The American journalist discusses Marguerite Duras, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Gunter Grass, the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

This is the true story of my life, born into a family who lived in poverty on the edge of Bristol. In the early 1930s the economy of England started to improve. This improved my life in that I had my own pair of shoes to wear and some new clothes instead of hand me downs but never enough food. I relate some of my experiences as a child and teenager, then my Stonemasonry story. My career in the armed forces in England and Malaya. When I entered the army I was 5foot 4 inches tall. Upon de-mobilisation I had grown to 6foot 3 inches due to being fed properly. I trained as an Alabaster worker and Stonemason. I finally was made the National President of the Association of Natural Stone Industries. This gave me the great honour of sitting down to a banquet with Prince Charles. I also had the privilege of meeting Princess Margaret, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Her majesty our present Queen. During my lifetime I have repaired many grand edifices and many Churches. It has been my good fortune to learn that from Saxon times onwards Stonemasons could do better work when their tools were made for them by Blacksmiths. This knowledge eluded most Masons but helped make me a much respected restorer in all periods of construction. I was appointed a lecturer at Bristol University and the Orton Trust in Northamptonshire. This was my real rags to riches story.

Ron Allen spent thirty-five years with the RCMP, during which he progressed through the ranks from rookie drug enforcement investigator to commander of the largest drug enforcement team in Canada. His career took him from the streets of Toronto to postings in the Yukon and Cape Breton. He also worked on international drug cases covering many points on the globe. As his career progressed, so did the drug trade, with seizures growing from grams and ounces to pounds, kilograms, and tonnes. This memoir recounts several of the cases in which Ron was involved, blending real-life incidents with a strong dose of humour—including the time he was sued for allegedly shooting a member of Parliament! Ron also reflects on the challenges of drug enforcement, the pros and cons of legalization—particularly cannabis—and whether Canada is accomplishing what it set out to do with the nation’s drug enforcement mandate. The book concludes with his personal views on some of the problems currently facing the RCMP and why, in Ron’s opinion, the Mounties’ scarlet tunic has lost some of its lustre. Current and retired members of the RCMP will enjoy this book, as will anyone with an interest in law enforcement, past and present, and those who are concerned about the future of Canada’s national police service.

To complement his work as a fiction writer, John Updike accepted any number of odd jobs—book reviews and introductions, speeches and tributes, a “few paragraphs” on baseball or beauty or Borges—and saw each as “an opportunity to learn something, or to extract from within some unsuspected wisdom.” In this, his largest collection of assorted prose, he brings generosity and insight to the works and lives of William Dean Howells, George Bernard Shaw, Philip Roth, Muriel Spark, and dozens more. Novels from outposts of postmodernism like Turkey, Albania, Israel, and Nigeria are reviewed, as are biographies of Cleopatra and Dorothy Parker. The more than a hundred considerations of books are flanked, on one side, by short stories, a playlet, and personal essays, and, on the other, by essays on his own oeuvre. Updike’s odd jobs would be any other writer’s chief work.

Whether revered for his masculinity, condemned as an icon of machismo, or perceived as possessing complex androgynous characteristics, Ernest Hemingway is acknowledged to be one of the most important twentieth-century American novelists. For Debra A. Moddelmog, the intense debate about the nature of his identity reveals how critics' desires give shape to an author's many guises. In her provocative book, Moddelmog interrogates Hemingway's persona and work to show how our perception of the writer is influenced by society's views on knowledge, power, and sexuality. She believes that recent attempts to reinvent Hemingway as man and as artist have been circumscribed by their authors' investment in heterosexist ideology; she seeks instead to situate Hemingway's sexual identity in the interface between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Moddelmog looks at how sexual orientation, gender, race, nationality, able-bodiedness—and the intersections of these elements—contribute to the formation of desire. Ultimately, she makes a far-reaching and suggestive argument about multiculturalism and the canons of American letters, asserting that those who teach literature must be aware of the politics and ethics of the authorial constructions they promote.

A literary journal in book form. Essays, fiction, poetry, and art.

This novel created a transatlantic literary sensation when it was first published in 1960 in the United States, and shortly afterward, in England. Set in Manhattan during a summer in the late 1950s, the story tells of a young woman who submits to a risky deception in order to obtain a legal abortion.

Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, became known as one of the most militant, anti-white black nationalists of the 1960s Black Power movement. An advocate of Black Cultural Nationalism, Baraka supported the rejection of all things white and western. He helped found and direct the influential Black Arts movement which sought to move black writers away from western aesthetic sensibilities and toward a more complete embrace of the black world. Except perhaps for James Baldwin, no single figure has had more of an impact on black intellectual and artistic life during the last forty years. In this groundbreaking and comprehensive study, the first to interweave Baraka's art and political activities, Jerry Watts takes us from his early immersion in the New York scene through the most dynamic period in the life and work of this controversial figure. Watts situates Baraka within the various worlds through which he travelled including Beat Bohemia, Marxist-Leninism, and Black Nationalism. In the process, he convincingly demonstrates how the 25 years between Baraka's emergence in 1960 and his continued influence in the mid-1980s can also be read as a general commentary on the condition of black intellectuals during the same time. Continually using Baraka as the focal point for a broader analysis, Watts illustrates the link between Baraka's life and the lives of other black writers trying to realize their artistic ambitions, and contrasts him with other key political intellectuals of the time. In a chapter sure to prove controversial, Watts links Baraka's famous misogyny to an attempt to bury his own homosexual past. A work of extraordinary breadth, Amira Baraka is a powerful portrait of one man's lifework and the pivotal time it represents in African-American history. Informed by a wealth of original research, it fills a crucial gap in the lively literature on black thought and history and will continue to be a touchstone work for some time to come.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [907]-914) and index.