An unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture,class, identity, and the meaning of freedomPrisons, the first volume of The Beulah Quintet—Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, classs, and identity and the meaning of fredom—follows the coming-of-age of Johnny Church from English youngster to dashing Oxford adolescent to idealistic Puritan in the service of Cromwell's Parliamen...

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet—Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom—is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and buil...

On the 80th anniversary of the war's end, 5 classic memoirs capture firsthand the shock, terror, and courage of the American fight against the Axis powers in Europe"The emotional environment of warfare has always been compelling," writes J. Glenn Gray in his incomparable World War II memoir and mediation, The Warriors. "Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it." The struggle to make sense of the experience of war, to find some meaning in the savagry a...

On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the essay, about what elements of fiction...

"If you survive your first day, I'll promote you."So promised George Wilson's World War II commanding officer in the hedgerows of Normandy -- and it was to be a promise dramatically fulfilled. From July, 1944, to the closing days of the war, from the first penetration of the Siegfried Line to the Nazis' last desperate charge in the Battle of the Bulge, Wilson fought in the thickest of the action, helping take the small towns of northern France and Belgium building by building....

A distinguished novelist and critic inspires readers and writers with this inside look at how the professionals read—and writeLong before there were creative writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.As she takes us on a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—Prose discovers why these wr...

Autobiography of World War Two Luftwaffe pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel, the most highly decorated German serviceman of WW2, and the only one to be awarded the Third Reich’s most prestigious medal which was specially created for Rudel by Hitler himself, the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds. Shot down over 24 times, Hans Rudel is credited with destroying over 500 tanks, 2,000 ground targets, the Russian battleship Marat, two cruisers and a destroyer, and...

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memo...

As the twentieth century closed, the veterans of its defining war passed away at a rate of a thousand per day. Fortunately, D-Day paratrooper Joseph Beyrle met author Thomas H. Taylor in time to record Behind Hitler's Lines, the true story of the first American paratrooper to land in Normandy and the only soldier to fight for both the United States and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany. It is a story of battle, followed by a succession of captures, escapes, recaptures, and re-escapes, ...

This updated edition of the classic, comprehensive guide to creative writing features new topics and writing prompts, contemporary examples, and more.A creative writer's shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction. This best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for decades it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft. Now in it...

This award-winning classic of WWII military history chronicles the Royal Air Force's bombing campaign against Germany.RAF Bomber Command's air offensive against the cities of Nazi Germany was one of the most epic campaigns of World War II. The struggle began meekly in 1939 with only a few aircraft—Whitleys, Hampdens, and Wellingtons—flying blindly through the night on their ill-conceived bombing runs. It ended six years later with 1,600 Lancasters, Halifaxes, and Mo...

The follow-up and companion volume to the New York Times bestselling How to Read Literature Like a Professor—a lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels to make everyday reading more enriching, satisfying, and funOf all the literary forms, the novel is arguably the most discussed . . . and fretted over. From Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote to the works of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and...