Books

To celebrate Billy Collins’s years as U.S. Poet Laureate, we are pleased to announce this special hardcover edition of one of the books that helped establish and secure his reputation in the 1990s.

These essays examine how women from the period of ancient Greece all the way through to modern times have appropriated traditional forms of rhetoric and used them in women’s discourse.

A compelling collection by one of the pioneers of revisionist approaches to the history of literacy in North America and Europe, The Labyrinths of Literacy offers original and controversial views on the relation of literacy to society, leading the way for scholars and citizens who are willing to question the importance and function of literacy in the development of society today.

This anthology celebrates more than twenty-five years of the Negro Ensemble Company’s significant contribution to American theater by collecting the ten plays most representative of the Company’s eclectic nature.

Winner of the fifteenth annual Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Dangerous Men contains a wide variety of distinct voices, peculiar characters, and odd settings, with tantalizing emphasis on lonliness, loss, and the ever-present struggle to find one’s place in the world. These are stories you will not forget.

The new edition of this long unavailable classic features an extensive analytical introduction by the noted architectural historian Dell Upton. Containing 416 black-and-white photographs, 81 measured drawings and an extensive text, this volume presents a splendid array of the early dwellings, barns, and other outbuildings, churches, arsenals, banks, inns, commercial buildings, tollhouses, mills, and even tombstones of western Pennsylvania.

Although compromise is an inherent part of politics, many politicians chose not to adjust their goals for fear of losing supporters or a strong debate position. It is the strategies of these office holders that John Gilmour describes in Strategic Disagreement, illuminating lost opportunities to pass important legislation resulting from such disagreements.

This volume describes the formative years of English composition courses in college through a study of the most prominent documents of the time: magazine articles, scholarly reports, early textbooks, teachers’ testimonies-and some of the actual student papers that provoked discussion. Includes writings by leading scholars of the era such as Adams Sherman Hill, Gertrude Buck, William Edward Mead, Lane Cooper, William Lyon Phelps, and Fred Newton Scott.

Winner, 1997 CCCC Outstanding Book Award

Winner of the 1994 Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize and the 2000 Creative Achievement Award from the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust.

The essays in this book show how the act of translation, when vigilantly and critically attended to, becomes a means for active interrogation.

Now back in print, this is a pioneering analysis of an elite driven, post-World War II urban renewal, that has become the classic model for all such redevelopment projects.

Winner of the 1996 Lambda Book Award for Lesbian Poetry.

This volume traces the major decisions, events, programs, and personalities that transformed the city of Pittsburgh during its urban renewal project, which began in 1977. Roy Lubove demonstrates how the city showed united determination to attract high technology companies in an attempt to reverse the economic fallout from the decline of the local steel industry. Lubove also separates the successes from the failures, the good intentions from the actual results.

The stories in this extraordinary collection are set in Northern Ireland, specifically Belfast, the center for more than thirty years of fighting between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestants loyal to the British crown. Cornell’s stories explore the emotional and psychological consequences of the struggle to endure not only violence, but loss, failure, and the inability to believe.

Publicly available for the first time, Pittsburgh entrepreneur, judge, and banker Thomas Mellon’s autobiography includes maps and rarely seen photographs. The preface by his grandson Paul Mellon and the foreword by David McCullough, along with the introduction, notes, and afterword by University of Pittsburgh professor Mary Briscoe, provide a historical and social context.