It was 1950, a brutally cold November in North Korea, and the war seemed all but over. And then a force of nearly 70,000 Chinese "volunteers" crossed the Yalu River, encircling the 30,000 United Nations troops at the Chosin Reservoir. The epic story of what followed--one of the iconic battles in Marine history--is told for the first time in gut-level detail in this book. From the point of view of the men in the foxholes and tanks, outposts and command posts, Chosin offers a harrowing, firsthand account of the 1st Marine Divisions breakout battle against overwhelming Chinese forces in the bitter North Korean winter. Seasoned military historian Eric Hammel describes the errors and miscalculations by American higher-ups that left the division strung out at the end of a narrow road scores of miles from the sea. Then he plunges into the action: the massing of Chinese forces; the punishing climate and terrain; the high-level over-confidence that crippled the American command; and the onset of the overpowering Chinese assault. His account provides a wealth of tactical and human detail and small unit action: from an intelligence officers efforts to make sense of conflicting reports, to engineers improvising a bridge from logs and snow, from Marines marching to POW camps, to a battle-weary messengers discovery of headquarter staff safely ensconced behind friendly lines, settling down in formal dress to a full-course dinner. The result is the most complete book ever written on this heroic battle, a masterful narrative from the perspective of those who fought. Previously published under the same title by Vanguard Press, 1981, ISBN - 081490856X; and by Presidio Press, 1990, ISBN - 089141782.

If the 1970s were the "Me Decade," and the '80s were the years of the Reagan counterrevolution, then the '90s, writes Ellen Willis, were the Decade of Denial. In keeping with the mass media's glib assumption that a phenomenal increase in wealth for a minority meant genuine national prosperity, the 1990s saw an astounding refusal, on both the left and right, to question received wisdom or engage in substantive deliberation. Turning her acute eye to the decade's defining moments-imbroglios like those surrounding the O. J. Simpson trial, The Bell Curve, Monica-gate, and the Million Man March-Ellen Willis reveals the mindlessness behind the noise. Arguing that we suffer from a lack of true freedom, she demands that we radically rethink our country and ourselves to create a society in which we can fully enjoy life.

A multivoiced collection of essays and images grounded in a relational feminism of diverse communities. This multivoiced collection of essays and images presents the perspectives of activists, scholars, artists, and curators from a broad range of constituencies. Challenging traditional disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the book moves beyond any unified feminist historical narrative to present a "relational" feminism of diverse communities, affiliations, and practices. The texts/images partake of many genres: reflective essay, testimonial dialogue, performance piece, digital collage, prose poem, and photomontage. Forging connections between usually compartmentalized areas of knowledge and of activism, the volume helps us to envision alternative epistemologies and imaginative alliances. Copublished with the New Museum of Contemporary Art.

For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek's groundbreaking work that offers a "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." Although she is an internationally recognized playwright, Jelinek's work is difficult to find in English, which makes this new volume, which includes Rechnitz: The Exterminating Angel and The Merchant's Contracts , all the more valuable. In Rechnitz , a chorus of messengers reports on the circumstances of the massacre of 180 Jews, an actual historical event that took place near the Austrian/Hungarian border town of Rechnitz. More than a docu-drama, this work explores the very transmission of historic memory and has been called Jelinek's best performance text to date. In The Merchant's Contracts , Jelinek brings us a comedy of economics, where the babble and media spin of spectators leave small investors alienated and bearing the brunt of the economic crisis. In the age of the global economy, Jelinek turns the story of a merchant of Vienna into a universal comedy of errors, making this her most accessible work. Along with an extensive introduction by the translator that both contextualizes and analyzes the two brilliant texts, a DVD of performances of both plays accompanies this volume. Available for the first time in English, this is a collection that testifies to the power and universality of Jelinek's work.

"A breathtaking journey across Iran where war and superstition, jealousy and betrayal, and passion and loyalty rage behind the impenetrable walls of mansions and the crumbling houses of the Jewish Quarter. Against the tumultuous background of World War II, Dr. Yaran will find himself caught in the thrall of the anti-Semitic Governor General, the most powerful man in the country. Dr. Yaran falls in love with the Governor General's defiant wife, Velvet, upending not only the life of the doctor's beloved daughter, but the entire community. In his quest to save everything and everyone he loves, Dr. Yaran will navigate the intersections of magic, science, lust, and treachery. His sole ally is the Governor General's servant, an exotic eunuch, who will do anything to aid his mistress in her dangerous quest to attain forbidden love." --

Disabled veterans were the First World War's most conspicuous legacy. Nearly eight million men in Europe returned from the First World War permanently disabled by injury or disease. In The War Come Home, Deborah Cohen offers a comparative analysis of the very different ways in which two belligerent nations--Germany and Britain--cared for their disabled. At the heart of this book is an apparent paradox. Although postwar Germany provided its disabled veterans with generous benefits, they came to despise the state that favored them. Disabled men proved susceptible to the Nazi cause. By contrast, British ex-servicemen remained loyal subjects, though they received only meager material compensation. Cohen explores the meaning of this paradox by focusing on the interplay between state agencies and private philanthropies on one hand, and the evolving relationship between disabled men and the general public on the other. Written with verve and compassion, The War Come Home describes in affecting detail disabled veterans' lives and their treatment at the hands of government agencies and private charities in Britain and Germany. Cohen's study moves from the intimate confines of veterans' homes to the offices of high-level bureaucrats; she tells of veterans' protests, of disabled men's families, and of the well-heeled philanthropists who made a cause of the war's victims. This superbly researched book provides an important new perspective on the ways in which states and societies confront the consequences of industrialized warfare.

Provides an overview of lesbian fiction, and analyzes the ways in which it has both mirrored and shaped the lesbian movement and lesbian culture.

Book by Lukacs, John

In this eloquent and thought-provoking "autohistory," John Lukacs, distinguished historian and writer, describes the history of his own convictions and beliefs. The journey takes us from the Hungary of the 1930s and the ravaged Budapest of World War II to Lukacs’s discovery of the New World, his forays into the intellectual life of New York City, and finally his settling in Philadelphia. Along the way, Lukacs examines many of the major currents of our period, including fascism, communism, democracy, anti-Semitism, and the Christian realism from which springs the book’s title. What emerges is a mind that brings to bear on the conflicts of the twentieth century the erudition of the European heritage and the independence of the American. In prose as elegant as it is supple, Confessions of an Original Sinner is at once the vivid account of one man’s voyage and an important contribution to that small library that brings into sharp focus the major intellectual developments of our time.

In this book Robert Pinsky writes about contemporary poetry as it reflects its modernist and Romantic past. He isolates certain persistent ideas about poetry's situation relative to life and focuses on the conflict the poet faces between the nature of words and poetic forms on one side, and the nature of experience on the other. The author ranges for his often surprising examples from Keats to the great modernists such as Stevens and Williams, to the contents of recent magazines. He considers work by Ammons, Ashbery, Bogan, Ginsberg, Lowell, Merwin, O'Hara, and younger writers, offering judgments and enthusiasms from a viewpoint that is consistent but unstereotyped. Like his poetry, Robert Pinsky's criticism joins the traditional and the innovative in ways that are thoughtful and unmistakably his own. His book is a bold essay on the contemporary situation in poetry, on the dazzling achievements of modernism, and on the nature or "situation" of poetry itself.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

Recent decades have been decisive for Russia not only politically but culturally as well. The end of the Cold War has enabled Russia to take part in the global rise and crystallization of postmodernism. This volume investigates the manifestations of this crucial trend in Russian fiction, poetry, art, and spirituality, demonstrating how Russian postmodernism is its own unique entity. It offers a point of departure and valuable guide to an area of contemporary literary-cultural studies insufficiently represented in English-language scholarship. This second edition includes additional essays on the topic and a new introduction examining the most recent developments.

"Roll over Derrida: Literature and Revolution is back in print. Nothing in the postmodern canon comes close to the intellectual grandeur of Trotsky's vision of art and literature in an age of revolution, or his extraordinary meditations on the popular ownership of culture."--Mike Davis "Re-reading Trotsky on literature 40 years later is a delight."--Tariq Ali Leon Trotsky penned this engaging book to elucidate the complex way in which art informs-- and can alter--our understanding of the world. Features new reader-friendly explanatory notes. Leon Trotsky was a leader of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and is the author of My Life . William Keach is a professor of English at Brown University. He is editor of Coleridge's Complete Poems .

"With the wit and penetration well known to readers of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library, Anka Muhlstein's PEN AND BRUSH revisits the delights of the French novel. This time she focuses on late 19th- and 20th-century writers--Balzac, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, and Maupassant--through the lens of their passionate involvement with the fine arts. She delves into the crucial role that painters play as characters in their novels, which she pairs with an exploration of the profound influence that painting exercised on the novelists' techniques, offering an intimate view of the intertwined worlds of painters and writers at the time. Muhlstein's deftly chosen vignettes bring to life a portrait of the nineteenth century's tight-knit artistic community, where Cezanne and Zola befriended each other as boys and Balzac yearned for the approval of Delacroix. She leads the reader on a journey of spontaneous discovery as she explores how a great painting can open a mind and spark creative fire"--