Weeks in This Country is a collection of poems concerned with place. From Turkey to rural Bohemia to Cape Cod, Griffith uses the rich imagery of her travels to evoke both the exotic and the personal. These are poems of observation and poems of meditation. Ultimately, they speak of the longing for connection—among individuals, between cultures, and across history.
“Jason Gray’s How to Paint the Savior Dead rethinks the complex traditional connections among women’s bodies, spirituality, and art. Gray is not afraid of hard work, hard thought, and big vision just because the subject of his fascination has been both exalted and besmirched by tradition, both enriched and impoverished by the hands of our predecessors. Gray throws himself into the mix of muses, amore, and immortality with more—much more—than common wit, passion, and intelligence. As he separates out mortal beauty from immortal, he ignores, as one of his poems says, ‘what is heavenly for what is Heaven.’” — Andrew Hudgins
First published in 1948, My Greatest Day in Football is a collection of reminiscences and stories from football’s early stars. College football games were the most memorable moments for many of these players and coaches, though some highlight professional and even high school games. Sam “Slingin’ Sammy” Baugh recounts the National League Championship game played at Wrigley Field during his rookie season; Felix A. “Doc” Blanchard, nicknamed “Mr. Inside” for his powerful running attack, describes the triumphant day when Army ended its thirteen-year losing streak to Notre Dame; and Glenn Scobie “Pop” Warner explains why a tough battle against Cal was his greatest day, even though his Stanford team was not victorious. George “the Gipper” Gipp, Knute Rockne, and Paul Brown, who perhaps provides the most surprising game of all, are all included in My Greatest Day in Football.
With the author as detective, each of Goodman’s essays examines a particularly notorious murder and subsequent trial. He introduces the readers to the 1923 shooting at the Savoy Hotel in London of Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey at the hands of his wife, Madame Marie-Marguerite Fahmy; he revisits the “Crime of the Century,” the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby in March 1932 allegedly by Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and his subsequent execution for this crime, even though this case against Hauptmann has come under scrutiny; and he explores the 1980 serial killings committed by Michele de Marco Lupo, a gay man who coaxed other homosexuals to meet with him, then strangled and savagely bit them.
As a true crime book, Tracks to Murder is witty and informative and enriches these classic American murder cases by placing them within their original settings. Goodman also plays them against their locations as they are today, resulting in a series of character sketches both contemporary and historical. As a travel book, it presents the seasoned reflections of a cultivated English writer on American manners and morals observed during his serendipitous transcontinental journey.
Northerners at War brings together noted historian J. Matthew Gallman’s most significant essays on the economic, social, and domestic aspects of life in the North during the Civil War. Gallman tackles a range of Civil War home front topics—from urban violence and Gettysburg’s wartime history to entrepreneurial endeavors and the war’s economic impact. He also examines gender issues, with a fascinating review of the career of orator Anna E. Dickinson and an insightful examination of how northerners used gendered notions of masculinity in rhetoric to recruit African American soldiers.
“In Toward Evening and the Day Far Spent, Stephen Frech takes a time-honored, traditional subject, the life of Christ, and brings it to life again. At the same time he deftly explores the divided nature of human beings—what it means to be spirit living in flesh, what it means to be incarnate. These fine, subtle, thoughtful poems again and again find the myth inside the real and the real inside the myth.”—Andrew Hudgins
Nicknamed “the Blonde Borgia,” Anna Marie Hahn was a cold-blooded serial killer who preyed on the elderly in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district in the 1930s. When the State of Ohio strapped its first woman into the electric chair, Hahn gained a place in the annals of crime as the nation’s first female serial killer to be executed in the chair.
Because of the fame The Sun Also Rises brought Ernest Hemingway, when Men Without Women was published just one year later, in 1927, it commanded popular and critical attention. Even reviewers who objected to a masculine emphasis and a sometimes harsh realism identified stories in the collection that could not be ignored. Close commentary, with special attention to allusions, demonstrates that Men Without Women merits a place among the best story collections in American literature.
With absorbing prose and detailed images, Stephen Fliegel unlocks the secrets of these sacred objects and portrays medieval Christian believers as souls kindred to us—humans striving in their own time to discern and preserve religious meaning and decorum. Fliegel provides a rich, understanding of the allegorical images that helped the church to communicate to the faithful through visual narrative and also provides a rich, textured understanding of sacred art and architecture.
