In this book John Hollander offers a buoyant guided tour of American light verse-a tradition he pursues from Ambrose Bierce's sardonic The devil's dictionary quatrains to the latter-day comic inventions of Edward Gorey, Kenneth Koch, and James Merrill. Along the way, American wits gathers a rich harvest of couplets, clerihews, epigrams, parodies, burlesques, and other forms of fractured verse. The varied and often surprising list of contributors includes Edwin Arlington Robinson, Don Marquis, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Morley, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ogden Nash, Phyllis McGinley, and Anthony Hecht.

This work is a distinctive, multidisciplinary encyclopedia covering the cultural, political, economic, musical, and literary impact that Ireland and the nations of the Americas have had on one another since the time of Brendan the Navigator. Ireland and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History aims to broaden the traditional notion of 'Irish-American' beyond Boston, New York, and Chicago. In additional to full coverage of Irish culture in those settings, it reveals the pervasive Irish influence in everything from the settling of the American West, to the spread of Christianity throughout the hemisphere, to Irish involvement in revolutionary movements from the American colonies to Mexico to South America. In addition, the encyclopedia shows the profound impact of Irish Americans on their homeland, in everything from art and literature informed by the emigrant experience, to efforts by Irish Americans to influence Irish politics. Ranging from colonial times to the present, and informed by the surge of academic interest in the past 30 years, Ireland and the Americas is the definitive resource on the profound ties that bind the cultures of Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Latin America.

This volume contributes to the study of early English poetics. In these essays, several related approaches and fields of study radiate outward from poetics, including stylistics, literary history, word studies, gender studies, metrics, and textual criticism. By combining and redirecting these traditional scholarly methods, as well as exploring newer ones such as object-oriented ontology and sound studies, these essays demonstrate how poetry responds to its intellectual, literary, and material contexts. The contributors propose to connect the small (syllables, words, and phrases) to the large (histories, emotions, faiths, secrets). In doing so, they attempt to work magic on the texts they consider: turning an ordinary word into something strange and new, or demonstrating texture, difference, and horizontality where previous eyes had perceived only smoothness, sameness, and verticality.

One of the Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Books of the Year Winner, 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award, Translation Category Shortlist, 2021 National Translation Award Finalist, 2021 PROSE Award, Literature Category Fifty rogue’s tales translated fifty ways An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature. Impostures follows the roguish Abū Zayd al-Sarūjī in his adventures around the medieval Middle East—we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English. Featuring picaresque adventures and linguistic acrobatics, Impostures brings the spirit of this masterpiece of Arabic literature into English in a dazzling display of translation. An English-only edition.

New York Times Bestseller The creator of The New Yorker’s long running satirical column, and “one of the funniest people in America,” pays tribute to comedic geniuses both past and present, including Mark Twain, George Saunders, Nora Ephron, and more (CBS Sunday Morning). Library of America’s collection of hilarious stories, essays, and articles is an exclusive Who’s Who of the very best American comic writing. Classic pieces of American humor appear here, such as “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry and a selection from Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Contemporary writing is well represented, with entries from comedic geniuses like David Sedaris, Larry Willmore, Roy Blount Jr., Sloane Crosby, Bernie Mac, Wanda Sykes, and George Saunders plus laugh-out-loud lesser-known pieces from The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, National Lampoon, and The Onion. Full List of Contributors Mark Twain George Ade O. Henry Sinclair Lewis Anita Loos Ring Lardner H. L. Mencken James Thurber Dorothy Parker S. J. Perelman Langston Hughes Frank Sullivan E. B. White Peter De Vries Terry Southern Lenny Bruce Tom Wolfe Jean Shepherd Hunter S. Thompson Douglas Kenney Henry Beard Bruce Jay Friedman Philip Roth Nora Ephron Michael O’Donoghue George W. S. Trow Fran Lebowitz Charles Portis Donald Barthelme Veronica Geng John Hughes Mark O’Donnell Garrison Keillor Bruce McCall Molly Ivins Calvin Trillin Dave Barry The Onion writers Susan Orlean Roy Blount Jr George Carlin Ian Frazier David Rakoff Bernie Mac David Sedaris Wanda Sykes Jack Handey David Owen George Saunders Jenny Allen Sloane Crosley Larry Wilmore

For over a hundred years, The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry in Anthologies has been the preeminent index for answers to questions about the world of poetry, identifying the author of a poem or the anthologies in which it can be found when only a title, first line, or last line is known. This latest edition-a "must have" for libraries-brings its index up to date as of May 31, 2006. This latest version features 85,000 classic and contemporary poems by 12,000 poets. Also included are works in translation and for the first time poetry in Spanish, Vietnamese, and French. The subject organization of the poems is especially useful. Hundreds of new subjects have been added, indexing poems on highly relevant topics such as Osama bin Laden, the war in Iraq, Dick Cheney, the Internet, and Rosa Parks, as well as timeless subjects like the Bill of Rights, unspoken love, faith, and inspiration. Our impressive team of consultants includes J. D. McClatchy, Harvey Shapiro, and former poet laureate Mark Strand. From The Norton Anthology of Poetry (2005 edition) to Poetry after 9/11 and Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, this new edition puts readers in touch with the best of the latest anthologies and the lasting favorites.