The Bible in the American Short Story examines Biblical influences in the post-World War II American short story. In a series of accessible chapters, Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg and Peter S. Hawkins offer close-readings of short stories by leading contemporary writers such as Flannery O'Connor, Allegra Goodman, Tobias Wolff and Kirstin Valdez Quade that highlight the biblical passages that they reference. Exploring episodes from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament and both Jewis...

Twenty tales of terror and suspense, brought to you by sinister storyteller Vincent PriceHorror legend Vincent Price presents an anthology of eerie, unsettling tales with a devilish twist - some purportedly based on his own adventures, others narrated by him in his own inimitable style.Listen to his horrifying accounts of an unnerving piscatorial experience Down Under, a violinist with very special hands, a Bonfire Night party when a bullying father disappe...

On a remote Scottish island, Doctors Curtis Lark and John Cornelius are convinced that the violent death of their friend Dr Hugh Dexter was no accident... Dexter's research notes reveal that he was investigating an island sickness affecting many of the inhabitants, turning them into zombies blindly obeying orders from an unknown source. The key to the mystery seems to be an apparently telepathic, but simple-minded, local girl, Flora. Lark and Cornelius want to take her to London to find ou...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWSHailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now ...

Melville's Philosophies departs from a long tradition of critical assessments of Melville that dismissed his philosophical capacities as ingenious but muddled. Its contributors do not apply philosophy to Melville in order to detect just how much of it he knew or understood. To the contrary, they try to hear the philosophical arguments themselves-often very strange and quite radical-that Melville never stopped articulating and reformulating. What emerges is a Melville who is materi...

The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is the first book to explore key religious themes - from boredom to addiction, and distraction – in the work of one of America's most celebrated contemporary novelists.In a series of short, topic-focussed chapters, the bookjoins a selection of key scenes from Wallace's novels Infinite Jest and The Pale King with clear explanations of how they contribute to his overall account of what it means to be a human bein...

This book explores multilingualism as an imaginative articulation of the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Spanish and American literature. It argues that while individual multilingual practices are highly singular, literary multilingualism exceeds the conventional bounds of modernism to become emblematic of the modern age. The book explores the confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism, examining the significance of this theme to the relationship bet...

Excursions with Thoreau is a major new exploration of Thoreau's writing and thought that is philosophical yet sensitive to the literary and religious.Edward F. Mooney's excursions through passages from Walden, Cape Cod, and his late essay “Walking” reveal Thoreau as a miraculous writer, artist, and religious adept. Of course Thoreau remains the familiar political activist and environmental philosopher, but in these fifteen excursions we discover new terrain. Among...

Inspired by the foreign policy entanglements of recent years, William V. Spanos offers a dramatic interpretation of Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, providing a fresh assessment of American exceptionalism and the place of a global America in the American imaginary. Spanos insists that Twain identifies with his protagonist, particularly in his defining use of the spectacle, and thus with an American exceptionalism that uncannily anticipates the George W. Bush adm...

Contributions by Ted Atkinson, Michael P. Bibler, Deborah Clarke, David A. Davis, David M. Earle, Jason D. Fichtel, Elizabeth Fielder, Joseph Fruscione, Matthew Pratt Guterl, Patrick E. Horn, Cheryl Lester, Jessica Martell, Sharon Monteith, Richard C. Moreland, Alan Nadel, Julie Beth Napolin, François Pitavy, Ramón Saldívar, Hortense J. Spillers, Terrell L. Tebbetts, Zackary Vernon, Randall Wilhelm, and Charles Reagan WilsonThese essays examine issues across the wide arc of Faulkne...

Although Walker Percy named many influences on his work and critics have zeroed in on Kierkegaard in particular, no one has considered his intentional influence: the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. In a study that revives and complicates notions of adaptation and influence, Jessica Hooten Wilson details the long career of Walker Percy. Walker Percy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence demonstrates—through close reading of both writers’ works, exa...

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...