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Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra. New York. 2017. Farrar Straus Giroux. 9780374274788. 406 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jason Heuer.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
One of our most important public intellectuals reveals the hidden history of our current global crisis. How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world―from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful[…]
James Joyce by Italo Svevo. San Francisco. 1950. City Lights Books. Reprinted Paperback Edition after A limited Edition of 1600 numbered copies were privately issued by James Laughlin for the friends and supporters of New Directions.Very Good In Wrappers. unpaginated. paperback. The cover photograph of Joyce is by Man Ray, from The Museum of Modern Art (new York) Collection. That of Svevo (back cover) is from the collection of his widow and shows Svevo in 1892 at the age of[…]
Tituba of Salem Village by Ann Petry. New York. 1964. Thomas Y. Crowell. hardcover. 256 pages. Jacket by John Wilson.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In Salem village in 1692, superstition and hysteria mounted to the climax that we know today as the Salem Witch Trials. A major figure in the trials—indeed, one of the first three ‘witches’ condemned - was Tituba, a slave from Barbados. In this book Ann Petry has brought Tituba alive for us.[…]
Satan is a Woman by Gil Brewer. New York. 1951. Facwett Gold Medal. paperback. 158 pages. September 1951. #169.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
She carried hell in her heart. SATAN IS A WOMAN. There is a legend of olden time that the Devil is not a fallen archangle at all, but a woman with flaxen hair and green eyes - a beautiful creature with an angel face, who can bend innocent young men to her will,[…]
Half-Truths & One-And-A-Half Truths by Karl Kraus. Montreal. 1976. Engendra Press. hardcover. 128 pages. Design by Anthony Crouch. Edited and translated from the German by Harry Zohn. 0919830005.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘This, and only this, is the substance of our civilization: the speed with which stupidity sucks us into its vortex.’ An intrepid guardian of the truth in an age drowning in lies, Karl Kraus (1874-1936), the great Viennese editor, moralist, polemicist and pacifist -[…]
Eurocentrism by Samir Amin. New York. 1989. Monthly Review Press. hardcover. 152 pages. Translated from the French by Russell More. 0853457867.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Since its first publication twenty years ago, Eurocentrism has become a classic of radical thought. Written by one of the world's foremost political economists, this original and provocative essay takes on one of the great 'ideological deformations' of our time: Eurocentrism. Rejecting the dominant Eurocentric view of world history, which narrowly[…]
The Shooting Gallery & Other Stories by Yuko Tsushima. New York. 1988. Pantheon Books. paperback. 138 pages. Translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt. 0394757432.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Eight stories by one of Japan's most important women authors concern the struggles of women in a repressive society. An unwed mother introduces her children to their father. A woman confronts the 'other woman'. A young single mother resents her children. These stories touch on universal themes[…]
The Bureaucrats by Honore de Balzac. Evanston. 1993. Northwestern University Press. 247 pages. paperback. Cover: Honore Daumier, ‘Le ventre Legiuslatif, from Association Mensuelle.’ Translated from the French by Charles Foulkes. Edited and with an introduction by Marco Diani. 0810109875. Originally published as Les Employés (1837 - Scènes de la vie Parisienne).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
THE BUREAUCRATS (Les Employés) stands out in Balzac’s immense oeuvre by offering a compelling analysis of an important nineteenth-century French[…]
The Traces Of Thomas Hariot by Muriel Rukeyser. New York. 1971. Random House. 366 pages. hardcover. 0394449231.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A study of the life of little-known Elizabethan Thomas Hariot - friend of Ralegh, Drake and Marlowe, and one of the first English explorers of the New World. Hariot was linked to poets, mathematicians and pioneer scientists, involved in the scientific, political, philosophical and sexual heresies of his time, and an expert in ships[…]
Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. New York. 1979. Viking Press. hardcover. 348 pages. June 1979. Jacket painting by Cornelia Gray. 0670616052.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the least known, and most controversial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, had a mistress for thirty-eight years, whom he loved and lived with until he died, the beautiful[…]
The Italics Are Mine by Nina Berberova. New York. 1969. Harcourt Brace & World. 606 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph & design by Robert A. Propper. Translated from the Russian by Philippe Radley.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This is the autobiography of Nina Berberova, who was born in St Petersburg in 1901, the only child of an Armenian father and a North Russian mother. After the Revolution, and the persecution of intellectuals which followed, she was forced[…]
The Republic Of Dreams by Nelida Pinon. New York. 1989. Knopf. 663 pages. July 1989. hardcover. 0394555252. Jacket illustration by Steven Rydberg. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Lane. (original title: Republica dos sonhos, 1984 - Livraria Francisco Alves Editora S/A, Rio de Janeiro).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This huge, mesmeric novel marks the debut in English of one of the most brilliant and admired of today’s Latin American writers.[…]
Tales of the German Imagination: From the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann by Peter Wortsman (editor). New York. 2012. Penguin Books. paperback. 361 pages. Cover: 'Melancholy of the Mountains', 1929, Coloured woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Translated from the German, selected and editied with an introduction by Peter Wortsman. 9780141198804.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Bringing together tales of melancholy and madness, nightmare and fantasy, this is a new collection of the most haunting German stories from[…]
The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov. Norfolk. 1941. 206 pages. November 1941. hardcover.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
THE REAL LIFE OF SEBASTIAN KNIGHT is a perversely magical literary detective story-subtle, intricate, leading to a tantalizing climax-about the mysterious life of a famous writer. Many people knew things about Sebastian Knight as a distinguished novelist, but probably fewer than a dozen knew of the two love affairs that so profoundly influenced his career, the second[…]
Conversation In The Cathedral by Mario Vargas Llosa. New York. 1984. Harper & Row. 601 pages. hardcover. 0060145021. (original title: Conversacion en La Catedral).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A powerful novel of political and personal greed, corruption, and terror set in modem Peru, by the author of The Green House and THE TIME OF THE HERO. Under the rule of the unseen military dictator General Odria. suspicion, paranoia, and blackmail become the realities of public and[…]
The Orwell Reader by George Orwell. New York. 1956. Harcourt Brace & Company. 456 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Here is Orwell’s work in all its remarkable range and variety. The selections in this anthology show how Orwell developed as writer and as thinker; inevitably, too, they reflect and illuminate the history of the time of troubles in which he lived and worked. ‘A magnificent tribute to the probity, consistency[…]
Mule Bone: A Comedy Of Negro Life by Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. New York. 1991. Harper Collins. 282 pages. hardcover. 0060553014. Jacket design by Suzanne Noli. Jacket illustration by David Diaz.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Set in Eatonville, Florida, Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown and the inspiration for much of her fiction, this energetic and often farcical play centers on Jim and Dave, a two-man song-and-dance team, and Daisy, the woman who comes between their[…]
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. New York. 1996. Penguin Books. 432 pages. paperback. 0140434143. The cover shows ‘Miss Cazenove mounted on a Grey Hunter’ by Jacques-Laurent Agasse. Edited and with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
MANSFIELD PARK is Jane Austen’s most profound and perplexing novel. Adopted into the household of her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, Fanny Price grows up a meek outsider among her cousins in the unaccustomed elegance of Mansfield Park.[…]
Eva's Man by Gayl Jones. New York. 1976. Random House. 179 pages. March 1976. hardcover. 0394499344. Jacket design and illustration by Wendell Minor.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Sitting in a prison cell—talking to a cellmate, a psychiatrist, herself, us - Eva Medina Canada is trying to remember it all, to keep memory separate from fantasy. But it is not easy. For a woman with no man and no money has to live in the streets, and[…]
Corregidora by Gayl Jones. New York. 1975. Random House. 186 pages. March 1975. hardcover. 0394493230. Jacket design by Wendell Minor.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Ursa Corregidora is lucky. She can sing her terror and her longing in a Kentucky café. She is less helpless then, and less bedeviled. But there is no song to numb her - to help her forget that the fruits of her marriage were violence and sterility; that she cannot live up[…]
The Price Of The Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 by James Baldwin. New York. 1985. St Martin's Press. 690 pages. hardcover. 0312643063. Jacket design by Andy Carpenter.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
James Baldwin is one of the major American voices of this century. Nowhere is this more evident than in THE PRICE OF THE TICKET, which includes virtually every important piece of nonfiction, short and long, that Mr. Baldwin has ever written. With total truth and profound[…]
Oriental Tales by Marguerite Yourcenar. New York. 1985. Farrar Straus Giroux. 147 pages. hardcover. 0374227284. Jacket painting by Tao-chi (1641-ca. 1710), from ‘Returning Home.’ Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Legends caught in flight, fables, allegories - these ten ORIENTAL TALES form a singular edifice in the work of Marguerite Yourcenar, as precious as a chapel in a vast palace. From China to Greece, from the Balkans to Japan, these TALES take us[…]
Harmless Poisons, Blameless Sins by Mohammed Mrabet. Santa Barbara. 1976. Black Sparrow Press. Taped and Translated from the Moghrebi by Paul Bowles. 105 pages. 0876852746.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
During his childhood Mrabet listened to traditional story tellers in Tangier´s cafés - a world that fascinated him. Later on he would invent his own stories, and Paul Bowles taped and transcribed his stories. Mrabet´s first novel Love with a Few Hairs was published 1967 in London[…]
Ancestor Stones by Aminatta Forna. New York. 2006. Atlantic Monthly Press. 323 pages. Jacket art by Bruno Barbier/Robert Harding. 0871139448. September 2006.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘Abie has followed the arc of a letter from London back to Africa, to the coffee groves of Kholifa Estates, the plantation formerly owned by her grandfather. It is a place she remembers from childhood and which now belongs to her - if she wants it. Standing among the ruined[…]
Dr. Futurity by Philip K. Dick. New York. 1960. Ace Books. Paperback Original. Bound As An Ace Double With SLAVERS OF SPACE by John Brunner. D-421. 138 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
DR. FUTURITY is a 1960 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. It is an expansion of his earlier short story ‘Time Pawn‘, which first saw publication in the summer 1954 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories. DR. FUTURITY was first published as a[…]
The Collected Works Of Jane Bowles by Jane Bowles. New York. 1966. Farrar Straus Giroux. Introduction by Truman Capote. 431 pages. Jacket design by Ronald Clyne.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Jane Bowles has for many years had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of the twentieth century. This collection of expertly crafted short fiction will fully acquaint all students and scholars with the author Tennessee Williams called the most important writer of[…]
How To Solve It by G. Polya. Garden City. 1957. Anchor/Doubleday. A93. 253 pages. Cover by George Giusti.Typography By Edward Gorey.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Heuristic - the study of the methods and rules of discovery and invention - has until our time been a largely neglected, almost forgotten, branch of learning. The disputed province of logic or philosophy or psychology, it tries to understand the process of solving problems and its typical mental operations.[…]
Country Place by Ann Petry. Boston. 1947. Houghton Mifflin. 266 pages. Cover: Paul Sample.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
With all the compassionate insight into human beings for which she is noted, Ann Petry exposes the hypocrisies of a tranquil New England town in this dramatic story of a war veteran who searches to find out whether his wife has been unfaithful. ‘Gossip, malice, infidelity, murder. . . are some of the dominant matters treated in Country Place.’[…]
The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul. New York. 1997. Free Press. 199 pages. Jacket design by Tom Stvan. Jacket photograph by Philip Wallick/PPD International. Author photograph by Beverley Rockett. 0684832577. January 1997.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Civilizations, like individuals, are often blinded to their true character by sentiment and ideology - and ours is perhaps the most glaring example. In a powerful meditation already hailed as ‘the best work of popular philosophizing produced in this[…]
The Narrows by Ann Petry. Boston. 1953. Houghton Mifflin. 428 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Originally published in 1953, The Narrows spins the unforgettable tale of a forbidden love affair between Link Williams, a college-educated twenty-six-year-old black man, and Camilo Sheffield, a wealthy married white woman. Set in the sleepy New England town of Monmouth, Connecticut, and 'filled with dramatic force, earthy humor, and tragic intensity', this classic novel deftly evokes a divisive era in America's[…]
Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 by W. E. B. Du Bois. New York. 1938. Harcourt Brace & Company. 746 pages. March 1938.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A distinguished scholar introduces the pioneering work in the study of the role of black Americans during the Reconstruction by the most gifted and influential black intellectual of his time. BLACK RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA is a book by W. E. B. Du Bois, first published in 1935. It is revisionist approach[…]
Incantations & Other Stories by Anjana Appachana. New Brunswick. 1992. Rutgers University Press. 150 pages. Cover photograph by Kasha Dalal. Cover design by the Senate. 0813518288.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This first collection of fiction by Anjana Appachana provides stories that are beautifully written, the characters in them carefully and respectfully drawn. All the stories are set in India, but the people in them seem somehow displaced within their own society—a society in transition but a[…]
The Street by Ann Petry. Boston. 1946. Houghton Mifflin. A Literary Fellowship Prize 1st Novel. 436 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
THE STREET tells the poignant, often heartbreaking story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved[…]
Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett. New York. 1995. Penguin Books. Edited & With An Introduction and Notes By David Blewett. 480 pages. The cover shows a detail of Lord George Graham in His Cabin by William Hogarth in the National Maritime Museum, London. 9780140433326.
RODERICK RANDOM was published in 1748 to immediate acclaim, and established Smollett among the most popular of eighteenth-century novelists. In this picaresque tale, Roderick Random suffers misfortune after misfortune as he drifts from one pummeling to another[…]
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship Of Reason In The West by John Ralston Saul. New York. 1992. Free Press. 640 pages. Cover design by Michael Langenstein. 0029277256.
The pitfalls of rationalism and and the rise of bureaucracy.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In a wide-ranging, provocative anatomy of modern society and its origins, novelist and historian John Ralston Saul explores the reason for our deepening sense of crisis and confusion. Throughout the Western world we talk endlessly[…]
“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” asks the healer Minnie Ransom in Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, set in Georgia in the 1970s. “Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed,[…]
On January 11, 2021, we published “Trump’s Lingering Menace,” Jonathan Stevenson’s observations about how dangerous it was to have a disgraced and enraged commander-in-chief still in nominal charge of the US military (not to mention the nuclear codes). Even before[…]
Through a series of black-and-white photographs, printed the size of large landscape paintings, visitors to Josef Koudelka’s exhibition at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s François Mitterrand site encountered a world emptied of its inhabitants. The images in “Ruins,” from Tunisia,[…]
Harsh and gray dawned the day of the Stupid Coup, with a lowering sky of dense dark clouds, slippery muddy grass underfoot, and a stiff, unforgiving wind that kept the “Stop the Steal” flags flapping. Face-painted and brightly festooned pilgrims[…]
Republican leaders enjoy flashing their badges as the “Party of Lincoln,” preening themselves on Lincoln’s moral victories and declaring themselves his rightful political heirs. “Our party, the Republican Party, was founded to defeat slavery. Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president,[…]
Among Chinese dissidents, Trump supporters outnumber Trump critics, and it is important to understand why. It is not because they are a far-right fringe. They are “pro-Trump” because they feel that for decades US administrations have been naive about the[…]
In November, a court at last notified Zhou Xiaoxuan, known more commonly by her nickname, Xianzi, that it would try her case, a civil lawsuit filed in 2018 against television host Zhu Jun, who she alleges sexually harassed her. But[…]
On January 3, The Washington Post published an op-ed signed by the ten living former secretaries of defense admonishing that, constitutionally, the US military is apolitical and cannot be involved in election disputes. Especially ominous was the fact that one of former[…]
On January 2, 2020, we published Anna Badkhen’s “‘Bright Unbearable Reality’: Migration As Seen from Above,” an essay about aerial photography. Badkhen tracks Western depictions of humanity from above, starting with the work of fifteenth-century Flemish Renaissance painter Joachim Patinir[…]
Wednesday’s riot at the US Capitol by supporters of outgoing President Donald J. Trump was dangerous, unprecedented, and anti-American, but it was also the ineluctable result of a months-long campaign by Trump to steal the 2020 presidential election. To the[…]
In the end, the ship would be lost to ice. Three and a half months out of Amsterdam, with the crew already drifting into scurvy’s embrace, Dutch explorer William Barents found the passage east blocked. In the last days of[…]
On December 29, 2020, we published Benjamin Moser’s essay “Sarajevo Revisited.” Part memoir, part travelogue, part pensée, it reflects on his recent return to Bosnia, where he took part in the international literary festival Bookstan Sarajevo. The reason for Moser’s[…]
The first Westerner known to portray human suffering from above was the Flemish Renaissance painter Joachim Patinir, born in Flanders circa 1480. Patinir is considered the inventor of what we now call Weltlandschaft, world landscape, which shows a panoramic cornucopia[…]
I recently found myself on a metal chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg, in Paris, submitting to my first-ever session of “philosophical therapy.” I was there because I had gotten an email from a philosophy professor I knew explaining that[…]
Shutters guarded the airport shops when I got to Vienna. Through the plastic coverings, you could see abandoned Sacher tortes and Mozart magnets, postcards with strapping Alpine blondes, and T-shirts reminding us that there are no kangaroos in Austria. Everything[…]
At a table in a dark kitchen, Mary Anning’s dying mother (Gemma Jones) cracks a hardboiled egg and finds a chick. She rises and dumps the ruined little body in the sink without ceremony, while Mary (Kate Winslet) eats her[…]
The total number of deaths from COVID-19 in the U.S. is set to top 400,000 before Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, but rollout of coronavirus vaccines has been slow, with many describing a vexing amount of red tape standing[…]
Read more...As security is ramped up in Washington, D.C., and state capitols across the U.S., the FBI is warning of more potential violence in the lead-up to Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20. Federal authorities have arrested over 100 people who[…]
Read more...Joe Biden Unveils $1.9 Trillion Coronavirus and Economic Relief Package, U.S. on Pace to Top 400,000 COVID-19 Deaths by Inauguration Day as Unemployment Surges, Dozens of Capitol Rioters Were on FBI Terrorism Watch List, QAnon Insurrectionist Jacob Chansley, Who Threatened[…]
Read more...As the United States breaks all records for coronavirus cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns another 92,000 could die in the next three weeks as complaints grow over the slow distribution of COVID vaccines. Across the country,[…]
Read more...We look at the fight for accountability after a white supremacist mob attacked the U.S. Capitol and as President Trump is impeached for a historic second time for his incitement of violence. Supporters who took part in the January 6[…]
Read more...The House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in a bid to overturn Joe Biden's Electoral College victory, and Trump will end his term in office with the distinction[…]
Read more...Donald Trump Impeached for Second Time After Inciting Insurrection at U.S. Capitol, More Capitol Insurrectionists Arrested as FBI Warns of Continued Domestic Terror Threat, 20,000 National Guard Troops Deploy to Washington, D.C., for Inauguration, Democrats Demand Probe into Whether GOP[…]
Read more...As Los Angeles County reports record COVID-19 infections, overflowing hospitals and record death tolls, we look at how Indigenous communities there are among the hardest hit in working-class neighborhoods, where many are essential workers. "Indigenous people, we don't have the[…]
Read more...As the House votes to impeach President Trump, the FBI warns there could be a repeat of the violent insurrection he encouraged on January 6, with Trump loyalists planning to hold armed protests nationwide ahead of Joe Biden's inauguration. We[…]
Read more...House to Impeach Trump as GOP Shows Signs of Backing Removal, FBI Warned of "War" Ahead of U.S. Capitol Assault as Military Issues Joint Condemnation, 3rd Lawmaker Tests Positive for COVID-19 After Insurrection as Dems Call Out GOP Links to[…]
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