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Zeno’s (established 1983) is an online used and out-of-print bookstore specializing in the categories of: literature in translation, modern first editions, and hard-to-find books. We started as a mail order business. In 1992 we moved into a storefront, and then to a bigger location a couple of years later. Eventually we closed the physical store to go online as zenosbooks.com. We have been selling our own hand-picked eclectic selection of used, hard-to-find, and even rare books via the internet ever since. We also offer a selection of over 60,000 new book titles. If you want to order a book that you don’t see on our site, let us know what it is. If it is in print we can probably get it for you. Write a review on our site (www.zenosbooks.com) of your favorite book and receive a 10% discount coupon. If you don't find your favorite book on our site, let us know about it and maybe we can add it.
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What I am reading...
Little America by Henry Bromell. New York. 2001. Knopf. 403 pages. June 2001. hardcover. Jacket photograph: Park Avenue Garage, Hotel Margurey, New York City, c. 1950 by Louis Faurer. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. keywords: Literature America. 0375406840.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
A suspense novel, a political thriller, a novel of discovery - LITTLE AMERICA opens in Boston today and tells the story of a man in search of the truth about his father’s past, a past locked away in the C.I.A.’s code of silence. Terry Hooper’s father - Quaker-raised, Yale-educated, a sometime poet, now a retired (is he?) State Department veteran - was, in the 1950s, the C.I.A. station chief in Kurash, a small, newly constituted Middle Eastern country, a country caught in the grip of cold war politics, a country of beautiful and frightening Otherness (Arab women hidden behind their veils, scar-faced men on horseback with curved sabers, and streets that melted in the heat), 90 percent Muslim, lodged like a walnut between Syria and Iraq. Mack Hooper’s assignment: to win the confidence of the King of Kurash, an enigmatic, British-educated desert aristocrat to whom no one, not even the U.S. Ambassador, had been able to get close. In a narrative that moves backward and forward in time, Terry puts together the pieces of the puzzle that has haunted him. Is his father a good man? Was he a friend to the young King, or a diplomat-seducer sent to betray him? What Terry unearths about the American intrigues in Kurash, about promises made, about monies delivered, about betrayal, about courage, about ‘us’ and ‘them,’ is brilliantly told in a novel that royally entertains while it evokes the conflict between private morality and public policy as it recaptures a time gone by, a time when Americans set out armed with ‘good intentions,’ youthful desire for adventure, and the belief that they could save the world.
Henry Bromell (born 1947) is an American author, screenwriter, and director. Bromell attended Eaglebrook School ('63) and the United World College of the Atlantic (64-66). He graduated from Amherst College in 1970. He won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, THE SLIGHTEST DISTANCE. His collection of short stories, I KNOW YOUR HEART, MARCO POLO, was published by Knopf. Bromell's work has appeared in two O. Henry Award collections. He has written and produced for many television series, including Chicago Hope, Northern Exposure, Homicide: Life on the Street, Brotherhood, and Carnivàle. Bromell wrote and directed the feature film Panic and the F. Scott Fitzgerald biopic Last Call. He married writer Trish Soodik, with whom he has a son. He was divorced from Trish Soodik at the time of her death from cancer in January, 2009. Bromell joined the crew of NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994. He served as a writer and co-executive producer for the shows third season. He contributed to writing seven episodes for the season. He was promoted to executive producer for the fourth season and wrote a further 17 episodes. He scaled back his involvement with the fifth season and became a consulting producer. He wrote a further two episodes before leaving the crew at the end of the season in 1997. He contributed to a total of 26 episodes as a writer over three seasons with the series. He returned as a co-writer and co-executive producer for the feature-length follow-up Homicide: The Movie in 2000.
The Circle Of Reason by Amitav Ghosh. New York. 1986. Viking Press. 423 pages. hardcover. Cover: Steve Jenkins/Neil Stuart. keywords: Literature India. 0670809845.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
Here is a genuine discovery: an astonishing, magical novel about the real and the ideal, the actual and the possible, about acts and passions, by an extraordinary young writer whose first book (unbelievably) it is. THE CIRCLE OF REASON is set in India and Africa in a time not unlike the present, and tells the story of three irrepressible people trying to find order in an anarchic world. The narrative follows the adventures of Alu, a preternaturally skilled orphan enlisted by his foster father as a soldier in his crusade against the forces of myth and unreason in their rural province. When a terrorist bomb blast ravages their village, Alu flees, pursued by a misguided but dedicated police inspector through the slums of Calcutta to Goa and a converted trawler that runs illegal aliens across the Arabian Sea to Africa. There he meets Zindi, a madam of huge girth and a huger heart; and at the novel's end these three characters - Alu, Jyoti Das, and Zindi - converge in a surprising confrontation with the forces of mystery, in which Alu comes full circle to encounter his past. THE CIRCLE OF REASON follows the form of the raga of classical Indian music: the first part, which spans several decades, has the leisurely pace of village life; the second part, which unfolds over about three weeks, goes forward with a simple, measured beat; and the third, a kind of scherzo, compresses its action into less than a day. But if the setting and structure of THE CIRCLE OF REASON are classically Indian, the thematic and narrative models Mr. Ghosh has followed are less so: the echoes here are of Melville and Cervantes. Above all, however, this novel is a triumphantly original and wholly compelling story, and a transcendent affirmation of faith in the human spirit. No one who reads it will remain unmoved.
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in East Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Iran, and India. He was educated at Delhi University and at Oxford, from which he received a doctorate in social anthropology. He now teaches at Delhi University. THE CIRCLE OF REASON, which took him three years to write, is his first novel.
A Most Dangerous Method: The Story Of Jung, Freud, & Sabina Spielrein by John Kerr. New York. 1993. Knopf. 610 pages. August 1993. hardcover. Jacket photograph of Freud (detail) is from the Mary Evans Picture Collection. Jacket design by Klee Design. keywords: Psychology History Jung Freud. 0679404120.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
In this groundbreaking work a brilliant scholar and clinician has reconstructed the explosive story of the woman whose relationship to both Jung and Freud lies at the heart of the origins of psychoanalysis. Based on recently recovered diaries, letters, and journals and on a close biographical rereading of the papers of Jung and Freud, the book pivots around Sabina Spielrein, an obscure Russian psychoanalyst, all but forgotten until the discovery - in a basement in Geneva in the mid-1970s - of a cache of documents whose very existence was unknown to the psychoanalytic community. These provided the clues that have enabled John Kerr to reconstruct nothing less than the missing history of the early years of psychoanalysis. His book allows us, for the first time, to grasp in its full dimensions the irreconcilable break between the men whose partnership established our century’s revolutionary new method of understanding human consciousness. By restoring Spielrein - her life and her work - to a central place in the history of psychoanalysis, A MOST DANGEROUS METHOD forces a profound and overdue reexamination of psychoanalysis both as science and as clinical practice. Sabina Spielrein enters the psychoanalytic enterprise as an eighteen-year-old patient - daughter of upper-class Russian Jewish parents - with whom Jung first tried out Freud’s new therapeutic technique. Subsequently she became Jung’s student, lover, colleague – and unwitting betrayer. When Jung tried to end the relationship in the interests of his career, Spielrein turned to Freud for help. And, having become not merely Freud’s colleague but his friend and prospective analysand, she provided him with intimate access to Jung’s most privately expressed ideas and plans: his thoughts about Freud and about the new science, and where he wanted to take it. When Freud learned what Jung’s real intentions were - and confronted him - it was all both men could do to keep their mutual rage from destroying the movement they had launched so successfully together. Kerr shows how deeply psychoanalysis has been affected by what each of its founders discovered about the other’s private life and the leverage each tried to exert through that knowledge. A work of meticulous scholarship, a humane and engrossing narrative, A MOST DANGEROUS METHOD brilliantly chronicles the early years of psychoanalysis and reveals the sexual politics entwined with its founding. It is a landmark work of biography and intellectual history that transforms our view of the twentieth century’s quintessential mode of self-understanding.
JOHN KERR was trained as a clinical psychologist at New York University. He is an editor at The Analytic Press, a scholarly press specializing in works on psychoanalysis, and was coeditor and a contributor to Freud and the History of Psychoanalysis. He divides his time between Boston and New York City.
Civilization And Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud. New York. 2005. Norton. 192 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Amy C. King. Jacket illustration by Gustave Dore, ‘Fallen Angels.’. keywords: Psychology. 0393059952.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
The seminal work of the twentieth century on its 75th anniversary with a new introduction on its extraordinary influence by the Pulitzer prize-winning author Louis Menand. CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS may be Sigmund Freud’s best-known work. It has been praised, dissected, lambasted, interpreted, and reinterpreted. Originally published in 1930, it seeks to answer some ultimate questions: What influences led to the creation of civilization? How did it come to be? And what determines its course? In this seminal volume of twentieth-century thought, Freud elucidates the contest between aggression, indeed the death drive, and its adversary, eros. He speaks to issues of human creativity and fulfillment, the place of beauty in culture, and the effects of repression. Louis Menand, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, a New Yorker staff writer, and a professor of English at Harvard University, reflects on the importance of this work in intellectual thought and why it has become such a landmark book in the history of ideas.
SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939) has left a lasting impact on psychology, literature, and intellectual history. His case studies are models of high literature. By striving to turn psychology into a science, he created the new field of psychoanalysis, which changed people’s understanding of personality. Freud, a medically trained doctor who broke loose from nineteenth-century thinking to create a modern vision of human nature, will always remain one of the world’s greatest thinkers.. Louis MENAND is Bass Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning THE METAPHYSICAL CLUB, AMERICAN STUDIES, and other works.
Complete Letters Of Sigmund Freud To Wilhelm Fliess 1887-1904 by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (editor). Cambridge. 1985. Harvard University Press. 506 pages. hardcover. keywords: Psychology Sigmund Freud Wilhelm Fliess Letters Psychiatry. 0674154207.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
Sigmund Freud’s letters to his closest friend, Wilhelm Fliess, are probably the single most important group of documents in the history of psychoanalysis. At no time intended for publication, the letters date from 1887 to 1904, a period that spans the birth and development of psychoanalysis. During the seventeen years of the correspondence Freud wrote some of his most revolutionary works: STUDIES ON HYSTERIA, THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS. ‘The Aetiology Of Hysteria,’ and the famous case study of Dora. Presented here, without any excisions, are 133 documents never before made public and 139 that previously were published only in part. The translation is based on a new and corrected German text, and unobtrusive annotation assists the reader with difficult allusions but permits individual interpretation of the material at hand. Seldom has the creator of a totally new field of human knowledge so overtly and in such detail revealed the thought processes leading to his discoveries. None of the later writings have the immediacy and the impact of these early letters, nor do any reveal so dramatically Freud’s innermost thoughts as he as in the very act of creation. We watch Freud draft and refine his theories, feel his rejection by scientific colleagues, and sense his professional isolation. As his friendship with Fliess grows and deepens, the two men meet periodically to exchange ideas and support each other’s endeavors. Freud turns more and more to his friend as an ‘audience of one,’ but in the end is spurned by Fliess too. Interspersed with Freud’s intellectual activities are passages on the events of everyday life - his children’s antics, his hiking vacations, his financial worries, his efforts to stop smoking. No biography could depict so fully the many-faceted man who springs to life from these letters.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is former projects director of the Sigmund Freud Archives. His previous publications include THE ASSAULT ON TRUTH.
Brother Man by Roger Mais. London. 1954. Jonathan Cape. 191 pages. hardcover. Jacket design from a painting by Roger Mais. keywords: Literature Caribbean Jamaica Black.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
In BROTHER MAN Roger Mais returns to Jamaica, the scene of his first novel, THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER, to tell a story which, simple in outline, is charged with emotional power that can hardly fail to move the least susceptible of readers. It is a story many times repeated in the world’s history and not yet at the end of its run. Brother Man, a cobbler by trade and a member of a sect called the Taferites, tries to live according to New Testament precepts. His neighbours in a poor street tolerate his eccentricities as long as they can trade upon them, and he succeeds in winning their respect and affection. Against his wholly beneficent influence is ranged that of Brother Ambo, an obeah man. It is a plain conflict between Good and Evil. The tribulations which Brother Man is called upon to endure involve unpleasant characters and violent incidents: life in a Jamaican slum is as ugly as slum life in any part of the world. Roger Mais has provided his own illustrations to the book. They beautifully reinforce the story.
Chester Himes: A Life by James Sallis. New York. 2001. Walker & Company. 368 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Krystyna Skalski. 0802713629.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
Chester Himes’s novels and memoirs represent one of the most important bodies of work by any American writer, but he is best known for The Harlem Cycle, the crime stories featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. His writing made him a major figure in Europe, but it is only recently that his talents have been acknowledged in the country that spurned him for most of his life, though his work is recognized as being on a par with that of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Jim Thompson. In this major literary biography, acclaimed poet, critic, and novelist James Sallis explores Himes’s life as no writer has attempted before. Combining the public facts with fresh interviews with the people who knew him best, including his second wife, Lesley, Sallis casts light onto the contradictious, self-interrogations, and misdirections that make Himes such an enigmatic and elusive subject. CHESTER HIMES: A LIFE is a definitive study not only of the life of a major African-American man of letters, but of his writing and its relationship to the man himself, drawing a remarkable, deeply affecting portrait of a too often misunderstood and neglected writer. This is a work of high scholarship and of penetrating and passionate insight, a rare conjoining of two fine writers - and as much a work of literature as any of their novels.
James Sallis is the author of the popular and critically acclaimed Lew Griffin novels as well as other works of and multiple collections of stories, poems, and essays. A lifelong student of the work of Chester Himes, he was featured as the leading expert on Himes in a recent CBS Sunday Morning broadcast. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife. Karyn.
Why I Left America & Other Essays by Oliver W. Harrington. Jackson. 1993. University Press Of Mississippi. 113 pages. hardcover. Photo of Oliver W. Harrington by Gerhard Kindt. 0878056556.
 FROM THE PUBLISHER –
To American black newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s Ollie Harrington was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons. He emerged as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and created Bootsie, the popular cartoon figure that became a fixture in black newspapers. Langston Hughes praised Harrington as America’s greatest black cartoonist. After serving as a war correspondent in Italy, he returned to his homeland and the impediment of racism that pervaded American life. As director of public relations for the NAACP, he crusaded against America’s policies of institutionalized racism, openly supporting leftist reform leaders. Upon hearing in this era of red-baiting that he was targeted for investigation, Harrington left America. In the culturally rich American community on the Left Bank in Paris that would come to include Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, he became a fixture. In 1961 he found himself trapped behind the Berlin Wall, but he chose to remain in East Germany. His cartoons appeared in East German magazines and in the American Communist newspaper The Daily World. Although he became a favorite with Eastern Bloc students and intellectuals, in America Harrington was mainly forgotten. The autobiographical pieces included in WHY I LEFT AMERICA AND OTHER ESSAYS, written mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, detail Oliver W. Harrington’s experiences as an African American artist in exile. One theme that persists in these writings and his cartoons is his intolerance of racism. Hence, as an artist, he has found it impossible not to be political. ‘Although I believe that ‘art for art’s sake’ has its merits,’ he says. ‘I personally feel that my art must be involved, and the most profound involvement must be with the Black liberation struggle.’ One essay, from Ebony magazine, fuels speculation about the mysterious circumstances in the death of his friend Richard Wright. In another piece Harrington details how he created the celebrated Bootsie. He writes in others of his life in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and in Paris with fellow black expatriate figures. Why did this African American choose to live in exile for over forty years? In an affectionate foreword to this volume Richard Wright’s daughter Julia gives clues to the answer. Her insights, along with M. Thomas Inge’s introductory essay about Harrington’s life and achievements, bring special focus to the experiences of an outstanding African American artist and social critic who has been virtually without recognition in his homeland.
M. Thomas Inge is the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College.
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