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For the first time, a deluxe collector's edition of the pathbreaking novels and stories that reinvented science fiction, with new introductions by the author.Winner of the 2018 Locus Award for Best SF Collection.In such visionary masterworks as the Nebula and Hugo Award winners The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin redrew the map of modern science fiction, imagining a galactic confederation of human colonies founded by the planet Hain, an array of worlds whose divergent societies-the result of both evolution and genetic engineering-allow her to speculate on what is intrinsic in human nature. Now, for the first time, the complete Hainish novels and stories are collected in a deluxe two-volume Library of America boxed set, with new introductions by the author.Volume one gathers the first five Hainish novels: Rocannon's World, in which an ethnologist sent to a bronze-age planet must help defeat an intergalactic enemy; Planet of Exile, the story of human colonists stranded on a planet that is slowly killing them; City of Illusions, which finds a future Earth ruled by the mysterious Shing; and the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning masterpieces The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed-as well as four short stories.Volume two presents Le Guin's final two Hainish novels, The Word for World Is Forest, in which Earth enslaves another planet to strip its natural resources, and The Telling, the harrowing story of a society which has suppressed its own cultural heritage. Rounding out the volume are seven short stories and the story suite Five Ways to Forgiveness, published here in full for the first time. The endpapers feature Le Guin's own hand-drawn map of Gethen, the planet that is the setting for The Left Hand of Darkness, and a full-color chart of the known worlds of Hainish descent.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

The ultimate Didion edition concludes with the brilliant and haunting works from her incomparable late phase. Library of America now completes its definitive, three-volume edition of one of the most electric writers of our time with the final seven books: Political Fictions (2001) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the American political landscape of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, its reflections on sound bites, photo ops, and an increasingly dysfunctional system still bracingly relevant. Fixed Ideas (2003), restored to print in this collection, traces the efforts of the Bush administration to "stake new ground in old domestic wars" in the wake of 9/11. Where I Was From (2003) explores the sunny myths and darker realities of Didion's native California, her personal recollections interwoven with sketches of water wars, sexual predators, mass incarceration, and corporate corruption. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which brought Didion the National Book Award and legions of new readers, registers the shock of the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, amid her daughter Quintana's ultimately terminal illness. Looking back on her marriage of four decades, she faces the abyss of a grief that "turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it." The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (2007) is Didion's lauded dramatic adaptation of the memoir.Blue Nights (2011) is Didion's raw and haunting search for consolation amid despair.South and West (2017) revisits Didion's notebooks from a happier time, recalling a roadtrip with her husband through the American South, and 1970s California. Here are the achingly beautiful memoirs and masterful collections of reportage and observation with which Joan Didion crowned the final decades of her extraordinary career.

From the recollections of his youth in Michigan to the visionary longings of the poems written just before his death, Theodore Roethke embarked on a quest to restore wholeness to a self that seemed irreparably broken. In the words of editor Edward Hirsch, "He courted the irrational and embraced what is most vulnerable in life." Hirsch's selection and perceptive introduction illuminate the daring and intensity of a poet who, in poems such as "My Papa's Waltz" and "The Lost Son," reached back into the abyss of childhood in an attempt to wrest self-knowledge out of memory. Roethke's true subject was the unfathomable depths of his own being, but his existential investigations were always shaped and disciplined by an exacting formal stringency, as equally at ease with Yeats' vigorous cadence ("Four for Sir John Davies") as with the spacious Whitmanian idiom on display in the virtuoso efforts of The Far Field. This gathering of Roethke's works also includes several of his poems for children, and a generous sampling from his notebook writings, offering a glimpse of the poet at work with the raw materials of language and ideas. About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

A fresh look at the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet laureate of the American Midwest With the publication of Chicago Poems in 1916, Carl Sandburg became one of the most famous poets in America: the voice of a Midwestern literary revolt, fusing free-verse poetics with hard-edged journalistic observation and energetic, sometimes raucous protest. By the time his first book appeared, Sandburg had been many things--a farm hand, a soldier in the Spanish-American War, an active Socialist, a newspaper reporter and movie reviewer--and he was determined to write poetry that would explode the genteel conventions of contemporary verse. His poems are populated by factory workers, washerwomen, crooked politicians, hobos, vaudeville dancers, and battle-scarred radicals. Writing from the bottom up, bringing to his poetry the immediacy of America's streets and prairies, factories and jails, Sandburg forged a distinctive style at once lyrical and vernacular, by turns angry, gritty, funny, and tender.

Cole Porter possessed to a singular degree the art of expressing depth through apparent frivolity. The effervescent wit and technical bravura of his songs are matched by their unguarded revelations of feeling. In the words of editor Robert Kimball, "Porter wrote tellingly of the pain and evanescence of emotional relationships. He gently mocked propriety and said that few things were simple or lasting or free from ambiguity." Of the masters of twentieth-century American songwriting, Porter was one of the few who wrote both music and lyrics, and, even in the absence of his melodies, his words distill an unmistakable mixture of poignancy and wit that marks him as a genius of light verse. Selected from over eight hundred songs, here are Porter's finest flights of invention, lyrics that are an indelible part of 20th-century culture: "Let's Do It," "Love for Sale," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Anything Goes," "In the Still of the Night," "I Concentrate on You," and dozens more. About the American Poets ProjectElegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today's most discerning poets and critics.

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 and senseless destruction, animates the five brilliant and unforgettable memoirs gathered here. Company Commander (1947), by Charles B. MacDonald, describes with startling immediacy and candor the "cold, dirty, rough, frightened, miserable" life of the infantryman and company commander from the aftermath of D-Day in September 1944 through the war's terrifying final days.The Warriors (1959), by J. Glenn Gray, a counterintelligence officer who served in Italy, France, and Germany and a scholar with a PhD. in philosophy, is a sensitive and revelatory meditation on the nature of war and its effects on both soldiers and civilians, interspliced with his letters, journals, and wartime memories. All the Brave Promises (1966) is novelist Mary Lee Settle's memoir of her year as an airfield radio operator in the Royal Air Force. Settle brilliantly evokes both the working-class culture of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force's "other ranks" and the petty and demeaning regimentation inherent in military life.The Fall of Fortresses (1980), by former B-17 navigator Elmer Bendiner, vividly recalls the fear and excitement he experienced flying bomber missions deep into Germany in 1943 without fighter escort.The Buffalo Saga (2009) is James Harden Daugherty's heartfelt account of his frontline service as a Black soldier in the 92nd Infantry Division, as he fights the Germans, endures the harsh Italian winter, and confronts the racism of his own army.This deluxe Library of America volume includes full-color endpaper maps of the European Theater, an eight-page photo insert, an introduction by West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet, and detailed notes.

Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix. Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . .  MAD. A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties. MAD became the zaniest, most subversive satire magazine ever to be sold on America's newsstands, anticipating the spirit of underground comix and 'zines and influencing humor writing in movies, television, and the internet to this day. Edited by David Mikics, The MAD Files celebrates the magazine's impact and the legacy of the Usual Gang of Idiots who transformed puerile punchlines and merciless mockery into an art form. 26 essays and comics present a varied, perceptive, and often very funny account of MAD's significance, ranging from the cultural to the aesthetic to the personal. Art Spiegelman reflects on how he "couldn't learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents--but I learned all about it from MAD"Roz Chast remembers how the magazine was "love at first sight. . . . It was one of my first inklings that there were other people out there who found the world as ridiculous as I did."David Hajdu and Grady Hendrix zero in on MAD's hilarious movie spoofsLiel Leibovitz delves into the Jewishness behind the magazine's humorand Rachel Shteir amplifies the often unsung contributions of MAD's women artists.Several essays are admiring profiles of the individual creators that made MAD what it was: Mort Drucker, Harvey Kurtzman, Al Jaffee, Antonio Prohias, and Will Elder. For longtime fans and new readers alike, The MAD Files is an indispensable guide to America's greatest satire magazine.

"The best black writer in America" (Time) joins the Library of America with a volume collecting 4 landmark novels about race and the legacy of slavery in America Includes A Lesson Before Dying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an early Oprah Book Club selection Born in 1933, the oldest of twelve children in a family of sharecroppers in Oscar, Louisiana, Ernest J. Gaines wrote novels and stories, set on and around the former slave plantation he called home, that are modern classics--nuanced, compassionate portraits of women and men, both Black and white, caught in the vortex of race in America. He joins the Library of America with this volume gathering his four greatest novels. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), the story of an elderly woman born into slavery who witnesses Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement. A living testament to the history, hopes, courage, and survival of her people, Miss Jane is one of the most indelible and unforgettable characters in American fiction.In My Father's House (1978) finds an activist minister organizing a civil rights protest in his town when his estranged son suddenly appears on the scene, threatening to expose his family's secret past.A Gathering of Old Men (1983) sees a group of elderly Black men with nothing left to lose decide to make a last stand against the racism that has defined and delimited their lives.A Lesson Before Dying (1993, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and an Oprah Book Club selection), in which a local schoolteacher attempts to help a young man falsely convicted of the murder of a white man face execution with dignity.A fitting tribute to a still underappreciated American genius, this volume also includes a chronology of Gaines's life and career written by his authorized biographer, John Wharton Lowe, and helpful notes.

Together for the first time, classic essays on how and when to disobey the government from two of the greatest thinkers in our literature As we grapple with how to respond to emerging threats against democracy, Library of America brings together for the first time two seminal essays about the duties of citizenship and the imperatives of conscience. In "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), Henry David Thoreau recounts the story of a night he spent in jail for refusing to pay poll taxes, which he believed supported the Mexican American War and the expansion of slavery. His larger aim was to articulate a view of individual conscience as a force in American politics. No writer has made a more persuasive case for obedience to a "higher law." In "Civil Disobedience" (1970), Hannah Arendt offers a stern rebuttal to Thoreau. For Arendt, Thoreau stands in willful opposition to the public and collective spirit that defines civil disobedience. Only through positive collective action and the promises we make to each other in a civil society can meaningful change occur. This deluxe paperback features an introduction by Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College, who reflects on the tradition of civil disobedience and the future of American politics.

'"For more than sixty years, Wendell Berry has invited readers to Port William, Kentucky, a fictional setting that rivals Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, as the most richly imagined place in American literature. Library of America presents Berry's career-spanning masterpiece of storytelling for the first time as a single chronological narrative. This second volume gathers twenty-three stories and two novels that chronicle the lives of the Port William Membership from 1945 to 1978"--

In 1 volume, 3 classic early works by the Southern physician-turned-novelist who galvanized American literature with stories of spiritual searching amid modern angst Includes the landmark, National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, in a fully annotation edition A physician-turned-writer and self-described diagnostician of "the malaise," Percy plumbed the depths of modern American angst and alienation as few other writers have. Now he joins the Library of America series with a volume collecting his first 3 books. The Moviegoer (1961), winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, is the story of John Bickerson "Binx" Bolling, a New Orleans stockbroker who finds in movies a resplendent reality that lifts him, for a time, out of the mire of everydayness. Binx is a modern-day pilgrim whose progress unfolds in what editor Paul Elie calls "the first work of what we call contemporary American fiction, the earliest novel to render a set of circumstances and an outlook that still feel recognizably ours." In The Last Gentleman (1966), Percy portrays another troubled, searching young man, this time a southerner living in New York whose intermitent amnesia and odd moments of déjà vu lead him to imagine that the world catastrophe everyone fears has already occurred. A satirical work of speculative fiction, Love in the Ruins (1971) introduces lapsed-Catholic psychiatrist Dr. Thomas More, inventor of the lapsometer, a devise that measures the spiritual sickness of a near-apocalyptic America torn apart by the forces of the far right and left. Rounding out the volume are three short nonfiction pieces by Percy: his speech upon accepting the National Book Award, his special message to readers of the Franklin edition of The Moviegoer, and his address to the Publicists' Association of the National Book Awards concerning Love in the Ruins.

"From October 1948 to October 1953, The New Yorker published humorist S.J. Perelman's "Cloudland Revisited" series: twenty-two reviews of once-popular books and silent films whose expiration dates had passed. All but forgotten even at the time, they were nonetheless part of Perelman's youth and made an indelible mark on him. ln the comic genius's biting satire they live once again: Gertrude Atherton's sensationalist fantasy Black Oxen; Sax Rohmer's supervillain blockbuster The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu; the "underwater" silent film adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; Edgar Rice Burrough's 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apes; and George Barr McCutcheon's 1901 historical fantasy novel Graustark-the Game of Thrones of its era-which launched numerous sequels and film adaptations. Here for the first time all twenty-two of Perelman's reappraisals are collected. With self-deprecating humor and frequent embarrassment, Perelman reflects on how rereading and rewatching brings us in contact with how we, like an old book or film, have both changed and remained the same. This paperback includes a tribute to Perelman's art by another New Yorker favorite, Adam Gopnik"--Provided by publisher

"Here together for the first time are all five remarkable standalone novels by the writer who transformed American speculative fiction. In The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr has dreams that have the power to change reality itself. The Eye of the Heron is set on the planet Victoria in a former Terran prison colony ripe for revolution. The Beginning Place follows two young people who discover a portal to a different, seemingly better world. Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand is a Winesburg, Ohio--like series of interconnected stories about the lives of artists and seekers in a small vacation town on the Oregon coast. Le Guin's powerful final novel, Lavinia, retells Vergil's Aeneid from the perspective of a woman who is not given a voice in the original. Volume features include hand-drawn maps by the author; three essays by Le Guin offering background on the novels; an updated chronology of her life and career; and detailed notes."--Dust jacket.

"A collections of the very best writings of America's funniest and zaniest humorist, made by the comic genius himself, is reissued in a handsome paperback. Here, S. J. Perelman's gift for wordplay, witticism, spoofery, and sheer nonsense are on full display. In a playful, loving tribute to the funny man, novelist Joshua Cohen-also an erudite wordsmith and punster-introduces Perelman's sui generis comic pieces to a new generation of readers, certain to fall in love with the writer whom The New York Times once noted for his ability "to transform the common clichâe or figure of speech into an exploding cigar." Included here are such beloved classics as the Joycean virtuoso performance "Scenario"; "A Farewell to Omsk," an homage to Dostoevsky; and Perelman's side-splitting send-up of the hardboiled detective fiction of Raymond Chandler, "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer."-- Provided by publisher.

"A deluxe hardcover edition of Keller's classic memoir The Story of My Life--presented in complete and unredacted form--along with the brilliant, still-underappreciated personal essays of The World I Live In, in which Keller reflects on the senses, language, philosophy, dreams, and belief. Includes a selection of more than a dozen essays, speeches, and letters--most of them out-of-print, previously uncollected, or previously unpublished--revealing Keller's thoughts on religion and faith, women's rights and workers' rights, racial injustice, and the peace movement. Chapters from her later memoir Midstream recall her friendship with Mark Twain, and memories of her mother"--

"The 72 columns selected here by editor Dan Barry, more than half of which have not been reprinted since initial publication, reveal Breslin at his best, addressing stories of national and global importance but more often uncovering tales of ordinary New Yorkers, by turns tragic or absurd but always gripping to read. Gathered here are the highlights of his consummate deadline artistry: his celebrated interview with the man who dug the grave for John F. Kennedy, his coverage of the assassination of Malcolm X, his dispatches from the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement and from Vietnam, accounts of his involvement with the "Son of Sam" case as the serial killer who terrorized New York City in 1977, his story about John Lennon's murder in 1980, his award-winning series about the AIDS crisis in 1986, and his disgusted glimpse of Donald Trump conning the press corps during a book promotion in 1990. These masterful columns are joined by two of Breslin's books: How the Good Guys Finally Won (1976), one of the best accounts of the Watergate scandal, centered on House Majority Leader Tip O'Neill and his allies, whose success in forcing Richard Nixon for office scored an unlikely victory for U.S. democracy; and The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiâerrez (2002), the story of an immigrant laborer killed at a construction site in Brooklyn and of the malfeasance among developers, city officials, and others that enabled the accident to happen. As quintessentially a New York figure as the memorable urban characters he portrayed, Breslin nonetheless transcended the confines of his local audience and became a national celebrity, writing with a novelist's awareness of the telling detail that reveals the depth of a person's, and a people's, character."--Provided by publisher.

This collection of 80 dramatic firsthand writings by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others brings to life the struggle for racial justice from the Civil War to World War. A vital resource for the teaching of the history of race in America that traces the ascendency of white supremacy after Reconstruction--and the outspoken resistance to it led by Black Americans and their allies. W.E.B. Du Bois famously identified "the problem of the color-line" as the defining issue in American life. The powerful writings gathered here reveal the many ways Americans, Black and white, fought against white supremacist efforts to police the color line, envisioning a better America in the face of disenfranchisement, segregation, and widespread lynching, mob violence, and police brutality.

A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution Black Writers of the Founding Era is the most comprehensive anthology ever published of Black writing from the turbulent decades surrounding the birth of the United States. An unprecedented archive of historical sources--including more than 200 poems, letters, sermons, newspaper advertisements, slave narratives, testimonies of faith and religious conversion, criminal confessions, court transcripts, travel accounts, private journals, wills, petitions for freedom, even dreams, by over 100 authors--it is a collection that reveals the surprising richness and diversity of Black experience in the new nation. Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, female and male, northern and southern; soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, accountants, orators, scientists, community organizers, preachers, restaurateurs and cooks, hairdressers, criminals, carpenters, and many more. Along with long-famous works like Phillis Wheatley's poems and Benjamin Banneker's astonishing mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering little-known Black perspectives on the events of the times, like the Boston Massacre and the death of George Washington. From their bold and eloquent contributions to public debates about the meanings of the revolution and the values of the new nation-- writings that dramatize the many ways in which protest, activism, and community organizing have been integral to the Black American experience from the beginning--to their intimate thoughts preserved in private diaries and letters, some unseen to the present day, the words of the many writers gathered here will indelibly alter our understandings of American history. A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on cutting edge scholarship, illuminate these writers' works and to situate them in their historical contexts. A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers included and images of the original manuscripts, broadside, and books in which their words have been preserved.

Rediscover the sensational 1967 literary thriller that captures the bitter struggles of postwar Black intellectuals and artists With a foreword by Ishmael Reed and a new introduction by Merve Emre about how this explosive novel laid bare America's racial fault lines Max Reddick, a novelist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter, has spent his career struggling against the riptide of race in America. Now terminally ill, he has nothing left to lose. An expat for many years, Max returns to Europe one last time to settle an old debt with his estranged Dutch wife, Margrit, and to attend the Paris funeral of his friend, rival, and mentor Harry Ames, a character loosely modelled on Richard Wright. In Amsterdam, among Harry's papers, Max uncovers explosive secret government documents outlining "King Alfred," a plan to be implemented in the event of widespread racial unrest and aiming "to terminate, once and for all, the Minority threat to the whole of the American society." Realizing that Harry has been assassinated, Max must risk everything to get the documents to the one man who can help. Greeted as a masterpiece when it was published in 1967, The Man Who Cried I Am stakes out a range of experience rarely seen in American fiction: from the life of a Black GI to the ferment of postcolonial Africa to an insider's view of Washington politics in the era of segregation and the Civil Rights Movement, including fictionalized portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. John A. Williams and his lost classic are overdue for rediscovery. Few novels have so deliberately blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality as The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), and many of its early readers assumed the King Alfred plan was real. In her introduction, Merve Emre examines the gonzo marketing plan behind the novel that fueled this confusion and prompted an FBI investigation. This deluxe paperback also includes a new foreword by novelist Ishmael Reed. "It is a blockbuster, a hydrogen bomb . . . . This is a book white people are not ready to read yet, neither are most black people who read. But [it] is the milestone produced since Native Son. Besides which, and where I should begin, it is a damn beautifully written book." --Chester Himes "Magnificent . . . obviously in the Baldwin and Ellison class." --John Fowles "If The Man Who Cried I Am were a painting it would be done by Brueghel or Bosch. The madness and the dance is never-ending display of humanity trying to creep past inevitable Fate." --Walter Mosely

Library of America caps its six-volume edition of William Faulkner's works with a volume gathering of all the stories he collected in his lifetime, in corrected texts Faulkner called the short story "the most demanding form after poetry" and wrote to an editor that "even to a collection of short stories, form, integration, is as important as to a novel--an entity of its own, single, set for one pitch, contrapuntal in integration, toward one end, one finale." Faulkner was a major practitioner of the short story form and keenly sensitive to its aesthetic demands. The Library of America edition of the collected writings of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting all the stories the author gathered for his book collections, in newly edited and authoritative texts. This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read. Faulkner's monumental Collected Stories (1950) presented the author's first two collections, These Thirteen (1931) and Doctor Martino (1934), along with seventeen new stories, all carefully selected and arranged by the author; Knight's Gambit (1949) collected six stories about attorney Gavin Stevens' detective work; and in Big Woods (1955) Faulkner gathered four hunting stories connected with interstitial material. This volume presents these three collections as carefully arranged by Faulkner, with new authoritative and corrected texts that best represent Faulkner's intentions for the stories. Here are such well-known stories as "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning," and "A Bear Hunt," as well as some of his most poetic--"Carcassone"--and less known, such as "The Tall Men," "Elly," and "Uncle Willy." Also included are Faulkner's stories "The Hound" (collected in Doctor Martino but omitted by the author from Collected Stories), "Spotted Horses," Faulkner's fictionalized autobiographical essay "Mississippi," as well as his Nobel Prize acceptance speech and helpful explanatory notes by Faulkner scholar Theresa M. Towner.

Rediscover one of America's best SF writers in a definitive hardcover edition gathering all her finest work together for the first time A LGBTQIA+ pioneer joins the Library of America series An incandescent stylist with a dark sense of humor and a provocative feminist edge, Joanna Russ upended every genre in which she worked. The essential novels and stories gathered in this definitive Library of America edition make a case for Russ not only as an astonishing writer of speculative fiction, but, in the words of Samuel Delany, "one of the finest--and most necessary--writers of American fiction" period. Here is her now-classic novel The Female Man (1975), in which four remarkable women--Jeannine, Janet, Joanna, and Jael--traverse alternate histories and parallel worlds (including the brilliantly imagined all-female utopia, Whileaway) in a multi-voiced, multidimensional voyage that continues to alter readers' sense of gender and reality. We Who Are About To ... (1977), recounting the fate of a misfit band of space-tourists stranded on an alien world, challenges "golden age" expectations about civilization, in what becomes an allegorical thriller. In On Strike Against God (1980), her incisive, darkly comic, and ultimately joyous final novel, Russ returns to Earth to explore LGBTQIA+ and feminist themes and the unfamiliar territory of "coming out" and lesbian romance. Russ's "Complete Alyx Stories"--which feature her inimitably sly, resilient, and stone-cold heroine Alyx, who is plucked from a life of petty crime in ancient Phoenicia to serve as adventurer-for-hire for the Trans-Temporal Authority, and which reinvent the sword and sorcery genre for a postmodern era--are presented in their entirety here for the first time, and newly restored to print. Also included are her unforgettable tales "When It Changed" and "Souls," the former a 1973 Nebula Award winner and the latter the recipient of the 1983 Hugo and Locus Awards.

Library of America presents a deluxe edition of unforgettable crime thrillers of the 1960s Here in two volumes are 9 timeless novels, including 4 lost classics now restored to print In the 1960s a number of gifted writers--some at the peak of their careers, others newcomers--reimagined American crime fiction. Here are nine novels of astonishing variety and inventiveness that pulse with the energies of that turbulent, transformative decade: Fredric Brown's The Murderers (1961), a darkly comic look at a murderous plot hatched on the hip fringes of Hollywood.Dan J. Marlowe's terrifying The Name of the Game Is Death (1962), about a nihilistic career criminal on the runCharles Williams's Dead Calm (1963), a masterful novel of natural peril and human evil on the high seas.Dorothy B. Hughes's The Expendable Man (1963), an unsettling tale of racism and wrongful accusation in the American Southwest.Richard Stark's taut The Score (1964), in which the master thief Parker plots the looting of an entire city with the cool precision of an expert mechanic.The Fiend (1964), in which Margaret Millar maps the interlocking anxieties of a seemingly tranquil California suburb through the rippling effects of a child's disappearance.Ed McBain's classic police procedural Doll (1965), a breakneck story that mixes murder, drugs, fashion models, and psychotherapy with the everyday professionalism of the 87th Precinct.Run Man Run (1966), Chester Himes's nightmarish tale of racism and police violence that follows a desperate young man seeking safe haven in New York City while being hunted by the law.Patricia Highsmith's ultimate meta-thriller, The Tremor of Forgery (1969), a novel in which a displaced traveler finds his own personality collapsing as he attempts to write a novel about a man coming undone.Each volume features an introduction by editor Geoffrey O'Brien (Hardboiled America), newly researched biographies of the writers and helpful notes, and an essay on textual selection.

"... the definitive edition of an essential figure in Black and American theater, spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s and including several works published for the first time."--Provided by publisher.

The ultimate Portis: for the first time in one collector's volume, the complete fiction and collected nonfiction of the author of True Grit Rediscover a comic genius and master storyteller comparable to Mark Twain"Charles Portis is one of the great pure pleasures available in American literature." -Ron Rosenbaum "Like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thomas Berger's Little Big Man, Charles Portis's True Grit captures the naïve elegance of the American voice." -Jonathan Lethem "No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does." -Donna Tartt "His fiction is the funniest I know." -Roy Blount, Jr. Twice adapted as a film, first in a version starring John Wayne and then by the Coen Brothers, True Grit is a wonder of novelistic perfection, told in the unforgettable voice of 14-year-old Mattie Ross as she sets out to avenge her murdered father in a quest that brings her out of her native Arkansas and into the wilds of the Choctaw Nation of the 1870s. One of the great literary Westerns, it is also a novel that has invited comparison with The Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Portis's deadpan debut novel Norwood (1966) is, like True Grit, the story of a quest, though here the stakes are far lower: an auto mechanic from Texas embarks on a madcap journey to New York City to try and recover $70 owed to him from an Army buddy. A book that according to Roy Blount Jr. "no one should die without having read," The Dog of the South (1979) is yet a third saga of pursuit, this time all the way to Central America. Ray Midge is on the road looking for the man who has run off with his car (and of somewhat less interest to him, his wife.) Masters of Atlantis (1985) conjures the fictional cult of Gnomonism and takes an uproarious plunge into the dark heart of conspiratorial thinking and schismatic in-fighting. Gringos (1991), set in Mexico, follows an expatriate ex-Marine in his search to find a UFO hunter gone missing in the Yucatan, amid a supporting cast of archaeologists, drug-addled hippie millenarians, and the son of the "bravest dog in all Mexico." A generous gathering of the nonfiction reveals Portis's skills as a reporter, above all in his coverage of the Civil Rights Movement; his appreciation of Arkansas history and landscape, as in "The Forgotten River"; and his poignancy as a family memoirist, on display in his recollection "Combinations of Jacksons."

"Nancy Hale was one of the most accomplished short story artists of her era, winner of ten O. Henry Awards and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1960s. But by the time of her death in 1988, this remarkable writer, so far ahead of her time in her depiction of complex women, was largely forgotten. Now Lauren Groff reintroduces this modern master with a selection of twenty-five of her best stories-- ... short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory"--

The years 1942 to 1954 saw William Faulkner's rise to literary celebrity-sought after by Hollywood, lionized by the critics, awarded a Nobel Prize in 1950 and the Pulitzer and National Book Award for 1954. But, despite his success, he was plagued by depression and alcohol and haunted by a sense that he had more to achieve-and a finite amount of time and energy to achieve it.This Library of America volume collects the novels written during this crucial period; defying the odds, Faulkner continued to break new ground in American fiction. He delved deeper into themes of race and religion and furthered his experiments with fictional structure and narrative voice. These newly restored texts, based on Faulkner's manuscripts, typescripts, and proof sheets, are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and are faithful to the author's intentions.Go Down, Moses (1942) is a haunting novel made up of seven related stories that explore the intertwined lives of black, white, and Indian inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. It includes "The Bear," one of the most famous works in all American fiction, with its evocation of "the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document."Characters from Go Down, Moses reappear in Intruder in the Dust (1948). Part detective novel, part morality tale, it is a compassionate story of a black man on trial and the growing moral awareness of a southern white boy.Requiem for a Nun (1951) is a sequel to Sanctuary. With an unusual structure combining novel and play, it tells the fate of the passionate, haunted Temple Drake and the murder case through which she achieves a tortured redemption. Prose interludes condense millennia of local history into a swirling counterpoint.In A Fable (1954), a recasting of the Christ story set during World War I, Faulkner wanted to "try to tell what I had found in my lifetime of truth in some important way before I had to put the pen down and die." The novel, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, is both an anguished spiritual parable and a drama of mutiny, betrayal, and violence in the barracks and on the battlefields.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

"'The poet's measures serve anarchic joy. / The story-teller tells one story: freedom.' Throughout a celebrated career that spanned genres, Ursula K. Le Guin was first and last a poet. This sixth volume in the definitive Library of America Le Guin edition presents for the first time an authoritative gathering of her verse -- from the earliest collection, Wild Angels, through her final publication, So Far So Good, which she delivered to her editor a week before her death. The major themes of Le Guin's work find their most refined expression here: exploration as a metaphor for both human bravery and creativity, the mystery and fragility of nature, the Tao Te Ching, marriage, aging, and womanhood. Features include a new introduction by Harold Bloom written in 2019, sixty-eight uncollected poems, a selection of Le Guin's prose writing about poetry, and helpful notes." -- Back cover.

A veteran of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, Ambrose Bierce went on to become one of the darkest and most death haunted of American writers, the blackest of black humorists. This volume gathers the most celebrated and significant of Bierce's writings. In the Midst of Life (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians), his collection of short fiction about the Civil War, which includes the masterpieces "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga," is suffused with a fiercely ironic sense of the horror and randomness of war. Can Such Things Be? brings together "The Death of Halpin Frayser," "The Damned Thing," "The Moonlit Road," and other tales of terror that make Bierce the genre's most significant American practitioner between Poe and Lovecraft. The Devil's Dictionary, the brilliant lexicon of subversively cynical definitions on which Bierce worked for decades, displays to the full his corrosive wit. In Bits of Autobiography, the series of memoirs that includes the memorable "What I Saw of Shiloh," he recreates his experiences in the war and its aftermath. The volume is rounded out with a selection of his best uncollected stories. Acclaimed Bierce scholar S. T. Joshi provides detailed notes and a newly researched chronology of Bierce's life and mysterious disappearance.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.