Heart, you bully, you punk

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Padgett Powell

Aliens of Affection marks new territory for Padgett Powell, picking up where his first collection of stories, Typical, left off. Although his characters continue to revolt against the received instructions of modern American living - refusing to be dunked in what Saul Bellow has called the "marinade of correctness" - their concerns are less for independence than for the maintenance of sanity itself. Emotional estrangement seems both inevitable and worth fighting against to the middle-aged heroine of the O. Henry prizewinner "Trick or Treat"; to the unmistakably American roofer of "Wayne" (who was introduced in Typical); to the deserted husband, father, and non-vet of "Dump"; and to the fantastic heroes in three stories grouped as "All Along the Watchtower."

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William Packard

Poet, novelist, scholar, translator, playwright, and teacher, William Packard has known every side of a writer's life. As founder and editor of The New York Quarterly, a national magazine devoted to the craft of poetry, he reads some 50,000 poems each year--most of them sadly deficient in sound, metrics, form, voice, and quality. This book is written to help poets address the central concerns of their craft and art. Lively, inspiring, opinionated, and sometimes curmudgeonly, The Art of Poetry Writing covers a broad range of topics, both technical and personal, that all poets need to consider: poetic devices and diction, verse forms and free verse, rhyme and metrics, creative vision and revision, the benefits and problems of workshops and writing classes, 30 writing challenges to develop form and style and technique, when to seek publication--and when not to, what to read while writing, the life of the poet, including keeping a journal, giving readings, applying for grants, and more. Remarks by and excerpts from the work of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Dickinson, Yeats, Auden, Stevens, Moore, Thomas, Ginsberg, Sexton, Plath, Dickey, Bukowski, Ashbery, and dozens of other poets make this an essential companion for students, teachers, and anyone who writes or reads poetry.

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William Trevor

"The Hill Bachelors contains a dozen new stories, set mostly but not entirely in Ireland.". "In 'Three People', an ageing father waits for the proposal for his daughter that will never come from the man who once told a lie to save her; in 'Against the Odds', a con-woman who has plied her trade across the entire Six Counties fixes this time on a widower in a small inland town; and in the poignant title-story, the youngest son returns for his father's funeral to the family hill farm to find it has become his unwelcome inheritance.". "William Trevor writes about the lonely and the sad, about those who have something to hide and those who barely have control over their lives."--BOOK JACKET.

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Rita Dove

A new collection by a much celebrated poet, former Poet Laureate of the United States Rita Dove. From the opening sequence, "Cameos," which probes the private griefs and dreams of a working-class family, to the emblematic grace of a living legend like Rosa Parks, who acquiesced to public life in order to "serve the public good," these poems explore the intersection of individual fates with the grand arc of history. If there are heroes, Dove maintains, they continually reinvent themselves, as each of us must do each morning.