"This volume contains three new screenplays by the writer-director of the prize-winning films Nothing But a Man, The Plot Against Harry, Vengeance is Mine and Pilgrim, Farewell." --Book Jacket.

Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of 'The Western Canon', has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare's genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays.

Mary Borden worked for four years in an evacuation hospital unit following the front lines up and down the European theater of the First World War. This beautifully written book, to be read alongside the likes of Sassoon, Graves, and Remarque, is a collection of her memories and impressions of that experience. Describing the men as they march into battle, engaging imaginatively with the stories of individual soldiers, and recounting procedures at the field hospital, the author offers a perspective on the war that is both powerful and intimate.

A leading film theorist and a filmmaker discuss the lasting contributions of the most prominent living filmmaker, Jean Luc-Godard Probably the most prominent living filmmaker, and one of the foremost directors of the postwar era, Jean Luc-Godard has received astonishingly little critical attention in the United States. With Speaking about Godard, leading film theorist Kaja Silverman and filmmaker Harun Farocki have made one of the most significant contributions to film studies in recent memory: a lively set of conversations about Godard and his major films, from Contempt to Passion. Combining the insights of a feminist film theorist with those of an avant-garde filmmaker, these eight dialogues–each representing a different period of Godard's film production, and together spanning his entire career–get at the very heart of his formal and theoretical innovations, teasing out, with probity and grace, the ways in which image and text inform one another throughout Godard's oeuvre. Indeed, the dialogic format here serves as the perfect means of capturing the rhythm of Godard's ongoing conversation with his own medium, in addition to shedding light on how a critic and a director of films respectively interpret his work. As it takes us through Godard's films in real time, Speaking about Godard conveys the sense that we are at the movies with Silverman and Farocki, and that we, as both student and participant, are the ultimate beneficiaries of the performance of this critique. Accessible, informative, witty, and, most of all, entertaining, the conversations assembled here form a testament to the continuing power of Godard's work to spark intense debate, and reinvigorate the study of one of the great artists of our time.

Published in 1935, George Santayana's The Last Puritan was the American philosopher's only novel and it became an instant best- seller, immediately linked in its painful voyage of self-discovery to The Education of Henry Adams. It is essentially a novel of ideas expressed in the birth, life, and early death of Oliver Alden. In Oliver's case the puritanical self-destruction that prevented him from realizing his own spirituality is transcended by his attainment of the type of self-knowledge that Santayana recommends throughout his moral philosophy. The Last Puritan is volume four in a new critical edition of George Santayana's wroks that restores Santayana's original text and provides important new scholarly information. Books in this series - the first complete publication of Santayana's works - include an editorial apparatus with notes to the text (identifying persons, places, and ideas), textual commentary (including a description of the composition and publication history, along with a discussion of editorial methods and decisions), lists of variants and emendations, and line-end hyphenations.

What constitutes historical truth is often subject to change. Through ingenious detection, the accepted wisdom of one generation may become the discredited legend of another -- or vice versa. In this wide- ranging study of historical investigation, former detective Joe Nickell allows the reader to look over his shoulder as he demonstrates the use of varied techniques in solving some of the world's most perplexing mysteries. All the major categories of historical mystery are here -- ancient riddles, biographical enigmas, hidden identity, "fakelore," questioned artifacts, suspect documents, lost texts, obscured sources, and scientific challenges. Each is then illustrated by a complete case from the author's own files. Nickell's investigation of the giant Nazca drawings in Peru, for example -- thought by some to provide proof of ancient extraterrestrial visitations -- uses innovative techniques to reveal a very different origin. Other cases concern the 1913 disappearance of writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce, the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, the truth about the identity of John Demjanjuk ("Ivan the Terrible" to Polish death camp victims), the fate of a lost colonial American text, the authenticity of Abraham Lincoln's celebrated Bixby letter, and the apparent real-life model for a mysterious character in a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In reaching his solutions, Nickell demonstrates a wide variety of investigative techniques -- chemical and instrumental analyses, physical experimentation, a "psychological autopsy," forensic identification, archival research, linguistic analysis, folklore study, and many others. His highly readable book will intrigue the scholar and the history buff no less than the mystery lover.