American Literature
Resisting Regionalism – On Sale
Gender And Naturalism In American Fiction, 1885-1915
When James Lane Allen defined the “Feminine Principle” and the “Masculine Principle” in American fiction for the Atlantic Monthly in 1897, he in effect described local color fiction and naturalism, two branches of realism often regarded as bearing little relationship to each other.…
Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors
The Poetics of the Public and the Personal
In the two decades that have passed since Robert Lowell’s death, Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors is the first critical survey of the poet's aesthetic efforts to make personal vision and public exhortation cohere and thus combine poetic genres that have been historically discrete.…
Sea of Grass
Richter’s novels and stories are filled with the fire of poetic prose and the drama of real lives. This is a reissue of the 1937 tale of cattle ranching on the high-grass plains of New Mexico at a time when a single man could control, if he were fierce enough, a ranch as big as some eastern seaboard states, but perhaps not hold the woman he loves as fiercely as the land.…
The Secret of the Hardy Boys
Leslie McFarlane and the Stratemeyer Syndicate
The author of the Hardy Boys Mysteries was, as millions of readers know, Franklin W. Dixon. Except there never was a Franklin W. Dixon. He was the creation of Edward Stratemeyer, the savvy founder of a children's book empire that also published the Tom Swift, Bobbsey Twins, and Nancy Drew series.…
Seduction of the Minotaur – On Sale
By Anaïs Nin
An excerpt from Seduction of the Minotaur: Some voyages have their inception in the blueprint of a dream, some in the urgency of contradicting a dream. Lillian's recurrent dream of a ship that could not reach the water, that sailed laboriously, pushed by her with great effort, through city streets, had determined her course toward the sea, as if she would give this ship, once and for all, its proper sea bed.…
Seeing Earth
Literary Responses to Space Exploration
By Ronald Weber
As our interest in space continues to grow, the cultural effects of space exploration become important. In Seeing Earth, Ronald Weber focuses on the literary response to this new frontier, examining an area of contemporary expression that has remained until now virtually untouched.…
The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters – On Sale
Edited by R. L. Barth
By Yvor Winters
Poet, teacher, and critic, Yvor Winters was a man of letters in more ways than one. This selection of his personal correspondence spans half a century of literary history and a lifetime of intellectual development and growth.…
The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov – On Sale
Edited by Daniel Anderson
By Howard Nemerov
“Will help readers get beyond the seeming congenital bitterness, beyond the glow of collegial reminiscence, to a rrive at Nemerov’s true virtues as a poet.”—The New York Times
The Selected Poems of Janet Lewis – On Sale
By Janet Lewis
Edited by R. L. Barth
Since the appearance in print of her early poems over seventy-five years ago, the poetry of Janet Lewis has grown in quiet acclaim and popularity. Although she is better known as a novelist of historical fiction, her first and last writings were poems.…
Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells – On Sale
Edited by Ruth Bardon
By W.D. Howells
The short stories of Ohio-born William Dean Howells (1837-1920), the leading figure in American realism, have been largely unknown to the reading public, at least partly because of their general unavailability and because of the difficulties of identifying, among Howells's voluminous short writings, those that are clearly short stories.…
Set the Ploughshare Deep – On Sale
A Prairie Memoir
Fifteen years in the making, Set the Ploughshare Deep is a memoir in prose, verse, and woodcuts. It depicts the consequences of Warren's advice for a writer who turned his back on cities and the academic world, who bought and sold, farmed and failed like his forebears, all the while distilling what he saw, heard, or felt into his tall tales and short verses.…
Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio – On Sale
With Variant Readings and Annotations
Edited by Ray Lewis White
In 1919 a middle-aged Chicago advertising writer from Ohio, a failure as a businessman, husband, and father, published a small yellow book of short stories intended to “reform” American literature.…
Sight Unseen – On Sale
Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other
In Sight Unseen radio drama, a genre traditionally dismissed as popular culture, is celebrated as high art. The radio plays discussed here range from the conventional (John Arden’s Pearl) to the docudramatic (David Rudkin’s Cries from Casement), from the curtly conversational (Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache) to the virtually operatic (Robert Ferguson’s Transfigured Night), testifying to radio drama’s variety and literary stature.…
Small Bird, Tell Me
Stories of Greek Immigrants
Helen Papanikolas has been honored frequently for her work in ethnic and labor history. Among her many publications are Toil and Rage in a New Land: The Greek Immigrants in Utah, Peoples of Utah (ed.…
Solving For X – On Sale
Poems
In Solving for X, his award-winning collection of new poems, Robert B. Shaw probes the familiar and encounters the unexpected; in the apparently random he discerns a hidden order. Throughout, Shaw ponders the human frailties and strengths that continue to characterize us, with glances at the stresses of these millennial times that now test our mettle and jar our complacency.…
Sometimes I’m Happy – On Sale
A Writer’s Memoir
Marshall Sprague’s colorful lifetime spanned the century like a mountain rainbow. Somewhere between the time he learned the true function of the umbrella stand in the Midwest Victorian household of his youth and his first solo train ride to New York City, he surrendered to an innate talent and inquisitiveness that subsequently engaged tens of thousands of his friends and readers.…
A Spy in the House of Love
By Anaïs Nin
Although Anaïs Nin found in her diaries a profound mode of self-creation and confession, she could not reveal this intimate record of her own experiences during her lifetime. Instead, she turned to fiction, where her stories and novels became artistic “distillations” of her secret diaries.…
Stories of Raymond Carver
A Critical Study
By Kirk Nesset
Raymond Carver, known in some circles as the “godfather of minimalism,” has been credited by many as the rejuvenator of the once-dying American short story. (See the link on this page to a 2008 Kenyon Review story that discusses the recent controversy over the editing of Carver’s stories.…
The Sturdy Oak
A Composite Novel of American Politics
Edited by Elizabeth Jordan
In the spring of 1916, as the workers for woman suffrage were laying plans for another attack on the bastions of male supremacy, the idea for The Sturdy Oak was born. Based on the rules of an old parlor game, wherein one person begins a narrative, another continues it, and another follows, this collaborative effort by the leading writers of the day, such as Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, and Kathleen Norris, is a satiric look at the gender roles of the time.…
Sunrise Brighter Still
The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters
Novelist and critic Alexander Blackburn credits Waters’s novels such as The Man Who Killed the Deer, Pike’s Peak, People of the Valley, and The Woman at Otowi Crossing with creating a worldview that transcends modern materialism and rationalism.…



















