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American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond
by Jeremy Dauber"America is the world's biggest haunted house and American Scary is the only travel guide you need. I loved this book." —Grady Hendrix, New York Times bestselling author of How to Sell a Haunted House and The Final Girl Support GroupFrom the acclaimed author of American Comics comes a sweeping and entertaining narrative that details the rise and enduring grip of horror in American literature, and, ultimately, culture—from the taut, terrifying stories of Edgar Allan Poe to the grisly, lingering films of Jordan Peele America is held captive by horror stories. They flicker on the screen of a darkened movie theater and are shared around the campfire. They blare out in tabloid true-crime headlines, and in the worried voices of local news anchors. They are consumed, virally, on the phones in our pockets. Like the victims in any slasher movie worth its salt, we can&’t escape the thrall of scary stories. In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of horror in the United States. Dauber draws a captivating through line that ties historical influences ranging from the Salem witch trials and enslaved-person narratives directly to the body of work we more closely associate with horror today: the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft, the lingering fiction of Shirley Jackson, the disquieting films of Alfred Hitchcock, the up-all-night stories of Stephen King, and the gripping critiques of Jordan Peele. With the dexterous weave of insight and style that have made him one of America&’s leading historians of popular culture, Dauber makes the haunting case that horror reveals the true depths of the American mind.
American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1960-1966 (LOA #321)
by Poul Anderson Clifford D. Simak Daniel Keyes Roger ZelasnyIn a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, four classic novels from science fiction's most transformative decade, including the landmark Flowers for AlgernonThis volume, the first of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, opens with Poul Anderson's immensely popular The High Crusade, in which aliens planning to conquer Earth land in Lincolnshire during the Hundred Years' War. In Clifford Simak's Hugo Award-winning Way Station, Enoch Wallace is a spry 124-year-old Civil War veteran whose lifelong job monitoring the intergalactic pit stop inside his home is largely uneventful--until a CIA agent shows up and Cold War hostilities threaten the peaceful harmony of the Galactic confederation. Daniel Keyes's beloved Flowers for Algernon, winner of the Nebula Award and adapted as the Academy Award-winning movie Charly, is told through the journal entries of Charlie Gordon, a young man with severe learning disabilities who is the test subject for surgery to improve his intelligence. And in the postapocalyptic earthscape of Roger Zelazny's Hugo Award-winning . . . And Call Me Conrad (also published as This Immortal) Conrad Nomikos reluctantly accepts the responsibility of showing the planet to the governing extraterrestrials' representative and protecting him from rebellious remnants of the human race. Using early manuscripts and original setting copy, this Library of America volume restores the novel to a version that most closely approximates Zelazny's original text.
American Science Fiction: Four Classic Novels 1968-1969 (LOA #322)
by Joanna Russ Jack Vance Samuel R. Delany R. A. LaffertyFour mind-bending novels from science fiction's most transformative decade in a deluxe collector's edition hardcover, including two long out-of-print classicsIn this second volume of a two-volume set gathering the best American science fiction from the tumultuous 1960s, R. A. Lafferty's quirky and utterly original Past Master, an unjustly neglected classic, imagines Sir Thomas More transported to the colony Astrobe in the year 2535, where he is made president of a future Utopia. In Picnic on Paradise, Joanna Russ presents her indelible heroine, Alyx, who is hired to protect a group of tourists in a hostile alien world. Samuel R. Delany's proto-cyberpunk space opera Nova, reprinted here for the first time in a text corrected by the author, combines the pacing of a revenge story with the arc of a grail-quest legend. Jack Vance's dystopian thriller Emphyrio is the coming-of-age story of Ghyl, who has been raised in a world barring the use of automation but has a strong sense of subversive individualism. The novel has been restored to the author's original text, without later editorial interventions.
American Scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the Making of the Beat Generation
by Jonah RaskinBiography of Allen Ginsberg, best known for his poem Howl, the emblem of the Beat Generation.
American Scriptures
by Laurie F. Maffly-KippA groundbreaking collection of sacred Christian writings of American origin from Mormons, Shakers, Christian Scientists, and others. "Scripture" is any work in which the authors, translators, editors, or discoverers all claim to have received wisdom from a source outside themselves, be it revelation, enlightened philosophy, or ancient archive. For the first time in a single volume, American Scriptures gathers fifteen of these texts from religious movements with origins in the United States. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp's concise single volume will enlighten not only readers interested in the historical and religious aspects of the scriptural texts, but also those whose interest has been piqued by such bestsellers as Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code.
American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations
by Shin YamashiroImplementing a never-before-seen approach to sea literature, American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations explores the role of American maritime activities and their cultural representations in literature. Differentiating between the 'terrestrial' and 'oceanic' as concepts, Shin Yamashiro divides sea literature into three categories: literature on the sea, by the sea, and beneath the sea. Discussing both canonical works and new books on scuba diving, deep-sea explorations, and surfing, this fascinating study recognizes sea literature's unique influence on American history.
American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture
by Shelley StreebyBy focusing on sensationalist literature of the period, Streeby explores issues of race, class, popular culture, and notions of empire in America around the U.S.-Mexican war.
American Short Novels
by R. P. Blackmur-Billy Budd by Herman Melville -The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain -Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane -Washington Square by Henry James -Melanctha by Gertrude Stein -The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams -The Venetian Glass Nephew by Elinor Wylie
American Short Stories
by Mcdougal LittellThe American short stories presented in the book are grouped under the following sections : Romanticism and Realism,The Birth of the Modern,Building a Tradition,New Voices and Identities.
American Short Stories (Second Edition)
by Perfection Learning Editorial StaffThis collection of short stories introduces you to some of America's most important writers though you may not like every one, but each author has a unique message to send and a distinctive way of sending it.
American Short Stories: 1920 To Present
by Perfection LearningAn American father in search of his daughter in France. A ranch woman in the Salinas Valley who yearns for companionship and a sense of self-worth. A postmistress in Mississippi who decides to live at the post office after feuding with her eccentric family. A terrified soldier in Vietnam who longs for his Minnesota home. These are some of the characters and situations you will encounter in American Short Stories: 1920 to the Present. They are as varied as the geography of the U.S. itself.
American Short Story Masterpieces
by Raymond Carver Tom JenksThis highly acclaimed collection of short stories by American writers contains only the best literary art of the past four decades. With a bias toward realism, editors Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks have selected fiction that "tells a story" and tells it with a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight. But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our age, our concerns, and our lives. Whether it's the end of a marriage, as in Bobbie Ann Manson's "Shiloh," or the struggle with self-esteem and weight in Andre Dubus's "The Fat Girl," the 36 works included her probe issues that give us that "shock of recognition" that is the hallmark of great art--wonderful, absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.
American Sketches: Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
by Walter IsaacsonWhat are the roots of creativity? What makes for great leadership? How do influential people end up rippling the surface of history? In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success. They had qualities that were even more rare, such as imagination and true curiosity. Isaacson reflects on how he became a writer, the lessons he learned from various people he met, and the challenges he sees for journalism in the digital age. He also offers loving tributes to his hometown of New Orleans, which both before and after Hurricane Katrina offered many of the ingredients for a creative culture, and to the Louisiana novelist Walker Percy, who was an early mentor. In an anecdotal and personal way, Isaacson describes the joys of the "so-called writing life" and the way that tales about the lives of fascinating people can enlighten our own lives.
American Skin
by Don De GraziaThe story of Alex Verdi who joins a multi-racial group of anti-Nazi skinheads.
American Skin
by Ken BruenAt the beginning of Bruen's dark tribute to the Irish fascination with the American dream, Stephen Blake is on the run after a bank heist, hoping to disappear in the desert near Tucson. Blake has the money and his girlfriend, Siobhan, knows how to launder it. All he has to do is change his accent and his skin and pass as an American. But John A. Stapleton, contract killer for the IRA, wants more than his share of the swag--and the psychotic Dade, obsessively devoted to the music of Tammy Wynette, is wandering the Southwest like a slaughter wagon. Noir master Bruen (The Guards) effortlessly moves his storyline back and forth in time, all his trademark pop-culture references in place, the banshee of existential agony wailing loudly.
American Skin: A Novel
by Ken BruenAt the beginning of Bruen&’s dark tribute to the Irish fascination with the American dream, Stephen Blake is on the run after a bank heist, hoping to disappear in the desert near Tucson. Blake has the money and his girlfriend, Siobhan, knows how to launder it. All he has to do is change his accent and his skin and pass as an American. But John A. Stapleton, contract killer for the IRA, wants more than his share of the swag—and the psychotic Dade, obsessively devoted to the music of Tammy Wynette, is wandering the Southwest like a slaughter wagon. Noir master Bruen (The Guards) effortlessly moves his storyline back and forth in time, all his trademark pop-culture references in place, the banshee of existential agony wailing loudly.
American Sky: A Novel
by James GradyAn atmospheric and dramatic novel set in mid-century Montana by the acclaimed author of Six Days of the Condor."Grady's style is loose, colorful, challenging and fun. I sometimes thought of Orwell&’s novel 1984, sometimes of the Dylan song 'Desolation Row.'"—Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post For the teenaged Luc, his days are preoccupied with the daily dramas of high school. President John F. Kennedy's assassination seems a world away. But the winds of history find its way to his small Montana town as marijuana clouds rise in the hallways and the notices of neighborhood young men of "Killed in Action" in Vietnam keep arriving at an increasing rate. Acclaimed novelist James Grady's American Sky brings to life the world of a young man who is caught in the nexus of vast social change. From blue collar life in the heartland to Kent State and the Civil Rights movement, American Sky is a sweeping narrative that builds to a crime that threatens to tear Luc's world apart. Previous compared to Larry McMurty, George Orwell, Harper Lee and Bob Dylan, James Grady explores Bruce Springsteen's generation and has crafted a action filled and timeless destined to become a classic.
American Slavery As It Is: Selections from the Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (Dover Thrift Editions)
by Theodore Dwight WeldThe stories of hundreds of African-Americans who lived in bondage are preserved in this powerful 1839 chronicle. Compiled by a prominent abolitionist, the accounts include personal narratives from freed slaves as well as testimonials from active and former slave owners, presenting a condemnation of slavery from both those who experienced it and those who perpetuated it. Detailing the overall conditions of slaves across multiple states and several years, the book includes information on their diet, clothing, housing, and working hours as well as their punishments and suffering.Connecticut farmer-turned-abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld (1803–1895) was a central leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society and traveled the country lecturing against slavery. Weld took great pains to document the trustworthiness of contributors to American Slavery so that there could be no doubt as to its authenticity. A major influence on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the book sold 100,000 copies in its first year of publication and remains a valuable historical testament. This edited selection presents these powerful first-person accounts to a new generation.
American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Bois
by Van Wienen Mark W."A meticulously researched, highly informed, carefully argued, and very accessible account of American socialism, socialists, and socialistic thinking, from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s . . . challenges the intellectual and political legacy of Werner Sombart'sWhy Is There No Socialism in the United States?, whose spirit still hovers over animated discussions about the 'failures' of socialism in the United States. " ---James A. Miller, George Washington University "A valuable rethinking and reframing of the traditions of leftist literary scholarship in the U. S. " ---Sylvia Cook, University of Missouri, St. Louis American Socialist Triptych: The Literary-Political Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Upton Sinclair, and W. E. B. Du Boisexplores the contributions of three writers to the development of American socialism over a fifty--year period and asserts the vitality of socialism in modern American literature and culture. Drawing upon a wide range of texts including archival sources, Mark W. Van Wienen demonstrates the influence of reform-oriented, democratic socialism both in the careers of these writers and in U. S. politics between 1890 and 1940. While offering unprecedented in-depth analysis of modern American socialist literature, this book charts the path by which the supposedly impossible, dangerous ideals of a cooperative commonwealth were realized, in part, by the New Deal. American Socialist Triptychprovides in-depth, innovative readings of the featured writers and their engagement with socialist thought and action. Upton Sinclair represents the movement's most visible manifestation, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901; Charlotte Perkins Gilman reflects the socialist elements in both feminism and 1890s reform movements, and W. E. B. Du Bois illuminates social democratic aspirations within the NAACP. Van Wienen's book seeks to re-energize studies of Sinclair by treating him as a serious cultural figure whose career peaked not in the early success ofThe Junglebut in his nearly successful 1934 run for the California governorship. It also demonstrates as never before the centrality of socialism throughout Gilman's and Du Bois's literary and political careers. More broadly,American Socialist Triptychchallenges previous scholarship on American radical literature, which has focused almost exclusively on the 1930s and Communist writers. Van Wienen argues that radical democracy was not the phenomenon of a decade or of a single group but a sustained tradition dispersed within the culture, providing a useful genealogical explanation for how socialist ideas were actually implemented through the New Deal. American Socialist Triptychalso revises modern American literary history, arguing for the endurance of realist and utopian literary modes at the height of modernist literary experimentation and showing the importance of socialism not only to the three featured writers but also to their peers, including Edward Bellamy, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Claude McKay. Further, by demonstrating the importance of social democratic thought to feminist and African American campaigns for equality, the book dialogues with recent theories of radical egalitarianism. Readers interested in American literature, U. S. history, political theory, and race, gender, and class studies will all find inAmerican Socialist Triptycha valuable and provocative resource.
American Soldier
by Matt MorilloDrama / Characters: 3m, 2f / In American Soldiers, the patriarch of a politically prominent Long Island family fights to hold the family together when his eldest daughter, an Army veteran, returns from the Middle East for an uneasy homecoming. The girl, emotionally scarred from her military service, is struggling to take her ex-boyfriend and sister away with her to start a new life in Colorado. Her aim is to liberate them of the hometown influences of society, religion and class that led her to enlist. The play reveals the urge of children to break away, the power of family destiny and the emotional ties that bind. What is it about Nassau and Suffolk counties that makes them a breeding ground for "good little American soldiers," as Angela Coletti, the returning veteran, says? Her late mother had been a local Assemblywoman and her brother, Carlo Jr., is now running for a congressional seat. They are liberal politicians and "modern" Catholics, chastened by the wars of our time, who would seem to hold the old beliefs at arms' length. But to Angela, they are no more than cogs in a machine of conformity whose morals make no sense and who perpetuate dangerous myths. The force of her rebellion is set against the determination of her father, a Vietnam Veteran who is equally committed to holding the family together. His methods range from the good old fatherly temper tantrum to the kind of heart-to-heart with his soldier-daughter that only veterans can have. Through their tug of war, we witness the real forces that keep many of our young people fighting what Angela calls, "the same fight, generation after generation." It's the power of family and the hold of religion.
American Son: A Novel
by Brian Ascalon RoleyA powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers.Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas's waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.A Los Angeles Times Best Book, New York Times Notable Book, and a Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize Finalist
American Song and Struggle from Columbus to World War 2: A Cultural History
by Will KaufmanLong before anyone ever heard of 'protest music', people in America were singing about their struggles. They sang for justice and fairness, food and shelter, and equality and freedom; they sang to be acknowledged. Sometimes they also sang to oppress. This book uncovers the history of these people and their songs, from the moment Columbus made fateful landfall to the start of the Second World War, when 'protest music' emerged as an identifiable brand. Cutting across musical genres, Will Kaufman recovers the passionate voices of America itself. We encounter songs of the mainland and the conquered territories of Hawai'i, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; we hear Indigenous songs, immigrant songs and Klan songs, minstrel songs and symphonies, songs of the heard and the unheard, songs of the celebrated and the anonymous, of the righteous and the despicable. This magisterial book shows that all these songs are woven into the very fabric of American history.
American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Poets)
by Terrance HayesA powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award winning author of Lighthead <P><P>"The right poetry collection for right now." - The Los Angeles Times <P><P>In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. <P><P>Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country's past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. <P>Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered--the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
American Speeches: Political Oratory from Abraham Lincoln to Bill Clinton
by Ted WidmerFrom the book: Public speeches have profoundly shaped American history and culture, transforming not only our politics but also our language and our sense of national identity. This volume collects the unabridged texts of 83 eloquent and dramatic speeches delivered by 45 American public figures between 1865 and 1997, beginning with Abraham Lincoln's last speech on Reconstruction and ending with Bill Clinton's heartfelt tribute to the Little Rock Nine. During this period American political oratory continued to evolve, as a more conversational style, influenced by the intimacy of radio and television, emerged alongside traditional forms of rhetoric. Included are speeches on Reconstruction by Thaddeus Stevens and African-American congressman Robert Brown Elliott, Frederick Douglass's brilliant oration on Abraham Lincoln, and Oliver Wendell Holmes's "touched with fire" Memorial Day Address. Speeches by Robert Ingersoll and William Jennings Bryan capture the fervor of 19th-century political conventions, while Theodore Roosevelt and Carl Schurz offer opposing views on imperialism. Ida B. Wells and Mary Church Terrell denounce the cruelty of lynching and the injustice of Jim Crow; Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt advocate the enfranchisement of women; and Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge present conflicting visions of the League of Nations. Also included are wartime speeches by George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower; an address on the atomic bomb by J. Robert Oppenheimer; Richard Nixon's "Checkers Speech"; Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet"; Barry Goldwater's speech to the 1964 Republican convention; Mario Savio urging Berkeley students to stop "the machine"; Barbara Jordan defending the Constitution during Watergate; and an extensive selection of speeches by Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Ted Widmer, editor, is t
American Spirits
by Russell BanksFrom one of America&’s most celebrated storytellers come three dark, interlocking tales about the residents of a rural New York town, and the shocking headlines that become their local mythologies.A husband sells property to a mysterious, temperamental stranger, and is hounded on social media when he publicly questions the man&’s character. A couple grows concerned when an enigmatic family moves next door, and the children start sneaking over to beg for help. Two dangerous criminals kidnap an elderly couple and begin blackmailing their grandson, demanding that he pay back what he owes.Suspenseful, thrilling, and expertly crafted, American Spirits explores the hostile undercurrents of our communities and American politics at large, as well as the ways local tragedies can be both devastating and, somehow, everyday. Ushering the reader through the town of Sam Dent, Russell Banks has etched yet another brilliant entry into the bedrock of American fiction.