Annie Dillard, a foremost practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a necromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This first full-length study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, religious mystic, professional critic, and arch-romantic.
“There is a sadness to McBride’s poetry that only a deep thinker can recreate, someone who has been inside the beautiful dark hollows of disappointment. It is encouraging to read the powerfully rendered thoughts of a vulnerable mind in a cynical time—here is a poet unafraid to be hurt; here is a poet bleeding in his own glass crop. Encouraging? Yes, because McBride understands that defensive poetry has no value.” — Larissa Szporluk
The Special Activities Group (SAG) and its subordinate companies have received little attention from historians, despite being an elite combat unit and participating in highly classified and dangerous missions in Korea. Rarely receiving more attention than a footnote, their story usually begins and ends on the night of September 12, 1950, with an amphibious raid near Kunsan. Until their inactivation on March 31, 1951, SAG simply disappears from most Korean War histories. Spare Not the Brave corrects this omission.
Speak a Powerful Magic features poems by schoolchildren, immigrants and refugees, patients and caregivers, and veterans, alongside the work of well-known contemporary American poets, and it demonstrates that poetry is truly of the people. We turn to poetry to give voice to what is troubling us, to honor what we love, to make sense of our lives, to remember our past, and to commemorate what we’ve lost. Here, it becomes clear that poetry, especially when coupled with the visual arts, has the potential to broaden our understanding and bring people together in ways that more traditional communications simply cannot.
Speak English! The Rise of Latinos in Baseball chronicles how much— and how little—has changed since the first Latino played in the big leagues in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the next century, the Alous, Vic Power, and Rico Carty worked to earn their place in the game amid taunts and ridicule. Today, even established players and stars may be told to speak English in clubhouses—eliciting cringes or shrugs from individuals who are seemingly still hurting.
Winner of the 2013 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Mark Doty, Judge
“It’s a joy. . .to come nearer to a realm of experience little explored in American poetry, the lives of those who are engaged in the complex project of transforming their own gender… Oliver Bendorf writes from a paradoxical, new-world position: the adult voice of a man who has just appeared in the world. A man emergent, a man in love, alive in the fluid instability of any category.”
—Mark Doty, from the Foreword
Samuel Shem’s classic novel about medical internship, The House of God, is required reading in medical schools throughout the world and is celebrated for its authentic description of medical training and practice, for its Rabelaisian comedy, and for its humanism and vision. His new novel, and most ambitious work yet, The Spirit of the Place, tells the story of an expatriate doctor called home to Columbia, New York, in the early 1980s to face his own history and that of the place. It is a novel of love and death, mothers and sons, ghosts and bullies, doctors and patients, illness and healing.
Verlyn Flieger’s expanded and updated edition of Splintered Light, a classic study of Tolkien’s fiction first published in 1983, examines The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings in light of Owen Barfield’s linguistic theory of the fragmentation of meaning. Flieger demonstrates Tolkien’s use of Barfield’s concept throughout his fiction, showing how his central image of primary light splintered and refracted acts as a metaphor for the languages, peoples, and history of Middle-earth.
In Spoilsmen in a “Flowery Fairyland,” Jack L. Hammersmith examines in detail the first eleven American ministers to Japan, exploring the information, expectations, and values they took with them and how they shaped U.S. diplomacy with Japan in the late nineteenth century. Of particular interest, he shows that the issue of trade, a dominant contemporary concern, was an ongoing nineteenth-century problem as well.
When he retired in 2006, Bob Dolgan had been a sportswriter for forty-five years at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Known for his unique perspectives on sports figures, Dolgan’s style, instincts, and experience as a reporter were evident in his columns that were beloved by his readers and admired by his colleagues.
