Literature
The Other John Updike
Poems, Short Stories, Prose, Play
John Updike has won a National Book Award and has earned both critical and popular acclaim. At the moment, his reputation rests largely on his novels, especially Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; Of the Farm; and The Coup.…
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism – On Sale
The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot
Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three nineteenth-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women.…
Pages – On Sale
New Poems and Cuttings
A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John Matthias has compiled here a major new collection, his first volume of poetry since the publication in 1995 of his retrospective collections of shorter and longer poems.…
The Palace of Bones – On Sale
The Palace of Bones by Allison Eir Jenks is an often stark and startling vision of the way we live, the places we inhabit, and the relics we make to comfort ourselves. Haunted by a quiet, unquenchable longing, Jenks expertly and calmly guides the reader through a vivid dreamscape in this first full-length collection of poems.…
A Paris Year
Dorothy and James T. Farrell, 1931–1932
The Depression that follows the 1929 stock market crash is emptying Paris of many American expatriates. Two exceptions are Dorothy and James T. Farrell, the naïve young couple who have fled their home in Chicago for the fabled liberation that Paris seems to offer.…
Pebbles, Monochromes and Other Modern Poems, 1891-1916
Edited by Edwin Cady
By W.D. Howells
For William Dean Howells, the 1880s throbbed with literary warfare over theory and criticism (realism), and social justice. But the terrible climax was more personal and came in the death of his daughter in 1889.…
People of the Valley
By Frank Waters
One of Frank Waters's most popular novels, People of the Valley takes place high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains where an isolated Spanish-speaking people confront a threatening world of change.…
Pike’s Peak – On Sale
Mining Saga
By Frank Waters
During the fabulous reign of Colorado Silver, innumerable prospectors passed by Pike’s Peak on their way to the silver strikes at Leadville, Aspen, and the boom camps in the Saguache, Sangre de Cristo, and San Juan mountain.…
The Poems of J. V. Cunningham
Edited by Timothy Steele
The lifework in verse of one of the century's finest and liveliest American poets, this collection of the poems of J. V. Cunningham (1911-85) documents the poet's development from his early days as an experimental modernist during the Depression to his emergence as the master of the classical "plain style"--distinguished by its wit, feeling, and subtlety.…
Poems Old and New, 1918-1978
By Janet Lewis
Kenneth Rexroth wrote: “Janet Lewis uses reason to veil and adorn the flesh of feeling and intuition. This is the way the greatest poetry has always been written.”The poems in this collection range over a period of 60 years.…
The Poetry of Resistance
Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition
Does the artist have a responsibility to mirror the conflicts and problems of society in his or her work? Perhaps more than most, the Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, has been faced with this question. Living in Belfast since 1957, Heaney decided to leave Northern Ireland altogether in 1972, his residency there spanning fifteen years of social upheaval and violence.…
A Poet’s Prose – On Sale
Selected Writings of Louise Bogan
By Mary Kinzie
Although best known as a master of the formal lyric poem, Louise Bogan (1897- 1970) also published fiction and what would now be called lyrical essays. A Poet’s Prose: Selected Writings of Louise Bogan showcases her devotion to compression, eloquence, and sharp truths.…
Pompilia
A Feminist Reading of Robert Browning's The Ring and The Book
By Ann P. Brady
When Count Guido Franceschini was tried by a Roman court in 1698 for the rape and murder of his young wife Pompilia, he had the church, the state, and “all of sensible Rome” supporting him. Their cynical mandate sprang from the traditional belief that in a patriarchal society the male should wield absolute power, including the power of life and death, over the female.…
Power of Blackness
Hawthorne, Poe, Melville
By Harry Levin
The Power of Blackness is a profound and searching reinterpretation of Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, the three classic American masters of fiction. It is also an experiment in critical method, an exploration of the myth-making process by way of what may come to be known as literary iconology.…
Power Plays
Wayang Golek Puppet Theater of West Java
Based on ethnographic fieldwork spanning twenty years, Power Plays is the first scholarly book in English on wayang golek, the Sundanese rod-puppet theater of West Java. It is a detailed and lively account of the ways in which performers of this major Asian theatrical form have engaged with political discourses in Indonesia.…
Private Poets, Worldly Acts – On Sale
Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry
By Kevin Stein
At a time when poets appear tragically detached from the public for which they write, Kevin Stein persuasively demonstrates in Private Poets, Worldy Acts the way a particular group of diverse poets have manifested their communal concerns.…
Pure Waters – On Sale
Frank Waters and the Quest for the Cosmic
By Frank Waters
Edited by Barbara Waters
The novels and nonfiction work of writer Frank Waters stand as a monument to his genius and to his lifetime quest to plumb the spiritual depths that he found for himself in the landscape and people of his beloved Southwest.…
The Quarry – On Sale
Poems
By Dan Lechay
Marvelous, disquieting, extraordinarily beautiful book that meditates on fundamental questions of time and change in and through a clear-eyed yet loving evocation of everyday existence. Once or twice in a generation a poet comes along who captures the essential spirit of the American Midwest and gives name to the peculiar nature that persists there.…
Raising the Dust – On Sale
The Literary Housekeeping of Mary Ward, Sarah Grand, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Raising the Dust identifies a heretofore-overlooked literary phenomenon that author Beth Sutton-Ramspeck calls "literary housekeeping." The three writers she examines rejected turn-of-the-century aestheticism and modernism in favor of a literature that is practical, even ostensibly mundane, designed to "set the human household in order.…
Rare Book Lore
Selections from the Letters of Ernest J. Wessen
By Ernest J. Wessen
Edited by Jack Matthews
Ernest J. Wessen was one of the legendary rare bookmen of the mid-twentieth century, and his letters, like his famous catalogs, Midland Notes, are a treasure of Americana. Wessen’s anecdotes of the chase, his wry comments upon collectors and fellow dealers (and, indeed, the world at large), his alternating moods of genial tolerance and peppery impatience with the scouts who brought him books and pamphlets…all combine to give a wonderfully informative, useful, and fascinating compendium of rare book lore — just as the title promises.…
