Books

This book presents in one volume a selection of the most representative, outstanding writing by Latin American women writers. Written entirely in Spanish, it is intended for third and fourth-year students.

Focuses on expressions of popular culture among blacks in Africa, the United States, and the Carribean. Fifteen essays cover a world of topics, from American girls’ Double Dutch games to protest discourse in Ghana; from the history of Rasta to the evolving significance of kente cloth from rap video music to hip-hop to zouk.

Co-Winner of the 1998 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize for outstanding research publication in the field of teaching English language, literature, rhetoric and composition, The Formation of College English reexamines the civic concerns of rhetoric and the politics that have shaped and continue to shape college English.

Co-Winner, 1997 MLA Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize

Nations use product standards, and manipulate them, for reasons other than practical use or safety. Samuel Krislov compares and contrasts the United States, the EC, the former Eastern bloc, and Japan—o link standard choice with political styles and to trace growing internationalization based on product efficiency criteria.

Jim Daniels’ Blessing the House visits the sites of domestic faith – Catholic schools, sex and marriage, childbirth – in an attempt to witness a world worth believing in. In their search for hope, grace, and decency in the small dramas of an individual life, these poems become larger, more overtly political and express a genuine interest in human emotion.

In the early nineteenth century Serb scholar Vuk Karadzic collected and published now classic transcriptions of Balkan oral poetry. This edition, by taking great care to preserve the unique meter and rhythm at the heart of Serbian oral poetry as well as the idiom of the original singers, offers the most complete and authoritative translations ever assembled in English.

The fifth collection of poetry by David Wojahn. The Falling Hour is a book in which the workings of personal history collide with the forces of public history, examining loss and cultural legacies. Marks a significant advance from Wojahn’s previous works, as he employs both strict forms and free verse.

Violent conflicts rooted in ethnicity have, unfortunately, become increasingly common throughout the world, particularly in countries recently liberated from authoritarianism. Using theory, case studies, and aggregate data, the essays in this volume address the difficulties facing contemporary leaders and offer potential solutions to the policy issues surrounding ethnic disputes.

Because of the power-fearing drafters of the U.S. Constitution, presidents have had to look beyond the formal powers of the office to influence Congress and push a legislative agenda. In Between the Branches, a book of unprecedented depth, Kenneth Collier traces the evolution of the methods the White House has developed to influence Congress over nine adminstrations, from Eisenhower to Clinton.

Connors provides a comprehensive history of composition and its pedagogical approaches to form, genre, and correctness. He shows where many of the today’s practices and assumptions about writing come from, and he translates what our techniques and theories of teaching have said over time about our attitudes toward students, language, and life.

During much of the military regime in Brazil (1964-1985), an elaborate but illegal system of restrictions prevented the press from covering important news or criticizing the government. In this intriguing new book, Anne-Marie Smith investigates why the press acquiesced to this system, and why this state-administered system of restrictions was known as “self-censorship.”

Environmental History, formerly Environmental History Review, has helped define an entire discipline through the publication of the finest scholarship of humanists, social and natural scientists, and a variety of other professionals. Out of the Woods gathers the best of this scholarship.

Toi Derricotte’s fourth collection of poetry. Tender probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

Winner of the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Fado and Other Stories is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence. Katherine Vaz is never afraid to confront her subject’s ambiguities and her characters’ conflicts – the simultaneous joy and sorrow of some of life’s discoveries, the pain sometimes hidden within passion and pleasure.

A few days before his death in 1996, Larry Levis mentioned to his friend and former instructor Philip Levine that he had “an all-but-completed manuscript” of poems. After Levis’s death, Levine edited the poems Levis had left behind. What emerged is this haunting collection, Elegy.