The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their craft. Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bobbie Ann Mason; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Rick Bass; Leonard Michaels; Christopher Tilghman; Thom Jones; Julia Alvarez; Andre Dubus; Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tobias Wolff. Their comments will interest readers devoted to their novels and stories, other writers, and aspiring writers.

Aram Saroyan tells of the intimate sides of the life of his father, Pulitzer Prize-Winning playwright and novelist William Saroyan.

A collection of cartoons and text by Pulitzer Prize winner Herbert Block.

Objectivist poet George Oppen (1908–1984), along with his contemporaries Lorine Niedecker, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakoski, provide an important bridge between the vanguard modernist American poets and the later works of poets such as Robert Creeley. In work often compounded by the populist urbanity of city lives, the Objectivists explored the social statements poetry can make. Because Oppen wrote only one essay and one essay-review, his correspondence, in effect, constitutes his essays. Oppen is emerging as one of the major poets of the postwar era; he was the recipient of an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the PEN/West Rediscovery Award, and a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His collection Of Being Numerous received the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. These working papers include a rich correspondence, letters which provide access to the sustained, perceptive body of critical and aesthetic thinking of Oppen’s poetic career. Provocative and witty comments on poetry and poetics, especially interesting for the development of an Objectivist aesthetics, and shrewd, deeply felt assessments about the politics of the twentieth century and its moral dilemmas are some of the issues attended to. This edition offers primary documentation about an influential poetics, a little-known movement, and its active figures. Given the aggressive studies of the politics of canon-formation, the interest in describing a historical context for individual literary achievement, and current debates about mainstream poetry, the rethinking of the Objectivist movement, and the collection of documents contributing to its poetics, is an important achievement in literary scholarship.

In these new poems, her eleventh collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet focuses on the themes of family, friendship, the pleasures and rigors of rural life and the animal world that have always engaged her powerfully and fruitfully. Change and the things that never change attract Kumin's attention equally. Whether chronicling the bounty of summer, the cycle of seasons, or memories of youthful parties, her voice is clear, wise, and compelling.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louis Simpson (1923-2012) was a leading figure in American letters for more than half a century. Born in Jamaica, the son of a lawyer of Scottish descent and a Russian mother, he emigrated to America at the age of 17. Voices in the Distance was the first selection of his poetry to be published in Britain for over 25 years, drawing on 18 collections, from The Arrivistes (1949) to his final book, Struggling Times, which he published in 2009 at the age of 86. Both timely and personal, Louis Simpson's poetry dramatises his continuing quarrel with suburban America, as well as his concerns about the direction of an American society struggling to retain its integrity in the midst of widespread challenges and worldwide strife. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. Maxine Kumin is the author of poetry, novels, short stories, essays and a number of children's books. She has received several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Poets' Prize, the Levinson Prize, and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She lives in Warner, New Hampshire.

(Piano Solo). Margo Guryan presents 14 charming variations on this famous piano piece. Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Gunther Schuller calls them "clever, witty, at times tender and elegant, at other times punning and ribald." Wonderful for advanced beginner to beginning advanced pianists.

"Karl Shapiro was one of the twentieth-century's major poets. He published more than twenty books of poetry, two autobiographies, including poetry, seven collections of essays, and a novel. Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress (the position now known as the U.S. Poet Laureate), he was the winner of numerous prizes and awards, including the Contemporary Poetry prize, two Guggenheim Foundation fellowships, the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Bollingen Prize. He was also a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a faculty member at several universities. Active in his craft well into his late seventies, in 2000 Shapiro died at the age of 86. This collection is compiled from the unpublished poems of Karl Shapiro at the University of Texas in Austin and elsewhere. They are largely as Shapiro left them, in a desk drawer in his apartment in uptown Manhattan"--