In this companion volume to Animals in the American Classics: How Natural History Inspired Great Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser brings together leading experts who explore the integral role animals play in American poetry. The ten essays in Animals in Classic American Poetry: How Natural History Inspired Great Verse showcase how the natural history of and imagery relating to animals have inspired some of America’s best-known and most beloved poets.The book highligh...

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage energy of the Atom made a leap toward the gaze of the first cell, to echo Merwin. Moe distills his methodology as follows: "My work?—I point," asserted the aphorism. "That’s what...

"Ursula Le Guin at her best . . . This is an important collection of eloquent, elegant pieces by one of our most acclaimed contemporary writers." —Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post Book World"I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind," writes Ursula K. Le Guin in her introduction to Dancing at the Edge of the World. But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last n...

The legendary reporter and author of The Right Stuff takes on Darwin, Chomsky, and the origin of language in "his boldest bit of dueling yet" ( The New York Times).Tom Wolfe, the great journalist-provocateur, aims his piercing wit at the presiding theories of what makes us human. The Kingdom of Speech is a captivating, paradigm-shifting argument that speech—not evolution—is responsible for humanity's com...

Finalist for Pulitzer Prize for General NonfictionFinalist for National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionPronged ants, horned humans, a landscape carved on a fruit pit--some of the displays in David Wilson's Museum of Jurassic Technology are hoaxes. But which ones? As he guides readers through an intellectual hall of mirrors, Lawrence Weschler revisits the 16th-century "wonder cabinets" that were the first museums and compels readers to examine the imaginative origins...

A revered ecologist and conservationist examines the origins and possible futures of humankind within the context of the Space Age, masterfully “[communicating] the awesome spectacle of our environmental crisis” (New York Times Book Review)To read Loren Eiseley is to renew a sense of wonder at the miracles and paradoxes of evolution and the ever-changing diversity of life. In this brilliant collection, he considers the cosmological significance and ultimat...

Reissued in a handsome A List edition, the largest collection of critical prose to date from world renowned author and poet Margaret Atwood, featuring an introduction by Lennie Goodings.Originally published in 1982, Second Words brings together fifty of Margaret Atwood’s finest essays and reviews spanning two decades, beginning in 1962, with an introduction and commentary by the author.With her incomparable wit and originality, Atwood discusses the...

A delightful and provocative journey across four decades of contemporary American poetry with Stephanie Burt, “the leading poetry critic of her generation” (New York Times), as our surefooted guide.In The Poem Is You, critic and poet Stephanie Burt canvasses contemporary American poetry —from the urgency of Claudia Rankine’s Citizento the limitless energy of Juan Felipe Herrera and the erotic provocations of D. A. Powell.Burt presents a range of s...

Every year since 1988 a major poet has selected seventy-five poems for publication in The Best American Poetry. The series has quickly grown in both sales and prestige, as poetry itself has seen a remarkable resurgence in popularity and vitality, fueled by established poets at the peak of their powers and a new generation of daring voices. As we approach the millennium, now is the opportune moment to take stock of american poetry and choose the work that will stand the tes...

The critic and scholar Heather Cass White offers an exploration of the nature of readingHeather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preem...

Let Great Reading Fuel Your WritingGreat writers readvoraciously and across many topics and genres. They read to learn, to research, to study the style of others, and to improve their own work. They read because they love the written word. But becoming well read takes time, dedication, and patience. The thought can be dauntingespecially when you're eager to get to your own writing.Fred White, author of The Daily Writer, helps you sort through the...

Rick Moody on John Cheever; Ben Marcus on Dr. Seuss; Mona Simpson on Henry James: Forty-five essays by great writers, about great writers.For Tributes, Conjunctions invited a number of contemporary writers to pay homage to American literary masters who made something possible for them—whether that was the act of writing itself, writing a certain book, writing in a particular manner, or living in a way that was consonant with the act of writing. Th...