"Like dispatches from another world, the twenty one essays in David Searcy's blazingly original Shame and Wonder are unfamiliar, profound, and haunting. Formerly a writer of literary horror, Searcy had essentially given up writing before he found himselfdrawn back--this time, to nonfiction--in his late sixties. Writing on a 1953 Olivetti typewriter in the spare Dallas studio he shares with his girlfriend, Searcy began writing, teasing out the Big...

"Until the twentieth century, scientists investigating the effects of drugs on the mind did so by experimenting on themselves. Vivid descriptions of drug experiences sparked insights across the mind sciences, pharmacology, medicine, and philosophy. Accounts in journals and literary fiction inspired a fascinated public to make their own experiments--in scientific demonstrations, on exotic travels, at literary salons, and in occult rituals. But after...

Why should we read? We assume that reading is good for us, but often we cannot articulate exactly what it does for us. In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially and cognitively. The book offers a comprehensive account of what counts as fiction, nonfiction and other genre distinctions. Ultimately the author supports the thesis that reading, hearing and...

Overview: W. B. Yeats was born in 1865, only 38 years after the death of William Blake, and died in 1939, the contemporary of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. His career crossed two centuries, and this volume represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by Cathleen...