"Neville's observations on inner and outer worlds deserve a large readership." -Studies in Short Fiction "Blending fictional and reportorial technique, Ms. Neville unwinds a tapestry of the Indiana seasons . . . in scene after remarkable scene she succeeds in disturbing and undermining one's calm. . . . moving . . . " -Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times " . . . shrewedly perceptive studies of the poetics of place . . . Neville pierces...

From Publishers Weekly: The rich and sometimes discordant strains of American self-scrutiny fill this wide-ranging anthology. Kennedy (The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) arranges the more than 200 selections according to themes like "The Flag," "Freedom of Speech," "Work, Opportunity and Invention" and "The Individual," and devotes equal space to the official, the devotional and the oppositional. The Declaration of Independence and...

From boyhood in Home, Pennsylvania, to his death in Tucson, Arizona, in 1989, this book offers - in Abbey's own words - the world of an American original. Whether writing fact or fiction, Abbey was always an autobiographer. Each of the thirty-five selections presented here, arranged chronologically by date of incident (not of publication), demonstrates that Abbey was passionately, insistently his own man. As poet-farmer Wendell Berry puts it: "He...

N. Scott Momaday's unique connection to the beauty and spirituality of the natural world surfaces in all of his works, from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn to his more recent collection In the Presence of the Sun. Yet In the Bear's House is Momaday's intensely personal quest to understand the spirit of the wilderness embodied in the animal image of Bear. Intimately linked to Bear since his childhood, Momaday searches for this elusive...

Literary style is the subject of this 1897 essay. The author considers word choice, memory, vision, cadence, slang, rhythm, emotion, intellect, sincerity, figures of speech, realism, criticism, and other topics, illustrating his points with examples from such authors as Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.

Prose and poems on the homosexual experience. In Unprotected, in the course of an unprotected sexual act, a man tries to convince himself it doesn't really matter, one dies anyway. The story, To the First Time, is on a man's first gay experience, and At Risk is on watching a friend die.

What do the most celebrated writers say about writing? Among those sharing their wisdom and experience on fiction, nonfiction, narrative, and style are Robert Louis Stevenson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and Henry James. Intended for students, this collection is also accessible to the general reader.

Tales of Europe, before and after the war, when lives could change in an instant Fleeing the Cuban revolution, a businessman's return to England is blocked by the secret police of General Franco. In Hungary, a peasant treasures a barrel of wine as a symbol of the world she lost during the war. At a Romanian ball, in the frenzied years that followed the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a British traveler finds himself challenged to a duel....

This 1895 volume visits the lesser-known literary haunts of such British writers as Dickens, Chaucer, Pope, Keats, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Byron, Eliot, the Brontës, and many, many more. Locations include places which inspired a particular author as well as spots shared by multiple groups such as Highgate, Lord Byron's tomb, Gray's country churchyard, Gad's Hill, childhood homes, and more.

"[This book] is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of "I know it when I see it." In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience...