Irish-American Books

pp.31 YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN--Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
pp.44 THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER--Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
pp.63 MOTHER SAVAGE--Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
pp.70 THE STORY OF AN HOUR--Kate Chopin (1851-1904)
pp.73 AN UPHEAVAL--Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
pp.81 ROMAN FEVER--Edith Wharton (1862-1937)
pp.94 PAUL'S CASE--Willa Cather (1873-1947)
pp.113 EVELINE--James Joyce (1882-1941)
pp.118 THE ROCKING-HORSE WINNER--D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
pp.133 THE JILTING OF GRANNY WEATHERALL--Katherine Ann Porter (1890-1980)
pp.142 SWEAT--Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
pp.154 A ROSE FOR EMILY--William Faulkner (1897-1961)
pp.164 HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS--Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
pp.169 THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK--Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
pp.175 THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS--John Steinbeck (1902-1968)
pp.186 THE MAN WHO WAS ALMOST A MAN--Richard Wright (1908-1960)
pp.198 LIVVIE--Eudora Welty (B. 1909)
pp.212 REUINON--John Cheever (1912-1982)
pp.215 THE GUEST--Albert Camus (1913-1960)
pp.228 A PARTY DOWN AT THE SQUARE--Ralph Ellison (1914-1995)
pp.235 THE LOTTERY--Shirley Jackson (1919-1965)
pp.244 A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND--Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964)
pp.260 A VERY OLD MAN WITH ENORMOUS WINGS--Gabriel García Márquez (B. 1928)
pp.267 DEAD MAN'S PATH--Chinua Achebe (B. 1930)
pp.271 VANDALS--Alice Munro (B. 1931)
pp.297 A & P--John Updike (B. 1932)
pp.304 A SMALL, GOOD THING--Raymond Carver (1938-1988)
pp.327 WHERE ARE YOU GOING, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?--Joyce Carol Oates (B. 1938)
pp.344 HAPPY ENDINGS--Margaret Atwood (B. 1939)
pp.348 SHILOH--Bobbie Ann Mason (B. 1940)
pp.362 EVERYDAY USE--Alice Walker (B. 1944)
pp.371 DIED AND GONE TO VEGAS--Tim Gautreaux (B. 1947)
pp.388 LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE--Dagoberto Gilb (B. 1950)
pp.399 TWO KINDS--Amy Tan (B. 1952)
pp.410 BARBIE-Q--Sandra Cisneros (B. 1954)
pp.412 THE RED CONVERTIBLE--Louise Erdrich (B. 1954)
pp.422 HOW TO TALK TO YOUR MOTHER (NOTES)--Lorrie Moore (B. 1954)

I bought this anthology used and it was obviously a former text book. I really enjoy it. While I greatly appreciate and adore full-length classic literature, short stories are a wonderful compromise for the times you don't want to be fully involved in a novel and neither want to read twaddle. Great authors with little commitment.

Editor R.S. Gwynn has chosen really wonderful samplings from a rather wide range of writers. Many women, non-whites, non-English-speakers... et cetera, should that aspect concern you. Each piece is prefaced with a short, non-intrusive biography of the author.

Certainly, authors/stories are absent, but I don't think it detracts from the value of this collection. It really is a lovely little book into which to nestle.

_Fine Frenzy_ was assigned in my (high school) freshman honors English class -- I am now 30, and it's still my favorite anthology.

Unlike most other poetry anthologies, it is organized thematically -- rather than, say, chronologically. W.H. Auden brushes shoulders with Aphra Behn; Theodore Roethke bumps elbows with Christina Rossetti. The book is broken into the following thematic sections:

Exuberance
Childhood, Youth, Maturity, Old Age
Social Conscience
Alienation
Love
Illusion/Reality
Faith
Order
Marriage
War
Mutability and Death
Insight

Within each section, the poems are alphabetical by author, which makes for some lovely juxtapositions of epoch and style.

The canon is well represented, but so is the obscure, the fresh, poets you won't find in most other anthologies.

It makes a wonderful introduction to poetry, and a wonderful field to wander for those whose introduction to poetry is long past.

Hugh Douglas has produced a very well researched and lucidly written book on the famous highland heroine.
The sometimes complicated family and clan relationships are very well and easily explained in this volume.
This book debunks many of the myths and legends that have grown around this singularly impressive woman. She was most certainly legendary and deserving of the status which she attained, and it is refreshing to read the facts of her saga.
Hugh Douglas is to be congratulated for this highly commended work.

A seminal work of superbly dedicated scholarship, The Forgotten Commissioner: Sir William Mildmay And The Anglo-french Commission Of 1750-1755 by the late British Diplomatic History expert Enid Robbie, is an informed and informative study of political intrigue between Britian and France during the era when America and Canada were still colonies. Double-dealings, diplomatic negotiations, and tensions that ultimately caused the Seven Years' War are all scrutinized in detail in this singularly absorbing and minutely detailed account.

Conor McPherson's trilogy of plays is quite stunning. He manages to combine the youthful indignation of Martin McDonagh with the intimacy and lyricism of Brian Friel. The result is breathtaking dramas that capture the imagination, but ultimately elude categorisation.

This an academic book (Syracuse University Press) that lumps all women's sf writing into 3 catagories: 1. Utopiean Science in Science Fiction by Women, 2. Beautiful Alien Monster-Women--BAMs, 3. Cross--Dressing as a Male narrator. The "women in SF feild" is much broader than that. But it is a good look at how the SF feild has treated women.

The Future Of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis And Literary Imagination is a scholarly summary of the distinct critical practices that constitute "ecocriticism" today. Written by one of the world's leading theorists, who traces the ecocritical movement to its roots in the 1970's and its coalescence in the 1990's, The Future Of Environmental Criticism Asks such bold questions as: Why has interest in environmental literary and cultural studies risen so rapidly in recent times? Can the emphasis upon preserving nature of earlier ecocriticism be successfully reconciled with later ecocritical issues of environmental justice? The Future Of Environmental Criticism draws from past and present reality to predict the directions in which future ecocritical movements will flow, and offers a positive-themed manifesto of means to balance differing agendas into a more unified, and therefore stronger movement.

Finnell's entry in the Great American Long Poem Contest is unlike any other I can think of. The individual sections skitter and swoop over great realms of aesthetic, personal, and historical territory, and the tone ranges from hilarity to wistfulness. In the guise of a meditation on Gauguin's strange allegorical painting, Finnell offers an indescribable mixture of family history, dream vision, artistic rumination, and slanted autobiography--all turning on and returning to the questions posed by Gauguin's title: "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" These huge questions fairly beg for solemnity and bardic posturing, but Finnell addresses them with consummately sly and strange offhandedness. Overall, his imagination is so odd, his sensibility so charming, his diction so fresh and capacious that it's easy to get lost in this book-and even easier to enjoy it.

I have had the priveleg to have Norman as a professor and I can tell you that is very well informed, articulate, kind, and funny. I imagine this would be a wonderful read...but $65? I guess I'll wait for a while...just one tip if you read this Proff. You're more likely to sway people to your point of veiw if they read the book :)

Breaks new ground in understanding the history and evolution of describing gender identity issues in fiction. Asserts that for lack of usable tropes for speaking or changing gender roles, several prominent novelists began to use language of insanity as such a trope. To this book Lange brings a double expertise I think may be unique: he is a sensitive critic, widely read, and a professionally trained psychiatrist. His is book that should generate discussion between psychology and literary criticism. This book gets better the deeper into it one penetrates. Timely, wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary--this is a complex achievement.