Allen's extraordinary verbal energy is contagious to the point of shouting.

The drive of Jeffery Renard Allen's new poems comes from music; blues, jazz, and even hip-hop. The idiom, which draws on African and Caribbean myth, African-American folk lore, street talk and night whispers, is as capable of meditative reflection and cultural speculation as it is of matters of self and identity. There is an awareness throughout these poems of Black history, of "the shackles of the old," ...

Heat lines are the lines created in the excited air just above the highway in summer. Michael Anania's new collection of poems deals with the energies provoked by image, memory, history, and myth.

Anania's verse idiom has been widely praised for its precision, rich language and lyric musicality. The Midwestern landscape from his earlier work reappears here, fused in one poem with a Miles Davis tune. Chicago is here as well, concrete, busy and filled with blues and jazz. There...

In Natural Light is a new collection of the luminous poetry of Michael Anania. Long known for his ability to bring to life the sights, sounds, and rhythms of rural life on the Western plains, here Anania also explores the lives and cadences of big-city Chicago. This conjunction of the imagery of the city, governed by his midwestern sensibility, gives strength to the poems, as in "Eclogue"

". . . how sudden they seem / the gradual lives / of flowers, or the faces ...

With scathing wit and lots of fun, Michael Anania takes us on a ride in this novel—the ride of growing up in America in the 1950s. Along the way we are entertained (by the cleverness of his story), shocked (by the directness of his dialogue), amused (by his youthful zany characters, but, above all, reminded of a terrible time in America—the McCarthy years. "This excellent novel, as timely as the razor's edge on which we live, is a natural," wrote Studs Terkel.

Funny...

Realities and political life are merged in "Old Obessions, New Morals, Borrowed Prose: Spiro Agnew as Novelist." "A Commitment to Grit: Writing in Chigago" acts as the centerpiece of a group of essays on the Windy City and its powerful collection of writers. "Teenspeak" is a caustic, funny peice on adolescents and the struggle parents have to communicate with them.

Hitler, the myths of the American West, Celine, Ogden Nash, Lana Turner, and Harriet Monroe people the landscape...

Smithsonian August 1998 In Camping With the Prince, journalist Thomas A. Bass explores African science in a collection of profiles, describing the heroic work of both Western scientists working in Africa and Africans who are creating their own scientific institutions and traditions. The book was written in the late 1980s and well deserves republication now. Bass’ theme is the need for science to grow African roots rather than transplanting Western assumptions, a process that is full...

This collection contains over three hundred letters of painter and decorative designer Vanessa Bell, the central figure in the Bloomsbury group. The daughter of Victorian writer Sir Leslie Stephen, and older sister of novelist Virginia Woolf, Bell studied art at the Royal Academy Schools in London and exhibited regularly with the London Group. Along with art critic Roger Fry and painter Duncan Grant, Bell founded the celebrated Omega workshops, which brought their innovative and unrestr...

In Trouble for Lucia, Lucia learns to ride a bicycle and we live through the saga of Blue Birdie (Mrs. Wyse's dead budgerigar [parakeet] invoked in a seance). Lucia and Georgie renew their acquaintance with the operatic diva Olga Braceley and the composer Cortese, but nobody in Tilling believes her when she claims to have entertained a duchess overnight. Lucia becomes Mayor of Tilling and Miss Mapp is appointed her Mayoress. This is the sixth volume in the "Lucia" series.

This is the fourth installment in the delicious "Mapp & Lucia" series, and a hilarious study of 1930's manners and the pecking order in the fictional English village of Tilling. Having long ago conquered the timid town of Riseholme, Emmeline "Lucia" Lucas finds herself rather bored and so rents a summer place in Tilling. To be specific, she rents the home of Miss Elizabeth Mapp, queen of all she surveys from her garden window. Immediately the gauntlet is thrown down as the two would-be ar...

The first book in Benson’s famous series introduces us to Emmeline Lucas (Lucia) as she attempts to thwart the social climbing of a newly arrived Opera singer, Olga Braceley. Along with Lucia’s friends, enemies and husband, Phillip, we see Benson’s rich gift for carefully painting gossip, intrigue, backstabbing and the many other activities that occupy the residents of the rural village Riseholm.

Like his famous Lucia character, E.F. Benson's Miss Mapp is a strikingly original comic creation, an arch-schemer and social climber from the British town of Tilling. A fortyish spinster, "anger and the gravest suspicion about everybody had kept her young and on the boil." Elizabeth Mapp spends her days looking out the window of her home, using opera glasses and a notebook to chart her neighbors affairs. Nothing escapes her as she spies on Major Benjamin Flint (who she has been trying ...

Lucia in London is E.F. Benson's second acclaimed Lucia novel. After her husband's Auntie Amy dies and leaves her London home to Lucia and her sweet but dull husband, Peppino, the Queen of English provincial society attempts to conquer London. Using her best social climbing instincts, nerves of steel, and an absolute inability to be embarrassed, Lucia dresses up "tightum" and prepares to mingle with the beau monde. She skillfully manages to get into London's fanciest parties without being...

The "Shower Posse" is derived from the "shower" of lead it shoots at rivals. Referred to by the FBI as "the most violent and notorious criminal organization ever in America," the Shower Posse was the epitome of drug dealing ruthlessness.

This tell-all saga is in the words of its mastermind, Vivian Blake. Blake skyrocketed to wealth with savvy business skills, but his savage henchmen terrorized the sheets into submission. Blake's men had been raised in Jamaica where murders wen...

Charles Boer's translation was nominated for a National Book Award. The Homeric Hymns are among the most important documents we have of Greek mythology. These poems treat the gods and goddesses individually, setting down the language by which they were known and addressed, and telling the stories of their encounters with each other and with mortals. Composed after Homer &mdash in his style &mdash they offer a view of the Greek mythic world from the 7th century B.C. into ...

In the early autumn of 1962, David Marnin, a young Foreign Service officer, arrives in Saigon to be the Ambassador's aide. Though young and inexperienced, he brings to the job a keen intelligence and a rich sense of adventure.

He soon becomes involved with one of the most beautiful Vietnamese women. Unforgettably depicted are scores of characters &mdash ambitious journalists, Saigon bargirls, diplomats, clandestine agents, a disenchanted general, a Catholic bishop, Buddhis...

Young Peony is sold into a rich Chinese household as a bondmaid &mdash an awkward role in which she is more a servant, but less a daughter. As she grows into a lovely, provocative young woman, Peony falls in love with the family's only son. However, tradition forbids them to wed. How she resolves her love for him and her devotion to her adoptive family unfolds in this profound tale, based on true events in China over a century ago.

The story of Tzu Hsi is the story of the last Empress in China. In the novel Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck recreates the life of one of the most intriguing rulers during a time of intense turbulence.

Tzu Hsi was born into one of the lowly ranks of the Imperial dynasty. According to custom, she moved to the Forbidden City at the age of seventeen to become one of hundreds of concubines. But her singular beauty and powers of manipulation quickly moved her into the position of Se...

To the Chinese the dragon is not an evil creature, but is a god and the friend of men who worship him. He "holds in his power prosperity and peace." Ruling the waters and the winds, he sends the good rain, is hence the symbol of fecundity. In the Hsia dynasty two dragons fought a great duel until both disappeared, leaving only a fertile foam from which were born the descendants of the Hsia. This the dragons came to be looked upon as the ancestors of a race of heroes. This is the story...

A House Divided, the third volume of the trilogy that began with The Good Earth and Sons , is a powerful portrayal of China in the midst of revolution. Wang Yuan is caught between the opposing ideas of different generations. After 6 years abroad, Yuan returns to China in the middle of a peasant uprising. His cousin is a captain in the revolutionary army, his sister has scandalized the family by her premarital pregnancy, and his warlord father c...

...News reaches the couple [Maharana Prince Jagat and his wife, Moti] that their only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border skirmish, an inconsolable Moti sends Jagat out to bring the boy's spirit home. On the journey, the prince becomes involved with a beautiful and mysterious young American woman. Thus begins the fatal attraction between Eastern and Western ways, one bound by rigid custom, the other temptingly ripe with freethinking....Her simple yet evocative language, ...