Anthologies

Some of the greatest storytellers of our time chronicle twentieth-century southern life. Rich in irony, sly humor, and vivid, dramatic imagery, the literature of the modern South is a vital amalgam of a once-rural society’s storytelling tradition and the painful contradictions and cultural clashes brought about by rapid change. The stories in this collection are as diverse as the region itself, yet they are all connected by a shared history and a uniquely southern strain of American language and narrative. Contributors include Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams.

In Florida Stories, Tales from the Tropics by Elmore Leonard, Cabeza de Vaca, Tennessee Williams, Damon Runyon, Joan Didion, John D. McDonald, Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Hemingway, and John Sayles, you will be drawn into an alluring collection of stories, essays and poems reflecting tropical Florida - a tropical paradise where everything happens all the time.

A compilation of the debut published stories of some of the twentieth century's finest writers features the work of Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anne Tyler, John Updike, James Baldwin, and others

“The editing is more than brilliant: It is nearly unimaginable how the Library of America team managed to do so much so well. . . . Every possible kind of poem is here in its best examples. No one has ever done a better anthology of modern American poetry, or even come close.” — Talk This second volume of the landmark two-volume Library of America anthology of twentieth-century poetry, organized chronologically by the poets’ birthdates, takes the reader from E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) to May Swenson (1913–1989). In the wake of the modernist renaissance, American poets continued to experiment with new techniques and themes, while the impact of the Depression and World War II and the continuing political struggle of African Americans became part of the fabric of a literature in transition. New schools and definitions of poetry seemed often to divide the literary scene. This was the era of the Harlem Renaissance, the Objectivists, the Fugitives, the proletarian poets. It was also an era of vigorously individuated voices—knotty, defiant, sometimes eccentric. The range of tone and subject matter is immense: here are Melvin B. Tolson’s swirlingly allusive Harlem portraits, Phyllis McGinley’s elegant verse transcriptions of suburbia, May Swenson’s playful meditations on the laws of physics. The diversity of formal approaches includes the extreme linguistic experiments of Eugene Jolas and Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Rolfe Humphries’s adaptation of traditional Welsh meter, the haiku of Richard Wright, the ballads of Helen Adam and Elder Olson, the epigrams of J.V. Cunningham. A selection of light verse is joined by lyrics from the era’s greatest songwriters, including Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, and Ira Gershwin. Several important long poems are presented complete, including Hart Crane’s The Bridge , Louis Zukofsky’s Poem beginning “The” and Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon: A Vision . Rounding out the volume are such infrequently anthologized figures as Vladimir Nabokov, James Agee, Tennessee Williams, and John Cage. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

John Updike has selected enduring stories from the eighty-four annual volumes of THE BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, and the result is a "spectacular tapestry of fictional achievement" (Entertainment Weekly). Volume 1 of the audio edition features a wide variety of contemporary writers reading classics of the genre, along with authors reading from their own work. "America and the 20th century -- at its best" (Wall Street Journal). Contents: The Other Woman by Sherwood Anderson, read by John Updike. Theft by Katherine Anne Porter, read by Jill McCorkle. Crazy Sunday by F. Scott Fitzgerald, read by George Plimpton. The Interior Castle by Jean Stafford, read by Mary Gordon. Gold Coast by James Alan McPherson, read by James Alan McPherson. The German Refugee by Bernard Malamud, read by Alan Cheuse. The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick, read by Cynthia Ozick. How to Win by Rosellen Brown, read by Rosellen Brown. I Want to Live! by Thom Jones, read by Thom Jones. Birthmates by Gish Jen, read by Gish Jen.

For writers Los Angeles has always been a place of paradisal promise and apocalyptic undercurrents. Simone de Beauvoir saw a kaleidoscopic “hall of mirrors,” Aldous Huxley a “city of dreadful joy.” Where Jack Kerouac found a “huge desert encampment,” David Thompson imagined “Marilyn Monroe, fifty miles long, lying on her side, half-buried on a ridge of crumbling rock.” In Writing Los Angeles , The Library of America presents a glittering panorama of the city, encompassing fiction, poetry, essays, journalism, and diaries by over seventy writers. This revelatory anthology brings to life the entrancing surfaces and unsettling contradictions of the City of Angels, from Raymond Chandler’s evocation of the murderous moods fed by the Santa Ana winds to John Gregory Dunne’s affectionate tribute to “the deceptive perspectives of the pale subtropical light.” Here are fascinating strata of Los Angeles’s cultural and social history, from the oil boom of the 1920s to the graffiti artists of the 1980s, from flamboyant evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson to surf music genius Brian Wilson, from the German émigré intellectuals chronicled by Salka Viertel to the hard-bitten homicide cops tracked by James Ellroy. Here are its fragile ecosystems, its architectural splendors, and its social chasms, in the words of writers as various as M.F.K. Fisher, William Faulkner, Bertolt Brecht, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, and Mona Simpson. Art Pepper discovers Central Avenue in the heyday of the 1940s jazz scene; Charles Mingus describes an early encounter with the builder of the Watts Towers; screenwriter Robert Towne reflects on the origins of Chinatown; John McPhee powerfully conveys the devastation of Los Angeles mudslides; David Hockney teaches himself how to drive in record time; and Pico Iyer finds at Los Angeles International Airport “as clear an image as exists today of the world we are about to enter.” Writing Los Angeles is an incomparable literary tour guide to a city of shifting identities and endless surprises.