Meticulously edited and annotated, Tennessee Williams's notebooks follow his growth as a writer from his undergraduate days to the publication and production of his most famous plays, from his drug addiction and drunkenness to the heights of his literary accomplishments.
Marian Engel emerged as a writer during that period in Canada when nationalism increased and “new feminism” dawned. Although she is recognized as a distinguished woman of letters, she has not been widely studied; consequently we know relatively little about her and her craft. The material collected in Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” is a major step in redressing that neglect. Extracts carefully chosen by Christl Verduyn from Marian Engel’s forty-nine notebooks — notebooks Engel began in the late 1940s and which she maintained until her death in 1985 — track Engel’s creative development, illustrate her commitment to the craft of writing and document her growth as a major Canadian writer. The notebooks also portray Engel’s surprising leaps of logic, her fascination with the bizarre, the eclecticism of her reading and the depth and variety of her thinking. Finally, they present moving documentation of a woman facing cancer and early death. Christl Verduyn’s illuminating introductory discussions to each of the notebooks unobtrusively guide us in the reading of these sometimes difficult writings. Marian Engel’s Notebooks: “Ah, mon cahier, écoute...” leaves readers with a vivid sense of Canadian culture during the 1960s and 1970s. It provides insight into the literary life of one of Canada’s significant woman writers, including her connections with other Canadian writers, and will be of special interest to scholars working in the field of literature.
From 1935 until his death, Albert Camus kept a series of notebooks to sketch out ideas for future works, record snatches of conversations and excerpts from books he was reading, and jot down his reflections on death and the horror of war, his feelings about women and loneliness and art, and his appreciations for the Algerian sun and sea. These three volumes, now available together for the first time in paperback, include all entries made from the time when Camus was still completely unknown in Europe, until he was killed in an automobile accident in 1960, at the height of his creative powers. In 1957 he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. A spiritual and intellectual autobiography, Camus' Notebooks are invariably more concerned with what he felt than with what he did. It is intriguing for the reader to watch him seize and develop certain themes and ideas, discard others that at first seemed promising, and explore different types of experience. Although the Notebooks may have served Camus as a practice ground, the prose is of superior quality, which makes a short spontaneous vignette or a moment of sensuous beauty quickly captured on the page a small work of art.Here is a record of one of the most unusual minds of our time.
GLOSSATOR 10 (2018) Astern in the Dinghy: Commentaries on Ezra’s Pound’s Thrones de los Cantares 96-109 Edited by Alexander Howard You in the dinghy (piccioletta) astern there! (CIX/788) Mr. Pound Goes to Washington Alexander Howard (University of Sydney) Some Contexts for Canto XCVI Richard Parker (University of Surrey) Gold and/or Humaneness: Pound’s Vision of Civilization in Canto XCVII Roxana Preda (University of Edinburgh) Hilarious Commentary: Ezra Pound’s Canto XCVIII Peter Nicholls (New York University) “Tinkle, tinkle, two tongues”: Sound, Sign, Canto XCIX Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield) “In the intellect possible”: Revisionism and Aesopian Language in Canto C Alex Pestell (Independent Scholar) Deep Rustication in Canto CI Mark Byron (University of Sydney) Shipwrecks and Mountaintops: Notes on Canto CII Mark Steven (University of Exeter) Revised Intentions: James Buchanan and the Antebellum White House in Canto CIII James Dowthwaite (University of Göttingen) Exploring Permanent Values: Canto CIV Archie Henderson (Independent Scholar) Canto CV: A Divagation? Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) So Slow: Canto CVI Sean Pryor (University of New South Wales) ‘The clearest mind ever in England’: Pound’s Late Paradisal in Canto CVII Miranda Hickman (McGill University) Three Ways of Looking at a Canto: Navigating Canto CVIII Kristin Grogan (Exeter College, University of Oxford) ‘To the king onely to put value’: Monarchy and Commons in Pound’s Canto CIX Alex Niven (University of Newcastle)
Josephine Pinckney (1895--1957) was an award-winning, best-selling author whose work critics frequently compared to that of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and Isak Dinesen. Her flair for storytelling and trenchant social commentary found expression in poetry, five novels -- Three O'Clock Dinner was the most successful -- stories, essays, and reviews. Pinckney belonged to a distinguished South Carolina family and often used Charleston as her setting, writing in the tradition of Ellen Glasgow by blending social realism with irony, tragedy, and humor in chronicling the foibles of the South's declining upper class. Barbara L. Bellows has produced the first biography of this very private woman and emotionally complex writer, whose life story is also the history of a place and time -- Charleston in the first half of the twentieth century. In A Talent for Living, Pinckney's life unfolds like a novel as she struggles to escape aristocratic codes and the ensnaring bonds of southern ladyhood and to embrace modern freedoms. In 1920, with DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen, she founded the Poetry Society of South Carolina, which helped spark the southern literary renaissance. Her home became a center of intellectual activity with visitors such as the poet Amy Lowell, the charismatic presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, and the founding editor of theSaturday Review of Literature Henry Seidel Canby. Sophisticated and cosmopolitan, she absorbed popular contemporary influences, particularly that of Freudian psychology, even as she retained an almost Gothic imagination shaped in her youth by the haunting, tragic beauty of the Low Country and its mystical Gullah culture. A skilled stylist, Pinckney excelled in creating memorable characters, but she never scripted an individual as engaging or intriguing as herself. Bellows offers a fascinating, exhaustively researched portrait of this onetime cultural icon and her well-concealed personal life.