Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was one of twentieth-century literature's most prolific letter-writers. This definitive volume showcases his correspondence with some of the most original and interesting artists of his time, including Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Neal Cassady, Lionel Trilling, Charles Olson, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Peter Orlovsky, Philip Glass, Arthur Miller, Ken Kesey, and hundreds of others. Through his letter writing, Ginsberg coordinated the efforts of his literary circle and kept everyone informed about what everyone else was doing. He also preached the gospel of the Beat movement by addressing political and social issues in countless letters to publishers, editors, and the news media, devising an entirely new way to educate readers and disseminate information. Drawing from numerous sources, this collection is both a riveting life in letters and an intimate guide to understanding an entire creative generation.

All the world’s religions are experiencing rapid change due to a confluence of social and economic global forces. Factors such as the pervasive intrusion of globalizing political and economic developments, polarized and morally equivalent presentations seen in the media, and the sense of surety demanded in and promised by a culture dominated by science are some of the factors that have placed extreme pressure on all religious traditions. This has stimulated unprecedented responses by religious groups, ranging from fundamentalism to the syncretistic search for meaning. As religion takes on new forms, the balance between individual and community is disrupted and reconfigured. Religions often lose the capacity to recall their ultimate purpose or lead their adherents toward it. This is the situation we call “the crisis of the holy.” It is a confluence of threats, challenges, and opportunities for all religions. This volume explores the contours of pressures, changes, and transformations and reflects on how all our religions are changing. By identifying commonalities across religions as they respond to these pressures, The Crisis of the Holy recommends ways religious traditions might cope with these changes and how they might join forces in doing so. Contributors: Vincent J. Cornell, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Sidney H. Griffith, Maria Reis Habito, B. Barry Levy, Deepak Sarma, Michael von Brück

"Amelia Rosselli is one of the great poets of postwar Italy, and recognized as such throughout Europe. She was also a musician and musicologist, close to John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she waged a lifelong battle against depression. The child of Carlo Rosselli, a major figure in the resistance to Mussolini who was assassinated with his brother Nello in 1937, Rosselli grew up in exile and went to high school in Scarsdale, making her fluent in English. English poetry, especially the lyrics and sonnets of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, became a prime reference for her own poetry, which mingles formal experimentation with memories of traditional forms to evoke the struggles of an embattled conscience. Rosselli's English poems, some of which were published by John Ashbery in the 1960s, are a major part of her body of work and are invariably included in Italian editions of her collected works.Sleep, the title under which Rosselli herself gathered these poems, is the first publication of her haunting and utterly original English oeuvre by an English publisher"--

Italian poet Amelia Rosselli grew up in an environment jolted by -assaults of personal and social history. The daughter of one of the heroes of the Italian Resistance during World War II, she suffered her father's assassination when she was seven. After an adolescence characterized by movement between cities and continents, her mother died, triggering a mental breakdown in the daughter. War Variations encompasses these intense life experiences, terrifying psychological realities that ultimately led to Rosselli's suicide.

The transformation of the human sciences into the social sciences in the third part of the 19th century was closely related to attempts to develop and implement methods for dealing with social tensions and the rationalization of society. This book studies the connections between academic disciplines and notions of Jewish assimilation and integration and demonstrates that the quest for Jewish assimilation is linked to and built into the conceptual foundations of modern social science disciplines. Focusing on two influential "assimilated" Jewish authors—anthropologist Franz Boas and sociologist Georg Simmel—this study shows that epistemological considerations underlie the authors' respective evaluations of the Jews' assimilation in German and American societies as a form of "group extinction" or as a form of "social identity." This conceptual model gives a new "key" to understanding pivotal issues in recent Jewish history and in the history of the social sciences.

In this volume, thirteen philosophers contribute new essays analyzing the criteria for personal identity and their import on ethics and the theory of action: it presents contemporary treatments of the issues discussed in Personal Identity , edited by John Perry (University of California Press, 1975)

"Andrea Goldsmith takes a group of Melbourne graduates to Oxford in the 1980s, then revisits them 20-odd years later. Now they are in their mid to late 40s, and life has left its mark on all of them: Jack, the brilliant Islamic scholar, whose career has stalled as he pursues his obsessive and unrequited love for Ava, the brilliant novelist, whose affair with Fleur - her muse - has ended, and who fears she may never write again, despite the constant love and support of Harry, the interloper in the group, the one who caught and married the beautiful Ava, the man who collected barbed wire and knew too much about cheese, and who now holds all their lives in his hands as the director of the academic institute that has brought them all back together in Australia and completely alienated Helen, the brilliant bio-scientist dedicated to eliminating shingella disease, whose work to save lives is being put to very sinister ends by those who fund her, unlike Connie (Conrad) who has been chosen by Harry to give the keynote lecture for his institute because of his media glamour and his easy charisma - though privately Connie would much prefer to spend his time with the beautiful twenty-five-year-old Sara than consider too closely the work his academic reputation rests upon. This is engrossing, character-driven storytelling. As it reveals the excitement and frustration of academic life (from conveying the complete absorption Helen can feel at a conference of scientists to Connies queasy compromises between popularity and rigour) the tissue of friendship remains, changing now as the group reconnects for the first time in decades, dealing with the reality of their present lives and their memories of the past. None will be unchanged by this. And not all will survive ..."--Provided by publisher.

'a witty realisation of how like is attracted to like, of how deep the rabbit fence of self-centredness goes, of how often an apparently virtuous interest in others is powered by malice and envy.'

What is the connection between breast enlargement and building renovation, yoga retreats and gourmet restaurants, cell phones and globalization? Wakefield, both the title of Andrei Codrescu's hilariously absurd and brilliantly observed novel and the name of its alienated hero, examines these and other perplexities of the late twentieth century. Picture Wakefield: He's divorced, lives alone in a comfortable, book-filled apartment in a sophisticated city. A motivational speaker, his talks leave audiences dispirited and anxious. But for this peculiar talent, he's nicely paid by corporate America, and he's in demand. Then one day the Devil shows up, walks right into Wakefield's tasteful living room, and says, "Time's up." Just as literary Fausts have done for centuries, Wakefield makes a bargain with Satan, who as it turns out, is having his own existential crisis due to bureaucratic headaches and younger upstart demons in the afterworld. The Devil gives Wakefield a year to find an authentic life--or else it's curtains. So Wakefield travels across the country meeting New Age gurus, billionaire techno-geeks, global pioneers, gambling addicts and models who look like heroin addicts, venture capitalists, art collectors, rainforest protectors, and S and M strippers. Andrei Codrescu brings his unique vision to the American character: our desire to change, renovate, and improve both our inner and outer worlds; to remodel not only our buildings but our bodies and minds. Wakefield is an inspired novel--part metaphysical mystery, part travel adventure, part architectural romp--by turns funny and deadly serious.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

"Rachel Kennedy and Oscar Livingston were not precisely friends or family. Rachel had been acquanted with Oscar for some time, first as her father's accountant, and then as her own. Part owner of a London bookshop, Rachel is thoroughly independent and somewhat distant, determinedly restrained in her feelings for others, but above all responsible. And it is this trait that leads Oscar and his wife Dorrie to seek out Rachel as a mentor for their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Heather. Yet when Heather seems poised to make an unsuitable romantic decision, Rachel decides to speak out and intervene, causing an unwitting and devastating insight."--Provided by publisher.

An English lawyer's obsession with Sarah, a beautiful cousin. Unable to have her, he marries another, then when Sarah gives him the signal rushes to her side, only to be disappointed. He returns to his wife, but once again the cousin beckons.

A compilation of essays written during the last twenty-five years covers such topics as nineteenth-century French painting, the literary works of Rousseau and Doris Lessing, and the Bible

Forced to cook and clean for three robbers, a little girl tricks them and escapes with their booty.

The last 15 years have witnessed deep changes in Israeli society. The naive solidarity of the early years of statehood has given way to more sophisticated approaches, and the atmosphere of the 1990s was conducive towards critique and open discussion. It was the age of the Oslo Accords, of the large wave of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union, economic growth and prosperity, and a concurrent feeling of security and well-being. Israel was fast becoming a postcapitalist society, a junior member of the global village. This newly acquired self-assurance led to openness towards unorthodox views on basic questions of Israeli identity. This book attempts to come to grips with these themes. The complex texture of Israeli society is drawn here by a number of hands, presenting up-to-date approaches, as viewed by experts.

The History of Linguistics , to be published in five volumes, aims to provide the reader with an authoritative and comprehensive account of the attitudes to language prevailing in different civilizations and in different periods by examining the very varied development of linguistic thought in the specific social, cultural and religious contexts involved. Issues discussed include the place of language in education, variation and prestige, and approaches to lexical and grammatical description. The authors of the individual chapters are specialists who have analysed the primary sources and produced original syntheses by exploring the linguistic interests and assumptions of particular cultures in their own terms, without seeking to reinterpret them as contributions towards the development of contemporary western conceptions of linguistic science. In Volume IV: Nineteenth Century Linguistics , Anna Morpurgo Davies shows how linguistics came into its own as an independent discipline separated from philosophical and literary studies and enjoyed a unique intellectual and institutional success tied to the research ethos of the new universities, until it became a model for other humanistic subjects which aimed at 'scientific status'. The linguistics of the nineteenth century abandons earlier theoretical discussions in favour of a more empirical and historical approach using new methods to compare languages and to investigate their history. The great achievement of this period is the demonstration that languages such as Sanskrit , Latin and English are related and derive from a parent language which is not attested but can be reconstructed. This book discusses in detail the theories developed and the individual findings obtained. In contrast with earlier historiographical trends it denies that the new approach originated entirely from German Romanticism, and highlights a form of continuity with the eighteenth century, while stressing that a deliberate break took place round the 1830s. By the end of the century the results of comparative and historical linguistics had been generally accepted, but it soon became clear that a historical approach could not by itself solve all questions that it raised. At this point the new interest in description and theory which characterizes the twentieth century began to gain prominence.