Life at home and abroad during the Depression and during the war-torn 1940s is chronicled in this collection of nineteen essays published from 1933 to 1957 by TIME and Fortune magazines. Reprint.
For the first time in book form—a great writer’s classic celebration of the essence of Brooklyn. In 1939, James Agee was assigned to write an article on Brooklyn for a special issue of Fortune on New York City. The draft was rejected for “creative differences,” and remained unpublished until it appeared in Esquire in 1968 under the title “Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes.” Crossing the borough from the brownstone heights over the Brooklyn Bridge out through backstreet neighborhoods like Flatbush, Midwood, and Sheepshead Bay that roll silently to the sea, Agee captured in 10,000 remarkable words, the essence of a place and its people. Propulsive, lyrical, jazzy, and tender, its pitch-perfect descriptions endure even as Brooklyn changes; Agee’s essay is a New York classic. Resonant with the rhythms of Hart Crane, Walt Whitman, and Thomas Wolfe, it takes its place alongside Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City as a great writer’s love-song to Brooklyn and alongside E. B. White’s Here Is New York as an essential statement of the place so many call home. James Agee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1909. One of the great prose stylists of the past century, Agee wrote in many forms—poetry, short stories, novels, essays, commentary, and criticism. In 1958 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Death in the Family, and he also wrote the classic account of poor Southern farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, accompanied by Walker Evans’s documentary photographs. With John Huston, he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for The African Queen, and he was an influential film and theater critic for Time and The Nation. James Agee died in 1955 of a heart attack in a New York City taxicab. In the fall of 2005, the Library of America will publish a two-volume collection of his writings. Jonathan Lethem’s novels include Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, his most recent book is The Disappointment Artist. Lethem was born and raised in Brooklyn, where he still lives.
A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression. The book shattered journalistic and literary conventions. Critic Lionel Trilling called it the “most realistic and most important moral effort of our American generation.” The origins of Agee and Evans’s famous collaboration date back to an assignment for Fortune magazine, which sent them to Alabama in the summer of 1936 to report a story that was never published. Some have assumed that Fortune’s editors shelved the story because of the unconventional style that marked Famous Men, and for years the original report was presumed lost. But fifty years after Agee’s death, a trove of his manuscripts turned out to include a typescript labeled “Cotton Tenants.” Once examined, the pages made it clear that Agee had in fact written a masterly, 30,000-word report for Fortune. Published here for the first time, and accompanied by thirty of Walker Evans’s historic photos, Cotton Tenants is an eloquent report of three families struggling through desperate times. Indeed, Agee’s dispatch remains relevant as one of the most honest explorations of poverty in America ever attempted and as a foundational document of long-form reporting. As the novelist Adam Haslett writes in an introduction, it is “a poet’s brief for the prosecution of economic and social injustice.”
“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.” James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the campus of St. Andrew’s, an Episcopal boarding school near Sewanee. There, Agee met Father James Harold Flye, who would become his history teacher. Though Agee was just ten, the two struck up an unlikely and enduring friendship, traveling Europe by bicycle and exchanging letters for thirty years, from Agee’s admission to Exeter Academy to his death at forty-five. The intimate letters, collected by Father Flye after Agee’s death, form the most intimate portrait of Agee available, a starkly revealing account of the internal and external life of a tortured twentieth-century genius. Agee candidly shares his struggles with depression, professional failure, and a tumultuous personal life that included three wives and four children. First published in 1962, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye followed the rediscovery of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and the posthumous publication of A Death in the Family, which won the 1958 Pulitzer Prize and became a hit Broadway play and film. The collection sold prolifically throughout the 1960s and ’70s in mass-market editions as a new generation of readers discovered the deep talents of the writer Dwight Macdonald called “the most broadly gifted writer of our American generation.”
In addition to producing such distinguished literary works as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and A Death in the Family, James Agee spent almost two decades of his professional career in journalism, primarily as an anonymous staff writer for the Henry Luce magazines Fortune and Time. At Fortune, especially, Agee excelled in pointed, bemused reporting on American life that embraced a wide range of topics, from cockfighting to the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg to the ambitious programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority. What is arguably his most celebrated Fortune piece, “The Great American Roadside,” remains a remarkably prescient account of the ways in which the automobile was transforming America's economic landscape and cultural sensibility. This book, the second volume in The Works of James Agee series, recovers for modern readers the remarkable breadth and depth of Agee's reportage, beginning with his apprenticeship writings for student publications at Exeter and Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s and concluding with his last book review (of a Dylan Thomas screenplay), written in 1953 for the New York Times. Also included are two posthumously published pieces—the Whitmanesque “Brooklyn Is” and a meditation on news photography and race relations, “'America! Look at Your Shame!'”—as well as unpublished articles, book reviews, and rough drafts and notes that yield unique insight into theauthor's complex writing process. (Excluded from this volume but scheduled for a later one is Agee's much-heralded film criticism.) To say that Agee was ambivalent about journalism is an understatement: in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he famously denounced it as “a broad and successful form of lying.” Yet, in his unsigned labors on behalf of the Luce empire and in various other assignments, Agee seized opportunities to hone his craft and exercise his acute powers of observation—work that would serve him well as he undertook the kind of passionate and deeply personal writing that would secure his reputation.
Introduction: An invention without a future -- Part 1. Issues -- Authorship, auteurism, and cultural politics -- The reign of adaptation -- Notes on acting in cinema -- Imitation, eccentricity, and impersonation in movie acting -- The death and rebirth of rhetoric -- Part 2. Authors, actors, adaptations -- Hawks, Chandler, Bogart, Bacall: The big sleep -- Uptown folk: blackness and entertainment in Cabin in the sky -- Hitchcock and humor -- Hitchcock at the margins of noir -- Spies and lovers: North by Northwest -- Welles, Hollywood, and Heart of darkness -- Orson Welles and movie acting -- Welles and Kubrick: two forms of exile -- The treasure of the Sierra Madre -- The return of the dead -- Part 3. In defense of criticism -- James Agee -- Manny Farber -- Andrew Sarris -- Jonathan Rosenbaum -- Years as a critic: 2007-2010.
“The ultimate literary bucket list.” —THE WASHINGTON POST Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that’s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children’s books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this. But it’s not a proscriptive list of the “great works”—rather, it’s a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage. Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too. Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton. There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, “if you like this, you’ll like that” recommendations , and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading. “948 pages later, you still want more!” —THE WASHINGTON POST
The author develops a phenomenological theory of the social structure of immediate experience. At the heart of this study is a theory of habitual sensitivity that originates in the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and John Dewey. The author develops this theory as an alternative to Schutzs theory of taken-for-granted knowledge, which has had a pervasive influence on how phenomenology has been understood and applied within sociology. Each chapter expands on Ostrows claim that the world is inherently social, by virtue of the sensitivity that immerses us within it before it ever becomes an object of reflection.
Clive James presents the “prequel” to his celebrated Cultural Amnesia—forty-nine essays that form a cultural education in one brilliant volume. Six years after the much-heralded publication of Cultural Amnesia, Clive James presents his “prequel”—forty-nine essays that he has selected as the best of his half-century career. Originally appearing as As of This Writing, Cultural Cohesion examines the twisted cultural terrain of the twentieth century in one of the most accessible and cohesive volumes available. Divided into four sections—“Poetry,” “Fiction and Literature,” “Culture and Criticism,” and “Visual Images”—James comments on poets like W. H. Auden and Phillip Larkin, novelists like D. H. Lawrence and Raymond Chandler (not to mention Judith Krantz!), and filmmakers like Fellini and Bogdanovich. Throughout, James delights his readers with his manic energy and critical aplomb. This volume, featuring a new introduction, is a one-volume cultural education that few recent books can rival.
James Dickey's creativity as a poet is well known. But there have been few opportunities for his readers to become familiar with the full dimensions of his mind, with the thoughts and perceptions that lie just outside the matter of his poetry. Sorties brings together the contents of a journal kept by Dickey for several years and six discerning essays on poetry and the creative process. The journal follows Dickey's mind as it alights on a wide array of topics, ranging from the work of his colleagues to the plotting of a new novel, from the onset of old age to pride over accomplishments in archery and guitar playing. Dickey can be blunt in his opinions, as when he states that "a second-rate writer like Norman Mailer will sit around wondering what on earth it is that Hemingway had that Mailer might possibly be able to get." But the journal also reveals a great capacity for sympathy, as when Dickey tells of his father's long illness, and a revealing candor--"I am Lewis," he writes of his novel Deliverance, "every word is true." The journal is at its most revealing, however, when Dickey discusses the craft of poetry. "It is good for a poet to remember," he writes, "that the human mind, though in some ways very complicated, is in some others very simple." This awareness that poetry must understand the simplicities of human existence is a recurring concern for Dickey, and he writes with disdain of the "brilliant things" that too often clog poetry, the stale self-absorption that warps the perceptions of many poets. In the essays that make up the second part of the book, Dickey also focuses on poetry, exploring the relation of the poet to his works, the promise of a younger generation of poets, and the place of Theodore Roethke as the greatest American poet. Wide-ranging and acute, Sorties opens up for the reader the discriminating mind that lies behind some of the most accomplished and memorable poetry written in America in this century.
In Volume I of this two-volume set, James A. Brown reports on and interprets decades of archaeological investigation at the Spiro Ceremonial Center, a major site along the Arkansas River in eastern Oklahoma. In Volume 2, he describes the archaeological collections in detail, covering burials, ceramics, stone tools, pipes, beads, textiles, ornaments, and animal bone. Foreword by James B. Griffin. Contributions by Alice M. Brues, Lyle W. Konigsberg, Paul W. Parmalee, and David H. Stansbery.
Green chemistry has progressed from being a driver for change in the chemical and allied industries to being a critical part of chemical education at all levels. The future chemist must be able to practice their trade in the light of increasing concerns about waste and resources, the safety of chemicals in consumer products, and increasingly restrictive legislation. While there are green chemistry educational resources available including lectures and experiments as well as numerous books on green chemistry and major green chemical technologies, there is no "green equivalent" of a standard organic chemistry textbook Systematically covering a variety of well-known reactions that commonly feature in standard organic textbooks this book supplements and supports the standard organic chemistry texts. It highlights the main sustainability issues of classical and contemporary organic transformations and critically evaluates them within a metric of established Green Chemistry Principles noting where additional efforts are needed to improve their environmental footprint. Written by a team of expert authors with a multinational advisory board, this book is a fantastic resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students worldwide.
CHOSEN BY TIME MAGAZINE AS ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR "ONE HELLISHLY EXCITING RIDE." --Detroit Free Press The '50s are finished. Zealous young senator Robert Kennedy has a red-hot jones to nail Jimmy Hoffa. JFK has his eyes on the Oval Office. J. Edgar Hoover is swooping down on the Red Menace. Howard Hughes is dodging subpoenas and digging up Kennedy dirt. And Castro is mopping up the bloody aftermath of his new communist nation. "HARD-BITTEN. . . INGENIOUS. . . ELLROY SEGUES INTO POLITICAL INTRIGUE WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT." --The New York Times In the thick of it: FBI men Kemper Boyd and Ward Littell. They work every side of the street, jerking the chains of made men, street scum, and celebrities alike, while Pete Bondurant, ex-rogue cop, freelance enforcer, troubleshooter, and troublemaker, has the conscience to louse it all up. "VASTLY ENTERTAINING." --Los Angeles Times Mob bosses, politicos, snitches, psychos, fall guys, and femmes fatale. They're mixing up a molotov cocktail guaranteed to end the country's innocence with a bang. Dig that crazy beat: it's America's heart racing out of control. . . . "A SUPREMELY CONTROLLED WORK OF ART." --The New York Times Book Review
When Bill James published his original Historical Baseball Abstract in 1985, he produced an immediate classic, hailed by the Chicago Tribune as the “holy book of baseball.” Now, baseball's beloved “Sultan of Stats” (The Boston Globe) is back with a fully revised and updated edition for the new millennium. Like the original, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is really several books in one. The Game provides a century's worth of American baseball history, told one decade at a time, with energetic facts and figures about How, Where, and by Whom the game was played. In The Players, you'll find listings of the top 100 players at each position in the major leagues, along with James's signature stats-based ratings method called “Win Shares,” a way of quantifying individual performance and calculating the offensive and defensive contributions of catchers, pitchers, infielders, and outfielders. And there's more: the Reference section covers Win Shares for each season and each player, and even offers a Win Share team comparison. A must-have for baseball fans and historians alike, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is as essential, entertaining, and enlightening as the sport itself.
In The One Voice of James Dickey, Gordon Van Ness skillfully documents James Dickey's growth from a callow teen interested primarily in sports to a mature poet who possessed literary genius and who deliberately advanced himself and his career. The letters from 1942 through 1969 depict Dickey gradually establishing a self-identity, deciding to write, struggling to determine a subject matter and style, working determinedly to gain initial recognition, and eventually seeking out the literary establishment to promote himself and his views on poetry. The letters also portray a complex personality with broad interests, acute intelligence, and heightened imagination as well as a deep need to re-create his past and assume various roles in the present." "From Dickey's extensive correspondence, Van Ness has selected not only those letters that best reveal the chronological development of Dickey's career and his conscious efforts to chart its course, but also those that portray his other interests and depict the various features of his personality. The letters are grouped by decade, with each period placed in perspective by a critical introduction. The introductory sections offer a psychological understanding of Dickey's personality by identifying the needs and fears that affected his actions. They also explain the American literary and cultural scene that Dickey confronted as he matured. Together, the letters and commentary yield a sense of Dickey's complex personality - both the man as a writer and the writer as a man - while arguing that he remained "one voice."" "Because how a writer writes - the appearance of a writer's words on a page - makes a statement, the letters are reproduced here without alterations. There are no silent deletions or revisions; the original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Dickey's letters gathered in The One Voice of James Dickey portray a poet's consciousness, chronicling its growth and revealing its breadth. They do not contain the whole truth, but they are what we have."--Jacket.
America was never innocent." Thus begins the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy. It's James Ellroy's pop history of the 1960s, his window-peeper's view of government misconduct, his dirty trickster's take on the great events of an incendiary era. It's a tour de force of the American idiom, and an acknowledged masterpiece. American Tabloid gives us Jack Kennedy's ride, seen from an insider's perspective. We're there for the rigged 1960 election. We're there for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. We're the eyes and ears and souls of three rogue cops who've signed on for the ride and come to see Jack as their betrayer. We're Jack's pimps and hatchet men, and we're there for that baroque slaying in Dallas. The Cold Six Thousand takes us from Dallas to Vietnam to Memphis to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. We're rubbing shoulders with RFK and MLK, calamitous klansmen, noted mafiosi. We're forced to relive the American sixties--and we come away breathless. The first two books of the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy revisit the most anarchic decade in our history. They are defined by their brutal linguistic flair and reckless panache.
Between 1600 and 1800 around 4,000 Catholic women left England for a life of exile in the convents of France, Flanders, Portugal and America. These closed communities offered religious contemplation and safety, but also provided an environment of concentrated female intellectualism. The nuns’ writings from this time form a unique resource.
This will help us customize your experience to showcase the most relevant content to your age group
Please select from below
Login
Not registered?
Sign up
Already registered?
Success – Your message will goes here
We'd love to hear from you!
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.