Upstate Literature

New Yorker book critic and award-winning author James Wood delivers a novel of a family struggling to connect with one another and find meaning in their own lives. In the years since his daughter Vanessa moved to America to become a professor of philosophy, Alan Querry has never been to visit. He has been too busy at home in northern England, holding together his business as a successful property developer. His younger daughter, Helen—a music executive in London—hasn’t gone, either, and the two sisters, close but competitive, have never quite recovered from their parents’ bitter divorce and the early death of their mother. But when Vanessa’s new boyfriend sends word that she has fallen into a severe depression and that he’s worried for her safety, Alan and Helen fly to New York and take the train to Saratoga Springs. Over the course of six wintry days in upstate New York, the Querry family begins to struggle with the questions that animate this profound and searching novel: Why do some people find living so much harder than others? Is happiness a skill that might be learned or a cruel accident of birth? Is reflection conducive to happiness or an obstacle to it? If, as a favorite philosopher of Helen’s puts it, “the only serious enterprise is living,” how should we live? Rich in subtle human insight, full of poignant and often funny portraits, and vivid with a sense of place, James Wood’s Upstate is a powerful, intense, beautiful novel.

The Encyclopedia of New York State is one of the most complete works on the Empire State to be published in a half-century. In nearly 2,000 pages and 4,000 signed entries, this single volume captures the impressive complexity of New York State as a historic crossroads of people and ideas, as a cradle of abolitionism and feminism, and as an apex of modern urban, suburban, and rural life. The Encyclopedia is packed with fascinating details from fields ranging from sociology and geography to history. Did you know that Manhattan's Lower East Side was once the most populated neighborhood in the world, but Hamilton County in the Adirondacks is the least densely populated county east of the Mississippi; New York is the only state to border both the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean; the Erie Canal opened New York City to rich farmland upstate . . . and to the west. Entries by experts chronicle New York's varied areas, politics, and persuasions with a cornucopia of subjects from environmentalism to higher education to railroads, weaving the state's diverse regions and peoples into one idea of New York State. Lavishly illustrated with 500 photographs and figures, 120 maps, and 140 tables, the Encyclopedia is key to understanding the state's past, present, and future. It is a crucial reference for students, teachers, historians, and business people, for New Yorkers of all persuasions, and for anyone interested in finding out more about New York State.

The thirty essays in English Literature and the Other Languages trace how the tangentiality of English and other modes of language affects the production of English literature, and investigate how questions of linguistic code can be made accessible to literary analysis. This collection studies multilingualism from the Reformation onwards, when Latin was an alternative to the emerging vernacular of the Anglican nation; the eighteenth-century confrontation between English and the languages of the colonies; the process whereby the standard British English of the colonizer has lost ground to independent englishes (American, Canadian, Indian, Caribbean, Nigerian, or New Zealand English), that now consider the original standard British English as the other languages the interaction between English and a range of British language varieties including Welsh, Irish, and Scots, the Lancashire and Dorset dialects, as well as working-class idiom; Chicano literature; translation and self-translation; Ezra Pound's revitalization of English in the Cantos; and the psychogrammar and comic dialogics in Joyce's Ulysses, As Norman Blake puts it in his Afterword to English Literature and the Other Languages: There has been no volume such as this which tries to take stock of the whole area and to put multilingualism in literature on the map. It is a subject which has been neglected for too long, and this volume is to be welcomed for its brave attempt to fill this lacuna.

In simple, darkly faceted stories, Philander Deming writes as a person whose childhood knowledge of the Adirondacks has been honed to a fine sense for its potential human tragedy. In this, the first collection of his best work, a haunting vision of the Adirondacks comes through that is hard to forget. Deming's themes revolve around deception and self-deception, loneliness, and good intentions gone awry. Most of his stories occur just before or after the Civil War. In almost every story, however, Deming shows his characters looking back towards the mountains, from the Mohawk or St. Lawrence Valley or from lonely settlements on the edge of the forest, or across Lake Champlain. Few Adirondack writers have been so convincing in conveying the keen isolation of life in the northern forest and its peculiar effects on the human mind. The wilderness community is cruel, fostered by ignorance and isolation. In the end, the mountains, seemingly a neutral back drop against which individuals confront a collective morality, are the real source of his inspiration.

This anthology, hailed as a significant contribution to American ethnic studies, features the short stories, poems, and plays of more than thirty Italian American artists. Drawing on their individual and collective backgrounds and experience, these writers convey another vision of American fife. A section of critical essays by established scholars in the field, with topics ranging from specific works and authors to broad literary movements and film studies, analyzes the Italian American phenomenon and the role of ethnicity in literature. The extensive bibliography treats creative works, critical essays, and films dealing with the Italian American experience and promises to be an invaluable research tool.

First published in 1999. The many available scholarly works on Italian-Americans are perhaps of little practical help to the undergraduate or high school student who needs background information when reading contemporary fiction with Italian characters, watching films that require a familiarity with Italian Americans, or looking at works of art that can be fully appreciated only if one understands Italian culture. This basic reference work for non-specialists and students offers quick insights and essential, easy-to-grasp information on Italian-American contributions to American art, music, literature, motion pictures and cultural life. This rich legacy is examined in a collection of original essays that include portrayals of Italian characters in the films of Francis Coppola, Italian American poetry, the art of Frank Stella, the music of Frank Zappa, a survey of Italian folk customs and an analysis of the evolution of Italian-American biography. Comprising 22 lengthy essays written specifically for this volume, the book identifies what is uniquely Italian in American life and examines how Italian customs, traditions, social mores and cultural antecedents have wrought their influence on the American character. Filled with insights, observations and ethnic facts and fictions, this volume should prove to be a valuable source of information for scholars, researchers and students interested in pinpointing and examining the cultural, intellectual and social influence of Italian immigrants and their successors.

First published in 1988, this book contains entries on famous American Humorists. Humor has been present in American literature, from the beginning, and has developed characteristics that reflect the American character, both regional and national. Although American literature was, in the past, treated as inferior to British literature, there has always been a large popular audience for the genre, which this book shows. The figures with entries in this encyclopedia not only amuse in their writing, but also aim to enlighten- setting out to expose the foibles and foolishness of society and the individuals who compose it. It is the manner in which these authors try to accomplish this end that determines whether they appear in the volume. Indeed, the book will demonstrate that the best humor has at its base, a ready understanding of human nature.