What constitutes personhood and consciousness? What memories get lost, and why? Expansive in her quest for answers, Lasky launches an inspired investigation of the forces that form our lives and deepest senses of ourselves. She identifies three dimensions of memory--ancestral, personal, and poetic--and in her singularly clear voice, undertakes to enter into their mysteries. From those recesses, she returns with a wide-ranging collection of essays that like lyric poems find the universal inside the particular. Memory reflects on the banal; private emotions and historical trauma; dear departed poets (Diane di Prima, Lucie Brock-Broido); her father's battle with Alzheimer's; and cultural events that have become charged sites of collective reminiscence (the moon landing, the music of Neutral Milk Hotel). Other pieces face the flip side of memory, asking what's left where memory is absent, and what's "real" beyond the horizon of death. The book closes with "Time, the Rose, and the Moon," an ars poetica published here in English for the first time, which offers the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros as a figure for the nonlinear processes of time, memory, and art. Like Mayer before her, Lasky reveals memory to be huge and haunting, as she accumulates impressions that challenge the very possibility of fixed meaning. "Every rose has the scent of death," she writes. "And poetry is a perfume. That will stay on your body forever.... Whatever happens this time around, remember that."
Christopher Smart's 'a Song to David'
This unique interpretation of Christopher Smart's masterpiece begins with a biography which offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of Christopher Smart, an extraordinary poet who died in an insane asylum all but abandoned by family and friends. Convinced that the current names of the days of the week should be changed to words that represent the true God of the universe, Smart chose seven Greek letters which are references to Christ. Scholars and critics have attempted to explain these letters, but none have apprehended Smart's purpose which was "to preach the very gospel of Christ." Herein Strong explains the reason for and meaning of these chosen Greek letters and their relation to the whole.
Joke Farming
The winner of four Emmys, a Peabody, and two Writers Guild Awards (all of which badly need dusting) explains his process for writing comedy without going insane. Philosophers may debate the meaning of comedy (thankfully keeping them too busy to fall into a life of crime), but the rest of us are more likely to wonder how we can make an audience laugh--or at least, how to entertain our friends and followers. According to award-winning comedy writer Elliott Kalan, we need to stop staring out the window, waiting for hilarious bits to stroll into view, fully formed. What we need is a process to plant their premises, tend to their structure and wording, and ultimately harvest them as funny material. In short, a farm. But for jokes. In Joke Farming, Kalan explains that it's easier to write jokes when you have a dependable method for doing so. All jokes, he argues, are built from the same elements: structure, premise, voice, tone, wording, and audience--and these elements can be applied to any comedic genre, from stand-up to sitcoms to satire. Kalan analyzes examples from his own career--including jokes that he wrote (and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote . . . ) as head writer for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart--as well as material from a diverse array of comedians, writers, and filmmakers, highlighting the phrasing, rhythm, and precise details that make their work so dang funny. Drawing on his experiences in professional writers' rooms as well as episodes from everyday life, Kalan's guide to jokes will appeal to aspiring writers, their mentors, comedy fans, and anyone who has to speak at a wedding. Joke Farming points the way toward a writing process that lessens stress and agony and yields more reliable rewards: a surprising tagline, a hilarious word choice, and--most importantly--a bigger laugh from the audience, whoever they may be.
