"A friend in history," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul." And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crain sees the soul of the nation's literature. In a sensitive analysis that weaves together literary criticism and historical narrative, Crain describes the strong friendships between men that supported and inspired some of America's greatest writing--the Gothic novels of Charles Brockden Brown, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the novels of Herman Melville. He traces the genealogy of these friendships through a series of stories. A dapper...
"A friend in history," Henry David Thoreau once wrote, "looks like some premature soul." And in the history of friendship in early America, Caleb Crai...
Called a "remarkable story" by John Greenleaf Whittier and described by John Keats as "very powerful," "Wieland," Charles Brockden Brown's disturbing 1798 tale of terror, is a masterpiece involving spontaneous combustion, disembodied voices, religious mania, and a gruesome murder based on a real-life incident. This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes "Wieland"'s fragmentary sequel, "Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist," as well as several other important but hard-to-find Brockden Brown short stories, including "Thessalonica," "Walstein's School of History," and "Death of Cicero." This...
Called a "remarkable story" by John Greenleaf Whittier and described by John Keats as "very powerful," "Wieland," Charles Brockden Brown's disturbing ...
A predecessor of both the nativist humor of Mark Twain and the exotic adventure stories of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Richard Dana, Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive is an entertaining romp through eighteenth-century society, a satiric look at a variety of American types, from the backwoods schoolmaster to the southern gentleman, and a serious expose of the horrors of the slave trade. "In stylistic purity and the clarity with which Tyler investigates and dramatizes American manners," the critic Jack B. Moore has noted, The Algerine Captive "stands alone in our...
A predecessor of both the nativist humor of Mark Twain and the exotic adventure stories of Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Richard Dana, Royal...
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal Slate Kansas City Star Flavorwire Policy Mic Buzzfeed Necessary Errors is a very good novel, an enviably good one, and to read it is to relive all the anxieties and illusions and grand projects of one s own youth. James Wood, The New Yorker An exquisite debut novel that brilliantly captures the lives and romances of young expatriates in newly democratic Prague It s October 1990. Jacob Putnam is young and full of ideas. He s...
ONE OF THE YEAR'S BEST BOOKS The Wall Street Journal Slate Kansas City Star Flavorwire Policy Mic Buzzfeed
