American Literature

Pages
New Poems and Cuttings
By John Matthias

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. Divided into three sections, Pages begins with thirty short poems that range in subject from Ovid and Akhmatova to remembered friends and family.

Value and Vision in American Literature
Essays in Honor of Ray Lewis White
Edited by Joseph Candido

The widely divergent voices in this collection are united by their common interest in the American literary heritage and by their intention to redefine that heritage by altering our angle of vision or forcing us to re-examine some traditional values.

Robert Lowell’s Shifting Colors
The Poetics of the Public and the Personal
By William Doreski

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.Rather

Mountain Dialogues
By Frank Waters
· Foreword by Thomas J. Lyon

“Mysticism is peculiar to the mountainbred,” Frank Waters once told an interviewer for Psychology Today. And in Mountain Dialogues, available for the first time in paperback, the mountainbred Waters proves it true. Ranging over such diverse subjects as silence, spirits, time, change, and the sacred mountains of the world, Waters sounds again and again the radiant, mystic theme of man’s inherent wholeness and his oneness with the cosmos.Writing

Word Play Place
Essays on the Poetry of John Matthias
Edited by Robert Archambeau

The poetry of John Matthias has long been admired by other poets for the way it refuses to be categorized. Lyrical and experimental, cosmopolitan and rooted in place, it challenges our received notions of what poetry can be at the end of the twentieth century. This volume introduces the work of this significant American poet to readers previously unfamiliar with it and enriches the reading of those who have long admired it.

Deprived of Unhappiness
By Sam Pickering

In this, his tenth book of essays, renowned raconteur Sam Pickering wanders from Nova Scotia to Tennessee, from a middle school athletic field to an English department. He tells stories about people named Googoo and Loppie. He examines trees and flowers. He watches a daughter play soccer and a son row. He attends funerals and remembers the past and imagines the future. His is the ordinary world observed closely.But reading Pickering makes life blossom.

Sturdy Oak
A Composite Novel of American Politics
Edited by Elizabeth Jordan
· Introduction by Ida H. Washington

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: a satiric look at the gender roles of the time written as a collaborative effort by the leading authors of the day, such as Fannie Hurst, Dorothy Canfield, and Kathleen Norris.

Arrows of Longing
The Correspondence between Anaïs Nin and Felix Pollak, 1952–1976
By Gregory H. Mason

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. Encouragement came from an unexpected source. Felix Pollak, an Austrian emigré and Rare Book Librarian at Northwestern University, had been entrusted with the task of acquiring some of Nin’s manuscripts for the library.

Haunted by Waters
Fly Fishing in North American Literature
By Mark Browning

Four essential questions: Why does one fish? How should one properly fish? What relations are created in fishing? And what effects does fishing have on the future? Haunted by Waters is a self-examination by the author as he constructs his own narrative and tries to answer these questions for himself. But it is also a thorough examination of the answers he uncovers in the course of reading what’s been written on the subject.As

The Destructive Element
New and Selected Poems
By Turner Cassity

Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional composer—Camille Saint-Saëns, say, or Richard Strauss—who does not doubt that the music is the score and the score is the music. That is, poetry is verse and verse is poetry.Given that confidence, he is prepared to take on any subject. In the forty years he has been publishing, Mr. Cassity has never once written about nothing.

America’s Sketchbook
The Cultural Life of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Genre
By Kristie Hamilton

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
By Lucien Stryk

Written over a career that spans five decades, And Still Birds Sing is the masterwork of a major voice in American poetry.Bringing

The Bent Twig
A Novel
By Dorothy Canfield
· Introduction by Ida H. Washington

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. This, coupled with her passionate temperament, makes Sylvia a compelling figure as she resists efforts to mold her with every rebellious fiber of her independent nature.Sylvia’s

Resisting Regionalism
Gender And Naturalism In American Fiction, 1885-1915
By Donna Campbell

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.

Wound and the Bow
Seven Studies in Literature
By Edmund Wilson

The Wound and the Bow collects seven wonderful essays on the delicate theme of the relation between art and suffering by the legendary literary and social critic, Edmund Wilson (1885–1972). This welcome re-issue—one of several for this title—testifies to the value publishers put on it and to a reluctance among them ever to let it stay out of print for very long.The

Recollections of Anaïs Nin
By Her Contemporaries
Edited by Benjamin Franklin V

Recollections of Anaïs Nin presents Nin through the eyes of twenty-six people who knew her. She is the unconventional, distant aunt; the thoughtful friend; the owner of a strangely disarming voice; the author eager for attention yet hypersensitive to criticism; the generous advisor to a literary magazine; the adulteress; the beautiful septuagenarian; the recommender of books—the contributors elaborate on thses and many other perceptions of Nin.Readers

The Immigrant Train
And Other Stories
By Natalie L. M. Petesch

In this short story collection, acclaimed author Natalie Petesch reaffirms for us our enduring debt to millions of immigrants who helped build America.

The Complete American Fantasies
By James Schevill

“Fantasies to me, as I wrote in an earlier 1983 edition of American Fantasies, are the active, visionary links between reality and imagination as my characters pursue their destinies. Although we pretend to be a pragmatic, materialistic country, our fantasies, once suppressed by tradition, peer increasingly through the media into our private and public behavior.

Cities of the Interior
By Anaïs Nin

Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love, Seduction of the Minotaur. Haunting and hypnotic, these five novels by Anaïs Nin began in 1946 to appear in quiet succession. Though published separately over the next fifteen years, the five were conceived as a continuous experience—a continuous novel like Proust’s, real and flowing as a river.The

Sight Unseen
Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio
By Elissa S. Guralnick

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.

Booking Pleasures
By Jack Matthews

“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.

From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson
By Edmund Wilson
· Edited by Janet Groth

Many of Wilson’s writings have been anthologized. But there is another body of work — over fifty fine essays on aspects of contemporary literature and ideas — that have been scattered in a variety of magazines, including The New Yorker, The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The Nation.

Beltane at Aphelion
Longer Poems
By John Matthias

Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias’s longer poems and is published simultaneously with Swimming at Midnight, which collects his shorter poems.

Small Bird, Tell Me
Stories of Greek Immigrants
By Helen Papanikolas

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.), and her parents’ own story of migration, Emily-George. With Small Bird, Tell Me, she joins a long and ancient tradition of Greek story-tellers whose art informs and enriches our lives.

Waste of Timelessness and Other Early Stories
By Anaïs Nin

These stories precede all of Nin’s published work to date. In them are many sources of the more mature work that collectors and growing writers can appreciate.

Nietzsche and Emerson
An Elective Affinity
By George J. Stack

George J. Stack traces the sources of ideas and theories that have long been considered the exclusive province of Friedrich Nietzsche to the surprisingly radical writings of the American essayist and poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson.Nietzsche and Emerson makes us see Emerson’s writings in a new, more intensified light and presents a new perspective on Nietzsche’s philosophy.

Higher Elevations
Stories From The West: A Writers’ Forum Anthology
Edited by Alexander Blackburn and C. Kenneth Pellow

Higher Elevations: Stories from the West is a rich and varied anthology of fiction from Writers’ Forum. As the subtitle promises, it is regional, but these are not all stories from your grandfather’s (or Hollywood’s) West.

Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk
Edited by Susan Porterfield

Lucien Stryk has been a presence in American letters for almost fifty years. Those who know his poetry well will find this collection particularly gratifying. Like journeying again to places visited long ago, Stryk’s writing is both familiar and wonderfully fresh.For those just becoming acquainted with Stryk’s work, Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk makes an excellent introduction.

5 Plays 5
Lovecraft’s Follies, The Ushers, Mother O, Shadows of Memory, The Last Romantics
By James Schevill

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.” The sucess of this production heralded James Schevill’s arrival as an important American playwright dedicated to a new kind of theatre that he calls in the introduction to this book, “Poetic Realism.”

Frank Waters
Man and Mystic
Edited by Vine Deloria Jr.

“In addition to his accomplishments as a talented novelist, a thorough historian, and an excellent essayist, Frank Waters is that rare breed of man who has merged heart and mind early in his life and moved forward to confront ultimate questions. This dilemma of faith and heritage, religion and identity, and commitment and comfort has never been resolved intellectually.

New and Selected Poems
By James Schevill

From a poetic career that spans more than half a century and that is still producing poems as fresh and honest as the first, comes James Schevill’s New and Selected Poems, redefining the achievement of this uniquely American vision.Schevill’s poetry, acclaimed and criticized, has been rigorously selected here by the poet himself down to the best and most representative of his significant output.

A Realist in the American Theatre
Selected Drama Criticism of William Dean Howells
Edited by Brenda Murphy

William Dean Howells has long been recognized as the chief spokesman for post-1880s American Realism. Most of his writing appeared in popular magazines, however, and has been lost to us. This collection brings together for the first time his most significant essays about American drama written between 1875 and 1919 and a full bibliography of his writings on drama and theatre.

Selected Short Stories of William Dean Howells
By W. D. Howells
· Edited by Ruth Bardon

Full texts of thirteen of Howells’s short stories, each preceded by a thorough critical analysis.

Sea of Grass
By Conrad Richter

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.

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.

Sunrise Brighter Still
The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters
By Alexander Blackburn
· Foreword by Charles L. Adams

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. Central to Waters’s vision, he suggests, is the individual in whom are concentrated the creative powers of the universe.

The Trees
By Conrad Richter

Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio River was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here, in the first novel of Conrad Richter’s Awakening Land trilogy, the Lucketts, a wild, woods-faring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation.

The Fields
By Conrad Richter

Conrad Richter’s trilogy of novels The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town, (1950) traces the transformation of Ohio from wilderness to farmland to the site of modern industrial civilization, all in the lifetime of one character. The trilogy earned Richter immediate acclaim as a historical novelist. The Town won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1951, and The Trees was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection soon after it was published.

A Gathering of Ways
By John Matthias

A Gathering of Ways is John Matthias’ first collection of poems since the publication of his warmly received Northern Summer collection in 1985.

House of Incest
By Anaïs Nin
· Introduction by Allison Pease
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

Originally published in 1936,  House of Incest  is Anaïs Nin’s first work of fiction. Based on Nin’s dreams, the novel is a surrealistic look within the narrator’s subconscious as she attempts to distance herself from a series of all-consuming and often taboo desires.

Curtain Calls
British and American Women and the Theater, 1660–1820
Edited by Mary A. Schofield and Cecilia Macheski

“I here and there o’heard a Coxcomb cry, Ah, rot—’tis a Woman’s Comedy.”Thus Aphra Behn ushers in a new era for women in the British Theatre (Sir Patient Fancy, 1678). In the hundred years that were to follow—and exactly those years that Curtain Calls examines—women truly took the theater world by storm.For each woman who chose a career in the theater world of the eighteenth century, there is a unique tale of struggle, insult, success, good or bad fortune, disaster, seduction, or fame.

Justina of Andalusia and Other Stories
By Natalie L. M. Petesch

This collection of stories is, like Petesch’s previous work, distinguished by its brilliant lyrical intensity and by characters who are stunningly alive. It is a powerful collection about impassioned cultural conflicts in present-day Spain and Mexico; it is also a book about ourselves—how we have failed to love the Earth and have squandered our resources.In the title story, it is Justina Olivia who breaks the moral law of her village in an unforgettable love story.

Early Prose Writings of William Dean Howells, 1852–1861
By W. D. Howells
· Edited by Thomas Wortham

While William Dean Howells is today best remembered as Mark Twain’s staunchest defender, Howells was, at his peak, the unrivaled man of letters in America: he had no contemporary equal. The achievements of both Twain and Henry James have since surpassed those of Howells in the literary hierarchy, but the work of Howells still remains an important part of American letters.In

The Nameless Sight
Poems 1937–1956
By Alan Swallow

Although Alan Swallow’s work on behalf of other poets has tended to overshadow his work as a poet, the reputation of his poems has been upon the ascendancy. This volume, a “selected” one, runs the gamut of Swallow’s themes. John Holmes reviewed in The New York Times, speaking of “love and compassion warming the face of the carving.”The volume was published in a beautiful limited edition by Carroll Coleman’s The Prairie Press.

Of Pen and Ink and Paper Scraps
By Lucien Stryk

The first of this new collection’s three parts ranges very widely, from poems of childhood-his own, his children’s, and his grandchild’s-to poems of keen social and political awareness, and on to pieces about his neighbors, about growing more firmly and deeply into a personal place.The

Edmund Wilson
A Critic For Our Time
By Janet Groth

In the course of a career that spanned five decades, Edmund Wilson’s literary output was impressive. His life’s work includes five volumes of poetry, two works of fiction, thirteen plays, and more than twenty volumes of social commentary on travel, politics, history, religion, anthropology, and economics. It is, however, his criticism for which Wilson is best known. To note a few of his accomplishments as a critic, Wilson furthered the understanding and appreciation of the poetry of W.B.

Other Concerns and Brother Clark
By Hollis Summers

Ordinary, everday, homely. These are words that come to mind to describe the dimension Hollis Summers’ poems live in. But they are inadequate words, and his are deceptively simple poems. They speak little, and quietly, but they record, in the silences they create, a desperate, melancholy magic about the surfaces and trivial events of our days. So we are led to discover, and assent, to all these tonal perceptions as the true domestic furniture of our inner lives.

Interior Country
Stories of the Modern West
Edited by Alexander Blackburn, Craig Lesley, and Jill Landem

A mile down the road from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, a woman unearths an ancient shard of pottery bearing the thousands-year-old thumbprint of a Navawi‘i woman. A marriage is thrown into crisis by the husband’s discovery, on a fishing trip, of a girl’s corpse. To impress the prostitute he wants to marry, a man constructs a homemade atomic bomb.

Ambiguous Dancers of Fame
Collected Poems: 1945-1986
By James Schevill

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. In these poems, Schevill reveals again the range of his lyrical and dramatic powers. As M.I.

Flowering Mimosa
By Natalie L. M. Petesch

Flowering Mimosa is a story of lost innocence and coming of age among the disinherited of America in the 1980’s. Against a backdrop of social and economic disruption in the American southwest, Petesch traces the fates of the Wingfield family, who have lost their Texas farm and moved to a mining town in Silver Valley, Idaho.As various tensions threaten to break the family apart, Tamsen Wingfield reacts most strongly.

Collected Short Plays
By James Schevill

In a time that emphasizes media spectaculars, the short play offers an exploration of minimal possibilities yet has the power to fix history in a moment’s structure, a flash of revelation. The short play is a powerful and innovative theatrical medium, relying upon compression and clarity rather than amplification, and reducing character and action to a spare, dramatic core.Schevill

Novel of the Future
By Anaïs Nin

In The Novel of the Future, Anaïs Nin explores the act of creation—in literature, film, art, and dance—to arrive at a new synthesis for the young artist struggling against the sterility, formlessness, and spiritual bankruptcy afflicting much of modern fiction.

Good-bye, Son and Other Stories
By Janet Lewis

Lewis’ only collection of short fiction was first published in 1946, but remains as quietly haunting today as it was then. Set in small communities of the upper Midwest and northern California in the ’30s and ’40s, these midcentury gems focus on the quiet cycles connecting youth and age, despair and hope, life and death.

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 author surveys what has been written about space exploration and calls attention to its dominant use as a means of deflecting attention back to earth and earthly concerns.

Northern Summer
New and Selected poems, 1963-1983
By John Matthias

Northern Summer is a representative selection from John Matthias’s previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, Bucyrus, that in part “Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time.”

American Fantasies
Collected Poems, 1945-1981
By James Schevill

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. The dramatic voices of the characters contrast with the subjective voice of the narrator as he moves through time and space, remembering and anticipating.

Duncan’s Colony
By Natalie L. M. Petesch

“During the nineteen sixties, following the missile crisis and during the Vietnam War, communitarian societies began to reappear in the United States. Those who were of an invincibly optimistic nature gathered together in agrarian or utopian communes reminiscent of the nineteenth century.

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.

A Woman Speaks
The Lectures, Seminars, and Interviews of Anaïs Nin
Edited by Evelyn J. Hinz

In this book Anaïs Nin speaks with warmth and urgency on those themes which have always been closest to her: relationships, creativity, the struggle for wholeness, the unveiling of woman, the artist as magician, women reconstructing the world, moving from the dream outward, and experiencing our lives to the fullest possible extent.

Awakening
By Lucien Stryk

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. Awakening is, in large part, an approach to what is most familiar by a poet whose language and poetic attention have found their own maturity.Years

The Trial of Soren Qvist
By Janet Lewis

The Wife of Martin Guerre
By Janet Lewis

Set in 16th century France, this compelling story of Bertrande de Rols is the first of the Cases of Circumstantial Evidence.

The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron
By Janet Lewis

This third novel in the three Cases of Circumstantial Evidence provides an intimate portrayal of deception and corruption in one small poor Parisian family in the late 1600s. In contrast to the majesty of the court of Louis XIV and the bloodthirsty crowds of Paris at that time, the simple lives of Jean Larcher and his wife and son are pitiably ruined by the presence of a seducer and his political pamphlets. The result: personal and public passions mesh to hang an innocent man.

The Town
By Conrad Richter

In the final novel of Richter’s Awakening Land trilogy, Sayward Wheeler completes her mission and lives to see the transition of her family and her friends, American pioneers, from the ways of wilderness to the ways of civilization. The Town, for which Richter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, is a much bigger book in every way than its predecessors; it is itself a rich contribution to literature and with the other novels comprises a great American epic.

Under a Glass Bell
By Anaïs Nin

Under a Glass Bell is one of Nin’s finest collections of stories. First published in 1944, it attracted the attention of Edmond Wilson, who reviewed the collection in The New Yorker. It was in these stories that Nin’s artistic and emotional vision took shape.

The Fathers
By Allen Tate
· Introduction by Arthur Mizener

The Fathers is the powerful novel by the poet and critic recognized as one of the great men of letters of our time.Old Major Buchan of Pleasant Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia, lived by a gentlemen’s agreement to ignore what was base or rude, to live a life which was gentle and comfortable because it was formal.

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.

Collages
By Anaïs Nin

“Collages began with an image which had haunted me. A friend, Renate, had told me about her trip to Vienna where she was born, and of her childhood relationships to statues. She told me stories of her childhood, her relationship to her father, her first love.I begin the novel with:Vienna was the city of statues. They were as numerous as the people who walked the streets.

Winter of Artifice
Three Novelettes
By Anaïs Nin

Winter of Artifice is a collection of novelettes: ‘Stella,’ ‘Winter of Artifice,’ and ‘The Voice.’

Seduction of the Minotaur
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.She

Ladders to Fire
By Anaïs Nin
· Foreword by Gunther Stuhlmann

After struggling with her own press and printing her own works, Anaïs Nin succeeded in getting Ladders to Fire accepted and published in 1946. This recognition marked a milestone in her life and career. Admitted into the fellowship of American novelists, she maintained the individuality of her literary style.