Alternating Current’s annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history. Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you’ll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’...

The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture sheds light on how imaginary works of fiction, film, and television reflect, refract, and respond to the recessionary times specific to the twenty-first century, a sustained period of economic crisis that has earned the title the “Great Recession.” This collection takes as its focus “Bust Culture,” a concept that refers to post-crash popular culture, specifically the kind mass produced by multinational ...

This selection of poems by Leonard Cohen, one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters in the world, is accompanied by twenty-four of his striking and provocative drawings.Cohen first made his name as a poet more than half a century ago and since then his achievements in poetry and music have made him an internationally revered figure. These fifteen poems, including “Death of a Lady’s Man,” “On Hearing a Name Long Unspoken,” and “The Embrace,” are drawn from across his remarkable c...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first volume of new and selected poems in twelve years.“America’s favorite poet.”—The Wall Street Journal**Aimless Love combines fifty new poems with generous selections from his four most recent books—Nine Horses, The Trouble with Poetry, Ballistics, and Horoscopes for the Dead. Collins’s unmistakable voice, which brings to...

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she h...

“Esolen signals with this book his presence in the top rank of authors of cultural criticism.” —American SpectatorPlay dates, soccer practice, day care, political correctness, drudgery without facts, television, video games, constant supervision, endless distractions: these and other insidious trends in child rearing and education are now the hallmarks of childhood. As author Anthony Esolen demonstrates in this elegantly written, often wickedly fu...

Short offers the tradition and glorious present of these popular forms that stretch and defy genre. From 1500 to present, hundreds of pieces. Inventive, entertaining, and addictive.Short prose forms are elusive to define--one writer's prose poem is another's flash fiction or brief essay. Rather than quibble, Short opts for inclusiveness. Here is a dazzling array: 100s of pieces (under 1250 words) from 24 Western countries, written over five centur...

"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."--Booklist, starred reviewIn this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thic...

Alice Walker's first published book collects poems written as a student and on her first visit to AfricaFor readers seeking the origins of Alice Walker's potent, distinctive voice, this collection will provide ample insight. Composed while she was still a student at Sarah Lawrence College in the late 1960s, these poems are already engaged with some of the moral dilemmas that have defined Walker's entire career. Luminous vignettes from her first trip to Africa give ...

Beat Generation great Jack Kerouac traverses the vast landscape of American counterculture in this raucous and insightful collectionIn these collected articles, essays, and wild autobiographical tales, Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, leads readers down the highways and through the myriad subcultures of mid-twentieth-century America, guiding them along with his ingenious observations and brilliant command of language. He cruises to San Francisco high on...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon, "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" ( The Times Literary Supplement).Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay, finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, wher...

Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented collaboration, 80 poems had been co...