Bøger udgivet af Stephen F. Austin University Press

In some ways, this volume 7 in the Ann and F. Lee Lawrence East Texas History Series of site-specific monographs, is a continuation of number 5, San Augustine, A Texas Treasure, also by John and Betty Oglesbee. After completing that assignment successfully, the Oglesbees have extended their interest and historical coverage westward approximately 100 miles along El Camino Real, essentially the modern route of State Highway 21. Again, they visited the sites, absorbed their historical, cultural, and one might say even spiritual manifestations and now pass them on to later travelers who follow in the footsteps made by Father Damien Massanet in 1690, Louis St. Denis in 1714, Sam Houston in 1833--or you, as you visit San Augustine, Nacogdoches, or Crockett. As usual, the Oglesbees provide wonderful illustrations of the scenes they describe.

"A storyteller with remarkable gifts." --Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. The Wonders of the Little World is a compelling novel that, like a journey down the midway of a colorful carnival, is filled with mystery and magic, surprise and wonder. Estelle Esmeralda, a fortune teller in a suffocating, small-scale carnival, is unable to predict her own future, much less discover where her missing husband has gone. With their precocious eleven-year-old daughter riding along, Estelle sets out on a road trip to search for Tony, a charismatic tightrope walker who disappeared suddenly on a quest to rectify his past. Interspersed between Estelle and Tony's chapters are secret journal entries by the spunky Ariel, who fills the pages with creative observations about her life within the unique and sometimes puzzling confines of the carnival. The Wonders of the Little World will delight the reader like a free-wheeling thrill ride that leads straight to the heart. With its unforgettable main characters trying to discover their place in the world, the story explores the thin lines between truth and lies, between who someone is and who they want to be. Part road trip across 1960s America, part love story, and part illumination of a family struggling to heal itself, this novel immerses the reader into a world that is not only entertaining but also moving and, ultimately, enlightening. Bill Meissner's prose is simultaneously a subtle and high-wire act, and his story-telling talents are on full display in The Wonders of the Little World. This new novel is both haunting and lovely as Meissner brings this gallery of irresistible, compassionately rendered carnival characters to life. And to a way of life: unique, nomadic, and most of all, emotionally riveting at every stop along the way. -- Jack Driscoll, author of 20 Stories: New & Selected Bill Meissner is such a beautiful writer. I admire his voice, his eye for detail, and his gentle humor, and The Wonders of the Little World might be his best novel yet. I was hooked from page one, and ready to follow Ariel, Estelle, and Tony wherever the road might take them. There's wonder and magic in these pages. -- Shannon Olson, author of Welcome to My Planet: Where English is Sometimes Spoken Regarding Meissner's previous novel, National Book Award winner Tim O'Brien stated, "Meissner has the storyteller's gift for creating living characters, living speech, living emotions, living drama. He knows the workings of the human heart."

In his debut poetry collection Little Palace, Adam Gellings gives readers a perfect example of that often-repeated but rarely achieved instruction: "show, don't tell." These sophisticated poems wander through the busy streets of Paris, past quiet courtyards full of flowers, into a kitchen that smells of fresh-baked bread. This metropolitan yet nostalgic collection brings the reader into new places and experiences while reminding them of familiar truths about human connection, the fugitive feeling of travel, and the universality of art."Adam J. Gellings doesn't write poems so much as he partitions arrondissements of feeling on the page." Dante Di Stefano, author of Lullaby with Incendiary Device

"Cyrus Cassells, a masterful poet and translator, has created a unique and powerful hybrid translation/poetic homage to Catalunya's great twentieth-century poet Salvador Espriu. The lion's share of To the Cypress Again and Again is a supple translation of Espriu's first book, Sinera Cemetery, along with selections from other collections. A reader will come away with a poignant sense of Espriu's beloved seaside landscape as well as, in Espriu's words, his "precious Catalan's/ mysterious gold" a language that was suppressed and forbidden under Franco's regime. Cassells has given us an enduring gift to the memory of Espriu-through his personal introduction, his loving translations, followed by his own Espriu-inspired poems that evoke "an alphabet of cypresses and sea-light," thus transmuting Espriu's elegiac voice into Cassells's own." -Sharon Dolin"At this particular darkening hour in Europe, we are graced by Cyrus Cassells's homage to Salvador Espriu. A survivor of Spain's civil war, who then became an internal émigré, Espriu intimately knew the cost of war and destruction. In exquisite, moving poems such as Sinera Cemetery, masterfully rendered by Cassells, we encounter Espriu's grieved, but resolute, fortitude: 'Liberty, the enduring word I utter time and again/between ancient boundaries/of vineyards and the sea.' Cassells's dialogue with Espriu is a gift, an enactment of the sacred pledge to uphold, against all odds, the 'enduring word.'" -Ellen Hinsey, author of The Illegal Age and Update on the Descent"To the Cypress Again and Again: Tribute to Salvador Espriu is a triumph of affinities, a testament to a translator's steady, slow-burning attention to a poet's work-and to the rich metamorphoses sparked by such devotion. These charged, luminous translations exalt Espriu's stark lyrics; not just accompanying but also communicating with them, Cassells's own poems are contemplative and ecstatic. Every translation is a conversation, and I'm grateful for this book as an example of both how and why." -Robin Myers, translator of Copy by Dolores Dorantes and Another Life by Daniel Lipara"Cyrus Cassells has translated more than the words of Salvador Espriu, a Catalan poet who survived what Franco wanted to bury. His translation brings a culture, a time, and an honoring of the duende that gave inner life to a 'sacramental duty' of bringing Espriu to the English language and the world poetic psyche. His own poems inspired by Espriu: 'I became all poetry, / all silence and verse--' are, I might say, transfigurations of exile in a native land. This book is masterful and rare in its beauty. A must read for all that value freedom and the everlasting life of a cypress." -Lisha Adela García, Literary translator and author of Blood Rivers and A Rope of Luna

Anna and Sebastian opens as a much older Anna grapples with aging and a disorienting change in the relationship with her long-time lover, Sebastian. Years earlier he hired a woman who, unlike Anna, was still of child-bearing age. Now, eighteen years later, the daughter, attempting to live alone as an adult, is sexually assaulted and trafficked. At this point, the novel explores the effects of assault and trafficking not only on Sebastian's daughter, but on Anna, who adapted to the unusual paternity, and on Sebastian, who did not bargain for the suffering he experiences as a father.

After the Locks are Changed showcases Gary Fincke's ability to not only write in multiple points of view, but to also locate and ground stories in places as varied as Los Angeles, small-town Pennsylvania, rural Appalachia and New York City. From straight-forward narratives to ones that are braided, associative, and multi-voiced, this veteran writer continues to write unflinching stories about American life.

Selected from six collections and over two decades of poems beginning with the promise of Nightwalking and carrying through to the award-winning Bone Music, Joel Peckham's Any Moonwalker Can Tell You draws from the best of a maximalist, gritty body of work that manages to balance page and stage. Intense and accessible, these poems channel the cosmic, longlined, and loose-limbed expansiveness of Whitman and the sonic, image-driven experimentation of Kinnell. Though this is a Selected Poems, there is thematic unity--a focus on how the personal and the collective intersect, how acts of empathy can access the ecstatic, and how music has the capacity to transform despair into hope. Beginning with the poet walking at night through a midwestern town and ending among the stars in a sequence of new poems that completes the collection, there is an upward and outward trajectory. Of Peckham's collection, The Heat of What Comes, composed in the aftermath of an accident that took lives of his wife, Susan, and his oldest son, Cyrus, Jack Ridl once wrote that "Joel Peckham has written a survival guide to America" in which the reader is "hurled through the culture's plurality of attacks on the heart. His grief is searing. He leads us through." Taken as a whole, this New and Selected Poems is a testament to the poet's recognition that survival is not enough, we must find a way to keep living, keep making music even after the record has stopped spinning: "the song having ended but not the hurried beating of the heart."

Journey into the lyrical world of Under a Gathering Sky, a compelling poetry collection that weaves together a narrative of exploration, introspection, and the timeless act of questing. In a masterful arrangement of five sections, these poems beckon readers to traverse a landscape marked by personal reckonings and the enduring legacies of literary greats. Opening with "Auguries," this collection gracefully dances across facial and temporal boundaries, laying down the foundation of an odyssey that challenges and inspires. The second section presents a series of slant dialogues, evoking powerful conversations with iconic poets and writers such as William Blake and Emily Dickinson, revealing the universality of human experience across eras.

Discover the transformative power of memory, love, and resilience. Our Creative Journey through A.D. chronicles one family's journey as they navigate the progression of Alzheimer's. Part artwork, part narrative, this testament of the human spirit not only captures the clinical aspects of Alzheimer's but also explores the emotional roller coaster that every family member rides--from denial, anger, and confusion to acceptance, love, and grace. This book offers solace to those directly impacted by Alzheimer's and insight to others fortunate enough not to have been immediately touched by it.

The aging process is a sneaky son-of-a-gun. It begins by lurking around the edges of one's life and occasionally darting into your person to take a bite out of your well-being. It then zips back into the shadows and waits for the next opportunity to reappear and take another bite out of your youth, your appearance, your confidence, and/or your already fragile self-concept. You'd like to grab it and strangle it, but it's always out of sight and out of reach. Each bite it takes out of one's existence leaves the victim a little less capable of ignoring the damage done by the attacks and a little less able to ignore their cumulative effects. Fighting against aging is a losing battle, but we do have a good shot at enjoying the many good parts of it. Aging Comes Without a Manual is a humorous look at aging and the notion that "seventy is the new fifty."

A self-portrait in the year of the high commission on love take place during the first year of the Reagan era. Jon "Duke" Wain, a charmed 18-year-old growing up in Meyerland, Houston's historic Jewish section, who is the heir apparent to his family's generations of rabbis, finds a companion for drinking, drugs, and living wildly in Manolo Salazar, his gay best friend, who has grown up in Hispanic Gulfgate, heir to his own father's evangelical ministry. On a Saturday night in September, in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island, then heading down the Texas coastline, intent on not returning home. On a Saturday night in September, in 1981, the night Nolan Ryan pitches his record fifth no-hitter at the Astrodome, the two scions light out for Galveston Island, then heading down the Texas coastline, intent on not returning home. Binging among an assortment of dangerous revelers, Duke meets Caroline Cahill, a haunting young woman who turns out to be a runaway from West Texas, and whose mother Duke discovers he may know a troubling secret about. Confronted at the threshold of life and fate, Duke wonders if Caroline Cahill's story is the route to putting his birthright behind him. The answer will change his life. A Self-Portrait in the Year of the High Commission on Love is about the tensions between ambition and faith, duty and desire, art and life--and about those whose lives must live with the consequences of choosing one over the other."--

This poetic biography tracks the life and career of landscape artist Albert Bierstadt, whose 19th-century representations of the American west earned him wealth and international acclaim. Relaying the story primarily through Bierstadt's voice, this imaginative collection also includes perspectives from the painter's family, friends, critics and patrons as it chronicles his youth in New Bedford, Massachusetts, his apprenticeship in Europe, his meteoric fame following western expeditions, and the emotional turbulence of diminished reputation due to changing cultural tastes. These narrative, lyric, and ekphrastic poems touch the momentum of the developing west, the devastation of native tribes and the great buffalo herds, as well as the resiliency of Bierstadt's art in times of environmental awareness and expansionist reappraisal. Neither defense nor homage, The Best Material for the Artist in the World offers a balanced appreciation of an influential artist-explorer who gave us iconic, sometimes mythic views of our defining wilderness landscapes.