"Roth comments, in selected interviews, articles, and essays, on the origins and developments of his five most recent books and on key preoccupations, preferences, experiences, and enthusiasms in his written and unwritten worlds." --Amazon.com.

The flowering of literary imagination known as the American Renaissance had few roots in the South. While Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were creating a body of work that would endure, the only southern writer making a lasting contribution was Edgar Allan Poe. This failure on the part of antebellum southern writers has long been a subject of debate among students of southern history and literature. Now one of the region's most distinguished men of letters offers a cogently argued and gracefully written account of the circumstances that prevented early southern writers from creating transcendent works of art. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., brings forty years of critical integrity and imaginative involvement with the history and literature of the South to his informal inquiry into the foundations of the southern literary imagination. His exploration centers on the lives and works of three of the most important writers of the pre-Civil War South: Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and Henry Timrod. In a close and highly original reading of Poe's poetry and fiction, Rubin shows just how profoundly growing up in Richmond, Virginia, influenced that writer. The sole author of the Old South whose work has endured did not use southern settings or concern himself with his region's history or politics. Poe was, according to Rubin, in active rebellion against the middle-class community of Richmond and its materialistic values. Simms, on the other hand, aspired to the plantation society ideal of his native Charleston, South Carolina. He was not the most devoted and energetic of southern writers and one of the country's best-known and most respected literary figures before the Civil War. Rubin finds an explanation for much of the lost promise of antebellum southern literature in Simms's career. Here was a talented man who got caught up in the politically obsessed plantation community of Charleston, becoming an apologist for the system and an ardent defender of slavery. Timrod, also a Charlestonian native, was a highly gifted poet whose work attained the stature of literature when the Civil War gave him a theme. He was known as the poet laureate of the Confederacy. Only when his region was locked in a desperate military struggle for the right to exist did he suddenly find his enduring voice. Anyone interested in southern life and literature will welcome his provocative and engaging new look at southern writing from one of the region's most perceptive critics.

"[His] way with the familiar essay--that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity--has much in common with that of Messrs, Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro." --Wall Street Journal

Book by Seidel, Frederick

The Great American Novel (1923) is an experimental novel by William Carlos Williams. Although he is predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his career. In the defining decade of Modernism, Williams sought to try his hand at the so-called "Great American Novel," a concept fueling impassioned debate in academic and artistic circles nationwide. Far from conventional, Williams' novel is a metafictional foray into matters more postmodern than modern, a commentary masquerading as narrative and a satire of the all-American overreliance on cliché in form and content. "If there is progress then there is a novel. Without progress there is nothing. Everything exists from the beginning. I existed in the beginning. I was a slobbering infant. Today I saw nameless grasses--I tapped the earth with my knuckle. It sounded hollow. It was dry as rubber. Eons of drought. No rain for fifteen days. No rain. It has never rained. It will never rain." Williams' novel begins with the word and a birth. Language describes the experience of awakening to experience, of coming into consciousness as a living being in a living world. Using words from everyday speech, he builds a novel out of observations, a book that remains conscious of itself throughout. Like the child whose first experience with the written word often comes from names and slogans stretched over trucks and billboards, the reader eventually comes to accept their new reality, a world where people love and succeed and fail, where history and art intercede to make meaning where they can. The Great American Novel showcases Williams' experimental form, stretching the meaning of "novel" to its outermost limit. This edition of William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending--and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone--to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Stating that this will be his only autobiographical work, Silverberg's book includes rare photos, ephemera from his own archives, and a complete bibliography of his works, from novels and short story collections to nonfiction.

"Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read."—Carolyn Heilbrun In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal. "[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul."—Anne Roiphe, New York Times Book Review "Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal."—Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery "From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet."—Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner

In 2004, Hippocampus Press published Out of the Immortal Night-an initial attempt to collect the widely dispersed and largely uncollected work of Samuel Loveman (1887-1976), an associate of H. P. Lovecraft, Ambrose Bierce, Clark Ashton Smith, and others, and an immensely talented poet and bookman in his own right. But that volume was largely restricted to Loveman's poetry, drama, and selected short fiction. Now, editors S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz have vastly expanded the scope of this volume to include a great deal of other work by Loveman. More poems have been discovered in the amateur press; many more works of fiction have come to light; and, most significantly, Loveman's critical essays and reviews, amounting to more than 100 pages, have been included. These essays range from articles on poets and poetry to memoirs of Hart Crane (who counted Loveman among his closest friends), and notices of books in book catalogs. In addition, the volume includes a lengthy and previously unpublished series of interviews that Loveman gave late in life to Thomas J. Hubschman, in which all manner of subjects-Hart Crane, H. P. Lovecraft, the writing of poetry, and much else-is covered. All told, this augmented edition presents a comprehensive portrait of one of the most interesting literary figures of his era.

"Fantasy once again, deftly and convincingly -- as only Robert Nathan can do it -- handled, with a satiric twist now and again, and a pull at the heartstrings. He has told the story of a failure whose one escape into a dream world comes through the imposed background of the ship he has built for himself in his own drab front yard. When the wife who demands results, sells it as a hot dog stand, he takes one last stand -- and Fate plays into his hands and launches the ship on the high road of adventure, southward bound. He picks up a "crew" as rudderless as himself, and they make their way against insuperable obstacles until "the law" catches up with them. But -- he has won something as a bulwark for the future. There is pathos and humor and that indefinable tug at the love of makebelieve that gave One more spring its impetus. It lacks the immediate application to current problems -- but it has the same adult fairy tale quality."--Kirkus.