Cheryl J. Fish first visited Finland as a Fulbright professor in 2007. Since then she has returned many times to research protest and resistance to mining and extraction in Arctic Fennoscandia in the works of Sami filmmakers, photographers, and artists. However, the landscapes and experiences of the country's saunas, lakes, villages, homes, streets, and parks evoked rich stories and poetry. This unique collection of poems, The Sauna Is Full of Maids, is a reflection on how present-day Finnish life intertwines with folklore and mythology-expressed in the Kalevala, a work of epic poetry compiled from long-lived ballads, songs, and incantations-and advancing modern developments. Accompanied by many of the poet's own photographs, this collection has the kind of rich cultural detail that warms and satisfies the reader with insight and appreciation.

The Kalevala is the great Finnish epic, which like the Iliad and the Odyssey, grew out of a rich oral tradition with prehistoric roots. During the first millenium of our era, speakers of Uralic languages (those outside the Indo-European group) who had settled in the Baltic region of Karelia, that straddles the border of eastern Finland and north-west Russia, developed an oral poetry that was to last into the nineteenth century. This poetry provided the basis of the Kalevala. It was assembled in the 1840s by the Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot, who took `dictation' from the performance of a folk singer, in much the same way as our great collections from the past, from Homeric poems to medieval songs and epics, have probably been set down. Published in 1849, it played a central role in the march towards Finnish independence and inspired some of Sibelius's greatest works. This new and exciting translation by poet Keith Bosley, prize-winning translator of the anthology Finnish Folk Poetry: Epic, is the first truly to combine liveliness with accuracy in a way which reflects the richness of the original. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Dispatches, diaries, memoirs, and letters by African-American travelers in search of home, justice, and adventure-from the Wild West to Australia.

In May, 1980, Mt. St. Helens erupted, releasing volcanic ash that reached from the Washington coast to Minnesota. Forty years later, in May, 2020, Duck Lake Books will release Crater & Tower by Cheryl J. Fish. This is a poetic comparison and contrast of the deadliest volcano in US History and the 911 attack on the Twin Towers, the deadliest terrorist attack in US history. These historic events haunt the collective American consciousness, and this book will grace the collective American s soul.

"On Midsummer Eve, 1865, more than 30 Finnish and Sami immigrants disembarked from a Great Lakes ship to a place called Hancock, Michigan. At the time, Hancock consisted of nothing more than a small cluster of humble buildings, but it was here, on the outskirts of mid-19th-century civilization, that Finnish settlement in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (UP) took root. Much to the surprise of these new Americans, Midsummer was not a religious holiday marked by feasts in celebration of the season's prolonged sunlight. Rather, the newcomers were immediately hastened into the bowels of the earth to extract copper in pursuit of the American Dream. In short order, hardworking Finnish immigrants became reputable miners, lumberjacks, farmers, maids, and commercial fishermen. A century and a half later, the UP boasts the largest Finnish population outside of the motherland and sustains the determined spirit the Finns call sisu--an influence that remains palpable in all 15 UP counties."--

Cheryl J. Fish argues that the concept of mobility offers a significant paradigm for reading literature of the United States and the Americas in the antebellum period, particularly for women writers of the African diaspora. Charting journeys across nations and literary traditions, she examines works by three undervalued writers--Mary Seacole, an Afro-Jamaican; Nancy Prince, an African American from Boston; and Margaret Fuller, a white New Englander and Transcendentalist--in whose lives mobility, travel literature, and benevolent work all converge. Refiguring the forms of domesticity, they traveled to the outposts of conflict and imperial expansion--colonial crossroads in Panama, Tsarist Russia, the Crimean War front, the U.S. frontier, and Jamaica after emancipation--and worked as healers, educators, and reformers. Each writer blended themes from exploration literature and various autobiographical genres to reconfigure racial and national identities and to issue a call for social action. They intervened strategically into discourses of medicine, education, religion, philanthropy, and emigration through a shifting and mobile subjectivity, negotiating relationships to various institutions, persons, and locations. For each woman, travel removed her from the familiar and placed her in a position of risk, "out-of-bounds," emotionally or physically. Seeking their own vision of the territories, they came to see themselves as citizens of the world, deeply involved in the causes they witnessed. As Fish documents, their desire to improve the quality of life for oppressed and wounded peoples distinguishes their works from other popular travel writers of the time. Drawing upon unpublished archival material such as letters, journals, and abolitionist periodicals, Fish incorporates print culture and theory into her discussion. She also examines historical accounts of the events and places with which these women were associated. She describes how Prince draws on the Bible and missionary discourse to make corrective readings of emigration policy and the lives of former slaves; Seacole appropriates the picaresque to embed her knowledge of Afro-Jamaican and Western medical tradition, and Fuller combines Romanticism and a fascination with racial science in her analysis of the American Midwest and in her evolving feminist critique. While writing in the popular 19th-century genre of the travelogue, Fish says, these black and white women were able to talk back, make and lose money, challenge stereotypes, and inform and entertain people with their adventures and benevolent work.

Indispensable information for away-from-home lodging, from the author of the New York Times bestseller The Travel Detective In Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective, America’s best-known and most trusted travel authority reveals the insider knowledge that can make every hotel stay as comfortable as (and sometimes even more cost-efficient than) home. With his incomparable access and nose for news, Peter Greenberg shares the secrets that people who know hotels—managers, maids, reservation clerks, bellhops, chefs, and maintenance guys—don’t want you to know about value, service, safety, security, and cleanliness. Tips include: • How to tell if your room is really clean • What never to order from room service • The real way to prevent hotel crime • How to beat excessive hotel phone charges • The exact rooms where headline-making events took place Drawn from the author’s experiences as both an investigative reporter and a constant traveler, Hotel Secrets from the Travel Detective is an essential guide to everything from luxury resorts to motels, from airport hotels and bed-and-breakfasts to outrageous (and often secret) alternatives to hotels.

A major discovery: Tanizaki's wonderful final novel--now in English

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • When romance writer Edith Hope’s life begins to resemble the plots of her own novels, she flees to Switzerland, where the quiet luxury of the Hotel du Lac promises to restore her to her senses. "Brookner's most absorbing novel ... wryly realistic ... graceful and attractive." —Anne Tyler, The New York Times Book Review But instead of peace and rest, Edith finds herself sequestered at the hotel with an assortment of love's casualties and exiles. She also attracts the attention of a worldly man determined to release her unused capacity for mischief and pleasure. Beautifully observed, witheringly funny, Hotel du Lac is Brookner at her most stylish and potently subversive. In the novel that won her the Booker Prize and established her international reputation, Anita Brookner finds a new vocabulary for framing the eternal question "Why love?"

This is the first appearance in English of The Kanteletar (1840-1), the companion volume to the Finnish national epic poem The Kalevala. Based on Finnish oral tradition, The Kanteletar (roughly "zither-daughter", a kind of muse) is a selection from a treasury of nearly seven hundred lyrics and ballads that celebrate the everyday life of a rural society at work and play. The ballads range from a beautiful sequence of legends about the Virgin Mary, through the grim tales of Elina, to a hilarious account of a dragon that refuses to devour its victims.