“Pop-song scholar Emerson presents 81 such songs in their earliest incarnations in this neat collection, sorting them in categories that, used in their heyday, still make sense: Plantation Melodies, Parlor Songs, Drinking and Temperance Songs…
“You have to hand it to a writer willing to attack the big questions head on, and to embed those questions in the story of small-town America, and then surround it all in the grandeur of the grandeur of America, and then abase some of its…
The Civil War’s greatest general as you’ve never seen him before, in a revealing collection of letters to his wife Julia
The first and only comprehensive collection of May Swenson’s poetry ever published
“In these essays, James illuminated his own writing process and the ideals he cherished as a novelist: his love of exactitude; his conviction that a story should be coherent in form, as organic as a living creature; his passionate belief…
A first-of-its-kind celebration of the newspaper scribes who immortalized the most memorable moments in sports | With a foreword by Charles P. Pierce
“Jack London used to like to eat raw-meat sandwiches, and he sometimes fancied himself a ‘blood beast’ rampaging through life. . . . Alaska in winter made him as a writer. The Klondike was where the ‘cold of space smot…
“We now see two things clearly that were not clear before: One is that Philip Roth is America’s greatest living novelist; the other is that, taken in sequence, his fictions constitute a landmark in the history of literary…
“I recently reread The Street and I just can’t figure out why this work is not more widely read and celebrated. After such a stunning reception in the 1940s, why hasn’t this novel become a college staple? . . . Maybe a better questio…