Despite Flannery O'Connor's brief life, her work, comprising novels, short stories, essays, and articles, has had a great impact on American literature and to some extent popular culture, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her writing has become well loved, well read, and often studied. This book reprints complete book reviews and excerpts from review essays on the works of Flannery O'Connor that appeared in newspapers and periodicals during the author's writing life (1945-64) and after her early death. The more than four hundred edited reviews are prefaced with a substantial Introduction that situates O'Connor within the critical milieu of post-war American letters and Southern literary tradition, and provides an overview of contemporary critical responses to her collected stories, novels, and occasional pieces. An important resource for scholars of O'Connor and of Southern literature generally, this volume reveals much about her early reception and the continuing relevance of her work.

During the middle years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the number of books published with titles that described themselves as flowers, gardens, or forests more than tripled. During those same years, English printers turned out scores of instructional manuals on gardening and husbandry, retailing useful knowledge to a growing class of literate landowners and pleasure gardeners. Both trends, Jessica Rosenberg shows, reflected a distinctive style of early modern plant-thinking, one that understood both plants and poems as composites of small pieces—slips or seeds to be recirculated by readers and planters. Botanical Poetics brings together studies of ecology, science, literary form, and the material text to explore how these developments transformed early modern conceptions of nature, poetic language, and the printed book. Drawing on little-studied titles in horticulture and popular print alongside poetry by Shakespeare, Spenser, and others, Rosenberg reveals how early modern print used a botanical idiom to anticipate histories of its own reading and reception, whether through replanting, uprooting, or fantasies of common property and proliferation. While our conventional narratives of English literary culture in this period see reading as an increasingly private practice, and literary production as more and more of an authorial domain, Botanical Poetics uncovers an alternate tradition: of commonplaces and common ground, of slips of herbs and poetry circulated, shared, and multiplied.

Finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the 2021 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize "Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, Orphans of Empire brings to life the half-forgotten world of early British Columbia. This is an immersive, shimmering novel." —Steven Price, author of #1 nationally bestselling By Gaslight and Giller-shortlisted Lampedusa In Grant Buday's new novel, three captivating stories intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on the shores of Burrard Inlet. In 1858 the serious and devoted Sir Richard Clement Moody receives the commission of a lifetime when he is sent to help establish "a second England"—what is now British Columbia. In 1865 Frisadie, an eighteen-year-old Kanaka housemaid, who is more entrepreneur than ingénue, arrives in New Brighton from Hawaii. She convinces Maxie Michaud to purchase the hotel with her, and it soon becomes the toast of the inlet. In 1885 Henry Fannin, a young, curious embalmer and magnetism devotee, having struck out in London and San Francisco, arrives in New Brighton and promptly falls in love with a tragic woman he hears crying on his first night at the hotel. Endearing, funny, and highly evocative of time and place, Orphans of Empire celebrates those living in the shadow of history's supposed heroes, their private struggles and personal agendas. Readers who loved Michael Crummey's Galore and Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World, will love this vivid novel of arrivals that prods at the ethics of settlement.