“F. Daniel Rzicznek’s Cloud Tablets presents to us prose poems as they’re meant to be—chock full of surprising images and compelling music. Where else would we find sheep in a library and a seraphim at a nightclub other than in a prose poem? Rzicznek presents these moments and others with the right mix of narrative and lyricism. There’s a gasp of surprise in each of these poems, exclamation points of existential joy waiting in the marginalia.”—Gary LaFemina

With 120 full-color reproductions of his paintings, as well as photographs of the artist at work and with his friends and family, Clyde Singer’s America places the artist in the context of his time and makes his work available to a new and appreciative audience.

The 1952 court-martial of Major General Robert W. Grow, senior U.S. military attaché in Moscow during the Korean War era, involved a general officer who had used questionable judgment in securing a personal diary that contained impolitic statements portions of which had been photocopies by an alleged Soviet agent in Frankfurt, West Germany. This era of Cold War tensions and McCarthyism, Western media sensationalism, and communist propaganda created a cause célèbre and influenced the Army Staff in the Pentagon, led by Lieutenant General Maxwell D. Taylor, to exercise controversial command influence under the aegis of the new Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Thomas Riha vanished on March 15, 1969, sparking a mystery that lives on 50 years later. A native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, Riha was a popular teacher at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a handsome man, with thick, graying hair and a wry smile.

After his disappearance, the FBI and the CIA told local law enforcement and university officials that Riha was alive and well and had left Boulder to get away from his wife. But, as Eileen Welsome convincingly argues, Riha was not alive and well at all. A woman named Galya Tannenbaum, she concludes, had murdered him.

Collaborative Form attempts to show the nature and limits of works of art that are made up of two or more artistic forms. The first task of this book is to analyze and interpret a set of such combinations. Each chapter treats one collaborative work and attempts to show that the principles of collaboration are the same, whether the components are poetry and graphic works as in Lettera Amorosa by Rene Char and George Braque, poetry and music as in Herzgewachse by Maurice Maeterlinck and Arnold Schoenberg, or more complex sets that include painting, music, dance, lighting, and drama as in Der gelbe Klang by Wassily Kandinsky, Morder, Hoffnung der frauen by Oskar Kokoschka, and Triad by Alwin Nikolais.

Although C. S. Lewis is best known for his prose and for his clear, lucid literary criticism, Christian apologetics, and imaginative Ransom and Narnia stories, he considered himself a poet for the first two and a half decades of his life. Owen Barfield recalls that anyone who met Lewis as a young man in the early 1920s at Oxford University quickly learned he was one “whose ruling passion was to become a great poet. At that time if you thought of Lewis you automatically thought of poetry.”

Ray Bradbury spent decades refashioning many of his early pulp and mainstream magazine stories to form the intricate story-cycle tapestries of The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine; other tales were revised or rewritten for such timeless collections as Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and The October Country. These volumes represent wonderful and enduring fictional masks for the author, but they are not his original masks. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury series returns to the earliest surviving forms of his oldest published tales, presenting many of them in versions not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Golden Age of the American magazine began to pass into history.

Though it highlights just one year of writing, this third volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury represents a crucial moment at the midpoint of his first full decade as a professional writer. The original versions of the 1940s stories recovered for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, presented in the order in which they were written and first sent off to find life in the magazine market, suggest that Bradbury’s masks didn’t always appeal to his editors. The Volume 3 stories were all written between March 1944 and March 1945, and the surviving letters of this period reveal the private conflict raging between Bradbury’s efforts to define a distinct style and creative vision at home in Los Angeles and the tyranny of genre requirements imposed by the distant pulp publishing world in New York.

In the past, collections of Bradbury’s works have juxtaposed stories with no indication as to the different time periods in which they were written. Even the mid- and late-career collections that Bradbury himself compiled contained stories that were written much earlier—a situation that has given rise to misconceptions about the origins of the stories themselves. In this new edition, editors William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller present for the first time the stories of Ray Bradbury in the order in which they were written. Moreover, they use texts that reflect Bradbury’s earliest settled intention for each tale. By examining his relationships with his agent, editor, and publisher, Touponce and Eller’s textual commentaries document the transformation of the stories—and Bradbury’s creative understanding of genre fiction—from their original forms to the versions known and loved today.

James Jessen Badal’s extensive research reveals how the citizens of Collinwood were desperate to find someone to blame. Rumor and suspicion splintered the grieving community. And yet they also rose to the challenge of healing: officials reached out to immigrant families unsure of their rights; city charities, churches, and relief agencies responded with medical help, comfort for the bereaved, and financial support; and fundraising efforts to assist families totaled over $50,000—more than $1 million today.