Based on extensive interviews with authors, editors, and publishers in four countries, this book examines the economic, social, and literary effect of the end of communist domination and accompanying cultural subsidies in Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The end of the communist regime has made the position of writer less lucrative as well as less prestigious within these four countries. Likewise, the countries' respective publishing markets are struggling to adjust to a new economy in which books are more expensive, Western competition is ever-increasing, and distribution systems must be rebuilt. The author addresses each of these concerns as they affect the individual nations and Central Europe as a whole and includes extensive bibliographical citations for primary and secondary works referenced in each chapter.

Levels of Incompetence is a rollicking reminiscence through eight decades of a life well-spent. Bob Davis is a skilled raconteur whose tales are spiced by the remembered pleasures of academic life, peripatetic travels, and endearing family profiles, and his wit and lively style are on full display.

In Born Again Skeptic & Other Valedictions, University of Oklahoma emeritus professor and peripatetic knowledge-seeker Robert Murray Davis tackles the big questions: about origins, identity, emotional and intellectual rootlessness; the little questions: why some small towns call to us and others don't, how academia works, or doesn't; and third-rail questions: about sex, relationships, women, men, religion, and aesthetics. The essays are witty and provocative, and Davis's writing style is both erudite and conversational.

Mapping out a cosmos bounded by heaven, hell, Kansas City, and St. Louis, Robert Murray Davis looks back on his life in central Missouri in the 1940s and 1950s. As he recalls his youth and early adulthood in the town of Boonville, Davis wryly contemplates some of the sharp dichotomies by which his world was ordered: grown-ups and kids, blacks and whites, Protestants and Catholics, boys and girls, town and country, work and play, art and life.

Davis sees now that as he grew up in white, postwar mid-America, he seldom pondered the limitations that its "either/or" perspective on life imposed. Sometimes, however, intimations about the world's complexity were too strong for him to ignore. The presence of an occasional black teammate in baseball jarred him into the realization that he knew nothing about some segments of Boonville society. His high school principal's lenient response to a teacher's demand for Davis's expulsion bared a weakness in the united front of adult authority over children. The boldness of the first girl in his class to wear makeup repelled and attracted him--and confused him about sex even more than did his Catholic education.

Many of Davis's recollections involve his family and read like captions to snapshots in a family album. However different they were from each other, the two family branches were unified by their mutual regard for uniqueness of character (Davis says his mother felt that one's real duty was not to be right but to be interesting). Anything said or done by a family member had story potential, and Davis learned at an early age that transgressions were judged less harshly if their retelling enhanced an already varied and idiosyncratic family saga.

Amid droll profiles of relatives like his guntoting, nearsighted grandfather, Davis also passes along such gems of practical information as the best way to kill a chicken and how to judge character by the car a person drives. Combining memoir with social history and inspired storytelling, "Mid-Lands" is a reflective and entertaining evocation of regional American life.

Compiled on the occasion of Evelyn Waugh's centenary in 2003, this collection of essays shows a renewed critical interest in the author extended by scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. The contributions go back to an international symposium held at La Rioja University, 15-17 May 2003. Apart from traditional debate over questions of fact and interpretation, the book contains innovative approaches to Waugh's oeuvre, some of which make use of theories of discourse and media studies and denote an increasingly sophisticated awareness of his religious, political, and social contexts. Beginning with those essays presenting overviews of Waugh's life and work, and continuing with discussions of particular books in chronological order, this volume deals with a wide variety of aspects that confirm Waugh's rising status a major twentieth-century classic.