A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by Jonathan Franzen and “the best prose stylist in America” by Rick Moody, gathered a generous selection of her essays about best writing practices, representations of Jesus, early tourist photographs, and much more. Essays Two collects Davis’s writings and talks on her second profession: the art of translation. The award-winning translator from the French reflects on her experience translating Proust (“A work of creation in its own right.” —Claire Messud, Newsday), Madame Bovary (“[Flaubert’s] masterwork has been given the English translation it deserves.” —Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review), and Michel Leiris (“Magnificent.” —Tim Watson, Public Books). She also makes an extended visit to the French city of Arles, and writes about the varied adventures of learning Norwegian, Dutch, and Spanish through reading and translation. Davis, a 2003 MacArthur Fellow and the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for her fiction, here focuses her unique intelligence and idiosyncratic ways of understanding on the endlessly complex relations between languages. Together with Essays One, this provocative and delightful volume cements her status as one of our most original and beguiling writers.

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick Moody hails her as "the best prose stylist in America." And for Claire Messud, “Davis's signal gift is to make us feel alive.” Best known for her masterful short stories and translations, Davis’s gifts extend equally to her nonfiction. In Essays One, Davis has, for the first time, gathered a selection of essays, commentaries, and lectures composed over the past five decades. In this first of two volumes, her subjects range from her earliest influences to her favorite short stories, from John Ashbery’s translation of Rimbaud to Alan Cote’s painting, and from the Shepherd’s Psalm to early tourist photographs. On display is the development and range of one of the sharpest, most capacious minds writing today.

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

2:12 a.m. is an insomniac's tour of counterproductive bedtime stories, Vegas weddings, Southern funerals, Nevada's nuclear testing grounds, Patty Hearst, Marina Oswald, sleepwalking murderers, Louise Bourgeois's Insomnia Drawings and more, revealing what wakeful nights conjure for a North Carolinian turned Californian, a farm child turned suburbanite, a 1960s romantic turned fatalist and a once-but-no-longer "gifted" sleeper. The collection, comprised of Best American Essays notables, Pushcart Prize nominees and the winner of Drunken Boat's Editors' Choice nonfiction award, mixes the strictly autobiographical with voice-driven reportage and includes essays that are factual, meditative, investigatory and lyrical to take full advantage of the versatility of the form. 2:12 a.m. is a book for all who revisit the past and brood on the future--a book about the dislocations of contemporary life, the hauntings of memory, and the perennial search, late night or otherwise, for meaning in existence.

The Writer's Notebook II offers aspiring authors sixteen insightful essays about the craft of writing by Tin House authors and summer workshop faculty members, including Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, Maggie Nelson, Karen Russell, Benjamin Percy, and others. The Writer's Notebook II continues in the tradition of The Writer's Notebook, featuring essays based on craft seminars from the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop, as well as a variety of craft essays from Tin House magazine contributors and Tin House Books authors. The collection includes essays that not only examine important craft aspects such as humor, suspense, and research but that also explore creating fractured and nonrealist narratives and the role of dream in fiction. An engaging and enlightening read, The Writer's Notebook II is both a toolkit and an inspiration for any writer. The Writer’s Notebook II offers aspiring authors sixteen insightful essays about the craft of writing by Tin House authors and summer workshop faculty members, including Aimee Bender, Steve Almond, Maggie Nelson, Karen Russell, Benjamin Percy, and others.

Post-modern generative fiction. Aesthetic response to novel and film. The cinem a novel. The case of Robbe-Grillet. International aspects of the Nouveau Roman. Topology and the Nouveau Roman. Modes of "Point of view". The alienated "I". N arrative "You". Interior duplication. Games and game structures in Robbe-Grill et. The evolution of view-point in Robbe-Grillet.

Literary Nonfiction. "TELEPHONE is, for me, a stellar example of what can be achieved in collaborative work where two voices figure out how to link connective threads that bring out the best in each of their words, images, and narrative flourishes. This is a real gift of a book, one I hope to keep learning from."--Hanif Abdurraqib "Miller and Wade's TELEPHONE is a polyphonic emergency. These divinely nostalgic and politely oracular essays,--are they essays? watch them essai,--pursue the maximum boundaries of genre, and there, in the peripheries, together, we reach into our pockets to read their decoded message: I love."--Lily Hoang "Wade and Miller's collaborative essay collection, TELEPHONE, stretches the possibilities of the form, creating a kind of thought puzzle that you're happy to never truly solve. Their voices bounce and blend, weave and bob, in a way that seems almost impossible and magical. TELEPHONE is a testament to the power of voice and the beauty of collaborative art."--Steven Church "TELEPHONE is unusual, thoughtful and compelling. The two voices together are clever, passionate, entertaining and intriguing. TELEPHONE pushes the boundaries and demonstrates the power and potential of the creative nonfiction genre."--Lee Gutkind "Miller and Wade's marvelous TELEPHONE takes the ordinary--cars, exercise, toys, sex--and elevates it to the extraordinary. Each subject is subjected to lyrical rendering and astonishing interpretation. TELEPHONE stuns us with its burnished music, its use of form, and its brilliant musings on seemingly quotidian subjects. In these twin-voiced essays is a celebration of narrative's thrall, but also a liberation blueprint that frees us from the tyranny of a single self, a single story."--James Allen Hall

Our Ocean Backyard: Collected Essays 2 brings together 106 previously published articles from Gary Griggs's popular column for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. Written for anyone with an interest in the oceans, the essays draw upon our rich history of ocean exploration and discovery, shedding light on what we can expect in the years and decades to come.

The Illusion of Life II 2 continues and extends the pioneering work in the theory of animation begun in The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. It provides an abundance of understandings, approaches, correctives, and challenges to scholars not only in animation studies and film studies, but in disciplines across the spectrum. It proceeds on the assumption that animation, in increasingly taking center stage thanks to computer animation and anime, calls ever more insistently for focused, rigorous theoretical attention. The sixteen essays composing the collection engage with post-World War II film animation in Japan and the United States, as well as with the expanded field of animation, including: the relation of live action and animation; video and computer games, the electronic, digitally animated mediascape, the city, flight simulation, the military and war; and animation in the entertainment industry. In addition, it contains essays of a more general theoretical nature on animation, as well as a substantial introduction addressing developments in animation and its theorizing.