America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.--From publisher description.

"Young Lions: How Jewish Authors Reinvented the American War Novel shows how Jews, traditionally castigated as weak and cowardly, for the first time became the popular literary representatives of what it meant to be a soldier and what it meant to be an American. Revisiting best-selling works ranging from Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead to Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and uncovering a range of unknown archival material, Leah Garrett shows how Jewish writers used the theme of World War II to reshape the American public's ideas about war, the Holocaust, and the role of Jews in postwar life. In contrast to most previous war fiction these new Jewish war novels were often ironic, funny, and irreverent and sought to teach the reading public broader lessons about liberalism, masculinity, and pluralism"--Page 4 of cover.

"As an orphaned survivor and witness to the horrors of Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel (1928-2016) compelled the world to confront the Holocaust with his searing memoir Night. How did this soft-spoken man from a small Carpathian town become such an influential figure on the world stage. Drawing on Wiesel's prodigious literary output and interviews with his family, friends, scholars, and critics, Joseph Berger seeks to answer this question."--

"Dreams play a powerful role in Indigenous culture, serving as warning, insight, guidance, solace, or hope. Bawaajigan - an Anishinaabemowin word for dream or vision - is a collection of powerful literary short fiction by Indigenous writers from across Turtle Island. Stories about the connection between the spirit world and everyday life and the rest of the cosmos; urban-fantasy and high-fantasy worlds; alternative histories, and alternative realities; brushes with the supernatural, the prophetic, the hallucinatory, and the surreal. Among these themes we find stories ranging from the gritty, the gothic, the comedic, and the heart-wrenchingly tragic: a tale about the state of sleep-deprivation that conjures an uncertainty as to where dream ends and reality begins; the ominous tension of television static that conjures a certainty of something terrible about to happen; encounters with spirit guides, and spirit enemies; confrontations with ghosts haunting residential school hallways, and ghosts looking on from the afterlife; and with concepts based on Ouija boards, bead-dreamers, Haudenosaunee wizards, talking eagles, giant snakes, sacred white buffalo calves, spider's silk, a burnt and blood-stained diary, longings for what could-have-been, worm holes fallen through reality, poppy-induced deliriums, imaginary friends, and knowledge revealed. Unifying everything: these are stories about the strength and power of dreams."--

Through personal essays and poetry, short fiction and painting, book reviews, interviews, performance pieces, and hybrid creations of text and image, Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba opens a window onto the meaning of nationality, transnationalism, and homeland in our time. For more than thirty-five years U.S.-Cuban relations have been couched in terms of the Cold War, often pitting Cubans in the diaspora against Cubans who remain in their homeland. Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba celebrates the informal networks that Cubans in both countries have maintained through artistic, academic, family, and other ties. The book brings together for the first time in English Cuban voices of the second generation, both on the island and in the diaspora. The multivocal and multigenre collection includes both scholarly and creative writing and an impressive range of visual art. The participants are earnest, angry, witty, and hopeful. They are sometimes visionaries, but they are not deluded about Cuban or North American realities. Their voices offer testimony to the continuing efforts of Cubans and Cuban-Americans to look beyond the animosities and failings of their respective societies and find possibilities for personal and international reconciliation, dialogue, and renewal. "Ruth Behar, as editor of Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba, leaps across conventional intellectual boundaries in an effort to show the complexity of nationhood, exile, and revolution in the Cuban experience of the last thirty years. An important book about the possibility and impossibility of building cultural and political bridges."--Arcadio Díaz-Quiñones, Princeton University "Behar narrows the straits of Florida with a richly textured dialogue of voices in and out of Cuba. Bridges to Cuba is sure to make history."--Liz Balmaseda, Miami Herald "A vital and interesting anthology about contemporary Cuba."--Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love " Bridges to Cuba is the first U.S. anthology that looks at Cuban creativity from an integrated perspective, refusing to kneel before the painful and often arbitrary divisions that have split the voices of this passionate culture into forever separate bands. The results are magnificent. Read this book and get a long overdue understanding of contemporary Cuban literature and art."--Margaret Randall, author of Women in Cuba: Twenty Years Later "In order for memory to be recovered, there must be a community that remembers and tells the story. . . . Bridges to Cuba displays a wealth of insights that leave the reader with a sense of having experienced first hand the intricate web of thought and feeling that is Cuban life."--Latino Review of Books "Ruth Behar's anthology represents one of the most important and moving bridges yet published on contemporary Cuba and its condition as the island that is still absent from the Western world. Bridges to Cuba is an extraordinary example of the faith and ability of Latin American intellectuals to cross true bridges, bridges of solidarity."--Marjorie Agosín, Wellesley College Ruth Behar is author of Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story and coeditor, with Deborah Gordon, of Women Writing Culture. She has been the recipient of awards from the MacArthur and Guggenheim foundations.

When compiler Jerome Charyn first read Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a world of letters opened up to him. It was his first exposure to the full potential of language, rendered breathlessly. In those pages he felt the terror and delight and buzz and ceaseless clatter of the inside of a hornet's head. Here, he shares with us nineteen stories, including one from Augie March, that evoke similar feelings of passion and pain and joy. Selected from some of America's most celebrated Jewish writers, as well as a few lesser known ones, Inside the Hornet's Head is a moving, daring, appealing, and indispensable work.

Deepens and enriches our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah. Challenging the notion that Jewish American and Holocaust literature have exhausted their limits, this volume reexamines these closely linked traditions in light of recent postmodern theory. Composed against the tumultuous background of great cultural transition and unprecedented state-sponsored systematic murder, Jewish American and Holocaust literature both address the concerns of postmodern human existence in extremis. In addition to exploring how various mythic and literary themes are deconstructed in the lurid light of Auschwitz, this book provides critical reassessments of Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth, as well as contemporary Jewish American writers who are extending this vibrant tradition into the new millennium. These essays deepen and enrich our understanding of the Jewish literary tradition and the implications of the Shoah.

Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted literary miscellany. Varying in length from just a sentence or paragraph to a several-page story or essay, Galchen's puzzle pieces assemble into a shining, unpredictable, mordant picture of the ordinary-extraordinary nature of babies and literature. Anecdotal or analytic, each part opens up an odd and tender world of wonder.

Broadway, the main street that runs through Robert Pinsky’s home town of Long Branch, New Jersey, was once like thousands of other main streets in small towns across the country. But for Pinsky, one of America’s most admired poets and its former Poet Laureate, this Broadway is the point of departure for a lively journey through the small towns of the American imagination. Thousands of Broadways explores the dreams and nightmares of such small towns—their welcoming yet suffocating, warm yet prejudicial character during their heyday, from the early nineteenth century through World War II. The citizens of quintessential small towns know one another extensively and even intimately, but fail to recognize the geniuses and criminal minds in their midst. Bringing the works of such figures as Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Alfred Hitchcock, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Preston Sturges to bear on this paradox, as well as reflections on his own time growing up in a small town, Pinsky explores how such imperfect knowledge shields communities from the anonymity and alienation of modern life. Along the way, he also considers how small towns can be small minded—in some cases viciously judgmental and oppressively provincial. Ultimately, Pinsky examines the uneasy regard that creative talents like him often have toward the small towns that either nurtured or thwarted their artistic impulses. Of living in a small town, Sherwood Anderson once wrote that "the sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people." Passionate, lyrical, and intensely moving, Thousands of Broadways is a rich exploration of this crucial theme in American literature by one of its most distinguished figures.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

"To Write Like a Woman is a rare example of a feminist tackling science fictuion using postmodern theory, which makes for a much more sophisticated and nuanced appraisal than the usual fare." ―Passion"Russ’ essays are witty and insightful. An excellent book for any writer or reader." ―Feminist Bookstore News"In her new book of essays... Russ continues to debunk and demand, edify and entertain.... Appreciative of surface aesthetics, she continually delves deeper than most critics, yet in terms so simple and accessible that her essays read like lively, angry, humorous dialogues conducted face-to-face with the author. Russ is the antithesis of the distant critic in her ivory tower." ―Paul Di Filippo, The Washington Post Book World"... 20 years of the author’s feisty reports from the front lines of literature." ―The San Francisco Review of Books"This is a book of imaginative and provoking essays, but you should read it for the sheer fun of it." ―The Women’s Review of Books"Collects more than two decades of criticism by Joanna Russ, one of the most perceptive, forthright and eloquent feminist commentators around." ―Feminist Bookstore News"... a super book....This is a book that, for once, really will appeal to readers of all kinds." ―Utopian Studies"If you enjoy science fiction, this is definitely a book that you’ll want to talk about. I found myself sneaking a few pages at times when I really didn’t have time to read." ―Jan Catano, AtlantisClassic essays on science fiction and feminism by Nebula and Hugo award-winning Joanna Russ. Here she ranges from a consideration of the aesthetic of science fiction to a reading of the lesbian identity of Willa Cather. To Write Like a Woman includes essays on horror stories and the supernatural, feminist utopias, popular literature for women (the "modern gothic"), and the feminist education of graduate students in English.

Husband and wife, parents and grandparents, Grace Paley and Robert Nichols are two writers and activists who constantly engage the world. Here and Somewhere Else, including uncollected or unpublished fiction by both Paley and Nichols, encompasses diverse countries and cultures, and counterpoints stories and poems that reveal engaged artists inventing different ways to illuminate political themes and issues.

Based on an intensive study of the original German text of Freud's writings, letters and journals, S. S. Prawer's new book is the first to make a full and systematic map of Freud's use of English literature. The great psychoanalyst has long been acclaimed as a polymath, as a practical doctor who was also a theoretician, as a writer of non-fiction which was also a counterpoint to the great novels of the early twentieth century, and as an essayist who, like Montaigne, absorbed all of the cultural world around him. Freud was fascinated by writings from many nations and languages, and his use of English shows the great range of his reading: from Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw, Henry Fielding to George Eliot, Mark Twain to Thornton Wilder; from scientific works by Maxwell and Darwin to the economics of Adam Smith, Malthus and Keynes, and from psychology and anthropology to the origins of religion. Though Freud's genius was unique, his sense of being a citizen of a world far wider than Vienna was not, and it can tell us much about the exchange of ideas across national and linguistic frontiers. Though he was a reader par excellence, he was also a case study in how world literature can be used by men and women who are not professional literary scholars or critics -- and of how much it can come to mean to them, and for their sense of who they are.

The site of a thriving literary tradition, Washington, DC, has been the home to many of our nation's most acclaimed writers. From the city's founding to the beginnings of modernism, literary luminaries including Walt Whitman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Henry Adams, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston have lived and worked at their craft in our nation's capital. In A Literary Guide to Washington, DC, Kim Roberts offers a guide to the city's rich literary history. Part walking tour, part anthology, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC is organized into five sections, each corresponding to a particularly vibrant period in Washington's literary community. Starting with the city's earliest years, Roberts examines writers such as Hasty-Pudding poet Joel Barlow and "Star-Spangled Banner" lyricist Francis Scott Key before moving on to the Civil War and Reconstruction and touching on the lives of authors such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and James Weldon Johnson. She wraps up her tour with World War I and the Jazz Age, which brought to the city some writers at the forefront of modernism, including the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Sinclair Lewis. The book's stimulating tours cover downtown, the LeDroit Park and Shaw neighborhoods, Lafayette Square, and the historic U Street district, bringing the history of the city to life in surprising ways. Written for tourists, literary enthusiasts, amateur historians, and armchair travelers, A Literary Guide to Washington, DC offers a cultural tour of our nation's capital through a literary lens.

From the beginning, myths have told of women who lived apart from men -- the Sirens who sang on the Aegean rocks, the Amazons of the Brazilian jungle, the self-reproducing women on islands in Polynesia, to mention only a few. As this theme emerged in her own fiction, Batya Weinbaum became intrigued by its persistence across time and cultures and began tracing it in literature and mythology, as well as in actual locales that are or were said to be islands of women. In this fascinating, interdisciplinary book, she explores how the myth of Amazons has served varying psychological needs in different cultures over time. Weinbaum first analyzes various historical interpretations and uses of the Amazon archetype, some designed to empower women, others created by men to disempower them. She next turns to the original Greek context, in Homer's epics and other aspects of Greek culture, and then traces how Amazons eventually evolved into negative representations of paganism. Moving from Rodriguez de Montalvo's fifteenth-century Sergas de Esplandian, which imagined an island of women in the New World, Weinbaum concludes with revealing fieldwork she conducted on Isla Mujeres (Island of Women) off the Yucatan Peninsula, which included giving birth with the participation of a native Maya midwife. Batya Weinbaum is Assistant Professor of English at Cleveland State University. She founded and edits the journal Femspec.

Final Edition is a one-issue-only political magazine written by people who are aesthetes and literary writers and edited by Wallace Shawn, who seriously believes that part of our national problem is that the people who run the country have a crude and minimal imaginative life and are too little acquainted with the quartets of Beethoven. The issue consists of five pieces: "Before the Election—Fragments from a Diary 2004" by Wallace Shawn The diarist broods on the analogy between the addiction to pornography and nationalistic obsessions, and he wonders whether a collection of people who vote in a kind of sleepwalking ignorance can ever be called a democracy. "Invitation to a Degraded World" by Jonathan Schell In this essay, Schell meditates on the comic book/disaster movie view of life, in which bin Laden and George Bush are both immersed, and discusses the "standing army" stationed in all of our homes, the media. "The Webern Variations" by Mark Strand Strand’s hauntingly delicious poem explores what is most poignantly beautiful, while exploring the themes of darkness, descent, decline, and nothingness. Wallace Shawn Interviews Noam Chomsky For those with no acquaintance with Chomsky, this could make a wonderful introduction, while offering surprising insights to those who know him well. Chomsky is electric with vitality, wit, and rage as he ranges ferociously across the present and ancient worlds, giving his thoughts on the development of the internet, the 2004 election, and the God of the Bible. In an odd way, the interview highlights the inspirational and optimistic quality of this enormously angry man. "The Twilight of the Superheroes" by Deborah Eisenberg In this brooding, passionate, and brilliant short story, Deborah Eisenberg paints a brutally honest portrait of New York City today and of our lives today, wherever we live. Through observing the lives of some sophisticated residents of the great metropolis, we encounter truths which are both poetic and deeply political.

The scientific achievements of the modern world failed to impress the leading writers of this century, leaving them instead profoundly disturbed by a sense of lost values and of the insignificance of the individual in a universe seemingly indifferent to human concerns. In The Search for Selfhood in Modern Literature Roston explores the strategies adopted by such mid-century authors as Greene, Salinger, Osborne, Baldwin and others in their attempt to cope with the spiritual vacuity - strategies including the emergence of the anti-hero and of literary existentialism - and offer in the course of the investigation fascinatingly new insights into their work.