Random House New Releases - Literary Criticism & Collections - American

The Geographical History of America by Gertrude Stein

2013-04-10T00:30:00-05:00

The Geographical History of America Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind
Written by Gertrude Stein

eBook, 240 pages | Random House | Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $11.99 | 978-0-307-82443-1 (0-307-82443-8)

First published in 1936, The Geographical History of America compiles prose pieces, dialogues, philosophical meditations, and playlets by one of the century's most influential writers. In this work, Stein sets forth her view of the human mind: what it is, how it works, and how it is different from - and more interesting than - human nature.

Melville by Andrew Delbanco

2013-02-20T00:30:00-05:00

Melville His World and Work
Written by Andrew Delbanco

eBook, 448 pages | Vintage | Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Biography & Autobiography - Literary | $12.99 | 978-0-307-83171-2 (0-307-83171-X)

If Dickens was nineteenth-century London personified, Herman Melville was the quintessential American. With a historian’s perspective and a critic’s insight, award-winning author Andrew Delbanco marvelously demonstrates that Melville was very much a man of his era and that he recorded — in his books, letters, and marginalia; and in conversations with friends like Nathaniel Hawthorne and with his literary cronies in Manhattan — an incomparable chapter of American history. From the bawdy storytelling of Typee to the spiritual preoccupations building up to and beyond Moby Dick, Delbanco brilliantly illuminates Melville’s life and work, and his crucial role as a man of American letters.

Washington Square by Henry James

2013-02-05T00:30:00-05:00

Washington Square
Written by Henry James

Hardcover, 232 pages | Everyman's Library | Fiction - Classics; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Fiction - Literary | $22.00 | 978-0-307-96142-6 (0-307-96142-7)

Washington Square is one of Henry James’s most appealing and popular novels, with the most straightforward plot and style of any of his works.

Set in the genteel New York of James’s early childhood, it is a tale of cruelty laced with comedy. Dr. Austin Sloper is a wealthy and domineering father who is disappointed in the unremarkable daughter he has produced; he dismisses her as both plain and simpleminded. The gentle and dutiful Catherine Sloper has always been in awe of her father, but when she falls in love with Morris Townsend, a penniless charmer whom Dr. Sloper accuses of being a fortune hunter, she dares to defy him and a battle of wills ensues that will leave her forever changed. Readers have long admired the way that the innocent Catherine, misled by her meddling aunt and mistreated by both her father and her lover, grows in strength and wisdom over the course of her ordeal.

Hugging the Shore by John Updike

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Hugging the Shore Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Trade Paperback, 896 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections | $25.00 | 978-0-8129-8378-4 (0-8129-8378-5)

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

“Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea,” writes John Updike in his Foreword to this collection of literary considerations. But the sailor doth protest too much: This collection begins somewhere near deep water, with a flotilla of short fiction, humor pieces, and personal essays, and even the least of the reviews here—those that “come about and draw even closer to the land with another nine-point quotation”—are distinguished by a novelist’s style, insight, and accuracy, not just surface sparkle. Indeed, as James Atlas commented, the most substantial critical articles, on Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman, go out as far as Updike’s fiction: They are “the sort of ambitious scholarly reappraisal not seen in this country since the death of Edmund Wilson.” With Hugging the Shore, Michiko Kakutani wrote, Updike established himself “as a major and enduring critical voice; indeed, as the pre-eminent critic of his generation.”

Hugging the Shore by John Updike

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Hugging the Shore Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

eBook, 896 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections | $13.99 | 978-0-679-64584-9 (0-679-64584-5)

Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Picked-Up Pieces Essays
Written by John Updike

Trade Paperback, 544 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections | $20.00 | 978-0-8129-8380-7 (0-8129-8380-7)

In John Updike’s second collection of assorted prose he comes into his own as a book reviewer; most of the pieces picked up here were first published in The New Yorker in the 1960s and early ’70s. If one word could sum up the young critic’s approach to books and their authors it would be “generosity”: “Better to praise and share,” he says in his Foreword, “than to blame and ban.” And so he follows his enthusiasms, which prove both deserving and infectious: Kierkegaard, Proust, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hamsun among the classics; Borges, Nabokov, Grass, Bellow, Cheever, and Jong among the contemporaries. Here too are meditations on Satan and cemeteries, travel essays on London and Anguilla, three very early “golf dreams,” and one big interview. Picked-Up Pieces is a glittering treasury for every reader who likes life, books, wit—and John Updike.

Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

2013-01-15T00:30:00-05:00

Picked-Up Pieces Essays
Written by John Updike

eBook, 544 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections | $13.99 | 978-0-679-64586-3 (0-679-64586-1)

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview by David Foster Wallace

2012-12-18T00:30:00-05:00

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Written by David Foster Wallace

eBook | Melville House | Biography & Autobiography - Literary; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $15.95 | 978-1-61219-207-9 (1-61219-207-6)

In intimate and eloquent interviews, including the last he gave before his suicide, the writer hailed by A.O. Scott of The New York Times as “the best mind of his generation” considers the state of modern America, entertainment and discipline, adulthood, literature, and his own inimitable writing style.

In addition to Wallace’s last interview, the volume features a conversation with Dave Eggers, a revealing Q&A with the magazine of his alma mater Amherst, his famous Salon interview with Laura Miller following the publication of Infinite Jest, and more.

These conversations showcase and illuminate the traits for which Wallace remains so beloved: his incomparable humility and enormous erudition, his wit, sensitivity, and humanity. As he eloquently describes his writing process and motivations, displays his curiosity by time and again turning the tables on his interviewers, and delivers thoughtful, idiosyncratic views on literature, politics, entertainment and discipline, and the state of modern America, a fuller picture of this remarkable mind is revealed.

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview by David Foster Wallace

2012-12-05T00:30:00-05:00

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Written by David Foster Wallace

Trade Paperback, 128 pages | Melville House | Biography & Autobiography - Literary; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $15.95 | 978-1-61219-206-2 (1-61219-206-8)

Unstuck in Time by Gregory D. Sumner

2012-12-04T00:30:00-05:00

Unstuck in Time A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Written by Gregory D. Sumner

Trade Paperback, 368 pages | Seven Stories Press | Biography & Autobiography - Literary; Literary Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $18.95 | 978-1-60980-430-5 (1-60980-430-9)

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut's best-known works--his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005)--to illustrate the quintessential American writer's profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms.

Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and "winners" over "losers." Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut's outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality--something he once memorably described as "an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness."

Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut's novels reflect the pain of his own life's experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

2012-11-20T00:30:00-05:00

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Hardcover | Beacon Press | Literary Criticism & Collections - African-American & Black; Social Science - Black Studies (Global); Literary Criticism & Collections - American - African-American | $27.95 | 978-0-8070-0611-5 (0-8070-0611-4)

A new edition of the book many have called James Baldwin’s most influential work

Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era. Writing as an artist, activist, and social critic, Baldwin probes the complex condition of being black in America. With a keen eye, he examines everything from the significance of the protest novel to the motives and circumstances of the many black expatriates of the time, from his home in “The Harlem Ghetto” to a sobering “Journey to Atlanta.”

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the twentieth century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic. His criticism on topics such as the paternalism of white progressives or on his own friend Richard Wright’s work is pointed and unabashed. He was also one of the few writing on race at the time who addressed the issue with a powerful mixture of outrage at the gross physical and political violence against black citizens and measured understanding of their oppressors, which helped awaken a white audience to the injustices under their noses. Naturally, this combination of brazen criticism and unconventional empathy for white readers won Baldwin as much condemnation as praise.

Notes is the book that established Baldwin’s voice as a social critic, and it remains one of his most admired works. The essays collected here create a cohesive sketch of black America and reveal an intimate portrait of Baldwin’s own search for identity as an artist, as a black man, and as an American.

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

2012-11-20T00:30:00-05:00

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

eBook | Beacon Press | Literary Criticism & Collections - African-American & Black; Social Science - Black Studies (Global); Literary Criticism & Collections - American - African-American | $27.95 | 978-0-8070-0624-5 (0-8070-0624-6)

A new edition published on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Baldwin’s death, including a new introduction by an important contemporary writer

Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written.

“A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.” —Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review

“Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.” —Time

From the Trade Paperback edition.

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

2012-11-20T00:30:00-05:00

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Trade Paperback, 192 pages | Beacon Press | Literary Criticism & Collections - African-American & Black; Social Science - Black Studies (Global); Literary Criticism & Collections - American - African-American | $15.00 | 978-0-8070-0623-8 (0-8070-0623-8)

Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

2012-10-16T00:30:00-05:00

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Written by Daniel Mendelsohn

eBook, 440 pages | New York Review Books | Literary Criticism & Collections; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections - Ancient & Classical | $24.95 | 978-1-59017-609-2 (1-59017-609-X)

Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as “one of the greatest critics of our time” (Poets& Writers). In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—each one glinting with “verve and sparkle,” “acumen and passion”—on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men.

Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, “Private Lives,” prefaced by Mendelsohn’sNew Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noël Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”

Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

2012-10-16T00:30:00-05:00

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Written by Daniel Mendelsohn

Hardcover, 440 pages | New York Review Books | Literary Criticism & Collections; Literary Criticism & Collections - American; Literary Criticism & Collections - Ancient & Classical | $24.95 | 978-1-59017-607-8 (1-59017-607-3)

Assorted Prose by John Updike

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

Assorted Prose
Written by John Updike

Trade Paperback, 288 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $17.00 | 978-0-8129-8377-7 (0-8129-8377-7)

John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of Updike’s boyish ambition to follow in the footsteps of Thurber and White. These jeux d’esprit are followed by “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” an immortal account of Ted Williams’s last at-bat in Fenway Park; “The Dogwood Tree,” a Wordsworthian evocation of one Pennsylvania childhood; and five autobiographical essays and stories. Rounding out the volume are classic considerations of Nabokov, Salinger, Spark, Beckett, and others, the earliest efforts of the book reviewer who would go on to become, in The New York Times’s estimation, “the pre-eminent critic of his generation.” Updike called this collection “motley but not unshapely.” Some would call it a classic of its kind.

Assorted Prose by John Updike

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

Assorted Prose
Written by John Updike

eBook, 288 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $12.99 | 978-0-679-64583-2 (0-679-64583-7)

Higher Gossip by Christopher Carduff

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

Higher Gossip Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike
Edited by Christopher Carduff

Trade Paperback, 528 pages | Random House Trade Paperbacks | Literary Criticism & Collections; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $20.00 | 978-0-8129-8368-5 (0-8129-8368-8)

Here is the collection of nonfiction pieces that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009. It opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him, reveals himself in every sentence to be in deep conversation with the sources of his magic. It concludes with a moving meditation on a world without religion, without art, and on the difficulties of faith in a disbelieving age. In between are pieces on Peanuts, Mars, and the songs of Cole Porter, a pageant of scenes from early Massachusetts, and a good deal of Updikean table talk. At the heart of the volume are dozens of book reviews from The New Yorker and illustrated art writings from The New York Review of Books. Updike’s criticism is gossip of the highest sort. We will not hear the likes of it again.

In Fact by Thomas Mallon

2012-08-22T00:30:00-05:00

In Fact Essays on Writers and Writing
Written by Thomas Mallon

eBook, 368 pages | Pantheon | Literary Criticism & Collections; Literary Criticism & Collections - Essays; Literary Criticism & Collections - American | $12.99 | 978-0-307-82430-1 (0-307-82430-6)

From the acclaimed novelist (Henry and Clara, Two Moons), essayist (A Book of One's Own), and critic (1998 National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing)—an engaging new collection of essays.

In Fact gathers the best of Thomas Mallon's superb criticism from the past twenty-two years—essays that appeared in his GQ column, "Doubting Thomas," and in The New York Times Book Review, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, and Harper's, among other publications. Here are his evaluations of the work of contemporary writers such as Nicholson Baker, Peter Carey, Tom Wolfe, Do DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Robert Stone, and reassessments of such earlier twentieth-century figures as John O'Hara, Sinclair Lewis, Truman Capote, and Mary McCarthy. Mallon also considers an array of odd literary genres and phenomena—including book indexes, obituaries, plagiarism, cancelled checks, fan mail, and author tours. And he turns his sharp eye on historical fiction (his own genre) as well as on the history, practice, and future of memoir.

Smart, unorthodox, and impassioned, this collection is an integral piece of an important literary career and an altogether marvelous read.

From the Hardcover edition.

The Long Walk to Freedom by Donald Weise

2012-08-21T00:30:00-05:00

The Long Walk to Freedom Runaway Slave Narratives
Edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise

Hardcover, 288 pages | Beacon Press | History - United States; Literary Criticism & Collections - American - African-American; Social Science - Slavery | $28.95 | 978-0-8070-6912-7 (0-8070-6912-4)

In this groundbreaking compilation of first-person accounts of the runaway slave phenomenon, editors Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise have recovered twelve narratives spanning eight decades—more than half of which have been long out of print. Told in the voices of the runaway slaves themselves, these narratives reveal the extraordinary and often innovative ways that these men and women sought freedom and demanded citizenship. Also included is an essay by UCLA history professor Brenda Stevenson that contextualizes these narratives, providing a brief yet comprehensive history of slavery, as well as a look into the daily life of a slave. Divided into four categories—running away for family, running inspired by religion, running by any means necessary, and running to be free—these stories are a testament to the indelible spirit of these remarkable survivors.

The Long Walk to Freedom presents excerpts from the narratives of well-known runaway slaves, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as from the narratives of lesser-known and virtually unknown people. Several of these excerpts have not been published for more than a hundred years. But they all portray the courageous and sometimes shocking ways that these men and women sought their freedom and asserted power, often challenging many of the common assumptions about slaves’ lack of agency.

Among the remarkable and inspiring stories is the tense but triumphant tale of Henry Box Brown, who, with a white abolitionist’s help, shipped himself in a box—over a twenty-seven-hour train ride, part of which he spent standing on his head—to freedom in Philadelphia. And there’s the story of William and Ellen Craft, who fled across thousands of miles, with Ellen, who was light-skinned, disguised as a white male slave-owner so she and her husband could achieve their dream of raising their children as free people.

Gripping, inspiring, and captivating, The Long Walk to Freedom is a remarkable collection that celebrates those who risked their lives in pursuit of basic human rights.

Random House New Releases - Literary Criticism & Collections - American

The Geographical History of America by Gertrude Stein

The Geographical History of America Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human MindWritten by Gertrude Stein

Melville by Andrew Delbanco

Melville His World and WorkWritten by Andrew Delbanco

Washington Square by Henry James

Washington Square Written by Henry James

Hugging the Shore by John Updike

Hugging the Shore Essays and CriticismWritten by John Updike

Hugging the Shore by John Updike

Hugging the Shore Essays and CriticismWritten by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces EssaysWritten by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces EssaysWritten by John Updike

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other ConversationsWritten by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other ConversationsWritten by David Foster Wallace

Unstuck in Time by Gregory D. Sumner

Unstuck in Time A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and NovelsWritten by Gregory D. Sumner

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son Written by James Baldwin Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son Written by James Baldwin Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son Written by James Baldwin Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop CultureWritten by Daniel Mendelsohn

Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop CultureWritten by Daniel Mendelsohn

Assorted Prose by John Updike

Assorted Prose Written by John Updike

Assorted Prose by John Updike

Assorted Prose Written by John Updike

Higher Gossip by Christopher Carduff

Higher Gossip Essays and CriticismWritten by John Updike Edited by Christopher Carduff

In Fact by Thomas Mallon

In Fact Essays on Writers and WritingWritten by Thomas Mallon

The Long Walk to Freedom by Donald Weise

The Long Walk to Freedom Runaway Slave NarrativesEdited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise

The Geographical History of America Or the Relation of Human Nature to the Human Mind
Written by Gertrude Stein

Melville His World and Work
Written by Andrew Delbanco

Washington Square
Written by Henry James

Hugging the Shore Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Hugging the Shore Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces Essays
Written by John Updike

Picked-Up Pieces Essays
Written by John Updike

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Written by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
Written by David Foster Wallace

Unstuck in Time A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Written by Gregory D. Sumner

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Notes of a Native Son
Written by James Baldwin
Foreword by Edward P. Jones

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Written by Daniel Mendelsohn

Waiting for the Barbarians Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture
Written by Daniel Mendelsohn

Assorted Prose
Written by John Updike

Assorted Prose
Written by John Updike

Higher Gossip Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike
Edited by Christopher Carduff

In Fact Essays on Writers and Writing
Written by Thomas Mallon

The Long Walk to Freedom Runaway Slave Narratives
Edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise