American Literature Book List ·

5 Plays 5

Lovecraft's Follies, The Ushers, Mother O, Shadows of Memory, The Last Romantics

In 1970 Adrian Hall’s production of Lovecraft’s Follies by the Trinity Repertory Company was praised in The New York Times as a “hilarious extravaganza—with music—that is also an earnest attempt to come to grips with the guilts and terrors of the Age of Technology.…

Absent Man

The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt

As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858—1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson.…

After the Grapes of Wrath

Essays on John Steinbeck in Honor of Tetsumaro Hayashi

Traditionally, the critical reputation of Nobel Prize-winning American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-1968) has rested on his achievements of the 1930s, especially In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937, The Long Valley (1938), and, of course, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), one of the most powerful – and arguable on of the greatest – American novels of this century.…

Ambiguous Dancers of Fame

Collected Poems: 1945-1986

This second volume of James Schevill's collected poems is a companion to his remarkable ongoing sequence of poems, The American Fantasies, published by Swallow in 1983. This collection extends the scope of the poet's concern with American power and influences to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean.…

American Fantasies

Collected Poems, 1945-1981

In this collection, Schevill brings together a series of poems that he has been working on since his first book was published in 1947. Diverse characters, both real and imaginary, reveal fantasies of American life and history.…

An American Vein

Critical Readings in Appalachian Literature

The blossoming of Appalachian studies began some thirty years ago. Thousands of young people from the hills have since been made aware of their region's rich literary tradition through high school and college courses.…

America’s Sketchbook

The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre

America’s Sketchbook recaptures the drama of nineteenth-century American cultural life, placing at its center a genre—the literary sketch—more available than the novel, less governable by the critical establishment, and shot through with the tensions and types of local and national culture-making.…

And Still Birds Sing

New and Collected Poems

Written over a career that spans five decades, And Still Birds Sing is the masterwork of a major voice in American poetry.Bringing together his previously collected poems as well as the three books published since then, a sampling of his renowned translations of haiku, and a generous number of previously unpublished new poems, this latest collection by poet and translator Lucien Stryk is evidence of the popular and critical acclaim for an important contributor to twentieth-century letters.…

The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree

Stories

The title of Helen Papanikolas’ second collection of short stories, The Apple Falls from the Apple Tree, is taken from an old Greek proverb and speaks of the new generation’s struggle with the vestiges of Greek customs.…

Arrows of Longing

The Correspondence between Anais Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952-1976

In the winter of 1951-52, Anaïs Nin was a writer in despair. More than a dozen publishing houses had rejected her new novel, A Spy in the House of Love, and Nin became desperate for literary acceptance.…

Awakening

The sharpness of Lucien Stryk’s poetry is made of simple things—frost on a windowpane at morning, ducks moving across a pond, an argument flailing in the distance, a neighbor's fuss over his lawn—set down in a language that is at once direct and powerful.…

Belonging

Poems

There are worlds within our own in which even the smallest victories are hard won, the tender moment is almost unbearable, and the understated rings like a bell. Belonging, a new collection by British poet Dick Davis, is an extended visit to these worlds.…

Below Grass Roots

A Novel

In Below Grass Roots, the second book in Frank Waters's Pikes Peak saga, turn-of-the-century Colorado Springs is prospering with the mining boom and a growing tourist industry. Patriarch Joseph Rogier becomes ever more obsessed with the treasures of the towering mountain and tries to enlist his son-in-law Jonathan Cable in his mining schemes.…

Beltane at Aphelion

Longer Poems

Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias's longer poems and is published simultaneously with Swimming at Midnight, which collects his shorter poems. The volume includes his exuberant experiments from the 1960s, Poem in Three Parts and Bucyrus, followed by The Stefan Bathory & Mihail Lermontov Poems, his comedic diptych from the 1970s set on a Polish and a Russian ocean liner, and by Northern Summer, his meditation on history and language set in Scotland.…

The Bent Twig

Unlike other young women of her generation, who were “bred up from childhood to sit behind tea-tables and say the right things to tea-drinkers,” Sylvia Marshall—the “twig” of this novel—was reared to think for herself and to trust her own instincts and experience.…

Beyond Hill and Hollow

Original Readings in Appalachian Women’s Studies

Women’s studies unites with Appalachian studies in Beyond Hill and Hollow, the first book to focus exclusively on studies of Appalachia’s women. Featuring the work of historians, linguists, sociologists, performance artists, literary critics, theater scholars, and others, the collection portrays the diverse cultures of Appalachian women.…

Blood of the Prodigal

An Ohio Amish Mystery

“No one who enjoys a fresh approach to the mystery novel, plus an insider’s look at Ohio’s Old Order Amish culture, should miss Blood of the Prodigal. P. L. Gaus gives us a kind, gentle, and intriguing look at crime inside Ohio’s famous Amish colony.”—Tony Hillerman

Booking Pleasures

“The covetous foraging for old and rare books,” is how Matthews defines “booking.” It is an act which leads naturally to the pleasures of adding them to one's personal library, then reading them as instruments of light and measure in a murky and chaotic world.…

Broken English

An Ohio Amish Mystery

The peaceful town of Millersburg, Ohio, in the heart of Ohio's Amish country, is rocked by the vicious murder of one of its citizens at the hands of an ex-convict. When a local reporter covering the story ends up dead as well, with the convict already behind bars, suspicion falls on David Hawkins, father of the first victim.…

Cast a Blue Shadow

An Ohio Amish Mystery

“The author portrays the conflicts among the various Amish sects whose varying degrees of strictness in some instances cause them to shun each other. Eschewing any academic pedantry, Gaus manages to expertly enlighten as well as entertain.”—Publishers Weekly