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Language & Literature Poetry, essays, humor, etc. Summer 2018
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More than true : the wisdom of fairy tales
by Robert Bly
The National Book Award-winning poet and author of the best-selling Iron John revisits a selection of enduring fairy tales, including "The Six Swans" and "The Frog Prince," to examine how they capture the essence of human nature.
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Jane and Dorothy : A True Tale of Sense and Sensibility; the Lives of Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth
by Marian Veevers
Jane Austen and Dorothy Wordsworth were born just four years apart, in the 1770s, in a world torn between heady revolutionary ideas and fierce conservatism, and both were influenced by the Romantic ideals of Dorothy's brother, William Wordsworth, and his friends. This book compares their upbringing and education, home lives and loves and, above all, their emotional and creative worlds. Original insights include a new discovery of serious depression suffered by Dorothy Wordsworth, a new and crucial discovery about Dorothy and William's relationship, and a critical look at the myths surrounding the man who stole Jane's heart.
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Herding Cats
by Sarah Andersen
In a humorous collection of comics, the author, an introvert, shares her experiences, which are at times weird, awkward and embarrassing, as she tries adulting on a daily basis.
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Have Dog, Will Travel : A Poet's Journey
by Stephen Kuusisto
A blind poet describes how being laid off from his job as a small college town professor led him into acquiring his first guide dog and how it changed his life and gave him a newfound appreciation for travel and independence.
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Camp Austen : my life as an accidental Jane Austen superfan
by Ted Scheinman
The senior editor of Pacific Standard magazine traces his upbringing as the son of a devoted Jane Austen scholar whose education was marked by literary tributes and his own contributions as the organizer of UNC-Chapel Hill's Jane Austen Summer Camp, where devotees engage in study and roleplaying.
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Neruda : the poet's calling
by Mark Eisner
Vividly describes the life of the intriguing and influential Chilean poet, bringing together his powerful poetry, his involvement in politics and his tumultuous personal life into a compelling narrative that also enlightens understanding of his work.
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The Library : A Catalogue of Wonders
by Stuart Kells
From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of Middle Earth and other fictional libraries, Kells explores the bookish places that capture our imaginations. The result is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as places of beauty and wonder, a celebration of books as objects and an account of the deeply personal nature of these hallowed spaces.
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See what can be done : essays, criticism, & commentary
by Lorrie Moore
A treasury of more than 50 prose pieces by the cultural commentator and author of Bark reviews the literary achievements of her contemporaries, sharing perspectives on subjects ranging from the art of writing fiction and the historical imagination to terrorism and the continuing unequal state of race in America
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The Displaced : Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Published in support of the International Rescue Committee and edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, a collection searing personal essays by prominent international refugees shares candid reflections on the Trump administration's 2017 executive order to limit or ban Muslim refugees from America.
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Sharp : the women who made an art of having an opinion
by Michelle Dean
The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men who often undervalued or dismissed their work. Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps, change the world.
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Air traffic : a memoir of ambition and manhood in America
by Gregory Pardlo
"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, his first work of prose: a deeply felt memoir of a family's bonds and a meditation on race, addiction, fatherhood, ambition, and American culture The Pardlos were an average, middle-class African American family living in a New Jersey Levittown: charismatic Gregory Sr., an air traffic controller, his wife, and their two sons, bookish Greg Jr. and musical-talent Robbie. But when "Big Greg" loses his job after participating in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981, he becomes a disillusioned, toxic, looming presence in the household--and a powerful rival for young Greg. While Big Greg succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money, Greg Jr. rebels--he joins a boot camp for prospective Marines,follows a woman to Denmark, drops out of college again and again, and yields to alcoholism. Years later, he falls for a beautiful, no-nonsense woman named Ginger and becomes a parent himself. Then, he finally grapples with the irresistible yet ruinous legacy of masculinity he inherited from his father. In chronicling his path to recovery and adulthood--Gregory Pardlo gives us a compassionate, loving ode to his father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating-yet-redemptive ties of family, as well as a scrupulous, searing examination of how African American manhood is shaped by contemporary American life"
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The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables : The Enchanting Island That Inspired L. M. Montgomery
by Catherine Reid
Anne of Green Gables is a bestselling classic, and the inspiration behind the new Netflix hit Anne with an E. Fans of both will delight in the beautiful pages of The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables as they discover how L. M. Montgomery’s deep connection to the landscapes of Prince Edward Island inspired her to write the beloved series. From the Lake of Shining Waters and the Haunted Wood to Lover’s Lane, readers will be immersed in the real places immortalized in the novel. Using Montgomery’s journals, archives, and scrapbooks, Catherine Reid explores the many similarities between Montgomery and her unforgettable heroine, Anne Shirley. The lush package includes Montgomery’s hand-colorized photographs, the illustrations originally used in Anne of Green Gables, and contemporary and historical photography.
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Look alive out there : essays
by Sloane Crosley
A latest collection of essays by the award-winning author of I Was Told There'd Be Cake shares her trademark, laugh-out-loud observations on subjects ranging from scaling active volcanoes and crashing shivas to assisted fertility and playing herself on Gossip Girl
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Planet Funny : How Comedy Took over Our Culture
by Ken Jennings
In Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. Entertaining, astounding, and completely head-scratching, Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.
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Life in the Garden
by Penelope Lively
From the Booker Prize winner and national bestselling author, reflections on gardening, art, literature, and life Penelope Lively takes up her key themes of time and memory, and her lifelong passions for art, literature, and gardening in this philosophical and poetic memoir. From the courtyards of her childhood home in Cairo to a family cottage in Somerset, to her own gardens in Oxford and London, Lively conducts an expert tour, taking us from Eden to Sissinghurst and into her own backyard, traversing the lives of writers like Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin while imparting her own sly and spare wisdom. "Her body of work proves that certain themes never go out of fashion," writes the New York Times Book Review, as true of this beautiful volume as of the rest of the Lively canon. Now in her eighty-fourth year, Lively muses, "To garden is to elide past, present, and future; it is a defiance of time.
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The Witch Doesn't Burn in This One
by Amanda Lovelace
A collection of evocative, relatable poems by the author of the princess saves herself in this one draws inspiration from the power, independence and resilience of the feminist witch archetype to encourage and embolden women to take control of their own stories. By the author of The Princess Saves Herself in This One.
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Wade in the Water : Poems
by Tracy K. Smith
A Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, using her signature voice--inquisitive, lyrical and wry--mulls over what it means to be a citizen, a mother and an artist in a culture arbitrated by wealth, men and violence, boldly tying America's modern moment both to our nation's fraught founding history and to a sense of the spirit, the everlasting.
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Tropic of Squalor : Poems
by Mary Karr
A new volume of poetry from the New York Times bestselling and esteemed author of The Liar’s Club and Lit. Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral and deeply felt and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous—that mystery some of us hope towards in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power—illness, death, love’s agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you’re an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness.
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