Absolom, Absolom! has long been seen as one of William Faulkner's supreme creations, as well as one of the leading American novels of the twentieth century. In this collection Fred Hobson has brought together eight of the most stimulating essays written over a thirty-year span which approach the novel both formally and historically.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: "Happy Days," "Heathen Days," "Newspaper Day"s, "Prejudices," "Treatise on the Gods," "On Politics," "Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work," "Minority Report," and "A Second Mencken Chrestomathy."

Written in 1941-42, these highlights capture the excitement of newspaper life in the heyday of print journalism.

The Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South brings together contemporary views of the literature of the region in a series of chapters employing critical tools not traditionally used in approaching southern literature. It assumes ideas of the South-global, multicultural, plural: more Souths than South-that would not have been embraced two or three decades ago, and it similarly expands the idea of literature itself. Representative of the current range of activity in the field of southern literary studies, it challenges earlier views of antebellum southern literature, as well as, in its discussions of twentieth century writing, questions the assumption that the Southern Renaissance of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was the supreme epoch of southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came afterward was judged. As well as canonical southern writers, it examines Native American literature, Latina/o literature, Asian American as well as African American literatures, Caribbean studies, sexuality studies, the relationship of literature to film, and a number of other topics which are relatively new to the field.