History & Criticism Fiction

Antipoems: How to Look Better & Feel Great

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The first major collection in almost twenty years of new work by one of Latin America's greatest poets.

"Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering of his signature mocking humor, subverting received conventions and pretensions in both poetry and everyday life, public and private, ingeniously and wittily rendered into English in an antitranslation (the word is Parra's) by Liz Werner.

Of the fifty-eight pieces in Antipoems, the first twenty-three are taken from Parra's 1985 collection, Hojas de Parra ("Vine Leaves" or "Leaves of Parra"), two others appeared in his P?ginas en Blanco ("Blank Pages," 2001), while the rest come straight out of his notebooks and have never been published before, either in Spanish or English. The book itself is divided into two sections, "Antipoems" (im)proper and a selection of Parra's most recent incarnation of the antipoem, the hand-drawn images of his "Visual Artefactos."

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This is the third edition of an essential glossary for students, now thoroughly updated and expanded with more than 50 new literary and critical terms. This title offers a comprehensive reference that clearly and accessibly defines over 850 important literary and critical terms from classical times to the present.It is thoroughly updated and expanded, with more than 50 new terms, including traditional terms, important contemporary terms and introductions to emerging fields of critical study. It features more contemporary examples, including references to movies, TV shows, and bestselling books, and includes new visual examples.This essential glossary presents clear, succinct, and lively definitions of over 850 literary and critical terms for today's student. Thoroughly updated and expanded, the third edition features more than 50 new terms, including traditional terms, important contemporary terms and introductions to emerging fields of critical study.

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Beowulf, A Longman Cultural Edition (Longman Cultural Editions)

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From Longman's new Cultural Editions Series, Beowulf, edited by Sarah Anderson and translated by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, includes the complete work and contextual materials on the early medieval age. This edition of Beowulf contains the translation of the work by Alan Sullivan and Timothy Murphy, with additional commentary and notes by editor Sarah Anderson, that explain unfamiliar terms, cultural references, and literary allusions; also included are maps of Anglo-Saxon England and Denmark, a glossary of proper names, and genealogies?all designed to assist readers in understanding this fascinating work. Readers interested in Beowulf

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Oy veh! If this book chronicles Julietta's Appleton's first 50 years, one can only imagine the sequel! Julietta's mother died when she was nine. Her father, a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, sent his daughter to 17 different schools in the U.S. and Europe, including Catholic boarding schools. Julietta has lived in 36 different homes in 6 different countries, and developed a witty and keen sense of observation along the way. She survived her mother?s peculiar health practices, grooved through the '60s without any permanent damage, raised and sent kids off to college, lived through the detonation of her marriage, and endured life in the suburbs as a single woman. A car accident in 1996 left her with a mild but permanent brain injury and chronic pain. And as if that were not enough, her fianc? of two months died suddenly of a heart attack just as the two were beginning a new life together. And yet, Julietta manages to find humor in everyday life?sex toys, hurricanes, chocolate, dating, and senile dementia are just some of her targets. She is wickedly funny, naughty, and provocative. Clothing Optional will make you laugh through your tears and cry through your laughter.

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Collected Poems, 1948-1984

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This remarkable collection, which won the 1986 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, includes most of the poems from each of Derek Walcott's seven prior books of verse and all of his long autobiographical poem, "Another Life." The 1992 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Walcott has been producing--for several decades--a poetry with all the beauty, wisdom, directness, and narrative force of our classic myths and fairy tales, and in this hefty volume readers will find a full record of his important endeavor. "Walcott's virutes as a poet are extraordinary," James Dickey wrote in The New York Times Book Review. "He could turn his attention on anything at all and make it live with a reality beyond its own; through his fearless language it becomes not only its acquired life, but the real one, the one that lasts . . . Walcott is spontaneous, headlong, and inventive beyond the limits of most other poets now writing."

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The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte

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The renowned Hatfield edition includes verse from an early, pseudonymous volume entitled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, as well as 200 works collected from various manuscript sources after Bront?'s death in 1848.

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Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader

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Pages: 883, Edition: 2, Paperback, National Council of Teachers of English

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Economy of the Unlost: (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan) (Martin Classical Lectures)

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The ancient Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos was the first poet in the Western tradition to take money for poetic composition. From this starting point, Anne Carson launches an exploration, poetic in its own right, of the idea of poetic economy. She offers a reading of certain of Simonides' texts and aligns these with writings of the modern Romanian poet Paul Celan, a Jew and survivor of the Holocaust, whose "economies" of language are notorious. Asking such questions as, What is lost when words are wasted? and Who profits when words are saved? Carson reveals the two poets' striking commonalities.

In Carson's view Simonides and Celan share a similar mentality or disposition toward the world, language and the work of the poet. Economy of the Unlost begins by showing how each of the two poets stands in a state of alienation between two worlds. In Simonides' case, the gift economy of fifth-century b.c. Greece was giving way to one based on money and commodities, while Celan's life spanned pre- and post-Holocaust worlds, and he himself, writing in German, became estranged from his native language. Carson goes on to consider various aspects of the two poets' techniques for coming to grips with the invisible through the visible world. A focus on the genre of the epitaph grants insights into the kinds of exchange the poets envision between the living and the dead. Assessing the impact on Simonidean composition of the material fact of inscription on stone, Carson suggests that a need for brevity influenced the exactitude and clarity of Simonides' style, and proposes a comparison with Celan's interest in the "negative design" of printmaking: both poets, though in different ways, employ a kind of negative image making, cutting away all that is superfluous. This book's juxtaposition of the two poets illuminates their differences--Simonides' fundamental faith in the power of the word, Celan's ultimate despair--as well as their similarities; it provides fertile ground for the virtuosic interplay of Carson's scholarship and her poetic sensibility.

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Giving Good Weight

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"You people come into the market?the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun?and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans one at a time. You pulp the nectarines and rape the sweet corn. You are something wonderful, you are?people of the city?and we, who are almost without exception strangers here, are as absorbed with you as you seem to be with the numbers on our hanging scales." So opens the title piece in this collection of John McPhee's classic essays, grouped here with four others, including "Brigade de Cuisine," a profile of an artistic and extraordinary chef; "The Keel of Lake Dickey," in which a journey down the whitewater of a wild river ends in the shadow of a huge projected dam; a report on plans for the construction of nuclear power plants that would float in the ocean; and a pinball shoot-out between two prizewinning journalists.

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The Gospel in Dostoyevsky: Selections from His Works

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A collection of excerpts from Dostoyevsky's writings, demonstrating his spiritual thoughts and grouped under such headings as "Man's Rebellion Against God" and "Life in God."

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