The Life and Times of An Irish Countryman is a chronicle of courage and determination of three generations of the Keane family, whose love of the land endured through the trials of emigration, the birth of a new nation and other challenges along the way. The story focuses on the life of Tommy Keane, a man with stubborn commitment to rural life and to improving the plight of farm families in the West of Ireland.

The Guitar in America offers a history of the instrument from America\'s late Victorian period to the Jazz Age. The narrative traces America\'s BMG (banjo, mandolin, and guitar) community, a late nineteenth-century musical and com-mercial movement dedicated to introducing these instru-ments into America\'s elite musical establishments. Using surviving BMG magazines, the author details an almost unknown history of the guitar during the movement\'s heyday, tracing the guitar\'s transformation from a refined parlor instrument to a mainstay in jazz and popular music. In the process, he not only introduces musicians (including numerous women guitarists) who led the movement, but also examines new techniques and instruments. Chapters consider the BMG movement\'s impact on jazz and popular music, the use of the guitar to promote attitudes towards women and minorities, and the challenges foreign guitarists such as Miguel Llobet and Andres Segovia presented to America\'s musicians. This volume opens a new chapter on the guitar in America, considering its cultivated past and documenting how banjoists and mandolinists aligned their instruments to it in an effort to raise social and cultural standing. At the same time, the book considers the BMG community within America\'s larger musical scene, examining its efforts as manifestations of this country\'s uneasy coupling of musical art and commerce. Jeffrey J. Noonan, associate professor of music at Southeast Missouri State University, has performed professionally on classical guitar, Renaissance lute, Baroque guitar, and theorbo for over twenty-five years. His articles have appeared in Soundboard and NYlon Review .

Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother, Urrea moved to San Diego at age three. In this memoir of his childhood, Urrea describes his experiences growing up in the barrio and his search for cultural identity.

How did the Japanese themselves respond to the American occupation? How were the sweeping reforms—political, social, and economic—of SCAP’s program received? How permanent was their effect, and why did some succeed and others fail completely? How successful in the long view was the democratization induced by MacArthur’s “artificial revolution”? And what tendencies existing in fundamental Japanese attitudes and history might account for this peculiar success? Kazuo Kawai, Japanese-born and educated in America, a political scientist and journalist, brings his unique experience and knowledge to bear on these questions. The result is a book which tells the story of the American occupation of Japan from the Japanese point of view. “This book deals with the American interlude in the history of Japan during which time that country was not only occupied by American troops and politically controlled by American officials but was subjected to almost every conceivable variety of American influence. It does not attempt to tell the story of the Occupation itself, for that story has already been told many times by Americans who, as participants or close observers, were in a position to tell it well. Instead, this work deals only with selected controversial aspects of the Japanese reaction to American influence during the Occupation period.”—Kazuo Kawai, Preface

Clark Ashton Smith -- one of the "big three" classic authors from the legendary pulp magazine Weird Tales (the others being H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard) -- began writing early in the twentieth century. By the 1920s, he became a regular poet and author in Weird Tales magazine, helping to usher in its golden age. "The Double Shadow" was originally published by the Auburn Journal in 1933 in an oversized edition limited to only 1,000 copies. Smith carefully signed and hand-corrected many typographical errors for years to come. A collection of six stories ranging from contemporary horror to weird alternate-world fantasy, it remains a fascinating introduction and showcase to his decadently jeweled prose.

A provocative, unprecedented anthology featuring original short stories on what it means to be an American from thirty bestselling and award-winning authors with an introduction by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen: “This chorus of brilliant voices articulating the shape and texture of contemporary America makes for necessary reading” (Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies). When Donald Trump claimed victory in the November 2016 election, the US literary and art world erupted in indignation. Many of America’s preeminent writers and artists are stridently opposed to the administration’s agenda and executive orders—and they’re not about to go gentle into that good night. In this “masterful literary achievement” (Kurt Eichenwald, author of Conspiracy of Fools), more than thirty of the most acclaimed writers at work today consider the fundamental ideals of a free, just, and compassionate democracy through fiction in an anthology that “promises to be both a powerful tool in the fight to uphold our values and a tribute to the remarkable voices behind it” (Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU). With an introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and edited by bestselling author Jonathan Santlofer, this powerful anthology includes original, striking art from fourteen of the country’s most celebrated artists, cartoonists, and graphic novelists, including Art Spiegelman, Roz Chast, Marilyn Minter, and Eric Fischl. Transcendent, urgent, and ultimately hopeful, It Occurs to Me That I Am America takes back the narrative of what it means to be an American in the 21st century.