The birth of the beat generation

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Chelsea Blackbird and Barney Nelson

Celebrated and controversial author Mary Austin (1866-1934) lived in and wrote about her beloved Southwest, a place that has shaped and been shaped by three distinctive groups: Indian, Spanish, and Anglo. Austin discovered in the Southwest that these cultures blended languages, races, and religions, creating what she believed were unique versions of Catholicism, nature worship, ceremonies, and visions. Those beliefs worked their way through her literary criticism, leading her to ground-breaking ideas of place-based influences, narrative techniques, and dramatic development. In Mary Austin?s Southwest, editors Blackbird and Nelson shine light on Austin?s work, revealing her to be a significant trailblazer for literary diversity. With thoughtful introductions to selected writings on Austin?s prose, drama, and poetry as well as an annotated checklist of her published Southwestern literary criticism, this collection is a celebration of a rich mixed heritage as expressed through the written word.--Amazon.com.

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Derek Mahon

Derek Mahon, best known as a poet, worked as a freelance journalist for many years, and his first prose book brings together a selection of his feature articles, lectures and book reviews. Some of these, like the essays on MacNeice and Beckett, Brian Moore and J.G. Farrell, are seriously 'literary' in nature; while others, like the reports from Coleraine, Rome and Los Angeles, are more discursive and relaxed, if not downright mischievous.

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Giannalberto Bendazzi

"... Its encyclopedic style will find it a place in the library of everyone interested in the subject." — Kirkus Reviews. "Enthusiastically recommended as both a fascinating story and an incredible reference resource for both scholars and aficionados of the art of film." —Choice. "Although animation has finally begun to be thought worthy of serious attention, the spate of books on it in recent years has focused primarily on commercial Hollywood animation. Bendazzi ambitiously attempts to fill the gap. He covers more than a century's worth of animation, from the 1888 th{‚}e{ƒ}atre optique (a device for projecting moving painted images that predates motion picture pioneers Edison and Lumi{Š}ere) to today's cutting edge computer-animation technology. He covers American animation, of course, but also describes developments in more than 70 other countries, in many of which animation emerged more as an art form than a box office draw. His work is not without shortcomings: the writing (the translation, anyway) is occasionally awkward, and despite or because of its exhaustive depth and scholarly approach, the text seldom conveys the delightfulness that makes the best cartoons so compelling. Carping aside, this valuable effort, already well received in France and Italy, promises to be the basic reference on its subject for some time to come." -- Gordon Flagg , Booklist review.

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W.G. Sebald

W.G. Sebald completed this extraordinary and important -- and already controversial -- book before his untimely death in December 2001. On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things -- such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF -- too terrible to bear. But rather than record the crises about them, writers sought to retrospectively justify their actions under the Nazis. For Sebald, this is an example of deliberate cultural amnesia; his analysis of its effects in and outside Germany has already provoked angry and painful debate. Sebald's incomparable novels are rooted in meticulous observation; his essays are novelistic. They include his childhood recollections of the war that spurred his horror at the collective amnesia around him. There are moments of black humour and, throughout, the unmatched sensitivity of Sebald's intelligence. This book is a vital study of suffering and forgetting, of the morality hidden in artistic decisions, and of both compromised and genuine heroics.From the Hardcover edition.