The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt
The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt

Author: Toby Wilkinson

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2013-01-08

Total Pages: 658

ISBN-13: 0553384902

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Magisterial . . . [A] rich portrait of ancient Egypt’s complex evolution over the course of three millenniums.”—Los Angeles Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly In this landmark volume, one of the world’s most renowned Egyptologists tells the epic story of this great civilization, from its birth as the first nation-state to its absorption into the Roman Empire. Drawing upon forty years of archaeological research, award-winning scholar Toby Wilkinson takes us inside a tribal society with a pre-monetary economy and decadent, divine kings who ruled with all-too-recognizable human emotions. Here are the legendary leaders: Akhenaten, the “heretic king,” who with his wife Nefertiti brought about a revolution with a bold new religion; Tutankhamun, whose dazzling tomb would remain hidden for three millennia; and eleven pharaohs called Ramesses, the last of whom presided over the militarism, lawlessness, and corruption that caused a political and societal decline. Filled with new information and unique interpretations, The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt is a riveting and revelatory work of wild drama, bold spectacle, unforgettable characters, and sweeping history. “With a literary flair and a sense for a story well told, Mr. Wilkinson offers a highly readable, factually up-to-date account.”—The Wall Street Journal “[Wilkinson] writes with considerable verve. . . . [He] is nimble at conveying the sumptuous pageantry and cultural sophistication of pharaonic Egypt.”—The New York Times

Middle Passages
Middle Passages

Author: Kamau Brathwaite

Publisher: New Directions Publishing

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 9780811212328

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Kamau Brathwaite's poetry offers stunning collages devoted to the history, mythology, and language of the African diaspora, and has gained him a world reputation. Middle Passages, his most recent collection, is his sixteenth poetry volume, but his first with an American publisher. With notes of protest and lament, the fourteen poems of Middle Passages address the effects of the Middle Passage of slavery on the New World, and celebrate great musicians (Ellington, Bessie Smith), poets, heroes of the resistance, and Third World leaders Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, and Nelson Mandela. And as the London Times Literary Supplement noted, it is "a poetry that moves between rage and tenderness, doubt and displacement to affirmation... Middle Passages is a potent and effective book, a work of passion and integrity."

Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey
Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey

Author: Kamau Brathwaite

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 9780966897609

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Literary Criticism. African American and Caribbean Studies. Kamau Brathwiate's CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY is based on the transcript of his discussion with Nathaniel Mackey at Poet's House in New York City. Brathwaite expansively elaborates on Mackey's (and audience member's) knowledgeable inquiries; his answers are layered with subsequent ruminations arising from his lifelong engagement with world literature and expressive cultures. A multiphasic drift, CONVERSATIONS WITH NATHANIEL MACKEY combines elements of biography and autobiography with poetic discourse on Caribbean literary history and negative effects of colonial domination. Brathwaite splices dialog with poetry, criticism, and instrictive imaginary voices in his now distinct and characteristic Sycorax 'video style' format. Both Brathwaite and Mackey have several titles carried by SPD. Mackey's ERODING WITNESS is newly available, along with WHATSAID SERIF (City Lights) and DJOBOT BAGHOSTUS'S RUN (Sun & Moon) Brathwaite's BLAC

Reading Writing Interfaces
Reading Writing Interfaces

Author: Lori Emerson

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2014-06-01

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1452942196

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Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries. Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates that technologies are more than mere tools and that the interface is not a neutral border between writer and machine but is in fact a collaborative creative space. Reading Writing Interfaces begins with digital literature’s defiance of the alleged invisibility of ubiquitous computing and multitouch in the early twenty-first century and then looks back at the ideology of the user-friendly graphical user interface that emerged along with the Apple Macintosh computer of the 1980s. She considers poetic experiments with and against the strictures of the typewriter in the 1960s and 1970s and takes a fresh look at Emily Dickinson’s self-printing projects as a challenge to the coherence of the book. Through archival research, Emerson offers examples of how literary engagements with screen-based and print-based technologies have transformed reading and writing. She reveals the ways in which writers—from Emily Dickinson to Jason Nelson and Judd Morrissey—work with and against media interfaces to undermine the assumed transparency of conventional literary practice.