Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers,... "Brokeback Mountain" is her masterpiece. Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

Annie Proulx has written some of the most original and brilliant short stories in contemporary literature, and for many readers and reviewers, Brokeback... Mountain is her masterpiece. Brokeback Mountain was originally published in The New Yorker. It won the National Magazine Award. It also won an O. Henry Prize. Included in this volume is Annie Proulx's haunting story about the difficult, dangerous love affair between a ranch hand and a rodeo cowboy. Also included is the celebrated screenplay for the major motion picture "Brokeback Mountain," written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. All three writers have contributed essays on the process of adapting this critically acclaimed story for film.

About 1.5 million households filed bankruptcy in the last year, making bankruptcy as common as college graduation and divorce. The recession has pushed... more and more families into financial collapse—with unemployment, declines in retirement wealth, and falling house values destabilizing the American middle class. Broke explores the consequences of this unprecedented growth in consumer debt and shows how excessive borrowing undermines the prosperity of middle class America.While the recession that began in mid-2007 has widened the scope of the financial pain caused by overindebtedness, the problem predated that large-scale economic meltdown. And by all indicators, consumer debt will be a defining feature of middle-class families for years to come. The staples of middle-class life—going to college, buying a house, starting a small business—carry with them more financial risk than ever before, requiring more borrowing and new riskier forms of borrowing. This book reveals the people behind the statistics, looking closely at how people get to the point of serious financial distress, the hardships of dealing with overwhelming debt, and the difficulty of righting one's financial life. In telling the stories of financial failures, this book exposes an all-too-real part of middle-class life that is often lost in the success stories that dominate the American economic narrative.Authored by experts in several disciplines, including economics, law, political science, psychology, and sociology, Broke presents analyses from an original, proprietary data set of unprecedented scope and detail, the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project. Topics include class status, home ownership, educational attainment, impacts of self-employment, gender differences, economic security, and the emotional costs of bankruptcy. The book makes judicious use of illustrations to present key findings and concludes with a discussion of the implications of the data for contemporary policy debates.

Shy Keenan was not meant to survive her childhood. Her mother beat her so severely that she was deaf and nearly blind by her first day in school. Her... stepsister thought nothing of pouring boiling water over her, and virtually every day she was raped by her stepfather. At age 10 she was sold to a gang of dockworkers, viciously attacked, and left for dead in a field with a fractured skull. Today, Shy is an internationally respected advocate in the fight for justice for victims of child sexual abuse. Six years ago, her testimony secured the imprisonment of her stepfather and his associates for a catalogue of crimes against children. This success was achieved only after a journey through extensive psychiatric care, prison, and near-suicide. Shy’s experiences expose the extreme wickedness of which some are capable, but also tell a story of hope, strength, and courage.

Jonathan Kaufman paints a vivid, moving portrait of the relationship between blacks and Jews in recent decades--from the strong partnership forged... during the civil rights movement of the 1960s to the angry war of words, recriminations, and highly charged confrontations making headlines today. Includes a new preface and epilogue by Kaufman.

Two destinies intersect in Broken April. The first is that of Gjor, a young mountaineer who (much against his will) has just killed a man in order to... avenge the death of his older brother, and who expects to be killed himself in keeping with the provisions of the Code that regulates life in the highlands. The second is that of a young couple on their honeymoon who have come to study the age-old customs of the place, including the blood feud.While the story is set in the early twentieth century, life on the high plateaus of Albania takes life back to the Dark Ages. The bloody shirt of the latest victim is hung up by the bereaved for all to see—until the avenger in turn kills his man with a rifle shot. For the young bride, the shock of this unending cycle of obligatory murder is devastating. The horror becomes personified when she catches a glimpse of Gjor as he wanders about the countryside, waiting for the truce of thirty days to end, and life with it. That momentary vision of the hapless murderer provokes in her a violent act of revulsion and contrition. Her life will be marked by it always.

Jose Zorrilla recreo con deslumbrante maestria una figura de la literatura universal de dimensiones miticas: el personaje de don Juan, que nuestro ... autor bautizo como don Juan Tenorio. Siguiendo la tradicion romantica, Zorrilla situo la accion dramatica en la Sevilla del siglo XVI, y siguiendo tambien a sus modelos creo su version del burlador de mujeres y desafiador de los muertos. Sin embargo, este don Juan de Zorrilla brilla con luz mas intensa: dona Ines consiguio hacer de el, hombre sin escrupulos, un hombre delicado y amante, y al ligar su destino al del pecador, logro su arrepentimiento postumo.

This journal records the Civil War experiences of a sensitive, well-educated, young southern woman. Kate Stone was twenty when the war began, living... with her widowed mother, five brothers, and younger sister at Brokenburn, their plantation home in northeastern Louisiana. When Grant moved against Vicksburg, the family fled before the invading armies, eventually found refuge in Texas, and finally returned to a devastated home.Kate began her journal in May, 1861, and made regular entries up to November, 1865. She included briefer sketches in 1867 and 1868. In chronicling her everyday activities, Kate revealed much about a way of life that is no more: books read, plantation management and crops, maintaining slaves in the antebellum period, the attitude and conduct of slaves during the war, the fate of refugees, and civilian morale.

There is more to classical literature than just the classics. Here David Slavitt expands the canon by presenting vivid, graceful, and amusing... translations of two neglected fragmentary works of Latin literature. The first is Publius Papinius Statius's first-century epic Achilleid, an extraordinary fusion of epic and New Comedy sentiments and humor that may represent the earliest literary imagining of the charm of adolescence. It relates the story of the education of Achilles under the centaur Chiron, his adopting the disguise of a girl during his sojourn at the court of Lycomedes in Scyros, his love affair with Deidamia, his detection by Ulysses and Diomedes, and his departure for Troy. The second work is Claudius Claudianus's unfinished fourth-century epic version of the rape of Proserpine. The two works together make a delightful pair. The afterword by David Konstan explores the traditions in which—and against which—Statius and Claudian composed their versions of these well-known stories.

Shimazaki's 1906 classic of modern Japanese literature portrays a young man born into the Burakumin outcaste class and his struggle against both social... discrimination and his own hypocrisy.

Even though the local church isn't in 'business' per se, it is still a business-- the Lord's business. This valuable church reference is divided into... four sections: law, finance, facilities, and personnel.

Alain Mabanckou’s riotous new novel centers on the patrons of a run-down bar in the Congo. In a country that appears to have forgotten the importance... of remembering, a former schoolteacher and bar regular nicknamed Broken Glass has been elected to record their stories for posterity. But Broken Glass fails spectacularly at staying out of trouble as one denizen after another wants to rewrite history in an attempt at making sure his portrayal will properly reflect their exciting and dynamic lives. Despondent over this apparent triumph of self-delusion over self-awareness, Broken Glass drowns his sorrows in red wine and riffs on the great books of Africa and the West. Brimming with life, death, and literary allusions, Broken Glass is Mabanckou’s finest novel — a mocking satire of the dangers of artistic integrity.

Broken Ground is a riveting exploration of the dark, brooding presence of the First World War in the lives of the inhabitants of a “soldier’s... settlement” on Vancouver Island. From out of a stubborn, desolate landscape studded with tree stumps, the settlers of Portuguese Creek have built a new life for themselves. But when an encroaching forest fire threatens this fledgling settlement, it also intensifies the remembered horrors of war. The story of Portuguese Creek is told by several of its citizens, including a boy trying to recover from the sudden loss of his father, and a former teacher haunted by what happened to the soldiers he led in France. With a memorable cast of characters, and by turns heart-rending and tragic, humorous and humane, Broken Ground is a powerful novel that immerses us in the lives of an entire community.

Broken Landscape is a sweeping chronicle of Indian tribal sovereignty under the United States Constitution and the way that legislators have interpreted... and misinterpreted tribal sovereignty since the nation's founding. Frank Pommersheim, one of America's leading scholars in Indian tribal law, offers a novel and deeply researched synthesis of this legal history from colonial times to the present, confronting the failures of constitutional analysis in contemporary Indian law jurisprudence. He demonstrates that the federal government has repeatedly failed to respect the Constitution's recognition of tribal sovereignty. Instead, it has favored excessive, unaccountable authority in its dealings with tribes. Pommersheim argues that the Supreme Court has strayed from its Constitutional roots as well, consistently issuing decisions over two centuries that have bolstered federal power over the tribes. Closing with a proposal for a Constitutional amendment that would reaffirm tribal sovereignty, Broken Landscape challenges us to finally accord Indian tribes and Indian people the respect and dignity that are their due.