This collection of 25 essays of literary criticism includes pieces on British poet John Milton, British fantasy writer C. S. Lewis, American horror writer Stephen King, American SF and fantasy writer Orson Scott Card, British horror writer Clive Barker, and several others. Complete with bibliography and index.

Science fiction and fantasy verse, including more than 50 poems, broken into four sections: "The World and Time"; "In the Shadow of the Gods"; "Nightmares in Daytime"; and "Apocalypse and Beyond."

This is the collected work of a major, versatile American poet passionately engaged with everything from the Holocaust and the Spanish Civil War to his love for New York City and his wife. The editors argue that his long poem sequence, Denmark Vesey, stands as the most ambitious poem about African American history ever written by a white American. Wicked Times includes previously unpublished poems and the first detailed account of Kramer's life, along with photos and extensive explanatory notes.

The canon of Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost writers of dark and atmospheric fiction and poetry, offers readers haunted shores teeming with various erudite men brooding in the waning light over their feelings for unobtainable women. Yet, whether the tales or verses are grotesque or sinister, Poe's narrators are Outsiders, dealing with emotions that so many LGBT individuals feel: isolation and abandonment as well as loneliness and lost love. In the Shirley Jackson Award nominated Where Thy Dark Eye Glances, editor Steve Berman has assembled a range of tales that queer the prose and poetry of the Poe, the man himself, as well as dark and eerie stories about reading Poe's work.

If the Truth Be Told: Accounts in Literary Forms plays with the sense of truth. It is composed of six chapters, “Childhood Dangers,” “Relational Logics,” “Jesus Chronicles,” “Criminal Tales,” “Aging, Illness, and Death Lessons,” and “Telling Truths.” Each chapter includes fictional and nonfictional accounts, including poems, stories, monologues, short dramas, essays, creative nonfiction, and mixed genres, to address each chapter’s subject. Pieces are based on the author’s personal experiences, newspapers accounts, and purely fictional accounts (all revealed in an appendix at the end of the book). Moving through the book from beginning to end, readers may or may not know whether they are reading a nonfictional or fictional text. Pelias intentionally subverts assumptions readers may have in reading the different pieces in order to blur the boundaries of what counts as evidence, what might be accepted as truth, what might be of use in everyday lives. In this vein, Pelias invites readers to consider what they value and why. As an engaging compilation of literary works, this book can be read by anyone simply for pleasure. If Truth Be Told can also be used in any number of college courses in communication, creative writing, cultural studies, ethics, narrative inquiry, philosophy, psychology, sociology and qualitative inquiry. The book includes an extensive appendix with general and chapter-by-chapter discussion questions. “If the truth be told, I’d confess that I found myself in many of the stories he told; I anticipate that other readers will as well, and we’ll all be better for it. If the Truth Be Told solidifies Pelias’s standing as a wise and creative writer par excellence.” – Carolyn Ellis, University of South Florida “For anyone interested in learning how to poetically and creatively capture the human experience, If the Truth be Told is a must read. Each tale richly satisfies yet whets the desire for more; the only solution is to keep reading right through to the end.”– Lesa Lockford, Bowling Green State University Ronald J. Pelias has spent his career working with the fusion of performance, literature, and qualitative methods in an ongoing search for truths that provide momentary places of rest.

Challenging Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," Beyond Lament is a rich and varied anthology consisting of new and previously published poems about the atrocity of the Holocaust. Marguerite M. Striar has arranged the nearly 300 poems by the likes of Paul Celan, Nelly Sachs, Czeslaw Milosz, Dannie Abse, and Robert Pinsky, as well as many others, to tell the story of the Holocaust.