'The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories' by Don DeLillo

Author Don DeLillo, whose archive resides at the Ransom Center, has released his first collection of short stories today. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, published by Scribner, includes pieces written between 1979 and 2011.

To celebrate the publication of the book, the Ransom Center will give away 2 signed copies of DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985). Email hrcgiveaway@gmail.com with “DeLillo” in the subject line by midnight CST tonight to be entered in a drawing for the book. [Update: Winners have been chosen and notified. Congrats to Angela A and Annie S!]

Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

In one of Tennessee Williams’s early writings in which he interviews himself, he identifies his audience as “the wild at heart kept in cages.” He also notes that the play Battle of Angels is a prayer for “more tolerance and respect for the wild and lyric impulses that the human heart feels and so often is forced to repress in order to avoid social censure and worse.”

The human heart and its freedom becomes a theme in both of the current exhibitions, whether about the personal life and work of Tennessee Williams, as seen in Becoming Tennessee Williams, or in the characters and novels featured in Culture Unbound: Collecting in the Twenty-First Century.

Williams’s draft of The Glass Menagerie, when…