"With its many voices, images and aphorisms--from those of Maxine Kumin to Luisa Valenzuela, from Rita Dove to Elizabeth Jolley--the book is a pleasure and a faithful companion".--Publishers Weekly. "Twenty terrific women writers reveal a little something about their work, and about themselves. . . . A gift in every possible way".--Los Angeles Times.
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch: the reputation-making debut short story collection that paved the way for a new generation of writers. • “Brilliant … Phillips is a virtuoso.” —The Chicago Tribune Jayne Anne Phillips's reputation-making debut collection paved the way for a new generation of writers. Raved about by reviewers and embraced by the likes of Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Annie Dillard, and Nadine Gordimer, Black Tickets now stands as a classic. With an uncanny ability to depict the lives of men and women who rarely register in our literature, Phillips writes stories that lay bare their suffering and joy. Here are the abused and the abandoned, the violent and the passive, the impoverished and the disenfranchised who populate the small towns and rural byways of the country. A patron of the arts reserves his fondest feeling for the one man who wants it least. A stripper, the daughter of a witch, escapes from poverty into another kind of violence. A young girl during the Depression is caught between the love of her crazy father and the no less powerful love of her sorrowful mother. These are great American stories that have earned a privileged place in our literature.
Filling a crucial need, this book provides concrete ways to support all students in grades 6–12 as they engage with rigorous grade-level texts in English language arts, science, and social studies. The authors offer fresh insights into adolescent reading and what makes a given text "tough"--including knowledge demands, text structure and complexity, vocabulary, and more. Research-based, step-by-step strategies are presented for explicitly scaffolding these challenges in the context of purposeful learning activities that leverage students' individual strengths and interests. The book includes planning tips, text selection guidelines, sample text sets, and vivid case studies from culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. Fourteen reproducible forms and handouts can be photocopied or downloaded for use with students.
For the characters we meet in Toni Jensen's stories, the past is very much the present. Theirs are American Indian lives off the reservation, lives lived beyond the usual boundaries set for American Indian characters: migratory, often overlooked, yet carrying tradition with them into a future of difference and possibility.
In her first collection of stories and pieces, Harriet Doerr explores the magical power of memory and brings us a wealth of unforgettable characters: eccentric eighty-two-year-old Great-Aunt Alice, who, empowered by a lucid memory, lived out her final, physically debilitated years with grace; Edie, who arrives in California from England to bring sanity and peace to a house with five half-orphaned children and a despairing widower; Paco, eight years old, and Gloria, eleven, children caught between the longing and pleasures of childhood and the harsh mature realities of their meager circumstances in a Mexican village. These and other characters are captured in the web of life with a startling sensitivity that will touch the reader at every turn. “Strikingly pure and radiant.”—The New York Times Book Review
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A powerful, poetic memoir about what it means to exist as an Indigenous woman in America, told in snapshots of the author’s encounters with gun violence. Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize • Goop Book Club Pick • “Essential . . . We need more voices like Toni Jensen’s, more books like Carry.”—Tommy Orange, New York Times bestselling author of There There Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As a Métis woman, she is no stranger to the violence enacted on the bodies of Indigenous women, on Indigenous land, and the ways it is hidden, ignored, forgotten. In Carry, Jensen maps her personal experience onto the historical, exploring how history is lived in the body and redefining the language we use to speak about violence in America. In the title chapter, Jensen connects the trauma of school shootings with her own experiences of racism and sexual assault on college campuses. “The Worry Line” explores the gun and gang violence in her neighborhood the year her daughter was born. “At the Workshop” focuses on her graduate school years, during which a workshop classmate repeatedly killed off thinly veiled versions of her in his stories. In “Women in the Fracklands,” Jensen takes the reader inside Standing Rock during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests and bears witness to the peril faced by women in regions overcome by the fracking boom. In prose at once forensic and deeply emotional, Toni Jensen shows herself to be a brave new voice and a fearless witness to her own difficult history—as well as to the violent cultural landscape in which she finds her coordinates. With each chapter, Carry reminds us that surviving in one’s country is not the same as surviving one’s country.
Southern Mothers, a collection of critical essays by prominent southern literary scholars, examines the significance of motherhood in southern fiction. The belle, the mammy, religion, and racism are several of the distinctive threads with which southern women writers have woven the fabric of their stories. Bringing southern motherhood into focus -- with all its peculiarities of attitude and tradition -- the essays speak to both the established and the unconventional modes of motherhood that are typical in southern writing and probe the extent to which southern women writers have rejected or embraced, supported or challenged the individual, social, and cultural understanding and institution of motherhood.
Over the last two decades, interest in translation around the world has increased beyond any predictions. International bestseller lists now contain large numbers of translated works, and writers from Latin America, Africa, India and China have joined the lists of eminent, bestselling European writers and those from the global English-speaking world. Despite this, translators tend to be invisible, as are the processes they follow and the strategies they employ when translating. The Translator as Writer bridges the divide between those who study translation and those who produce translations, through essays written by well-known translators talking about their own work as distinctive creative literary practice. The book emphasises this creativity, arguing that translators are effectively writers, or rewriters who produce works that can be read and enjoyed by an entirely new audience. The aim of the book is to give a proper prominence to the role of translators and in so doing to move attention back to the act of translating, away from more abstract speculation about what translation might involve.
With novels like Ellen Foster and A Virtuous Woman, award-winning writer Kaye Gibbons has gained both critical acclaim and a large, devoted following among readers. This literary companion equips the reader with information about characters, plots, dates, allusions, literary motifs, and themes from the bestselling author's works. After an annotated chronology of Gibbons' life, the work presents 103 A-Z entries that include Snodgrass's analysis, cover the writings of reviewers and critics, and provide selected bibliographies. Appendices offer an historical timeline with references to corresponding historical events from Gibbons' novels, along with a list of 42 topics for group or individual research projects.
On the windswept plains of northwestern China, Mongol bandits swoop down upon an American missionary couple and steal their small child. The Reverend sets out in search of the boy and becomes lost in the rugged, corrupt countryside populated by opium dens, sly nomadic warlords and traveling circuses. This upright Midwestern minister develops a following among the Chinese peasants and is christened Ghost Man for what they perceive are his otherworldly powers. Grace, his young ingénue wife, pregnant with their second child, takes to her sick bed in the mission compound, where visions of her stolen child and lost husband begin to beckon to her from across the plains. The foreign couple’s savvy and dedicated Chinese servants, Ahcho and Mai Lin, accompany and eventually lead them through dangerous territory to find one another again. With their Christian beliefs sorely tested, their concept of fate expanded, and their physical health rapidly deteriorating, the Reverend and Grace may finally discover an understanding between them that is greater than the vast distance they have come.
