Other Voices Other Lives

Other Voices, Other Lives is a selection of poems, plays, and interviews drawn from over 40 years of work by one of America's most beloved and influential women of letters. Grace Cavalieri writes of women's lives, loves, and work in a multitude of voices. The book also includes interview excerpts from her public radio series, The Poet & the Poem. Her incisive interviews with Robert Pinsky, Lucille Clifton, and Josephine Jacobsen offer profound insights into the writing life.

Truman Capote’s first novel is a story of almost supernatural intensity and inventiveness, an audacious foray into the mind of a sensitive boy as he seeks out the grown-up enigmas of love and death in the ghostly landscape of the deep South. “Intense, brilliant . . . . Capote has an astonishing command . . . a magic all his own.” —The Atlantic At the age of twelve, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully’s Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face—and heart—of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.

Other Voices, Other Places is a novel about an evangelistic witness by thousands of born-again redeemed spirits in Heaven, made ready for spiritual service to a failing humanity on Earth. These spiritual workers have received the most complete, personal, and experiential knowledge from teachings by Old and New Testament characters, writers, and prophets. Challenges, though, exist. A world awaits, full of doubt, suspicion, and ridicule. Evil is also actively involved with its own commentaries and plans. The voice of Sybil Davies, a storyteller from Heaven, calls out to humanity on Earth to keep hope, faith, and trust alive. She is reporting on the eventual full victory of “good” over “evil” and the awarding of eternal life.

The author describes this volume as a "textography" because it combines certain elements of both text analysis and ethnography. Through analysis of texts, textual forms, and systems of texts, it shows the lives, life commitments, and life projects of people deeply embedded in the literate culture of the university. The people examined work in a single building, but their textual lives are maintained in different times and spaces, measured by the dimensions of text production and text circulation in their fields of work. These domains of text time and space are to some degree differentiated by the three specialties that mark the three floors of a small building at a major research university--the ethnographic site of this journey into textual lives--computing, taxonomic botany, and English as a second language. This research site provides the opportunity to re-examine the concept of discourse community and to investigate the nature and origination of academic discourse from a new perspective. The author is a distinctive member of the applied linguistics and composition communities, an original stamped by the global village of language education in which he has lived his life, and revealed in his own autobiographical account embedded within this book. This book now reveals him as a person making text about how people are embedded in making their textual lives within the discursive landscapes their communities afford. In doing so, he shows not only his own love of language as a way of life, but also his appreciation of how all his subjects find their labors of love in the language they create. This book has been written to appeal to a general academic audience as well as to specialists in rhetoric, discourse analysis, and composition.

Leading Anglican writers from around the world challenge the assumption that the communion is split between a liberal 'north' and an orthodox 'south'. Anglican churches worldwide are sharply divided on homosexuality. The dominant sterotype is that of a "global south" unanimously lined up against homosexuality as immoral and sinful, and of a liberal and decadent global north. The differences between the two sides are seen as fundamental, and irreconcilable. Nothing is further from the truth: homosexual behavior exists across the whole Anglican Communion, whether it is openly celebrated or quietly integrated into local churches and cultures. In this extraordinary book, in development for several years, this is exposed as a myth. Christians throughout Africa, Asia, and the developing world - bishops, priests and religious, academics and lay writers - open up dramatic new perspectives on familiar arguments and debates. Topics include biblical interpretation, sexuality and doctrine, local history, sexuality and personhood, the influence of other faiths, issues of colonialism and post-colonialism, homophobia, and the place of homosexual persons in the church. Other Voices, Other Worlds reveals the rich historical and cross-cultural complexity to same-sex relationships, and injects dramatic new perspectives into a debate that has become stale and predictable.

"Other Voices, Other Towns" has, in reality, taken Caleb Pirtle III a lifetime to write. During the thirty years he has been writing about travel across this great land, he spent much of his time listening to those whose paths he crossed. Pirtle collects people. He collects their stories. He is firmly convinced that everyone who has ever walked across the street has a great story to tell if only someone will take the time to listen. Pirtle has recorded many of them in "Other Voices, Other Towns." The sketches, the anecdotes, the tales they tell, the memories they have stored, their lessons of life make you feel better or make you want to cry. Their stories are filled with disappointments and with inspiration: The blind man who tends his beehives in the Smoky Mountains and knows that someday "I'm going to where the mountains are higher and prettier and you don't get bee stung." The rancher who bought a whole town because it had a beer joint, and he could get a drink any time he was thirsty. The woman who built a major university on the strength of a dime. The grieving father searching for "the best little girl in the world." The vagabond who became a great writer because he flunked grammar and could not enroll in college. The last man on the mountain, the last survivor on an island, the last woman strong enough to tame though not civilize the Okefenokee Swamp. The teacher who taught history in school by singing the lessons he had written as songs. The men who created "Lum and Abner." The scientist digging for clues to prove a space ship had crashed in the backyard of Aurora, Texas. The performer who rescued the abandoned remains of a crumbling theater. The actor who figured out that a theater ticket was worth a mess of greens or a gallon milk during the Great Depression. The old con artist and wildcatter who defied the odds and discovered a great oilfield. The politician who had one cause, passed it in the legislature, and went home because there were no other bills that concerned him. The fishermen who stumbled across pearls in a landlocked lake. The girl singer who rode in a small RV behind the star until she became the star. The sad journey down the trail of broken promises. And the greatest worm fiddler of them all. For Pirtle, other voices in other towns, have all been joined together to form the traveler's story.

Mythologized as the era of the “good war” and the “Greatest Generation,” the 1940s are frequently understood as a more heroic, uncomplicated time in American history. Yet just below the surface, a sense of dread, alienation, and the haunting specter of radical evil permeated American art and literature. Writers returned home from World War II and gave form to their disorienting experiences of violence and cruelty. They probed the darkness that the war opened up and confronted bigotry, existential guilt, ecological concerns, and fear about the nature and survival of the human race. In Facing the Abyss, George Hutchinson offers readings of individual works and the larger intellectual and cultural scene to reveal the 1940s as a period of profound and influential accomplishment. Facing the Abyss examines the relation of aesthetics to politics, the idea of universalism, and the connections among authors across racial, ethnic, and gender divisions. Modernist and avant-garde styles were absorbed into popular culture as writers and artists turned away from social realism to emphasize the process of artistic creation. Hutchinson explores a range of important writers, from Saul Bellow and Mary McCarthy to Richard Wright and James Baldwin. African American and Jewish novelists critiqued racism and anti-Semitism, women writers pushed back on the misogyny unleashed during the war, and authors such as Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams reflected a new openness in the depiction of homosexuality. The decade also witnessed an awakening of American environmental and ecological consciousness. Hutchinson argues that despite the individualized experiences depicted in these works, a common belief in art’s ability to communicate the universal in particulars united the most important works of literature and art during the 1940s. Hutchinson’s capacious view of American literary and cultural history masterfully weaves together a wide range of creative and intellectual expression into a sweeping new narrative of this pivotal decade.