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Naval hero for all the South, Raphael Semmes (1809-1877) sailed two famous Confederate raiders. He outfitted CSS Sumter in 1861 and captured 18 Union merchant ships in six months before the raider was blockaded at Gibraltar. Next he took command of CSS Alabama, an English-built raider, and terrorized U.S. merchant vessels on the high seas from August 1862 until the raider was sunk in battle off Cherbourg in June 1864. During that two-year period, he captured more enemy merchant ships than any other cruiser captain in maritime history. He is considered one of the greatest ship's commanders that America has produced.  In this first, full-scale biography that relies on Semmes's private papers, unpublished diaries, and correspondence, Spencer has produced a well-balanced and comprehensive account of the man, as well as the naval officer. The biographer paints a vivid portrait of Semmesthe intellectual, the family man, lawyer, romanticist, nationalistproviding a greater understanding of the man behind the heroic deeds.  Semmes was born in Maryland to a slave-holding family and entered the United States Navy in 1826. In 1849, he moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, to be near the navy base at Pensacola, Florida, and to practice law during leaves. Semmes was an astute student, not only of international and maritime law but also of weather patterns; astronomy; flora and fauna; naval, social, and cultural history; and the classics. His study of constitutional law led him to side with his adopted state in 1861, a move that set the stage for his place in history.    

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A fictional meditation on time and experiencepart journal, part meditation, part dreamscape   In language that is frank and uncompromising, Rob Stephensons debut novel, Passes Through, moves forward in a rare and daring manner. Part journal, part meditation on aesthetics, part dreamscape, Passes Through investigates experience, identity, beauty, and sexuality, while provocatively complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagination versus observation. It is a narrative of and about language, a narrative of and about narrative.    Can we truly experience the present, the novel asks? No, we cannot, Passes Through suggests again and again. Stephenson throws to the wayside all of the traditional elements of fiction and in doing so composes a sort of musical composition of obsessive consciousness and selfhoods slippage. This haunting novel never takes the easy route and baffles and confounds on its way toward a stunning yet inevitable finale.

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Politics and Welfare in Birmingham, 19001975

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This well-written volume explores the relationships between politics and welfare programs for low-income residents in Birmingham during four periods in the twentieth century:  1900-1917, the formative period of city building when welfare was predominantly a responsibility of the private sector;  1928-1941, when the Great Depression devastated the local economy and federal intervention became the principal means of meeting human need;  the mid 1950s, when the lasting impacts of the New Deal could be assessed and when matters of race relations became increasingly significant;  1962-1975, when an intense period of local government reform, the Civil Rights movement, federal intervention in the form of the War on Poverty, and increasing demands for citizen participation all reinforced one another.  From the time of its founding in 1871, Birmingham has had a biracial population, so the theme of race relations runs naturally throughout the narrative. LaMonte pays particular attention to those efforts to achieve a more harmonious biracial community, including the failed effort to establish an Urban League in the 1940s, the progressive activities of the Community Chests Interracial Division in the 1950s, which were abruptly terminated, and the dramatic events of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when local events were elevated to international significance.

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Nietzsche's Kisses is the story of Friedrich Nietzsche's last mad night on earth. Locked in a small room on the top floor of a house in Weimar, the most radical and influential of nineteenth-century German philosophers hovers between dream and wakefulness, memory and hallucination, the first person, second, and third, past and present, reliving his brief love affair with feminist Lou Salome, his stormy association with Richard Wagner, and his conflicted relationship with Lisbeth, his radibly anti-Semitic sister. Here is an authoritative portrait of the Nietzsche we know and the Nietzsche we don't. His titantic ego, suppressed, squelched, and sealed up within him, all but unknown to his acquaintances, creates a maniacal and raging giant inside his own skull that is mysterious and unnerving. Both stylistically and formally innovative, the prose in Nietzsche's Kisses is surprising and rich. The result is a vivid, complex experience of Nietzsche's final hours.    

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Originally published in 1986, this new edition returns to print a classic, influential work of American fiction  The author of the acclaimed novel Reflex and Bone Structure returns here in My Amputations to the question of identity, the double, adventure, detection, and mystery, but with more hypnotic power and range. In My Amputations he has his protagonist, Mason Ellis (who may just be a desperate ex-con or a wronged American novelist out to right the wrong done to him), jump through flaming loops like a trained dog, so to speak. In other words, there seems to be no end to the troubles Mason Ellis faces.   His story takes him from the South Side of Chicago, to New York, with a stint in Attica prison, across America and Europe and into the primal depths of Africa. Mason, all the while, tries to convince the reader that he is the important American writer he says he is. Upon his release from prison he sets out to prove his claim. After an audacious bank-robbery and a couple of burglaries that are hilarious, he goes into hiding to escape the malice of one of his cohorts, and eventually flees to Europe. The irony is that he is now as much the runner as the seeker. After encounters with a Zuni ex-folksinger, kidnappers, the New York underworld, literary groupies, an Italian swordsman, a violent German secret society, and an anti-bellum cotillion in rural Greece, he finds himself face to face (behind a mask) with his own destiny.

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Rhetorical Knowledge in Legal Practice and Critical Legal Theory

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A clear summary of contemporary rhetorical philosophy and its intersections with hermeneutics and critical theory   This book describes the significance of rhetorical knowledge for law through detailed discussions of some of the most difficult legal issues facing courts today, including affirmative action, gay rights, and assisted suicide.   Francis J. Mootz responds to both extremes, those who argue that law is merely a rhetorical mask for the exercise of power and those who demonstrate an ideological faith in laws autonomy, and he breaks new ground by returning to modern classics in the fields of rhetoric and hermeneutics. Drawing from Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric" and Hans-Georg Gadamer's "philosophical hermeneutics," Mootz argues that justice is a product of rhetorical knowledge. Drawing from Nietzsche, Mootzs conception of rhetorical knowledge opens up the dynamic possibilities of critical legal theory.   

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The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi

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Deanne Stephens Nuwer explores the social, political, racial, and economic consequences of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic in Mississippi. A mild winter, a long spring, and a torrid summer produced conditions favoring the Aedes aegypti and spread of fever. In late July New Orleans newspapers reported the epidemic and upriver officials established checkpoints, but efforts at quarantine came too late. Yellow fever was developing by late July, and in August deaths were reported. With a fresh memory of an 1873 epidemic, thousands fled, some carrying the disease with them. The fever raged until mid-October, killing many: in Mississippi 28 percent of yellow fever victims died. Thought to be immune to the disease, blacks also contracted the fever in large numbers, although only 7 percent died. There is no consensus explaining the disparity, although it is possible that exposure to yellow fever in Africa provided blacks with inherited resistance.   Those fleeing the plague encountered quarantines throughout the South. Some were successful in keeping the disease from spreading, but most efforts failed. These hit hardest were towns along the railroads leading from the river, many of which experienced staggering losses.   Yellow fevers impact, however, was not all negative. Many communities began sanitation reforms, and yellow fever did not again strike in epidemic proportions. Sewer systems and better water supply did wonders for public health in preventing cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. Mississippi also undertook an infrastructure leading to acceptance of national health care efforts: not an easy step for a militantly states' rights and racially reactionary society.  

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Greg Mulcahys new novel opens on a man suffering an accident at his workplace. His colleagues there are known, at least initially, only as OHearn and Minouche. In the aftermath of the incident, this trinity begins to fall apart. His career falls apart. His life falls apart.   OHearn is the story of the story the man tells himself in confused chronology as he struggles to make sense of a world and a landscape where things have stopped making sense.   The laws of causation are absent or profoundly obscured in this explanatory narrative, but then so is all individual motivation. Action seems to end only in a world of winners and losers and occurs solely to reinforce that world by further enriching the winners at the, sometimes willful, expense of the losers.    OHearn is funny, contradictory, satiric, heartbreakinga work unlike anything in our contemporary literature.

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Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds

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Winner of the 2013 CNY Book Award for Fiction.   When you step inside Patrick Lawlers Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds, you will find yourself hovering in the clouds, among a family and a town, and in the world of one of fictions most inventive writers.   Patrick Lawlers novel is about resonance, echoes, and naming; about hiding inside of names; about standing completely still; and about the fractalization of family. Connect the dots. Connect the secrets. Mother. Father. Sisters. Brother. Every character wears a variety of masks, and every place is also someplace else.   Rescuers of Skydivers Search Among the Clouds is a reconfiguring of narrativehow stories exist inside stories, how place exists inside self, how self exists inside others, and how parachutists exist inside clouds.

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WINNER OF FC2s AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW/RONALD SUKENICK INNOVATE FICTION PRIZE  Step inside a gallery where the strange feels familiar. A monogrammed cube appears in your town. Your landlord cheats you out of first place in the annual Christmas decorating contest. You need to learn how to love and care for your matea paring knife. These situations and more reveal the wondrous play and surreal humor that make up the stories in Amelia Grays stunning collection of stories: Museum of the Weird. Acerbic wit and luminous prose mark these shorts, while sickness and death lurk amidst the humor. Characters find their footing in these bizarre scenarios and manage to fall into redemption and rebirth. Museum of the Weird invites you into its hallways, then beguiles, bewitches, and reveals a writer who has discovered a manner of storytelling all her own.

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Vignettes of a middle-class American family told through lists, each reflecting their obsessions, their complaints, their desires, and their humanity.  A suburban family of foura man, woman, boy, and girlstruggle through claustrophobic days crowded with home improvement projects, conflicts at work and school, a job loss, illnesses, separation, and the wearying confrontation with aging. The accoutrements of modern lifeelectronic devices and vehicleshave ceased to be tools that support them and have become instead the central fulcrums around which their lives wheel as they chase cleanliness and other high virtues of middle American life.   In Matthew Robersons hands, the familys list-making transcends the simple goal of planning. Their lists reveal the aspirations and anxieties that lie beneath the superficial clatter of everyday activities. Fearing the aimless chaos of unplanned days, the family compulsively compiles lists as maps to steer them away from uncertainty and failure, and yet at what point does a list stop being a map and become the final destination? The family creates an illusory cloud of meaningful activity but cannot stave off the mortal entropies that mark the suburban middle class.

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The eleven stories and one novella of Mother Box, and Other Tales bring together everyday reality and something that is dramatically not in compelling narratives of new possibilities.  In language that is both barb and bauble, bitter and unbearably sweet, Sarah Blackman spins the threads of stories where everything is probable and nothing is constant. The stories in Mother Box, and Other Tales occur in an in-between world of outlandish possibility that has become irrefutable reality: a woman gives birth to seven babies and realizes at one of their weddings that they were foxes all along; a girl with irritating social quirks has been raised literally by cardboard boxes; a young woman throws a dinner party only to have her elaborate dessert upstaged by one of the guests who, as it turns out, is the moon. Love between mothers and children is a puzzling thrum that sounds at the very edge of hearing; a muted pulse that, nevertheless, beats and beats and beats.  In these tales, the prosaic details of everyday lifea half-eaten sandwich, an unopened pack of letters on a tabletake on fevered significance as the characters blunder into revelations that occlude even as they unfold.

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A surrealist account of the creative and descriptive arts.  In these five surrealist collages, waking life continually gives way before the onslaught of dreams. Yuriy Tarnawsky has condensed the vastness of scope typical of novels into shorter fragmentsmininovelsthat require the readers active participation. The tone is a balance of dead-pan comedy and solemn gothic, sometimes a near-parody of wide-eyed candor, sometimes recounting utterly mad or barely conceivable states of affairs.  A candidate for major surgery struggles unsuccessfully to avoid it. Two strangers meet, and eventually marry, after participating in scream therapy. A pianist stops playing because he believes his hand is not there when he sits at the keyboard. A character sees the giant blue and white flowers he has craved his whole life only at the instance of his electrocution. Tyler Pavarotti, a tailor, voluntarily takes a role in a production in which he will be killed. Tarnawskys language is elegant and careful, and his studied concentration of rhythm allows his work to transcend prose, nestling somewhere within the realm of musical composition. Both tragic and beautiful, in these stories life dissolves in time like blood in water.   

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A stunning new collection of stories by a master fictionist, Once Human shows the ways to go beyond standard maps of simple understanding  A manga artist who is afraid that she herself is slipping into a cartoon version of life, a lab technician who makes art with the cloning technology she uses at work, a sociologist hunting for the gene that makes some people want to take risksthese are some of the characters that populate the stories in Once Human. Exploring the spaces where life is shaped by science and the technologies we bring into being, Steve Tomasulas characters often find that the harder they look at the world, the less they can say. The map that emerges from these stories charts the territory of human longing and the failure of poetry, science, and technology to explain the why of the world, if not its how.

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Matthew Kirkpatricks debut, Light without Heat, is an inventive, surprising collection of short stories full of odd, marginal characters rendered with surreal humor and lyrical, often beautiful language.   Formally playful, these stories take the shape of biographies, instructions, glossaries, and diagrams, all ultimately in the service of depicting characters with emotional intensity.   Stories in the collection explore the flawed nature of memory, workplace malaise, the isolation of home, and the last throes of ending love. No two stories in Light without Heat are the same, yet all of them work toward sharing human experience in new, innovative ways.

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Linda Perdido, the story of the antisocial Linda Perdido told by her well-behaved sister Qua, is a memoir like no other.  Set in a vast and unknown region in the Midwest, Mac Wellmans Linda Perdido chronicles the lives of two sisters: Linda and Qua Perdido. Linda is bad, acting out every antisocial impulse she has and then some; Qua is good but comes to hate her sister, though she chooses to write a memoir about her, thus Linda Perdido.   Their lives are complicated by many figures, among them the Traveler, a lonely man who follows the migration patterns of a strange bird, the Perdido Macaw; the Counter-Terrorist, who gets his facts wrong and cannot decipher the ominous chatter; a FedEx delivery man, Donn Morocco, who loses his mind after his truck is stolen by the rampaging Linda. These and others meet and complicate each others lives, often ruinously, culminating at what will become Ground Zero on the day before the attacks.

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This collectionderived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibilitycontains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth.   At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of formsgenres, anti-genres, fantasies, gameswhile highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary life: Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.

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La Medusa is a polyphonic novel of post-conceptual consciousness. At the heart of the whole floats Medusa, an androgynous central awareness that anchors the novel throughout. La Medusa is at once the city of Los Angeles, with its snaking freeways and serpentine shifts between reality and illusion, and a braina modern mind that is both expansive and penetrating in its obsessions and perceptions. Vanessa Places charactersa trucker and his wife, a nine-year-old saxophonist, an ice cream vendor, a sex worker, and a corpse, among othersare borderless selves in a borderless city, a city impossible to contain. Her expert ventriloquism and explosive imagination anchor this epic narrative in language that is fierce and vibrant, a penetrating a cross-section of contemporary Los Angeles and a cross-section of the modern mind.

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A story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be. After burning up the blacktop in New Mexico with The Fast Red Road and rewriting Indian history on the Great Plains with The Bird is Gone, Stephen Graham Jones now takes us to Montana. Set on a Blackfeet Indian reservation, Ledfeather lays bare the life of one Indian boy, Doby Saxon: his near-death experience, his suicide attempts, his brief glimpse of victory, and the unnecessary death of one of his best friends. But through Doby emerges a connection to the past, to an Indian Agent who served the United States government over a century before. This revelation leads to another and another until it becomes clear that the decisions of this single Indian agent have impacted the lives of generations of Blackfeet Indiansand the life of Doby Saxon, a boy standing in the middle of the road at night, his hands balled into fists, the reservation wheeling all around him like the whole of Blackfeet history collapsing in on him. Joness beautifully complex novel is a story of life, death, love, and the ties that bind us not only to what has been, but what will be: the power of one moment, the weight of one decision, the inevitability of one outcome, and the price of one life.

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It Was Like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted Nature

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This work by Diane Williams delves into the strange relationships of men and women. From marital betrayal to spousal abuse and unrelenting desire, Williams illuminates the lives of her characters in prose as sparse and stark as it is beautiful. These stories are as short as prose poems and as complex as novels. In them, meanings remain ambiguous and consequences seem uncertain. In the novella On Sexual Strength she describes the intense and sometimes strange relationship between two neighboring couples and the rage that comes with adultery, and a narrator whose social inadequacies and lack of inhibitions lead to destruction.   The world Williams creates is a sensual place where quiet epiphaniessuch as   the one that occurs after an extramarital affair are also possible: It was like My Trying to Have a Tender-Hearted nature. This is how love can be featured. Such flashes of insight and emotion glue together the fragments of life Williams lays before the reader, and the reader rejoices at the revelations.