Praise for Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel: “A unique tour de force.” --The New York Times Book Review “One of the most remarkable books that I have read in a long time.” --Kenneth Rexroth “Mr. Connell’s Notes are what one intelligent, sensitive artist has been able to salvage from all experience as testimony to the rather pathetic integrity of the human species in the face of extinction. The book is no manual or tract, however, although its political meaning is unmistakable, but a work of art, even a work of high art.” --Hayden Carruth

"We have here on the planet with us a man of such courage and strength of spirit that he has not lost what Alfred Adler calls 'the nerve for excellence.' He has kept it despite the burden of an awareness not only of the enormity of his project and of the limitations of his own human understanding, but also of the abject ignorance and indifference of his audience... "Somehow Connell makes you care. Many modern poets demand a good deal of work; Connell excites it. Sometimes the note–taker's [narrator] tone is hectoring, even belligerent; if you have any competitive spirit at all, you seize a thread—any thread—follow it, and lo, it traces a pattern. . . you understand at last that these notes are not tentative explorations, and far less are they 'expression:' they are instead the magnificent artifices of a giant intellect... "These poems are masterpieces. You could bend a lifetime of energy to their study, and have lived well. The fabric of their meaning is seamless, inexhaustible. . . their language is steely and bladelike; from both of its surfaces flickering lights gleam. Each page sheds insight on every other page; understanding snaps back and forth, tacking like a sloop up the long fjord of mystery."—Annie Dillard, Harper

Winner, 2022 Society of Midland Authors award for Biography/Memoir Evan S. Connell (1924–2013) emerged from the American Midwest determined to become a writer. He eventually made his mark with attention-getting fiction and deep explorations into history. His linked novels Mrs. Bridge (1959) and Mr. Bridge (1969) paint a devastating portrait of the lives of a prosperous suburban family not unlike his own that, more than a half century later, continue to haunt readers with their minimalist elegance and muted satire. As an essayist and historian, Connell produced a wide range of work, including a sumptuous body of travel writing, a bestselling epic account of Custer at the Little Bighorn, and a singular series of meditations on history and the human tragedy. This first portrait and appraisal of an under-recognized American writer is based on personal accounts by friends, relatives, writers, and others who knew him; extensive correspondence in library archives; and insightful literary and cultural analysis of Connell’s work and its context. It also illuminates aspects of American publishing, Hollywood, male anxieties, and the power of place.

Fifty-six stories, some new, some republished. In Corset, a wife does headstands in the nude to excite her husband, in Au Lapin Gros, a man falls for a woman's big feet, and A Cottage Near Twin Falls is on a boring cocktail party.

This long-awaited collection of Blaisdell's critical writings includes essays on literature, art, and film, along with moving tributes by some of the distinguished writers who numbered Blaisdell among their friends.

Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, a young man sits in his cramped San Francisco apartment during the turbulent 1960s and channels everything around him into a diary that is a perfect record of a world going to pieces.

Remembered Words is a selection of Alastair Fowler's essays on genre, realism, and the emblem (three interrelated subjects), published over six decades. It offers readers a way to arrive at a sense of how approaches to these subjects have changed over that period. Specifically, it shows how genre has come to be understood in terms of family resemblance theory. Remembered Words argues that realism can be seen as altering historically, so that Renaissance realism, for example, differs from those of later periods. Similar changes are traced in the emblem, which Fowler shows to be not only a particular genre, but an element of various kinds of realism. Famous passages in ancient literature are remembered in the familiar emblems of the Renaissance; and Renaissance emblems form the basis of metaphors in later literature. Meanwhile, the general approach of the critic and the reader has been altering over the years—as becomes evident when one takes into account the time-scale of sixty years (an unusually long working life for a critic). Modern theoretical approaches—which are often casually regarded as self-evident—may appear less inevitable and more arbitrary. This is not to say that they are necessarily wrong, just that they need to be argued for. Remembered Words is intended for senior undergraduates and for graduate students, who may use it to form ideas of Fowler's approach and that of his contemporaries and predecessors over the last half century.