A new translation of Federico García Lorca's captivating lecture on duende.

For years, Federico García Lorca's lecture on duende has been a source of insight for writers and performers, including Ted Hughes, Nick Cave, Patti Smith, and Amanda Gorman.

Duende: Play and Theory not only provides a path into Lorca's poetics and the arts of Spain; it is one of the strangest, most compelling accounts of inspiration ever offered by a poet. Contrasting the demon called duende with the Angel and the Muse, Lorca describes a mysterious telluric, diabolical current, an irreducible it, that can draw the best from both performer and audience.

This new translation by Christopher Maurer, based on a thoroughly revised edition of the Spanish original of 1933, also included in this volume, offers a more accurate and fully annotated version of the lecture, with an introduction by eminent philologist José Javier León. Drawing on a deep knowledge of flamenco, and correcting decades of discussion about duende and its supposed origins in Spanish folklore and popular speech, León shows to what extent the concept of duende--understood as the imp of artistic inspiration--was the playful, yet deadly serious, invention of Lorca himself.

Lorca's bravura performance of duende is foreshadowed here with a bilingual version--the most complete ever--of his other major text on inspiration, Imagination, Inspiration, Evasion, in which he calls for greater freedom in poetry as if searching for duende and its constant baptism of newly created things.

Part of James Joyce's genius was his ability to find the poetry in everyday life. For Joyce, even a simple object like a table becomes magical, a board that was of the birchwood of Finlandy and it was upheld by four dwarfmen of that country but they durst not move more for enchantment. How might we learn to regain some of the child-like play with language and sense of delight in the ordinary that comes so naturally to Joyce?

The Joyce of Everyday Life teaches us how to interpret seemingly mundane objects and encounters with openness and active curiosity in order to attain greater self-understanding and a fuller appreciation of others. Through a close examination of Joyce's joyous, musical prose, this book shows how language provides us with the means to revitalize daily experience and social interactions across a huge, diverse, and everchanging world.

Acclaimed Joyce scholar Vicki Mahaffey demonstrates how his writing might prompt us to engage in a different kind of reading, treating words and fiction as tools for expanding the boundaries of the self with humor and feeling. A book for everyone who loves language, The Joyce of Everyday Life is a lyrical romp through quotidian existence.

In a series of incisive readings, Francisco E. Robles provides a literary history of midcentury US multiethnic literature, tracing the shift from coalitional aesthetics to multiculturalism by focusing on how migrancy and labor politics shape literary innovation. Along the way, Robles shows how writers kept the Popular Front's legacy of coalitional aesthetics alive through literary practices of what he calls speaking with, whereby authors undo their authority as scribes, audiences become participatory interpreters, and texts emerge as places of communal and collaborative work.

Beginning with significant, unexpected connections between Zora Neale Hurston and Muriel Rukeyser, and delving deeply into the work of Sanora Babb, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, poets of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, Carlos Bulosan, Tomás Rivera, and authors included in This Bridge Called My Back, Robles examines texts whose range of experimental strategies deliberately engage figurations of movement, migration, and coalition. The experimentation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it's overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the astonishing ways these authors conceive of migrancy as neither static nor statistical but as a modality that necessitates writerly innovation. The result is a genealogy of coalitional aesthetics as a significantly important branch of American midcentury multiethnic writing that sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.

How and why did Minnesota, distant from both dream coasts, become a literary mecca? Why not Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, St Louis, or Cleveland? What made the Twin Cities fertile ground for the birth and growth of the Loft Literary Center, the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and Milkweed Editions, and an ideal place for Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press to transplant themselves? The Minnesota literary renaissance of the 1960s and 70s was due at the start to one generous and visionary poet, Robert Bly, and his gift for generating excitement across the state, involving many young poets, and creating a community of mutually supportive writers. A florescence of poetry reading series, poetry magazines, small press books, and literary organizations ensued. Read Sowing Seeds to appreciate fully the origins of the wondrous scene in which we are privileged to live.

Exploring the important themes of guilt and morality in James Joyce's final work



James Joyce's last novel, Finnegans Wake,
is notorious for its complex structure and is considered by many to be
unreadable. Approaching this complicated book with attention to the
theme of guilt, an important concept that has been underexplored in
studies of the Wake, Talia Abu presents a clear and thorough
interpretation that helps illuminate the book for even the most novice
Joyce readers.

In Guilt and Finnegans Wake,
Talia Abu examines how Joyce portrays the evolution of cultural beliefs
about morality, from the concept of a moral code set in place by a
transcendental authority to an embodied morality that originates in
material existence. Through close readings of the novel, Abu
demonstrates that Joyce engages with guilt as it relates to the Catholic
doctrine of original sin, the institution of the marriage contract, the
theories of Nietzsche, and the views of Freud--including Freud's
emphasis on physical experience as the primary aspect of being.
Ultimately, Abu argues that Joyce sees guilt as a personal and unique
experience and that emotions such as guilt can be reclaimed from the
influence of religious and social institutions.



Delving
into Joyce's representation of historical events while also analyzing
Joyce's wordplay and linguistic techniques and drawing from multiple
disciplines to understand different conceptions of guilt, this book
shows the importance of the theme to the form of Finnegans Wake and
Joyce's craft more broadly. Pursuing the questions and ideas that Joyce
raises about guilt and morality, Talia Abu makes a case for the enduring
relevance of Joyce's work today.



A volume in the Florida James Joyce Series, edited by Sam Slote

Iona Heath relates the importance that John Berger's work and friendship had on her working life as a GP. It includes extracts from letters that span 20 years of her correspondence with John Berger.

In this book, Iona Heath writes about reading John Berger's writing over more than 50 years and her friendship and correspondence with him over the best part of 20 years. Dr Heath found that both of these interacted profoundly with her work as a general practitioner in a deprived urban area in London. For Iona Heath, general practice is a quite extraordinary undertaking: every working day, sitting with a succession of unique individuals, each worried about some aspect of their health or life circumstances, many burdened by unspoken fears, and each seeking some form of answer. Starting with A Fortunate Man, when she was an ignorant but hopeful undergraduate medical student, she found reading John Berger on any subject had something new to tell her about the aspirations and detail of her work: clues about how to look and how to listen and much else. Later when they started to correspond, Iona Heath found herself in the privileged position of being able to check her understanding directly with the writer and on each occasion found deeper levels of awareness and insight. She is convinced that reading John Berger made her a better doctor.

Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it's typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right.

Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith's White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know), and globalization's gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift).

By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present.

An insightful guide to the life and literary career of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson

Hunter S. Thompson (1937-2005) pushed the boundaries of storytelling. While the writer is most recognized for the genre-bending work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), in Understanding Hunter S. Thompson, Kevin J. Hayes provides a broad and nuanced analysis of Thompson's multifaceted career and unique literary voice. Following a biographical introduction, Hayes examines the different roles Thompson played throughout his literary career, providing a view of his work unlike any previously published biographical or critical study. The ensuing chapters examine Thompson's work in his capacities as a foreign correspondent, literary critic, New Journalist, gonzo journalist, campaign writer, anthologist, letter writer, and novelist. Hayes draws on previously unrecorded articles, correspondence, and interviews to inform his insightful analysis. Written in an engaging and propulsive style, Understanding Hunter S. Thompson is essential reading for scholars and fans.

Mid-Century Romance chronicles a revival of the historical novel in thehe middle decades of the twentieth century in the cultures of British modernism and international communism. Born of a national turn in world politics, these novels met the turbulence of mid-century history with narratives of national becoming, roadmaps to situate their readers in the pattern of social change. Their writers were often mindful of the genre's romantic-era heritage: they saw themselves as following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott and they drew on the same rescued remains of primitive poetry and popular antiquities that romanticism first used to construct its versions of national identity, culture, and tradition. This book shows how the impulse to salvage traces of ancestral culture and press them to new purpose links the mid-century national-historical novel to the rise of radical social history and magical realism.
Post-war anticommunism shaped a tradition of the novel as a preserve of art and the individual. Mid-Century Romance counters with a different genealogy of the British and world novel, whose object is society and the future of community, the nation and its people. It situates its cast of British writers--including the modernists Hope Mirrlees and Virginia Woolf, the communists Jack Lindsay and Sylvia Townsend Warner, the eccentric modernist and sometime fellow traveller John Cowper Powys, and the New Left luminary Raymond Williams--in a transnational perspective that reaches from Bihar, India to Bahia, Brazil.

Returns us to Gertrude Stein's theater by way of the modernist medium of radio

What happens when we listen to Gertrude Stein's plays as radio and music theater? This book explores the sound of Stein's theater and proposes that radio, when approached both historically and phenomenologically, offers technical solutions to her texts' unique challenges. Adam J. Frank documents the collaborative project of staging Stein's early plays and offers new critical interpretations of these lesser-known works. Radio Free Stein grapples with her innovative theater poetics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives: sound and media studies, affect and object relations theory, linguistic performativity, theater scholarship, and music composition.

In a series of incisive readings, Francisco E. Robles provides a literary history of midcentury US multiethnic literature, tracing the shift from coalitional aesthetics to multiculturalism by focusing on how migrancy and labor politics shape literary innovation. Along the way, Robles shows how writers kept the Popular Front's legacy of coalitional aesthetics alive through literary practices of what he calls speaking with, whereby authors undo their authority as scribes, audiences become participatory interpreters, and texts emerge as places of communal and collaborative work.

Beginning with significant, unexpected connections between Zora Neale Hurston and Muriel Rukeyser, and delving deeply into the work of Sanora Babb, Woody Guthrie, Gwendolyn Brooks, poets of the Memphis Sanitation Strike, Carlos Bulosan, Tomás Rivera, and authors included in This Bridge Called My Back, Robles examines texts whose range of experimental strategies deliberately engage figurations of movement, migration, and coalition. The experimentation these works display emerges from the particular methods of speaking with that they contain, whether it's overcoming exclusion by finding new ways of representing migrants through word and sound, or in the astonishing ways these authors conceive of migrancy as neither static nor statistical but as a modality that necessitates writerly innovation. The result is a genealogy of coalitional aesthetics as a significantly important branch of American midcentury multiethnic writing that sustained and indeed extended the Popular Front and its legacies.

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. This volume, with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike.

The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides.

The annotations reflect the latest scholarship and have been thoroughly reviewed by an international team of experts. They are designed to be accessible to first-time readers and college students and will also serve as a resource for Joycean specialists. The volume includes contemporaneous maps of Dublin to illustrate the cityscape's relevance to Joyce's novel. Unlike previous volumes of annotations, almost every note includes documentation about sources.

In 2024 the literary community commemorates the 100th anniversary of the death of Joseph Conrad. This volume of collected essays takes the opportunity to reflect on Conrad's enduring influence on literature and culture in the 21st century.

Offering reflections on Conrad's legacy by leading critics and scholars in the field of Conrad studies as well as by significant figures in the arts and cultural sector, it represents a unique contribution to Conrad studies and provides an overview of how the author continues to inspire and shape contemporary literature and culture in the 21st century.

Covering a broad range of topics, from discussions of how Conrad has inspired contemporary films and operas through to the pertinence of his works to current conflicts and key contemporary issues, Joseph Conrad's Cultural Legacyoffers unique, original insights into the enduring relevance of one of the leading literary figures of the 20th century.

Making No Compromise is the first book-length account of the lives and editorial careers of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the women who founded the avant-garde journal the Little Review in Chicago in 1914.

Born in the nineteenth-century Midwest, Anderson and Heap grew up to be iconoclastic rebels, living openly as lesbians, and advocating causes from anarchy to feminism and free love. Their lives and work shattered cultural, social, and sexual norms. As their paths crisscrossed Chicago, New York, Paris, and Europe; two World Wars; and a parade of the most celebrated artists of their time, they transformed themselves and their journal into major forces for shifting perspectives on literature and art.

Imagism, Dada, surrealism, and Machine Age aesthetics were among the radical trends the Little Review promoted and introduced to US audiences. Anderson and Heap published the early work of the men of 1914--Ezra Pound, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, and T. S. Eliot--and promoted women writers such as Djuna Barnes, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Mina Loy, Mary Butts, and the inimitable Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the mid-1920s Anderson and Heap became adherents of George I. Gurdjieff, a Russian mystic, and in 1929 ceased publication of the Little Review.

Holly A. Baggett examines the roles of radical politics, sexuality, modernism, and spirituality and suggests that Anderson and Heap's interest in esoteric questions was evident from the early days of the Little Review. Making No Compromise tells the story of two women who played an important role in shaping modernism.

Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America

Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic

Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association

Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as difficult become familiar to audiences?

In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another's work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille's essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way, and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy. Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and Albert Camus.

In keeping with Critique's mission to explore the totality of human knowledge, Bataille's articles did not just focus on the literary but featured important reflections on the science of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and living that would inhabit that excess.

This is the first of three volumes collecting Bataille's post-war essays. Beginning with an article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille's post-war thought.