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"Stephen Adly Guirgis brings his prodigious gifts for exploring the lives of social outcasts to new heights in this play about the inner workings of a women's halfway house in New York City. In a shelter on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the unmoored residents struggle with addiction, abuse, mental illness, and neglect. Between daily therapy sessions, they clash with the staff and each other, form alliances, and fall in love. All the while, they live under constant threat that the place they call home may soon be shuttered at the behest of their wealthy neighbors. By turns harrowing, humorous, and heartbreaking, Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven roaringly brings to life the experiences of women who society has tried to shuffle out of sight and out of mind"-- Provided by publisher.

Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to "pass" for white, describes a journey through the strata of Black society-- from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. A complex and moving look at what it meant to forge an identity in a culture that recognized nothing but color.

• Dos and Crys
• A Texas expatriate
• A rover on the road
• Paris and Pamplona in the summer of 1924
• Love and duty
• Winter struggles, spring blues
• Crys makes a decision-Dos to the rescue
• Interlude in Paris-Strasbourg Loyalties-arrival stateside
• Madame Butterfly
• Two marriages
• C.R.D. on Hemingway and others; Dos Passos's women in Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.
• The unorthodox New Dealer and the unlikely Republican.

"Based on the correspondence between the two, this dual biography tells the love story between the novelist John Dos Passos and his fiancée Crystal Ross in the Paris of the 1920s"-- Provided by publisher.
"Soul Mates of the Lost Generation recovers for contemporary readers one of the last great collections of letters of the Jazz Age. It is the correspondence between the pioneering novelist John Dos Passos and a young woman named Crystal Ross, to whom he was engaged and who reveals herself as one of the truly daring, vivacious spirits of that extraordinary time. Before his passing in 2015, Ross's son, the esteemed literary scholar Lewis M. Dabney, completed a dual biography of the couple's time together based on this rare correspondence. The bulk of the letters were written between 1923 and 1928, during Dos Passos's first major creative period. The letters relate scenes from the pair's life in the rich culture of Paris in the 1920s and their association with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, and other figures of literary modernism. Engaged in 1924, Dos Passos and Ross often corresponded about their ongoing work and the work of others in Dos Passos's circle. Dos Passos introduced his fianče to Hemingway, and the couple accompanied him and other writers on an early trip to Pamplona, the setting of The Sun Also Rises, in which Ross makes a cameo appearance. This collection of never-before-seen letters offers rare insights into the life of the influential modernist author of Manhattan Transfer, The 42nd Parallel, and The Big Money, and into that of a remarkably independent, fascinating woman" -- Page 2 of cover.

"A young Indian woman falsely rumored to have killed her husband finds a way to make her unfortunate reputation surprisingly useful--but complications arise when other village women seek her help offing their husbands--in this provocative, razor-sharp debut. "The Bandit Queens heralds a prodigious and sophisticated literary talent." Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland. In the five years since her husband's disappearance, Geeta has become accustomed to a solitary life; you'd be surprised how difficult it is to make friends when your entire village believes you're a witch who murdered your husband. And since she can't convince anyone that she didn't murder him, she figures she might as well use her fearsome reputation to protect herself as a woman on her own. But when other women in the village decide that they, too, want to be "self-made" widows and rid themselves of their abusive husbands, Geeta's reputation becomes a double-edged sword--the very thing that's meant to keep her safe is now threatening everything she's built as she unwittingly becomes the go-to consultant for village husband-disposal. Unfortunately, Geeta finds that even the best-laid plans of would-be widows tend to go awry, and the women find themselves caught in a web of their own making--and long-estranged friendships will have to be re-formed if they hope to make it out of their mess alive. Acerbic, insightful, and full of dark humor, Parini Shroff's The Bandit Queens--with its unique combination of poignant social commentary and irreverence--is an absolutely unforgettable novel"-- Provided by publisher.

"Eighteen-year-old Shelley, born into a much-despised branch of the Zheng family in Yunnan Province and living in the shadow of his widowed father's grief, dreams of bigger things. Buoyed by an exuberant heart and his cousin Deng's tall tales about the United States, Shelley heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny, confident that any hurdles will be easily overcome by the awesome powers of the "Chinese groove," a belief in the unspoken bonds between countrymen that transcend time and borders"-- Provided by publisher.

"In the Soviet Union in 1973, there is perhaps no greater honor for a young girl than to be chosen to be part of the famed USSR gymnastics program. So when eight-year-old Anya is tapped, her family is thrilled. What is left of her family, that is. Years ago her mother disappeared. Anya's only confidant is her neighbor, an older woman who survived unspeakable horrors during her ten years in a Gulag camp--and who, unbeknownst to Anya, was also her mother's confidant and might hold the key to her disappearance. As Anya moves up the ranks of competitive gymnastics, and as other girls move down, Anya soon comes to realize that there is very little margin of error for anyone"-- Provided by publisher.

• Invisible to Whom? The Uncreated Consciousness of the Race
• The Golden Age, Time Past
• Personal Vision, Living Culture: Translating Politics into Art
• In the Shadow of Democracy
• Negro-Americanizing the Novel

With In the Shadow of Invisibility, Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. offers a long-overdue reconsideration of Ralph Ellison, examining the trajectory of his intellectual thought in relation to its resonances in twenty-first-century American culture. Bland charts Ellison's evolving attitudes on several central topics including democracy, race, identity, social community, place, and political expression. This compelling new exploration of Ellison's legacy stresses the perpetual need to reexamine the intersections of race, literature, and American culture, with particular attention to how the democratic principle has grown increasingly urgent in the nation's ongoing, and often contentious, conversations about race. Arguing that Ellison saw racial and social identity as being inseparable from the nation's past and its complicated history of racial anxiety, In the Shadow of Invisibility traces the growth and transformation of Ellison's ideas across his life and work, from his early apprentice writing that culminated in his groundbreaking first novel, Invisible Man, through the posthumous publication of his unfinished second novel, Three Days before the Shooting . . . Focused on his mythic vision of the promise of America, this book firmly situates Ellison in the sociopolitical environments from which his ideas arose, with close consideration of his published writings, including his influential essays on literature and jazz, as well as his working notes and correspondence. Bland foregrounds Ellison's thinking on the responsibilities of Black writers to examine democratic ideals, the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, and the impacts of civil rights movements. Interweaving biography, history, and literary criticism, and drawing from extensive archival research, In the Shadow of Invisibility reveals the extent to which Ellison's work exposes the contradictions inherent in American culture, arguing anew for the importance and immediacy of his writings in the broader context of American intellectual thought.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

David Jaffin is the world's busiest poet. As the title suggests, this volume was written in the days running up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, and engages with the author's life, meditations, thoughts about art, literature, friends and God during the run-up to day when troops crossed the border.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Foreword: Imagining Pauline Hopkins across time / John Cullen Gruesser
• Introduction: The expansive vision of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins / JoAnn Pavletich
• Texts and contexts. "Strun 'em up fer a eggsample to the res'": lynch law's rhetoric of exemplarity and Pauline E. Hopkins's contending forces / John Cyril Barton
• Pauline E. Hopkins's editorial rise and radical racial uplift in fiction publishing at the Colored American Magazine / Elizabeth J. Cali
• Literary and legal genres in Pauline Hopkins's Hagar's daughter: black testimony, the production of truth, and the regulation of property / Valerie Sirenko
• Intertexts. Intertextual transformations: Pauline E. Hopkins and Alice French [Octave Thanet] / Hanna Wallinger
• Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: nineteenth-century America's cultural stenographer / Karin L. Hooks
• "It's this cursed slavery that's to blame": nineteenth-century discourse on slavery and Pauline Hopkins's historiographic counternarratives / Sabine Isabell Engwer
• "Gazing hopelessly into the future": utopia and the racial politics of genre in Of one blood; or, The hidden self / Courtney L. Novosat
• Stolen words: literature as a tool for revolution / Colleen C. O'Brien
• Textual practices. "Coming unalone": reflections on teaching Pauline Hopkins / Geoffrey Sanborn
• The serial pleasures of reading Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins / Cherene Sherrard-Johnson
• Afterword: "I sing of the wrongs of a race": Pauline E. Hopkins as editor and author / Edlie L. Wong

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work. JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins's life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women's voices, Hopkins's texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins's era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, all of whom are safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. They receive weekly dispatches from The Preshutian, their school newspaper, informing them of older classmates killed or wounded in action. Their heroic deaths only make the war more exciting. Gaunt, half-German, is busy fighting his own private battle- an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the gorgeous, rich, charming Ellwood-not having a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. Meanwhile, Gaunt's German mother and twin sister ask him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from the anti-German attacks they're already facing. Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, fueled by his education in Greek heroics and romantic wartime poetry. Before long, most of their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, the boys become intimately acquainted with the harsh realities of war. Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one other, but their friends are all dying, often in front of them, and no one knows when they'll be next"-- Provided by publisher

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Matter of Black Living
• Phillis Wheatley's Pleasures
• James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw's Joyful Conversion
• Desiring John Marrant
• David Walker's Good News
• Coda-- Or, Reading Pleasures: Looking for Arbour/Obour/Orbour Notes
• Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

In the early United States, a Black person committed an act of resistance simply by reading and writing. Yet we overlook that these activities also brought pleasure. Tara A. Bynum tells the compelling stories of four early American writers who expressed feeling good despite living while enslaved or only nominally free. The poet Phillis Wheatley delights in writing letters to a friend. Ministers John Marrant and James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw memorialize their love for God. David Walker's pamphlets ask Black Americans to claim their victory over slavery. Together, their writings reflect the joyous, if messy, humanity inside each of them. This proof of a thriving interior self in pursuit of good feeling forces us to reckon with the fact that Black lives do matter. A daring assertion of Black people's humanity, Reading Pleasures reveals how four Black writers experienced positive feelings and analyzes the ways these emotions served creative, political, and racialized ends.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor's Introduction: Sara Rutkowski
• Part I: Politics, Purpose, and Vision
• Chapter 1: Three Lenses on the Legacy of the Federal Writers' Project
• Chapter 2: Henry Alsberg: Architect and Defender of the Project and its Legacies
• Chapter 3: Understanding the Living Lore Units: B. A. Botkin, Folklore, and Creative Writing on the FWP
• Chapter 4: "Shadows of Tragic Premonition": The Native Son and the Federal Writers' Project
• Part II: The American Scene

• Chapter 5: State Guides then and Now: From Controversial New Deal Project to National Treasure
• Chapter 6: Of Conquistadors and Corridos: Aurora Lucero-White and the New Mexico Federal Writers' Project
• Chapter 7: Lyle Saxon: The FWP, Identity, and Historical Tourism in New Orleans
• Chapter 8: A View from the Boardwalk: The New York City Guide and Coney Island Hypertext
• Part III: Raw Material and Opportunity
• Chapter 9: "Crime and Juvenile Delinquency-My Pet Hobby at Present": Margaret Walker and the FWP in Chicago

• Chapter 10: Ernest J. Gaines's Literary and Historical Strategies in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: Imitating the Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives
• Chapter 11: Eddie Shimano and Gerald Chan Sieg: Asian American Writers in the FWP
• Chapter 12: A View of the Archives: Ralph Ellison's Collection of Children's Rhymes for the FWP
• Afterword
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover

Established in 1935, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) sent around 6,500 unemployed historians, teachers, writers, and librarians out to document America's past and present in the midst of the Great Depression. The English poet W. H. Auden referred to this New Deal program as "one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state."Featuring original work by scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives, this edited collection provides fresh insights into how this extraordinary program helped transform American culture. In addition to examining some of the major twentieth-century writers whose careers the FWP helped to launch-including Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker-Rewriting America presents new perspectives on the role of African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, and women on the project. Essays also address how the project's goals continue to resonate with contemporary realities in the midst of major economic and cultural upheaval. Along with the volume editor, contributors include Adam Arenson, Sue Rubenstein DeMasi, Racheal Harris, Jerrold Hirsch, Kathi King, Maiko Mine, Deborah Mutnick, Diane Noreen Rivera, Greg Robinson, Robert Singer, James Sun, and David A. Taylor.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• I Gave Birth in Another Era Bildungsroman Reading The Bell Jar in Everglades National Park Gong! Gong! Gong! Now that You're Dead, I'm Observing Great Bodies of Water With Joy with No Joy Now Wait for Last Year Let's Make the Water Turn Black And the Days Shall be Filled with Music The Poet Enters Through the Subjunctive Mood Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk I Sang a Song with the Dead March Pandemie Planting a Loquat Tree During the Worst Week of the Pandemic As in the Pyroclastic Volcano The Future is Not What it Was Your Eyes Resemble Mine Poem with Three Lines by Gustaf Sobin Dollar Tree Poiesis Tick Tock Cryptic Hold! Said the Hand Said the Money To Take a Lover in the Intricately Woven Kaleidoscope Dear Anselm, Pastoral in the Minor Key The Only Cloud in the Sky to Impress me with a Demoniacal Grandeur The Password is Hex Key 526 The Flammagenitus Strophes Skate World Waveform It was Raining in the French Concession Double Happiness or "Modernity Means Contingency" Trashland Political Economy An Equanimous Defense of the Exclamation Point New Year's Requiem Makeup Pollen Ointment I Bought You a Bonsai Cypress Tree on the Way to the Shore On Avondale and Riverside.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Sandra Simonds's Triptychs is a brilliant intersection of poetic form and the passage of time. Crafted initially in strips handwritten on rolls of receipt paper obtained at a dollar store, then assembled into three textual columns that sit side-by-side on the page, these triptychs are joined or disjoined in several ways-through diction, through the special relation of words (evoking intimacy, touch or, in contrast, alienation), and through thematic similarities or dissimilarities. Each poem is wildly surprising, ranging from conversations between Baudelaire and Jayne Eyre to the enjoyment of macaroons. As a result, the poems energize the confines of this writing space as they invite readers to recall painterly constructions and news headlines, wherein each pillar is in conversation with another, sequentially and simultaneously. With the same lyric attention found in all of Simonds's poetry, the poems here mark an innovative shift in poetics that is both polyvocal and singular.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Preface ix Introduction: Celes Tisdale's Poetry Workshop at Attica / Mark Nowak
• 1 Introduction to the Original Printing of Betcha Ain't: Poems from Attica (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1974 / Celes Tisdale
• 25 Betcha Ain't: Poems from Attica
• 29 Celes Tisdale's Attica Poem and Journals
• 71 When the Smoke Cleared: More Poems from Attica
• 103 Epilogue: Remember This
• 133 Acknowledgments
• 135 Appendix: Workshop Documents 137.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

Following the Attica prison uprising in September 1971, Celes Tisdale-a poet and then professor at Buffalo State College-began leading poetry workshops with those incarcerated at Attica. Tisdale's workshop created a space of radical Black creativity and solidarity, in which poets who lived through the uprising were able to turn their experiences into poetry. The poems written by Tisdale's students were published as Betcha Ain't: Poems from Attica in 1974. When the Smoke Cleared contains the entirety of Betcha Ain't, Tisdale's own poems and journal entries from the three years he taught at Attica, a previously unpublished collection of poems by Attica poets, and a critical introduction by poet Mark Nowak. In addition to the poetry, Tisdale's journal entries give readers a unique opportunity to experience what it was like to enter Attica as an educator and return week after week to discuss poetry. When the Smoke Cleared showcases these poets' achievements, their desire for self-determination, and their historical role as storytellers of Black life in a prison monitored exclusively by white guards and administrators.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Catalyzed by her notoriously "dirty, " fabulously successful bestseller Valley of the Dolls, the "Jackie Susann Sixties" brimmed with camp comedy that now permeates contemporary celebrations of the author, from Pee-wee's Playhouse to RuPaul's Drag Race and Lee Daniels's Star. First christened "camp" by Gloria Steinem in an excoriating review of Valley of the Dolls and compounded by the publishing juggernauts The Love Machine (1969), Once Is Not Enough (1973), and Dolores (1976), the comedy of Jackie Susann illuminated conflicting positions about gender, sexuality, and aesthetic value. Through a writing formula that Ken Feil calls sleazy realism, Susann veers from gossip to confession and devises comedies of bad manners spun from real celebrities whose occasionally queer and always outre antics clashed with their "official" personas, the popular genres they were famous for, and the narrow, normative constructions of identity and reality shaped by the culture industry. Susann's promotional appearances led to another comedy of bad manners, this one populated with critics alternately horrified and delighted by an upstart woman vulgarian barging into the male literary firmament, and which continues to inspire fascination for the author, her novels, and their legendarily bad film adaptations.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• The "fantasy" of a woman in charge in the female American
• Talking sex and revolution in Saint-Domingue in Sansay's Secret history
• The militarization of home in Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie
• The limits of the imaginary in the reconstructed US in Lydia Maria Child's Romance of the republic
• Massachusetts in the American imagination in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the life of a slave girl

In Imaginary Empires, Maria O'Malley examines early American texts published between 1767 and 1867 whose narratives represent women's engagement in the formation of empire. Her analysis unearths a variety of responses to contact, exchange, and cohabitation in the early United States, stressing the possibilities inherent in the literary to foster participation, resignification, and rapprochement. New readings of The Female American, Leonora Sansay's Secret History, Catharine Maria Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic, and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl confound the metaphors of ghosts, haunting, and amnesia that proliferate in many recent studies of early US literary history. Instead, as O'Malley shows, these writings foreground acts of foundational violence involved in the militarization of domestic spaces, the legal impediments to the transfer of property and wealth, and the geopolitical standing of the United States. Racialized and gendered figures in the texts refuse to die, leave, or stay silent. In imagining different kinds of futures, these writers reckon with the ambivalent role of women in empire-building as they negotiate between their own subordinate position in society and their exertion of sovereignty over others. By tracing a thread of virtual history found in works by women, Imaginary Empires explores how reflections of the past offer a means of shaping future sociopolitical formations.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Challenges the myth of the United States as a nation of immigrants by bringing together two groups rarely read together: Native Americans and Eastern European immigrants In this cultural history of Americanization during the Progressive Era, Cristina Stanciu argues that new immigrants and Native Americans shaped the intellectual and cultural debates over inclusion and exclusion, challenging ideas of national belonging, citizenship, and literary and cultural production. Deeply grounded in a wide-ranging archive of Indigenous and new immigrant writing and visual culture-including congressional acts, testimonies, news reports, cartoons, poetry, fiction, and silent film-this book brings together voices of Native and immigrant America. Stanciu shows that, although Native Americans and new immigrants faced different legal and cultural obstacles to citizenship, the challenges they faced and their resistance to assimilation and Americanization often ran along parallel paths. Both struggled against idealized models of American citizenship that dominated public spaces. Both participated in government-sponsored Americanization efforts and worked to gain agency and sovereignty while negotiating naturalization. Rethinking popular understandings of Americanization, Stanciu argues that the new immigrants and Native Americans at the heart of this book expanded the narrow definitions of American identity.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"The latest work from the veteran novelist called "one hell of a writer" by James Baldwin, "wonderfully wry" by Donald Barthelme, and a "writer's writer" by Ishmael Reed, Blue in Green narrates one evening in August 1959, when, only eight days after the release of his landmark album Kind of Blue, Miles Davis is assaulted by a member of New York City Police Department outside of Birdland. In the aftermath of Davis's brief stint in custody, we enter the strained relationship between Davis and the woman he will soon marry, Frances Taylor, whom he has recently pressured into ending her run as a performer on Broadway and retiring from modern dance and ballet altogether. Frances, who is increasingly subject to Davis's temper--fueled by both his professional envy and substance abuse--reckons with her strict upbringing, and, through a fateful meeting with Lena Horne, the conflicting demands of motherhood and artistic vocation. Meanwhile, blowing off steam from his beating, Miles speeds across Manhattan in his Ferrari. Racing alongside him are recollections of a stony, young John Coltrane, a combative Charlie Parker, and the stilted world of the Black middle class he's left behind."-- Publisher's description