Literary Collections

What would you do if your eighty-year-old father dragged you into his hell-bent hunt for new love? Bob Morris, a seriously single son, tells you all about it in this warm, witty, and wacky chronicle of a year of dating dangerously. A few months after the death of his wife, Joe Morris, an affable, eccentric, bridge-obsessed octogenarian, starts flapping about for a replacement. If he can get a new hip, he figures, why not a new wife? At first, his son Bob is appalled, but suspicion quickly turns to enthusiasm as he finds himself trolling the personals, screening prospects, and offering etiquette tips, chaperoning services, and post-date assessments to his needy father. Bob hopes that Joe will find a well-heeled lady—or at least one who is very patient—to get him out of his hair. But soon they discover that finding a new mate will not be as easy as they think: one date is too morose, another too liberal; one's a three-timer, another just needs an escort until Mr. Right comes along. Dad persists and son assists. Am I pimping for my father? he begins to wonder. Meanwhile, Bob suffers similar frustrations; trying to find love isn't easy in a big-city market that has little use for a middle-aged gay man with an attitude and a paunch. But with the encouragement of his father (his biggest fan and the world's "most democratic Republican") he prevails. In the end, this memoir becomes a twin love story and a soulful lesson about giving and receiving affection with an open heart. With wicked humor and a dollop of compassion, Bob Morris gleefully explores the impact of senior parents on their boomer kids and the perils of dating at any age. more...

Price: $19.95

Early modern autobiographies and diaries provide a unique insight into women's lives and how they represented themselves. Combining a fresh account of the development of autobiography with close reading, this important contribution to the fields of early modern literary studies and gender studies illuminates the interactions between literature and autobiography. more...

Price: $64.00

Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850–December 3, 1894), was a Scottish novelist, poet and travel writer, and a representative of neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, and J. M. Barrie. Most modernist writers dismissed him, however, because he was popular and did not write within their definition of modernism. It is only recently that critics have begun to look beyond Stevenson's popularity and allow him a place in the canon. [Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Louis_Stevenson under the terms of the GNU-FDL] more...

Price: $7.99

Because I Tell a Joke or Two explores the complex relationship between comedy and the social differences of class, region, age, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nationhood. more...

Price: $43.95

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany to an American soldier father and a German mother in 1920, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for fifty years. He published his first story in 1944 when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He died in San Pedro, California on March 9, 1994 at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp (1994). During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), Ham on Rye (1982), and Hollywood (1989). His most recent books are the posthumous collections What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire (1999), Open All Night: New Poems (2000), and Beerspit Night and Cursing: The Correspondence of Charles Bukowski & Sheri Martinelli 1960-1967 (2001). All of his books have now been published in translation in over a dozen languages and his worldwide popularity remains undiminished. In the years to come Black Sparrow will publish additional volumes of previously uncollected poetry and letters. SHERI MARTINELLI (1918-1996) was an artist, writer, model, and magazine editor. She studied ceramics at the Philadelphia School of Arts, engraving at Atelier 17, and literature with Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Federal Hospital for the Insane. Reproductions of some of her paintings were published in La Martinelli (1956), with an introduction by Pound. She edited the Anagogic & Paideumic Review (1959-70) and privately published numerous booklets of prose, poetry, and drawings. STEVEN MOORE is the author/editor of five previous books—three on William Gaddis, one on Ronald Firbank, and an anthology of vampire poetry—and has contributed numerous essays on modern literature to a variety of more...

Price: $13.95