To escape an addiction, a young blind man in California steps into a station wagon with his friends and their foster kids to deliver a handmade casket to a dying grandfather in Florida. As they battle their way across the southern half of the nation, this rag-tag American family falls prey to love and lies, greed and violence, crime and Katrina. With a voice reminiscent of John Irving, Nodine produces a classic "road-picture" novel that is part Travels...

More so than any other art form, film relies on collaboration. The essays in this collection, “Film and the Art of Adaptation, consider a range of contemporary films inspired by celebrated works of American literature, including Baz Luhrmann's spectacular take on The Great Gatsby and James Franco's faithful transposition of As I Lay Dying. Ruth Yeazell considers the difficulty of representing the interior life of one of Henry James's orphaned children...

William Faulkner was undoubtedly one of the greatest American writers. Now, you can take Thomas Merton as your personal guide in discovering the literary and spiritual genius of Faulkner’s works.   Awarded both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962) was a multi-talented writer who wrote such beloved classics as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. In this series, you will join renowned mystic...

Alphabetically arranged entries include discussions of individual authors, literary movements, institutions, notable texts, literary developments, themes, ethnic literatures, and "topic" essays.

"Most of human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, or tribes. The concept of the "citizen," an idea we take for granted, is historically quite rare-and was, until recently, amongst America's most profoundly cherished ideals. But without shock treatment, warns historian and conservative political commentator Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it for well over two centuries may soon vanish. In The Dying Citizen,...

Includes selections by Ernie Pyle, William L. Shirer, Dorothy Thompson, A.J. Liebling, Edward R. Murrow, Margaret Bourke-White, Howard K. Smith, E.B. White, Brendan Gill, Richard Tregaskis, John Hersey, Homer Bigart, I.F. Stone, S.J. Perelman, Robert Sherrod, Ernest Hemingway, Irwin Shaw, Bill Mauldin, Eric Sevareid, Richard C. Hottelet, James Agee, and others. Includes chronology and 9 maps.

The first anthology ever to present the entire range of ancient Greek and Roman stories--from myths and fairy tales to jokes Captured centaurs and satyrs, talking animals, people who suddenly change sex, men who give birth, the temporarily insane and the permanently thick-witted, delicate sensualists, incompetent seers, a woman who remembers too much, a man who cannot laugh--these are just some of the colorful characters who feature in the unforgettable...