The fourteen essays collected here provide an up-to-date survey of the important films based on, or inspired by, nineteenth-century American fiction, from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans to Owen Wister's The Virginian. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book includes production stills and full filmographies. Together with its companion volume on twentieth-century fiction, the volume offers a comprehensive account of the rich tradition of American literature on screen.

The author is interested in the process of reading, in how readers reconstruct meanings in texts, especially meanings that are inferred or left unstated. Her central claim is that the process of reading is informed by a deep cognitive architecture, a set of skills for reading cues that one brings to texts. She conceives the process of reading texts as one of reading minds, of uncovering default meanings embedded in narratives. Since developing a theory of the unspoken, as it were, is difficult, Zunshine turns to a particular population, people who are autistic and who have difficulty reading the thoughts of others and have limited imaginative capacity. Drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology, Zunshine probes the structures of mind that motivate production of narrative, exploring a series of hypotheses "about cognitive cravings that are satisfied ... and created ... when we read fiction."

With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy.

This tale leads us back to Boston in the early part of the twentieth century and into two completely captivating worlds. One is that of Lydia, an Irish-American shop girl with bigger aspirations than your average young woman from South Boston. She seems to be well on her way to the life she has dreamed of when she marries Henry Wickett, a shy medical student and the scion of a Boston Brahmin family. However, soon after their wedding Henry abruptly quits medical school to create a mail-order patent medicine called "Wickett's Remedy," and just as Lydia begins to adjust to her husband's new vocation, the infamous Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 begins its deadly sweep across the world, irrevocably changing their lives. In a world turned almost unrecognizable by swift and sudden tragedy, Lydia finds herself working as a nurse in an experimental ward dedicated to understanding the raging epidemic-through the use of human subjects.

In a beautiful hymn to wildness, Kingsolver celebrates the prodigal spirit of human nature and of nature itself. Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate takes over the countryside, the novel's characters find their connections to one another in the forested mountains of southern Appalachia.

Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions, and get renewed from time to time. Mr. Keillor's full design is a genuine work of American history as well as a comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life. Keillor's strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary Keillor's laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength. His true subject is how daily life is shot with grace. He writes a prose that can be turned to laughter, tears, compassion, satire or a hundred other effects.

The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch, saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud, and ether addict and abortionist. It is also the life story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who was never adopted.

Since his retirement from the Navajo Tribal Police, Joe Leaphorn has been called on occasionally by his former colleagues to help them solve a puzzling crime. Leaphorn, aided by Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito, always delivers. But this time, the problem is with an old case of Joe's, his "last case," unsolved and still haunting him. And with the absence of Chee and Bernie, Leaphorn is on his own. Interestingly, the case involved a priceless Navajo rug gone missing. Now, years later, Leaphorn is picking up the threads of a crime he'd thought impossible to solve.

Dreamer is the first work of fiction to explore Martin Luther King’, Jr.’s life. The story, told by Matthew Bishop, one of King's devoted followers, is also a tale of doubles, warring brothers, envy, and inequality. The novel introduces us to Chaym Smith, a man whose startling physical resemblance to King wins him the job of official stand-in. In the course of training Chaym to shield King from danger, Matthew comes to realize the philosophical magnitude of our greatest civil rights leader and the ambiguities within the Movement itself, and he as well as the reader, are irreversibly changed. What makes one man great and the other just a mirror for greatness could be revealed in this novel.

For preternaturally prescient Lucas Chandler, the year 1952 is full of secrets, sweet, tragic, and mysterious. At 7, he still sleeps under the bed when he's scared and disappears behind his mother's skirts from time to time. But he's old enough to understand that prejudice, class rivalry (townies paint their houses; farmers don't), and violence are part of the fabric of his outwardly quiet farming community. Abandoning the political and courtroom venues of his popular thrillers, Grisham calls up the cotton fields of his native Arkansas as a setting for this thriller.

This novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one. Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him, answers "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe it must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet is considered "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print."

In 1996, a rare book expert is offered the job of a lifetime: analysis and conservation of a mysterious, beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain recently saved from destruction during the shelling of Sarajevo's libraries. When Hanna Heath, a caustic Aussie loner with a passion for her work, discovers a series of tiny artifacts in the book's ancient binding, an insect-wing fragment, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair, she begins to unlock the mysteries of the book's eventful past and to uncover the dramatic stories of those who created it and those who risked everything to protect it. In Bosnia during World War II, a Muslim risks his life to protect it from the Nazis. In the hedonistic salons of fin-de-siecle Vienna, the book becomes a pawn in the struggle against the city's rising anti-Semitism. In Venice in 1609, a Catholic priest saves the book from the Inquisition's fires. In Taragona in 1492, the scribe who wrote the text sees his family destroyed by the agonies of forced exile. Finally, in Seville in 1480, the reason for the manuscript's extraordinary illuminations is disclosed. Hanna's investigations unexpectedly plunge her into the intrigues of fine art forgers and ultranationalist fanatics.

This novel takes on the world of politics and explores the role of the writer in our times with an extraordinary moral compass. At the center of the book is Senor C, an aging author who has been asked to write his thoughts on the state of the world by his German publisher. These thoughts, called "Strong Opinions," address a wide range of subjects and include a scathing indictment of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Tony Blair, as well as being a witheringly honest examination of everything from Machiavelli and the current state of the university to music, literature, and intelligent design, offering unexpected perceptions and insightful arguments along the way. Meanwhile, someone new enters the writer's life. She is Anya, the beautiful young woman he hires to type his manuscript. The relationship that develops between Senor C and Anya has a profound effect on both of them.

When Jasmine is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a life of quiet isolation in the small Indian village where she was born. But the force of Jasmine's desires propels her explosively into a larger, more dangerous, and ultimately more life-giving world. In just a few years, Jasmine becomes Jane Ripplemeyer, the adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee and pregnant by her husband a middle-aged Iowa banker .. Jasmine's metamorphosis, with its shocking upheavals and its slow evolutionary steps, illuminates the making of an American mind. Even more powerfully, her story depicts the shifting contours of an America being transformed by her and others like her, our new neighbors, friends, and lovers.

A psychological thriller and deeply romantic novel that speaks with unforgettable force about the redemptive power of love, this story is told in seven parts, by six different narrators whose lives are entangled in unexpected ways.

Elizabeth D. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religions and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.