This is a collection of tales that will appeal to both general readers and to gambling enthusiasts. The stories deal with the most profound of human passions stirred by the compulsion for taking chances. These are not stories about the mechanics of gambling, but instead, as Doyle Brunson notes in the introduction, these are tales that both engage the reader with lively writing and deal with fundamental human concerns: relationships, self esteem, love, hate. The contributors to the volume are experienced writers who are dedicated to telling good yarns and who know about gambling.

"Never Forever Dead," is a paranormal book that offers information and relays the experiences and stories of a hostile haunts investigator of thirty years. The book is geared to offer some new insights, and theories, that the author has developed, from her three decades of working hostile haunts cases. Everything in this book has been taken directly from the author's own experience, and not from other sources.

American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon.

Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes: DEGREESL DEGREESDBLA brief biography DEGREESL DEGREESDBLA discussion of major works and themes DEGREES DEGREESDBLA survey of the writer's critical reception DEGREESL DEGREESDBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sour

Women writers have been traditionally excluded from literary canons and not until recently have scholars begun to rediscover or discover for the first time neglected women writers and their works. This reference includes alphabetically arranged entries on 58 American women authors who wrote between 1900 and 1945. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and discusses a particular author's biography, her major works and themes, and the critical response to her writings. The entries close with extensive primary and secondary bibliographies, and the volume concludes with a list of works for further reading.

The period surveyed by this reference is rich and diverse. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, two major artistic movements, occurred between 1900 and 1945, and the entries included here demonstrate the significant contributions women made to these movements. The volume as a whole strives to reflect the diversity of American culture and includes entries for African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Chinese American women. It includes well known writers such as Willa Cather and Eudora Welty, along with more neglected ones such as Anita Scott Coleman and Sui Sin Far.

Eudora Welty holds a prominent position among Southern writers, receiving critical attention in publications that scan a wide range of interests. Journals that specialize in American literature, journals that publish general essays, and journals that focus on Southern literature frequently include articles about her works. Her writings have been included in anthologies and have been adapted for the stage and television. This book traces the evolving critical response to her fiction.

In a lucid introductory essay, Champion presents an overview and summarizes the body of criticism on Welty's fiction. The rest of the volume presents representative selections of criticism from the initial reception of Welty's work to the present day. The selections are grouped in chapters devoted to Welty's principal writings. Her fiction is treated chronologically, and the selections within each chapter are also arranged in chronological order. Thus the book charts the development of Welty criticism over an extended period of time. A bibliography of works for further reading completes the volume.

Proclaimed by H.L. Mencken as one of the great masterpieces of the world and by Ernest Hemingway as the source of all modern American literature, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains firmly established in both the American and world literary canons as a classic work of literature. Yet it continues to have its critical detractors and still arouses the kind of impassioned controversy that banned it from the Concord, Massachusetts, Public Library on publication as trashy and vicious. The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn contains newspaper articles, book reviews, and scholarly essays spanning the period from the early response in the 1880s, through the centennial celebration, to the present. The collection reflects the major literary trends and issues of response to Huckleberry Finn, such as the persistent attempts to ban the book, the literary criticism concerning the book's ending, and the many thematic interpretations. Among the essayists included are literary figures such as T.S. Eliot and Twain specialist scholars such as Walter Blair, Leo Marx, and James Cox. The text of an ABC-TV Nightline News Special on the centennial, Huckleberry Finn: Literature or Racist Trash is printed. Editor Champion provides an introductory overview on the range and issues of critical response, a feature on the various adaptations of Huckleberry Finn, and a bibliography of additional scholarship. Of interest to any scholar or researcher of Mark Twain, the collection would be valuable to teachers and students reading Huckleberry Finn at any level from high school upward.

Though Anita Scott Coleman was born in Mexico and reared in New Mexico, her stories appeared frequently in ""The Crisis"" and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Reflecting and illuminating the movements major themes, her often award-winning stories, delicate and understated, offer subtle commentary on the status of black women, their role in black society, and the position of African Americans in an overwhelmingly white society. As a young woman in New Mexico, Anita Scott graduated from New Mexico Teachers College and enjoyed a brief teaching career until she married. Later she moved to California, where despite her distance from Harlem she wrote her last nine published stories, polished examples of the Renaissances finest short fiction, including Unfinished Masterpieces. As one by one the journals of the Harlem Renaissance ceased publication, Coleman's career itself remained regrettably unfinished. By 1960, when she died at age seventy, the literary legacy of this masterful southwestern storyteller was forgotten. What Champion and Glasrud have recovered in this collection is more than Coleman's complete collected short fiction. It is a road map of African American life in the Southwest and West during the movements glory days, etching not only indelible glimpses of character and culture but also the farthest reaching evidence of the Harlem Renaissances success in sharing ideals and goals across a nation.