Once, there was a little girl named Laura who lived in an abandoned cabin deep in the big woods of what was once Wisconsin. Laura was born many years after the Great Bust. Elsewhere, war and hunger and disease still linger. But Laura and her family live safe in their little house in the wilderness, growing their own food, making their own tools, and scavving their own Supplies. Then, one winter, as refugees from the east begin pouring into the nearby market town, Laura and her family are forced to migrate westward towards the dry, unpopulated flatlands known as the Wastes. On their journey, Laura encounters the marvelous ruins left over from Lectric Times and meets the diverse peoples who inhabit the former domains of the Old Merican Emprie. But there are dangers as well on the long road between the Big Woods and the Wastes, for the wild country in which Laura grew up was one still plagued by warlords, cannibals, and a terrible sickness that turns men into monsters...

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression." As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays. In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.

When you were a baby I sat very still to hold you. I could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. I stopped breathing so you wouldn't ... You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew ... Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it.

Thames River Police Office magistrate John Harriott must rely on a senior officer to solve two brutal killings, while in mid-sixteenth-century Plymouth, a young man dreams of a better life only to fall victim to the brutal slave trade.

Lurid depictions of sex and impotence, themes of emperor worship and violence, the use of realism and myth--these characterize the fiction of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo. Susan Napier discovers surprising similarities as well as provocative dissimilarities in the work of two writers of radically different political orientations. Napier places Yukio’s and Kenzaburo’s fiction in the context of postwar Japanese political and social realities and, in a new preface for the paperback edition, reflects on each writer’s position in the tradition of Japanese literature.

Newly revised and in paperback for the first time, this definitive, annotated edition of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land "includes as a bonus""all the essays Eliot wrote as he was composing his masterpiece. Enriched with period photographs, a London map of cited locations, groundbreaking information on the origins of the work, and full annotations, the volume is itself a landmark in literary history. "More than any previous editor, Rainey provides the reader with every resource that might help explain the genesis and significance of the poem. . . . The most imaginative and useful edition of "The Waste Land" ever published."--Adam Kirsch, "New Criterion ""For the student or for anyone who wants to get the maximum amount of information out of a foundational modernist work, this is the best available edition."--"Publishers Weekly"

Prepare yourself for a journey through the world of Patton Oswalt, one of the most creative, insightful, and hysterical voices on the entertain­ment scene today. Widely known for his roles in the films Big Fan and Ratatouille, as well as the television hit The King of Queens, Patton Oswalt—a staple of Comedy Central—has been amusing audiences for decades. Now, with Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, he offers a fascinating look into his most unusual, and lovable, mindscape. Oswalt combines memoir with uproarious humor, from snow forts to Dungeons & Dragons to gifts from Grandma that had to be explained. He remem­bers his teen summers spent working in a movie Cineplex and his early years doing stand-up. Readers are also treated to several graphic elements, includ­ing a vampire tale for the rest of us and some greeting cards with a special touch. Then there’s the book’s centerpiece, which posits that before all young creative minds have anything to write about, they will home in on one of three story lines: zom­bies, spaceships, or wastelands. Oswalt chose wastelands, and ever since he has been mining our society’s wasteland for perversion and excess, pop culture and fatty foods, indie rock and single-malt scotch. Zombie Spaceship Wasteland is an inventive account of the evolution of Patton Oswalt’s wildly insightful worldview, sure to indulge his legion of fans and lure many new admirers to his very entertaining “wasteland.”