Nothing Can Bring Back The Hour

On a warm summer evening in the late 1960s, as Samantha DeSantis walks home from an impromptu softball game, she spots a bike in the distance. She watches as the rider picks up speed, drawing nearer. It's Buck Kendall, an alarmingly handsome, mysterious, and charismatic boy from her school. She can't look away as the hope of finally meeting him draws near. In ways she can't yet possibly understand, the immediate connection they share is oddly familiar. Their budding relationship awakens her to the joy and pain of love-and teaches her about the woman she will become. Samantha learns even more when she dares to break the ice and challenge the wildly popular (and equally untamed) Brian. She learns that boys can be good friends, too. Every girl in school wants him, but to Brian, Samantha is the best girl in the world. He knows that someday, some guy will be lucky to have her. From two very different types of love, Samantha learns more than she could ever hope or expect. The heart wants what it wants. Why fight it?

THE STORY: Good looking, a star athlete, and son of the richest man in town, Bud Stamper is the prize catch in his high-school class, and Deanie Loomis is the girl lucky enough to get him. But both Bud and Deanie are disturbed by the powerful feeli

This evocative narrative draws us into the inner life of a young Chinese peasant girl, May-ping, and her first glimmerings of youthful love and idealism under the Maoist regime in China. As she grows into a mature woman, she becomes increasingly aware of the strife around her. An intelligent girl born into a Poor-Class family in a small village in rural China, she is, because of the Maoist policy towards such families, able to pursue her dream of going to university. To her surprise, urban snobbery and “student thought-spying” at university make it essential for her to hide her real thoughts. Such self-protection becomes especially necessary once her idealistic boyfriend Dan — a secret boyfriend because young people were forbidden to be romantically involved — is sent to a labour camp for his outspoken ways. In her village, she learns that everything has value except the lives of girls and women. One of her childhood friends, a landowner’s daughter who because of her family’s Landlord Class, is not allowed to go to university drowns herself when forced to face an arranged marriage. Hua-Hua, a shy and gentle neighbour, hangs herself after her husband beats her brutally for not bearing him a son. May-ping manages to survive the Cultural Revolution as a member of the Communist party who feels outside the system and keeps her inner self intact. Her story reveals how political change during the Maoist regime left its mark on ordinary people. Employing stories within stories, the narrator carries the reader to a mythological realm to images of the resilient water lilies and the nurturing lily pond.

The novelized true story of Wilhelmina Huebner Metting, an orphaned farm girl who uprooted her life in Germany to search for an aunt living in America, a quest which took her to New York's infamous Hell's Kitchen where she started a seamstress business and eventually became a passionate social reformer involved with the Colored Orphan Asylum and a central figure in the New York City Draft Riot of 1863.

Poetry is nothing but the beauty of a tender thought expressed in the language of the heart. As a heart fills with love and flows out as the charmed word, poetry touches everyones heart irrespective of races and cultures.

The sixteen essays in this second volume of Harvard English Studies explore and reevaluate the work of twentieth-century writers and critics from Joyce and James to Iris Murdoch and Mailer, from Yeats and Eliot to critics and poets of the present generation. Part I, "Writers and Critics," includes among other essays an exploration of erotic imagination in Dubliners and a study of Dickensian motifs in Murdoch's London novels. Other articles deal with the present standing of Yeats's and Eliot's poetry, the prosodies of free verse, and the role of the writer in modern fiction. Part II, "Twentieth Century Valuations Reconsidered" assesses some of the influential twentieth-century critical positions on Shakespeare, the pastoral, Donne, the metaphysical poets, Milton, Pope, and Wordsworth. Distinguished contributors include Josephine Miles, Frank Kermode, F. R. Leavis, and Christopher Ricks.

Through a wide variety of verbal and pictorial references, this book demonstrates how Wordsworth's iconography, albeit apparently 'collateral', makes crucial contributions to his central arguments and preoccupations in The Excursion, as well as in his other major works.