Late Fragments

The first English collection of the late poetry and prose fragments of literary icon Charles Baudelaire "[A] handsome new book . . . all this inchoate material is given context by Sieburth's learned, elegantly written commentary. He is the perfect guide."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post "[These] unfinished works written after 1861 . . . deliver what their titles seem to promise: a soul stripped of guises and illusions."--Ange Mlinko, New York Review of Books While not as well known as his other works, Charles Baudelaire's late poems, drafts of poems, and prose fragments are texts indispensable to the history of modern poetics. This volume brings together Baudelaire's late fragmentary writings, aphoristic in form and radical in thought, into one edited collection for the first time. Substantial introductions to each work by Richard Sieburth combine the literary context with formal analysis and reception history to give readers a comprehensive picture of the genesis of these works and their subsequent fate. Baudelaire's turn toward fragmentary writing involved not only a conscious renunciation of his aesthetics of perfection and unity, but a desertion of the harmonies of the traditional lyric in favor of the disjunctions of prose. These are daring works, often painful to read in their misanthropy and unconventional beauty.

*THE NUMBER 1 BESTSELLER* What are the things we live for? What matters most in life when your time is short? This brave, frank and heartbreaking book shows what it means to die before your time; how to take charge of your life and fill it with wonder, hope and joy even in the face of tragedy. Ambitious and talented, Kate Gross worked at Number 10 Downing Street for two British Prime Ministers whilst only in her twenties. At thirty, she was CEO of a charity working with fragile democracies in Africa. She had married 'the best looking man I've ever kissed' - and given birth to twin boys in 2008. The future was bright. But aged 34, Kate was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. After a two-year battle with the disease, Kate died peacefully at home on Christmas morning, just ten minutes before her sons awoke to open their stockings. She began to write as a gift to herself, a reminder that she could create even as her body began to self-destruct. Written for those she loves,her book is not a conventional cancer memoir; nor is it filled with medical jargon or misery. Instead, it is Kate's powerful attempt to make sense of the woman who emerged in the strange, lucid final chunk of her life. Her book aspires to give hope and purpose to the lives of her readers even as her own life drew to its close. Kate should have been granted decades to say all that she says in these pages. Denied the chance to bore her children and grandchildren with stories when she became fat and old, she offers us all instead her thoughts on how to live; on the wonder to be found in the everyday; the importance of friendship and love; what it means to die before your time and how to fill your life with hope and joy even in the face of tragedy.

"This book is intended to be a survival guide for aging lives. It is intended to be the welcome marker that finally appears when you think you have lost the trail." -from the book's prologue

Picture your 21st birthday. Did you have a party? If so, do you remember who was there? How clear are these memories? Should we trust them? Such questions have fascinated scientists for hundreds of years, and, as Alison Winter shows in this book, the answers have changed dramatically in just the past century.

Emily Dickinson's fragments, which appear at a late moment in the trajectory of her writing, are essentially private texts, belonging to the space of creation rather than communication. Never prepared for publication, perhaps never even meant to be read, they are symptoms of the processes of composition, data of the work of writing. Radical Scatters is an electronic archive of eighty-two documents carrying fragmentary texts written by Dickinson between c. 1870 and 1886, as well as fifty-four poems, letters, and other writings with direct links to the fragments. Conceding the inadequacy of conventional scholarly paradigms to represent them, Marta Werner has taken advantage of the capabilities of computer technology to conceive and develop an alternative model of presentation, a new paradigm that allows scholars to work with Dickinson's texts in unedited form and to draw on them in a nonlinear manner. The archive comprises six bodies of materials: high-quality facsimiles of the fragments and related texts; diplomatic transcriptions that display the documents's spatial dynamics; SGML-marked electronic texts; images of other documents drawn from the realm of Dickinson's late papers; various critical paratexts; and maps and code, type, and hand libraries. All of the primary materials in the archive are organized for full electronic search and analysis. Radical Scatters will revolutionize Dickinson scholarship in particular and textual scholarship more generally. Marta L. Werner is Assistant Professor of Literature, Georgia State University.

"This collection of writings, drawn from a wide variety of sources, reveals the intellectual depth and breadth of the author. The articles include political commentary, cultural critique, literary analysis, extended book reviews, and even a short story by West. All of these are held together by a prophetic Afro-American Christian perspective. The value of this book is that it provides easy access to a significant selection of the author's corpus." --Religious Studies Review (October 1989) "This volume collects over 50 articles, book reviews, and addresses by a Union Seminary theologian . . . . The most eloquent pieces are those in which West explains and interprets his more personally felt tradition of Afro-American Protestantism." -- Library Journal

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Addition and Nine Days, a superbly crafted and captivating literary mystery about a lost book and a secret love.

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.

The Greek philosopher Porphyry of Tyre had a reputation as the fiercest critic of Christianity. It was well-deserved: he composed (at the end the 3rd century A.D.) fifteen discourses against the Christians, so offensive that Christian emperors ordered them to be burnt. We thus rely on the testimonies of three prominent Christian writers to know what Porphyry wrote. Scholars have long thought that we could rely on those testimonies to know Porphyry's ideas. Exploring early religious debates which still resonate today, Porphyry in Fragments argues instead that Porphyry's actual thoughts became mixed with the thoughts of the Christians who preserved his ideas, as well as those of other Christian opponents.

Aboard a long-range research vessel, in the vast reaches of the South Pacific, the cast and crew of the reality show Sealife believe they have found a ratings bonanza. For a director dying for drama, a distress call from Henders Island—a mere blip on any radar—might be just the ticket. Until the first scientist sets foot on Henders—and the ultimate test of survival begins. For when they reach the island’s shores, the scientists are utterly unprepared for what they find—creatures unlike any ever recorded in natural history. This is not a lost world frozen in time; this is Earth as it might have looked after evolving on a separate path for half a billion years—a fragment of a lost continent, with an ecosystem that could topple ours like a house of cards.