This study of the short stories of Raymond Carver also takes excursions into his poetry and essays. Runyon argues that the stories are intricately linked as part of a cohesive body of work.

The fox and the crow, the tortoise and the hare, the hen that laid the golden eggs - all of these familiar characters, and more, are present and accounted for in this complete translation of La Fontaine's fables. Runyon's translation is delightfully fresh and faithful to the original French. He brings new life to these timeless tales. "Dr. Randy Runyon brings La Fontaine's fables alive for a new generation of English readers. Moving from the rhyme-rich, late seventeenth-century French to rhyme-poor English, he employs the couplet to maintain surprising, apt and often humorous rhyme patterns throughout the twelve books of the fables. The wisdom and good sense of the fables is no surprise, the feeling, in this translation, that they are of and for our time is a surprise." James A. Perkins, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, Westminster College, and author of Decembers and The All-American, Coast-to-Coast, Icebox Poetry Anthology.

Robert Penn Warren's reputation as a poet, though always considerable, has soared in the last decade, as indicated by his recent selection as America's first poet laureate. The Braided Dream is one of the first book-length studies of the poetry that has led to Warren's recent rise to eminence and the first to consider his final collection, Altitudes and Extensions. In a communicable, jargon-free style that will appeal to the nonacademic reader as well as the serious scholar, Randolph Paul Runyon provides a detailed and illuminating guide to a body of poetry that, despite its greatness, has until now seemed resistant to full understanding. Every poem of Warren's last four sequences -- Now and Then, Being Here, Rumor Verified, and Altitudes and Extensions -- is given a close reading, with a precise laying-out of words, phrases, and recurring images that not only enrich the texture of the poetry but are themselves the texture. Runyon demonstrates the relevance of Freud's concept of the dream work of the unconscious to a reading of this tightly interwoven poetry. He shows how Warren's poems assume additional meanings by the poet's very arrangement of them, deepening his thesis by arguing that "poems eat poems" as each reuses and reconceptualizes the imagery of its predecessor, frequently with ironic or parodic effect.

" In this captivating tale, Randolph Paul Runyon follows the trail of the first woman imprisoned for assisting runaway slaves and explores the mystery surrounding her life and work. In September 1844, Delia Webster took a break from her teaching responsibilities at Lexington Female Academy and accompanied Calvin Fairbank, a Methodist preacher from Oberlin College, on a Saturdary drive in the country. At the end of their trip, their passengers--Lewis Hayden and his family--remained in southern Ohio, ticketed for the Underground Railroad. Webster and Fairbank returned to a near riot and jail cells. Webster earned a sentence to the state penitentiary in Frankfort, where the warden, Newton Craig, married and a father, became enamored of her and was tempted into a compromising relationship he would come to regret. Hayden reached freedom in Boston, where he became a prominent businessman, the ringleader in the courthouse rescue of a fugitive slave, and the last link in the chain of events that led to the Harpers Ferry Raid. Webster, the focal point at which these lives intersect, remains an enigma. Was she, as one contemporary noted, ""A young lady of irreproachable character""? Or, as another observed, ""a very bold and defiant kind of woman, without a spark of feminine modesty, and, withal, very shrewd and cunning""? Runyon has doggedly pursued every historical lead to bring color and shape to the tale of these fascinating characters.