The Best American Catholic Short Stories captures twenty of the best short stories from thirteen American Catholic writers over the past seventy-five years. Spanning most of the twentieth century, the stories in this collection deal with many of the issues brought into the spotlight with Vatican II. One ongoing area of controversy, of course, is in the very notion of Catholic fiction. What constitutes a work as "Catholic"? This new collection, with its rich variety of themes, styles, and tones, takes an important step in answering this question. Pat Schnapp and Dan McVeigh have assembled an extraordinary sampling that is unique in its subject and scope. Major contributors include Mary Gordon, Flannery O'Connor, Ron Hansen, T. Coraghessan Boyle, and Richard Russo.

Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize for History, Great River was hailed as a literary masterpiece and enduring classic when it first appeared in 1954. It is an epic history of four civilizations--Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American--that people the Southwest through ten centuries. With the skill of a novelist, the veracity of a scholar, and the love of a long-time resident, Paul Horgan describes the Rio Grande, its role in human history, and the overlapping cultures that have grown up alongside it or entered into conflict over the land it traverses. Now in its fourth revised edition, Great River remains a monumental part of American historical writing.

In July, 1921, Peter Hurd was a West Point plebe with dreams of a military destiny. But by the spring of 1924, the young man from Roswell, New Mexico, had abandoned the army as a career and was studying painting in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, under N. C. Wyeth. The experiences that led Hurd to art, and ultimately to fame as a painter of the Southwest, are candidly revealed in this comprehensive autobiographical collection of Hurd's letters and journals. Introduced by Paul Horgan, award-winning novelist, historian, and biographer and lifelong friend of Hurd, the book spans fifty years of Hurd's life. Beginning with his cadet days at the U.S. Military Academy, the letters trace his apprenticeship under Wyeth; his romance with Henriette, Wyeth's daughter; the Hurds' family life in both Pennsylvania and New Mexico; Hurd's passionate love for the Southwest; his friendships with other artists and writers; his various painting techniques; and his philosophy of art. "My credo is a simple one," Hurd once wrote. "It is to live just as intensely as possible, to keep my perceptions at a peak of sensitivity, and to try to realize to the fullest every moment of consciousness." The story of one of America's premier realist painters will fascinate those interested in the creative arts as well as anyone who savors clear and eloquent prose.

Gathers brief, humorous poems about Marie Antoinette, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Thoreau, Woolf, Sand, Dreiser, James, Browning, Stein, Bach, Poe, Liszt, Brahms, and Freud.