Maxine Hong Kingston

Autobiographical accounts and fictional writing by veterans and other trauma victims, including survivors of gang violence, domestic violence, and drug abuse.

"To Be the Poet is Kingston's manifesto, the avowal and declaration of a writer who has devoted a good part of her sixty years to writing prose, and who, over the course of this spirited and inspiring book, works out what the rest of her life will be, in poetry. Taking readers along with her, this celebrated writer gathers advice from her gifted contemporaries and from sages, critics, and writers whom she takes as ancestors. She consults her past, her conscience, her time - and puts together a volume at once irreverent and deeply serious, playful and practical, partaking of poetry throughout as it pursues the meaning, the possibility, and the power of the life of the poet.". "A manual on inviting poetry, on conjuring the elusive muse, To Be the Poet is also a harvest of poems, from charms recollected out of childhood to bursts of eloquence, wonder, and waggish wit along the way to discovering what it is to be a poet."--BOOK JACKET.

"In this collection of interviews, Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. From the first, her books have hovered along the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and imagination. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created." "She explains how she worked to bridge her parents' Chinese dialect with American slang, how she learned to explore her inheritance and find new relevance in her mother's "talk-stories," and how she developed the complex juxtapositions of myths and memoir that fill her books."--BOOK JACKET.

In this collection of eleven pieces, originally issued as a limited hand-printed edition, Maxine Hong Kingston does not attempt to capture Hawai'i but "instead and incidentally" to describe her "piece by piece, and hope that the sum praises her." The essays provide readers with a generous sampling of Kingston's signature: an angle of vision, exquisitely balanced and clear-sighted, that awakens one to a knowledge of things.

A young Chinese-American hippie in San Francisco during the late 60s is driven by his dream of writing and staging an epic production of interwoven Chinese novels and folktales, taking the reader on an extraordinary journey through an era.

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts is Kingston's disturbing and fiercely beautiful account of growing up Chinese-American in California. The young Kingston lives in two worlds: the America to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." Her mother tells her traditional tales of strong, wily women warriors - tales that clash puzzlingly with the real oppression of women. Kingston learns to fill in the mystifying spaces in her mother's stories with stories of her own, engaging her family's past and her own present with anger, imagination, and dazzling passion.

Incident —Countee Cullen 5 Excerpt from The History of Art —H. W. Janson 11 Don't let that horse/eat that violin —Lawrence Ferlinghetti 11 The Upturned Face —Stephen Crane 14 How to Defuse the Population Bomb—Robert S. McNamara zz Population: The Uninvited Guest—Eugene Linden 30 Excerpt from My Lord, What a Morning —Marian Anderson 34 Parent and Child: What's behind spiked hair and pierced ears—Lawrence Kutner 37 Language and the Lunatic Fringe —Doris Lessing 40 Excerpt from Mr. Godolphin—Martha Sullivan Research in Brief: Flight of the Bumblebee —Mary Jones 48 How a New England Legend Came to Be —Alan Ferguson 50 Maintaining the Organic Lawn 51 Village of Snake Charmers Sees Hard Times —Barbara Crossette 52 Assault Weapons Aren't 'the Problem —Gary Kleck 54 Our Two-Sided Brain —John Chaffee 65 Stars —Sara Teasdale 80 Excerpt from Tarzan of the Apes—Edgar Rice Burroughs 91 The Waning Moon—Percy Bysshe Shelley 103 Hagar the Horrible—Dik Browne 103 The First Tastes of Vintage '93—Bryan Miller 104 '80s-Babble: Untidy Treasure —Stefan Kanfer 105 Dermatitis —Samuel M. Bluefarb, M.D. 117 A Brief History of Exercise—Victoria Roberts 143 [The Story of an Hour]( —Kate Chopin 177 I'm Your Horse in the Night—Luisa Valenzuela 183 Appointment in Samarra—W. Somerset Maugham 191 Excerpt from Elmira—Richard Brautigan 197 Excerpt from [Fahrenheit 451]( Bradbury 203 Chains 1942—Fanny Tillman Trueherz and Sandra Brown 209 Jack Luggage —William McGreevy 221 Girls of Summer —Marie Brenner 229 Death in the Orchard—Edward Brown 235 Excerpt from "No Name Woman" in The Woman Warrior—Maxine Hong Kingston 241 A Rough Ride—John Marchese 247 Marian Anderson Is Dead at 96; Singer Shattered Racial Barriers —Allan Kozinn 257 300 People of Letters Come To Pulitzer's Birthday Party—James Barron 265 How to Assay an Essay —Carmen Collins 283 Hand, Eye, Brain: Some "Basics" in the Writing Process—Janet Emig 289 Seeing and Imagining: Clues to the Workings Of the Mind's Eye—Sandra Blakeslee 295 Linguists Debate Study Classifying Language As Innate Human Skill —Gina Kolata 305 The Many Lives and Tricks of 9 —Pico Iyer 313 Cross Out a Landmark on the Chinatown Tour—Michael T. Kaufman 319 Dollie And Johnnie—William Safire 325 Into the Sunshine and Another Spring—John A. Gould 331 Language of Early Americans is Deciphered —John Noble Wilford 337 In Praise of the Humble Comma—Pico lyer 345 The 30•Second Spot Quiz —Hugh Rank 362 The Communication Collapse—Norman Cousins 371 Appearances Are Destructive—Mark Mathabane 377 Voters Assailed by Unfair Persuasion—Daniel Goleman 383 When Movies Ruled Our Lives—Theodore Roszak 399 Hue and Cry—Barbara Flanagan 407

The Adventure of the Speckled Band, by Arthur Conan Doyle Death Arrives on Schedule, by Hansjörg Martin The Feeling of Power, by Isaac Asimov The Expedition, by Rudolf Lorenzen The Cegua, by Robert D. San Souci Master and Man, by Leo Tolstoy Just Lather, That's All by Hernando Téllez Nervous Conditions, by Tsitsi Dangarembga Marriage Is a Private Affair, by Chinua Achebe Cranes, by Hwang Sun-won Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Gir, by Anne Frank Letter to Indira Tagore, by Rabindranath Tagore Letter to the Rev. J. H. Twichell, by Mark Twain When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, by Le Ly Hayslip By Any Other Name, by Santha Rama Rau Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane China Men, by Maxine Hong Kingston The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, by Willy Lindwer Account Evened With India, Says P.M., From Dawn Tests Are Nowhere Near India's: Fernandes, From The Times of India Pakistan Nuclear Moratorium Welcomed, From the BBC Online Network The Frightening Joy, From De Volkskrant Building Atomic Security, From Zycie Warszawy Macbeth, by William Shakespeare "Master Harold"... and the Boys, by Athol Fugard The Stronger, by August Strindberg The Diameter of the Bomb, by Yehuda Amichai Taking Leave of a Friend, by Li Po Thoughts of Hanoi, by Nguyen Thi Vinh Mindoro, by Ramón Sunico Ode to a Pair of Socks, by Pablo Neruda Haiku by Matsuo Bashō Haiku by Takarai Kikaku Haiku by Anonymous Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas Letter to the English, by Joan of Arc Nobel Lecture, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn Gettysburg Address, by Abraham Lincoln Inaugural Address, by John F. Kennedy Of Repentance, by Michel de Montaigne A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid A Modest Proposal, by Jonathan Swift Cup Inanity and Patriotic Profanity, From the Buenos Aires Herald Staying at a Japanese Inn: Peace, Tranquillity, Insects, by Dave Barry Why Can't We Have Our Own Apartment?, by Erma Bombeck Lohengrin, by Leo Slezak A Wedding Without Musicians, by Sholom Aleichem