Product Description: Through a collection of challenging but humorous essays, grounded in personal experience, observation and anecdote, Ziauddin Sardar analyzes the key characteristics of the embryonic 21st century. From advertising to zapping, sex to shopping, toys to hype, The A to Z of Postmodern Life explores the ideas, products, artifacts and “-isms” that shape the undefined, but ever encompassing, global culture...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: On August 18, 1941, Orwell joined the BBC’s Overseas Service as Talks Producer for features, talks and commentaries on the war. He wrote at least 220 items for broadcast to India and to occupied Malaya and Indonesia.

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Product Description: A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation.In this fourth collection of reflections on writing and the writing life, the late William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

The noted critic offers a collection of his poetry, film, culture, and fiction criticism, ranging from 1967-2001, including forty-nine witty essays on Judith Krantz, James Agee, Fellini, D. H. Lawrence, W. H. Auden, and more. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Nature writing, as Thoreau knew, can be deeply subversive because it points to ways of living that diverge fundamentally from dominant attitudes. Thoreau would have welcomed these essays by America's most important nature writers, for in exploring our intrinsic relationship with the earth, they also consider our alienation from nature and how that alienation is manifested...read more

The latest offering in the Poets on Poetry series from acclaimed poet, critic, and National Endowment for the Arts' chairman Dana Gioia, Barrier of a Common Language collects essays on British poets and poetry spanning the past two decades. Gioia ignited a national debate on the relevance of poetry in 1991 when he published an essay in the Atlantic titled "Can Poetry Matter?" The essay was expanded into a book of the same name and went on to become one of the best-selling books of contemporary poetry criticism in the 1990s. In Barrier of a Common Language Gioia addresses the current disconnect between British and American poetry, the result of America's growing postwar self-sufficiency in its intellectual concerns and concomitant patronizing attitude toward Britain. Writes Gioia, "Today . . . most American readers are not only unfamiliar with current British poetry, but modestly proud of the fact. They do not dissemble, but urbanely flourish their ignorance as an indisputable sign of discrimination." Whether British poetry ever regains the importance in Anglo-American literary traditions it had fifty years ago, Gioia believes, will depend on the quality of service it receives from critics, poets, editors, and anthologists who alone can make it accurately heard and understood. Poet, critic, and acclaimed author of Can Poetry Matter? Dana Gioia is one of America's leading contemporary men of letters. Winner of the American Book Award, Gioia is internationally recognized for his role in reviving rhyme, meter, and narrative in contemporary poetry.

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The college version of The Best American Essays, Fourth Edition, is a collection of essays for first-year composition courses, loosely arranged by broad aims of discourse, including narrative, informative, and argumentative essays. In addition to its rhetorical organization, the reader also offers flexibility for instructors who prefer a thematic or alphabetical organization. The editor introduces students to various types of essays, followed by commentary from well-known writers on such subjects as "Essayists Must Tell the Truth" and "Essays Are Not Scientific Documents."

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Product Description: From news coverage of world-shaping events such as the crisis and war in Kosovo to critical analysis of the domestic political scene, this book covers the whole spectrum of current affair reportage by "The Times" in the year 2000, month by month...read more

Product Description: In 1858, 600 blacks moved from San Francisco north to the colonies that would eventually become British Columbia (B.C.), Canada. The move was in part initiated by an invitation penned by the governor of the British colonies, James Douglas, who is commonly believed to have had African ancestry, a rumor he neither confirmed nor denied...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

A leading poet discusses the role of poetry in creating narrative in a series of powerful, informative essays--including 'Where Poems Take Place,' 'A Shared Humanity,' and 'The Primal Storyteller'--about the capacity of poetry to tell stories. Simultaneous. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Coleridge is such a celebrity that many who have never read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" have a fair idea who he was, and yet the common impression of him is not flattering. He is typically seen as a youthful genius transformed by drugs and philosophy into a tedious sage...read more

In a collection of interviews, fifteen National Book Award winners and finalists examine the profound relationship between reading and writing and describe the book that has had the most influence on his or her life.

Product Description: Breakfast Served Any Time All Day collects forty years of writings on poetry in one essential volume by master of American letters Donald Hall.Praise for Breakfast Served:". . . the essays in this book are engaging, passionate, strange, and unified...read more

Product Description: This is a prose poem about reading - a playful, epigrammatic nocturne upon the dream-state one falls into when lost in a book, and the uncanny, trancelike pleasure of making silent marks on paper utter sounds inside one's head. A meditation on reading, the book goes both far and deep, resisting easy summary and classification...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In 1991, Dana Gioia's provocative essay "Can Poetry Matter?" was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and received more public response than any other piece in the magazine's history. In his book, Gioia more fully addressed the question: Is there a place for poetry to be part of modern American mainstream culture? Ten years later, the debate is as lively and heated as ever...read more