This book contains not only more than 400 sea shanties - chanteys to Americans - but as much of their history as Stan Hugill could collect in his extraordinary career as sailor, scholar, author, artist and inspiration to new generations of sea-music enthusiasts and performers.

Our most death-defying adventures and wildest flights of imagination—the stuff such as dreams are made of—this is the realm of fantasy. And ever since ancestral storytellers created myths of monsters, lost worlds, dragons, and heroes, fantastical tales have transported us to these magical places beyond. William Morris, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard are just a few examples of writers who sailed off the edge of their known worlds into...

"Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading A Book Is A Sign Of Order In The World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter--and utterly pleasurable--immersion."--Publisher...

"From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, "not for its what but its how." In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to "rhyme and the way we really talk," Leithauser...

P. D. James--one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today--gives us a personal, lively exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it. She examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens's Bleak House, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Sara Paretsky. She compares...