zeno's picks
Book Blogs
(05/23/2013) Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens
(05/23/2013) Blood, Class, & Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies by Christopher Hitchens. New York. 1990. Farrar Straus Giroux. 398 pages. hardcover. keywords: History England America. 0374114439. Jacket design by Tom McKeveny.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
America’s ‘special relationship’ with Britain goes largely unexamined. It is usually presented as a matter of tradition, manners, and common culture, sanctified by wartime alliance. Christopher Hitchens shows here that the special ingredient in the relationship is a compound of empire, transmitted from an ancien régime that has tried to preserve and renew itself thereby. The cultural counterpart to this, he argues, has been a hypocritical attempt by England to play Greece to the American Rome. Reviewing the critical points of American history and politics in the past hundred years, Hitchens demonstrates that at every stage - imperial expansion in 1898, world war in 1917 and 1941, confrontation with the Soviet Union in 1918 and 1948 - it has been the British connection that has turned the scale. He argues that in related matters - the assumption of huge commitments overseas, the development of a global intelligence network, and the rise of a nuclear establishment - America also answered British promptings. He stresses the ironic process whereby, having encouraged the United States to become first a junior and then an equal partner in the business of empire, Britain found itself finally supplanted. The special relationship has also helped shape the American scene at home, with profound English influences on the hierarchy of scholarship, language, manners, ethnicity, and taste. Though this Anglo-Saxon hegemony is now in eclipse, Hitchens illuminates the ways in which Anglophilia still works - and the appeal to blood upon which it is based. Two figures - Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling - pervade these pages, and their latent influence is explored. (There are two unknown poems by Kipling in the book.) In the relationship between these two men and the two Roosevelts, Hitchens finds the analogue and the ancestry of a fascinating cultural and historical complexity.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London’s Daily Express, Harper’s, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/22/2013) Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens
(05/22/2013) Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens. New York/Boston. 2011. Twelve. 788 pages. September 2011. hardcover. keywords: Literature Essays England Politics. 9781455502776. Cover photo by Alpha/Landov. Cover design by Eric Baker.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The first new book of essays by Christopher Hitchens since 2004, ARGUABLY offers an indispensable key to understanding the passionate and skeptical spirit of one of our most dazzling writers, widely admired for the clarity of his style, a result of his disciplined and candid thinking. Topics range from ruminations on why Charles Dickens was among the best of writers and the worst of men to the haunting science fiction of J.G. Ballard; from the enduring legacies of Thomas Jefferson and George Orwell to the persistent agonies of anti-Semitism and jihad. Hitchens even looks at the recent financial crisis and argues for arthe enduring relevance of Karl Marx. The book forms a bridge between the two parallel enterprises of culture and politics. It reveals how politics justifies itself by culture, and how the latter prompts the former. In this fashion, ARGUABLY burnishes Christopher Hitchens' credentials as-to quote Christopher Buckley-our ‘greatest living essayist in the English language.’
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper’s, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London’s Daily Express, Harper’s, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/21/2013) Cast The First Stone by Chester Himes
(05/21/2013) Cast The First Stone by Chester Himes. New York. 1972. Signet/New American Library. 303 pages. January 1972. Y4882. paperback. keywords: African American Literature Prison America.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A GREAT NOVEL THAT RIPS ASIDE THE BARRED DOORS OF PRISON LIFE. James Monroe was young and educated. He stood before the judge and tried to look humble and heard himself sentenced to twenty years in prison. Here is Chester Himes’s great novel of prison life. It is a story both of brutal debasement and of the slow growth of maturity and compassion. It is a vivid re-creation of a perverse society with its own rules, its own taboos, its own virtues and grotesque vices. And strangely enough, it is also a love story - a love between two men. ‘Accurate and intense. . . as good as IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO.’ - Saturday Review. ‘A nightmarish picture, illuminated by flashes of sardonic humor. . . . I’ve never read anything like it.’ - Saturday Review.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/20/2013) The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
(05/20/2013) The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes. New York. 1985. Farrar Straus Giroux. 199 pages. October 1985. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Mexico Latin America. 0374225788. Original title: El Gringo Viejo, 1985 - Fondo de Cultura Economica. Cover: Author photo (c) 1985 Andres Caray Jacket design by Drenttel Doyle Partners.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
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.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/19/2013) The Buried Mirror: Reflections On Spain & The New World by Carlos Fuentes
(05/19/2013) The Buried Mirror: Reflections On Spain & The New World by Carlos Fuentes. Boston. 1992. Houghton Mifflin. April 1992. hardcover. keywords: Latin America Translated History Mexico. 0395479789.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In his introduction to this passionate history of Spain and the Spanish-speaking peoples of the Americas, Carlos Fuentes asks the necessary question: What do we really have to celebrate of Columbus’s historic voyage to the New World? After all, the quincentennial of the ‘discovery of America’ finds Latin American republics in a state of deep crisis, with inflation, unemployment, and excessive foreign debt threatening their still precarious economic and political institutions. But Fuentes finds much consolation in an amazingly rich cultural heritage, one that has been created with ‘the greatest joy, the greatest gravity, and the greatest risk’ and that lives in art, in literature, and above all in the vital societies of Central and South America. From the mysterious cave drawings at Altamira to the explosive graffiti on the walls of East Los Angeles, images of Spain and the Americas speak to us of the great variety of Spanish culture. Carlos Fuentes knows this culture intimately. Combining a sophisticated perspective on world events and a novelist’s eye for irony and metaphor, he weaves a historical narrative of dazzling color and vibrancy. Sweeping across centuries of tumultuous history, Fuentes gives new life to monarchs and conquistadors, to Indian cultures and revolutions, and finally to modern-day Spain, Latin America, and the Hispanic United States, History and its players come alive on every page, in the stories of the famous and the little-known, the heroes and tyrants, martyrs and saints, virgins and kings. Using the illuminating metaphor of mirrors, inspired by mirrors found in ancient burial caches in the Americas, Fuentes challenges us to think in new ways about how a national character is formed, how a stereotype evolves, and what continuities are discovered when a human community truly understands its roots. Illustrated with more than 160 stunning drawings, paintings, and photographs, THE BURIED MIRROR celebrates a culture of enormous wealth and diversity, as Carlos Fuentes fulfills the poet Pablo Neruda’s resounding cry. ‘I am here to sing this history.’
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/18/2013) Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges
(05/18/2013) Selected Poems by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1999. Viking Press. 478 pages. April 1999. hardcover. keywords: Poetry Argentina Latin America Literature South America Translated. 0670849413. Jacket design by Paul Buckley.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘The roots of language are irrational and of a magical satire. The Dane who pronounced the name of Thor or the Saxon who uttered the name of Thunor did not know whether these words represented the god of thunder or the rumble that is beard after the lightning flash. Poetry wants to return to that ancient magic. Without fixed rules, it progresses in a hesitant, daring way, as if moving in darkness. Poetry is a mysterious chess, whose chessboard and whose pieces change as in a dream and over which I shall be gazing after I am dead.’ Though universally acclaimed for his dazzling fictions, Jorge Luis Borges always considered himself first and foremost a poet. A decade before writing his earliest stories, Borges published his first book of poems. And even in that precocious debut, the twenty-four-year-old poet claimed for himself the principal themes that would preoccupy him for the next half century: the cult of his ancestors and his ‘mysterious habit called Buenos Aires’; the enigma of time and the many yesterdays of history; the metaphysics of Schopenhauer and Berkeley; the now-familiar mirrors, mazes, and swords. This new bilingual selection brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges’s poetry ever assembled in English, including scores of poems never previously translated. Edited by Alexander Coleman, the selection draws from a lifetime’s work – from Borges’s first published volume of verse, Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923), to his final work, Los conjurados, published just a year before his death in 1986. Throughout this unique collection the brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched by luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators: Willis Barnstone, Alexander Coleman, Robert Fitzgerald, Stephen Kessler, Kenneth Krabbenhoft, Eric McHenry, W. S. Merwin, Alastair Reid, Hoyt Rogers, Mark Strand, Charles Tomlinson, Alan S. Trueblood, and John Updike. When Viking published Andrew Hurley’s new translation of Borges’s COLLECTED FICTIONS last year, the book was hailed in The New York Times as an event, and cause for celebration. Now, commemorating the hundredth anniversary of his birth, the celebration continues with SELECTED POEM, the second installment in Viking’s three-volume edition of Borges’s collected works in English. One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century,
JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986) published numerous collections of poems, essays, and fiction. Director of the National library of Buenos Aires from 1955 to 1973, Borges was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from both Columbia and Oxford. He received various literary awards over the course of his career, including the International Publishers’ Prize (which he shared with Samuel Beckett in 1961), the Jerusalem Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize.
ALEXANDER COLEMAN is professor emeritus of Portuguese and Spanish Studies at New York University.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/17/2013) Going To The Territory by Ralph Ellison
(05/17/2013) Going To The Territory by Ralph Ellison. New York. 1986. Random House. 339 pages. July 1986. hardcover. keywords: Essays America Black African American. 0394540506. Jacket design by Richard Adelson.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America’s most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. He analyzes the subversive quality of black laughter, the mythic underpinnings of his masterpiece Invisible Man, and the extent to which America’s national identity rests on the contributions of African Americans. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.
RALPH ELLISON was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of INVISIBLE MAN (1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. He published two volumes of nonfiction, SHADOW AND ACT (1964) and GOING TO THE TERRITORY (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON IN 1995. For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, on Riverside Drive in Harlem in New York City.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/16/2013) Run With The Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski
(05/16/2013) Run With The Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. New York. 1993. Harper Collins. 497 pages. May 1993. hardcover. keywords: Literature America. 0060169117. Cover design by Louise Fili. Jacket photograph by John Montfort.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
For five decades, Charles Bukowski’s writing has depicted life on the edge with an unflinchingly mordant clarity that has earned him millions of devotees all over the world. Here is the first comprehensive collection of the best of Bukowski’s autobiographical stories, novels, and poems, and it brings into razor-sharp focus the counterculture idol’s astonishing life and work. Bukowski’s crisp, gritty, highly personal writing chronicles his spectacularly extreme life, with its mingling strings of odd jobs, unusual women, inspired debauches, matter-of-fact desperation, and literary triumphs. RUN WITH THE HUNTED weaves these strings together in a manner that is as appropriate for Bukowski’s work as it is unusual for an anthology. It is arranged chronologically, not by its contents’ original publication dates but by the period in Bukowski’s life that each entry covers. As such, it transcends the realm of anthology and becomes something very like Bukowski’s memoir. Beginning with his first recollection of consciousness (as a toddler under a table in 1922) and culminating with wry septuagenarian reflections, RUN WITH THE HUNTED is packed with dispassionately eloquent accounts of his hard life - from brutal childhood to reluctant stardom - and crystalline observations of life at large. Compiled by John Martin, Bukowski’s longtime friend and editor, this landmark volume distills the essence of a prodigious life’s work and offers a sometimes harrowing, invariably exhilarating reading experience. An internationally famous figure in poetry and prose.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI was born In Andernach, Germany, and brought to the United States at the age of three. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived for many years in San Pedro, Callfornia. He published his first story when he was twenty-four and began writing poetry at the age of thirty-five. He has now written over forty-five books of poetry and prose, as well as the screenplay of the film Barfly.
JOHN MARTIN started Black Sparrow Press in 1966 specifically to publish Charles Bukowski’s work. Since then, Black Sparrow has published approximately five hundred books of poetry and prose by a wide variety of authors.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/15/2013) The Writings Of W. E. B. Du Bois by W. E. B. Du Bois
(05/15/2013) The Writings Of W. E. B. Du Bois by W. E. B. Du Bois. New York. 1975. Thomas Y Crowell. 299 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Black America Politics Biography History African American. 0690004621. Jacket by Andrew Rhodes.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Here is the powerful testimony of one of America’s greatest black spokesmen, W. E. B. Du Bois. Newbery-award winner Virginia Hamilton is the author of a comprehensive biography of Du Bois. Now she has edited a representative selection of his essays, articles, speeches, and excerpts from his other writings, to which she has added her own pertinent introductions. Revealed here in an extraordinary range covering seventy years of his long, productive life, W. E. B. Du Bois speaks to blacks and whites alike. A controversial political figure and activist, he was a founder of the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, The Crisis magazine, and the Pan-African Movement. Du Bois here voices his protest against slavery, segregation, racial inequality, and oppression of blacks. He discusses children and women’s suffrage, education and progress, socialism and black self-sufficiency. Seeing himself as both unique and part of a vast problem, he eloquently describes his early years, researches, and teaching experiences, as well as his trial and acquittal, his travels to Russia and China, and the final meaning of his accomplishments to future generations. The life and works of this distinguished man have been much honored since his death in Ghana, Africa, in 1963. This book will provide the reader with rewarding insights into the prophetic thought and philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/14/2013) Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed
(05/14/2013) Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings: An American Controversy by Annette Gordon-Reed. Charlottesville. 1997. University Press Of Virginia. 288 pages. hardcover. keywords: Jefferson Women Black History Slavery America African American. 0813916984. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Rumors of Thomas Jefferson’s sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings have circulated for two centuries. It remains, among all aspects of Jefferson’s renowned life, perhaps the most hotly contested topic. With THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS, Annette Gordon-Reed promises to intensify this ongoing debate as she identifies glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars evaluations of the existing evidence. She has assembled a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place been denied a fair hearing. Friends of Jefferson sought to debunk the Hemings story as early as 1800, and most subsequent historians and biographers have followed suit, finding the affair unthinkable based upon their view of Jefferson’s life, character, and beliefs. Gordon-Reed responds to these critics by pointing to numerous errors and prejudices in their writings, ranging from inaccurate citations, to impossible time lines, to virtual exclusions of evidence – especially evidence concerning the Hemings family. She demonstrates how these scholars may have been misguided by their own biases and may even have tailored evidence to serve and preserve their opinions of Jefferson. Possessing both a layperson’s unfettered curiosity and a lawyer’s logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Her analysis is accessible, with each chapter revolving around a key figure in the Hemings drama. The resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships - relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself. THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS is a controversial new look at a centuries-old question that should fascinate general readers and historians alike. It promises to be the definitive word on the subject for years to come.
ANNETTE GORDON-REED, a graduate of Harvard Law School, is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/13/2013) Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac
(05/13/2013) Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac. New York. 1968. Penguin Books. Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. 334 pages. L205. paperback. The cover shows a detail of 'The Print Collector' by Daumier, in the Musee du Petit Palais, Paris (Snark International). Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Herbert J. Hunt. keywords: Penguin Classic Paperback France Literature Translated 19th Century. Originally published as Le Cousin Pons (1847).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
COUSIN PONS (1848), one of Balzac’s last novels, offers a diametrically opposite view of family relationships from the one he develops in its companion, COUSIN BETTE. Cousin Bette thinks only of destroying the family on whose patronage she has been for so long forced to live: but Cousin Pons is a mild, harmless old man treated with spiteful contempt by hi well-to-do relations. The novel is one of the best examples in the Human Comedy of Balzac’s rueful contemplation - pessimistic but not despairing - of human nature, and in the lugubrious account of Pons’s physical collapse and death one suspects a presentiment of the fate which was shortly to overtake the author. Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/12/2013) Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney
(05/12/2013) Walking Wounded by William McIlvanney. London. 1989. Hodder & Stoughton. 189 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Scotland. 034026330x.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
William McIlvanney’s characters are ordinary people whose lives, no matter what pressures they are under retain ‘the stubborn resplendence of unfulfilled dreams’. They are the heart and the soul of the industrial town of Graithnock, where the author has set his previous distinguished books like DOCHERTY and THE BIG MAN; and, men and women both, and young people too, they are casualties of the struggle to live in defiance of defeat. Even when their dreams seem irretrievably diminished, they live on and battle on, with humour and resilience courage and wit, and understanding for themselves and their world. The title ’Walking Wounded’ says it all – in a book as astonishing for its perception and power as for its epic, eloquent economy, its ability to reveal a lifetime in an hour-glass.
William McIlvanney, novelist and poet, was educated at Kilmarnock Academy and Glasgow University. He also makes frequent forays into journalism and television as both writer and presenter. His first novel REMEDY IS NONE won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1967, and his second A GIFT FROM NESSUS a Scottish Arts Council Publication Award in 1969. His first volume of poems THE LONGSHIPS IN HARBOUR (1970) was followed by DOCHERTY, his moving recreation of the mining community of the Ayrshire town of ‘Graithnock’ — ‘some of his phrases hammer against you like a collier’s pick’, as Peter Tinniswood wrote in The Times - which won him the prestigious Whitbread Award for Fiction in 1975. After his two LAIDLAW novels, LAIDLAW and THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH - both of which gained Silver Dagger awards from the Crime Writers’ Association - William McIlvanney published THESE WORDS: WEDDINGS AND AFTER in 1984 and his latest novel THE BIG MAN in 1985, also set in and around Graithnock.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/11/2013) Selected Writings Of The American Transcendentalists by George Hochfield (editor)
(05/11/2013) Selected Writings Of The American Transcendentalists by George Hochfield (editor). New York. 1966. Signet/New American Library. 432 pages. November 1966. CQ345. paperback. keywords: Signet Classic Paperback America Philosophy Transcendentalism Literature 19th Century.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
'... the fullest, most radical, rashest expression of that vision we have had: the 'American dream' at its moment of greatest intensity and innocence.' Thus George Hochfield characterizes the movement which dominated the nation's intellectual life during the second third of the nineteenth century, and which has found renewed relevance at a time when the problems of private conscience and social protest once again command our concern. Bursting with explosive force upon the American scene, Transcendentalism sought to revivify religion by stripping it of all dogma; to realize the full promise of the democratic ideal by creating a new social order, a new breed of man; and, above all, to affirm the primacy of personal vision, individual consciousness. Here, collected in one volume, are selections from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, Orestes A. Brownson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Henry David Thoreau, and others-men and women who, as George Hochfield declares, 'wrote an irreplaceable chapter of American history. They were among the first of a breed which has played a decisive role in our culture: the unattached, committed intellectual who confronts the problems of society. Both their example and their dreams continue to haunt us.'
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/10/2013) The Catacombs by William Demby
(05/10/2013) The Catacombs by William Demby. New York. 1965. Pantheon Books. 244 pages. June 1965. hardcover. keywords: Literature Black America African American. Jacket design by Irwin Rosenhouse. Jacket photo by Fabio Coen.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This is a daring book of great beauty, and it offers a remarkably vivid view of the America of the sixties, seen through time and space by an important contemporary novelist of unique perspective and skill. THE CATACOMBS is an autobiographical novel by an American Negro writer who has spent most of his adult life in Rome; written in cinematic style, it details the dramatic events that led to his decision to return to the United States. Doris, a young Negro girl living in Rome and employed as one of Elizabeth Taylor’s handmaidens in the filming of Cleopatra, is having a novel written about her by a friend, William Demby. The action runs from 1961 through 1964, and, in detailing Doris’ life, it explores the turbulent lives of many other Americans living in Italy, the civil rights crisis in the United States, and the world political events that are taking place at the same time. All merge into a single crisis, and through them and the events of his own daily life, the writer himself gradually rebuilds a stronger, tougher identity in order to return and cope with the country of his birth as Negro, writer, and man.
William Demby was born in Pittsburgh on Christmas Day in 1922. After spending the years of World War II in Italy he attended Fisk University in Nashville, and was graduated in 1947. He returned to Italy the same year, where he finished his first novel, BEETLECREEK. When it was published in 1931, the New Yorker wrote: ‘It would be hard to give Mr. Demby too much praise for the skill with which he has maneuvered the various relationships in his book. At times, one has the feeling that he simply set the scene and named the characters, and let them carry on alone from there, so naturally and inevitably does their story develop to its ending.’ In the years that followed, he worked in the Italian film industry as a writer and translator, and, with Rome as his base, traveled in Europe, Ethiopia, Japan and Thailand. Late in 1963, Mr. Demby returned to live in America. He is married to the former Lucia Drudi, and they have a nine-year-old son, James.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/09/2013) The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau
(05/09/2013) The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau. Berkeley. 2011. University of California Press. December 2011. paperback. keywords: Sociology Anthropology History Literature. 9780520271456.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
'The Practice of Everyday Life…offers ample evidence why we should pay heed to de Certeau and why more of us have not done so.'- Journal of Modern History. Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the ordinary person for reclaiming autonomy from the forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature. Previous paperback published 2002 (978-0-520-23699-8).
The late Michel de Certeau was Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris and Visiting Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/08/2013) Domestic Peace & Other Stories by Honore de Balzac
(05/08/2013) Domestic Peace & Other Stories by Honore de Balzac. Baltimore. 1958. Penguin Books. Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. 267 pages. L80. paperback. Translated from the French & With An Introduction by M. A. Crawfoird. keywords: Literature France Translated. Original titles - Domestic Peace (La Paix du ménage, 1830); The Young Conscript (Le Réquisitionnaire, 1831); El Verdugo (1830); An Episode Under the Terror (Un épisode sous la Terreur, 1830); Before Jena (an episode from A Mysteriou Affair); The Abbe Birotteau; Le Colonel Chabert (1832 - Scènes de la vie privée).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
All these stories were first published between 1830 and 1832, with the exception of the fragment from A MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR, which first appeared in 1841. After publishing the first novel to which he set his name, LES CHOUANS, in 1829, Balzac was exploiting the fashion of the moment for the story, and wrote quantities of them, very rapidly, among masses of other work, making use of the short form to work out his ideas and develop his techniques. These stories are some of the best in the world’s literature. But they are much more than that. They are organically part of the Comedie humaine. The groups into which Balzac at this time began to classify them together were to form the nuclei around which the Comedie humaine was to grow for the next twenty years. When they were written, the great novels were still all to come, but they were to add themselves to and extend a scheme gradually beginning to reveal itself. It was in 1834 that the frame was put together of what was in 1842 first called The Human Comedy. That frame had three parts: (1) Studies of Manners, (2) Philosophical Studies, (3) Analytical Studies. Of these, the first, Studies of Manners, was to be built from six groups: Scenes of Private Life, Scenes of Provincial Life, Scenes of Life in Paris, Scenes of Political, Military, and Country Life.
Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/07/2013) Black Women's Blues: A Literary Anthology 1934-1988 by Rita B. Dandridge
(05/07/2013) Black Women's Blues: A Literary Anthology 1934-1988 by Rita B. Dandridge. New York. 1992. G. K. Hall. 398 pages. hardcover. keywords: Black Women Anthology African American. 0816190844. Jacket design by Blake Logan.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
An important new contribution to the study of twentieth-century African-American women, BLACK WOMEN’S BLUES, A LITERARY ANTHOLOGY: 1934—1988 charts the sociohistorical struggles of African-American women and their responses to these struggles, from the Depression to the civil rights and block power movements, to the women’s liberation movement. Covering a wide range of expression and experience, the selections are organized around several themes - racism, sexism, intraracial prejudice, black mothers and daughters in conflict, women searching for sisterhood and self-definition, and women demanding accountability from society. Over 40 selections are drawn from letters, short stories, poems, plays, essays, novels, and autobiographies, including such works as Alice Walker’s ‘The Revenge of Hannah Kemhuff,’ Sonia Sanchez’s UH, UH; BUT HOW DO IT FREE US? and Michele Wallace’s ‘Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood’; excerpts from Ann Petry’s THE STREET, Zora Neale Hurston’s THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD, and Toni Morrison’s THE BLUEST EYE; and powerfully eloquent letters written by destitute black women to government officials. This study illuminates the important relationship between history and literature and opens new territory for critical examination of contemporary black women’s writings.
Rita B. Dandridge received her Ph.D. from Howard University and is currently Professor of English at Norfolk State University. Her previous work includes an annotated bibliography on the author Ann Allen Shockley.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/06/2013) Colonel Chabert by Honore de Balzac
(05/06/2013) Colonel Chabert by Honore de Balzac. London. 2003. Hesperus Press. 88 pages. paperback. Cover design by Frank Muggeridge. Translated from the French by Andrew Brown. Foreword by A. N. Wilson. keywords: Literature France 19th Century Translated. 1843910373. Originally published as Le Colonel Chabert (1832 - Scènes de la vie privée).
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Balzac once referred to art as 'nature concentrated.' And nowhere did his own art achieve such a rarefied state as in Colonel Chabert-one of the celebrated 'Scenes from Private Life' from La Comedie Humaine. Chabert is among Balzac's most tragic heroes: a decorated Napoleonic War veteran believed to have been killed in battle. Severely disfigured, the Colonel, returns to Paris as if risen from the grave. There he finds his wife remarried, his pension gone, and his name linked nostalgically to the faded days of Empire. Employing a young lawyer named Derville, Chabert finds an ally to negotiate the labyrinthine system of Restoration justice; but as Derville plays the game of law and intrigue, we discover why Balzac himself thought that most post-Revolutionary politics were plagued with corruption. Chabert, despite his dignity, his history, his status as a fallen warrior, is no match for a society driven by the wiles of lawyers. An officially dead man returns from the war and reveals his story.
Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Many of Balzac's works have been made into or have inspired films, and they are a continuing source of inspiration for writers, filmmakers and critics. An enthusiastic reader and independent thinker as a child, Balzac had trouble adapting to the teaching style of his grammar school. His willful nature caused trouble throughout his life and frustrated his ambitions to succeed in the world of business. When he finished school, Balzac was an apprentice in a law office, but he turned his back on the study of law after wearying of its inhumanity and banal routine. Before and during his career as a writer, he attempted to be a publisher, printer, businessman, critic, and politician; he failed in all of these efforts. La Comédie humaine reflects his real-life difficulties, and includes scenes from his own experience. Balzac suffered from health problems throughout his life, possibly due to his intense writing schedule. His relationship with his family was often strained by financial and personal difficulties, and he ended several friendships over critical reviews. In 1850 he married Ewelina Hanska, his longtime love; he died five months later.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/05/2013) Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
(05/05/2013) Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. New York. 2009. Penguin Press. Hardcover. 416 pages. August 2009. Jacket image - Darshan Zenith/Cruiser Art. keywords: Literature America. 9781592402247.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon - private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog. It’s been awhile since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that ‘love’ is another of those words going around at the moment, like ‘trip’ or ‘groovy,’ except that this one usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there . . . or . . . if you were there, then you . . . or, wait, is it.
Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, most recently, MASON AND DIXON. He received the National Book Award FOR GRAVITY’S RAINBOW in 1974.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/04/2013) The First Man by Albert Camus
(05/04/2013) The First Man by Albert Camus. New York. 1995. Knopf. 327 pages. September 1995. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated France Algeria. 0679439374. Jacket photograph: Albert Camus as soccer goalie of R.U.A.,c. 1930. Albert Camus Archives/IMEC Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Just published in France in 1994 - thirty-four years after the handwritten manuscript was discovered in the car wreckage when Camus was killed - this autobiographical novel has received extraordinary acclaim (‘shattering,’ Le Monde called it; ‘a voice that pierces the heart,’ wrote Francoise Giroud). The First Man is a radiant, deeply moving novel of childhood. Camus intended it as the opening book of a projected epic - his War and Peace - but in its storytelling magic and its evocative power, it has a satisfying completeness on its own, covering, as it does, the years of Camus’s childhood in Algeria. As he recaptures memories of growing up fatherless with a deaf-mute mother and an illiterate, tyrannical grandmother, Camus renders the poverty of a working-class neighborhood transcended by all the sensuous pleasures that nourish this boy’s young life - the escapes to the beach and to the soccer fields with his schoolmates, the joyous hunting expeditions in the backcountry with his uncle and his cronies, the sounds and smells of the streets and docks of Belcourt, the delights of the sun and the sea, and his overwhelming love for his silent mother. Throughout there is the undercurrent of a frustrating search for a father and the awareness of the escalating tension between Algeria and France. But with the miraculous intervention of a wise schoolteacher the future suddenly opens up. Because these pages were never honed and edited by Camus - the handwritten manuscript was simply transcribed by his daughter - there is a raw energy to the writing. Feelings and images are poured onto the page with an intensity that makes this story of a childhood more spontaneous, more lyrical, more moving than anything Camus published in his lifetime.
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. The son of a working-class family, he spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. In occupied France in 1942 he published THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and THE STRANGER, a philosophical essay and a novel that first brought him to the attention of intellectual circles. THE STRANGER has since gained an international reputation and is one the most widely read novels of this century. Among his other works of fiction are THE PLAGUE, THE FALL, and EXILE AND THE KINGDOM. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/03/2013) The Book Of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
(05/03/2013) The Book Of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1970. Avon Discus. 256 pages. October 1970. QS19. paperback. keywords: Literature Latin America Argentina Translated. 0380000199.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The bestiary of a master fantasist. THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, said Benjamin DeMott in The New York Times, ‘is an astonishing ‘construct’ - the brave, beautiful man behind it ranks among the few perfectly composed, thoroughly fascinating literary intelligences alive.’ Borges draws oh sources ranging from Chinese legends to the works of Kafka and C. S. Lewis. In the lucid, razor-sharp prose that distinguishes all his work, he reports on beasts as diverse as the Chilean Chonchon, which is shaped like a human head, the huge ears serving as wings for its flight on moonless nights; and the homely and mournful Squonk of Pennsylvania, which thwarts capture by dissolving itself in its own tears. Stanton Hoffman said in the Nation, ‘THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS is more than a Borgesian entertainment. Its real justification lies in its relationship to Borges’ other work, especially to those pervasive themes and metaphors which seem to me to establish Borges’ singularity and importance as a writer. the encyclopedia as art.’
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/02/2013) Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr
(05/02/2013) Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr. Berkeley. 2012. University of California Press. 471 pages. hardcover. keywords: United States History Race Studies. 9780520271852.
The definitive history of the Black Panther Party based on 12 years of intensive research, new sources, and first-hand accounts, making the claim that the Black Panthers represented one of the greatest challenges ever to American power. Endorsed by Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘Finally! A book that clarifies the history of our movement, our aspirations, our struggles, and the bitter challenges we faced. This is a profoundly important and revealing work.’ - Bobby Seale, Chairman, Black Panther Party. ‘This is the definitive history of one of the great revolutionary organizations in the history of this country.’ - Cornel West, author of Race Matters. Black Against Empire is the definitive history of the Panthers— one that helps us rethink the very meaning of a revolutionary movement.’ Michael Omi, co-author of Racial Formation in the United States In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the U.S., the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the U.S. government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism. In the face of intense repression, the Party flourished, becoming the center of a revolutionary movement with offices in 68 U.S. cities and powerful allies around the world. Black Against Empire is the first comprehensive overview and analysis of the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. Bold, engrossing, and richly detailed, this book cuts through the mythology and obfuscation, revealing the political dynamics that drove the explosive growth of this revolutionary movement, and its disastrous unraveling. Informed by twelve years of meticulous archival research, as well as familiarity with most of the former Party leadership and many rankand- file members, this book is the definitive history of one of the greatest challenges ever posed to American state power.
Joshua Bloom is a fellow at the Ralph J. Bunche Center at UCLA. He is the co-editor of Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy and the collection editor of the Black Panther Newspaper.
Waldo E. Martin, Jr. is Professor of History at UC Berkeley. He is the author of No Coward Soldiers: Black Cultural Politics in Postwar America, Brown Vs. Board of Education: A Brief History with Documents, and The Mind of Frederick Douglass.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(05/01/2013) The Violent Land by Jorge Amado
(05/01/2013) The Violent Land by Jorge Amado. New York. 1979. Avon/Bard. 276 pages. November 1979. paperback. keywords: Literature Translated Brazil Latin America. 0380476967. Originally published in Portuguese in Brazil as Terras do sem fim by Livaria Martins Editora in 1943.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
CHOCOLATE GOLD. The siren-song of the lush, cocoa-growing forests of Bahia lures them all-the adventurers, the assassins, the gamblers, the brave and beautiful women. It is not a gentle song, but a song of greed, madness, and blood. It is a song that promises riches untold, or death for the price of a swig of rum, a song most cannot resist-until it is too late-not Margot, the golden blonde prostitute who comes for love; not Cabral, the talented, unscrupulous lawyer who works for one of the cacao colonels’; and not Juca, whose ruthless quest to reap the jungle’s harvest plants the seeds of his own destruction. Against the violent, colorful backdrop of Brazil’s ‘cacao-rush-a phenomenon that rivals California’s gold rush in drama, tragedy, and humor-Jorge Amado weaves together the fates of two landowning families involved in a bloody feud over a tract of virgin forest to which neither has a rightful claim. In his foreword to this edition, the author has written, ‘No other of my books is as dear to me; in it lie my roots; it is of the blood from which I was created.'
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/30/2013) The Swallow & The Tom Cat: A Love Story by Jorge Amado
(04/30/2013) The Swallow & The Tom Cat: A Love Story by Jorge Amado. New York. 1982. Delacorte Press. 96 pages. October 1982. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Brazil Latin America. 0440083257. (original title: O Gato Malhado e a Andorinha Sinha: Uma Historia de Amor, 1976 - Distribuidora Record). Cover: Illustrated by Caryb?. Book and jacket design copyright (c) 1982 Joan Stoliar.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
What a fine world this would be if a swallow could tall in love with a stray cat and the two of them could live happily ever after. In this marvelous dreamworld there is no prejudice at all between creatures or people high and low Jorge Amado, the internationally best-selling Brazilian novelist has written a delightful fable that could become the favorite gift between star-crossed lovers everywhere. Although this is indeed a fantasy in which Dawn and Morning and Spring and The Wind are memorable characters along with Miss Swallow and the Striped Cat the Reverend Parrot and the Old Owl, Amado fans will be cheered by the same storyteller’s art, the wild imagination, the lusty humor, and the philosophical asides of the master himself. Jorge Amado brings a richness of meaning to the simple tale of long ago when the Swallow and the Tom Cat fell in love.
Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 30 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) in 1978. His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia. Amado was born in a fazenda (‘farm’) in the inland of the city of Itabuna, in the southern part of the Brazilian state of Bahia, son of João Amado de Faria and D. Eulália Leal. The farm Amado was born in was precisely located on the village of Ferradas, which though today is a district of Itabuna, at the time was administered by the town of Ilhéus. That is why he considered himself a citizen of Ilhéus. In the large cocoa plantation, Amado knew the misery and the struggles of the people working the earth, living in almost slave conditions, which were to be a theme always present in his later works (for example, the notable Terras do Sem Fim of 1944). When he was only one year old the family moved to Ilhéus, a coastal city, where he spent his childhood. He attended high school in Salvador, the capital of the state. During that period Amado began to collaborate with several magazines and took part in literary life, as one of the founders of the Modernist ‘Rebels’ Academy’. Amado published his first novel, O País do Carnaval, in 1931, at age 18. Later he married Matilde Garcia Rosa and had a daughter, Lila, in 1933. The same year he published his second novel, Cacau, which increased his popularity. Amado’s leftist activities made his life difficult under the dictatorial regime of Getulio Vargas: in 1935 he was arrested for the first time, and two years later his books were publicly burned. His works were banned from Portugal, but in the rest of Europe he gained great popularity with the publication of Jubiabá in France. The book had enthusiastic reviews, including that of Nobel Prize Award winner Albert Camus. Being a militant, from 1941 to 1942 Amado was compelled to go into exile to Argentina and Uruguay. When he returned to Brazil he separated from Matilde Garcia Rosa. In 1945 he was elected to the National Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) (he received more votes than any other candidate in the state of São Paulo). He signed a law granting freedom of religious faith. The same year he remarried, this time to the writer Zélia Gattai. In 1947 he had a son, João Jorge. The same year his party was declared illegal, and its members arrested and persecuted. Amado chose exile once again, this time in France, where he remained until he was expelled in 1950. His first daughter, Lila, had died in 1949. From 1950 to 1952 Amado lived in Czechoslovakia, where another daughter, Paloma, was born. He also travelled to the Soviet Union, winning the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. On his return to Brazil in 1955, Amado abandoned active political life, leaving the Communist Party one year later: from that period on he dedicated himself solely to literature. His second creative phase began in 1958 with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, which was described by Jean-Paul Sartre as ‘the best example of a folk novel’: Amado abandoned, in part, the realism and the social themes of his early works, producing a series of novels focusing mainly on feminine characters, devoted to a kind of smiling celebration of the traditions and the beauties of Bahia. His depiction of the sexual customs of his land was much to the scandal of the 1950s Brazilian society: for several years Amado could not even enter Ilhéus, where the novel was set, due to threats received for the alleged offense to the morality of the city’s women. On April 6, 1961 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Literature. He received the title of Doctor honoris causa from several Universities in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Israel and France, as well as other honors in almost every South American country, including Obá de Xangô (santoon) of the Candomblé, the traditional Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia. Amado’s popularity as a writer never decreased. His books were translated into 49 languages in 55 countries, were adapted into films, theatrical works, and TV programs. They even inspired some samba schools of the Brazilian Carnival. In 1987, the House of Jorge Amado Foundation was created, in Salvador. It promotes the protection of Amado’s estate and the development of culture in Bahia. Amado died on August 6, 2001. His ashes were spread in the garden of his house four days later.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/29/2013) Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
(04/29/2013) Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1984. New Directions. 121 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Argentina Latin America. 0811209040. (original title: Siete noches, 1980 - Fondo e Cultura Economica, Mexico). Jacket illustration, a detail from the Persian miniature 'The Nightmare of Zahhak,' reproduced by the permission of Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. (All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art); design by Leslie Bauman.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions blur the distinction between fact and fantasy, scholarship and imagination. Behind his playful cerebrations lies an impressive erudition amassed over a lifetime of study, in spite of failing eyesight and eventual blindness. Allusive motifs run through his writings in amazing diversity, and in SEVEN NIGHTS they are distilled into the form of public lectures, originally given in Buenos Aires in 1977, and now made available for the first time in English translation. ‘The Divine Comedy’; ‘Nightmares’; ‘The Thousand and One Nights’; ‘Buddhism’; ‘Poetry’; ‘The Kabbalah’; ‘Blindness’ - the relevance of these lectures to Borges’s oeuvre is thoughtfully explored in an introduction by Alastair Reid, who as a translator has in the past himself worked closely with the author. The texts themselves have been rendered into English by Eliot Weinberger, translator of the poetry of Octavio Paz and Homero Aridjis. (original title: Siete noches, 1980 - Fondo e Cultura Economica, Mexico).
Borges was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, where he still lives, and has long been acknowledged internationally as one of the foremost writers of the century. His ingenious and innovative work was introduced to North American readers in 1962 through LABYRINTHS (New Directions) and FICCIONES (Grove) - paving the way for the immense popularity of Latin American literature of recent years. ‘Jorge Luis Borges is. a central fact of Western culture. He is also one of the finest, subtlest, and least appreciated of comedians.’ - J. D. O’Hara, The Washington Post Book World.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/28/2013) Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell
(04/28/2013) Keep The Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell. London. 1936. Gollancz. 318 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature England.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING is the story of Gordon Comstock, a poor young man who works by day in a grubby London bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rented room, trying to write. Gordon has published a slim volume of verse (entitled MICE); he is determined to keep free of the ‘money world’ of safe, lucrative jobs, marriage, family responsibilities. This world, to Gordon, spells the end of art and aspiration. It is symbolized for him by the aspidistra, the homely, indestructible house plant that stands in every middle-class British window. Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, understands him: she is patient with his pride and lack of funds. But then, as it happens with lovers, events overtake them. Orwell’s picture of the ‘money world,’ as Gordon sees it, is in his best satirical vein. His exposure of Gordon’s pretensions is both merciless and funny. But there is poignancy as well as wit in what Lionel Trilling has called ‘a remarkable novel.’ KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING, says Mr. Trilling. ‘is a summa of all the criticisms of a commercial civilization that have ever been made, and it is a detailed demonstration of the bitter and virtually hopeless plight of the lower-middle-class man. Yet it insists that to live even in this plight is not without its stubborn joy.’ And indeed, hope does breakthrough in this book’s happy ending, which is Orwell’s tribute to the stubborn virtues of ordinary people — who keep the aspidistra flying.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/27/2013) Memoirs From The House Of The Dead by Feodor Dostoevsky
(04/27/2013) Memoirs From The House Of The Dead by Feodor Dostoevsky. London. 1956. Oxford University Press. 294 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Russia.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In this almost documentary account of his own experience of penal servitude in Siberia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor, the degradation, in relentless detail - even down to the intricate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters. The steam-bath scene itself, where the livid branded bodies seem to burn in the fires of Hell, is an extraordinary tour de force.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/26/2013) Down & Out In Paris And London by George Orwell
(04/26/2013) Down & Out In Paris And London by George Orwell. New York. 1933. Harper & Brothers. 292 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature England Memoir Poverty.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell (Eric Blair), published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is a picaresque account of living on the breadline in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins. Orwell's first version of DOWN AND OUT was called ‘A Scullion's Diary’. Completed in October 1930, it used only his Paris material. He offered it to Jonathan Cape in the summer of 1931. Cape rejected it in the autumn. A year later he offered ‘a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added)’ to Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot, then an editorial director, also rejected it. It was in the home of Mabel Fierz, who had, with her husband, a London businessman named Francis, been for a number of years a visitor to Southwold in the summer, and who was on friendly terms with the Blairs, that Orwell discarded the typescript. Fierz at this point took it to a literary agent, Leonard Moore, who ‘recognised it as a 'natural' for the new house of Gollancz.’ Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish the work, subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names, and offered an advance of £40. The title improvised by Gollancz, CONFESSIONS OF A DOWN AND OUTER bothered Orwell. ‘Would The Confessions of a Dishwasher do as well?’ he asked Moore. ‘I would rather answer to dishwasher than down & out.’At the last minute, Gollancz shortened the title to DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The author, after possibilities including ‘X,’ ‘P.S. Burton’ (an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions), ‘Kenneth Miles’ and ‘H. Lewis Allways’ had been considered, was renamed ‘George Orwell.’ Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and Orwell was the name he used from then on for his main works - although many periodical articles were still published under the name Eric Blair. DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews from, among others, C. Day Lewis, WH Davies, Compton Mackenzie and JB Priestley. It was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers in New York. Sales were low, however, until December 1940, when Penguin Books printed 55,000 copies for sale at sixpence. A French translation, which Orwell admired, by RN Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert, entitled La Vache Enragée, was published by Éditions Gallimard, on 2 May 1935, with a preface by Panait Istrati and an introduction by Orwell.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/25/2013) Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams
(04/25/2013) Mine Boy by Peter Abrahams. New York. 1976. Collier/Macmillan. 191 pages. 4805. paperback. keywords: Literature South Africa Black.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Young, strong, proud, and black, Xuma came from a Stone Age tribe o the Johannesburg ghetto, innocently seeking work in the gold mines and a new life in the big city. Too soon he discovered that the price of civilization was dehumanization and the cost of living, despair. He learned that running was a way of life; that justice was reserved for whites only, and that a man was no better than the color of his skin. Deep in brawling, boot-legging Malay Town he found a new kind of kinship and love – and a new kind of fear and hatred called apartheid, with its passes, beatings, and the servile compromises that often meant the difference between life and death. And deep in the rich, cruel South African mines he discovered red-haired, white-skinned Paddy who said that a man must be a man before he is a color, for this is his only hope. MINE BOY is Peter Abrahams’ brilliant and moving story of a black man’s struggle for life in South Africa. Told with compassion, insight, and rare understanding, it traces the violent coming-of-age of a simple up-country native in his strange and hostile land.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
(04/24/2013) Such, Such Were The Joys by George Orwell
(04/24/2013) Such, Such Were The Joys by George Orwell. New York. 1953. Harcourt Brace & Company. 230 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature England Essays.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The death of George Orwell in 1950 removed from the literary scene one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. At that time he left a considerable amount of writing which had not appeared in book form, part of which was published in 1950 under the title, SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT. Another important part appears in this volume. SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS takes its title from the long autobiographical account - nearly one-third of the book - of Orwell’s early schooling at a place he calls Crossgates, in which he draws memorable portraits of his headmistress and headmaster. In this setting we get the first glimpses of Orwell as the person about whom his schoolmate Cyril Connolly wrote, ‘The remarkable thing about Orwell was that he alone among the boys was an intellectual, and not a parrot.’ George Orwell’s uncompromising honesty, as well as his refusal to take anything for granted, characterize all his writing. The eleven pieces brought together here range from ‘Anti-Semitism in Britain’ to his analysis of the motivations of writers, ‘Why I Write.’ ‘Inside the Whale’ is perhaps the most balanced appraisal yet made of that controversial figure, Henry Miller. ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ is written from a perspective shared by few men, for although Orwell was wounded while fighting with the Loyalists, he did not hesitate to expose the Communist betrayal in Spain. ‘Orwell’s passing has deprived the world of a man whom critics still unborn may well describe as the most important English writer to have lived his whole life during the first half of the twentieth century.’ - JAMES STERN, New Republic. ‘George Orwell was the conscience of his generation.’ - V. S. PRITCHETT, New York Times Book Review. ‘There are no replacement for a George Orwell, just as there are no replacements for a Bernard Shaw or a Mark Twain. In his literary criticism and political essays he pricked, provoked and badgered lazy minds, delighted those who enjoyed watching an original intelligence at work.’ – Time.
GEORGE ORWELL first gained wide recognition in America with the publication of his satiric fable, ANIMAL FARM. In addition to NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, his novels include COMING UP FOR AIR, BURMESE DAYS, and DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. He died in London on January 21, 1950.
Check zenosbooks.com for either a used or a new copy of this book, or you can add it to your wishlist.
More Articles...
- (04/23/2013) God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens
- (04/22/2013) The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- (04/21/2013) Rock Crystal by Adalbert Stifter
- (04/20/2013) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- (04/19/2013) Robert Walser Rediscovered: Stories, Fairy-Tale Plays, & Critical Responses by Mark Harman (editor).
- (04/18/2013) Report From The Besieged City by Zbigniew Herbert
- (04/17/2013) On Grief & Reason: Essays by Joseph Brodsky
- (04/16/2013) Microscripts by Robert Walser
- (04/15/2013) Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
- (04/14/2013) La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas
- (04/13/2013) Painting Harlem Modern: The Art of Jacob Lawrence by Patricia Hills
- (04/12/2013) Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
- (04/11/2013) Jefferson's Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism by Roger Wilkins
- (04/10/2013) A Child Is Not A Knife: Selected Poems Of Göran Sonnevi by Göran Sonnevi
- (04/09/2013) Bowling Alone: The Collapse & Revival Of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
- (04/08/2013) Women’s Early American Historical Narratives by Sharon M. Harris (introduction and notes)
- (04/07/2013) Passage Of Tears by Abdourahman A. Waberi
- (04/06/2013) The Nobleman and Other Romances by Isabelle de Charriere
- (04/05/2013) The Roosevelt I Knew by Frances Perkins
- (04/04/2013) Thrand of Gotu: Two Icelandic Sagas by George Johnston (translator)
- (04/03/2013) The Battle Of Adwa: African Victory In The Age Of Empire by Raymond Jones
- (04/02/2013) Amsterdam Stories by Nescio
- (04/01/2013) The Death Of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days by Mark Edmundson
- (03/31/2013) Outrage: An Inspector Erlendur Novel by Arnaldur Indridason
- (03/30/2013) Finding George Orwell In Burma by Emma Larkin
- (03/29/2013) Burmese Days by George Orwell
- (03/28/2013) Keynes: The Rise, Fall, & Return Of The 20th Century’s Most Influential Economist by Peter Clarke
- (03/27/2013) The Worldly Philosophers by Robert Heilbroner
- (03/26/2013) Ousmane Sembene: the Making of a Militant Artist by Samba Gadjigo
- (03/25/2013) Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley & The CIA's Crusades by David Corn
- (03/24/2013) Seven Icelandic Short Stories by Asgeir Petursson and Steingrimur J. Porsteinsson (editors)
- (03/23/2013) The Black Ice Score by Richard Stark
- (03/22/2013) Porcupines: A Philosophical Anthology by Graham Higgin
- (03/21/2013) Apocryphal Tales by Karel Capek
- (03/20/2013) Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, & Power by Jesse L. Byock