The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950-1965 collects Edmund Wilson's masterful essays written during a fifteen year span. Originally published in leading periodicals like the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker, this collection features literary criticism, essays, and reviews by Wilson on F. Scott Fitzgerald, H.L. Mencken, Bernard Shaw, Max Beerbohm, James Branch Cabell, Marquis de Sade, and more.

Written by a physician, Body Language – from Head to Toe is a “dictionary” of American idioms and other expressions that contain the name of a body part. The use of body part-related expressions is both interesting and fun. This book contains about 2,000 such idioms, words, and expressions, such as “with the back against the wall,” “brainstorming,” “sweet tooth,” and “tongue in cheek.” Says author Per-Olof Hasselgren, “As a surgeon, I understand the importance of anatomy and the knowledge of organs and tissues. This book reflects my longstanding interest in idioms and other expressions referring to body parts, and it ‘connects’ anatomy with the spoken and written language.” This book was written for three main reasons. First, anatomy matters, particularly in surgery. During the last several years, collecting such expressions became a hobby for the author. Second, as someone moving to this country from another part of the world, Dr. Hasselgren is interested in the peculiarities of the American language. Idioms, slang, and other expressions are specific for any given language and quite often cannot be directly translated. Third, when one starts to be aware of them, written and spoken body language can become quite entertaining.

Discover hundreds of entertaining and often hilarious etymological journeys, by the bestselling author of Can Holding in a Fart Kill You? English is filled with curious, intriguing and bizarre phrases. This book reveals the surprising, captivating and even hilarious origins behind 400 of them, including: • Read between the Lines • Cat Got Your Tongue? • Put a Sock in It • Close, but No Cigar • Bring Home the Bacon • Caught Red-Handed • Under the Weather • Raining Cats and Dogs Perfect for trivia and language lovers alike, this entertaining collection is the ultimate guide to understanding these baffling mini mysteries of the English language.

When Edmund Wilson died in 1972 he was widely acclaimed as one of America's great literary critics. But it was often forgotten by many of his admirers that he was also a brilliant and penetrating critic of American life. In a literary career spanning half a century, Wilson commented on nearly every aspect of the American experience, and he produced a body of work on the subject that rivals those of Tocqueville and Henry Adams. In this book, George H. Douglas has distilled the essence from Wilson's many writings on America. An active reporter and journalist as much as a scholar, Wilson ranged from Harding to Nixon, from bathtub gin to marijuana. Douglas here surveys Wilson's mordant observations on the roaring twenties, the Great Depression, income tax, suburbia, sex, populist politics, the Vietnam War, the Great Society, the failure of American scholarship, pollution of the landscape, and the breakdown of traditional American values. The Wilson who emerges from this survey is a historical writer with deep and unshakable roots in Jeffersonian democracy. Among his most far-seeing and poignant books are studies of the literature of the American Civil War and of the treatment of the American Indian. Pained by the crumbling moral order, Wilson was never completely at home in the twentieth century. In politics he was neither a liberal nor a conservative as those terms are understood today. He endured those ideologies and their adherents, but his genius was that he could bring them into hard focus from the perspective of the traditional American individualist who was too pained to accept the standardized commercial world that had grown up around him. Edmund Wilson's America offers a distinctive overview of the nation's life and culture as seen and judged by its leading man of letters.

The last of Edmund Wilson's posthumously published journals turned out to be one of his major books, The Sixties: the Last Journal, 1960–1972--a personal history that is also brilliant social comedy and an anatomy of the times. Wilson catches the flavor of an international elite -- Stravinsky, Auden, Andre Malraux, and Isaiah Berlin -- as well as the New York literati and the Kennedy White House, but he never strays too far from the common life, whether noting the routines of his normal neighbors or the struggle of his own aging. "Candor and intelligence come through on every page--in this always absorbing journal by perhaps the last great man of American letters." - Kirkus Reviews

Presents information about horses and how to care for them, as well as the basics of riding--told from the horse's point of view.