Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in Literature & Fiction

Beginning with an exploration of some of Robert Frost's least-known poems, these essays consider Ezra Pound's letters, T. S. Elliot's metaphysical lectures, the lightness of Elizabeth Bishop, and the civil tongue of Richard Wilbur, finding in poetry a language that lasts beyond the petty conventions of the age. Added to these thoughtful essays are provocative reviews of contemporary poetry, full of Logan's caustic wit and sharp-eyed scrutiny.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was an American original - a luminous literary theorist, an erratic genius, and an analyst par excellence of human obsession and compulsion. The scope of his literary achievements and the dramatic character of Poe's life have drawn readers and critics to him in droves. And yet, upon his death, one obituary penned by a literary enemy in the New York Daily Tribune cascaded into a lasting stain on Poe's character, leaving a historic misunderstanding.

Louie Cameron, once a successful architect and musician, now a vagabond, is wounded while defending a damsel in distress, which leads him to become entangled in the lives of Andrea, an artist and professor, and her parents, habitués of a remote beach house in northern California. The blossoming of deep love between Louie and Andrea gives Louie the courage to return to Santa Cruz to make peace with Marie, the former love of his life, with unforeseen and startling consequences.

Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night is a spirited, offbeat collection of stories, elongated riffs on that thing we call...love. All manner of love stories: thwarted love stories, imaginary love stories, love stories offhand and obsessive, philosophical love stories, erudite and amusing love stories. Quirky, real, idealistic, deluded, bohemian, and true, these are people who can - and often do - fall in love with a pair of ears, August afternoons, saucers of vitamins, New Age carpenters, and dead bumblebees.

Finally, the truth about vampires.Vampires are the most fearsome and fascinating of all creatures of folklore. For the first time, detailed accounts of the vampire and how its tradition developed in different cultures are gathered in one volume by eminent folklorist Alan Dundes.

In the nine stories of Let's Do, various calamities strike ordinary Midwesterners, who cope with a mixture of good intentions and ineptitude. Balancing humor with painful clarity, author Rebecca Meacham pulls listeners into the lives of characters who struggle with and more often against - change.

Geoff Schmidt's debut collection, Out of Time, is a meditation on meaning and mortality, and the ways that story and the imagined life can sustain us. In these stories, vengeful infants destroy and rebuild the world, rivalrous siblings and their mother encounter witches and ghosts and the possessed, Barack Obama and Keith Richards smoke their last cigarettes, men and women with cancer variously don gorilla suits or experience all time simultaneously.

Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy-three great masters of the English novel-are three remarkable imagining minds. As readers of their novels, we feel ourselves to be in contact with their authorial minds and conjure the minds they create spread across the pages of their narrative worlds. In the way that we believe in and hold in mind the idea that other human beings have minds of their own do we as readers of the novel believe we are in the presence of these other minds. But how?

Sex trafficking is not a recent phenomenon. Over 100 years ago, the first international traffic in women for prostitution emerged, prompting a worldwide effort to combat it. The Politics of Trafficking provides a unique look at the history of that first anti-trafficking movement, illuminating the role gender, sexuality, and national interests play in international politics. Initially conceived as a global humanitarian effort to protect women from sexual exploitation, the movement's feminist-inspired vision failed to achieve its goal....

Largely set in the South, the 11 stories of Body Language guide us into the hidden worlds of the culture wars. The people in these stories belong to the fringes of society, struggling for an identity and a place to belong.

When a poet addresses a living person - whether friend or enemy, lover or sister - we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy - George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino?

Matt Debenham's stories are for people who think they don't like short stories. These stories don't leave off in mid-breath; instead, they feature characters who seem to live on even after their closing pages. The humor in The Book of Right and Wrong makes the jarring moments that much more jarring, and the tender moments that much more tender. At once heartbreaking and hilarious, the 11 stories in The Book of Right and Wrong capture their characters at the defining moments of their lives.

Powerful and haunting, the 10 stories in this debut collection conjure a world where dreams and reality merge, often with dangerous consequences. Michael Hyde explores the relationships between illusion and reality, delusion and clarity, as his characters come to realize that the revelations they wholeheartedly pursue are often not the ones that await them and will move them. A teenage girl obsessed with the death of a classmate hopes to become the killer's next victim, a wayward graveyard attendant punishes the dead for his punishments in life, and a ghostly vision in a garden shed offers a catalyst for one woman's change.

In Ann Harleman's remarkable debut collection, men and women of extraordinary passions look for and sometimes find the hidden heart of ordinary life. Testing themselves and each other, they search for ways to connect. Harleman combines a clear eye with a generous heart, revealing her characters - misguided, selfish, loving, brave - through a compassionate, often humorous probing of their inner and outer worlds.

This extraordinary first collection of short stories covers the landscape of dysfunctional childhood, urban angst, and human disconnection with a wit and insight that keep you riveted. The characters here have rich and imaginative interior lives, but grave difficulty relating to the outside world.

Molly McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment. We meet McNett's endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.

This highly understandable audiobook offers a contemporary interpretation of the political thought of Edmund Burke, drawing on his experiences to illuminate and address fundamental questions of politics and society that are of particular interest today. In Edmund Burke for Our Time, Byrne asserts that Burke's politics is reflective of unique and sophisticated ideas about how people think and learn, and about determinants of political behavior.

Good With Dogs and Cats: The Adventures of Healing Weintraub is a novel about a man who helps dogs and cats resolve their difficulties with humans, and vice-versa. Set in the small town of Mercy on the far north coast of California, Good With Dogs and Cats spans a decade in the life of Healing Weintraub and his friends and relations, both animal and human. Mystery and romance and comedy abound in this poignant tale brimming with fascinating insights into the minds and hearts of dogs and cats and people.

Should we draw an analogy between Shakespeare’s tyrants—Richard III, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and King Lear—and Donald Trump? In Shakespeare and Trump, Jeffrey Wilson applies literary criticism to real life, examining plot, character, villainy, soliloquy, tragedy, myth, and metaphor to identify the formal features of the Trump phenomenon, and its hidden causes, structure, and meanings.

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary.