Short Stories

Contains concise synopses of the storys' plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

This book uses texts from classical to modern Japanese literature to examine concepts of 'respect for the strong', as a notion of an evolutionary society, and 'sympathy for the weak', as a notion of a non-violent and changeless egalitarian society. The term strong refers not just to those with strength and power. It also includes other ideal attributes such as beauty, youth and goodness. Similarly, the term weak implies not only the weak and infirm, but also the disadvantaged, the indecent, the unsophisticated and those generally shunned by society. The former are associated not only with the power of life, competition, evolution, progress, development, ability, effectiveness, efficiency, individuality, the future, hope and romance, but also with violence, fighting, bullying, discrimination and sacrifice. The latter, in contrast, invoke notions of peace, egalitarianism, anti-discrimination and welfare, as well as stagnation, retreat, retrogression, degeneration and the decline of vital powers. By using these two concepts Murakami skillfully weaves a narrative that is part literary criticism, part social commentary. As such the book will be of huge interest to not only scholars and students of Japanese literature, but also those of Japanese society and culture.

This collection of essays offers insights into various aspects of modern Japanese cultural history from modernist architecture to women as cultural symbols, popular songs and the rhetoric of empire-building. The text is organized around three central topics: geographical and cultural space, cosmopolitanism and national identity, and diversity, autonomy and integration.

In-depth look at Modernism as a historical and literary movement as well as modern critical interpretation of characteristic styles and themes.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.

Porter was the both the first lady of American letters and a woman whose indomitable will forged a life that, as biographer Joan Givner makes clear, was not only remarkable but may have been her most creative fiction of all. Born Callie Porter in the log-cabin poverty of rural Texas, she invented her own history, changing her name and ""acquiring"" a lineage of statesmen to become an aristocratic daughter of the Old South. Porter lived a life of drama and passion that spanned nine decades and witnessed some of this century's most tumultuous events. She travelled from revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s to Berlin at Hitler's rise and to Paris at the start of World War II; from Hollywood in the Forties to Washington during the Kennedy era. Somehow, by design or coincidence, she was always right in the eye of the storm when history was being made. By the end of her life, she had risen from rags to riches, anonymity to renown - all on her own terms, all on the strength of her talent, her immense stamina, and her often ruthless determination. As evocative of her era it is of the woman herself, this book is a portrait of an artist who crafted her life to appear as elegant and structured as her short stories and who, in so doing, sometimes edited out some of her own experience the hard, cold facts that until now have remained obscure.

Contains concise synopses of the plot, characters and themes along with an annotated list of additional critical sources.

Contains concise synopses of the story's plots, characters and themes along with a brief author biography, a discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance and excerpted criticism.
***An alternate version of the title of Chekov's "The Lady with the Dog'.

This revised and expanded edition of Beidler and Barton's indispensable A Reader's Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich builds on the sellout success of the first edition. Every serious reader of Erdrich's fiction will want access to this comprehensive new edition, which includes valuable new material. Completely updated with information on four new novels published since the first edition: The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, The Master Butchers Singing Club, Four Souls, and The Painted Drum. Easy-to-use genealogical charts for the various families. A map and geographical details about the settings for the novels. A detailed composite dictionary of characters (even including the minor characters). A glossary of all of the Ojibwe words, phrases, and sentences that Erdrich, an astoundingly versatile and energetic Native American author, uses in her panoply of novels.

Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, the most prominent writers of Native American descent, collaborate on all their works. In these interviews, conducted both separately and jointly, they discuss how their writing moves from conception to completion and how The Beet Queen, Tracks, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and The Crown of Columbus have been enhanced by both their artistic and their matrimonial union. Being of mixed blood and having lived in both white and Native American worlds, they give an original perspective on American society. Sometimes with humor and always with refreshing candor, their discussions undermine the damaging stereotypes of Native Americans. Some of the interviews focus on their nonfiction book, The Broken Cord, which recounts the struggle to solve their adopted son's health problems from fetal alcohol syndrome. Included are two recent interviews published here for the first time. In this collection, Erdrich and Dorris tell why they have chosen to write about many varying subjects and of why they refuse to be imprisoned in a literary ghetto of writers whose only subjects are Native Americans.

In Understanding Louise Erdrich, Seema Kurup offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Native American novelist whose work stands as a testament to the struggle of the Ojibwe people to survive colonization and contemporary reservation life. Kurup traces in Erdrich's oeuvre the theme of colonization, both historical and cultural, and its lasting effects, starting with the various novels of the Love Medicine epic, the National Book Award-winning The Round House, The Birchbark House series of children's literature, the memoirs The Blue Jays Dance and Books and Island in Ojibwe Country, and selected poetry. Kurup elucidates Erdrich's historical context, thematic concerns, and literary strategies through close readings, offering an introductory approach to Erdrich and revealing several entry points for further investigation. Kurup asserts that Erdrich's writing has emerged not out of a postcolonial identity but from the ongoing condition of colonization faced by Native Americans in the United States, which is manifested in the very real and contemporary struggle for sovereignty and basic civil rights. Exploring the ways in which Erdrich moves effortlessly from trickster humor to searing pathos and from the personal to the political, Kurup takes up the complex issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and community in Erdrich's writing. Kurup shows that Erdrich offers readers poignant and complex portraits of Native American lives in vibrant, three-dimensional, and poetic prose while simultaneously bearing witness to the abiding strength and grace of the Ojibwe people and their presence and participation in the history of the United States.

Includes concise synopses of plot, characters and themes, a brief author biography, discussion of the story's cultural and historical significance, and excerpted criticism.