On a chilly evening in March, 1917, 17-year-old Virginia Lampley disappears from her upper-class home in Richmond, Virginia. Her straight-laced parents never see or hear from her again. Seventy years later, her granddaughter Christine begins an earnest search for Virginia, using a single diary entry as the only clue to her whereabouts. In March, 1977, ill-tempered reference librarian William Wilson begins his own diary in an attempt to explain why his existence is so loathsome to him. When he meets Christine by chance in the library, he begins to be as obsessed by her as she is by her grandmother. When he finds that she has been writing a journal about her activities, his boring life takes a turn that he never could have imagined. Their search takes them not only into the life of the theater in the early 1900s, but into their childhoods as well, where it turns out that nothing is what it seems. Three notebooks; three diaries; three very different fates.

What is this World? What kind of place is it? "The round kind. The spinning kind. The moist kind. The inhabited kind. The kind with flamingos (real and artificial). The kind where water in the sky turns into beautifully symmetrical crystal flakes sculpted by artists unable to stop themselves (in both design and quantity). The kind of place with tiny, powerfully jawed mites assigned to the carpets to eat my dead skin as it flakes off. The kind with people who kill and people who love and people who do both... "This world is beautiful but badly broken." "I love it as it is, because it is a story, and it isn't stuck in one place. It is full of conflict and darkness like every good story, a world of surprises and questions to explore. And there's someone behind it; there are uncomfortable answers to the how's and whys and what's. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Through Him were all things made... Welcome to His poem. His play. His novel. Let the pages flick your thumbs."

Edward Wilson is remembered as the artist of the British Antarctic Expedition. He died in the Antarctic in March 1912, leaving specimens, diaries and sketchbooks. But he drew all his life, collecting his work into indexed volumes. This collection contains the bulk of his non-Antarctic work in chronological order, showing his artistic development.

The novels of Paul Auster—finely wrought, self-reflexive, filled with doublings, coincidences, and mysteries—have captured the imagination of readers and the admiration of many critics of contemporary literature. In Beyond the Red Notebook, the first book devoted to the works of Auster, Dennis Barone has assembled an international group of scholars who present twelve essays that provide a rich and insightful examination of Auster's writings. The authors explore connections between Auster's poetry and fiction, the philosophical underpinnings of his writing, its relation to detective fiction, and its unique embodiment of the postmodern sublime. Their essays provide the fullest analysis available of Auster's themes of solitude, chance, and paternity found in works such as The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace, The Music of Chance, and Leviathan. This volume includes contributions from Pascal Bruckner, Marc Chenetier, Norman Finkelstein, Derek Rubin, Madeleine Sorapure, Stephen Bernstein, Tim Woods, Steven Weisenburger, Arthur Saltzman, Eric Wirth, and Motoyuki Shibata. The extensive bibliography, prepared by William Drenttel, will greatly benefit both scholars and general readers.

A reference and souvenir volume with biographes and gallery portraits of all the Presidents

Ross Gibson continues his speculative brilliance with this work on the astronomer and colonist William Dawes, using his notebooks as source material. It is an intellectual adventure around the tensions and pleasures of language and meaning, particularly Dawes' encounters under the southern stars, sharing ideas with a small group of Indigenous people from around Sydney Harbour. Dawes called his collaborators 'the Eora'. They told him it was their word for 'people', and it might have been the first thing they watched him write down. These were the years when Britain seized the Eora country, leading eventually to the establishment of the modern nation of Australia. Fragmentary, poetic and intriguing, Gibson describes, ponders and interprets the pages of Dawes' notebooks, which are reproduced throughout.

This Commemorative Edition of The Notebook of a Colonial Clergyman marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania and celebrates the pioneer missionary spirit and work of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg arrived in the American colonies as 31-year-old Lutheran pastorin 1742, to take up missionary work among the German immigrants who were coming to the New World in search of a new life. His ministry spanned 45 tumultuous years - years of political revolution, years that saw both the birth of a new nation and the establishment of the Lutheran Church on American soil. With the inception of the Ministerium of Pennsylvania in 1748, the Lutheran tradition took on an organizational structure that positioned the fledgling church to grow in the American context. The birth of the new nation and the growth of the new church are uniquely captured in this collection of Muhlenberg's journal entries. These excerpts from Muhlenberg's notebooks take you back to the colonial period with fascinating anecdotes and penetrating insights into the political, religious, and cultural realities of the time. Muhlenberg the man and Muhlenberg the missionary of the gospel of Christ come alive for later generations in these revealing journal entries.