Product Description: A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014Best New Fiction of May 2014, Typographical EraAlternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman...read more

Literary Nonfiction. This is an inspiring book about writing and—more unusually—a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action despite every kind of obstacle. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition's adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote: obsession. Ultimately Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as "a good secret" for our time, when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat.

Product Description: Fiction. Off the coast of the small town of Truror is an island steeped in local legend, a place once home to mysterious religious orders and apocryphal lost settlements ... a place that seems, in the right fog, to lift right out of the water and fly...read more

Product Description: Much of our strongest poetry that learned its lessons from early modernism lives by its defensive measures, that is, by means of reversing, inverting, and challenging in covert ways a dominant perceptual mode. Defensive Measures explores strategies by which poets claim their distinctiveness, and argues that poetry is the one literary form that most insistently demands a defense...read more

Product Description: In Civilian Histories, her fourth book of poetry, Lee Upton portrays contemporary culture as the many-eyed, monstrous argus, and explores the common gestures between people and among cultures that constitute “foreign relations.” Formally ambitious, ranging from short, allusive lyrics to long, intricately patterned sequences, Upton’s poems reflect on complicity in and vulnerability to violence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: In her most ambitious collection of poems to date, Lee Upton extends and deepens her experiments with perception and language.Drawn into the orbit of her poems are multiple figurations--a Dante-inspired guide and a Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, Hamlet's Gertrude, and Lewis Carroll's Alice--and Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter, Louise Bogan, and Sylvia Plath...read more

Product Description: This study of Garrigue reappraises the career of this distinguished poet by focusing on her central motifs.

Poems examine the connections between memory and facts, the passage of time, the pressures of love, and the alienation of daily life