Presents extended reviews of noteworthy books, short reviews, essays and articles on topics and trends in publishing, literature, culture and the arts. Includes lists of best sellers (hardcover and paperback).

This reader’s guide provides uniquely organized and up-to-date information on the most important and enjoyable contemporary English-language novels. Offering critically substantiated reading recommendations, careful cross-referencing, and extensive indexing, this book is appropriate for both the weekend reader looking for the best new mystery and the full-time graduate student hoping to survey the latest in magical realism. More than 1,000 titles are included, each entry citing major reviews and giving a brief description for each book.

Jazz in the Time of the Novel argues that a culture’s understanding of the concept of time plays a central role in its economic, social, and aesthetic affairs and that a culture arrives at its conception of time through its artistic practices. Bruce Barnhart, in Jazz in the Time of the Novel, shows that American culture of the first three decades of the twentieth century was shaped by the kindred rhythms and movements of two particular art forms: jazz and fiction. At the beginning of the twentieth century, widespread changes in America’s social, demographic, and economic norms threatened longstanding faith in a unified and inevitable movement towards a better future. As Barnhart shows both jazz and novels of the period address these temporal uncertainties, inserting themselves into arguments about the proper unfolding of an affirmative American future. Barnhart proposes that these two aesthetic forms can be viewed as co-participants in an ongoing discussion about the way in which the future should be imagined and experienced—a discussion symptomatic of the broader exchanges taking place within the many trajectories comprising early twentieth-century American culture. This book includes in-depth approaches to numerous examples of jazz and the novel, including performances by James P. Johnson, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, and Ethel Waters, and novels by James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, among others. In addition to the details of specific musical and literary works, Jazz in the Time of the Novel offers careful consideration as to how these works impact their social context.

Two inner-city girls tackle love, basketball, high school graduation, and an uncertain future in this coming-of-age novel by the author of Wingshooters. The Necessary Hunger follows two basketball stars—Nancy Takahiro and Raina Webber—and several of their friends through their last year of high school. For some of them, their senior year will be full of glory, and the anticipation of college. For others, however, stranded in an inner-city Los Angeles neighborhood that promises little in the way of opportunity, it will mark not only the end of their time in school but also the end of their hope. As Nancy and Raina both prepare to leave the urban neighborhood that has nurtured them, they find themselves looking toward a future that is no longer easily defined. The Necessary Hunger is about families, friendship, racial identity, and young people who are nearing adulthood in a dangerous and challenging world. It is about sports as a means of salvation, about the nature of competition, and ultimately about the various kinds of love. Our reissue of The Necessary Hunger includes a new introduction by Lynell George, and a new afterword by Nina Revoyr. Praise for The Age of Hunger “A wholesome coming-of-age novel about two lesbian high-school basketball stars, Revoyr’s debut is a meditation on consuming passion and a reflection on lost opportunities.” —Publishers Weekly “A quietly intimate, vigorously honest, and uniquely American hoop dream: tough and tender, without a single false note.” —Kirkuks Reviews “The Necessary Hunger is absolutely pioneering: it may be the first work by an out, queer Asian American writer to be published out of a major press AND for that work to include a major queer Asian American lesbian courtship plot. The interracial dynamics and high school sporting plot all make for an engaging work, one well worthy of retaining in print forever!” —Asian American Literature Fans “[Revoyr’s] characters are diverse and full of vulnerabilities, passion, and drive, and it is commendable to see a gay, Asian-American, female athlete as the protagonist . . . All in all, the story is worth reading to experience the racial tensions and teenage gay love and angst in a city that is growing restless.” —The Eclectic Review

In this first book-length monograph on the Mexican American novelist, essayist, and playwright John Rechy, best known for his debut novel City of Night, María DeGuzmán offers a conceptually clear yet aesthetically, philosophically, and socio-politically fine-grained analysis of the spectrum of his writing. Recipient of PEN Center USA's Lifetime Achievement Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, ONE Magazine's National Gay and Lesbian Cultural Hero Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Luis Leal Award for Excellence in Chicano/Latino Literature, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement, Rechy is the author of fifteen novels, at least three plays, and several volumes of nonfiction. He has written for the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, the New York Times, and Saturday Review. In Understanding John Rechy, María DeGuzmán offers a brief biographical overview and then traces the development of Rechy's craft through his major works by calling attention to central issues, recurring situations and characters, styles, and special techniques. She examines the complexities of his representation of identity, the subjectivity in his male homosexual odyssey and identity quest novels, and his experimentation with genre. She offers a concise yet intricate analysis of the major organizing paradigms and themes, genres, modes, styles, and handling of the gay Chicano's oeuvre. The book's guiding analysis pays particular attention to the ways in which Rechy's works function as cultural critique challenging mainstream values in a deep-structure manner.

This book is in part an anthology of the best of accounts of the World Writers Conference and also an overview of the lively wide-ranging global debate that the authors' views engendered among the many writers who took part.

Presents alphabetized profiles of more than sixty twentieth- and twenty-first-century American women fiction writers, such as Sandra Cisneros, Toni Morrison, and Joyce Carol Oates, describing their lives, major works and themes, and critical receptions and providing primary and secondary.

 In the midst of acne, social anxiety and training bras are the teen idols that make adolescent life a little more bearable. Whether their cutouts are plastered on bedroom walls or hidden behind locker doors, there is no denying the impact of these stars on young women. This collection of new essays explores with tenderness and humor the teen crushes of the past 60 years—from Elvis to John Lennon to Whitney Houston—who have influenced the choices of women, romantically or otherwise, well into adulthood.

Provides a comprehensive overview of the best writers and works of the current English-speaking literary world.