Mexico has a rich literary heritage that extends back over centuries to the Aztec and Mayan civilizations. This major new reference work surveys more than five hundred years of Mexican literature from a sociocultural perspective. More than merely a catalog of names and titles, it examines in detail the literary phenomena that constitute Mexico's most significant and original contributions to literature. Recognizing that no one scholar can authoritatively...

Editors Maureen O'Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including Old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish folksongs, and drama. For each author the editors provide a biographical sketch, a brief discussion of how his or her selections relate to a larger body of work, and a selected bibliography. This edition also features a larger sampling of women writers.

This novel continues the stories of five interrelated families who struggle with social, political, and economic turmoil in the mid-twentieth century, during which they witness the rise of Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the horrors of World War II. It picks up right where the first book left off, and continues up to the explosions of the American and Soviet atomic bombs. Carla von Ulrich, born of German and English parents, finds her life...

Roads of Destiny (1909) is a collection of short stories by American writer O. Henry. Inspired by his experiences as a fugitive and in prison, these stories address themes of crime, poverty, and fate. "A Retrieved Reformation," perhaps the most notable of the collection's twenty-two stories, is semi-autobiographical in that it explores the life of a criminal and fugitive who maintains a moral identity while struggling to adjust to life outside of...

Follows the fates of five interrelated families--American, German, Russian, English, and Welsh--as they move through the dramas of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the struggle for women's suffrage. Sigue los destinos de cinco familias interrelacionadas--una estadounidense, una alemana, una rusa, una inglesa, y una galesa--mientras pasan por los dramas de la Primera Guerra Mundial, la Revolución Rusa, y la lucha por el sufragio femenino....

"The moment just before Radar Radmanovic is born, all of the hospital's electricity mysteriously fails. The delivery takes place in total darkness. Lights back on, the staff sees a healthy baby boy-with pitch-black skin-born to the stunned white parents. No one understands the uncanny electrical event or the unexpected skin color. "A childbirth is an explosion," the ancient physician says by way of explanation. "Some shrapnel is inevitable, isn't...

Begins with the linguistic and intellectual foundations of Chinese literature and moves successively through verse, prose, fiction, drama, and commentary and criticism; it then closes with popular and peripheral manifestations. A special feature is the focus on such contextual subjects as the history of popular culture, the effect of religion upon literature, the role of women, and relationships with non-Sinitic languages and peoples.

Originally published in 1908, this is a collection of fourteen short stories by O. Henry, most focusing on two "grafters" (that is, confidence men), who have a certain code of ethics by which they operate. They try to hoodwink the wealthy, never the poor. Includes illustrations for several stories by H.C. Greening, a cartoonist and friend of Henry's. "A Tempered Wind" is illustrated by May Wilson Preston, one of the few women in the Society of Illustrators...

The Horse's Mouth, the third and most celebrated volume of Joyce Cary's First Trilogy, is perhaps the finest novel ever written about an artist. Its painter hero, the charming and larcenous Gulley Jimson, has an insatiable genius for creation and a no less remarkable appetite for destruction. Is he a great artist? a has-been? or an exhausted, drunken ne'er-do-well? He is without doubt a visionary, and as he criss-crosses London in search of money...