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 Why This World: A Biography Of Clarice Lispector by Benjamin Moser. New York/Oxford. 2009. Oxford University Press. 479 pages. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. Jacket photo - Clarice Lispector in Washington, ca. 1954. 9780195385564.

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   That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's art was directly connected to her turbulent life. Born amidst the horrors of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice's beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil virtually from her adolescence. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer, and asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her both the heir to Kafka and the unlikely author of ‘perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century.’ From Ukraine to Recife, from Naples and Berne to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art.

  Benjamin Moser (September 14, 1976) is an American writer who lives in Utrecht, Netherlands. Born in Houston, Moser attended high school in Texas and France before graduating from Brown University with a degree in History. He briefly studied Chinese and Portuguese. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Utrecht University. He is the New Books Columnist for Harper's Magazine, a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, and the author of a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector titled Why This World. He discovered the books of Clarice Lispector while studying Portuguese-language literature. He has published translations from the Dutch, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. He speaks six languages in addition to these. He lives with Arthur Japin (a Dutch writer). 

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Highsmith, Patricia. Deep Water. London. 1958. Heinemann. 259 pages. hardcover. Wrapper design by Stein.  

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Victor Van Allen didn't like dancing. His wife, Melinda, did. Melinda was gay and attractive. Victor was quiet. Perhaps it was this special quietness that made Melinda's men friends increasingly uneasy in Victor's presence. The trouble started when Victor casually remarked to one of Melinda's friends, "If I really don't like someone, I kill him . . . Remember Malcolm McRae?" The friend, remembering that Malcolm had been killed, mysteriously, left town. But Melinda found a new friend, and a succession of others. Through it all, Victor drew sympathy and admiration from his community. Everyone admired and respected his patience with his wife. No one would believe that Victor's patience would ever wear thin no one but Melinda, who found herself being mysteriously deprived of her admirers, one after the other. But who would believe Melinda? Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train won praise as a novel and as a Hitchcock film. In 1956 her The Talented Mr. Ripley was awarded an Edgar Allan Poe scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. She has again written an unusual and chilling novel, set against a background of penetrating character study.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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Burrows, Jack. John Ringo: The Gunfighter Who Never Was. Tucson. 1987. University of Arizona Press. 0816509751. 242 pages. hardcover.

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He was the deadliest gun in the West. Or was he? Ringo: the very name has come to represent the archetypal Western gunfighter and has spawned any number of fictitious characters laying claim to authenticity. John Ringo's place in western lore is not without basis: he rode with outlaw gangs for thirteen of his thirty-two years, participated in Texas's Hoodoo War, and was part of the faction that opposed the Earp brothers in Tombstone, Arizona. Yet his life remains as mysterious as his grave, a bouldered cairn under a five-stemmed blackjack oak. Western historian Jack Burrows now challenges popular views of Ringo in this first full-length treatment of the myth and the man. Based on twenty years of research into historical archives and interviews with Ringo's family, it cuts through the misconceptions and legends to show just what kind of man Ringo really was.

Jack Burrows (May 28, 1918 - September 9, 2014) was a professor at San Jose College in the History Department. He was a true historian and author, especially passionate about the Old West and Native American history. Jack was born in Murphys, a little-known town in the low Sierras, where he spent his time listening to the Miwok Indians and enjoying the outdoors and wildlife. Jack left "home" when he was deployed in the first round of WWII Army soldiers. He spent 42 months on the frontlines in the South Pacific jungle, where few survived. Using the GI bill, he was able to complete degrees at both UCSB and Stanford – resulting in a 33 year career as a Professor at San Jose City College.

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Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. New York. 1985. Farrar Straus Giroux. 199 pages. October 1985. hardcover. 0374225788. Original title: El Gringo Viejo, 1985 - Fondo de Cultura Economica. Cover: Author photo (c) 1985 Andres Caray Jacket design by Drenttel Doyle Partners.

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   Carlos Fuentes has long been concerned with the Mexico of Pancho Villa. As Mexico’s greatest living novelist - one whose work is suffused with the weight of history - it is not surprising that in his new novel, THE OLD GRINGO, he brings the Mexico of 1914 uncannily to life. But Fuentes also knows a great deal about the United States, and his novel is, most of all, about the tragic history of these two cultures in conflict. THE OLD GRINGO tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, journalist, and his last mysterious days in Mexico among Villa’s soldiers. In particular, the book is about the encounter between Bierce (the ‘old gringo’ of the title) and Tomás Arroyo, one of Villa’s generals. The novel also concerns Harriet Winslow, an American woman in Mexico, whose relations with Bierce and Arroyo become crucial to the book’s conclusion. In the end, the incompatibility of Mexico and the United States (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both Bierce and Arroyo. THE OLD GRINGO is a wise book, full of toughness and humanity. It is without question one of the finest works of modern Latin American fiction. Fuentes is a master storyteller, and he has written a book of enormous ambition in a way that is at once challenging and accessible. THE OLD GRINGO is a profound work about politics, love, the human tragedy.

Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 – May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world’ and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s’, while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist’. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

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Di Benedetto, Antonio. Nest in the Bones: Stories. Brooklyn. 2017. Archipelago Books. 9780914671725. Translated from the Spanish by Martina Broner. 275 pages. paperback.

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Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto’s wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called “dirty war” to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto’s kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, examining civilization’s subtle but violent imprint on human consciousness. A late-twentieth century master of the short form and revered by his contemporaries, Nest in the Bones is the first comprehensive volume of Benedetto’s stories available in English. PRAISE: “This collection from renowned Argentinean author Di Benedetto (Zama) showcases his short stories’ development from sparse and experimental into melancholic, deeply affecting fables… These stories bolster Di Benedetto’s reputation as a visionary talent, and serve as a worthy introduction to one of Latin America’s most influential writers.” — Publishers Weekly. “[B]lends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky… Di Benedetto’s view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It’s a winning combination.” — Kirkus Reviews. “an impressive swath of subjects, emotions and perspectives. . . Readers with a love of Latin American authors will find Di Benedetto a welcome addition to the canon that’s available in English.” — Noah Cruickshank, the Field Museum, in Shelf Awareness. “In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly… Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders.” — Harvard Review. “Very well translated… displays to perfection…the range of [Di Benedetto’s] experiments with strangeness…Di Benedetto’s characters, with their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony,’ are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka.” — London Review of Books. “[NEST IN THE BONES is] a sampling of the Argentine’s short fiction… demonstrating an extraordinary experimental and emotional range that Zama—largely confined as it is to the perspective of a single self-centered narrator—could only hint at.” — Public Books. “Di Benedetto has written indispensable pages that have moved and continue moving me.” — Jorge Luis Borges. “One of the greatest Argentinean writers and one of the greatest writers of Latin America.” — Roberto Bolaño.

Antonio di Benedetto (2 November 1922 in Mendoza – 10 October 1986 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor. Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). El Silenciero (The Silencer, 1964) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages.

Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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Otele, Olivette. African Europeans: An Untold History. New York. 2021. Basic Books. 9781541619678. 507 pages. hardcover. Jacket image: Portrait of a Young Woman, Museum purchase, Saint Louis Art Museum.

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A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent  Conventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans of African descent. From the third century, when the Egyptian Saint Maurice became the leader of a Roman legion, all the way up to the present, Otele explores encounters between those defined as "Africans" and those called "Europeans." She gives equal attention to the most prominent figures—like Alessandro de Medici, the first duke of Florence thought to have been born to a free African woman in a Roman village—and the untold stories—like the lives of dual-heritage families in Europe's coastal

Olivette Otele is professor of the history of slavery at the University of Bristol and vice president of the Royal Historical Society. She is the first Black woman to be appointed to a professorial chair in history in the UK, and her writing has appeared in the Guardian, BBC Extra, and Times Higher Education. She lives in the UK.

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Thompson, Hunter S.. Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail. London. 1974. Allison & Busby. 085031125x. With illustrations by Ralph Steadman. 510 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Clara Scremini.

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The aftermath of Watergate leaves sone very important questions: How typical were those dirty tricks? Are all American politicians like that? Does the style and pace of American electioneering make corruption almost inevitable? This book provides us with unique insights with which we can &gin to form answers. It is "the best account yet published of what it feels like to be out there in the middle of the American political process" (New York Times). Dr Hunter S Thompson established himself with his earlier books, Hell's Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the most exciting new commentator on the American scene to emerge in the last decade. In this new book he describes in passionate and personal prose the year he spent totally involved in the 1972 Presidential election — from "The Rancid Resurrection of Hubert Humphrey" to "Wallace Gunned Down in Maryland", from "How George McGovern Ran Wild on the Beach & Stomped Almost Everybody" to "Nixon Tightens the Screws", and finally to the "Shoot-Out in the Dung-Heap Corral". It is a vivid, eye-witness, month-by- month account of the Watergate election and the personalities (Nixon, McGovern, Humphrey, Kennedy, Agnew) who made it happen.

Hunter Stockton Thompson (July 18, 1937 – February 20, 2005) was an American journalist and author. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, to a middle-class family, Thompson had a turbulent youth after the death of his father left the family in poverty. He was unable to formally finish high school as he was incarcerated for 60 days after abetting a robbery. He subsequently joined the United States Air Force before moving into journalism. He traveled frequently, including stints in California, Puerto Rico, and Brazil, before settling in Aspen, Colorado, in the early 1960s. Thompson became internationally known with the publication of Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967). For his research on the book he had spent a year living and riding with the Angels, experiencing their lives and hearing their stories first-hand. Previously a relatively conventional journalist, with the publication in 1970 of 'The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved' he became a counter cultural figure, with his own brand of New Journalism which he termed 'Gonzo', an experimental style of journalism where reporters involve themselves in the action to such a degree that they become central figures of their stories. The work he remains best known for, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream (1971), constitutes a rumination on the failure of the 1960s counterculture movement. It was first serialized in Rolling Stone, a magazine with which Thompson would be long associated, and was released as a film starring Johnny Depp and directed by Terry Gilliam in 1998. Politically minded, Thompson ran unsuccessfully for sheriff of Pitkin County, Colorado, in 1970, on the Freak Power ticket. He became well known for his inveterate hatred of Richard Nixon, whom he claimed represented 'that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character' and whom he characterized in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. Thompson's output notably declined from the mid-1970s, as he struggled with the consequences of fame, and he complained that he could no longer merely report on events as he was too easily recognized. He was also known for his lifelong use of alcohol and illegal drugs, his love of firearms, and his iconoclastic contempt for authoritarianism. He remarked: 'I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.' While suffering a bout of health problems, Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67. Per his wishes, his ashes were fired out of a cannon in a ceremony funded by his friend, Johnny Depp, and attended by a host of friends including then Senator John Kerry and Jack Nicholson. Hari Kunzru wrote that, 'the true voice of Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist ... one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.'

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Colomé, Pura López. Watchword. Middletown. 2012. Wesleyan University Press. 9780819571182. Wesleyan Poetry Series. Translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander. 176 pages. hardcover.

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In her most recent book, Watchword-the winner of the Villaurrutia, Mexico's most esteemed literary prize-acclaimed poet Pura López Colomé writes of life at its brink with fierce honesty and an unblinking eye.   This work shares the darkness, intensity, and skeptical hope of Thomas Hardy's great poems.   Like them, López Colomé's poems have flashes of secular mysticism, sparked from language itself, which generate unforgettable passages and give voice to a world familiar and odd, wounded and buoyant.   In the energy and intensity of her work and in her exhilarating words, we discover both a line of conduct and the source for a richer life.   This bilingual edition features the poems en face in Spanish and English.   

PURA LÓPEZ COLOMÉ is the Villaurrutia Prize–winning author of several important books, including El sueño del cazador, Aurora, and Intemperie, as well as a volume of collected poems, Música inaudita.

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Di Benedetto, Antonio. Animal World [Mundo Animal]. Riverside. 1997. Xenos Books. 1879378175. A Xenos Dual-Language Edition.Translated from the Spanish by H. E. Francis. Afterword by Jorge Garcia-Gomez. 138 pages. paperback. Cover art: ‘Animal Costume” by Peter Zokosky, 1990. Cover design by Seton Kim.  

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

Animal World is a collection of short stories written by Antonio di Benedetto, with hallucinatory animal transformations by the internationally acknowledged Argentine master. Written in conversational and even intentionally awkward language, they present a confused and troubled narrator, who, tormented by mysterious gnawings of guilt, becomes involved in some obscure way with an animal or whole group of animals. They invade his soul, drive him to rage or deliver him from his obsession. Often the story hinges on a pun, a distorted folktale, or an illogical association. While not spectacular in itself, each story adds to the preceding to create a growing sense of doom. Thus story by story the reader becomes ensnared in a horrifying, hallucinatory realm of associations. "Powerful stories by Argentine writer from Mundo animal, his first collection, influenced by Borges, Kafka, and others. Di Benedetto explains that he wants to 'intern' readers in 'the mysteries of life,' something which his complexly plotted tales of the transformation of human beings-become animals accomplish provocatively. Adequate, although at times stilted, translations. Bilingual edition"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Antonio di Benedetto (2 November 1922 in Mendoza – 10 October 1986 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor. Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). El Silenciero (The Silencer, 1964) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages. Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and José Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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Schacker, Jennifer and Jones, Christine A. (editors). Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: Fairy-Tale Beasts. Detroit. 2015. Wayne State University Press. 9780814340691. Series in Fairy-Tale Studies. 8.25 x 10.75. 27 illustrations. 136 pages. hardcover.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

A wide variety of creatures walk, fly, leap, slither, and swim through fairy-tale history. Some marvelous animal characters are deeply inscribed in current popular culture—the beast redeemed by beauty, the wolf in pursuit of little girls and little pigs, the frog prince released from enchantment by a young princess. But like the adventures of many fairy-tale heroes, a curious reader’s exploration in the genre can yield surprises, challenges, and unexpected rewards. Feathers, Paws, Fins, and Claws: Fairy-Tale Beasts presents lesser-known tales featuring animals both wild and gentle who appear in imaginative landscapes and enjoy a host of surprising talents. With striking original illustrations by artist Lina Kusaite and helpful introductions by fairy-tale scholars Jennifer Schacker and Christine A. Jones, the offbeat, haunting stories in this collection are rich and surprisingly relevant, demanding creative reading by audiences aged young adult and up. Schacker and Jones choose stories that represent several centuries and cultural perspectives on how animals think and move. In these ten stories, rats are just as seductive as Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf; snakes find human mates; and dancing sheep and well-mannered bears blur the line between human and beast. Stories range in form from literary ballads to tales L enough to be considered short stories, and all are presented as closely as possible to their original print versions, reflecting the use of historical spelling and punctuation. Beasts move between typical animal behavior (a bird seeking to spread its wings and fly or a clever cat artfully catching its prey) and acts that seem much more human than beastly (three fastidious bears keeping a tidy home together or a snake inviting itself to the dinner table). Kusaite’s full-color artwork rounds out this collection, drawing imaginatively on a wide range of visual traditions—from Inuit design to the work of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

Together with the short introductions to the tales themselves, the illustrations invite readers to rediscover the fascinating world of animal fairy tales. All readers interested in storytelling, fairy-tale history, and translation will treasure this beautiful collection.

Jennifer Schacker is associate professor of English at University of Guelph and author of National Dreams: The Remaking of Fairy Tales in Nineteenth-Century England.

Christine A. Jones is associate professor of French at the University of Utah and author of Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France.

Jones and Schacker are longtime collaborators and co-editors of Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives.