All Patrick O'Brian's strengths are on parade in this novel of action and intrigue, set partly in Malta, partly in the treacherous, pirate-infested waters of the Red Sea. While Captain Aubrey worries about repairs to his ship, Stephen Maturin assumes the center stage for the dockyards and salons of Malta are alive with Napoleon's agents, and the admiralty's intelligence network is compromised. Maturin's cunning is the sole bulwark against sabotage of Aubrey's daring mission.
Kay Boyle's Fifty Stories is an eloquent testament to the possibility of living and writing with passion and honor. In Paris in the twenties, in Austria before and after the Anschluss, in New York, in occupied Germany, in California, Boyle has been an inspiration both as an exquisite stylist and as a chronicler of the nuances of human experience. Now in her ninetieth year, Kay Boyle dares us, in this most comprehensive collection of her stories, to explore the themes that have preoccupied her for a lifetime: "the inviolate integrity of the human soul, the impact of external events on the most intimate of feelings, our fractured experience of love versus duty, self-respect versus hubris, social convention versus personal ethic...She is still unquestionably modern" (Ann Hornaday, The New York Times Book Review). Acclaimed novelist Louise Erdrich has provided a very personal appreciation of Boyle's power and grace. As she comments in the Introduction: "Kay is a citizen whose life and art are intertwined, one morally dependent on the other, both inexhaustible."
'In her delightful sequel to My Small Country Living (Norton, 1984), McMullen tells tales about her Welsh farm and its incredible assortment of goats, sheep, dogs, horses, and people...for fans of Herriot, a new voice from the country.' --Booklist
Our world is shrinking fast: goods, money, microbes, pollution, people, and ideas are crossing borders with growing ease. National governments are ill-suited for tackling the problems that result, from climate change, to the soaring trade in limited resource commodities like timber, to the management of regional water supplies. Hilary French argues that the only long-term solution to our environmental problems is a worldwide commitment to strengthening the international treaties and institutions essential for integrating ecological considerations into the still-nascent rules of global commerce. More than two hundred international environmental treaties already exist, but few of them stipulate stringent commitments and effective enforcement; and institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization continue to view environmental protection as a peripheral concern. But at the same time, new communications technologies are making it possible for nongovernmental organizations to mobilize powerful coalitions of private citizens to press for change, and some forward-thinking businesses have begun to support environmental codes of conduct and other international standards. Vanishing Borders provides people concerned about the future of the planet with a clear plan of action for ensuring environmental stability in the wake of globalization.
They are: Hugh Gough, Charles Napier, Charles Gordon, Frederick Roberts, Garnet Wolseley, Evelyn Wood, Hector Macdonald, and Herbert Kitchener.
Packard Schmidt is an appealing but seedy timeserver in the English department of a third-rate midwestern college. When his semester teaching the dismally undermotivated is done, Pack dashes off to Vegas--his favorite place on earth. There he runs into an ex-student-turned-call-girl, and his world falls apart. Author Edward Allen is an avid fan of game shows and casinos and the author of Straight Through the Night.
Open The Acorn Plan and listen to its sad, comic chorus of Southern voices, and to the story of Billy Riley, a brooding, reckless young man struggling to resolve the competing claims of love, loyalty, and ambition.
Mr. Empson sees the pastoral convention as including not only poems of shepherd life but any work "about the people but not by or for" them. Finding examples in the writing of every country and century, from Mencius to William Faulkner or Céline, he concentrates on an analysis of certain works and forms in English literature, several of them, like Alice in Wonderland, Troilus and Cressida, and proletarian novels not traditionally considered pastoral. His chapter on Milton and Bentley is a precursor of Mr. Empson's 1961 book, Milton's God. With virtuoso clarity and perception throughout he brings the student to a new awareness of hidden values in individual works and to the creative possibilities of the language.
At nineteen years old, Colin Harpur's girlfriend Denise Prior knows little about criminals, and even less about the law. When Denise drifts into the social circle of Harpur's number-one informant Jack Lamb, and one of the criminals is shot to death during a robbery, Denise's life is suddenly in danger and Harpur must solve a new crime-before it happens.
Herbert Simmons' first novel, winner of the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1957, relates the violent rise and fall of 18-years-old Jake Adams, whose Buick Dynaflow, custom-made suits, and attractiveness to women are all the fruits of his job pushing dope for the Organization.
Aller Retour New York is truly vintage Henry Miller, written during his most creative period, between Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). Miller always said that his best writing was in his letters, and this unbuttoned missive to his friend Alfred Perlès is not only his longest (nearly 80 pages!) but his best-an exuberant, rambling, episodic, humorous account of his visit to New York in 1935 and return to Europe aboard a Dutch ship. Despite its high repute among Miller devotees, Aller Retour New York has never been easy to find. It was first brought out in Paris in 1935 in a limited edition, and a second edition, "Printed for Private Circulation Only," was issued in the United States ten years later. It is now available in paperback as a Revived Modern Classic, with an introduction by George Wickes that illuminates the people and personal circumstances which inform Aller Retour New York.
Configurations was his first major collection to be published in this country, and includes in their entirety Sun Stone (1957) and Blanco (1967). Paz himself translated many of the poems from the Spanish. Some distinguished contributors to this bilingual edition include, among others, Paul Blackburn, Lysander Kemp. Denise Levertov, and Muriel Rukeyser. Paz's poems, although rooted in the mythology of South America and his native Mexico, nevertheless have an international background, transfiguring the images of the contemporary world. Powerful, angry, erotic, they voice the desires and rage of a generation.
An idiosyncratic and highly controversial French philosopher, Jacques Derrida inspired profound changes in disciplines as diverse as law, anthropology, literature and architecture. In Derrida's view, texts and contexts are woven with inconsistencies and blindspots, which provide us with a chance to think in new ways about, among other things, language, community, identity and forgiveness. Derrida's suggestions for "how to read" lead to a new vision of ethics and a new concept of responsibility.Penelope Deutscher discusses extracts from the full range of Derrida's work, including Of Grammatology, Dissemination, Limited Inc, The Other Heading: Reflections on Europe, Monolinguism of the Other, Given Time, and "Force of Law."
Emphasizing the Romantic heritage and modernist legacy of Karl Marx's writings, Peter Osborne presents Marx's thought as a developing investigation into what it means, concretely, for humans to be practical historical beings.Drawing on passages from a wide range of Marx's writings, and showing the links among them, Osborne refutes the myth of Marx as a reductively economistic thinker. What Marx meant by "materialism," "communism," and the "critique of political economy" was much richer and more original, philosophically, than is generally recognized. With the renewed globalization of capitalism since 1989, Osborne argues, Marx's analyses of the consequences of commodification are more relevant today than ever before.Extracts are taken from the full breadth of Marx's writings, including Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and The Communist Manifesto to Capital.
Ralph Ember longs to be respectable. The trouble is his money comes from big-time drug dealing, where fortunes are made but reputations are dubious and the risks truly murderous. Ralph has to decide whether to go after a syndicate alone or form an alliance with others.
Worldwatch Institute researcher Chris Bright explains why conservation biologists are raising the alarm about a global threat to biodiversity that is unfolding largely unnoticed - bioinvasion, the spread of alien, "exotic" organisms.With the exception of a few spectacular invasions, like the zebra mussel's conquest of the Great Lakes, there has been little public recognition of the dangers posed by these invading species. But exotic species are injuring our biological wealth on virtually every level - from the genetic (when exotics interbreed with native species) to the wholesale transformation of landscapes.Life Out of Bounds shows that this "biological pollution" is now beginning to corrode the world's economies as well. But the policy responses, on both the national and international levels, have usually been weak and uncoordinated. This book outlines the current scientific research on the threat, the social and economic implications if these invasions are allowed to continue unchecked, and steps that can be taken to contain the spread of exotic species.
Covers everything from the first spark of inspiration to the final draft. Writers will see how a series of careful questions will lead them to the messages of their reports, and will learn how to let those messages drive the structure of the piece. From this foundation they will be able to create a paragraph-by-paragraph plan of their entire report. A final chapter explains the author's techniques for editing reports of any length.
Well-known writers, including William Maxwell, Margaret Atwood, Don DeLillo, and Mark Richard, join lesser-known writers, such as Molly Giles, Andrew Lam, Judy Troy--who will be (or should be) better known--in this stellar collection of 60 short-shorts--serious writing that's fun to read.
The new edition retains the author's pungent analysis of what makes math "hard" for otherwise successful people and how women, more than men, become victims of a gendered view of math. It has been substantially updated to incorporate new research on what we know and don't know about "sex differences" in brain organization and function, and it has been enlarged to include problems, puzzles, and strategies tried out in hundreds of math anxiety workshops Tobias and her colleagues have sponsored.What remains unchanged is the author's politics. She sees "math anxiety" as a political issue. So long as people themselves to be disabled in mathematics and do not rise up and confront the social and pedagogical origins of their disabilities, they will be denied "math mental health." Tobias defines this as "the willingness to learn the math you need when you need it." In an ever more technical society, having that willingness can make the difference between high and low self-esteem, failure and success.
Ablaze with intellectual and social change, Paris in the 1830s and 1840s beckons to two English brothers-Frederick and Charles Courtland, an architect and a priest-each of whom is struggling for self-definition and social recognition. Of their lives and this world Sennett has made a remarkable work of fiction that transports the reader into nineteenth century Europe and into the nature and inconsistencies of culture and faith, and the way each is shaped by the passage of time.
As Marilyn Hacker has written, "Black, lesbian, mother, cancer survivor, urban woman: none of Lorde's selves has ever silenced the others; the counterpoint among them is often the material of her strongest poems."
As both a poet and novelist, Charlie Smith has been hailed as one of the most original voices on the literary scene today. The New York Times calls him "prodigiously talented" and Madison Smartt Bell describes him as "not only a spectacular stylist but also a visionary." He is the author of four novels, a book of novellas, and two previous volumes of poetry, Red Roads and Indistinguishable from the Darkness. In images both stark and voluptuous, Charlie Smith writes in The Palms of a world that is sometimes brutal, violent, and chaotic. His mythmaking imagination, Stanley Kunitz says, is "the art of the born storyteller...in love with language and places, heart's mysteries, and the invitation of roads." He follows where the imagination leads, whether it be driving a rental car east on Sunset Boulevard or "stepping into Nebraska / as one would step onto a white ferry." In his willingness to stand looking until he sees, he draws us into the urgency and glory of American life.
So begins May Sarton's short, swift blow of a novel, about the powerlessness of the old and the rage it can bring. As We Are Now tells the story of Caroline Spencer, a 76-year-old retired schoolteacher, mentally strong but physically frail, who has been moved by relatives into a "home." Subjected to subtle humiliations and petty cruelties, sustained for too short a time by the love of another person, she fights back with all she has, and in a powerful climax wins a terrible victory.
"This collection of 25 short stories written in English by non-Americans represents a wide range of writers working in all genres. Some of these writers are well known and widely published; others have just begun their writing careers." -Library Journal
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