Frederick Turner

Frederick W. Turner

First published in 1980, Beyond Geography continues to influence and impress its readers. This new edition, prepared for the Columbus quincentennial, includes a new introduction by T. H. Watkins and a new preface by the author. As the public debates Columbus's legacy, it is important for us to learn of the spiritual background of European domination of the Americas, for the Europeans who conquered the Americas substituted history for myth as a way of understanding life.

The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness

Beyond Geography

Though branded as pornography for its graphic language and explicit sexuality, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is far more than a work that tested American censorship laws. In this riveting book, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tropic of Cancer's initial U.S. release, Frederick Turner investigates Miller's unconventional novel, its tumultuous publishing history, and its unique place in American letters. Written in the slums of a foreign city by a man who was an utter literary failure in his homeland, Tropic of Cancer was published in 1934 by a pornographer in Paris, but soon banned in the United States. Not until 1961, when Grove Press triumphed over the censors, did Miller's book appear in American bookstores. Turner argues that Tropic of Cancer is “lawless, violent, colorful, misogynistic, anarchical, bigoted, and shaped by the same forces that shaped the nation.” Further, the novel draws on more than two centuries of New World history, folklore, and popular culture in ways never attempted before. How Henry Miller, outcast and renegade, came to understand what literary dynamite he had within him, how he learned to sound his “war whoop” over the roofs of the world, is the subject of Turner's revelatory study.

Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer"

Renegade

Epic does many things. Among others, it defines the nature of the human storyteller; recalls the creation of the world and of the human race; describes the paradoxical role of the hero as both the Everyman and the radical exception; and establishes the complex quest underlying all human action. Epic illustrates that these ingredients of epic storytelling are universal cultural elements, in existence across multiple remote geographical locations, historical eras, ethnic and linguistic groups, and levels of technological and economic development. Frederick Turner argues that epic, despite being scoffed at and neglected for over sixty years, is the most fundamental and important of all literary forms and thereby deserves serious critical attention. It is the source and originof all other literature, the frame within which any story is possible. The mission of this book is to repair gaps in the literary understanding of epic studies—and offer permission to future epic writers and composers. The cultural genres of Marvel Comics, gothic, anime, manga, multi-user dungeon gaming, and superhero movies reprise all the epic themes and motifs. Consider The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Lost, The Matrix, Superman, Harry Potter, and Narnia. Here can be found the epic beast-man, the miraculous birth of the hero, the creation myth, the founding of the city, the quest journey, the descent into the land of the dead, the monsters, and the trickster. This book will be of interest to all readers fascinated by folklore, oral tradition, religious studies, anthropology, mythology, and enthusiastic about literature in general.

Form, Content, and History

Epic

The Go-Between : A Novel of the Kennedy Years

When the Earth becomes a maelstrom of storms and rising sea levels due to catastrophic climate change, some want to give up and call it a day for humanity. Yet there are also those heroic few who are determined to take action and dosomething about the impending apocalypse. These are the geo-engineers—men and women of creativity, knowledge and drive—who will do whatever it takes to save the planet.They will take on the challenge of bringing the planet back into balance. They will fiercely protect their work from the belligerent navies of two large nations— even if this means risking life and limb in a major sea battle. And with a new dawn of artificial intelligence on the horizon, these valiant few may make the difference between a future of human and A.I. enlightenment or a dark age of never-ending terror. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management). “Frederick Turner reveals the poetic soul of science fiction”—David Brin “A science fiction epic poem has at its command that great property of science fiction, evoking a sense of wonder in a reader. Science fiction delivers the intellectual and emotional charge of telling stories about what might happen and what people might do about it. It’s just fun to read about stuff like that. Fred Turner’s epic poem Apocalypse is all those things: cool, as memorable as your favorite song in many spots, and, most of all, entertaining. Fun.”—from the introduction

An Epic Poem

Apocalypse

Zsuzsanna Ozsvath

The pure verbal energy characterizing Hungarian poetry may be regarded as one of the most striking components of Hungarian culture. More than 800 years ago, under the inspiration of classical and medieval Latin poetry, Hungarian poets began to craft a rich chain of poetic designs, much of it in response to the country’s cataclysmic history. With precision, depth, and great intensity, these verses give accounts of their authors’ vision of themselves as participants in history and their most personal experience in the world. Light within the Shade includes 135 of the most important Hungarian poems ranging from the fourteenth to the twenty-first century. Organized in chronological order, the poems are followed by an essay by Ozsváth providing the historical, biographical, and cultural background of the poets and the poetry. The book concludes with Turner’s essay on the special thematic and literary qualities of Hungarian poetry, as well as notes on translation practices. This essential volume exposes English-speaking readers to Hungarian poetry’s artistic achievement in history and culture, its evolutionary development as a tradition, and its significance within the context of world literature.

Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Light within the Shade

Miklós Radnóti

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

Presents a collection of poems by the Hungarian author

The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti

Foamy Sky

John Mack Faragher

In 1893 a young Frederick Jackson Turner stood before the American Historical Association and delivered his famous frontier thesis. To a less than enthusiastic audience, he argued that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development"; that this frontier accounted for American democracy and character; and that the frontier had closed forever with uncertain consequences for the American future. Despite the indifference of Turner's first audience, his essay would soon prove to be the single most influential piece of writing on American history, with extraordinary impact both in intellectual circles and in popular literature. Within a few years his views had become the dominant interpretation of the American past. A collection of his essays won the Pulitzer Prize, and for almost half a century, Turner's thesis was the most familiar model taught in schools, extolled by politicians, and screened in fictional form at local movie theaters each Saturday afternoon. Now, a hundred years after Turner's famous address, award-winning biographer John Mack Faragher collects and introduces the pioneer historian's ten most significant essays. Remarkable for their truly modern sense that a debate about the past is simultaneously a debate about the present, these essays remain stimulating reading, both as a road map to the early-twentieth-century American mind and as a model of committed scholarship. Faragher introduces us to Turner's work with a look at his role as a public intellectual and his effect on Americans' understanding of their national character. In the afterword, Faragher turns to the recent heated debate over Turner's legacy. Western history has reemerged in the news as historians argue over Turner's place in our current mind-set. In a world of dizzying intellectual change, it may come as something of a surprise that historians have taken so long to overturn the interpretation of a century-old conference paper. But while some claim that Turner's vision of the American West as a great egalitarian land of opportunity was long ago dismissed, others, in the words of historian Donald Worster, maintain that Turner still "presides over western history like a Holy Ghost.". Against this backdrop, Faragher looks at what the concept of the West means to us today and provides a reader's guide to the provocative new literature of the American frontier. Rereading these essays in the fresh light of Faragher's analysis brings new appreciation for the richness of Turner's work and an understanding of contemporary historians' admiration for Turner's commitment to the study of what it has meant to be American.

"The Significance of the Frontier in American History", and Other Essays

Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner

Originally published in 1988, Genesis was the first major work of fiction that addressed the idea of terraforming Mars. It not only suggested the idea, but provided a feasible solution for doing so. During its initial publication, Genesis was on the list of recommended reading at NASA, and has since gone on to enjoy cult status. Its acknowledged list of admirers includes such literary luminaries as Brian Aldiss, Amy Clampitt, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas M. Disch, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet, James Merrill. It is with great pride that Ilium Press brings this influential and prescient work back into print.

An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars

Genesis

Brett Cooke

Biopoetics

A double shadow

Donald Burton Kuspit

Frederick Hart

Before his death in 1999, Frederick Hart was hailed as America's greatest living sculptor. His powerful and inspirational figurative creations for such venues as the National Cathedral and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial changed the face of American art. Inspired by the great classical sculptors Michelangelo and Rodin, Hart single-handedly revived the classical form in monumental pieces, the complexity, size and beauty of which are rightly compared to works of the Old Masters.This magnificent book is published as Hart's catalogue raisonne?a detailed showcase of his relatively short lifetime of extraordinary production?timed to coincide with the largest Hart retrospective and exhibit ever mounted, at the University of Louisville, from September to November 2007.Essays by Donald Kuspit and Frederick Turner accompany hundreds of impressive color plates. Also included is an extensive chronology, bibliography and index of Hart's works.Butler Books is proud to announce that Frederick Hart: The Complete Works was awarded the Silver Medal for Excellence in the national Fine Arts category of the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

The Complete Works

Immigrant, inventor, botanist, writer and pioneering conservationist, Muir is one of the great Scots of the nineteenth century. From his humble origins in Dunbar, John Muir has risen to the status of an American icon as the father of American conservation. While others dreamed of becoming the archetypal New World Man, escaping into the wilderness beyond the confines and comfits of civilisation, very few actually lived the dream as Muir did, fully and deeply. Frederick Turner's monumental work is the definitive biography on Muir.

From Scotland to the Sierra - A Biography

John Muir

Set four hundred years in the future, Frederick Turner's epic poem, The New World, celebrates American culture in A.D. 2376. As the book opens, the nation-state has been fragmented and replaced by new political forms: the Riots, violent anarchistic matriarchies, whose members are addicted to psychedelic joyjuice; the Burbs, populations descended from the old middle classes and now slaves to the Riots; the Mad Counties, religious theocracies dominated by fanatical fundamentalists; and the Free Counties, Jeffersonian democracies where arts and sciences flourish. Within this setting, Turner's epic tells the story of a tragic family feud involving Ruth Jefferson, daughter of the political leader, Shaker McCloud; Antony Manse, a handsome aristocrat; Ruth's half-brother, the ambitious Simon Raven McCloud, who is under the influence of his grandmother, the witch Faith Raven; and the hero, James George Quincy. When banished from the Free Counties, the vengeful Simon Raven transforms himself into a messianic figure who inspires a league of Mad Counties to launch a holy war to annihilate the Free Counties. Turner's epic calls for a cultural commitment to transcend the contemporary choice between blind faith and hedonistic relativism. This bold work challenges many conventional assumptions about modern poetry and its relationship to other literary forms and the culture at large. Praise for Frederick Turner "This is a grand, glowing poem.... A thousand bravos " - James Merrill, Pulitzer Prize winning poet "The New World may be the first straight-forward heroic epic since Tennyson that really works. Turner's stroke of genius was to place the story in the future and tell it in a science-fiction mode. Suddenly all the epic formulas become not only permissible again but credible." - Dana Gioia "What astonishes me most is the way this poem builds and builds. To begin with, I was taking note of particular things that I found thrilling or delightful, but the deeper I got into the narrative, the more sustained the richness of it as a whole, and the seamless coherence of the tragic horror with the joyousness that I see as its central meaning. The poem inspires us to go back to the epics of the past, whose roots it shows us to be so much alive after all." - Amy Clampitt "If the use of epic poetry is to be more than a conceit, it has to be in the service of a tale for which it is better suited than the novel.... The epic poem] has historically enjoyed a greater ability to convey a culture's character and spirit through language. Turner uses the strengths of the epic form to good effect.... The New World is an ambitious work and Turner pulls off what he set out to accomplish: He's written good science fiction while creating and presenting a possible future in a way that a novel could not have accomplished. It's good poetry, too." - Dani Zweig "Myth, religious parable, and science fiction are genetically recombined into lyrical new forms of being. Turner has taken up the most ancient challenges of the poet, delivering work as intellectually charged as formally challenging." - Paul Lake "Frederick Turner comes across in his poems as a man of impressively broad experience, intellectual brilliance, and originality. His vocabulary alone is a tour de force. He's at his best when he unleashes his extraordinary powers of observation." - Richard Tillinghast

The New World

A faded newspaperman downs a double Maker’s Mark and contemplates life as a “ham-and-egger,” a hack. Then one day he finds the scoop of a lifetime in a Chicago basement: diaries belonging to the infamous Judith Campbell Exner. Right, that Judy, the game girl who waltzed into the midst of America’s most powerful politicians, entertainers, and criminals as they conspired to rule America. When Frank Sinatra flew Judy to Hawaii for a weekend of partying, she could hardly have imagined where it would lead her: straight to the White House and the waiting arms of Jack Kennedy. And then came the day that JFK and his brother Bobby asked her to carry a black bag to Chicago, where she was to hand it off to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. As our Narrator pieces the notebooks into a coherent story, he finds mob connections, rigged primaries, assassination plots, and trysts—and begins to see beyond the tabloid fare to a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where the fates of nations are at stake. As one by one the men Judy loved betrayed her and disappeared, and as the FBI pursued her into a living hell, her diary entries disintegrate along with the beautiful, tough, sweet woman the Narrator has come to know. Who was Exner, after all? Just a gangster’s moll? Or a bighearted woman who believed the sky-high promises of the New Frontier—and paid the price?

A Novel of the Kennedy Years

The Go-Between

"I love you according to my bond," says Cordelia to her father in King Lear. As the play turns out, Cordelia proves to be an exemplary and loving daughter. A bond is both a legal or financial obligation, and a connection of mutual love. How are these things connected? In As You Like It, Shakespeare describes marriage as a "blessed bond of board and bed": the emotional, religious, and sexual sides of marriage cannot be detached from its status as a legal and economic contract. These examples are the pith of Frederick Turner's fascinating new book. Based on the proven maxim that "money makes the world go round," this engaging study draws from Shakespeare's texts to present a lexicon of common words, as well as a variety of familiar familial and cultural situations, in an economic context. Making constant recourse to well-known material from Shakespeare's plays, Turner demonstrates that the terms of money and value permeate our minds and lives even in our most mundane moments. His book offers a new, humane, evolutionary economics that fully expresses the moral, spiritual, and aesthetic relationships among persons, and between humans and nature. Playful and incisive, Turner's book offers a way to engage the wisdom of Shakespeare in everyday life in a trenchant prose that is accessible to lovers of Shakespeare at all levels.

The Morality of Love and Money

Shakespeare's Twenty-First Century Economics

In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Frederick Turner presents a new theory of aesthetics based on the argument that beauty is an objective reality in the universe. He identifies the experience of beauty as a pancultural, neurobiological phenomenon. Drawing on a wide range of fields-- ritual and dramatic performance, the oral tradition, paleoanthropology and human evolution, neurobiology, cosmology and theoretic physics, chaos theory and fractal mathematics-- the book describes evolution as a self-organizing, emergent process that generates increasingly advanced forms of self-reflection, and proposes that the experience of beauty is the recognition of this evolutionary process and the reward for participating in it.

Frederick Turner

Books

Your next favorite book is out there