Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and in this open letter to his father—a letter that was never sent—Kafka... tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense, and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, Letter to My Father is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent and highly conflicted relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Kafka’s inspired work is both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him.

Reproducing more than one hundred never-before-published vintage photographs dating from shortly after the introduction of photography in the United... States to the end of World War I, this groundbreaking book focuses attention on the physical intimacy between men that challenges the conventional view of the Victorian era as more inhibited than our own. David Deitcher's provocative text combines historical research, social observation, pictorial analysis, and personal reflection to explore the nature of same-sex affection between men during that period and the meaning of its ambiguous photographic legacy for people today. We now understand that the Victorians had a surprisingly broad-minded attitude toward intimate friendships: men and women were in many ways encouraged to establish intense, even passionate, bonds with members of their own sex. These ties could be romantic in ways that we would identify as sexual but that Victorians, in their state of pre-Freudian innocence, would not. Enthusiastic collectors - most of them gay - have rescued these enigmatic objects from oblivion. Dear Friends investigates the social conditions that made these photographs possible and examines both their abandonment and subsequent retrieval by those who cherish them as rare historical visual evidence of love between men.

This unique book compiles some 120 remarkable letters from Japanese citizens to General Douglas MacArthur during the postwar occupation of Japan... (1945-1952). Painstakingly culled from a vast collection, these letters evoke the unfiltered voices of people of all classes and occupations during the tremendous upheaval of the early postwar period, when the Japanese were coming to terms with the devastating losses of the war, adjusting to a new political system, and creating the framework for economic and social recovery. Written by people of all ages and walks of life, the letters raise issues ranging from Japanese war crimes to the future of the emperor system, from the behavior of American occupation troops to pleas for the United States to annex Japan. Some writers offered to serve as spies for the occupation forces; others appealed for help in solving individual problems, protested allegedly unfair treatment by the occupation, or made detailed recommendations for the reform of Japanese society. Sodei's running commentary places the letters in their historical context, and the substantive foreword by John W. Dower, who drew upon Sodei's research for his Pulitzer Prize-winning Embracing Defeat, further assesses the significance of the letters in understanding Japan's occupation experience.

She trusted her immense intuition and generous heart--and published the most groundbreaking books for children in modern history... Ursula Nordstrom,... director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973, was arguably the single most creative force for innovation in children's book publishing in the United States during the twentieth century. Considered an editor of maverick temperament and taste, her unorthodox vision helped create such classics as Goodnight Moon, Charlotte's Web, Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and The Giving Tree.Leonard S. Marcus has culled an exceptional collection of letters from the HarperCollins archives. The letters included here are representative of the brilliant correspondence that was instrumental in the creation of some of the most beloved books in the world today. Full of wit and humor, they are immensely entertaining, thought-provoking, and moving in their revelation of the devotion and high-voltage intellect of an incomparably gifted editor, mentor, and publishing visionary.

A brilliant new collection of stories from one of the most acclaimed and beloved writers of our time. Alice Munro’s peerless ability to give us the... essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking. A poet, finding herself in alien territory at her first literary party, is rescued by a seasoned newspaper columnist, and is soon hurtling across the continent, young child in tow, toward a hoped-for but completely unplanned meeting. A young soldier, returning to his fiancée from the Second World War, steps off the train before his stop and onto the farm of another woman, beginning a life on the move. A wealthy young woman having an affair with the married lawyer hired by her father to handle his estate comes up with a surprising way to deal with the blackmailer who finds them out.               While most of these stories take place in Munro’s home territory—the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron—the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories “autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact.” A girl who can’t sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.            Suffused with Munro’s clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.

Dear Mr. Henshaw,I wish somebody would stop stealing the good stuff out of my lunchbag. I guess I wish a lot of other things, too. I wish someday Dad... and Bandit would pull up in front in the rig ... Dad would yell out of the cab, "Come on, Leigh. Hop in and I'll give you a lift to school."Leigh Botts has been author Boyd Henshaw's number one fan ever since he was in second grade. Now in sixth grade, Leigh lives with his mother and is the new kid at school. He's lonely, troubled by the absence of his father, a cross-country trucker, and angry because a mysterious thief steals from his lunchbag. Then Leigh's teacher assigns a letter-writing project. Naturally Leigh chooses to write to Mr. Henshaw, whose surprising answer changes Leigh's life.

A stream of confession about a life and the history of Lebanon in which this life is lived. A great many things merge and melt into one another. There... is the change of outlook of the village population on the world and the universe - is the earth flat or round as they say on television. There is the younger generation looking towards Beirut. There is the feeling of growing up in a time torn between great expectations and mounting political tensions. There is the struggle, within the central character, between philosophy of a neatly classifiable world and society and the palpable reality of a dirty war that leads in the end to the pseudo-death of the narrator. There are reflections on the daily language and the ideology attached to it. There are recollections, both bitter and sweet, harsh and tender, about Beirut and Lebanon as it was and as it could have been.

Everybody’s Gulf War Syndrome is a little bit different. Or so believes Larry, who returns home from Desert Storm to find his hair gone and his bones... rapidly disintegrating. Then there’s Lance Corporal James Laverne of the US Marines, who grows a third ear in Kuwait. And in the audaciously comic novella “Notes from a Bunker Along Highway 8,” a Green Beret deserts his team after seeing a vision of George Washington, only to find a new calling—administering aid to wounded Iraqi civilians; he’s hindered only by the furtive nature of his mission and an unruly band of chimpanzees. Together these narratives form a bracing amalgamation of devastating humor and brilliant cultural observation, in which Gabe Hudson fearlessly explores the darker implications of American military power.

Impoverished young Americans had no greater champion during the Depression than Eleanor Roosevelt. As First Lady, Mrs. Roosevelt used her newspaper... columns and radio broadcasts to crusade for expanded federal aid to poor children and teens. She was the most visible spokesperson for the National Youth Administration, the New Deal's central agency for aiding the needy young, and she was adamant in insisting that federal aid to young people be administered without discrimination so that it reached blacks as well as whites, girls as well as boys. This activism made Mrs. Roosevelt a beloved figure among poor teens and children, who between 1933 and 1941 wrote her thousands of letters describing their problems and requesting her help. Dear Mrs. Roosevelt presents nearly 200 of these extraordinary documents to open a window into the lives of the Depression's youngest victims. In their own words, the letter writers confide what it was like to be needy and young during the worst economic crisis in American history. Revealing both the strengths and the limitations of New Deal liberalism, this book depicts an administration concerned and caring enough to elicit such moving appeals for help yet unable to respond in the very personal ways the letter writers hoped.

Dear Paulo: Letters from Those Who Dare Teach is a heartfelt response from teachers, academics, and community workers to the work of the internationally... renowned educator and author Paulo Freire. From newly minted teachers terrified of facing their first day in the classroom to seasoned academics whose work has largely been inspired by Freire, this collection is both a loving memorial and a call to action to work for social justice, praxis, and democracy, ideals envisioned and brilliantly articulated by Paulo.

In this indeterminate text comprised of letters, resembling both fiction and poetry but not wholly comfortable in either category, each sentence is like... being stabbed by a beautiful murderer, each entry like crossing the border into some new language. This hybrid prose-poem trips from razor-blade symphonies, to the history of stares, from landlord snitches to basement laments, leading readers down existential corridors that blaze with the dark humor of guilt, of loneliness, and of wishes for vengeance that speak eloquently of what we can find at the core of humanity. - Steve Tomasula, author of VAS and THE BOOK OF PORTRAITURE. DEAR RA is sharp, funny, morbid, and deliriously (re)readable. - Steve Shapiro, author of THE CINEMATIC BODY.

From The New York Times Book Review: "Set in the early 1960s, the first half of the book is a bitter-comic story of banking, amorous and political... lives various citizens of Klail City told in epistolary form by one Jehu Malacara... The rest of the book is a series of character sketches cum fictional interviews touching on the life and fate of Jehu... Although his [Hinojosa's] sharp eye and accurate ear capture a place, its people and time in a masterly way, his work goes far beyond regionalism. His is a writer for all readers, and Dear Rafe is a delight in any league."

Welcome to Klail City, in Belken County, along the Mexico border in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. In the weeks leading up to the Democratic primary, Jehu... Malacara chronicles the political rabble-rousing of Klail City’s wealthiest citizens in letters to his cousin Rafe Buenrostro. Led by Arnold "Noddy" Perkins, the who’s who of Belken County create a complex web of relationships. Wrangling bank loans, club memberships, and local politics, Perkins dominates the political and economic landscape of the community. When Malacara turns up missing, and the writer, P. Galindo, begins interviewing the citizens, tales of deceit and betrayal float to the surface. From Jehu’s knockout girlfriend Ollie to up-and-coming socialite Becky Escobar and even to old man Perkins himself, Hinojosa offers a feast of quirky characters and misdeeds. Part epistolary, part mystery novel, the population of Klail City makes an indelible impression. With an introduction by Hinojosa scholar Manuel Martín-Rodríguez, a professor at University of California – Merced, this volume combines for the first time the English and Spanish-language versions of the novel that creates a fictitious community that The New York Times compared to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha and Marquez’s Macondo.

A nihilistic wit reminiscent of Samuel Beckett.?Independent on SundayThis is the strange, magical story of a young girl growing up in modern Turkey,... from her birth in a small rural village haunted by fairies and demons to her traumatic move to the big city. Based on her own childhood experiences, Latife Tekin's literary debut marked a turning point in Turkish fiction.Concentrating on a daughter's struggle against her overbearing mother set against the pressures of a rapidly changing society, Dear Shameless Death is a fantastic, hallucinatory novel, with strong feminist insights about what it means to be a woman growing up in Turkey today.A major best seller in her native Turkey, Latife Tekin maintains a politically active presence and has written a number of literary works. Her first novel, Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills, was published by Marion Boyars to great critical acclaim.