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 bestelling 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 Includes unpublished essays, drama, and poetry that enhances Zukofsky's stature withing the revolutionary modernist movement.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.
The Tower and the Ruin
No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his world of Middle-earth--a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that anyone could have created it, seemingly out of thin air. In The Tower and the Ruin, Michael D. C. Drout explores Tolkien's genius, allowing us to glimpse the making of every work from The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Silmarillion to lesser-known books such as The Fall of Gondolin as well as his poetry. We see how Tolkien invented myths, legends, cultures, languages, histories, and an intricate, multivocal narrative. We come to understand how, early on, Tolkien drew upon and modified material he found in Beowulf, the Kalevala, and other medieval literature from Northern Europe, and how he later developed the complex form of sorrow that is the primary theme of his mature works. Sweeping and hugely perceptive--and enhanced throughout by Drout's personal reflections as a dedicated reader of Tolkien since childhood--The Tower and the Ruin illuminates Tolkien anew.
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 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 myths about race that continue to shape our world. Drawing on a rich tapestry of historical analysis, literary criticism, and cultural theory, Hazel Carby interrogates how racial fictions have been constructed, maintained, and weaponized across centuries to justify systems of domination and exploitation. Traversing global geographies and temporalities, Racial Fictions reveals the interconnectedness of America's domestic racial struggles with international colonial ambitions. Carby examines the ideological underpinnings of racial hierarchies, the afterlife of slavery, and the ongoing impact of settler colonialism. The book critically engages with the works of key Black intellectuals such as Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as contemporary movements like Black Lives Matter, situating them within a broader narrative of resistance and survival. Carby challenges readers to confront the 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.
Elizabeth Oakes Smith: Selected Writings, Volume III
Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures - Yokai & Japanese Mythology
Encyclopedia of Mythical Creatures - Yokai & Japanese Mythology
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 and promote the modern Fascist state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and untranslated periodical contributions, Catherine E. Paul delves into the vexing work of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, providing fresh understanding of Fascist deployment of art, architecture, blockbuster exhibitions, music, archaeological projects, urban design, and literature. Pound's prose writings of this period cement a "directive" approach--declaiming his views with an authority that shuts down disagreement. Reading such important prose works as Jefferson and/or Mussolini and Guide to Kulchur, as well as the surprisingly propagandistic aspects of the Pisan Cantos in the context of Pound's profound investment in Italian Fascist cultural nationalism, Fascist Directive reveals the importance of this approach to his larger artistic mission.
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.
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.
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."
Reading Together
A lively and thoughtful exploration of how book clubs change the way we read. In this engaging and vivacious memoir, college professor Katarzyna Bartoszyńska thinks back on various book clubs she has been a part of. Through brief discussions of a variety of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction works such as Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Marjane Satrapi's Chicken with Plums, and Alma Guillermoprieto's Dancing in Cuba, she considers how the things she has learned in book club discussions differ from what she tries to teach students in her literature classes. As she muses on the various benefits that we imagine reading offers, she describes the unique knowledge that book clubs can provide.
Encounters with Jane Austen
Celebrating the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, a vibrant anthology of contemporary writing by women. With an introductory overview of Austen's life and work by academic, author and speaker, Professor Jennie Batchelor, over 20 contributors will reveal the impact of Austen's timeless writing on their own journeys.
Peach Pit Coraz籀n
Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952-2016), a prominent Latina writer, was, among various recognitions, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her 1989 first novel, The Line of the Sun (Georgia); awarded the coveted O. Henry Prize for her short story "The Latin Deli" in 1994; and inducted into the Georgia Writer's Hall of Fame in 2010. Beginning her literary career as a poet, Ortiz Cofer was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and creative nonfiction essays, often inspired by her diverse cultural background. She was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, and moved to Paterson, New Jersey, as a child in the mid-1950s. In Paterson, she witnessed the rise of a Puerto Rican community. During her early teenage years, her family left for Augusta, Georgia, the state where she put down roots. She joined the English Department at the University of Georgia in 1984, eventually being named the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing, before retiring from teaching in 2014. Her work often engaged with the intersections of the various geographies, cultures, and languages of the places she called home throughout her life. Rafael Ocasio's critical introduction and commentary on representative literary pieces are guided by interviews conducted during his twenty-seven-year friendship with Ortiz Cofer. One common subject of their conversations, as they joked, was labeling themselves as "Georgia-Ricans." From a temporal hindsight point of view, as a Georgia-Rican writer, Ortiz Cofer recalls events that led to her rise as a Latina writer who was celebratory of a Latinx identity, a multiethnic community that comprised a range of socioeconomic backgrounds, while also being critical of their traditional binary concepts pertaining to gender and sexual orientations.
Inventions on the Brink
Inventions on the Brink, a collection of literary journalism by J. T. Barbarese, offers engagingly plainspoken and informed essays on American poetry from Edgar Allan Poe to the present, written by a poet with long experience in the classroom. The collection discusses writers as divergent as Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, Hart Crane and A. R. Ammons, Gerald Stern and John Prine. It includes a separate section of essays examining the craft of translation with attention to specific works translated from ancient Greek, Italian, and modern French. A distinguishing feature of the book is that it is informed by literary theory but independent of any particular critical modality. Barbarese writes about literature for a general audience, particularly readers with wide tastes interested in engaging with literary art. His essays are the outcome of deeply reading and internalizing work he has known, studied, and admired over the course of a long career of publishing, teaching, and public lecturing.