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Peopled by eccentrics and sparkling with humor and grace, this memoir by the editor of "Tin House" magazine tracks her fathers illness and death and her fragmented familys reunion.
It will scarcely be supposed that, with the passion of covetousness gnawing at my heart, I had space or convenience for any other feeling. But Abram Skinner had loved his children; and to this passion I was introduced, as well as to the other. At first I was surprised that I should bestow the least regard upon them, seeing that they were no children of mine. I endeavoured to shake off the feeling of attachment, as an absurdity, but could not; in spite of myself, I found my spirit yearning towards them; and by-and-by, having lost my identity entirely, I could scarcely, even when I made the effort, recall the consciousness that I was not their parent in reality. Indeed, the transformation that had now occurred to my spirit was more thorough than it had been in either previous instance; I could scarce convince myself I had not been born the being I represented; my past existence began to appear to my reflections only as some idle dream, that the fever of sickness had brought upon my mind; and I forgot that I was, or had been, Sheppard Lee.
"Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself" is a satirical work from the early years of the American Republic. It was written in the form as an autobiography and acquired wide acclaim after publishing. The story tells about a young man wishing to find a buried treasure. Instead, he finds the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. This results in a picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness. But every new form disappoints him. Lee comes to the conclusion that everything in America, even virtue and vice, are interchangeable; everything is an object and has its price.
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THE STORIES: THE CHINESE. The scene is the Chinese laundry that is also home for the Lee family--father, mother and son, Chester. The older Lees are quite obviously Asian while Chester (who is usually taken for Jewish) is not--but his questions as to
An Arkansas Florilegium is a late-flowering extension of the work initiated sixty years ago with University of Arkansas botanist Edwin B. Smith’s first entries in his pioneering Atlas and Annotated List of the Vascular Plants of Arkansas. Soon after this seminal survey of the state’s flora was published in 1978, Kent Bonar, a Missouri-born Thoreau acolyte employed as a naturalist by the Arkansas Park Service, began lugging the volume along on hikes through the woods surrounding his Newton County home, entering hundreds upon hundreds of meticulous illustrations into Smith’s work. Thirty-five years later, with Smith retired and Bonar long gone from the park service but still drawing, Bonar’s weathered and battered copy of the atlas was seized by a diverse cadre of amateur admirers motivated by fears of its damage or loss. Their fears were certainly justified; after all, the pages were now jammed to the margins with some 3,500 drawings, and the volume had already survived one accidental dunking in an Ozark stream. An Arkansas Florilegium brings Smith’s and Bonar’s knowledge and lifelong diligence to the world in this unique mix of art, science, and Arkansas saga.