"An imaginative and provocative interpretation of the meaning of Los Angeles, carefully thought out and beautifully written."—Robert Winter, editor of Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California "McClung's sharp eye, and his ability to be both critic and analyst, combine to make this a book of real timeliness. It is unusual, and it is smart."—William Deverell, author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910

This is the first book-length study in English on Vittorio Sereni (1913-83), a major figure in Italian 20th-century poetry. It argues that a key innovation of Sereni's poetry is the way in which it reworks the boundaries of poetic space to construct a lyric 'I' radically repositioned in the textual universe with respect to its predecessors.

Tiergarten is Berlin's oldest park, with more than five hundred acres of woodland in the heart of the city. Before it was absorbed by the city, the area that became Tiergarten was a naturally occurring forest. Throughout its history, it was used as royal hunting grounds and as a landscaped public park, and--in the years of hardship following World War II-- an area where trees were felled for firewood, before changing social and political circumstances and the growing ecological movement led to measures to restore and replant the vast public space. Thus, Tiergarten has become not only a very popular place of recreation but as well a biotope of extraordinarily high biodiversity. Generously illustrated with historical and contemporary photographs, Tiergarten, Landscape of Transgression takes readers through the history of the park, with an eye toward exploring it as a radical spatial expression--a space where humans and other species and conflicting histories coexist in close proximity, and a model for future environments in areas of intense urbanization. Born of a recent symposium staged by the Technische Universit t Berlin, the book brings together twelve essays with a range of archival documents, including newspaper articles, maps, reports, plans, and photographs.

Primordial Landscapes:Iceland Revealed elegantly explores the diverse and raw beauty of Iceland's extraordinary landscapes through striking images by photographer and naturalist Feodor Pitcairn and the inspired words of geophysicist, author and poet Ari Trausti Gudmundsson.This collection illuminates topographical phenomenon shaped and crafted by the most powerful natural forces on earth: rain and glacier melt from thunderous waterfalls and rivers that carve at the earth's surface; arctic snow and ice peppering teh land and sea with striking shapes and patterns, feeding the climate and water cycles; lava flows from active volcanos, that build vast textured landforms where life can begin and take hold. These are the beautiful and extraordinary results of our planet's most fundamental geological processes.

In the early 1970s, empowered by the civil rights and women's movements, a new group of women writers began speaking to the American public. Their topic, broadly defined, was the postmodern American West. By the mid-1980s, their combined works made for a bona fide literary groundswell in both critical and commercial terms. However, as Krista Comer notes, despite the attentions of publishers, the media, and millions of readers, literary scholars have rarely addressed this movement or its writers. Too many critics, Comer argues, still enamored of western images that are both masculine and antimodern, have been slow to reckon with the emergence of a new, far more "feminine," postmodern, multiracial, and urban west. Here, she calls for a redesign of the field of western cultural studies, one that engages issues of gender and race and is more self-conscious about space itself_especially that cherished symbol of western "authenticity," open landscape. Surveying works by Joan Didion, Wanda Coleman, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barbara Kingsolver, Pam Houston, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, and Mary Clearman Blew, Comer shows how these and other contemporary women writers have mapped new geographical imaginations upon the cultural and social spaces of today's American West.