Bank robberies should run like clockwork, right? If your name's Parker, you expect nothing less. Until, that is, one of your partners gets too greedy for his own good. The four-way split following a job leaves too small a take for George Uhl, who beg...

In "Frames of Friction", Carsten Junker maps out a dazzling panorama of critical cultural debates from the twentieth century to explore the ways in which African American speakers and writers established their authority and gained recognition. Taking...

Newly famous in the wake of the publication of her groundbreaking "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas", Gertrude Stein delivered her "Narration" lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home coun...

"Romey's Order" is an indelible sequence of poems voiced by an invented (and inventive) boy-speaker called Romey, set alongside a river in the South Carolina lowcountry. As the word-furious eye and voice of these poems, Romey urgently records – and...

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women's college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell's classic novel was originally published to overwh...

After laughing their way through his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, few readers would suspect that Mark Twain's last years were anything but happy and joyful. They would be wrong. Contrary to the myth perpetrated...

Available for the first time as an independent work, David Grene's legendary translation of "Oedipus the King" renders Sophocles' Greek into cogent, vivid, and poetic English for a new generation to savor. Over the years, Grene and Lattimore's "Compl...

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. Children's Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from "Aesop's fables to Mother Goose", from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to "Peter Pan"...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! In 1922, the same year that saw the establishment of the Czechoslovak Football Association, a former singer and cabaret director from Prague published a novel about soccer. Eighty-six year...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point,...