You’ve never, ever read a story like this. Ashley Young is stuck in an unsatisfying marriage and a dead-end job. But when a sexually transmitted plague breaks out in her small town—one that slowly transforms everyone infected into crazed zombielike sex fiends—everything about her life changes. Facing quarantine, National Guard barricades, the onset of winter, and a rapidly spreading, mysterious sex plague, Ashley and everyone else in her small Colorado town find their deepest feelings for one another surfacing…both amorously and violently. When everyone in Ashley’s life begins taking comfort in one another’s arms, no one really knows who’s infected and who’s not. And because the disease perpetuates itself as an aphrodisiac, sex—the very thing that offers comfort—only contributes to spreading the plague. In a crumbling world with little to lose, Ashley begins to discover a resilience she didn’t know she possessed and a strength she’s never had before. Her newly acquired agency may come at a price, however, when Ashley must ultimately choose between her own survival and saving the people she loves. DEAD IN BED by Bailey Simms delivers a tour-de-force series that’s as emotionally incisive as it is shockingly sexy, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, and as frightful as it is impossible to put down.

You’ve never, ever read a story like this. Ashley Young is stuck in an unsatisfying marriage and a dead-end job. But when a sexually transmitted plague breaks out in her small town—one that slowly transforms everyone infected into crazed zombielike sex fiends—everything about her life changes. Facing quarantine, National Guard barricades, the onset of winter, and a rapidly spreading, mysterious sex plague, Ashley and everyone else in her small Colorado town find their deepest feelings for one another surfacing…both amorously and violently. When everyone in Ashley’s life begins taking comfort in one another’s arms, no one really knows who’s infected and who’s not. And because the disease perpetuates itself as an aphrodisiac, sex—the very thing that offers comfort—only contributes to spreading the plague. In a crumbling world with little to lose, Ashley begins to discover a resilience she didn’t know she possessed and a strength she’s never had before. Her newly acquired agency may come at a price, however, when Ashley must ultimately choose between her own survival and saving the people she loves. DEAD IN BED by Bailey Simms delivers a tour-de-force series that’s as emotionally incisive as it is shockingly sexy, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, and as frightful as it is impossible to put down.

You’ve never, ever read a story like this. Ashley Young is stuck in an unsatisfying marriage and a dead-end job. But when a sexually transmitted plague breaks out in her small town—one that slowly transforms everyone infected into crazed zombielike sex fiends—everything about her life changes. Facing quarantine, National Guard barricades, the onset of winter, and a rapidly spreading, mysterious sex plague, Ashley and everyone else in her small Colorado town find their deepest feelings for one another surfacing…both amorously and violently. When everyone in Ashley’s life begins taking comfort in one another’s arms, no one really knows who’s infected and who’s not. And because the disease perpetuates itself as an aphrodisiac, sex—the very thing that offers comfort—only contributes to spreading the plague. In a crumbling world with little to lose, Ashley begins to discover a resilience she didn’t know she possessed and a strength she’s never had before. Her newly acquired agency may come at a price, however, when Ashley must ultimately choose between her own survival and saving the people she loves. DEAD IN BED by Bailey Simms delivers a tour-de-force series that’s as emotionally incisive as it is shockingly sexy, as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, and as frightful as it is impossible to put down.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1867.

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.

Throughout the 19th century, American poetry was a profoundly populist literary form. It circulated in New England magazines and Southern newspapers; it was read aloud in taverns, homes, and schools across the country. Antebellum reviewers envisioned poetry as the touchstone democratic genre, and their Civil War–era counterparts celebrated its motivating power, singing poems on battlefields. Following the war, however, as criticism grew more professionalized and American literature emerged as an academic subject, reviewers increasingly elevated difficult, dispassionate writing and elite readers over their supposedly common counterparts, thereby separating “authentic” poetry for intellectuals from “popular” poetry for everyone else.\ Conceptually and methodologically unique among studies of 19th-century American poetry, Who Killed American Poetry? not only charts changing attitudes toward American poetry, but also applies these ideas to the work of representative individual poets. Closely analyzing hundreds of reviews and critical essays, Karen L. Kilcup tracks the century’s developing aesthetic standards and highlights the different criteria reviewers used to assess poetry based on poets’ class, gender, ethnicity, and location. She shows that, as early as the 1820s, critics began to marginalize some kinds of emotional American poetry, a shift many scholars have attributed primarily to the late-century emergence of affectively restrained modernist ideals. Mapping this literary critical history enables us to more readily apprehend poetry’s status in American culture—both in the past and present—and encourages us to scrutinize the standards of academic criticism that underwrite contemporary aesthetics and continue to constrain poetry’s appeal. Who American Killed Poetry? enlarges our understanding of American culture over the past two hundred years and will interest scholars in literary studies, historical poetics, American studies, gender studies, canon criticism, genre studies, the history of criticism, and affect studies. It will also appeal to poetry readers and those who enjoy reading about American cultural history.