This rueful, riveting, piercingly funny (Julia Cameron) book is about mothering a Down syndrome child that opts for sass over sap, and it's a small masterpiece of heavenly visions and inexplicable phenomena that's as down-to-earth as anyone could ask for. View More...
AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINAL Virginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm "the prince" of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his "whim of iron" and "cleverness amounting to genius," while Beerbohm himself noted that "only the insane take themselves quite seriously." From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until he put his pen aside in the aftermath of World War II, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own. Here Phillip Lopate, one of the finest essayists of our day, has selected the finest of Beerbohm's essays. Wheth... View More...
Focusing on the big picture as well as the crucial details, Bell examines twelve stories by both established writers (including Peter Taylor, Mary Gaitskill, and Carolyn Chute) and his own former students. A story's use of time, plot, character, and other elements of fiction are analyzed, and readers are challenged to see each story's flaws and strengths. Careful endnotes bring attention to the ways in which various writers use language. Bell urges writers to develop the habit of thinking about form and finding the form that best suits their subject matter and style. His direct and practical a... View More...
Gabriel Garc a M rquez (b. 1927) is a sophisticated literary artist with broad popularity. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. In 1982, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Conversations with Gabriel Garc a M rquez starts with the years of his early phenomenal success and continues through his most recent, turn-of-the-century exchanges. He speaks of his impoverished childhood, his life as an indifferent student, his apprenticeship as a journalist, the inspiration that led to the writing of his most renowned novel, the difficult... View More...
Hilaire Belloc was a poet, polemicist, and prose stylist without peer, but above all, an entire generation's mighty champion for the Catholic faith. He was a prolific historian who authored many important works such as How the Reformation Happened, Europe and the Faith, and The Crusades. View More...
Aims to study the age of Chaucer and the events that shaped his career, and to show how the age made the poet. It also pays considerable attention to the precise poetic means Chaucer used to produce his effects. View More...
"Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably. . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book." In these twelve deeply personal, connected essays, Bernard details the experience of growing up black in the south with a family name inherited from a white man, surviving a random stabbing at a New Haven coffee shop, marrying a white man from the North and bringing him home to her family, adopt... View More...
A collection of essays on agrarian living from the poet and author hailed as "America's greatest philosopher on sustainable life" (The Chicago Tribune).In A Continuous Harmony, renowned poet, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry makes an impassioned case for returning to a way of life Americans once lived on small family farms. The book's title is taken from an account by the American mountaineer Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. "It seemed to me," Horenbein wrote, "that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its... View More...
Unfortunately, on occasions too frequent and destructive to enumerate, the teachings of Christ have been either ignored or distorted by the very people calling themselves Christian. Whether directed towards social intolerance or attitudes of warlike aggression, these right-wing citizens have claimed a power of influence that far exceeds their numbers. Blessed Are the Peacemakers collects the sayings of Jesus, selected by Wendell Berry, who contributes an essay of introduction. This is a book of inspiration and prayerful compassion, a ringing call to action at a time when our country and the wo... View More...
Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry's caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. A progenitor of the slow food movement, Wendell Berry reminds us all to take the time to understand the basics of what we ingest. "Eating is an agriculture act," he writes. Indeed, we are all players in the food economy. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection that is e... View More...
"The courage of a book, it has been said, is that it looks away from nothing. Here is a brave book." ―The Charlotte Observer "Berry says that these recent essays mostly say again what he has said before. His faithful readers may think he hasn't, however, said any of it better before." ―Booklist (starred review) "His refusal to abandon the local for the global, to sacrifice neighborliness, community integrity, and economic diversity for access to Wal-Mart, has never seemed more appealing, nor his questions of personal accountability more powerful." ―Kirkus Reviews There ar... View More...
Includes 20 color plates of Hubbard's own paintings, along with several photographs of Anna and Harlan Hubbard. Wendell Berry is also the author of Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy. See other books in the series Blazer Lectures.
"Wherever we live, however we do so, we desperately need a prophet of responsibility; and although the days of the prophets seem past to many of us, Berry may be the closest to one we have. But, fortunately, he is also a poet of responsibility. He makes one believe that the good life may not only be harder than what we're used to but sweeter as well." ―The New York Review of Books In Home Economics, Berry explores this process and continues to discuss what it means to make oneself "responsibly at home." As he argues, a measure of the health of the planet is economics--the health of its ... View More...
"Berry's latest collection of essays is the reminiscence of a literary life. It is a book that acknowledges a lifetime of intellectual influences, and in doing so, positions Berry more squarely as a cornerstone of American literature . . . A necessary book. Here, Berry's place as the 'grandfather of slow food' or the 'prophet of rural living' is not questioned. This book ensures we understand the depth and breadth of Berry's art." ―San Francisco Chronicle " A] stellar collection . . . Foodies, architects, transportation engineers, and other writers are adopting and adapting Berry's] co... View More...
An impassioned and rigorous appeal for reconnection to the land and human feeling by one of America's most heartfelt and humble writers.When he accepted the invitation to deliver The Jefferson Lecture--our nation's highest honor for distinguished intellectual achievement--Wendell Berry decided to take on the obligation of thinking again about the problems that have engaged him throughout his long career. He wanted a fresh start, not only in looking at the groundwork of the problems facing our nation and the earth itself, but in gaining hope from some examples of repair and healing even in thes... View More...
Berry's gentlemanly prose is a velvet glove clothing a rather devastating critique of E.O. Wilson's Consilience, and its attempt to subsume all human knowledge and experience -- artistic and religious -- within an ''imperialistic materialism.'' Berry Brings together a sympathy with religious experience, intimacy with the natural order, and an easy literary genius to integrate the ''two cultures'' of science and the humanities when they should be integrated, and to separate them when they should be separated. We were tempted to start quoting him, but then realized that we would simply be reprin... View More...
"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization. But his insights are universal because Our Only World is filled with beautiful, compassionate writing and careful, profound thinking." --Associated Press The planet's environmental problems respect no national boundaries. From soil erosion and population displacement to climate change and failed energy policies, American governing classes are p... View More...
