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Go back to the Future Is Female in this all new collection of wildly entertaining stories by the trailblazing feminist writers who transformed American science fiction in the 1970sIn the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the "baboon patriarchy"-Ursula Le Guin's words-that had long dominated the genre, imagining futures that are still visionary. In this sequel to her groundbreaking 2018 anthology The Future is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek offers a time machine back to the decade when far-sighted rebels changed science fiction forever with stories that made female community, agency, and sexuality central to the American future. Here are twenty-three wild, witty, and wonderful classics that dramatize the liberating energies of the 1970s:Sonya Dorman, "Bitching It" (1971) Kate Wilhelm, "The Funeral" (1972)Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (1972) NEBULA AWARD Miriam Allen deFord, "A Way Out"(1973)Vonda N. McIntyre, "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (1973) NEBULA James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) HUGO AWARD Kathleen Sky, "Lament of the Keeku Bird" (1973)Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974) NEBULA & LOCUS AWARD Eleanor Arnason, "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons" (1974)Kathleen M. Sidney, "The Anthropologist" (1975)Marta Randall, "A Scarab in the City of Time" (1975) Elinor Busby, "A Time to Kill" (1977)Raccoona Sheldon, "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) NEBULA AWARD Pamela Sargent, "If Ever I Should Leave You" (1974)Joan D. Vinge, "View from a Height" (1978)M. Lucie Chin, "The Best Is Yet to Be" (1978)Lisa Tuttle, "Wives" (1979) Connie Willis, "Daisy, In the Sun" (1979)

"Two late masterpieces by John Updike that take on the American Century and Shakespeare's Hamlet, and a bittersweet coda to the Rabbit series: In the Beauty of the Lilies, Gertrude and Claudius, and Rabbit Remembered"--

More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich"No one," Hannah Arendt observed, "has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue." But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Fifty years ago, the century's greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, remain powerfully relevant, perhaps more so today than when they were written. In "Truth and Politics," Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality-the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives-can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents. In "Lying in Politics," written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia, arguing that the real goal of the Vietnam War-and of the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations-was nothing other than the burnishing of America's image. In his introduction, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) engages with Arendt's essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying.

Rediscover Rudolfo Anaya: mythmaker, master storyteller, American original "The godfather and guru of Chicano literature." -Tony HillermanA writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Anaya broke new ground with his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, a mythic work that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest. Set just after World War II, Bless Me, Ultima revolves around the young boy Antonio and his quest to understand his identity and the demands of his future. Although his mother's heart is set on his entering the priesthood, Antonio is drawn to the charismatic Ultima, an elderly curandera or healer who embodies the ancient wisdom of the pre-Columbian past. The 1979 novel Tortuga draws on Anaya's experience of suffering and recuperation after a diving accident as a teenager. Its hero, nicknamed "Tortuga" because his body cast encases him like a turtle's shell, grapples with the realities of bodily pain as he discovers that true healing is spiritual as well as physical. The story reverberates with local folklore about a mountain, also called Tortuga, home to a sleeping spirit who will one day awaken and journey onward to the sea. Weaving these threads together, Anaya creates, in the words of editor Luis Alberto Urrea, "a tapestry inside of which he was encoding an entire history of our very souls." In the 1992 novel Alburquerque (restoring the "r" to the city's original name), a young Mexican American boxing champion discovers that his white biological mother had given him up for adoption at birth, and he must now reevaluate everything he thought he was. The winner of a PEN West Fiction Award, the novel brims with emotionally powerful characterizations, political commentary, humor, and lyrical writing that reveals Anaya to be, once again, an indispensable American fabulist.

The eloquent and defiant writings of the great American freedom fighter, selected by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographerFrederick Douglass was one of the greatest orators and essayists in American history. While toiling as an enslaved laborer in the Baltimore shipyards he bought a secondhand copy of The Columbian Orator, a "noble acquisition" that he carried with him on his escape to the North. Douglass began his career as an antislavery lecturer in 1841 and founded his first newspaper, North Star, six years later.For the next five decades he used his voice and wielded his pen in the cause of emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, Douglass developed a unique oratorical and literary style that combined scriptural cadences with savage irony, moral urgency, and keen insight. In his incandescent jeremiad "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" Douglass skewered the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; and in "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" he refuted white supremacist ideology. "Resistance to Blood-Houndism" called for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; "Capt. John Brown Not Insane" praised the "self-forgetful heroism" of the abolitionist martyr; and "How to End the War," published in 1861, called for the raising of Black troops and the destruction of slavery. In his oration at the Freedmen's Memorial in 1876, Douglass offered a brilliantly perceptive assessment of Lincoln's role in emancipation; "There Was a Right Side in the Late War" attacked the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy; and "The Lessons of the Hour" denounced lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South.As a special feature the volume also includes Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," about a shipboard insurrection.

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet." Willa Cather's remark describes her own reasons for re-creating in her works the Nebraska frontier of her youth. Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit.The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather's first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous "Paul's Case," a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is "The Sculptor's Funeral," about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town.O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit-an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer.In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather's love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather's heroines, derives from what the author calls "the naïve, generous country that gave on its joyous force."A masterpiece at once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, My Ántonia (1918) portrays a family of Bohemian emigrants on the Nebraska frontier. Despite the suicide of her father and the desertion of the father of her child, Ántonia Shimerda retains an unselfish nature that allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm a courageous passion for life and motherhood-a dauntlessness intrinsically rooted in the awesome wonder of the prairie.One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.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 third volume of Library of America's five-volume edition of Updike's novels features the continuation of the renowned Rabbit saga and two wickedly funny satires set in the charged realms of sex, politics, and family.The third volume in our five-volume selected edition of the novels of John Updike includes three books: The Coup, one of Updike's most outlandish satires, set in a fictional African nation; Rabbit Is Rich, the third, and many say best, novel starring his most famous protagonist; and the wildly popular The Witches of Eastwick, which was memorably adapted in the film starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon, and Jack Nicholson. In The Coup, a surprising departure from his prior novels, Updike stages a withering take down of an array of targets, from American materialism and its baleful effects on the developing world to the follies of Cold War geopolitics and the fevered megalomania of the dictatorial mind. In Rabbit Is Rich, the third installment of the Rabbit tetralogy, we meet up with Harry Angstrom, now 46, dealing as best he can with the challenges and cares of midlife, a time when "you are carrying the world in a sense and yet it seems more out of control than ever." In The Witches of Eastwick, Updike imagines a small New England town possessed by magic-at least as practiced by the female trio at its center who, freed from the burdens of their marriages, make common cause and unleash their whimsical witchcraft on Eastwick's narrow-minded townspeople.

For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, all of Richard Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays-themselves towering achievements in English verse-are brought together for the first time in this two-volume gift set.One of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was also a prolific translator of French and Russian literature. His verse translations of Molière's plays are especially admired by readers and are still performed today around the world. "Wilbur," the critic John Simon wrote, "makes Molière into as great an English verse playwright as he was a French one." Now, for the first time, all ten of Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays are brought together in two-volume boxed set, fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations.The first volume comprises Molière's delightful early farces The Bungler, Lovers' Quarrels, and The Imaginary Cuckhold, or Sganarelle; the comedies The School for Husbands and The School for Wives, about the efforts of middle-aged men to control their young wives or fiancés, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere's seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Molière's retelling of the timeless story, performed only briefly in the playwright's lifetime before pious censure forced it to close and not part of the repertoire of the Comédie-Française until 1847.The second volume includes the elusive masterpiece, The Misanthrope, often said to occupy the same space in comedy as Shakespeare's Hamlet does in tragedy; the fantastic farce Amphitryon, about how Jupiter and Mercury commandeer the identities of two mortals ; Tartuffe, Molière's biting satire of religious hypocrisy; and The Learned Ladies, like Tarfuffe, a drama of a household turned suddenly upside down. These volumes include the original introductions by Richard Wilbur and an introduction by Adam Gopnik on the exquisite art of Wilbur's translations.

What kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance? These are the dark questions that animate Nemeses, the quartet of thematically related short novels that are published here together for the first time in this final volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works. Everyman (2006) is the sparse and affecting story of one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, Indignation (2008) is the extraordinary narrative of a young man struggling against the conformity of McCarthy-era America and his father's overwhelming fear. In The Humbling (2009), aging actor Simon Axler embarks on a risky and aberrant affair in a desperate attempt to recoup his lost artistic gifts. And in Nemesis (2010), Roth offers an exacting portrait of the emotions-fear and anger, bewilderment and grief-bred by a polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944.Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.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.

A definitive edition of the landmark book that forever changed our understanding of the Civil War’s aftermath and the legacy of racism in America Upon publication in 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois’s now classic Black Reconstruction offered a revelatory new assessment of Reconstruction—and of American democracy itself. One of the towering African American thinkers and activists of the twentieth century, Du Bois brought all his intellectual powers to bear on the nation’s post-Civil War era of political reorganization, a time when African American progress was met with a white supremacist backlash and ultimately yielded to the consolidation of the unjust social order of Jim Crow. Black Reconstruction is a pioneering work of revisionist scholarship that, in the wake of the censorship of Du Bois’s characterization of Reconstruction by the Encyclopedia Britannica, was written to debunk influential historians whose racist ideas and emphases had disfigured the historical record. “The chief witness in Reconstruction, the emancipated slave himself,” Du Bois argued, “has been almost barred from court. His written Reconstruction record has been largely destroyed and nearly always neglected.” In setting the record straight Du Bois produced what co-editor Eric Foner has called an “indispensable book,” a magisterial work of detached scholarship that is also imbued with passionate outrage. Presented in a handsome and authoritative hardcover edition prepared by Foner and co-editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Black Reconstruction is joined here for the first time with important writings that trace Du Bois’s thinking throughout his career about Reconstruction and its centrality in understanding the tortured course of democracy in America. 

Rediscover one of America’s pioneering women crime writers with this classic noir starring a Long Beach private investigator reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe“Are you trying to tell me you don''t want the job, Mr. Sader?” It started as a missing persons case and grew more puzzling with the discovery of another strangely coincidental disappearance. Private eye Jim Sader finds himself deep in a multilayered intrigue revolving around oil and real estate and the sleazy underpinnings of Long Beach, California, in the 1950s. Taut, suspenseful, and gritty, many consider Sleep with Strangers to be Dolores Hitchens’ best novel.

From The Federalist to Citizens United, a bestselling historian presents key writings on five crucial questions confronting American democracy today Amid the frenzied overload of 24-hour cable news and incessant social media, at a time when many of us fear for the future of our democracy, it is becoming harder and harder to think clearly about politics. American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions provides an alternative for those who want to step back and look to the past for inspiration and guidance.   Edited with perceptive and provocative commentary by bestselling historian and journalist Nicholas Lemann (The Promised Land, Transaction Man), the book presents key writings from the American past that speak to five contemporary flashpoints in our political landscape: race, gender, immigration, and citizenship; opportunity and inequality; the purpose and powers of the federal government; money, special privilege, and corruption; and protest and civil disobedience. Some of the selections are well-known—George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail—while others will be new to many readers—Horace Mann’s argument for public schools as a means of fighting inequality, Jane Addams’s perceptive analysis of gender and social class in charity work, Randolph Bourne envisioning a “Trans-National America.”   American Democracy presents a remarkable range of insightful and eloquent American political writing, while serving as an invaluable resource for concerned citizens who wish to become better-informed participants in the ongoing drama of our democracy.

In their own voices, the full story of the women and men who struggled to make American democracy wholeWith a record number of female candidates in the 2020 election and women''s rights an increasingly urgent topic in the news, it''s crucial that we understand the history that got us where we are now. For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women''s suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal. Expertly curated and introduced by scholar Susan Ware, each piece is also introduced by a headnote so that together these 100 selections by over 80 writers tell the full history of the movement--from Abigail Adams to the Declaration of Sentiments to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the limiting of suffrage under Jim Crow. Includes writings by Ida B. Wells, Mabel Lee, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, presidents Grover Cleveland on the anti-suffrage side and Woodrow Wilson urging passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a wartime measure, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many others.

A literary landmark: Kevin Young presents the biggest and best anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the presentOnly now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of many voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. And only here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, is this glorious living tradition wholly revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history--in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective--and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology''s concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolutionHere for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

Lauren Groff invites a new generation of readers to rediscover the haunting stories of a neglected mid-century masterA teenage girl in Connecticut driven to near delirium over her burgeoning sexuality. A twenty-something New Yorker transplanted to a small Virginia community who boldly befriends the town pariah. A New England widow in search of alcohol and excitement while babysitting her grandson. A Maryland socialite who has built a secret bomb shelter that becomes the center of her imaginative life. These are some of the characters who inhabit Nancy Hale's lush fiction. Haunting, vivid, and wonderfully subversive, Hale's stories typically concern women recognizable to all of us-sometimes fragile, possibly wicked, deceptively ordinary, navigating their way uncertainly through life. 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- brilliant short fiction that encompasses childhood and adolescence, marriage and motherhood, desire and infidelity, madness and memory. Where the Light Falls reveals Hale as a gifted stylist-a painter in light and shadow-and an acute observer of modern American life.

"Undoubtedly, the single finest collection of Wallace Stevens ever produced." - Library JournalWallace Stevens's unique voice combined meditative speculation and what he called "the essential gaudiness of poetry" in a body of work of astonishing profusion and exuberance, poems that have remained an inspiration and influence for generations of poets and readers. Now, for the first time, the works of America's supreme poet of the imagination are collected in one authoritative Library of America volume.Here are all of Stevens's published books of poetry, side-by-side for the first time with the haunting lyrics of his later years and early work that traces the development of his art. From the rococo inventiveness of Harmonium, his first volume (including such classics as "Sunday Morning" and "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"), through "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," "Esthétique du Mal," "The Auroras of Autumn," and the other large-scale masterpieces of his middle years, to the austere final poems of "The Rock," Stevens's poetry explores with unrelenting intensity the relation between the world and the human imagination, between nature as found and nature as invented, and the ways poetry mediates between them. The volume presents over ninety poems uncollected by Stevens, including early versions of often-discussed works like "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "Owl's Clover."Also here is the most comprehensive selection of Stevens's prose writings. The Necessary Angel (1951), his distinguished book of essays, joins nearly fifty shorter pieces, many previously uncollected: reviews, speeches, short stories, criticism, philosophical writings, and responses to the work of T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and other poets. The often-dazzling aphorisms Stevens gathered over the years are included, as are his plays and selections from his poetic notebooks. Rounding out the volume is a fifty-year span of journal entries and letters, newly edited from manuscript sources, which provide fascinating glimpses of Stevens's thoughts on poetry and the creative process.The volume also contains explanatory notes, a detailed chronology of Stevens' life, and an essay on textual selection.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.

In this, the second volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of the collected works of Philip Roth, published by special arrangement with the author, the range and inventiveness of Roth's fiction is dazzlingly displayed in four extraordinarily diverse works.When She Was Good (1967) is the trenchant portrait of Lucy Nelson, a young midwestern woman whose perception of her own suffering turns her into a ferocious force, "enemy-ridden and unforgivingly defiant," as Roth would later describe her. A small-town 1940s America of restrictive social pressures and foreclosed opportunities provides the novel's background.The publication of the hilarious Portnoy's Complaint (1969) was a cultural event that turned Roth into a reluctant celebrity. The confession of a bewildered psychoanalytic patient thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality yet held back by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood, Portnoy unleashed Roth's comic virtuosity and opened new avenues for American fiction.In Our Gang (1971), described by Anthony Burgess as a "brilliant satire in the real Swift tradition," Roth effects a savage takedown of the administration of Richard Nixon (who figures here as Trick E. Dixon). Written before the revelations of the Watergate scandal, Our Gang continues to resonate as a broad and outraged response to the clownish hypocrisy and moral theatrics of the American political scene.The Kafkaesque excursion The Breast (1972) introduces David Kepesh in the first volume of a trilogy that continues with The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). The Breast prompted Cynthia Ozick to remark, "One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture."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 second volume of the Library of America's definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for our time of political and cultural distrust and division, whether expounding the joys and wisdom of nonindustrial agriculture, relishing the pleasure of eating food produced locally by people you know, or giving voice to a righteous contempt for hollow innovation. He is our most important writer on the cultural crisis posed by industrialization and mass consumerism, and the vital role of rural, sustainable farming in preserving the planet as well as our national character. Now, in celebration of Berry's extraordinary six-decade-long career, Library of America presents a two-volume selection of his nonfiction writings prepared in close consultation with the author. In this second volume, forty-four essays from ten works turn to issues of political and social debate--big government, science and religion, and the meaning of citizenship following the tragedy of 9/11. Also included is his Jefferson Lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities, "It All Turns on Affection" (2012). Berry's essays remain timely, even urgent today, and will resonate with anyone interested in our relationship to the natural world and especially with a younger, politically engaged generation invested in the future welfare of the planet.INCLUDES: Life is a Miracle AND SELECTIONS FROM Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community Another Turn of the Crank Citizenship Papers The Way of Ignorance What Matters? Imagination in Place It All Turns on Affection Our Only World The Art of Loading BrushLIBRARY 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.

Originally published from 1932 to 1943, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books are classics of children's literature, beloved by millions. But readers who last enjoyed them as children may be astonished at the quiet poetry of Wilder's prose and the force and poignancy of her portrait of the lives of American pioneers. Now The Library of America and editor Caroline Fraser present a definitive boxed set that affirms Wilder's place in the American canon, reintroducing these enduring works to readers young and old. Here, for the first time in two collectible hardcover volumes, are all eight Little House novels-brilliant narratives of the early life of Laura Ingalls and her family as they grow up with the country in the woods, on the plains, and finally in the small towns of the advancing American frontier-plus the posthumous novella The First Four Years, which recounts the early years of the author's marriage to Almanzo Wilder. As a special feature, four rare autobiographical pieces address the need for historical accuracy in children's literature, reveal real life events not included in the novels, and answer the inevitable question: what happened next?Contains:VOLUME ONELittle House in the Big WoodsFarmer Boy Little House on the Prairie On the Banks of Plum CreekLibrary of America volume #229VOLUME TWO By the Shores of Silver LakeThe Long Winter Little Town on the PrairieThese Happy Golden Years The First Four YearsLibrary of America volume #230Each volume features deluxe three-part bindings, a newly-researched chronology of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life and career, and helpful notes. The volumes are also available separately with standard Library of America series bindings and jackets.

In her short lifetime, Flannery O'Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man."In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"-these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.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.