"A stunning, unclassifiable work by one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers and writers, this book is an inspiring amalgam of letters, poetry, and profound musings on everything from Caravaggio to the nature of time itself. 'Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as though through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless ...In our brief mortal lives, we are grinders of these lenses'. When John Berger wrote this apparently unclassifiable book, it was to become a sensation, translated into nine languages and indelible from the minds of those who read it. This stunning work is a shoebox filled with delicate love letters containing poetry and thoughts on mortality, art, love, and absence, capturing moments in time that hover above Berger's surprising landscapes. From his lyrical description of the works of Caravaggio and profound explorations of death and immigration to the sight of some lilac at dusk in the mountains, this is a beautiful and most intimate response to the world around us"-- Provided by publisher.

Recognizing the intrinsic literary merit of much of children's writing, Ruth Krauss listened to their ideas, poems, and stories and wrote them down with a professional's touch. Maurice Sendak's drawings highlight the whimsy and logic of these writings, and also stand on their own as picture-poems. The result is seventeen very funny, poignant, insightful, exuberant pieces of literature that bring out all the best of childhood imaginings.

The second in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality. Two criteria were used in the selecting of these stories—literary merit and importance to the genre. The result is that the variety of subjects is matched only by the richness and diversity of their handling—brilliant, frightening, clever, bizarre, powerful, witty, funny—and several steps in-between. Whatever else these stories may be doing, they all explore the interplay between human beings and the technological society man has created for himself. Good science fiction simultaneously peers into remote realms of space and time and holds a mirror to the contemporary moment; and if the reflection in that mirror is somewhat distorted, so be it. Blame not the messenger for bearing bad tidings. Herewith ten stories which demonstrate the unsettling kinds of insights that science fiction alone can offer. More are on the way. The nine volumes of this series provide an exciting cumulative view of a field in which some of the most vigorous and inventive fiction of our times has been produced. Simply put, here is the best science fiction from the best science fiction writers.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The seventh in a series of superb science fiction. The Alpha series of anthologies center on no particular theme except that of literary quality and importance to the science fiction genre. Since its inception in 1970, the Alpha series has been dedicated to the proposition that science fiction can be a literature not only of stimulating and unfamiliar ideas but also of skilful and vigorous writing. Thus far Alpha has offered sixty-odd stories that exemplify the best of science fiction: challenging, provocative views of the universe, presented in crisp, sparkling prose. The volumes in the series offer some of the liveliest work produced in the short-story form anywhere in the world, and not just of the science-fiction category. Alpha serves a secondary purpose: to rescue from oblivion stories that might otherwise be undeservedly forgotten. Herewith, the seventh feast of outstanding fiction.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Nadine Gordimer describes this collection of her non-fiction pieces as a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in. The collection of essays, articles and addresses encompass Gordimer's own evidence of the inequities of apartheid as she saw them in 1956, her account of the bans on literature still in effect in the mid-1970s, through to South Africa's emergence in 1994 as a free country. Gordimer's canvas is global and her themes are wide-ranging. She examines the impact of technology on our expanding world-view, the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction and she reassess the role of the writer in the modern world.

"Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as 'Who Owns Anne Frank?,' 'What Helen Keller Saw,' 'Dostoevsky's Unabomber,' and 'Transcending the Kafkaesque,' Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including 'A Hebrew Sibyl,' 'What Happened to the Baby?,' 'Dictation,' 'The Biographer's Hat,' and 'The Conversion of the Jews,' Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth." -

Here, freshly picked from a brilliant connoisseur (and practitioner) of humor, are the finest, funniest writings of everyone who makes us laugh today - from Thurber to Woody Allen, from Benchley to Joseph Heller, from Leacock (Stephen) to Lebowitz (Fran)... the names (they're all on the front of the jacket) tell the story !

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

One of the five Confucian classics, The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest collection of poetry in world literature and the finest treasure of traditional songs left from antiquity. Where the other Confucian classics treat outward things: deeds, moral precepts, the way the world works,” as Stephen Owen tells us in his foreword, The Book of Songs is the classic of the human heart and the human mind.”

"Older fans will admire [Burstein's] dedication to remembering and honoring the past." -Publisher's Weekly The award-nominated stories in this collection will bring memories of the future flooding back. Two new stories and all-new afterwords enliven the past with a touch of the present and that which is yet to come. You don't need a collection of antique spaceships or a carefully calibrated time machine to share the memories of the final Holocaust survivor. You don't have to jump through the gate between universes in search of a lost friend. All you have to do is open your eyes. You'll remember the future. The future remembers you.

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus weilds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection—part fiction, part handbook—as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations—both comic and disturbing—in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

This extraordinary collection is the first to present the unprecedented range of American Jewish fiction today, from the acclaimed immigrant and post-immigrant masters such as Singer, Bellow, Roth, Ozick, Malamud, and Paley to the new voices of post-acculturation like those of Mark Helprin, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Daphne Merkin, Allegra Goodman, and Adam Schwartz. Writing Our Way Home limns the dramatic transformation of Jewish life in the past three decades. Its stories arise from such developments as the emergence of feminism, the impact of Israel, the broken silence about the Holocaust, the return to - as well as flight from - tradition, and the birth of an egalitarian religious creativity alongside the further advance of assimilation. It also exhibits the writers' growing knowledge of modern and biblical Hebrew, the wellspring of a new Jewish literature. In bringing our consciousness of American Jewish fiction up to date, the editors emphasize the "open literary community" that has come into being. As Ted Solotaroff characterizes it, "the religious and the secular, the experimental and the traditional, the realistic and the surreal cohabit, and even sometimes nuzzle, more or less peaceably." At the same time, the editors find some developments particularly promising, such as the rekindled literary strategies of Judaism employed by writers "culturally confident" enough, as Nessa Rapoport points out, to turn nostalgic stereotypes into archetypes. Rich and provocative in themselves, these twenty-four stories announce that the Jewish imagination in late-twentieth-century America is flourishing in unforeseen and dazzling ways as its authors continue to extend a remarkably adaptive literary tradition across an array of contemporary contexts.

This Singing World by Louis Untermeyer

The struggle to write with deep emotion is the subject of this extraordinary book, the previously unpublished credo of one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. "You don't write a novel out of sheer pity any more than you blow a safe out of a vague longing to be rich," writes Nelson Algren in his only longer work of nonfiction, adding: "A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery." Nonconformity is about 20th-century America: "Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder." And it is about the trouble writers ask for when they try to describe America: "Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards . . . [where there] are still . . . defeats in which everything is lost [and] victories that fall close enough to the heart to afford living hope." In Nonconformity, Algren identifies the essential nature of the writer's relation to society, drawing examples from Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Twain, and Fitzgerald, as well as utility infielder Leo Durocher and legendary barkeep Martin Dooley. He shares his deepest beliefs about the state of literature and its role in society, along the way painting a chilling portrait of the early 1950s, Joe McCarthy's heyday, when many American writers were blacklisted and ruined for saying similar things to what Algren is saying here.

Simpson, Louis. Searching for the Ox. New Poems and a Preface by Louis Simpson. New York, William Morrow & Co., 1976. 13 cm x 20,5 cm. 93 pages. Original Softcover. Very good condition with some minor signs of external wear. From the library of swiss - american - irish poet Chuck Kruger. With his name to front free endpaper. Contains among others the following poems: Venus in the Tropics; Dinner at the Sea-View Inn; The Psyche of Riverside Drive; Lorenzo; The Spring at Gadara; The Stevenson Poster; The Hour of Feeling; The Rejected; The Sun and the Moon; The Mannequins; Hubert's Museum; Boots and Saddles; The Middleaged Man etc.