In Crossing the Next Meridian, Charles F. Wilkinson, an expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws explains some of the core problems facing the American West now and in the years to come. He examines the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation and argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat desertification and environmental decline, and to heal splintered communities. Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences of the laws, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of the laws and regulations that govern mining, ranching, forestry, and water use. He relates stories of Westerners who face these issues on a day-to-day basis, and discusses what can and should be done to bring government policies in line with the reality of twentieth-century American life.

In Crossing the Next Meridian, Wilkinson explains to a general audience some of the core problems that face the American West, both now and in the years to come. An expert on federal public lands, Native American issues, and the West's arcane water laws, Wilkinson looks at the outmoded ideas that pervade land use and resource allocation. He argues that significant reform of Western law is needed to combat environmental decline and heal splintered communities. Interweaving legal history with examples of present-day consequences, both intended and unintended, Wilkinson traces the origins and development of Western laws and regulations. He relates stories of Westerners who face these issues on a day-to-day basis and discusses what can and should be done to bring government policies in line with the reality of twentieth-century American life. His examination seeks a middle ground between those who champion unrestricted growth and those who advocate complete preservation.

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. Marking the threshold region where luminous life seems suspended but death has not yet darkened the horizon, it belongs to an evasive and evanescent world, carrying the tint of smoke, fog, ashes, and dust. As the ambiguous space of thought and remembrance where things blend and blur, gray measures the difference between distance and proximity, shading into tinges of hesitation, hues of taciturnity, tones of time past and lost. Thus it may also be the spectral medium of literature itself—that grainy gas of language. Written with a lead pencil akin to those found in Nabokov, Rilke, Svevo, Poe, and Dickinson, The Gray Book chronicles the vicissitudes of such equivocal articulation—registering the graphite traces it leaves behind but also recording the dwindling span of its life. The book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett. Loosely arranging these literary finds according to a revision of the four elements, The Gray Book distances itself from tradition and treats not water but tears, not fire but vapor, not earth but grain, not air but clouds. The narrative thus construed, proceeding in the meandering movements of volatile thought rather than in the prudent steps of a treatise, appears gradually affected by its subject. Themes and facts previously confined to the realm of quoted texts leak into the narrative itself. The border between fiction and fact slowly dissolves as the book approaches the curious void that the author locates at the heart of "gray literature." Shaped by an omnipresent though increasingly unreliable narrator, The Gray Book may thus ultimately yield a poetics cast in the form of a ghost story.

This volume consists of fourteen pieces selected by Levinas himself in 1987 from a large body of uncollected essays.

Now a major motion picture starring Nicolas Cage and directed by Gabe Polsky. In his National Book Award–winning novel Augustus, John Williams uncovered the secrets of ancient Rome. With Butcher’s Crossing, his fiercely intelligent, beautifully written western, Williams dismantles the myths of modern America. It is the 1870s, and Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek “an original relation to nature,” drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher’s Crossing, a small Kansas town on the outskirts of nowhere. Butcher’s Crossing is full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. Before long Andrews strikes up a friendship with one of them, a man who regales Andrews with tales of immense herds of buffalo, ready for the taking, hidden away in a beautiful valley deep in the Colorado Rockies. He convinces Andrews to join in an expedition to track the animals down. The journey out is grueling, but at the end is a place of paradisal richness. Once there, however, the three men abandon themselves to an orgy of slaughter, so caught up in killing buffalo that they lose all sense of time. Winter soon overtakes them: they are snowed in. Next spring, half-insane with cabin fever, cold, and hunger, they stagger back to Butcher’s Crossing to find a world as irremediably changed as they have been.

25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road: an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America's westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marked the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century. The book's three studies each concentrate on a different Celan poem. "The Poetry of Constancy: Paul Celan's Translation of Shakespeare's Sonnet 105" investigates a historical turn from a poetry that claims to present its object to a poetry that only promises to do so. "Reading 'Engführung'" follows the movement of poetic language into territory undisclosed to epistemic reason. "Eden" addresses "Du liegst," a poem on the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; Szondi actually was with Celan when the poem was written. It analyzes the relation between the historical facts to which a poem refers and its composition. The book contains, as appendixes, Szondi's notes for three more projected studies of Celan poems, left unwritten at the time of his death in 1971.