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An approachable and indispensable guide to Shakespeare's sonnets Shakespeare's sonnets are the greatest single work of lyric poetry in English, as passionate and daring as any love poems we may ever encounter, and yet they are often misunderstood. Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets reveals an underlying structure within the 154 poems that illuminates the entire work, and provides a guide-for first-time readers as well as scholars-that inspires a new understanding of this complex masterpiece. The Elizabethan scholar and former president of Harvard University Neil L. Rudenstine makes a compelling case for the existence of a dramatic arc within the work through an expert interpretation of distinct groups of sonnets in relation to one another. The sonnets show us a poet in turmoil whose love for a young man-who returns his affections-is utterly transformative, binding him in such an irresistible way that it survives a number of infidelities. And the poet and the young man are drawn into a cycle of lust and betrayal by a "dark lady," a woman with the "power to make love groan." Rudenstine's reading unveils the relationship between major groups of poems: the expressions of love, the transgressions, the longings, the jealousies, and the reconciliations. This critical analysis is accompanied by the text of all of Shakespeare's sonnets. Accessible and thought-provoking, Ideas of Order is an invaluable companion to this cornerstone of literature.
A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, NonfictionA New York Times Notable Book of 2015A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2015An NPR Best Book of 2015Countless books have been written about the civil rights movement, but far less attention has been paid to what happened after the dramatic passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965 and the turbulent forces it unleashed. Give Us the Ballot tells this story for the first time.In this groundbreaking narrative history, Ari Berman charts both the transformation of American democracy under the VRA and the counterrevolution that has sought to limit voting rights, from 1965 to the present day. The act enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. And yet, fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power, with lawmakers devising new strategies to keep minorities out of the voting booth and with the Supreme Court declaring a key part of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional.Berman brings the struggle over voting rights to life through meticulous archival research, in-depth interviews with major figures in the debate, and incisive on-the-ground reporting. In vivid prose, he takes the reader from the demonstrations of the civil rights era to the halls of Congress to the chambers of the Supreme Court. At this important moment in history, Give Us the Ballot provides new insight into one of the most vital political and civil rights issues of our time.
A provocative rethinking of France's long relationship with the Arab worldTo fully understand both the social and political pressures wracking contemporary France-and, indeed, all of Europe-as well as major events from the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the tensions in Mali, Andrew Hussey believes that we have to look beyond the confines of domestic horizons. As much as unemployment, economic stagnation, and social deprivation exacerbate the ongoing turmoil in the banlieues, the root of the problem lies elsewhere: in the continuing fallout from Europe's colonial era.Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, literature, and politics with his years of personal experience visiting the banlieues and countries across the Arab world, especially Algeria, Hussey attempts to make sense of the present situation. In the course of teasing out the myriad interconnections between past and present in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Beirut, and Western Europe, The French Intifada shows that the defining conflict of the twenty-first century will not be between Islam and the West but between two dramatically different experiences of the world-the colonizers and the colonized.
"Beautifully packed with detail . . . Does for Bangladesh what Rushdie did for India." -The Sunday TimesFrom the Man Booker-short-listed author of The Northern Clemency, a family and a nation-Bangladesh-are forged through storytelling, conversation, jokes, feuds, blood, songs, bravery, and sacrifice. In late 1970 a boy named Saadi is born into a large, defiantly Bengali family in eastern Pakistan. Months later the country splits in two in what will become one of the most ferocious twentieth-century civil wars. Saadi tells the story of his childhood and of the ingenious ways his family survived the violence and conflicts: from his aunts stuffing him with sweets to stop marauding soldiers from hearing him cry, to street games based on American television shows; from the basement compartment his grandfather built to hide his treasured books, pictures, and music until after the war, to the daily gossip about each and every one of the relatives, servants, and neighbors. Scenes from Early Life is a beautifully detailed novel of profound empathy-an attempt to capture the collective memory of a family and a country. At once heartbreaking and surprisingly funny, Scenes from Early Life is based on the life of Philip Hensher's husband, and as such it is at once a memoir, a novel, and a history. As this remarkable writer brings the past to life, we come to feel, vividly and viscerally, that Saadi's family-and its struggles and triumphs-are our own.
When does a game stop being a game? And what would cause a young boy to commit an act of savage violence? In Time on My Hands by Giorgio Vasta, the year is 1978, and a chilling drama is unfolding in Rome. Members of a leftist terrorist group known as the Red Brigades have kidnapped the former Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, and are holding him in a secret prison, while broadcasting their demands to the public. Far from Rome, in Palermo, Sicily, a trio of eleven-year-old schoolboys are following Moro's abduction with intense interest. To their minds, the terrorists are warriors, striking a blow at the stifling conformity and propriety of everyday Italian life. Just like the Red Brigades, the boys give themselves code names: Nimbus, Radius, and Flight. They shave their heads, develop a secret language, and begin a life of escalating crime in worshipful imitation of their heroes. But when Moro's body is discovered in the trunk of a car, riddled with bullets, and as the stakes of the friends' games grow higher, Nimbus, the most innocent of the three, must decide just how far he is willing to go.
An indispensable tool for high-schoolers, undergraduates, or even amateur enthusiasts, Writing World War II teaches the craft of history writing-by example. In a series of thoughtful essays, Sylvie Murray examines American involvement in World War II and how it has subsequently been portrayed by historians. Murray addresses three broad topics-the prelude to war, the war effort on the home front, and the atypical experiences of soldiers-in an effort to recapture the mixed emotions of the time and the larger forces shaping public opinion. Her work challenges the traditional notions of "the greatest generation" and "the good war," and explores viewpoints that have been largely ignored in popular retellings. The book serves a dual purpose, critiquing the approaches of various historians while at the same time offering Murray's own writing as a model for constructing a persuasive essay.But as Murray is rightly critical of one-sided historical arguments, Writing World War II offers another layer of analysis and instruction throughout. At various points in the book, her fellow historian Robert D. Johnston chimes in to assess Murray's prose, demystifying her techniques while helping you to become more critical of all sorts of historical writing-including your own.
Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was / for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoyevsky, and Celan. What the poems share is their setting in the cool, spacious, spotlit, book-lined place that is Williams's consciousness, a place whose workings he has rendered for fifty years with inimitable candor and style. "Williams manages to consistently maintain the gentle, witty, and honest voice that he has spent a lifetime crafting." -Rachel A. Burns, The Harvard Crimson
Our best-laid plans will yield to fate.And we will say, "We lived. We ate."Roy Blount Jr. is one of America's most cherished comic writers. He's been compared to Mark Twain and James Thurber, and his books have been called everything from "a work of art" (Robert W. Creamer, The New York Times Book Review) to "a book to read till it falls apart" (Newsweek). Now, in Save Room for Pie, he applies his much-praised wit and charm to a rich and fundamental topic: food.As a lifelong eater, Blount always got along easy with food-he didn't have to think, he just ate. But food doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's the global climate and the global economy to consider, not to mention Blount's chronic sinusitis, which constricts his sense of smell, and consequently his taste buds. So while he's always frowned on eating with an ulterior motive, times have changed. Save Room for Pie grapples with these and other food-related questions in Blount's signature style. Here you'll find lively meditations on everything from bacon froth to grapefruit, Kobe beef to biscuits. You'll also find defenses of gizzards, mullet, okra, cane syrup, watermelon, and boiled peanuts; an imagined dialogue between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; input from Louis Armstrong, Frederick Douglass, and Blaze Starr; and of course some shampooed possums and carjacking turkeys.In poems and songs, limericks and fake (or sometimes true) news stories, Blount talks about food in surprising and innovative ways, with all the wit and verve that prompted Garrison Keillor, in The Paris Review, to say: "Blount is the best. He can be literate, uncouth, and soulful all in one sentence."
A lush, lyrical debut from a vibrant new poetic voiceA sparrow like a "fumbled punch line" is lost in an airport; a man translating Ovid is transfigured by witnessing a massacre in Jamestown in 1621; a woman smiles seductively as the skin on her back is opened out like a wing; a lizard upon a laptop shimmers with the true life, primitive and binary, of our modern information age.In the sonically rich, formally restless poems of this debut collection, Song & Error, the thread that unravels all we think we know of the world is plucked loose and drawn from a seal's beached corpse. Uniting past and present, history and autobiography, Averill Curdy's poems strive to endure within "the crease of transformation" and to speak-sing-of that terrible beauty.
"Cox puts a human face on the struggle for equality in this thoughtful, well-written exploration of race relations in the South."-The Raleigh News & ObserverAt night, under the same roof, under the same moon, nothing divides the girls, Evie and Janey Louise. Talking in their beds, they discuss their strong mothers and their absent fathers, and they wonder about the paths their lives will take. Yet during the day, Evie is blind to their differences-that she is white and her best friend is black.In Night Talk, Elizabeth Cox tells a moving story about two girls who, though they grew up in the same house, reflect the alternate realities of white and black society. They are influenced by both the massive social changes sweeping the country during the Civil Rights years, and by our extraordinary human capacities for fear and hate and love. But in the end, it is the world they share under cover of darkness, through their candid nighttime conversations, that proves to be the strongest force of all.
"Reading this book revives the spirit of civic action today for those who are unjustifiably forlorn about overcoming injustice."-Ralph NaderAn on-the-ground history of ordinary Americans who took to the streets when political issues became personalThe 1960s are widely seen as the high tide of political activism in the United States. According to this view, Americans retreated to the private realm after the tumult of the civil rights and antiwar movements, and on the rare occasions when they did take action, it was mainly to express their wish to be left alone by government-as recommended by Ronald Reagan and the ascendant New Right. In fact, as Michael Stewart Foley shows in Front Porch Politics, this understanding of post-1960s politics needs drastic revision. On the community level, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an unprecedented upsurge of innovative and impassioned grass roots political activity. In Southern California and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, tenants challenged landlords with sit-ins and referenda; in the upper Midwest, farmers vandalized power lines and mobilized tractors to protect their land; and in the deindustrializing cities of the Rust Belt, laid-off workers boldly claimed the right to own their idled factories. Meanwhile, activists fought to defend the traditional family or to expand the rights of women, while entire towns organized to protest the toxic sludge in their basements. Recalling Love Canal, the tax revolt in California, ACT UP, and other crusades famous or forgotten, Foley shows how Americans were propelled by personal experiences and emotions into the public sphere. Disregarding conventional ideas of left and right, they turned to political action when they perceived, from their actual or figurative front porches, an immediate threat to their families, homes, or dreams. Front Porch Politics is a vivid and authoritative people's history of a time when Americans followed their outrage into the streets. Addressing today's readers, it is also a field guide for effective activism in an era when mass movements may seem impractical or even passé. The distinctively visceral, local, and highly personal politics that Americans practiced in the 1970s and 1980s provide a model of citizenship participation worth emulating if we are to renew our democracy.
Heavenly Questions, the first new collection of poems from Gjertrud Schnackenberg since her critically acclaimed The Throne of Labdacus, finds her at the height of her talents and showcases her continued growth as an artist. In six long poems, Schnackenberg's rhyme-rich blank verse, with its densely packed images, shifts effortlessly between the lyric and the epic, setting passion to a verbal music that is recognizably her own.An exceptional and moving new collection from one of the most talented American poets of our time, Heavenly Questions is a work of intellectual, aesthetic, and technical innovation-and, more than that, a deeply compassionate and strikingly personal work.
Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective-celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances. "In firm, clear, often elegant prose, [Daisy Hay] narrates the main events in the lives of her subjects from 1813, when they began to coalesce around Hunt in London, till 1822" (Ben Downing, The New York Times Book Review). Young Romantics is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship played out against a backdrop of political turbulence and intense literary creativity. "Hay's account of the passionate and messy lives of her Romantics is vivid, picturesque, and finely told" (Richard Eder, The Boston Globe).
A shocking exposé of sexual abuse and the struggle for justice at one of America's most prestigious schoolsIn June 2012, Amos Kamil's New York Times Magazine cover story, "Prep-School Predators," caused a shock wave that is still rippling. In his piece, he detailed a decades-long pattern of sexual abuse at the highly prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx. After the article appeared, Kamil closely observed the fallout. While the article revealed the misdeeds of three teachers, this was just the beginning: An extraordinary twenty-two former Horace Mann teachers and administrators have since been accused of abuse.In Great Is the Truth, Kamil and his coauthor, Sean Elder, tell the riveting story of how one of the country's leading schools was beset by scandal. They relate what happened as survivors of abuse came forward and sought redress. We see the school and its influential backers circle the wagons. We meet Horace Mann alumni who work to change New York State's sexual abuse laws. And we encounter a former teacher who candidly recalls his inappropriate relationships with students."Great is the truth and it prevails" may be the motto of Horace Mann, but for many alumni the truth remains all too hard to come by. This book is essential reading for anyone trying to understand how an elite institution can fail those in its charge, and what can be done about it.
An exuberant tale of a man caught between faith and freedom, from one of Italy's most talented young novelists Thirty years old, growing flabby in a sexless marriage, Piero Rosini has decided to dedicate his life to Jesus. He's renounced the novels and American music that were filling his head with bullshit; he's moved out of his fancy bourgeois neighborhood, which was keeping him from finding spiritual purity and the Lord's truth. Now that he and his wife have settled into an unfinished housing development on the far outskirts of Rome, he'll be able to really concentrate on his job at an ultraconservative Catholic publishing house, editing books that highlight the decadence and degradation of modern society, including one claiming that Pope John Paul II was secretly Jewish. But Piero is suffocating. He worries that The Jewish Pope might be taking things too far. He can't get his beautiful sister-in-law out of his head. Temptations are breaking down his religious resolve. He decides to flee to Paris, which turns out not to be the best way of guarding his purity. With a charismatic narrator as familiar with the finer points of Christian theology as with the floor layout of IKEA and the schedules of European budget airlines, Francesco Pacifico's exuberant novel brings us Europe old and new and the inner workings of a conflicted but always compelling mind. The Story of My Purity is fiction with great humor, intelligence, neuroticism, and vision, from a young writer at the beginning of a tremendous career.
The author of The Warhol Economy asks how does celebrity work and why do we care about some people more than others? What is celebrity? Why is it such a dominant force in our culture? And why do we seem preoccupied with it now more than ever? Celebrity-our collective fascination with particular people-is everywhere and takes many forms, from the sports star, notorious Wall Street tycoon, or film icon, to the hometown quarterback, YouTube sensation, or friend who compulsively documents his life on the Internet. We follow with rapt attention all the minute details of stars' lives: their romances, their spending habits, even how they drink their coffee. For those anointed, celebrity can translate into big business and top social status, but why do some attain stardom while millions of others do not? Why are we simply more interested in certain people?Elizabeth Currid-Halkett presents the first rigorous exploration of celebrity, arguing that our desire to "celebrate" some people and not others has profound implications, elevating social statuses, making or breaking careers and companies, and generating astronomical dividends. Tracing the phenomenon from the art world to tabletop gaming conventions to the film industry, Currid-Halkett looks at celebrity as an expression of economics, geography (both real and virtual), and networking strategies.Starstruck brings together extensive statistical research and analysis, along with interviews with top agents and publicists, YouTube executives, major art dealers and gallery directors, Bollywood players, and sports experts. Laying out the enormous impact of the celebrity industry and identifying the patterns by which individuals become stars, Currid-Halkett successfully makes the argument that celebrity is an important social phenomenon and a driving force in the worldwide economy.
Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man's open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville's Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville's nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831-32, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America.Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war.Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville's Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.
A searing novel about two friends on opposite sides of the law, from the author of Rust and Bone, "a writer of immense power" (Peter Straub)On the Canadian side of Niagara Falls, life beyond the tourist trade isn't easy. Locals like Duncan Diggs and Owen Stuckey have few chances to leave. For Duncan, that means shift work on a production line. For Owen, it means pinning it all on a shot at college basketball. But they should know better; they've been unlucky before. As boys, they were abducted and abandoned in the woods. Though they made it out alive, the memory of that time won't fade. Over the years they drift apart, but when Duncan is drawn into a chaotic world of bare-knuckle fighting and other shady dealings, Owen, now a cop, can't look the other way any longer. Together, they'll be forced to survive the wilderness once more as their friendship is pushed to the limit in Cataract City, a white-hot novel by the rising star Craig Davidson.
The gripping and revelatory story of the dramatic race to merge the human brain with machinesLeading neuroscience researchers are racing to unlock the secrets of the mind. On the cusp of decoding brain signals that govern motor skills, they are developing miraculous technologies that will enable paraplegics and wounded soldiers to move prosthetic limbs and will give all of us the power to manipulate computers and other objects through thought alone. These fiercely competitive scientists are vying for government and venture capital funding, prestige, and wealth.Part life-altering cure, part science fiction, part Defense Department dream, these cutting-edge brain-computer interfaces promise to improve lives--but they also hold the potential to augment soldiers' combat capabilities. In The Brain Electric, Malcolm Gay follows the dramatic emergence of these technologies, taking us behind the scenes in operating rooms, startups, and research labs, where the future is unfolding. With access to many of the field's top scientists, Gay illuminates this extraordinary race--where science, medicine, profit, and war converge--for the first time. But this isn't just a story about technology. At the heart of the scientists' research is a group of brave patient-volunteers, whose lives are given new meaning through these experiments. The Brain Electric asks us to rethink our relationship to technology, our bodies, even consciousness itself, challenging our assumptions about what it means to be human.
A dark, gripping coming-of-age tale that explores violence, friendship, family, and what it means to be a manSummer, Palermo, early 1980s. The air hangs hot and heavy. The Mafia-ruled city is a powder keg ready to ignite. In a boxing gym, a fatherless nine-year-old boy climbs into the ring to face his first opponent.So begins On Earth as It Is in Heaven, a sweeping multigenerational saga that reaches back to the collapse of the Italian front in North Africa and forward to young Davidù's quest to become Italy's national boxing champion, a feat that has eluded the other men of his family.But Davide Enia, whose layered, lyrical, nonchronological novel caused a sensation when it was published in Italy in 2012, has crafted an epic that soars in miniature as well. The brutal struggles for dominance among Davidù's all male circle of friends; his strict but devoted grandmother, whose literacy is a badge of honor; his charismatic and manipulative great-uncle, who will become his trainer-the vicious scenes and sometimes unsympathetic characters Enia sketches land hard and true.On Earth as It Is in Heaven is both firmly grounded in what Leonardo Sciascia liked to call "Sicilitude" - the language and mentality of that eternally perplexing island - and devastatingly universal. A meditation on physical violence, love and sex, friendship and betrayal, boxing and ambition, Enia's novel is also a coming-of-age tale that speaks - sometimes crudely, but always honestly - about the joys and terrors of becoming a man.
"Scintillating and rather magical . . . House of Exile is an extraordinary book, and a really rare accomplishment." -Michael Hoffman, The Times Literary Supplement In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner, Nelly Kroeger, fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as Heinrich's family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks. In House of Exile, Heinrich and Nelly's story is crossed with others from their circle of friends, relatives, and contemporaries: Heinrich's brother, Thomas Mann; his sister, Carla; their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth; and, beyond them, the writers James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Evelyn Juers brings this generation of exiles to life with tremendous poignancy and imaginative power. In train compartments, ship cabins, and rented rooms, the Manns clung to what was left to them-their bodies, their minds, and their books-in a turbulent and self-destructive era.
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