Böcker av A. Robert Lee

Designs of Blackness provides less a narrative literary history than, precisely, a series of mappings - each literary-critical and comparative while at the same time offering cultural and historical context.

Boldly explores the multiple kinds of 'modern' that have contributed to English literary tradition from the medieval era to the twenty-first century.

Can it now be doubted that Native American/First Nations literary voice has become other than an established, and hugely compelling, compass? Native North American Authorship takes bearings, a roster of close readings yet situated within the wider latitudes and longitudes of timeline, place, memory. The emphasis falls throughout upon imagination, the "breath" within given texts be they fiction, poetry or self-writing. This is also to emphasize Native writing as modern (and in some cases postmodern) phenomenon, for sure rooted in tribal particularity, oral tradition, and trickster lore, but also given to reflexivity, the writer looking over his/her own shoulder. The authorship involved is now a literature equally of the city and indeed of geographies encountered beyond North America. The aim is to avoid suggesting some Grand Synthesis or to replay battles of reservation/off reservation ideology. The account opens with two purviews: the scale of Native written texts from early Christian-convert witness to contemporary verse and story by names like Tommy Pico and Eden Robinson, and the fuller implication of a category like Native American Renaissance. Key author portraits follow of N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie and Louis Owens. New longer fiction and anthology stories invite their respective chapters as do the story-collections of Diane Glancy and Stephen Graham Jones. Poetry assumes focus in the accounts of Joy Harjo and her contemporaries and Simon Ortiz and his contemporaries, with specific chapters on Jim Barnes, Linda Hogan and Ralph Salisbury. The epilogue adds further context: "Native" as cultural etymology, the role of site and space-time, and the affinities of Native authorship with other Native arts.

WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE by A. Robert Lee offers poems whose starting point or source of inspiration is a work of visual art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the "action" of a painting or sculpture, Lee seeks both to engage and amplify their meaning. Accessible and insightful, these delightful poems express the poet's playful attention to a wide international range of paintings, photography, films, sculptures and architecture, and the impact literary and visual arts can have on society. For those interested in the re-thinking of ekphrastic poetry's motives and purposes, and the interplay between poetry and visual art, WRITTEN EYE: VISUALS/VERSE is essential reading.

A unique take on modern life in Tokyo. A Japan of trains, every day to and fro, carriage scenes and theatre, vistas from the window, advertising posters. To be savoured through the Odakyu line. Pitched as creative text and line-graphics, Tokyo Commute offers on-track and off-track observations. Poetics of Japanese routine and etiquette.

Closely examines the fiction and autobiographical writings of Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ralph Ellison, N. Scott Momaday, Toni Morrison, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Jessica Hagedorn in cultural perspective.

A collection of interviews with Gerald Vizenor, one of the most powerful and provocative voices in the Native world today. These conversations with the novelist and cultural critic reveal much about the man, his literary creations, and his critical perspectives on important issues affecting Native peoples in the late twentieth century.

A study that explores those counter-seams of modern American writing that sit outside, or at least awkwardly within, agreed literary canons. It analyses three literary branches in the tradition: a re-envisioning of the whole Beat web or circuit; a consortium of postwar 'outrider' voices; and, a purview of what has been designated 'ethnic' writing.

A study of black and postcolonial writing in Britain