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Mr. Kafka: And Other Tales from the Time of the Cult by Bohumil Hrabal. New York. 2015. New Directions. 9780811224802. Translated by Paul Wilson. 142 pages. paperback. Cover design by Dan Stiles. Translation of Inzerát na dům, ve kterém už nechci bydlet.

DESCRIPTION - Wonderful stories of Communist Prague by “the masterly Bohumil Hrabal” (The New Yorker). Never before published in English, the stories in Mr. Kafka and Other Tales from the Time of the Cult were written mostly in the 1950s and present the Czech master Bohumil Hrabal at the height of his powers. The stories capture a time when Czech Stalinists were turning society upside down, inflicting their social and political experiments on mostly unwilling subjects. These stories are set variously in the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague; on the raucous and dangerous factory floor of the famous Poldi steelworks where Hrabal himself once worked; in a cacophonous open-air dance hall where classical and popular music come to blows; at the basement studio where a crazed artist attempts to fashion a national icon; on the scaffolding around a decommissioned church. Hrabal captures men and women trapped in an eerily beautiful nightmare, longing for a world where “humor and metaphysical escape can reign supreme.”

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997) is viewed by many as the quintessential Czech novelist of the post-war period. Best known in the English-speaking world through the film adaptations of his novels Closely Watched Trains (Northwestern, 1995), Too Loud a Solitude (Harvest, 1992), and I Served the King of England (Vintage, 1990), Hrabal is the author of many works of fiction. He fell to his death in 1997 while feeding pigeons from a hospital window.

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Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962 - 1972 by Alejandra Pizarnik. New York. 2016. New Directions. 9780811223966. Translated by Yvette Siegert. 384 pages. paperback. Translation of Extraccion de La Piedra de Locura (Colección Visor de poesía). 

DESCRIPTION - The first full-length collection in English by one of Latin America’s most significant twentieth-century poets. Revered by the likes of Octavio Paz and Roberto Bolaño, Alejandra Pizarnik is still a hidden treasure in the U.S. Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962–1972 comprises all of her middle to late work, as well as a selection of posthumously published verse. Obsessed with themes of solitude, childhood, madness and death, Pizarnik explored the shifting valences of the self and the border between speech and silence. In her own words, she was drawn to "the suffering of Baudelaire, the suicide of Nerval, the premature silence of Rimbaud, the mysterious and fleeting presence of Lautréamont,” as well as to the “unparalleled intensity” of Artaud’s “physical and moral suffering.”. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Flora Alejandra Pizarnik (29 April 1936 – 25 September 1972) was an Argentine poet. Her idiosyncratic and thematically introspective poetry has been considered "one of the most unusual bodies of work in Latin American literature", and has been recognized and celebrated for its fixation on "the limitation of language, silence, the body, night, the nature of intimacy, madness, [and] death". Pizarnik studied philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and worked as a writer and a literary critic for several publishers and magazines. She lived in Paris between 1960 and 1964, where she translated authors such as Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux, Aimé Césaire and Yves Bonnefoy. She also studied history of religion and French literature at the Sorbonne. Back in Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published three of her major works: Works and Nights, Extracting the Stone of Madness, and The Musical Hell as well as a prose work titled The Bloody Countess. In 1969 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and later, in 1971, a Fulbright Fellowship. On 25 September 1972, she died by suicide after ingesting an overdose of secobarbital. Her work has influenced generations of authors in Latin America.

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 Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America by Frank J. Donner. Berkeley. 1990. University of California Press. hardcover. 503 pages. 0520059514.

DESCRIPTION - This landmark exposé of the dark history of repressive police operations in American cities offers a richly detailed account of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms over the past century. In an incisive examination of undercover work in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia as well as Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Haven, Baltimore, and Birmingham, Frank Donner reveals the underside of American law enforcement. Protectors of Privilege spotlights the repressive police tactics of the past thirty years, particularly the urban intelligence operations and abuses that burgeoned during the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Donner examines the open police violence and corruption in Chicago; the power-hungry Frank Rizzo, whose fear mongering polarized Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s; the ties between the police department and right-wing movements in Los Angeles; and the tarnished professionalism of New York's finest. Meticulously documented, Protectors of Privilege traces the history of countersubversion and police misconduct from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, beginning with the Gilded Age repression of economic protest and anarchist activities. Donner exposes the machinations of City Hall to curb organized labor early in this century, overheated police behavior during World War I, the ideological response to the Depression and its consequences, and police misconduct during the Cold War. More than just a description of police intelligence and abuse of power, Protectors of Privilege demonstrates how patterns of police behavior accord with patterns of city politics as a whole and uncovers the ties between police departments, the CIA, and private right-wing groups. Donner first documents the shift in police interest from crime to countersubversion and then traces the connections between police corruption and countersubversive activities, probing, for example, the role of infiltrators and agents provocateurs in stimulating the violence they then exposed. Protectors of Privilege offers the most comprehensive account yet published of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms in America. In a period when protest movements and ghetto unrest could spur a renewal of police abuses, this book speaks to all Americans.

 Frank Donner (November 25, 1911 – June 10, 1993) was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Project on Political Surveillance. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Donner earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Wisconsin and a law degree from Columbia University. Donner worked for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from 1940 to 1945 before leaving for private practice, primarily representing the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and the United Steelworkers of America. With attorneys Arthur Kinoy and Marshall Perlin he founded the New York firm Donner, Kinoy & Perlin, which specialized in representing progressive and leftist clients, including Soviet spy Morton Sobell and the Labor Youth League. In the 1950s, the firm represented numerous individuals, including labor officials, who refused to take loyalty oaths or to testify on their membership in communist organizations, as well as several who were prosecuted under the Smith Act. Donner, himself, was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956, accused of membership in a Communist cell within the NLRB in the 1940s. He refused to testify, invoking his fifth amendment rights. Donner was a board member for the National Lawyers Guild. Beginning in 1980, Donner headed the Project on Political Surveillance for the ACLU. During that time he wrote several books outlining official use of domestic surveillance and the use of Red Squads, programs like COINTELPRO, and other agencies to infiltrate organizations suspected of political dissent. Donner also cited the government's use of scapegoats to divert attention from government criticism onto other political groups.

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Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003 by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2011. New Directuons. 9780811218146. Edited by Ignacio Echevarria. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 390 pages. hardcover. Cover by Rodrigo Corral Design. Originally published in Spanish as Entre parentesis.

DESCRIPTION - Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolaño wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. “Taken together,” as the editor Ignacio Echevarría remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: the closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented ‘autobiography.’” Bolaño’s career as a nonfiction writer began in 1998, the year he became famous overnight for The Savage Detectives; he was suddenly in demand for articles and speeches, and he took to this new vocation like a duck to water. Cantankerous, irreverent, and insufferably opinionated, Bolaño also could be tender (about his family and favorite places) as well as a fierce advocate for his heroes (Borges, Cortázar, Parra) and his favorite contemporaries, whose books he read assiduously and promoted generously. A demanding critic, he declares that in his “ideal literary kitchen there lives a warrior”: he argues for courage, and especially for bravery in the face of failure. Between Parentheses fully lives up to his own demands: “I ask for creativity from literary criticism, creativity at all levels.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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A Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolaño. New York. 2014. New Directions. 109 pages.  hardcover. Jacket photograph by Allen Frame. Jacket design by Erik Rieselbach.  Translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer.  9780811223355.  

DESCRIPTION - Published in Spanish right before Bolaño's death, A Little Lumpen Novelita percolates with a fierce and tender love of women. ‘Now I am a mother and a married woman, but not long ago I led a life of crime’: so Bianca begins her tale of growing up the hard way in Rome. Orphaned overnight as a teenager—’our parents died in a car crash on their first vacation without us’—she drops out of school, gets a crappy job, and drifts into bad company. Her younger brother brings home two petty criminals who need a place to stay. As the four of them share the family apartment and plot a strange crime, Bianca learns how low she can fall. Electric and tense with foreboding, with its jagged, propulsive short chapters beautifully translated by Natasha Wimmer, A Little Lumpen Novelita delivers a surprising, fractured fairy tale of seizing control of one’s fate.

Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile. At fifteen, he moved with his family to Mexico and there became a Trotskyite and a journalist. In 1973, he returned to Chile and enlisted in Allende’s party but was imprisoned for a week after the military coup. He then went to El Salvador, where he knew the poet Roque Dalton, then to Mexico, and finally Spain where he worked as a dishwasher, waiter, night watchman, garbageman, longshoreman, and salesman until the 80’s when he could make enough money to support himself by writing, and publishing. In 1999 he won the extremely prestigious Herralde & el Rómulo Gallego Award, considered the Latin American Nobel Prize (García Márquez and Vargas Llosa have been other winners.) He died of liver failure in Barcelona, and is survived by his wife and two children.

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A Hell of a Woman by Jim Thompson. Berkeley. 1984. Black Lizard Books. 0916870774. 183 pages. paperback. Cover art by Nancy MacGregor. Originally published by Lion in 1954.

DESCRIPTION - Young, beautiful, and fearfully abused, Mona was the kind of girl even a hard man like Dillon couldn't bring himself to use. But when Mona told him about the vicious aunt who had turned her into something little better than a prostitute - and about the money the old lady has stashed away - Dillon found it surprisingly easy to kill for her.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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The Kill-Off by Jim Thompson. New York. 1957. Lion Library. Paperback Original. 192 pages. paperback. 142. Cover by William Rose. 

DESCRIPTION - Like a shroud the evil wound itself about the tiny New England town that year - unleashing long-buried secrets and distorted passions - laying bare the violence at its decadent core . . . And here with merciless realism Jim Thompson unravels the web of murder which that evil spun - and strips to nakedness the deadly potential of the human spirit.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. New York. 1952. Lion.  356 pages. paperback. Lion #99.  

DESCRIPTION - Lou Ford is the deputy sheriff of a small town in Texas. The worst thing most people can say against him is that he's a little slow and a little boring. But, then, most people don't know about the sickness--the sickness that almost got Lou put away when he was younger. The sickness that is about to surface again. An underground classic since its publication in 1952, The Killer Inside Me is the book that made Jim Thompson's name synonymous with the roman noir. In a small town in Texas there is a sheriff's deputy named Lou Ford, a man so dull that he lives in cliches, so good-natured that he doesn't even lay a finger on the drunks who come into his custody. But then, that would be too easy, for Lou's sickness requires other victims. . . . A nightmarish book of psychopathic evil. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Myers Thompson (September 27, 1906 - April 7, 1977) was an American author and screenwriter, known for his pulp crime fiction. Thompson wrote more than thirty novels, the majority of which were original paperback publications by pulp fiction houses, from the late-1940s through mid-1950s. Despite some positive critical notice, notably by Anthony Boucher in The New York Times, he was little-recognized in his lifetime. Only after death did Thompson's literary stature grow, when in the late 1980s, several novels were re-published in the Black Lizard series of re-discovered crime fiction. Thompson's writing culminated in a few of his best-regarded works: The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman and Pop. 1280. A number of Thompson's books became popular films, including The Getaway and The Grifters. The writer R.V. Cassill has suggested that of all pulp fiction, Thompson's was the rawest and most harrowing; that neither Dashiell Hammett nor Raymond Chandler nor even Horace McCoy, author of the bleak They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, ever ‘wrote a book within miles of Thompson'. Similarly, in the introduction to Now and on Earth, Stephen King says he most admires Thompson's work because ‘The guy was over the top. The guy was absolutely over the top. Big Jim didn't know the meaning of the word stop. There are three brave lets inherent in the forgoing: he let himself see everything, he let himself write it down, then he let himself publish it.' Thompson admired Fyodor Dostoyevsky and was nicknamed ‘Dimestore Dostoevsky' by writer Geoffrey O'Brien. Film director Stephen Frears, who directed an adaptation of Thompson's The Grifters as 1990's The Grifters, also identified elements of Greek tragedy in his themes.

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 Utopia 14 by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. New York. 1954. Bantam. paperback. 312 pages. October 1954. A1262. 1st published in hardcover by Scribner in 1952 under the title PLAYER PIANO. 

DESCRIPTION - Man's revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow. Here is the gripping story of one man's rebellion against a terrifying world of tomorrow - a machine-ruled America that threatens to make man obsolete. In the great tradition of 'Brave New World' and '1984' Kurt Vonnegut uses a strange and marvelous world of the future to tell of passions and conflicts that are ageless. Man's revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow... Here is the gripping story of one man's rebellion against a terrifying world of tomorrow - a machine-ruled America that threatens to make man obsolete. In the great tradition of 'Brave New World' and '1984' Kurt Vonnegut uses a strange and marvelous world of the future to tell of passions and conflicts that are ageless. Utopia 14 is, perhaps, Vonnegut’s most accessible novel and, unlike some of his other publications, does not seem to draw the ire of censors and detractors (although it does contain very brief mature language). The novel, however, still clearly shows the craft for which Vonnegut is famous and provides the literary challenges that instructors desire. Utopia 14 provides the irony and dark humor on which Vonnegut built his literary reputation but within a very straightforward literary construct — its plot is without the problems of time readers find in Slaughterhouse-Five. The text describes characters whose motivations are unique (a reporter, for instance, whose work leads him to a new religion and new job as dictator of an island nation) but whose presentation is easily comprehensible. As with any Vonnegut novel, social commentary, while steeped in irony, remains explicit. This commentary will allow Utopia 14 to become part of a social studies curriculum that analyzes elements of Cold War America or weapons of mass destruction and their role in history or current events. Vonnegut’s book also lends itself to any class’s discussions of religion, politics, and societal values.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.’

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The Healing by Gayl Jones. Boston. 1998. Beacon Press. 285 pages. Jacket illustration by Leigh Wells. 0807063142. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Two decades after the publication of her last novel, EVA'S MAN, Gayl Jones returns with a new novel heralded by Newsweek as 'a major literary event. ' Nominated for the National Book Award, THE HEALING is the story of Harlan Jane Eagleton, a faith healer from Louisville, Kentucky, who travels from town to town restoring minds and bodies. Beginning in the present and working backward in time to the central mystery of the novel -- the story of her first healing -- Harlan revisits her various previous incarnations as the manager of a rising rock singer, the lover of an Afro-German horse dealer, a race-track gambler, and a small-town beautician. Lyrical and at times humorous, THE HEALING is a dramatic exploration of the struggle to let go of pain, anger, and even love.

Gayl Jones was born in Kentucky in 1949. She attended Connecticut College and Brown University, and has taught a Wellesley College and the University of Michigan. Her other books include THE HEALING (1998 National Book Award Finalist and New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and many others.

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