In the past, collections of Bradbury’s works have juxtaposed stories with no indication as to the different time periods in which they were written. Even the mid- and late-career collections that Bradbury himself compiled contained stories that were written much earlier—a situation that has given rise to misconceptions about the origins of the stories themselves. In this new edition, editors William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller present for the first time the stories of Ray Bradbury in the order in which they were written. Moreover, they use texts that reflect Bradbury’s earliest settled intention for each tale. By examining his relationships with his agent, editor, and publisher, Touponce and Eller’s textual commentaries document the transformation of the stories—and Bradbury’s creative understanding of genre fiction—from their original forms to the versions known and loved today.

Melville has long been regarded as an author of raw genius who knew, or cared, little about the art of the novel, and even harbored hostility toward its conventions. In The Weaver-God, He Weaves, Christopher Sten sets out to correct this widespread view, showing not only what Melville knew about the novelist’s craft but how he appropriated and transformed a whole series of distinct genres: Typee is presented in the context of the popular romance, with its paired themes of sex and violence; Omoo is viewed in the framework of early Spanish and later French examples of the picaresque novel; and Mardi is seen as an instance of the once widely popular genre of the imaginary voyage. Sten also reveals how Melville radically transformed certain existing genres—the epic novel in Moby-Dick and the historical novel in Israel Potter—or forged profound new directions for genres still in their early stages—the psychological novel in Pierre and the experimental novel in the Confidence-Man.

In Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, editors Suzanne del Gizzo and Frederic J. Svoboda have collected the best essays and reviews—pieces that examine the novel’s themes, its composition and structure, and the complex issue of editing a manuscript for posthumous publication—and placed them in a single, cohesive volume. Among the included works are E. L. Doctorow’s famous New York Times review “Braver Than We Thought,” a new essay by Tom Jenks examining his editing process in “Editing Hemingway: The Garden of Eden,” and Mark Spilka’s “Hemingway’s Barbershop Quintet: The Garden of Eden Manuscript,” a precursor to his groundbreaking study of Hemingway’s concerns with sex and gender roles, Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny.

Darling Ro and the Benét Women presents a revealing glimpse of social and literary life in New York and Paris during the 1920s. Using a recently released collection of letters from the Benét Collection at Yale University, author Evelyn Helmick Hively extracts captivating anecdotes and impressions about a talented group of writers and impressive feminist figures. Written by Rosemary Carr Benét to her mother, Dr. Rachel Hickey Carr (one of Chicago’s first women physicians), the compilation of letters and short dispatches from Paris provides the focus of the book.

With the release of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and forthcoming film version of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Faërie, author Verlyn Flieger, one of world’s foremost Tolkien scholars, presents a selection of her best articles—some never before published—on a range of Tolkien topics. The essays are divided into three distinct sections. The first explores Tolkien’s ideas of sub-creation–the making of a Secondary World and its relation to the real world, the second looks at Tolkien’s reconfiguration of the medieval story tradition, and the third places his work firmly within the context of the twentieth century and “modernist” literature.

William Faulkner has long been considered the great racial interrogator of the early-twentieth-century South. In Drawing First Blood, author Marc Kevin Dudley suggests that Ernest Hemingway not only shared Faulkner’s racial concerns but extended them beyond the South to encompass the entire nation. Though Hemingway wrote extensively about Native Americans and African Americans, always in the back of his mind was Africa. Dudley sees Hemingway’s fascination with, and eventual push toward, the African continent as a grand experiment meant to both placate and comfort the white psyche, and to challenge and unsettle it, too.

The contributors to Ernest Hemingway and the Geography of Memory employ an intriguing range of approaches to Hemingway’s work, using the concept of memory as an interpretive tool to enhance understanding of Hemingway’s creative process. The essays are divided into four sections— Memory and Composition, Memory and Allusion, Memory and Place, and Memory and Truth—and examine The Garden of Eden, In Our Time, The Old Man and the Sea, Green Hills of Africa, Under Kilimanjaro, The Sun Also Rises, A Moveable Feast, A Farewell to Arms, and Death in the Afternoon, as well as several of Hemingway’s short stories.

“The Indian Hater” and Other Stories, by James Hall returns to print an important and popular writer from an often-overlooked moment in American literary history. In the decades before the Civil War, when readers and writers in both the United States and England thought about writing from the American West they thought about James Hall (1793–1867) and his stories “The Indian Hater” and “Pete Featherton.” Between 1828 and 1836, Hall wrote dozens of short stories in a wide variety of genres while working as an editor, politician, and businessman, first in frontier Illinois and after 1833 in Cincinnati. Many of his stories were immediately reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic and achieved success with both the popular audience and the critics, despite their unorthodox treatment of the frontier.

Author Craig A. Warren explores seven popular novels about the Civil War—The Red Badge of Courage, Gone with the Wind, None Shall Look Back, The Judas Field, The Unvanquished, The Killer Angels, and Absalom, Absalom! His study reveals that the war owes much of its cultural power to a large but overlooked genre of writing: postwar memoirs, regimental histories, and other narratives authored by Union and Confederate veterans. Warren contends that literary scholars and historians took seriously the influence that veterans’ narratives had on the shape and character of Civil War fiction.

In 1996 René Villarreal returned to Cuba to retrieve his memoir of his life with Ernest Hemingway at the Finca Vigia. Sadly, he learned that the manuscript and photographs had been lost. Determined to tell his story, Villarreal, together with his son Raúl, set about rewriting the account of how he came to be Ernest Hemingway’s majordomo, confidant, and friend—his Cuban son.