The strength of poetry

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Willard Spiegelman

"Willard Spiegelman is considered one of the finest critics of poetry writing today. This volume collects his best work on the subject, offering essays that span his entire career and chart his changing relationship to an elusive form. With his trademark perfect pitch, in engaging and stylish prose, Spiegelman takes readers on a tour of the diverse landscape of British, American, and Latin poetry, as he provides nuanced, insightful readings of works by our greatest poets." "Ultimately, Imaginative Transcripts is less a survey of a field than a reflection of one man's literary interests and tastes. It is also an impassioned argument in favor of keeping the close reading of poetry, both in and out of the classroom, at the heart of a literary education."--Jacket.

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P.D. James

In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James--one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today--gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie ("arch-breaker of rules"), Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they've created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky's sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction--and of the detective hero--in recent years.There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.From the Hardcover edition.

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Steven Watson

From New York to San Francisco, Texas, Mexico, and beyond, the fascinating group of maverick poets and writers known as the Beats lived a life of wild experimentation, rebelling against the buttoned-up conformity of the 1950s. With text accompanied by more than one hundred photographs, The Birth of the Beat Generation brings their rebellion into sharp focus, tracing the connections between such figures as William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke to reveal the legend that would make them into cultural icons.

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Herbert C. Morton

The publication of Webster's Third New International Dictionary in 1961 set off a storm of controversy both in the popular press and in scholarly journals that was virtually unprecedented in its scope and intensity. The New York Times ridiculed the new dictionary's alleged failure to label slang in a now-famous editorial that began, "A passel of double-domes at the G. & C. Merriam Company joint in Springfield, Mass., have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years...and now they have finalized...a new edition of a swell and esteemed book.". The attack was joined by Life magazine, the Saturday Review, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and other magazines and newspapers across the country. Critics charged that Webster's Third had abandoned its responsibility to uphold standards of good English and that it would encourage permissiveness in the teaching of English. Rejoinders by the dictionary's editor, Philip Babcock Gove, and sympathetic journalists and scholars had little effect. Herbert Morton tells the story from the beginning, drawing on new sources: Gove's papers, the files of the publisher, and interviews with former staff members and participants in the controversy. He describes how the Third Edition was planned and put together by Gove, where it went astray, and how it was misunderstood and misinterpreted by its detractors. Later assessments showed that its flaws were exaggerated. It has come to be regarded by virtually all language experts as one of the great dictionaries of our time. This is a very human story as well as the first full account of an extraordinary episode in the annals of lexicography. The issues it brought to the fore are still alive and will be of interest to all those fascinated by the English language and by how it is recorded in our dictionaries.