One hundred years after the publication of his first major work, Ernest Hemingway remains an important author. His work addressed the search for meaning in the wake of a 'Great War' and amid the challenges of rapidly changing social conventions, and his prose style has influenced generations of journalists and writers. Hemingway was wounded on the battlefield and caught up throughout his life in conflicting desires. He was also a deeply committed artist, a restless experimenter with the el...

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” wrote W. H. Auden in 1939, expressing a belief that came to dominate American literary institutions in the late 1940s — the idea that good poetry cannot, and should not, be politically engaged. By contrast, Michael Thurston here looks back to the 1920s and 1930s to a generation of poets who wrote with the precise hope and the deep conviction that they would move their audiences to action. He offers an engaging new look at the political poetry of Edwin Rolfe, ...

Knowing that the Cape is more than tourist-riddled beaches and overpriced ice cream, Michael Thurston takes us on a late-summer retread of one of Thoreau's most famous walks. Blending travel writing and literary criticism, Thurston takes us along two centuries of the shore, reconsidering the dreadful shipwreck of the St. John, and considering the pliability of a hand-painted postcard. From artists like Joel Meyerwitz and Edward Hopper, to statesman John Hay and cinematographer Robert Richa...

Combining detailed explorations of both mainstream and experimental poets with a clear historical and literary overview, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry offers readers at all levels an ideal guide to the rich body of poetic works published in Britain and Ireland over the last half-century.Features detailed discussions of individual poems that are widely available in anthologies and selected poems volumesPays explicit attention to how to re...

ON THE QUAY AT SMYRNA narrates in awful detail the violence and suffering wrought by the Turks during the Greco-Turkish War, seen primarily through the eyes of a teenage girl. It conveys the vibrant sights and smells, the sounds and tastes, the daily routines—with all their tedium and richness—that characterized the lives of its inhabitants from the days before the city's sacking. Margot Demopoulos tells the story of Penelope, the adolescent daughter of a Greek Smyrniot banker and a mother...

A heart-stopping true-life tale of maritime disaster, survival, and daring rescue from a master storytellerSeventy-foot waves batter a torn life raft 250 miles out to sea in one of the world's most dangerous places, the Gulf Stream. Hanging on to the raft are three men, a Canadian, a Brit, and their captain, Jean Pierre de Lutz, a dual citizen of America and France. Their capsized forty-seven-foot sailboat has filled with water and disappeared below the tempestuous sea. The giant w...

The author of the New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep returns with a lively history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the brutal battles, the starry rivalries, and the colorful behind-the-scenes drama.America does not have royalty. It has the Academy Awards. For nine decades, perfectly coiffed starlets, debonair leading men, and producers with gold in their eyes have chased the elusive Oscar. What began as an industry banqu...

Men I've Never Been recounts Michael Sadowski's odyssey as a boy who shuns his own identity—and, ultimately, his sexual orientation—in order to become who he thinks he's supposed to be. Beginning with the memory of a four-year-old sitting in a dingy dive bar, sounding out newspaper headlines while his boasting father collects drinks from onlookers, each chapter highlights a different image of manhood that Sadowski saw at home, at school, or on television—from sports heroes, hunter...

Enter the realm of the carnie king, Patty Conklin, the flamboyant founder of what would become the world's largest carnival company. Patty started on the mean streets of New York selling peanuts before becoming a a small-time operator. Winning the midway contract for the Canadian National Exhibition in 1937, he made it his personal world's fair. It became the foundation for his son and grandson to expand Conklin Shows until they were playing the biggest fairs and exhibitions throughout Nor...

Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary debates in cultural studies and contemporary theory, Modernism, Inc. provides a new look at the relationship between modernism and postmodernism within the critical frame of twentieth-century American culture.Organized around the idea of "incorporation"--embodiment, repressed memory, and advanced capitalism--Modernism, Inc. covers a wide range of topics: Josephine Baker's "hot house style"; the president's p...

During the height of the blizzard of 1978, a tanker foundered on the shoals off the Massachusetts coast. The Coast Guard dispatched a patrol boat that was soon in trouble, too.A pilot-boat captain, Frank Quirk, heard of the Coast Guard’s plight on his radio. He gathered his crew of four, readied his forty-nine-foot steel boat, the Can Do, and entered the maelstrom of the blizzard soon to be known as the Storm of the Century.Encountering one of the ...

Rescue of the Bounty is the harrowing story of the sinking and rescue of Bounty—the tall ship used in the classic 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty—which was caught in the path of Hurricane Sandy with sixteen aboard.On Thursday, October 25, 2012, Captain Robin Walbridge made the fateful decision to sail Bounty from New London, Connecticut, to St. Petersburg, Florida. Walbridge was well aware that a hurricane was forecast to travel north from the Car...