This collection explores how anthologizers and editors of Edgar Allan Poe play an integral role in shaping our conceptions of Poe as the author we have come to recognize, revere, and critique today. In the spheres of literature and popular culture, Poe wields more global influence than any other U.S. author. This influence, however, cannot be attributed solely to the quality of Poe’s texts or to his compellingly tragic biography. Rather, his continued prominence as a writer owes much to th...

Edgar Allan Poe’s image and import shifted during the twentieth century, and this shift is clearly connected to the work of three writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America—Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga and Argentines Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. In Borges’s Poe, Emron Esplin focuses on the second author in this trio and argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe’s works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe’s i...

Few, if any, U.S. writers are as important to the history of world literature as Edgar Allan Poe, and few, if any, U.S. authors owe so much of their current reputations to the process of translation. Translated Poe brings together 31 essays from 19 different national/literary traditions to demonstrate Poe’s extensive influence on world literature and thought while revealing the importance of the vehicle that delivers Poe to the world—translation.Translated Poe is not preoccupied wi...

"Utterly delightful" essays from the creator of the HBO's Bored to Death reveal intimate details of his life as a famously neurotic New York writer ( Brendan Halpin, Los Angeles Times) .Jonathan Ames has drawn comparisons across the literary spectrum, from David Sedaris to F. Scott Fitzgerald to P.G. Wodehouse, and his books, as well as his abilities as a performer, have made him a favorite on the Late Show

William Shawn once called The Talk of the Town the soul of the magazine. The section began in the first issue, in 1925. But it wasn't until a couple of years later, when E. B. White and James Thurber arrived, that the Talk of the Town story became what it is today: a precise piece of journalism that always gets the story and has a little fun along the way.The Fun of It is the first anthology of Talk pieces that spans the magazine's life. ...

Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law’s construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for contemporary legal personhood across categories of race, citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and original study of how law invents categories of identificatio...

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world."Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a "kosmo-polites," or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one's place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective.Cosmopo...

Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensi...

Translation—from both a theoretical and a practical point of view—articulates differing but interconnected modes of circulation in the work of writers originally from different geographical areas of transatlantic encounter, such as Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean.After Translation examines from a transnational perspective the various ways in which translation facilitates the circulation of modern poetry and poetics across the Atlantic. It rethinks the theore...

Clear Word and Third Sight examines the strands of a collective African diasporic consciousness represented in the work of a number of Black Caribbean writers. Catherine A. John shows how a shared consciousness, or “third sight,” is rooted in both pre- and postcolonial cultural practices and disseminated through a rich oral tradition. This consciousness has served diasporic communities by creating an alternate philosophical “worldsense” linking those of African descent across spac...

Recent retirees have a lot of adjustments to make, and we’re not talking only pant size here. This entertaining book on aging offers hilarious suggestions for handling some of life’s more daunting challenges--from prostate cancer to keeping fit, from overly complicated TV remotes to night driving. (McCoy wonders if other drivers in their 70s always see trees in the middle of the road after dark.) The author finds an amusing side to the problems of aging in this perceptive, on-the-mark coll...

What image of Latin America have North American fiction writers created, found, or echoed, and how has the prevailing discourse about the region shaped their work? How have their writings contributed to the discursive construction of our southern neighbors, and how has the literature undermined this construction and added layers of complexity that subvert any approach based on stereotypes? Combining American Studies, Canadian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Cultural Theory, Breinig re...