Novel Ideas: November 2017

This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world. By chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. His search leads to his own death -- and to the author's timeless investigation into the nature of love and the meaning of the human condition. This new edition of Wilder's 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning novel contains a new foreword by Russell Banks.

A national bestseller when it first appeared in 1963, The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two "letters," written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle...all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.

Tracing the struggle for freedom and civil rights across two centuries, this anthology comprises speeches by Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other influential figures in the history of African-American culture and politics. The collection begins with Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America," followed by Jermain Wesley Loguen's "I Am a Fugitive Slave," the famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech by Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass's immortal "What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?" Subsequent orators include John Sweat Rock, John M. Langston, James T. Rapier, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Francis J. Grimk#65533;, Marcus Garvey, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s "I Have a Dream" speech appears here, along with Malcolm X's "The Ballot or The Bullet," Shirley Chisholm's "The Black Woman in Contemporary America," "The Constitution: A Living Document" by Thurgood Marshall, and Barack Obama's "Knox College Commencement Address." Includes two selections from the Common Core State Standards Initiative: "I Have a Dream" and "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July."