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Written before but published after The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Craneâs Maggie: A Girl of the Streets offers a stark image of the underbelly of urban American life at the end of the nineteenth century. Maggie Johnson, a lovely innocent too slight to carry the weight of poverty, dreams of escaping New Yorkâs Bowery and the casual cruelty of her alcoholic family. After her younger brother dies, she runs off with Pete, a bartender with pretensions to wealth and culture. But Pete himself is easily seduced by the seemingly sophisticated Nellie, and Maggie finds herself abandoned in the unforgiving metropolis.
Publishers feared that Craneâs portrait of brutal fathers swilling away their lives in cheap bars, drunken mothers raging at terrified children, and ruined young women walking the streets, would be more than their readers could bear. But Craneâs impressionistic style and thematic intensity won the day, and Maggie—the authorâs favorite among his works—helped to shape the writers that followed him and begin the era of literary naturalism.
This edition also includes the short novel Georgeâs Mother, plus “A Night at the Millionaireâs Club,â “Opiumâs Varied Dreams,â “When a Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers,â and several other of Craneâs masterful short stories.
Robert Tine is the author of six novels, including State of Grace and Black Market. He has written for a variety of periodicals and magazines—from the New York Times to Newsweek.
Magic City weaves history, mysticism and murder into a tightly plotted tale of ordinary yet heroic characters. Joe Samuels, a young black man trying to be the next Houdini, must solve the riddle of his brother's ghost and find a way to escape being lynched for a rape he did not commit. Mary Keane, a young white woman, must find a way to free herself from her own loneliness and fight to make townsfolk listen to her and exonerate Joe. Ghosts, magic, jail escapes and a visitation from Houdini create the backdrop for Joe's and Mary's journeys of self-discovery and racial understanding. A harrowing and mythic tale of dreams, magic and violence gone awry, Magic City leads the reader through twists and turns to a conflagration of destruction and revelation.
"The Metamorphoses of Ovid offers to the modern world such a key to the literary and religious culture of the ancients that it becomes an important event when at last a good poet comes up with a translation into English verse." âJohn Crowe Ransom
"... a charming and expert English version, which is right in tone for the Metamorphoses."ÃÂ âFrancis Fergusson
"This new Ovid, fresh and faithful, is right for our time and should help to restore a great reputation." âMark Van Doren
The first and still the best modern verse translation of the Metamorphoses, Humphries' version of Ovid's masterpiece captures its wit, merriment, and sophistication.
Everyone will enjoy this first modern translation by an American poet of Ovid's great work, the major treasury of classical mythology, which has perennially stimulated the minds of men. In this lively rendering there are no stock props of the pastoral and no literary landscaping, but real food on the table and sometimes real blood on the ground.
Not only is Ovid's Metamorphoses a collection of all the myths of the time of the Roman poet as he knew them, but the book presents at the same time a series of love poemsâabout the loves of men, women, and the gods. There are also poems of hate, to give the proper shading to the narrative. And pervading all is the writer's love for this earth, its people, its phenomena.
Using ten-beat, unrhymed lines in his translation, Rolfe Humphries shows a definite kinship for Ovid's swift and colloquial language and Humphries' whole poetic manner is in tune with the wit and sophistication of the Roman poet.
In the first story, "The Use of Reason," a lifelong burglar is nearly brought down by his mother, who talks too much when she drinks in her local pub. In "A Song," Noel, on the town with a group of his musician friends, ends up in the same bar as his estranged mother, who is asked to sing. She sings an Irish ballad about love and treachery and he is convinced that she is singing directly to him. In "A Priest in the Family," Molly's son Frank is accused of abuse, but no one has the courage to tell her until it is almost time for the trial. Her reaction is not entirely predictable. "Three Friends" takes place after a young man attends his mother's funeral. He joins his friends for a night of carousing and drugs ending with a late-night swim, where he is emboldened to make an overt sexual pass at one of his buddies, with interesting results. The final story, "A Long Winter," is set in Spain in a remote village. Miquel's mother drinks. Everyone knows it but Miquel. His father pours out her supply of booze and she leaves the house. So far it's a simple story. It doesn't stay that way. Each of these stories has its own gravitas, its own sadness, and that laser-beam of insight that is Toíbín's trademark. --Valerie Ryan