Arrested in 1849 for belonging to a secret group of radical utopians, Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to four years in a Siberian labor camp - a terrible mental, spiritual, and physical ordeal that inspired him to write the novel The House of the Dead. Told from the point of view of a fictitious narrator - a convict serving a ten-year sentence for murdering his wife novel describes in vivid detail the horrors that Dostoevsky himself witnessed while in prison. The House of the Dead also describes the spiritual death and gradual resurrection from despair experienced by the novel’s central character ...

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy

Genre: An Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy  provides a critical overview of the rich body of scholarship that has informed a "genre turn" in Rhetoric and Composition, including a range of interdisciplinary perspectives from rhetorical theory, applied linguistics, sociology, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literary theory.

The English Language: From Sound to Sense

Grounded in linguistic research and argumentation, The English Language: From Sound to Sense  is written to help readers become independent language analysts capable of critically evaluating claims about the language and the people who use it.

As a "reporter on the afterlife," Kurt Vonnegut bravely allows himself to be strapped to a gurney by his friend Jack Kevorkian and dispatched-round-trip-to the Pearly Gates. Revised and rewritten for this slim volume, Vonnegut's "interviews" range from the gossamer-slight to the deliciously barbed. Among the dead people he is privileged to talk to are Salvatore Biagini, a retired construction worker who died of a heart attack while rescuing his schnauzer from a pit bull; John Brown, still smoldering 140 years after his death by hanging; William Shakespeare, who spouts quotations and ...