Two thirteen-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, harrowing experience with a nightmarish traveling carnival. The carnival's leader, "Mr. Dark" bears a tattoo for each person lured by the offer to live out their secret fantasies. Mr. Dark's malevolent presence is countered by that of Will's father, Charles Halloway, who harbors his own secret desire to regain his youth.

To truly understand the United States of America, you must explore its literary tradition. Now, in this grand collection of 84 fascinating lectures, you'll get the chance to finally become familiar with America's true literary masterpieces (some you may already be familiar with, others you have yet to discover). Professor Weinstein has crafted these lectures to explain why some works become classics while others do not, why some "immortal" works fade...

This comprehensive 1901 history spans the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, with a sharp regional focus on New England, the Middle States, and the South; it also contains in-depth critical biographies of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman.

This 1906 collection of essays by a noted American educator and lecturer covers the lives, works, and character of nineteen authors-including Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Francis Parkman, and Walt Whitman. This was a break-out work because it was the first of its kind to prominently feature American writers publishing after 1789....

"Often treated like night itself--both visible and invisible, feared and romanticized--Latina/os make up the largest minority group in the United States. In her newest work, María DeGuzmán explores representations of night in art and literature from the Caribbean, Colombia, Central and South America, and the United States, calling into question night's effect on the formation of identity for Latina/os in and outside the United States. She takes...

"A meditation instructor and former English teacher shows how the great classics of Western literature illustrate the essential concepts of Eastern philosophy. The discussion includes works by authors such as John Keats, William Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Frederick Douglass, and many others"--

A new assemblage of masterly essays from a foremost scholar of American history and culture Alan Trachtenberg has always been interested in cultural artifacts that register meanings and feelings that Americans share even when they disagree about them. Some of the most beloved ones-like the famous last photograph of Abraham Lincoln, taken at the time of his second inaugural-are downright puzzling, and it is their obscure, riddle like aspects that...

A submarine's deadliest antagonist is another sub. Some of our most illustrious writers have tried their best to sink their enemies, using all the weapons at their command-wit, humor, sarcasm, invective, and the occasional right cross to the jaw. In these, eight profiles of quarrels between famous authors, Anthony Arthur draws on a lifetime of reading and teaching their works to describe the feuds as lively duels of strong personalities. Going beyond...

In the aftermath of America's centennial celebrations of 1876, readers developed an appetite for chronicles of the nation's past. Born amid this national vogue, the field of American literary history was touted as the balm for numerous "ills--from burgeoning immigration to American anti-intellectualism to demanding university administrators--and enjoyed immense popularity between 1880 and 1910. In the first major analysis of the field's early decades,...