This opening novel of a projected tetralogy called The Masters of Destiny examines the recurrent American conundrum, the issue of race. At the core stands two families related first by ownership and then, because of the infidelity of a plantation master, by blood, - establishing on a familial level an anguished, disorderly, and insoluble relationship paralleling the great forces of the historical. Fully engaging a social, sexual, and even violent milieu, the story portrays the clash of opposing cultures in scenes ranging from the American South to New England and Europe. The Civil War is made vivid by the sheer terror, horror, and confusion of both civilian and soldier. The book culminates with the journey made by a plantation 'heroine' and her aged slave through the collapse of the white Southern world - and the corollary release of the black - to Washington in search of her imprisoned Confederate husband. Part social mosaic, psychological analysis, historical study, and of course romance and drama, Lost in The Elysian Fields reveals the characters' personality by their response to these epical events which either compel them into action or sweep them into oblivion.
Named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2013. * Winner of rare "double crown" of starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. * Publishers Weekly Featured Fiction selection. Simpson Weems is a 36-year-old aspiring poet whose life has been on hold -- to the breaking point. All he needs to fulfill his potential is to move to San Francisco, but he's torn between his long-held dream of being a great artist and obligations to his aged, ailing mother and his emotionally volatile brother, the all-demanding Bartholomew. Will someone in his family have to die before he can get to California? And how might that be arranged?Written "on location" in New Orleans and set shortly before Hurricane Katrina, Elysian Fields combines menace, the comic strangeness of Flannery O'Connor, and hints of magical realism to convey vivid, original characters and a Crescent City that is both recognizable and more offbeat and seductive than visitors usually see.PRAISE FOR "ELYSIAN FIELDS""A wholly involving story with Faulknerian characters in a fully realized setting. [A] tale of brotherly love and menace. . . . LaFlaur's descriptive talent shines. Fertile imagery drips like Spanish moss: the old buildings collapsing, 'as though the humidity-sodden bricks were returning to mud,' while 'cloud stacks glowed like the battlements of heaven.' [Main character] Simpson's mental landscape is equally vivid, drawn with such empathy and depth that readers will forgive his perpetual indecision and may even root for him to carry out the removal of his near-deranged brother." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"[R]eaders will find the author's portrayal of New Orleans convincing and his characters fascinating and fully developed. . . . Life in the Weems family of 1999 New Orleans is anything but Elysian in this engrossing Southern Gothic snapshot." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)"A stunning debut . . . shades of Tennessee Williams, Faulkner and John Kennedy Toole. . . . LaFlaur gently and expertly pulls readers along with his characters, never flinching in the face of their foibles . . ." --Antigravity magazine (New Orleans)"[A] wonderful debut novel, a southern gothic that is at times comedic, at times heartbreaking . . . In places Elysian Fields is as heavy as summer air in New Orleans, but it most definitely has a sense of humor. . . . [A]n impressive debut that will leave readers looking forward to LaFlaur's next offering." --Self-Publishing Review
No city in America knows how to mark death with more funerary panache than New Orleans. The pageants commemorating departed citizens are often in themselves works of performance art. A grand obituary remains key to this Stygian passage. And no one writes them like New Orleanian John Pope. Collected here are not just simple, mindless recitations of schools and workplaces, marriages, and mourners bereft. These pieces in Getting Off at Elysian Fields: Obituaries from the New Orleans “Times-Picayune” are full-blooded life stories with accounts of great achievements, dubious dabblings, unavoidable foibles, relationships gone sour, and happenstances that turn out to be life-changing. To be sure, there are stories about Carnival monarchs, great philanthropists, and a few politicians. But because New Orleans embraces eccentric behavior, there are stories of people who colored way outside the lines. For instance, there was the doctor who used his plasma to make his flowers grow, and the philanthropist who took money she had put aside for a fur coat to underwrite the lawsuit that desegregated Tulane University. A letter carrier everyone loved turned out to have been a spy during World War II, and a fledgling lawyer changed his lifelong thoughts about race when he saw blind people going into a Christmas party through separate doors—one for white people and another for African Americans. Then there was the punctilious judge who got down on his hands and knees to edge his lawn—with scissors. Because New Orleans funerals are distinctive, the author includes accounts of four that he covered, complete with soulful singing and even some dancing. As a popular, local bumper sticker indisputably declares, “New Orleans—We Put the Fun in Funeral.”
Sheriff Dave Robicheaux returns to New Orleans to investigate the beating of a controversial Catholic priest and murder of three teenage girls in this intense, atmospheric entry in the New York Times bestselling series. For Dave Robicheaux, there is no easy passage home. New Orleans, and the memories of his life in the Big Easy, will always haunt him. So to return there means visiting old ghosts, exposing old wounds, opening himself up to new, yet familiar, dangers. When Robicheaux, now a police officer based in the somewhat quieter Louisiana town of New Iberia, learns that an old friend, Father Jimmie Dolan, a Catholic priest always at the center of controversy, has been the victim of a particularly brutal assault, he knows he has to return to New Orleans to investigate, if only unofficially. What he doesn’t realize is that in doing so he is inviting into his life—and into the lives of those around him—an ancestral evil that could destroy them all. A masterful exploration of the troubled side of human nature and the darkest corners of the heart, and filled with the kinds of unforgettable characters that are the hallmarks of his novels, Last Car to Elysian Fields is Burke in top form in the kind of lush, atmospheric thriller that is “an outstanding entry in an excellent series” (Publishers Weekly).
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
This multi-volume reset collection will address a significant shortfall in scholarly work, offering contemporary reviews of the work of Romantic women writers to a wider audience.
ROMANTICISM Praise for the third edition: “An outstanding anthology, an excellent choice for advanced undergraduate courses on the Romantic era. This edition’s improvements include illustrations, a detailed chronology, and expanded selections from women poets. I look forward to using this edition of Romanticism for years to come.” Kim Wheatley, College of William and Mary “This anthology, even more magnificent and indispensable in its Third Edition, is not simply the most useful or the most learned anthology of English Romantic poetry and thought; it is the most exciting.” Leslie Brisman, Yale University Duncan Wu’s Romanticism: An Anthology has been appreciated by thousands of literature students and their teachers across the globe since its first appearance in 1994, and is the most widely used teaching text in the field in the UK. Now in its fourth edition, it stands as the essential work on Romanticism. It remains the only such book to contain complete poems and essays edited especially for this volume from manuscript and early printed sources by Wu, along with his explanatory annotations and author headnotes. This new edition carries all texts from the previous edition, adding Keats’s Isabella and Shelley’s Epipsychidion, as well as a new selection from the poems of Sir Walter Scott. All editorial materials, including annotations, author headnotes, and prefatory materials, are revised for this new edition. Romanticism: An Anthology remains the only textbook of its kind to include complete and uncut texts of: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798) Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage, The Pedlar, The Two-Part Prelude, Michael, The Brothers and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (3rd edn, 1786), The Emigrants, Beachy Head Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Records of Woman sequence (all 19 poems) Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III and Don Juan Dedication and Cantos I and II Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Urizen Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, Epipsychidion, The Mask of Anarchy and Adonais Keats, Odes, the two Hyperions, Lamia, Isabella and The Eve of St Agnes Hannah More, Sensibility and Slavery: A Poem Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade Helen Maria Williams, A Farewell, for two years, to England As well as generous selections from the works of Mary Robinson, John Thelwall, Dorothy Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, John Clare, Letitia Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Visit www.romanticismanthology.com for resources to accompany the anthology, including a dynamic timeline which illustrates key historical and literary events during the Romantic period and features links to useful materials and visual media.
