The Flaming Corsage

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 184983847X
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (498 download)

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Book Synopsis The Flaming Corsage by : William Kennedy

Download or read book The Flaming Corsage written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a Manhattan hotel room, the "Love Nest Killings of 1908" take place. But the mystery of who killed whom, and why, does not unravel until we explore the lives of Katrina Taylor and Edward Daughtery. He is a first-generation Irish American and a successful playwright. She is a high-born Protestant, a beautiful seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life. Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether. Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, The Flaming Corsagefollows Katrina and Edward as other lives impact upon theirs-their socially opposed families; Edward's flirtatious actress paramour, Melissa Spencer; the physician Giles Fitzroy, and his wife; and Edward's friend, the cynical journalist Thomas Maginn. The Flaming Corsageevocatively portrays through the lens of Albany's robust Irishtown and English-Dutch aristocracy the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.

Billy Phelan's Greatest Game

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Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1849838550
Total Pages : 261 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (498 download)

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Book Synopsis Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Billy Phelan's Greatest Game written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss's son. In relating Billy's fall from the underworld grace and his storybook redemption, Kennedy captures the seamy underside of a brassy, sweaty city that would prefer to pretend that the Depression doesn't exist.

Quinn's Book

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Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504042093
Total Pages : 233 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Quinn's Book by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Quinn's Book written by William Kennedy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1849, a boy saves a girl from the Hudson River in this story “of wonders and sweetness, magic and horrors [that] immerses itself in the marvelous” (The Boston Sunday Globe). A penniless Irish orphan, Daniel Quinn is among the crowds gathered at the Hudson River in Albany to watch a legendary dancer aboard the ferry. But when the boat strikes the ice that chokes the water on this wintry day, awe turns to terror. Though the dancer’s life is lost, Daniel risks his neck and rescues her niece, Maud Fallon. But just as he’s falling in love with the beautiful, passionate girl, she’s snatched away from him. As the years pass and Daniel continues his quest for the beguiling Maud, he will witness the rise and fall of great dynasties in upstate New York, epochal prize fights, the exotic world of the theater, visitations from spirits beyond the grave, horrific battles between Irish immigrants and the Know-Nothings, the New York draft riots, the perils of the Underground Railroad, and the bloody despair of the Civil War. Rich with nineteenth-century history and filled with flourishes of humor and magical realism, this is an “engrossing and eerily profound” novel (Time) from an author who, in the words of Stephen King, “writes with verve and nerve [and] paints a full and lively canvas.” In the tradition of E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate or Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale, it is a remarkable saga from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Ironweed.

O Albany!

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101665947
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (16 download)

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Book Synopsis O Albany! by : William Kennedy

Download or read book O Albany! written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1985-09-03 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kennedy's O Albany! is in part the non-fictional stories he covered in his novels, Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. Kennedy retells the exploits of the bootlegger Jack 'Legs' Diamond, the bungled 1933 kidnapping of John O'Connell, Jr., heir to the Albany Democratic machine and explores the Albany of his past, including its demographics and vanished neighborhoods.

Legs

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0140064842
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Legs by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Legs written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-01-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Legs, the inaugural book in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle of novels, brilliantly evokes the flamboyant career of gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond. Through the equivocal eyes of Diamond’s attorney, Marcus Gorman (who scraps a promising political career for the more elemental excitement of the criminal underworld), we watch as Legs and his showgirl mistress, Kiki Roberts, blaze their gaudy trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s.

Ironweed

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1849838364
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (498 download)

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Book Synopsis Ironweed by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Ironweed written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, basis of the film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Francis Phelan, ex-big-leaguer, part-time gravedigger, full-time bum with the gift of gab, is back in town. He left Albany twenty-two years earlier after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now he's on the way back to the wife and home he abandoned, haunted at every corner by the ghosts of his violent life. Francis; his wino ladyfriend of nine years, Helen; and his stumblebum pal, Rudy, shuffle their ragtag way through the city's bleakest streets, surviving on gumption, muscatel, and black wit. estiny is not their business. 'The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter.' Guardian 'But for all the rich variety of prose and event, from hallucination to bedrock realism to slapstick and to blessed quotidian peace, ''Ironweed'' is more austere than its predecessors. It is more fierce, but also more forgiving.' Quoted from the classic New York Times review of Ironweed, which made it an overnight sensation.

Roscoe

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0142001732
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis Roscoe by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Roscoe written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2002-11-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Thick with crime, passion, and backroom banter” (The New Yorker), Roscoe is an odyssey of great scope and linguistic verve, a deadly, comic masterpiece from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ironweed It's V-J Day, the war is over, and Roscoe Conway, after twenty-six years as the second in command of Albany's notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there's no way out, and only his Machiavellian imagination can help him cope with the erupting disasters. Every step leads back to the past—to the early loss of his true love, the takeover of city hall, the machine's fight with FDR and Al Smith to elect a governor, and the methodical assassination of gangster Jack "Legs" Diamond. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

The Albany Cycle

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780743221023
Total Pages : 723 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis The Albany Cycle by : William Kennedy

Download or read book The Albany Cycle written by William Kennedy and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 723 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francis Phelan is, alongside 'Legs' Diamond, William Kennedy's greatest character. Ex-ball player, latterly a bum, lush and hardcase, he is central to these three Albany novels: father to the pool shark Billy who struggles with his legacy of violence and self-glorification (BILLY PHELAN'S GREATEST GAME); brother to artist Peter whose paintings explore the dark corners of his family history, including Francis's life (VERY OLD BONES); and antihero of Pulitzer Prize winning IRONWEED, in which Phelan returns to Albany at the end of the Depression, roaming the familiar streets with his hobo pal Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.

Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin Books
ISBN 13 : 0143122045
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (431 download)

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Book Synopsis Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Ironweed," a dramatic novel of love and revolution from one of America's finest writers. This is an unforgettably riotous story of romance and redemption set against the landscape of the civil rights movement.

Very Old Bones

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Publisher : Open Road Media
ISBN 13 : 1504042123
Total Pages : 238 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Very Old Bones by : William Kennedy

Download or read book Very Old Bones written by William Kennedy and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a Pulitzer Prize–winning author: “An immensely gratifying novel” of an Irish-American clan whose exploits changed Albany forever (The Boston Globe). When it was built, the Phelan mansion was the only home on the block. In the decades since, countless tragedies have swept through its rambling halls, but no matter how many times its foundations have been rocked, the old house still stands. Now, in 1958, its sole occupants are the eccentric old painter Peter Phelan and his illegitimate son, Orson, who sees all—but says nothing. When Peter invites his remaining family to hear him read his will aloud, it forces the Phelan clan to reckon with the most powerful force in Albany: their own tortured history. Unveiling a series of portraits inspired by family tragedy, Peter takes the Phelans back into the past, as far as 1887, forcing them to come face-to-face with the origins of the family curse. As the raucous narrative unfolds, Orson does his best to grapple with his roots, and the knowledge that the sins of the past can never truly be washed away. William Kennedy’s eight-book Albany Cycle is one of the most ambitious projects in modern historical fiction, a kaleidoscopic portrait of a city whose heroes are its corrupt politicians, conmen, and thieves. The Phelans are one of the roughest families in American literature, and also one of the greatest, who “can claim a place beside O’Neill’s Tyrones and Steinbeck’s Joads” (Library Journal).

An Albany Trio

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0140257861
Total Pages : 625 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (42 download)

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Book Synopsis An Albany Trio by : William Kennedy

Download or read book An Albany Trio written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-07-01 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Kennedy's justly acclaimed Albany Cycle [is] one of the imperishable products of American literature since the Second World War. These books can be read singly or in sequence, but read they must be. Kennedy is one of our necessary writers.”—GQ Legs inaugurated William Kennedy’s celebrated cycle of novels set in Albany, New York. True to both life and myth. Legs evokes the flamboyant career of the legendary gangster Jack “Legs” Diamond, who was finally murdered in Albany, and his showgirl mistress as they blaze a trail across the tabloid pages of the 1920s and 1930s. The second novel in the Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie, as he moves through the lurid nighttime glare of a tough Depression-era town. Full of Irish pluck, he works the fringes of Albany sporting life with his own particular style—until he falls from underworld grace. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed, Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany after killing a scab during a workers’ strike, and again after he accidentally—and fatally—dropped his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back, roaming familiar streets and trying to make peace with ghosts of the past and present. William Kennedy’s Albany Cycle of novels reflect what he once described as the fusion of his imagination with a single place. A native and longtime resident of Albany, New York, his work moves from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, chronicling family life, the city’s netherworld, and its spheres of power—financial, ethnic, political—often among the Irish-Americans who dominated the city in this period. The novels in his cycle include, Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn’s Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, and Roscoe.

Bootlegger of the Soul

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Author :
Publisher : State University of New York Press
ISBN 13 : 143847332X
Total Pages : 410 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (384 download)

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Book Synopsis Bootlegger of the Soul by : Suzanne Lance

Download or read book Bootlegger of the Soul written by Suzanne Lance and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who put Albany on the world’s literary map. The award-winning novelist William Kennedy is perhaps best known for his Albany Cycle, a series of novels that put Albany on the world’s literary map alongside James Joyce’s Dublin, Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. Bootlegger of the Soul offers a fresh and authoritative overview of Kennedy’s long literary career and his astonishing trajectory from journalist to struggling novelist to Pulitzer Prize winner. Included here are reviews, interviews, and scholarly essays on Kennedy’s work, as well as essays, speeches, a play, and a short story by the author himself, together with more than fifty historical and personal photographs. Lively, readable, and brimming with the infectious wit and lyrical prose that animates Kennedy’s novels, Bootlegger of the Soul is a celebration of a writer still working hard at his craft at age ninety. Suzanne Lance is Associate Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Paul Grondahl is Director of the New York State Writers Institute and is the author of several books, including Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma and I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt.

Reading William Kennedy

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Author :
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780815607243
Total Pages : 228 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (72 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading William Kennedy by : Michael Patrick Gillespie

Download or read book Reading William Kennedy written by Michael Patrick Gillespie and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A favorite of library and community reading groups, William Kennedy is best known for his novels Ironweed and his most recent, The Flaming Corsage. This eminently readable book provides a helpful introduction to students and others interested in his work. With engaging candor, Michael Patrick Gillespie provides a keen analysis of Kennedy's best-known works, a firm base for interpretation, and a better understanding of the cultural world that shapes the characters and informs the plots of Kennedy's novels. Rather than prescribing what one should see when reading Kennedy's works, the book moves to the next stage of exploring diverse responses to Kennedy's canon, broadening the reader's awareness of the range of alternative strategies and perspective. Gillespie begins with an introduction that outlines the imaginative context for Kennedy's work. Subsequent chapters, in three parts, provide extended treatments of his early work, key elements in the first three Albany novels, and finally the maturity of his overall fiction, including his new play, Grand View.

The Journals of Ayn Rand

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101137215
Total Pages : 753 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis The Journals of Ayn Rand by : Ayn Rand

Download or read book The Journals of Ayn Rand written by Ayn Rand and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-08-01 with total page 753 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rarely has a writer and thinker of the stature of Ayn Rand afforded us access to her most intimate thoughts and feelings. From Journals of Ayn Rand, we gain an invaluable new understanding and appreciation of the woman, the artist, and the philosopher, and of the enduring legacy she has left us.Rand comes vibrantly to life as an untried screenwriter in Hollywood, creating stories that reflect her youthful vision of the world. We see her painful memories of communist Russia and her struggles to convey them in We the Living. Most fascinating is the intricate, step-by-step process through which she created the plots and characters of her two masterworks, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and the years of painstaking research that imbued the novels with their powerful authenticity. Complete with reflections on her legendary screenplay concerning the making of the atomic bomb and tantalizing descriptions of projects cut short by her death, Journals of Ayn Rand illuminates the mind and heart of an extraordinary woman as no biography or memoir ever could. On these vivid pages, Ayn Rand lives.

The Atheist Wore Goat Silk

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Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807165697
Total Pages : 97 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (71 download)

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Book Synopsis The Atheist Wore Goat Silk by : Anna Journey

Download or read book The Atheist Wore Goat Silk written by Anna Journey and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2017-02-02 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The tropic foliage of Anna Journey’s book is so lushly ashimmer with invitation andthreat that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Which is just what this poet intends: the world seduces us to enter, and to enter again, and to do so is both to find pleasure and to perish into a field of ghosts.”— Mark Doty, author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems "Anna Journey has talent to burn: gothic, elegiac, and celebratory by turns, her poems possess a giddy imaginative dexterity that is exceedingly rare in a debut collection. More important, there is a gravity and heft to her poems; they are willing to confront the Big Issues and militantly resist the easy tour de force. Jarrell says somewhere that a certain helplessness before her material is one of the poet’s principal tools. I hear that haunted helplessness in lines such as these: 'I can’t stop— / the story // going like the tongue goes: // lit and loosed, moving, / like Lucifer, / down.' Anna Journey is on the threshold of a significant career."—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004

The Serpent King

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Author :
Publisher : Ember
ISBN 13 : 0553524046
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (535 download)

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Book Synopsis The Serpent King by : Jeff Zentner

Download or read book The Serpent King written by Jeff Zentner and published by Ember. This book was released on 2017-06-06 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named to ten BEST OF THE YEAR lists and selected as a William C. Morris Award Winner,The Serpent King is the critically acclaimed, much-beloved story of three teens who find themselves--and each other--while on the cusp of graduating from high school with hopes of leaving their small-town behind. Perfect for fans of John Green's Turtles All the Way Down. "Move over, John Green; Zentner is coming for you." —The New York Public Library “Will fill the infinite space that was left in your chest after you finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower.” —BookRiot.com Dill isn't the most popular kid at his rural Tennessee high school. After his father fell from grace in a public scandal that reverberated throughout their small town, Dill became a target. Fortunately, his two fellow misfits and best friends, Travis and Lydia, have his back. But as they begin their senior year, Dill feels the coils of his future tightening around him. His only escapes are music and his secret feelings for Lydia--neither of which he is brave enough to share. Graduation feels more like an ending to Dill than a beginning. But even before then, he must cope with another ending--one that will rock his life to the core. Debut novelist Jeff Zentner provides an unblinking and at times comic view of the hard realities of growing up in the Bible belt, and an intimate look at the struggles to find one’s true self in the wreckage of the past. “A story about friendship, family and forgiveness, it’s as funny and witty as it is utterly heartbreaking.” —PasteMagazine.com “A brutally honest portrayal of teen life . . . [and] a love letter to the South from a man who really understands it.” —Mashable.com “I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another.”—New York Times

The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0195156536
Total Pages : 2273 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (951 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature by : Jay Parini

Download or read book The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature written by Jay Parini and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 2273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays thatreflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf.At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures arediscussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with abibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion.A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work,placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticatedenough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating.The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they alsogather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim forcomprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right.In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.