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West of the Jordan
by Laila HalabyA poignant novel of four Arab women; the first Bluestreak original. This is a brilliant and revelatory first novel by a woman who is both an Arab and an American, who speaks with both voices and understands both worlds. Through the narratives of four cousins at the brink of maturity, Laila Halaby immerses her readers in the lives, friendships, and loves of girls struggling with national, ethnic, and sexual identities. <p><p> Mawal is the stable one, living steeped in the security of Palestinian traditions in the West Bank. Hala is torn between two worlds--in love in Jordan, drawn back to the world she has come to love in Arizona. Khadija is terrified by the sexual freedom of her American friends, but scarred, both literally and figuratively, by her father's abusive behavior. Soraya is lost in trying to forge an acceptable life in a foreign yet familiar land, in love with her own uncle, and unable to navigate the fast culture of California youth. <p> Interweaving their stories, allowing us to see each cousin from multiple points of view, Halaby creates a compelling and entirely original story, a window into the rich and complicated Arab world.
West of the West: Dreamers, Believers, Builders, and Killers in the Golden State
by Mark AraxTeddy Roosevelt once exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West. I am west of the West," and in this book, Mark Arax spends four years travelling up and down the Golden State to explore its singular place in the world. This is California beyond the clichés. This is California as only a native son, deep in the dust, could draw it.Compelling, lyrical, and ominous, his new collection finds a different drama rising out of each confounding landscape. "The Summer of the Death of Hilario Guzman" has been praised as a "stunningly intimate" portrait of one immigrant family from Oaxaca, through harrowing border crossings and brutal raisin harvests. Down the road in the "Home Front," right-wing Christians and Jews form a strange pact that tries to silence debate on the War on Terror, and a conflicted father loses not one but two sons in Iraq. "The Last Okie in Lamont," the inspiration for the town in the Grapes of Wrath, has but one Okie left, who tells Arax his life story as he drives to a funeral to bury one more Dust Bowl migrant. "The Highlands of Humboldt" is a journey to marijuana growing capital of the U.S., where the old hippies are battling the new hippies over "pollution pot" and the local bank collects a mountain of cash each day, much of it redolent of cannabis. Arax pieces together the murder-suicide at the heart of a rotisserie chicken empire in "The Legend of Zankou," a story included in the Best American Crime Reporting 2009. And, in the end, he provides a moving epilogue to the murder of his own father, a crime in the California heartland finally solved after thirty years.In the finest tradition of Joan Didion, Arax combines journalism, essay, and memoir to capture social upheaval as well as the sense of being rooted in a community. Piece by piece, the stories become a whole, a stunning panorama of California, and America, in a new century.
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
by Harold BloomThe literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller.NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDHarold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a &“heroically brave, formidably learned&” defense of the great works of literature that comprise the traditional Western Canon. Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the essential writers of the western literary tradition (The New York Times Book Review).Placing William Shakespeare at the &“center of the canon,&” Bloom examines the literary contributions of Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Jane Austen, Emily Dickenson, Leo Tolstoy, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce, Pablo Neruda, and many others. Bloom's book, much-discussed and praised in publications as diverse as The Economist and Entertainment Weekly, offers a dazzling display of erudition and passion.&“An impressive work…deeply, rightly passionate about the great books of the past.&”—Michel Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
The Western Flyer: Steinbeck's Boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries
by Kevin M. BaileyIn January 2010, the Gemini was moored in the Swinomish Slough on a Native American reservation near Anacortes, Washington. Unbeknownst to almost everyone, the rusted and dilapidated boat was in fact the most famous fishing vessel ever to have sailed: the original Western Flyer, immortalized in John Steinbeck's nonfiction classic The Log from the Sea of Cortez. In this book, Kevin M. Bailey resurrects this forgotten witness to the changing tides of Pacific fisheries. He draws on the Steinbeck archives, interviews with family members of crew, and more than three decades of working in Pacific Northwest fisheries to trace the depletion of marine life through the voyages of a single ship. After Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts--a pioneer in the study of the West Coast's diverse sea life and the inspiration behind "Doc" in Cannery Row--chartered the boat for their now-famous 1940 expedition, the Western Flyer returned to its life as a sardine seiner in California. But when the sardine fishery in Monterey collapsed, the boat moved on: fishing for Pacific ocean perch off Washington, king crab in the Bering Sea off Alaska, and finally wild Pacific salmon--all industries that would also face collapse. As the Western Flyer herself faces an uncertain future--a businessman has bought her, intending to bring the boat to Salinas, California, and turn it into a restaurant feature just blocks from Steinbeck's grave--debates about the status of the California sardine, and of West Coast fisheries generally, have resurfaced. A compelling and timely tale of a boat and the people it carried, of fisheries exploited, and of fortunes won and lost, The Western Flyer is environmental history at its best: a journey through time and across the sea, charting the ebb and flow of the cobalt waters of the Pacific coast.
Western Icelandic Short Stories
by Kirsten Wolf Árný HjaltadóttirThis selection of Western Icelandic writings, the first of its kind in English, represents a wide collection of first and second generation Icelandic-Canadian authors.The stories, first published between 1895 and 1930, are set mainly in North America (especially Manitoba). They reflect a weath of literary activity, from the numerous Western Icelandic newspapers and journals, to the reading circles and cultural and literary societies that supported them. The stories show a wide range of experiences and influences, including Old Norse Icelandic literature and romantic nationalism, but they also reveal the emergence of a literature that bears a unique cultural imprint.Western Icelandic Short Stories includes some of the best wirting from the period--- narrative, descriptive, comical, satirical, and serious. The stories may be read as much for enjoyment as for what they reveal about the Western Icelandic literary tradition.
The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier (Routledge Transnational Perspectives On American Literature Ser. #12)
by Megan McGilchristThe western American landscape has always had great significance in American thinking, requiring an unlikely union between frontier mythology and the reality of a fragile western environment. Additionally it has borne the burden of being a gendered space, seen by some as the traditional "virgin land" of the explorers and pioneers, subject to masculine desires, and by others as a masculine space in which the feminine is neither desired nor appreciated. Both Wallace Stegner and Cormac McCarthy focus on this landscape and environment; its spiritual, narrative, symbolic, imaginative, and ideological force is central to their work. In this study, McGilchrist shows how their various treatments of these issues relate to the social climates (pre- and post-Vietnam era) in which they were written, and how despite historical discontinuities, both Stegner and McCarthy reveal a similar unease about the effects of the myth of the frontier on American thought and life. The gendering of the landscape is revealed as indicative of the attempts to deny the failure of the myth, and to force the often numinous western landscape into parameters which will never contain it. Stegner's pre-Vietnam sensibility allows the natural world to emerge tentatively triumphant from the ruins of frontier mythology, whereas McCarthy's conclusions suggest a darker future for the West in particular and America in general. However, McGilchrist suggests that the conclusion of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, upon which her arguments regarding McCarthy are largely based, offers a gleam of hope in its final conclusion of acceptance of the feminine.
The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics, From Homer to Faulkner
by Sandra NewmanA side-splitting tour that makes it a blast to read the Western literary canon, from the ancient Greeks to the Modernists. To many, the Great Books evoke angst: the complicated Renaissance dramas we bluffed our way through in college, the dusty Everyman's Library editions that look classy on the shelf but make us feel guilty because they've never been opened. On a mission to restore the West's great works to their rightful place (they were intended to be entertaining!), Sandra Newman has produced a reading guide like no other. Beginning with Greek and Roman literature, she takes readers through hilarious detours and captivating historical tidbits on the road to Modernism. Along the way, we find parallels between Rabelais and South Park, Jane Austen and Sex and the City, Jonathan Swift and Jon Stewart, uncovering the original humor and riskiness that propelled great authors to celebrity. Packed with pop culture gems, stories of literary hoaxes, ironic day jobs for authors, bad reviews of books that would later become classics, and more.
Western Literature in a World Context, Volume 2: The Enlightenment Through the Present
by Paul Davis Gary Harrison David Johnson Patricia Smith John CrawfordA two-volume anthology that places the Western literary tradition and its canon within a world context. Selections are divided into 6 major literary periods, with each period subdivided into Representative Texts, Western Texts, The World Context, and Background Texts.
Western Literature in China and the Translation of a Nation
by Shouhua QiThis book studies the reception history of Western literature in China from the 1840s to the present. Qi explores the socio-historical contexts and the contours of how Western literature was introduced, mostly through translation and assesses its transformative impact in the cultural, literary as well as sociopolitical life of modern China.
Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche: From Herodotus to Nietzsche
by Douglas RobinsonDouglas Robinson offers the most comprehensive collection of translation theory readings available to date, from the Histories of Herodotus in the mid-fifth century before our era to the end of the nineteenth century. The result is a startling panoply of thinking about translation across the centuries, covering such topics as the best type of translator, problems of translating sacred texts, translation and language teaching, translation as rhetoric, translation and empire, and translation and gender. This pioneering anthology contains 124 texts by 90 authors, 9 of them women. Sixteen texts by 4 authors appear here for the first time in English translation; 17 texts by 9 authors appear in completely new translations. Every entry is provided with a bibliographical headnote and footnotes. Intended for classroom use in History of Translation Theory, History of Rhetoric or History of Western Thought courses, this anthology will also prove useful to scholars of translation and those interested in the intellectual history of the West.
Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry (4th Edition)
by David Mason John Frederick NimsWESTERN WIND teaches by example and provides an outstanding collection of classic and contemporary poems. The text also includes exercises, chapter summaries, games, diagrams, illustrations, and 4-color reproductions of great works of art.
Westerns: A Women's History (Postwestern Horizons)
by Victoria LamontAt every turn in the development of what we now know as the western, women writers have been instrumental in its formation. Yet the myth that the western is male-authored persists. Westerns: A Women’s History debunks this myth once and for all by recovering the women writers of popular westerns who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the western genre as we now know it emerged. Victoria Lamont offers detailed studies of some of the many women who helped shape the western. Their novels bear the classic hallmarks of the western—cowboys, schoolmarms, gun violence, lynchings, cattle branding—while also placing female characters at the center of their western adventures and improvising with western conventions in surprising and ingenious ways. In Emma Ghent Curtis’s The Administratrix a widow disguises herself as a cowboy and infiltrates the cowboy gang responsible for lynching her husband. Muriel Newhall’s pulp serial character, Sheriff Minnie, comes to the rescue of a steady stream of defenseless female victims. B. M. Bower, Katharine Newlin Burt, and Frances McElrath use cattle branding as a metaphor for their feminist critiques of patriarchy. In addition to recovering the work of these and other women authors of popular westerns, Lamont uses original archival analysis of the western-fiction publishing scene to overturn the long-standing myth of the western as a male-dominated genre.
Wet Hen (Bright Owl Books)
by Molly CoxeHen and her eggs are wet. Luckily her friend Ben is there to help! This fun photographic easy-to-read story features the short"e" vowel sound. Kane Press's new series of super simple easy readers, Bright Owl Books, launches with Molly Coxe's five photographic stories, which feature the short vowel sounds and are each only around 100 words. These irresistibly silly stories help kids learn to read through repetition and by teaching the basic building blocks of reading—vowel sounds—giving kids the perfect start on educational success.
Wet Hot American Summer: The Annotated Screenplay
by Michael Showalter David WainThe screenwriters behind the cult classic comedy present the definitive behind-the-scenes companion volume.With its unbelievable ensemble cast, Wet Hot American Summer hilariously skewered 1980s teen comedies while becoming a beloved classic in its own right. Now screenwriters David Wain and Michael Showalter have created a behind-the-scenes annotated version of the original screenplay that launched a thousand Halloween costumes. They provide commentary on how and why they made the artistic decisions they did while writing and filming the movie, as well as the Netflix series that came after. The book also features reproduced ephemera from filming—photos, original (and scathing) reviews, AIM chat conversations, marked up script pages, and so much more. Written and curated by Wain and Showalter, this is the must-have guide to all things Wet Hot.
The Wet Pup (Primary Phonics Storybook #Set 1A Book 7)
by Barbara W. MakarA systematic, phonics-based early reading program that includes: the most practice for every skill, decodable readers for every skill, and reinforcement materials--help struggling students succeed in the regular classroom
Wetland Cultures: Ancient, Traditional, Contemporary (Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment)
by Rod GiblettTraditional cultures have a long and vital association with wetlands as sacred places imbued with spiritual and ceremonial significance that provide physical sustenance and sources of materials in paludiculture. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures denigrated wetlands as places of disease, terror, horror, the hellish and the monstrous. Judeo-Christian theology was syncretized with them into the mainstream denigration of wetlands. Wetlands are a marginalized community, an oppressed minority and non-binary, queer bodies of water.
The Whaddayah Mean Leave Home and Travel for the Rest of My Life Book
by Gene Townsend Deanne Townsend"Gene and Deanne Townsend are full-time RV'ers who, at ages (Ahem!) "too young to retire" were advised by other full-timers: "If you're gonna' do it, go for it while you're young! Thus, they "sold it all" and hit the road, knowing that it would mean having to work for at least 20 more years. But loving the concept of making the entire United States their home so much, they accepted the challenge wholeheartedly! Now, years later, they are eager to share with you the pros and cons of this lifestyle of freedom!"-About the Authors
The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea
by Philip HoareA travelogue through the history, literature, and lore of the remarkable mammals that we long have been fascinated with, from Moby-Dick to Free Willy.From his childhood fascination with the gigantic Natural History Museum model of a blue whale, to his abiding love of Moby-Dick, to his adult encounters with the living animals in the Atlantic Ocean, the acclaimed writer Philip Hoare has been obsessed with whales. The Whale is his unforgettable and moving attempt to explain why these strange and beautiful animals exert such a powerful hold on our imagination.Praise for The WhaleWinner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction“This tour de force is a sensuous biography of the great mammals that range on and under Earth’s oceans.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review“The Whale is part cultural study, part travelogue, as Hoare traces the footsteps of Herman Melville from New York to New Bedford and Nantucket . . . [and] digresses on our abuses of the whale and the devastations of the whaling industry.” —Boston Globe“One of the most sublime reading experiences you’ll have this year.” —NPR’S All Things Considered
Wham! It's a Poetry Jam: Discovering Performance Poetry
by Sara HolbrookTake a wild ride with poet Sara Holbrook as she guides young writers in performing their poetry with style and pizzazz. With enthusiasm and a touch of irreverence, Ms. Holbrook, a performance poet herself, explains how to use voice, rhythm, attitude, movement, and other techniques to perform poetry in a group, duo, or solo. More than thirty poems are included for young readers to practice, as well as instructions for putting on a poetry jam at school or in the community.
Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism
by Lisa Tyler Reader in American Literature Laura Rattray Parley Ann Boswell Dustin Faulstick Anna Green Peter Hays Jennifer Haytock Caroline Hellman Ellen Andrews Knodt Cecilia Macheski Milena Radeva Sirpa Salenius Linda Wagner-MartinWharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism is the first book to examine the connections linking two major American writers of the twentieth century, Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway. In twelve critical essays, accompanied by a foreword from Wharton scholar Laura Rattray and a critical introduction by volume editor Lisa Tyler, contributors reveal the writers’ overlapping contexts, interests, and aesthetic techniques. Thematic sections highlight modernist trends found in each author’s works. To begin, Peter Hays and Ellen Andrews Knodt argue for reading Wharton as a modernist writer, noting how her works feature characteristics that critics customarily credit to a younger generation of writers, including Hemingway. Since Wharton and Hemingway each volunteered for humanitarian medical service in World War I, then drew upon their experiences in subsequent literary works, Jennifer Haytock and Milena Radeva-Costello analyze their powerful perspectives on the cataclysmic conflict traditionally viewed as marking the advent of modernism in literature. In turn, Cecilia Macheski and Sirpa Salenius consider the authors’ passionate representations of Italy, informed by personal sojourns there, in which they observed its beautiful landscapes and culture, its liberating contrast with the United States, and its period of fascist politics. Linda Wagner-Martin, Lisa Tyler, and Anna Green focus on the complicated gender politics embedded in the works of Wharton and Hemingway, as evidenced in their ideas about female agency, sexual liberation, architecture, and modes of transportation. In the collection’s final section, Dustin Faulstick, Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, and Parley Ann Boswell address suggestive intertextualities between the two authors with respect to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, their serialized publications in Scribner’s Magazine, and their affinities with the literary and cinematic tradition of noir. Together, the essays in this engaging collection prove that comparative studies of Wharton and Hemingway open new avenues for understanding the pivotal aesthetic and cultural movements central to the development of American literary modernism.
What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton and the Will to Collect Books
by Sheila LimingExamining the personal library and the making of self When writer Edith Wharton died in 1937, without any children, her library of more than five thousand volumes was divided and subsequently sold. Decades later, it was reassembled and returned to The Mount, her historic Massachusetts estate. What a Library Means to a Woman examines personal libraries as technologies of self-creation in modern America, focusing on Wharton and her remarkable collection of books.Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. She tells the story of Wharton&’s library in concert with Wharton scholarship and treatises from this era concerning the wider fields of book history, material and print culture, and the histories (and pathologies) of collecting. Liming&’s study blends literary and historical analysis while engaging with modern discussions about gender, inheritance, and hoarding. It offers a review of the many meanings of a library collection, while reading one specific collection in light of its owner&’s literary celebrity.What a Library Means to a Woman was born from Liming&’s ongoing work digitizing the Wharton library collection. It ultimately argues for a multifaceted understanding of authorship by linking Wharton&’s literary persona to her library, which was, as she saw it, the site of her self-making.
What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction
by Alice McDermottA collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe)What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the bestselling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom about her chosen art, acquired over a lifetime as an acclaimed writer and teacher of writing.From technical advice (“check that your verbs aren’t burdened by unnecessary hads and woulds”) to setting the bar (“I expect the fiction I read to carry with it the conviction that it is written with no other incentive than that it must be written”), from the demands of readers (“they’d been given a story with a baby in it, and they damn well wanted that baby accounted for”) to the foibles of public life (“I’ve never subscribed to the notion that a film adaptation is the final imprimatur for a work of fiction, despite how often I’ve been told by encouraging friends and strangers, ‘Maybe they’ll make a movie of your novel,’ as if I’d been aiming for a screenplay all along but somehow missed the mark and wrote a novel by mistake”), McDermott muses trenchantly and delightfully about the craft of fiction.She also serves throughout as the artful conductor of a literary chorus, quoting generously from the work of other great writers (including Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Morrison, and Woolf ), beautifully joining her voice with theirs. These stories of lessons learned and books read, and of the terrors and the joys of what she calls “this mad pursuit,” form a rich and valuable sourcebook for readers and writers alike: a deeply charming meditation on the unique gift that is literature.
What America Read
by Gordon HutnerDespite the vigorous study of modern American fiction, today's readers are only familiar with a partial shelf of a vast library. Gordon Hutner describes the distorted, canonized history of the twentieth-century American novel as a record of modern classics insufficiently appreciated in their day but recuperated by scholars in order to shape the grand tradition of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. In presenting literary history this way, Hutner argues, scholars have forgotten a rich treasury of realist novels that recount the story of the American middle-class's confrontation with modernity. Reading these novels now offers an extraordinary opportunity to witness debates about what kind of nation America would become and what place its newly dominant middle class would have--and, Hutner suggests, should also lead us to wonder how our own contemporary novels will be remembered.
What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity
by Philip ArmstrongWhat Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity argues that nonhuman animals, and stories about them, have always been closely bound up with the conceptual and material work of modernity. In the first half of the book, Philip Armstrong examines the function of animals and animal representations in four classic narratives: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Frankenstein and Moby-Dick. He then goes on to explore how these stories have been re-worked, in ways that reflect shifting social and environmental forces, by later novelists, including H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Franz Kafka, Brigid Brophy, Bernard Malamud, Timothy Findley, Will Self, Margaret Atwood, Yann Martel and J.M. Coetzee. What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity also introduces readers to new developments in the study of human-animal relations. It does so by attending both to the significance of animals to humans, and to animals’ own purposes or designs; to what animals mean to us, and to what they mean to do, and how they mean to live.