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An account of the book publisher who is home to more Nobel Prize-winning writers than any other publishing house in the world reveals the era and city that built FSG through the stories of two men--Roger Straus and Robert Giroux.
When in 1901 Alfred Nobel bequeathed to the world the funds to support the Nobel Prize, one of his few directives for the category of literature was that the artists selected be of "idealistic tendency." Since its inception, the prize has given a very public voice to some of the world's greatest writers, and their responses to the honor-their acceptance speeches-have themselves often been epochal within each author's body of literature. From the famed call to "arms" by William Faulkner to the multicultural song of Derek Walcott, from 1903's Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to 1999's Günter Grass, this collection traces the ideals of the artists and the selection committee itself throughout the entir...
From 1906 until 1922, Geraldine Farrar was the Metropolitan Opera's most popular and glamorous prima donna. Convinced that music must always serve the drama, she often sacrificed tonal beauty to dramatic effect, and her acting was noted for its intensity and realism. Nevertheless, Farrar was a superb singer, possessing a beautiful lyric soprano voice. Farrar was also a star of the silent screen, appearing in 14 films from 1915 to 1920. In retirement, she was mentor and friend to the African American soprano Camilla Williams, enabling Williams to become the first African American to have a regular contract with a major American opera company. This biography and critical analysis of Farrar's career provides a detailed account of her major contributions to the history of opera.
In The Emergence of Jewish Theology in America Robert G. Goldy traces the birth and development of American Jewish theology from the Second World War to the present, taking into account its social, historical, and intellectual roots and its revolitionary impact on the rabbinate and the Jewish intellectual community. Affected by the horros of war, many "third generation" American Jews became dissatisfied with Jewish liberal thought and sought an American Jewish theology that would be radical, existentialist, and neo-Orthodox.
Theoretical accounts of modern American poetry often regard literary texts as the expression of a subjectivity irremediably fractured by the dividing practices of power. In Changing Subjects, Srikanth Reddy seeks to redress our critical bias toward a fatalistic poetics of rupture and fragmentation by foregrounding a fluent tradition of writers from Walt Whitman to John Ashbery who explore digression, rather than disjunction, as a rhetorical strategy for the making of modern poetry.Mapping the ramifying topography of literary digression, Changing Subjects offers a wide-ranging anatomy of "the excursus" within twentieth-century American poetics. Moving from aesthetics to the archive to narrato...
This book focuses on six women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil (1909-1943, French philosopher), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975, German-American philosopher), Mary McCarthy (1912-1989, American writer), Susan Sontag (1933-2004, American writer), Diane Arbus (1923-1971, American photographer, and Joan Didion (1934, American writer). It traces the careers of these women and their challenges to the pre-eminence of empathy as the ethical posture from which to examine pain.
This analytical, polemical, and personal book creates a lively interaction between mysticism and activism. Looking beyond superficial links between spirituality and justice, it creates an in-depth engagement of mysticism as an inner revolution and activism as a mirroring socioeconomic transfiguration. Based on the twin premises of the mystical tradition and Social Gospel-liberation theology that those who experience God in prayer or engage in social action ought to be our primary theologians, it examines what these two traditions say about theology, to each other, and to us. The broad synthesis that results from this fascinating dialogue brings new insights into mysticism, activism, theology, and ethics, and casts a unique light on how we pray and live. If Only We Could See brings together a wealth of spiritual material from the early Desert, medieval mystics, and modern spiritual writers alongside an equally rich resource of abolitionists, anti-apartheid activists, civil rights leaders, nonviolent change agents, and peacemakers. The results yield valuable insights for a theology that challenges every personal and political status quo.
In the decade from the early 1960s to the early 1970s, Latin American authors found themselves writing for a new audience in both Latin America and Spain and in an ideologically charged climate as the Cold War found another focus in the Cuban Revolution. The writers who emerged in this energized cultural moment--among others, Julio Cortázar (Argentina), Guillermo Cabrera Infante (Cuba), José Donoso (Chile), Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Gabriel García Márquez (Colombia), Manuel Puig (Argentina), and Mario Varas Llosa (Peru)--experimented with narrative forms that sometimes bore a vexed relation to the changing political situations of Latin America. This volume provides a wide range of options for teaching the complexities of the Boom, explores the influence of Boom works and authors, presents different frameworks for thinking about the Boom, proposes ways to approach it in the classroom, and provides resources for selecting materials for courses.
Thomas Merton was arguably the twentieth century's most widely published and widely read spiritual writer. This book explores Merton's prophetic writings and experience as they offer guidance for those seeking to experience God, to simplify their lives, to live more humanly, and to shape Christian community in the face of alienation, consumerism, noise, and technology. The book includes parts of three previously unpublished conference contributions by Merton on technology. Exploring Merton's thoughts on monastic renewal, prayer, radical simplicity, ecology, technology, war, peace and interfaith dialogue, Dekar reminds us why Merton was so influential and why he continues to be so.