A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture examines the cultural and historical contexts behind the work of major Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, and Gabriel Garcнa Mбrquez.

African American women writers have made an enormous contribution to our culture. Many of these authors wrote during the Harlem Renaissance, a particularly vital time in African American arts and letters, while others have been especially active since the 1970s, an era in which works by African American women are adapted into films and are widely read in book clubs. Literature by African American women is important for its aesthetic qualities, and it also illuminates the social issues which these authors have confronted. This book conveniently surveys the lives and works of African American women writers. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on more than 150 African American women novelists, poets, playwrights, short fiction writers, autobiographers, essayists, and influential scholars. Some of these figures, such as Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor, are among the most popular authors writing today, while others have been largely neglected or are recently emerging.

In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s.

Kipling affects a wide-eyed innocence, and expresses astonishment at features of American life that differ from his own, not least the freedom (and attraction) of American women. However, he scorns the political machines that made a mockery of American democracy, and while exhibiting the racist attitudes that made him controversial in the 20th century concludes “It is not good to be a negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Will America come to own the twenty-first century? Will its power and ideas dominate the globe? Or will the United States buckle underneath the pressure of new international challenges?

This groundbreaking book looks at changing patterns of American thought and culture at the dawn of the new millennium, a time in which the world's richest nation has never been more powerful or controversial. The volume brings together eminent North American and European thinkers to investigate the crucial issues and challenges facing the United States. From the subterranean political shifts of the electoral landscape to the latest biomedical advances, from the literary response to 9/11 to the rise of reality television, this collection explores the political, social, and cultural contours of contemporary American life. It also places the United States within a global narrative of commerce, cultural exchange, international diplomacy, ideological conflict, and war. These eighteen original essays address leadership, foreign policy, propaganda, religion, health, technology, immigration, 9/11, and digital media. Locating the roots of our contemporary concerns, contributors revisit the Clinton years and even earlier periods of twentieth-century American history, while also looking forward to the potential conflicts of a global future and to the soaring possibilities of American enterprise and imagination.

Crane wrote the first draft of this book in only ten days. As the story of a young boy's first battle, not only in war but with his own fear, pride, and cowardice, it still remains as one of the best fictions about the American Civil War.