Jack Robinson made his name as a much-sought-after fashion and celebrity photographer during the 1960s and early 1970s, and his work is well documented in hundreds of pages of Vogue, the New York Times, and Life, as well as other publications. However, his personal life remains virtually unknown. In this study of Robinson and his photography, Howard Philips Smith takes an in-depth look at Robinson’s early life in New Orleans, where he discovered his passion for painting, photography, and the Dixie Bohemian life of the French Quarter. A Sojourn in Paradise: Jack Robinson in 1950s New Orleans features more than one hundred photographs taken by the artist, accompanied by detailed commentary about Robinson’s life in New Orleans and excerpts from interviews with the people who knew him when he lived there. Robinson’s photographs of New Orleans reveal the genesis of two unique and fascinating facets of the city’s history and culture: the creation of the first gay Carnival krewes who would make their own unique contribution to the rich cultural history of the city and the formation of the Orleans Gallery, one of the earliest centers of the contemporary art movement blossoming in 1950s America. This detailed study of Jack Robinson’s early life and photography illustrates the contributions of a gifted, gay artist whose quiet spirit and constant interior struggle found refuge in New Orleans, the city where he was able to find himself, for a time, free from society’s grip and open to exploring life on his own terms.

“A striking memoir of a gifted black woman’s lonely, difficult, and unsatisfying climb to the heights of American power and prestige.” —Kirkus Reviews Parker’s compelling memoir offers a revealing glimpse inside corporate America through the eyes of a black woman “intruder.” From a nurturing childhood in a middle-class black community, Parker rose in the ranks on Wall Street only to discover that racism and sexism still prevail at the top. Full of both outrage and regret, Trespassing is frank and unflinching but leavened with humor and compassion. “An important, keenly observed work that should be read by everyone who is interested in a good story, as well as by those intrigued by the gripping personal drama that comes from extending token access to a few black professionals and calling that phenomenon—integration” (Lani Guinier, author of The Tyranny of Meritocracy). “The stings and isolation of a career at the top . . . engagingly written and fluidly paced.” —The New York Times “An important voice in Black women’s emerging tapestry of words.” —Jill Nelson, author of Volunteer Slavery “Searching and painfully revealing, depicting each moment with searing clarity . . . Parker shows what it means to be invisible and erased.” —Time “Graceful . . . funny, moving and insightful.” —Newsday

Reminiscences of an Indian professorơs stay in United States, 1960-1964.

In this haunting and noirish novel by a leading author and critic, an Indian writer travels to Berlin and soon finds himself slipping into a fragmented, fuguelike state. An Indian writer has come to Berlin as a visiting professor. This is his second sojourn in the city, which seems strange, and also strangely familiar, to him. He is disoriented by its names, its immensity, and its history; he is worried that something may happen to him there. Faqrul, a friendly Bangladeshi poet living in exile, takes him up—then disappears. The visiting writer is increasingly adrift in a city that not long ago was two cities, each cut off from the other, much as the new unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. It is the fall of 2005; every day it grows colder. The visitor is beginning to feel his middle age. To him, the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless commodities from all over the place and no prospect of any sort of historical transformation, appears to exist in a state of amnesiac suspense. He gets involved with a woman, Birgit. He begins to miss his classes. He blacks out in the street. People are worried. “I’ve lost my bearings—not in the city; in its history,” he thinks. “The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.” But does he? Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn is a dramatic and disconcerting work of fiction, a book about the present as it slips into the past, a picture of a city and of a troubled mind, a historical novel about an ostensibly post-historical time, a story of haunting. Here, as in his earlier work, Chaudhuri pries open fictional form to explore questions of public and private life in ways that are both bold and subtle.

Theodore Roosevelt ventured into the American West to seek authentic frontier experience and the strenuous life. The New York aristocrat traveled to western Dakota Territory in 1883 to kill his first buffalo. He got his buffalo, but he also fell in love with the badlands of what is now North Dakota. On impulse, Roosevelt invested a significant portion of his wealth in two badlands ranches, and he spent the better part of 1883-87 ranching, hunting, serving as deputy sheriff, writing books, and attempting to become an authentic American cowboy. In North Dakota the New York dude became the Theodore Roosevelt who led a cowboy brigade of cavalrymen up Kettle and San Juan Hills in 1898 and then led the American people into the twentieth century as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. This book contains 70 stories, many set in Dakota Territory, about Roosevelt's life as an adventurer, politician, and man of letters, lavishly illustrated with more than 100 photographs, some never previously published. Clay S. Jenkinson's introduction assesses what Roosevelt learned from his sojourn in the West, including his commitment to conservation of America's natural resources. With a foreword by best-selling biographer Douglas Brinkley, this book tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's life in his own words, carefully excerpted from his 1913 autobiography.

How American is Miss America? For Susan Supernaw, a Muscogee (Creek) and Munsee Native American, the question wasn't just academic. Throughout a childhood clouded by poverty, alcoholism, abuse, and a physical disability, Supernaw sought escape in school and dance and the Native American Church. She became a presidential scholar, won a scholarship to college, and was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 1971. Supernaw might not have won the Miss America pageant that year, but she did call attention to the Native peoples living largely invisible lives throughout their own American land. And she did at long last earn her Native American name. Chronicling a quest to escape poverty and find meaning, Supernaw's story is revealing, humorous, and deeply moving. Muscogee Daughter is the story of finding a Native American identity among the distractions and difficulties of American life and of discerning an identity among competing notions of what it is to be a woman, a Native American, and a citizen of the world.

Krivak pens a stunning debut novel of brutality and survival on the Southern Front of World War I.