Books published by The Library of America

Go back to the Future Is Female in this all new collection of wildly entertaining stories by the trailblazing feminist writers who transformed American science fiction in the 1970sIn the 1970s, feminist authors created a new mode of science fiction in defiance of the "baboon patriarchy"-Ursula Le Guin's words-that had long dominated the genre, imagining futures that are still visionary. In this sequel to her groundbreaking 2018 anthology The Future is Female!: 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, SF-expert Lisa Yaszek offers a time machine back to the decade when far-sighted rebels changed science fiction forever with stories that made female community, agency, and sexuality central to the American future. Here are twenty-three wild, witty, and wonderful classics that dramatize the liberating energies of the 1970s:Sonya Dorman, "Bitching It" (1971) Kate Wilhelm, "The Funeral" (1972)Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (1972) NEBULA AWARD Miriam Allen deFord, "A Way Out"(1973)Vonda N. McIntyre, "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" (1973) NEBULA James Tiptree, Jr., "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) HUGO AWARD Kathleen Sky, "Lament of the Keeku Bird" (1973)Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Day Before the Revolution" (1974) NEBULA & LOCUS AWARD Eleanor Arnason, "The Warlord of Saturn's Moons" (1974)Kathleen M. Sidney, "The Anthropologist" (1975)Marta Randall, "A Scarab in the City of Time" (1975) Elinor Busby, "A Time to Kill" (1977)Raccoona Sheldon, "The Screwfly Solution" (1977) NEBULA AWARD Pamela Sargent, "If Ever I Should Leave You" (1974)Joan D. Vinge, "View from a Height" (1978)M. Lucie Chin, "The Best Is Yet to Be" (1978)Lisa Tuttle, "Wives" (1979) Connie Willis, "Daisy, In the Sun" (1979)

More urgent than ever, two landmark essays by the legendary political theorist on the greatest threat to democracy, gathered with a new introduction by David Bromwich"No one," Hannah Arendt observed, "has ever counted truthfulness as a political virtue." But why do politicians lie? What is the relationship between political lies and self-delusion? And how much organized deceit can a democracy endure before it ceases to function? Fifty years ago, the century's greatest political theorist turned her focus to these essential questions in two seminal essays, brought together here for the first time. Her conclusions, delivered in searching prose that crackles with insight and intelligence, remain powerfully relevant, perhaps more so today than when they were written. In "Truth and Politics," Arendt explores the affinity between lying and politics, and reminds us that the survival of factual truth depends on the testimony of credible witnesses and on an informed citizenry. She shows how our shared sense of reality-the texture of facts in which we wrap our daily lives-can be torn apart by organized lying, replaced with a fantasy world of airbrushed evidence and doctored documents. In "Lying in Politics," written in response to the release of the Pentagon Papers, Arendt applies these insights to an analysis of American policy in Southeast Asia, arguing that the real goal of the Vietnam War-and of the official lies used to justify it by successive administrations-was nothing other than the burnishing of America's image. In his introduction, David Bromwich (American Breakdown: The Trump Years and How They Befell Us) engages with Arendt's essays in the context of her other writings and underscores their clarion call to take seriously the ever-present threat to democracy posed by lying.

Rediscover Rudolfo Anaya: mythmaker, master storyteller, American original "The godfather and guru of Chicano literature." -Tony HillermanA writer powerfully attuned to the land and history of his native New Mexico, Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) is one of the giants of Latino literature. Over the course of a remarkable and acclaimed literary career, Anaya redefined the American experience for generations of readers. Anaya broke new ground with his 1972 novel Bless Me, Ultima, a mythic work that captures the richness and complexity of history, community, and place in the American Southwest. Set just after World War II, Bless Me, Ultima revolves around the young boy Antonio and his quest to understand his identity and the demands of his future. Although his mother's heart is set on his entering the priesthood, Antonio is drawn to the charismatic Ultima, an elderly curandera or healer who embodies the ancient wisdom of the pre-Columbian past. The 1979 novel Tortuga draws on Anaya's experience of suffering and recuperation after a diving accident as a teenager. Its hero, nicknamed "Tortuga" because his body cast encases him like a turtle's shell, grapples with the realities of bodily pain as he discovers that true healing is spiritual as well as physical. The story reverberates with local folklore about a mountain, also called Tortuga, home to a sleeping spirit who will one day awaken and journey onward to the sea. Weaving these threads together, Anaya creates, in the words of editor Luis Alberto Urrea, "a tapestry inside of which he was encoding an entire history of our very souls." In the 1992 novel Alburquerque (restoring the "r" to the city's original name), a young Mexican American boxing champion discovers that his white biological mother had given him up for adoption at birth, and he must now reevaluate everything he thought he was. The winner of a PEN West Fiction Award, the novel brims with emotionally powerful characterizations, political commentary, humor, and lyrical writing that reveals Anaya to be, once again, an indispensable American fabulist.

The eloquent and defiant writings of the great American freedom fighter, selected by his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographerFrederick Douglass was one of the greatest orators and essayists in American history. While toiling as an enslaved laborer in the Baltimore shipyards he bought a secondhand copy of The Columbian Orator, a "noble acquisition" that he carried with him on his escape to the North. Douglass began his career as an antislavery lecturer in 1841 and founded his first newspaper, North Star, six years later.For the next five decades he used his voice and wielded his pen in the cause of emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity. Inspired by the Hebrew prophets, Douglass developed a unique oratorical and literary style that combined scriptural cadences with savage irony, moral urgency, and keen insight. In his incandescent jeremiad "What to the Slave is the 4th of July?" Douglass skewered the hypocrisy of the slaveholding republic; and in "The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered" he refuted white supremacist ideology. "Resistance to Blood-Houndism" called for forceful opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act; "Capt. John Brown Not Insane" praised the "self-forgetful heroism" of the abolitionist martyr; and "How to End the War," published in 1861, called for the raising of Black troops and the destruction of slavery. In his oration at the Freedmen's Memorial in 1876, Douglass offered a brilliantly perceptive assessment of Lincoln's role in emancipation; "There Was a Right Side in the Late War" attacked the "Lost Cause" mythology of the Confederacy; and "The Lessons of the Hour" denounced lynching and disenfranchisement in the emerging Jim Crow South.As a special feature the volume also includes Douglass's only foray into fiction, the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," about a shipboard insurrection.

For the 400th anniversary of Moliere's birth, all of Richard Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays-themselves towering achievements in English verse-are brought together for the first time in this two-volume gift set.One of the most accomplished American poets of his generation, Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) was also a prolific translator of French and Russian literature. His verse translations of Molière's plays are especially admired by readers and are still performed today around the world. "Wilbur," the critic John Simon wrote, "makes Molière into as great an English verse playwright as he was a French one." Now, for the first time, all ten of Wilbur's unsurpassed translations of Molière's plays are brought together in two-volume boxed set, fulfilling the poet's vision for the translations.The first volume comprises Molière's delightful early farces The Bungler, Lovers' Quarrels, and The Imaginary Cuckhold, or Sganarelle; the comedies The School for Husbands and The School for Wives, about the efforts of middle-aged men to control their young wives or fiancés, which so delighted female theater goers in Moliere's seventeenth-century France; and Don Juan, Molière's retelling of the timeless story, performed only briefly in the playwright's lifetime before pious censure forced it to close and not part of the repertoire of the Comédie-Française until 1847.The second volume includes the elusive masterpiece, The Misanthrope, often said to occupy the same space in comedy as Shakespeare's Hamlet does in tragedy; the fantastic farce Amphitryon, about how Jupiter and Mercury commandeer the identities of two mortals ; Tartuffe, Molière's biting satire of religious hypocrisy; and The Learned Ladies, like Tarfuffe, a drama of a household turned suddenly upside down. These volumes include the original introductions by Richard Wilbur and an introduction by Adam Gopnik on the exquisite art of Wilbur's translations.

STEPH CURRY''S "UNDERRRATED" BOOK CLUB PICK FOR APRIL 2022NAACP IMAGE AWARD FINALISTNEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLERONE OF TIME''S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2021ONE OF OPRAH''S 15 FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2021ONE OF THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE''S 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2021A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF 2021A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel about race and police violence by the legendary author of Native Son and Black BoyFred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city’s sewer system. This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a masterpiece that Richard Wright was unable to publish in his lifetime. Written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), at the height of his creative powers, it would eventually see publication only in drastically condensed and truncated form in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961). Now, for the first time, by special arrangement with the author''s estate, the full text of this incendiary novel about race and violence in America, the work that meant more to Wright than any other (“I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration”), is published in the form that he intended, complete with his companion essay, “Memories of My Grandmother.” Malcolm Wright, the author’s grandson, contributes an afterword.

From The Federalist to Citizens United, a bestselling historian presents key writings on five crucial questions confronting American democracy today Amid the frenzied overload of 24-hour cable news and incessant social media, at a time when many of us fear for the future of our democracy, it is becoming harder and harder to think clearly about politics. American Democracy: 21 Historic Answers to 5 Urgent Questions provides an alternative for those who want to step back and look to the past for inspiration and guidance.   Edited with perceptive and provocative commentary by bestselling historian and journalist Nicholas Lemann (The Promised Land, Transaction Man), the book presents key writings from the American past that speak to five contemporary flashpoints in our political landscape: race, gender, immigration, and citizenship; opportunity and inequality; the purpose and powers of the federal government; money, special privilege, and corruption; and protest and civil disobedience. Some of the selections are well-known—George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation at Newport, Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the 4th of July,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from Birmingham Jail—while others will be new to many readers—Horace Mann’s argument for public schools as a means of fighting inequality, Jane Addams’s perceptive analysis of gender and social class in charity work, Randolph Bourne envisioning a “Trans-National America.”   American Democracy presents a remarkable range of insightful and eloquent American political writing, while serving as an invaluable resource for concerned citizens who wish to become better-informed participants in the ongoing drama of our democracy.

For the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower's arrival, a landmark collection of firsthand accounts charting the history of the English newcomers and their fateful encounters with the region's Native peoplesFor centuries the story of the Pilgrims and the Mayflower has been told and retold--the landing at Plymouth Rock and the first Thanksgiving, and the decades that followed, as the colonists struggled to build an enduring and righteous community in the New World wilderness. But the place where the Plymouth colonists settled was no wilderness: it was Patuxet, in the ancestral homeland of the Wampanoag people, a long-inhabited region of fruitful and sustainable agriculture and well-traveled trade routes, a civilization with deep historical memories and cultural traditions. And while many Americans have sought comfort in the reassuring story of peaceful cross-cultural relations embodied in the myth of the first Thanksgiving, far fewer are aware of the complex history of diplomacy, exchange, and conflict between the Plymouth colonists and Native peoples. Now, published for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Mayflower, Plymouth Colony brings together for the first time fascinating first-hand narratives written by English settlers--Mourt's Relation, the classic account of the colony's first year; Governor William Bradford's masterful Of Plimouth Plantation; Edward Winslow's Good News from New England; the heterodox Thomas Morton's irreverent challenge to Puritanism, New English Canaan; and Mary Rowlandson's landmark "captivity narrative" The Sovereignty and Goodness of God--with a selection of carefully chosen documents (deeds, patents, letters, speeches) that illuminate the intricacies of Anglo-Native encounters, the complex role of Christian Indians, and the legacy of Massasoit, Weetamoo, Metacom ("King Philip"), and other Wampanoag leaders who faced the ongoing incursion into their lands of settlers from across the sea. The interactions of Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoag culminated in the horrors of King Philip's War, a conflict that may have killed seven percent of the total population, Anglo and Native, of New England. While the war led to the end of Plymouth's existence as a separate colony in 1692, it did not extinguish the Wampanoag people, who still live in their ancestral homeland in the twenty-first century.

In their own voices, the full story of the women and men who struggled to make American democracy wholeWith a record number of female candidates in the 2020 election and women''s rights an increasingly urgent topic in the news, it''s crucial that we understand the history that got us where we are now. For the first time, here is the full, definitive story of the movement for voting rights for American women, of every race, told through the voices of the women and men who lived it. Here are the most recognizable figures in the campaign for women''s suffrage, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but also the black, Chinese, and American Indian women and men who were not only essential to the movement but expanded its directions and aims. Here, too, are the anti-suffragists who worried about where the country would head if the right to vote were universal. Expertly curated and introduced by scholar Susan Ware, each piece is also introduced by a headnote so that together these 100 selections by over 80 writers tell the full history of the movement--from Abigail Adams to the Declaration of Sentiments to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the limiting of suffrage under Jim Crow. Includes writings by Ida B. Wells, Mabel Lee, Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, presidents Grover Cleveland on the anti-suffrage side and Woodrow Wilson urging passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a wartime measure, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among many others.

A literary landmark: Kevin Young presents the biggest and best anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the presentOnly now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of many voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. And only here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, is this glorious living tradition wholly revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history--in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective--and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology''s concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

A landmark of literary recovery: the first major edition of 19th-century America''s greatest woman writerIn her lifetime Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894) was considered with George Eliot one of the two greatest women writers of the English language. She wrote fiction of remarkable intellectual power that outsold those of her male contemporaries Henry James and Willian Dean Howells. James enshrined memories of his long, complicated friendship with Woolson in The Beast in the Jungle and The Wings of the Dove, and more recently Colm Tobin treated the relationship in his novel The Master. But Woolson''s close association with James, and her likely suicide in Venice, have tended to overshadow her own literary accomplishments, pigeonholing her as a martyr to the male literary establishment. This volume, the most comprehensive gathering of Woolson''s stories to date, represents the culmination of decades of recovery work done by scholars, and puts the focus back on the work, where it belongs.Set variously in the Great Lakes region, the post-Civil War South, and Europe, Woolson''s short stories often concern outsiders of one kind or another--prophets and misfits living in remote landscapes, uneducated coal miners, impoverished spinsters, neglected nuns, a haunted caretaker of the dead, destitute southerners, and female artists driven to extreme behavior as they seek the admiration or approval of established (male) critics or writers. Woolson''s minute realism captures both the social texture of her time and the inner emotional lives of these overlooked and marginalized characters. Most of all her writings startle us with their simmering intensity, their sensual descriptions of the environment, and refusal to smooth out the ambiguities and tensions that inevitably result from human efforts to communicate and connect. Her fiction is deeply human, resonating with a power across the centuries that makes them remarkably modern for today''s readers.

Library of America's definitive Updike edition continues with three masterful novels on the joys and the discontents of the sexual revolutionHere for the first time in one volume are three of John Updike's most essential novels--the scandalous Couples, the brilliant Rabbit Redux, and the uproarious A Month of Sundays--which together form an unforgettable triptych of the social turbulence that roiled America from the Kennedy to the Nixon years. Written with the grace, verve, and style of one of literature's most sophisticated entertainers, these books not only reveal Updike's genius in characterization and his formal versatility as a novelist but also delve into the complexities of sex and marriage, social class and personal morality, and the difficult quandaries of the flesh and the spirit. As a special feature the volume also presents two short pieces that shed light on the novels and the tale "Couples: A Short Story," the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.