"With her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic, Linda Hogan reinforces my faith in reading, writing, living." —Barbara Kingsolver Raised in a remote seaside village, Thomas Witka Just marries Ruth, his beloved since infancy. But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.

Originally written in Dutch, Adriaen Coenen's illustrated manuscripts represent the first European natural history of whales and other marine animals.

The story of a whale's life as told by the whale in the dream of a 13 year old boy

A rich and captivating novel set amid the witty, high-spirited literary society of 1850s New England, offering a new window on Herman Melville’s emotionally charged relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and how it transformed his masterpiece, Moby-Dick In the summer of 1850, Herman Melville finds himself hounded by creditors and afraid his writing career might be coming to an end—his last three novels have been commercial failures and the critics have turned against him. In despair, Melville takes his family for a vacation to his cousin’s farm in the Berkshires, where he meets Nathaniel Hawthorne at a picnic—and his life turns upside down. The Whale chronicles the fervent love affair that grows out of that serendipitous afternoon. Already in debt, Melville recklessly borrows money to purchase a local farm in order to remain near Hawthorne, his newfound muse. The two develop a deep connection marked by tensions and estrangements, and feelings both shared and suppressed. Melville dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne, and Mark Beauregard’s novel fills in the story behind that dedication with historical accuracy and exquisite emotional precision, reflecting his nuanced reading of the real letters and journals of Melville, Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and others. An exuberant tale of longing and passion, The Whale captures not only a transformative relationship—long the subject of speculation—between two of our most enduring authors, but also their exhilarating moment in history, when a community of high-spirited and ambitious writers was creating truly American literature for the first time.

Pacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of “becoming oceanic” and suggests a different mode of understanding, viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present, remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty. At the same time, as a planetary element necessary to sustaining life and well-being, the Pacific could become the means to envisioning ecological solidarity, if compellingly framed in terms that elicit consent and inspire an imagination of co-belonging and care. The Pacific can signify a bioregional site of coalitional promise as much as a danger zone of antagonistic peril. With ground-breaking writings from authors based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and new modes of research – including multispecies ethnography and practice, ecopoetics, and indigenous cosmopolitics – authors explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically grounded range of research themes. This volume aims to decenter continental/land poetics as such via long-standing transnational Pacific ties, re-worlding Pacific literature as world literature.

America From Apple Pie to Ziegfeld Follies is a four book series of reproducible low level ESL/EFL/Literacy reading and discussion texts. Each unit examines an element of the American experience that will genuinely interest and inform not only immigrants to the United States but also learners abroad who want to know more about the people, history, geography and culture of this great nation. Although the passages are limited to an elementary level of language difficulty, their style remains vivid and authentic. Readers will be inspired by the courage of Harriet Tubman, awed by the beauty of the Grand Canyon, fascinated by the work of the F.B.I., and shocked by the events surrounding Watergate.

Whaling has become one of the most controversial environmental issues. It is not that all whale species are at the brink of extinction, but that whales have become important symbols to both pro- and anti-whaling factions and can easily be appropriated as the common heritage of humankind. This book, the first of its kind, is therefore not about whales and whaling per se but about how people communicate about whales and whaling. It contributes to a better understanding and discussion of controversial environmental issues: Why and how are issues selected? How is knowledge on these issues produced and distributed by organizations and activists? And why do affluent countries like Japan and Norway still support whaling, which is of insignificant economic importance? Basing his analysis on fieldwork in Japan and Norway and at the International Whaling Commission, the author argues how an image of a "superwhale" has been constructed and how this image has replaced meat and oil as the important whale commodity. He concludes that the whaling issue provides an arena where NGOs and authorities on each side can unite, swapping political legitimacy and building personal relations that can be useful on issues where relations are less harmonious.

This accessible and unusually wide-ranging book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonial and African American women's writing. It provides a valuable gender and culture inflected critical introduction to well established women writers: Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Margaret Atwood, Suniti Namjoshi, Bessie Head, and others from the U.S.A., India, Africa, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and introduces emergent writers from South East Asia, Cyprus and Oceania. Engaging with and clarifying contested critical areas of feminism and the postcolonial; exploring historical background and cultural context, economic, political, and psychoanalytic influences on gendered experience, it provides a cohesive discussion of key issues such as cultural and gendered identity, motherhood, mothertongue, language, relationships, women's economic constraints and sexual politics.

Wonderful for browsing, and invaluable for finding specific information, Literature Lovers Book of Lists is a compendium of useful and sometimes whimsical information for anyone who loves books and loves to read, at any age or reading level. It is organized into nine sections and provides nearly 200 lists relating to genres, authors, characters and settings, awards, literary terms with their definitions and much more. There are even lists of books of prose and poetry available on audiocassettes. If it has to do with literature, this book has the answers. What book has had the longest run on The New York Times best-seller list? Who is the only four-time winner of the Pulitizer Prize for drama? What is the complete list of Shakespeare's plays and poems? Who are some of the most notable African American authors? What are the three main variations of the sonnet? What famous writers belonged to The Bloomsbury Group? Literature Lovers Book of Lists is both exciting and informative at the same time.