Black Venus by Angela Carter. London. 1985. Chatto & Windus/Hogarth Press. hardcover. 121 pages. Jacket design by Don Macpherson. 0701139641.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Extraordinary and diverse people inhabit this rich, ripe, occasionally raucous collection of short stories. Some are based on real people - Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire’s handsome and reluctant muse who never asked to be called the Black Venus, trapped in the terminal ennui of the poet’s passion, snatching at a little lifesaving respectability against all odds. Edgar Allen Poe, with his face of a tragic actor, demonstrating in every thought and deed how right his friends were when they said ‘No man is safe who drinks before breakfast.’ And Lizzie Borden, lying in bed one hot summer’s night in a turn-of-the-century New England mill town, dreaming about parricide. And some of these people are totally imaginary. Such as the seventeenth century whore, transported to Virginia for thieving, who turns into a good woman in spite of herself among the Indians, who have nothing worth stealing. And a girl, suckled by wolves, strange and indifferent as nature, who will not tolerate returning to humanity. To say nothing of the ‘infant prodigy of the pans’, the child chef who teaches himself French from cookery books (‘A for asperges. And one of them - ‘Call me the Golden Herm’ - takes off from a clue about the ambiguous nature of the changeling prince in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ who causes so much trouble between Oberon and Titania. Angela Carter wonderfully mingles history, fiction, invention, literary criticism, high drama and low comedy in a glorious collection of stories as full of contradictions and surprises as life itself. Angela Carter was born in 1940. She read English at Bristol University, spent two years living in Japan and from 1976-8 was a Fellow in Creative Writing at Sheffield University. She was visiting professor in the Writing Programme at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, in 1980-81, and writer in residence at the University of Adelaide, South Australia, in 1984. Her first novel, SHADOW DANCE, was published in 1965, to be followed by THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), SEVERAL PERCEPTIONS (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), HEROES AND VILLAINS (1969), LOVE (1971), THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DR HOFFMAN (1972), THE PASSION OF NEW EVE (1977) and NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS (1984). Angela Carter has also published two collections of stories, Fireworks (1974) and THE BLOODY CHAMBER (1979, Cheltenham Festival of Literature Award); and two works of non-fiction, THE SADEIAN WOMAN: AN EXERCISE IN CULTURAL HISTORY (1979) AND NOTHING SACRED (1982), a collection of her journalism from New Society and elsewhere. She also wrote, with Neil Jordan, the script for the film The Company of Wolves (1984).
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.
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The Killing Of Crazy Horse by Thomas Powers. New York. 2010. Knopf. hardcover. 569 pages. November 2010. Front-of-jacket image - ‘Retreat of Major Marcus Reno’s Command’ (detail) by Amos Bad Heart Bull. Jacket design by Jason Booher. 9780375414466.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
He was the greatest Indian warrior of the nineteenth century. His victory over General Custer at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 was the worst defeat inflicted on the frontier Army. And the death of Crazy Horse in federal custody has remained a controversy for more than a century. THE KILLING OF CRAZY HORSE pieces together the many sources of fear and misunderstanding that resulted in an official killing hard to distinguish from a crime. A rich cast of characters, whites and Indians alike, passes through this story, including Red Cloud, the chief who dominated Oglala history for fifty years but saw in Crazy Horse a dangerous rival; No Water and Woman Dress, both of whom hated Crazy Horse and schemed against him; the young interpreter Billy Garnett, son of a fifteen-year-old Oglala woman and a Confederate general killed at Gettysburg; General George Crook, who bitterly resented newspaper reports that he had been whipped by Crazy Horse in battle; Little Big Man, who betrayed Crazy Horse; Lieutenant William Philo Clark, the smart West Point graduate who thought he could ‘work’ Indians to do the Army’s bidding; and Fast Thunder, who called Crazy Horse cousin, held him the moment he was stabbed, and then told his grandson thirty years later, ‘They tricked me! They tricked me!’ At the center of the story is Crazy Horse himself, the warrior of few words whom the Crow said they knew best among the Sioux, because he always came closest to them in battle. No photograph of him exists today. The death of Crazy Horse was a traumatic event not only in Sioux but also in American history. With the Great Sioux War as background and context, drawing on many new materials as well as documents in libraries and archives, Thomas Powers recounts the final months and days of Crazy Horse’s life not to lay blame but to establish what happened.
Thomas Powers is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and writer best known for his books on the history of intelligence organizations. Among them are INTELLIGENCE WARS: AMERICAN SECRET HISTORY FROM HITLER TO AL-QAEDA; HEISENBERG’S WAR: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE GERMAN BOMB; and THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS: RICHARD HELMS AND THE CIA. For most of the last decade Powers kept a 1984 Volvo at a nephew’s house in Colorado, which he drove on frequent trips to the northern Plains. He lives in Vermont with his wife, Candace.
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Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter. New York. 1996. Henry Holt. hardcover. 462 pages. April 1996. Jacket illustration by John Wesrmark. Introduction by Salman Rushdie. 0805044620.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
From early reflections on jazz and Japan, through vigorous refashionings of vampires and werewolves, to stunning snapshots of real-life outcasts and the glorious but tainted world of ‘the rich and famous,’ this complete collection of Angela Carter’s short stories gathers together four published books-’Fireworks,’ ‘The Bloody Chamber,’ ‘Black Venus,’ ‘American Ghosts’ and ‘Old World Wonders’-with her early work and uncollected stories. ‘A strange, compelling book. an undoubted success.’ -The New York Times.
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.
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American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz. Princeton. 2014. Princeton University Press. hardcover. 390 pages. September 2014. Jacket painting: Guy Pene Du Bois, ‘Portia in a Pink Blouse,’ 1942. Jacket design by Pamela Lewis Schnitter. 9780691150604.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes.'--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they brought modernism to Main Street, democratized literature and ideas, spurred social mobility, and helped readers fashion new identities. Drawing on extensive original research, Paula Rabinowitz unearths the far-reaching political, social, and aesthetic impact of the pulps between the late 1930s and early 1960s. Published in vast numbers of titles, available everywhere, and sometimes selling in the millions, pulps were throwaway objects accessible to anyone with a quarter. Conventionally associated with romance, crime, and science fiction, the pulps in fact came in every genre and subject. American Pulp tells how these books ingeniously repackaged highbrow fiction and nonfiction for a mass audience, drawing in readers of every kind with promises of entertainment, enlightenment, and titillation. Focusing on important episodes in pulp history, Rabinowitz looks at the wide-ranging effects of free paperbacks distributed to World War II servicemen and women; how pulps prompted important censorship and First Amendment cases; how some gay women read pulp lesbian novels as how-to-dress manuals; the unlikely appearance in pulp science fiction of early representations of the Holocaust; how writers and artists appropriated pulp as a literary and visual style; and much more. Examining their often-lurid packaging as well as their content, American Pulp is richly illustrated with reproductions of dozens of pulp paperback covers, many in color. A fascinating cultural history, American Pulp will change the way we look at these ephemeral yet enduringly intriguing books.
Paula Rabinowitz is professor of English at the University of Minnesota. Her books include Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism, and she is the coeditor of Habits of Being, a four-volume series on clothing and identity.
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The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm. Princeton. Princeton University Press. hardcover. 519 pages. Cover illustration by Andrea Dezsö. Illustrated by Andrea Dezsö. 9780691160597.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published their Children's and Household Tales in 1812, followed by a second volume in 1815, they had no idea that such stories as 'Rapunzel,' 'Hansel and Gretel,' and 'Cinderella' would become the most celebrated in the world. Yet few people today are familiar with the majority of tales from the two early volumes, since in the next four decades the Grimms would publish six other editions, each extensively revised in content and style. For the very first time, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm makes available in English all 156 stories from the 1812 and 1815 editions. These narrative gems, newly translated and brought together in one beautiful book, are accompanied by sumptuous new illustrations from award-winning artist Andrea Dezsö. From 'The Frog King' to 'The Golden Key,' wondrous worlds unfold--heroes and heroines are rewarded, weaker animals triumph over the strong, and simple bumpkins prove themselves not so simple after all. Esteemed fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes offers accessible translations that retain the spare description and engaging storytelling style of the originals. Indeed, this is what makes the tales from the 1812 and 1815 editions unique--they reflect diverse voices, rooted in oral traditions, that are absent from the Grimms' later, more embellished collections of tales. Zipes's introduction gives important historical context, and the book includes the Grimms' prefaces and notes. A delight to read, The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm presents these peerless stories to a whole new generation of readers.
The Brothers Grimm (or Die Brüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as 'Cinderella' ('Aschenputtel'), 'The Frog Prince' ('Der Froschkönig'), 'Hansel and Gretel' ('Hänsel und Gretel'), 'Rapunzel', 'Rumpelstiltskin' ('Rumpelstilzchen'), and 'Snow White' ('Schneewittchen'). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812. The brothers spent their formative years in the German town of Hanau. Their father's death in 1796 caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years after. They both attended the University of Marburg where they developed a curiosity about German folklore, which grew into a lifelong dedication to collecting German folk tales. The rise of romanticism during the 19th century revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the brothers represented a pure form of national literature and culture. With the goal of researching a scholarly treatise on folk tales, they established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between 1812 and 1857, their first collection was revised and republished many times, growing from 86 stories to more than 200. In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetime. The popularity of the Grimms' collected folk tales has endured well. The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. In the mid-20th century, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized.
Jack Zipes is the translator of 'The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm' (Bantam), the editor of 'The Great Fairy Tale Tradition' (Norton), and the author of 'Grimm Legacies' (Princeton), among many other books. He is professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Andrea Dezsö is a visual artist who works across a broad range of media. Her permanent public art is installed in two NYC subway stations, at CUNY Fiterman Hall, and at the US Embassy in Bucharest. Dezsö exhibits in museums and galleries worldwide and is associate professor of art at Hampshire College.
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What Became Of Jane Austen? And Other Questions by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1971. Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. hardcover. 223 pages. 0151958602.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Although Kingsley Amis’s reputation rests mainly on his novels, he has since 1955 established himself as one of England’s wittiest and most trenchant essayists and critics. The remarkable variety of his ideas and interests makes the present volume as stimulating and recurrently surprising as it is enjoyable. There is literary criticism of writers as diverse as Hans Christian Andersen, Jules Verne, and Miss Austen herself (Janeites will take umbrage), and of novels from SORRELL AND SON to PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT and LOLITA (‘one of the troubles with LOLITA is that, so far from being too pornographic, it is not pornographic enough’). There are articles on such widely assorted topics as horror movies, fictional detectives, and the National Eistedfodd of Wales, and accounts of the author’s experiences as judge at a beauty contest, with a poet named Dylan Thomas, and with one named Yevgeny Yevtushenko. And there are assorted fragments of autobiography (a reminiscence of the first school he attended, a memoir of his father) and confession (why he wrote a James Bond novel, why he left the Left). This is, in short, a miscellany, and a bracing one; its arrangement is not random, and it should be read straight through rather than browsed in. Kingsley Amis’s characteristically witty, challenging, sometimes enraging voice proves also to be that of a rationalist, a moralist, a man of good sense – and a writer of some of the best prose of our day.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he was an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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Mary Ann Carroll: First Lady of the Highwaymen by Gary Monroe. Gainesville. University Press of Florida. hardcover. 192 pages. September 2014. 8 x 10. 9780813049694.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Beach scenes on hotel walls, Poinciana trees in the White House. ‘Here, Monroe tells perhaps his most compelling tale of all—about the only Highwaywoman, Mary Ann Carroll ‘ —Jeff Klinkenberg, author of Alligators in B-Flat. ‘A tale of triumph, personal survival, discipline, and, finally, of faith ‘—Linda Hudson, mayor, Fort Pierce, Florida. In the years since the art world discovered them, much has been made of the Highwaymen—the loosely knit band of African American painters whose edenic Florida land scapes, created with inexpensive materials and sold out of their cars, ‘shaped the state’s popular image as much as oranges and alligators’ (New York Times) But lost in the legends surrounding the group is the mesmerizing story of Mary Ann Carroll, the only female ‘Highwayman ‘ In 1957, sixteen-year-old Carroll met Harold Newton, later dubbed the original Highwayman He had red flames on his car and was painting a landscape along the side of the road The young African American girl was shocked: here was a black man who didn’t work in the orange groves, who made a living off his paintings It wasn’t long before she was creating and selling her own landscapes, and the other Highwaymen, taking note of her startling use of color, welcomed her into the fold Carroll sold her first painting at eighteen - remarkable for any young artist, unheard of for a black woman artist in the South Like her Highwaymen brethren, she travelled across the state, selling her art at hotels, offices, and restaurants where she was not allowed to drink, eat, or even sit If the Highwaymen faced discrimination at every door they knocked on, then the challenges were magnified for Carroll She took pride in always having her pristine Buick gassed and ready to go and her small handgun cleaned and ready to use After years of virtual obscurity, Carroll was invited to the First Lady’s Luncheon in 2011, where she presented a painting of her iconic poinciana to Michelle Obama Mary Ann Carroll is the never-before-told story of a black female artist’s hard- fought journey to feed her family and make a name for herself in a man’s world.
GARY MONROE, professor of fine arts and photography at Daytona State College, is the author of numerous books, including The Highwaymen: Florida’s African-American Landscape Painters, The Highwaymen Murals: Al Black’s Concrete Dreams, and Harold Newton: The Original Highwayman Harold Newton The Highwaymen The Original Highwayman.
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Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley. New York. 1958. Harper & Brothers. hardcover. 147 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
BRAVE NEW WORLD REVISITED is not fiction. It is a shocking, yet calm, estimate of what has been done (since the publication of BRAVE NEW WORLD in 1932), what is being done and what may very soon be done to turn men into compliant robots. The enemies of freedom are subtle, often unobserved, and far more numerous than we suppose. Mr. Huxley reveals them with the lucidity and scientific insight for which he is famous. With overpowering impact, the book is a challenge to complacency and a plea that mankind should educate itself in freedom before it is too late.
Aldous Huxley was born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel, CROME YELLOW (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by ANTIC HAY (1923), THOSE BARREN LEAVES (1925) and POINT COUNTER POINT (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgment on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in ALONG THE ROAD (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work BRAVE NEW WORLD (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanizing aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel EYELESS IN GAZA (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as MUSIC AT NIGHT (1931) and ENDS AND MEANS (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (TIME MUST HAVE A STOP, 1944 and ISLAND, 1962) and non-fiction (THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY, 1945, GREY EMINENCE, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, 1954. Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.
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New Maps Of Hell: A Survey Of Science Fiction by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1960. Harcourt Brace & Company. hardcover. 161 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In this hilarious, inspiring and provocative series of essays, Kingsley Amis introduces every reader to the wonders and value of science fiction writing. He surveys the magnificent panorama of this world of fact and fantasy, of Jules Verne and H G Wells, of madly ingenious inventions and cosmic disaster, of bug-eyed monsters and credible human experiments, of revolutionary inventions and awesome transformations, of exploration of the outer reaches of space, and of strange worlds within the universe. New Maps of Hell is a warm and witty exploration of a world many readers may be yet to discover.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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The Golden Age Of Science Fiction by Kingsley Amis (editor). London. 1981. Hutchinson & Company. hardcover. 370 pages. 009145770x.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
An anthology of science fiction short stories by Anthony Boucher, Philip Latham, Frederick Pohl, Brian W. Aldiss, James Blish, Kurt Vonnegut, J. G. Ballard, Robert Sheckley, H. Beam Piper, Cordwainer Smith, Arthur C. Clarke, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov, F. L. Wallace, Jerome Bixby, Poul Anderson. Kingsley Amis locates "the golden age of science fiction" somewhere between its flowering in the late 40s and the lapse into self-consciousness in the early 60s. The stories in this anthology, which includes most of the greatest names in science fiction, come from the years 1949-62. They offer an astonishingly varied range, but all of them illustrate Amis's summing up of the achievements of the ‘golden age’: In the words of Kingsley Amis, ‘what they wrote was far more inventive, more fictional, fictitious, fictive than any other kind of fiction.’
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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Spectrum V: A Fifth S. F. Anthology by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (editors). London. 1966. Gollancz. hardcover. 272 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The SPECTRUM science fiction anthologies edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest have been hailed, one after another, as being unquestionably at the top of their class. Appealing both to the regular science fiction addict and also to the casual reader, this new collection, the fifth in the series, presents a cross-section of science-fiction ideas to tickle and stimulate every palate. The eight stories deal, amongst other things, with how humanity can graduate into Galactic society; why 28 days on the Moon can change entirely a spaceman’s fundamental concept of life; how strange plants on a distant planet reproduce; and how, scientifically, the impossible can be achieved in about two weeks! The authors are F. L. Wallace; Walter M. Miller; Raymond F. Jones; James H. Schmitz; Tom Godwin; Theodore L. Thomas; Paul Ash and Richard Ashby. As usual, Amis and Conquest have started the Anthology with a provoking commentary on science fiction as a genre and, as in previous books in the series, nearly every story is published here for the first time in volume form.
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. George Robert Acworth Conquest, (15 July 1917 – 3 August 2015) known as Robert Conquest - was an Anglo-American historian and poet best known for his influential works of Soviet history which include The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purges of the 1930s (1968, 4th ed., 2008). He was a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
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My Enemy's Enemy by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1963. Harcourt Brace & World. hardcover. 224 pages. Jacket design by Paul Bacon Studios.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
There are surprises in this first collection of stories by one of the most prominent members of England’s new generation of writers. Satire is here, along with characteristically apt and original turns of phrase, but the tone is more sober than that in any of Kingsley Amis’s four novels, and we discover fresh aspects of a talent that until now has seemed predominantly comic. The closing phases of the war in Europe provide a background for two short stories and a novella about a Corps of Signals company in Belgium, which dramatize with acerb irony the dismay felt by adherents of the old order as a radically different England begins to emerge from the conflict. There are other ironies in three contrasting stories set in postwar England: sad and wry in an account of strife between a sluttish young woman and a detestable social worker; gentler in a swift sketch portraying a girl of eighteen on her first date with an office superior; overtly compassionate in a substantial and beautifully modulated tale about a man in his sixties who discovers fresh truths about himself and human nature in general when he attends the funeral of the woman he has loved. The final story, in which an aficionado of science fiction successfully tries his own hand at that mode, brings to a subtly disturbing close a volume of uncommon interest and variety.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri. New York. 1977. Norton. hardcover. 602 pages. Painting by Domenica di Michelino, ‘Dante and His Poem’ (detail). Jacket design by Mike McIver. Translated by John Ciardi. 0393044726.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This brilliant, standard translation of one of the great classics of Western literature is now made available in a single-volume hardcover edition, for the first time complete and in final form. Although Dante is one of the two who 'divide the world between them,' the world had to wait until now for a truly accessible translation of Dante into spoken English. Archibald MacLeish describes Ciardi's version as 'a text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation wich at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original, 'a spectacular achievement.'
Durante degli Alighieri (Dante 1265–1321), was a major Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, originally called Comedìa and later called Divina by Boccaccio, is widely considered the greatest literary work composed in the Italian language and a masterpiece of world literature. In Italy he is called il Sommo Poeta (‘the Supreme Poet’) and il Poeta. He, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are also called ‘the three fountains’ and ‘the three crowns’. Dante is also called ‘the Father of the Italian language.’
Poet, educator, critic, John Ciardi has won countless awards, much praise, and a strong following for his own poetry. He was the poetry editor of the Saturday Review for sixteen years, director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference for seventeen years, and an essayist of both wit and powerful insight.
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We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire by Suzanna Reiss. Berkeley. University of California Press. paperback. 330 pages. August 2014. American Crossroads, 39. 6 x 9. 1 map, 12 images. 9780520280786.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This history of U.S.-led international drug control provides new perspective on the economic, ideological, and political foundations of a Cold War American empire. We Sell Drugs is grounded in the transnational geography and political economy of the coca leaf and coca-derived commodities market stretching to the U.S. from Peru and Bolivia. Coca was one of two seminal substances in international drug control. More than a narrow account of the biography of a famous plant and its equally famous derivative products—Coca-Cola and cocaine—Suzanna Reiss situates these commodities within a landscape of drug production and consumption. Examining efforts to control the circuits through which coca traveled, Reiss provides a geographic and legal anchor for considering the historical construction of designations of legality and illegality. The book also argues that the legal status of any given drug is premised on who grew, manufactured, distributed, and consumed it and not on the qualities of the
drug itself. Drug control is part of a powerful toolbox for ordering international trade, national economies, and society’s habits and daily lives. In a historical landscape animated by struggles over political economy, national autonomy, colonialism, and racial equality, We Sell Drugs insists on the socio-historical underpinnings of designations of legality to explore how drug control became a weapon for ordering domestic and international affairs.
Suzanna Reiss is assistant professor of history at the University of Hawai’i Manoa.
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Johnson Without Boswell by Hugh Kingsmill. New York. 1941. Knopf. hardcover. 318 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘Boswell’s LIFE OF JOHNSON is in some respects a first draft of Boswell’s autobiography. Some say that Boswell resurrected Johnson; others that Johnson lies imprisoned in Boswell’s book. How Boswell posthumously possessed Johnson and, like a great theatrical director, produced him for an audience of readers as a tremendous John Bull character, was brilliantly indicated by an anthology called JOHNSON WITHOUT BOSWELL , put together in 1940 by Hugh Kingsmill.’ - an extract from Michael Holroyd’s Biography Lecture on the Orange Word Stage at the Hay festival, June 9, 2002.
Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (21 November 1889 – 15 May 1949), who dropped his last name for professional purposes, was a versatile British writer and journalist. Writers Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn were his brothers. Hugh Kingsmill Lunn was born in London and educated at Harrow School and the University of Oxford. After graduating he worked for a brief period for Frank Harris, who edited the publication Hearth and Home in 1911/2, alongside Enid Bagnold; Kingsmill later wrote a debunking biography of Harris, after the spell had worn off. He began fighting in the British Army in World War I in 1916, and was captured in France the next year. After the war, he began to write, initially both science fiction and crime fiction. In the 1930s he was a contributor to the English Review; later he wrote a good deal of non-fiction for this periodical's successor, the English Review Magazine. His large output includes criticism, essays and biographies, parodies and humour, as well as novels, and edited a number of anthologies. He is remembered for saying 'friends are God's apology for relations', with a notable flavour of Ambrose Bierce. The dictum was subsequently used by Richard Ingrams for the title of his memoir of Kingsmill's friendships with Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm Muggeridge, two intimate friends whom he influenced greatly.Muggeridge drew a darker attitude from Kingsmill's sardonic wit. Dawnist was Kingsmill's word for those infected with unrealistic or utopian idealism — the enemy as far as he was concerned. Kingmill’s works include: The Will To Love (1919) novel, The Dawn's Delay (1924) stories, Blondel (1927), Matthew Arnold (1928) biography, After Puritanism, 1850-1900 (1929), An Anthology Of Invective And Abuse (1929), The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) novel, Behind Both Lines (1930) autobiographical, More Invective (1930) anthology, The Worst of Love (1931) anthology, After Puritanism (1931), Frank Harris (1932) biography, The Table Of Truth (1933), Samuel Johnson (1933) biography, The Sentimental Journey (1934) biography of Charles Dickens, The Casanova Fable: A Satirical Revaluation (1934) with William Gerhardi, What They Said At The Time (1935) anthology, Parents and Children (1936) anthology; Brave Old World (1936) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, A Pre-View Of Next Year's News (1937) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Skye High: The Record Of A Tour Through Scotland In The Wake Of The Samuel Johnson And James Boswell.(1937) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, Made On Earth (1937) anthology on marriage, The English Genius: a survey of the English achievement and character (1938) editor, essays by W. R. Inge, Hilaire Belloc, Hesketh Pearson, William Gerhardi, E .S. P. Haynes, Douglas Woodruff, Charles Petrie, J. F. C. Fuller, Alfred Noyes, Rose Macaulay, Brian Lunn, Rebecca West, K. Hare, T. W. Earp, D. H. Lawrence (1938) biography, Next Year's News (1938) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Courage (1939) anthology, Johnson Without Boswell: A Contemporary Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1940) editor, The Fall (1940), This Blessed Plot (1942) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, The Poisoned Crown (1944) essays on genealogies, Talking Of Dick Whittington (1947) travel, with Hesketh Pearson), The Progress Of A Biographer (1949), The High Hill of the Muses (1955) anthology, The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings (1970) edited by Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, His Life and Personality.
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Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages by Lynn T. Ramey. Gainesville. University Press of Florida. hardcover. 192 pages. September 2014. 9 x 6. 9780813060071.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘A provocative study of western racial attitudes Ramey adds an important, likely controversial, and well-written scholarly challenge to the argument that racism in the West was the product of nineteenth-century science ‘—Hamilton Cravens, coeditor of Race and Science. ‘The significance of this book extends beyond the medieval past Black Legacies shows that behind myths of knights in shining armor and fair maidens lies a contested literary and cultural history of medievalism that troubles understandings of race Uncorrected Proof from the nineteenth century to today ‘—Russ Castronovo, author of Beautiful Democracy. Black Legacies looks at color-based prejudice in medieval and modern texts in order to reveal key similarities Bringing far-removed time periods into startling conversation, this book argues that certain attitudes and practices present in Europe’s Middle Ages were foundational in the development of the western concept of race Using historical, literary, and artistic sources, Lynn Ramey shows that twelfth- and thirteenth-century discourse was preoccupied with skin color and the coding of black as ‘evil’ and white as ‘good ‘ Ramey demonstrates that fears of miscegenation show up in all medieval European societies She pinpoints these same ideas in the rhetoric of later centuries Mapmakers and travel writers of the colonial era used medieval lore of ‘monstrous peoples’ to question the humanity of indigenous New World populations, and medieval arguments about humanness were employed to justify the slave trade Ramey even analyzes how race is
explored in films set in medieval Europe, revealing an enduring fascination with the Middle Ages as a touchstone for processing and coping with racial conflict in the West today.
LYNN T. RAMEY is associate professor of French at Vanderbilt University She is the author of Christian, Saracen and Genre in Medieval French Literature: Imagination and Cultural Interaction in the French Middle Ages and coeditor of Race, Class, and Gender in ‘Medieval’ Cinema.
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One Fat Englishman by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1964. Harcourt Brace World. hardcover. 192 pages. Jacket design by Janet Halverson.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘Roger, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?’ says Helene Bang, a beautiful Danish-American to the hero of the funniest novel Kingsley Amis has yet written. ‘Why are you so awful?’ Part of the awfulness of Roger Micheldene, an English publisher at large in the United States, is snobbery. (‘Very angst-producing, being a snob,’ says Roger.) There are also the seven deadly sins, of which he considers himself qualified in gluttony, sloth, and lust, and distinguished in anger. As he spends an October week or two shuttling between New York and the environs of Budweiser College in Pennsylvania, his snobbery and gluttony and anger are too rampant to leave much room for sloth, and his lust for the dazzling Helene drives him to extremes. Turning his relentless gaze upon the American way of life, Kingsley Amis has been inspired to create other notable figures: the precocious undergraduate author of a way-out novel, who proposes to goad Roger into behaving spontaneously; an earnest young priest, who incurs Roger’s loathing by assuring him that his soul is at variance with God; an alcoholic literary agent’s nymphomaniacal wife, who occasionally succeeds in distracting Roger from Helene. They are presented with glee and gusto and the keenest wit, but it is Roger Micheldene - at once a prototype of the insufferable Englishman and a brilliantly realized individual sufficiently human to win our sneaking sympathy – who dominates a supremely entertaining comedy of bad manners.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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Chinese Junks on the Pacific: Views from a Different Deck by Hans Konrad Van Tilburg. Gainesville. University Press of Florida. paperback. 288 pages. June 2013. A volume in the series New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, edited by James C. Bradford and Gene A. Smith. 6 x 9. 55 b/w illus. 9780813049212.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
‘It is Van Tilburg’s goal to broaden our understanding of Chinese nautical technology, to explore the evolution of Chinese vessels between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, to investigate the differences between Chinese and Western ships and, in the absence of historical documents, to read the vessels themselves as cultural artefacts [sic] or texts that contain historical information regarding their construction and functions that would otherwise be lost to history.’ —International Journal of Maritime History ‘Treats surviving ships as living records of China’s pre-modern shipbuilding and shipping practices at an archaeological and anthropological juncture. This is a welcome move in scholarship.’ - Mariner’s Mirror ‘By focusing on the voyage of ten junks that crossed the Pacific between 1905 and 1989. [Van Tilburg] reveals the multifarious history behind these vessels and the stereotypes held by an intrigued American public witnessing their arrival.’—Bulletin of the Pacific Circle.
Hans Konrad Van Tilburg, maritime heritage coordinator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is the author of A Civil War Gunboat in Pacific Waters: Life on Board USS Saginaw.
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The Return Of William Shakespeare by Hugh Kingsmill. London. 1929. Duckworth & Company. hardcover. 254 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
This is the fantastic tale of an insignificant scientist, Albert Henry Butt, who discovers a way to bring the dead back to life. He is able to bring back anyone who has ever lived, but only if he knows exactly when and where the person was born. The character, Melmouth, a Shakespeare fan, talks Butt into bringing the elusive Shakespeare back to life. So, Butt reanimates the Shakespeare living in 1607, when Melmouth believes Shakespeare was at his most influential. However, Shakespeare cannot cope with modern life and 1607 was a time when he was in a deep depression. He has an emotional breakdown. By the time Shakespeare recovers, the unavoidable physical decay of his body begins. Will the mystery of Shakespeare be uncovered?.
Hugh Kingsmill Lunn (21 November 1889 – 15 May 1949), who dropped his last name for professional purposes, was a versatile British writer and journalist. Writers Arnold Lunn and Brian Lunn were his brothers. Hugh Kingsmill Lunn was born in London and educated at Harrow School and the University of Oxford. After graduating he worked for a brief period for Frank Harris, who edited the publication Hearth and Home in 1911/2, alongside Enid Bagnold; Kingsmill later wrote a debunking biography of Harris, after the spell had worn off. He began fighting in the British Army in World War I in 1916, and was captured in France the next year. After the war, he began to write, initially both science fiction and crime fiction. In the 1930s he was a contributor to the English Review; later he wrote a good deal of non-fiction for this periodical's successor, the English Review Magazine. His large output includes criticism, essays and biographies, parodies and humour, as well as novels, and edited a number of anthologies. He is remembered for saying 'friends are God's apology for relations', with a notable flavour of Ambrose Bierce. The dictum was subsequently used by Richard Ingrams for the title of his memoir of Kingsmill's friendships with Hesketh Pearson and Malcolm Muggeridge, two intimate friends whom he influenced greatly.Muggeridge drew a darker attitude from Kingsmill's sardonic wit. Dawnist was Kingsmill's word for those infected with unrealistic or utopian idealism — the enemy as far as he was concerned. Kingmill’s works include: The Will To Love (1919) novel, The Dawn's Delay (1924) stories, Blondel (1927), Matthew Arnold (1928) biography, After Puritanism, 1850-1900 (1929), An Anthology Of Invective And Abuse (1929), The Return of William Shakespeare (1929) novel, Behind Both Lines (1930) autobiographical, More Invective (1930) anthology, The Worst of Love (1931) anthology, After Puritanism (1931), Frank Harris (1932) biography, The Table Of Truth (1933), Samuel Johnson (1933) biography, The Sentimental Journey (1934) biography of Charles Dickens, The Casanova Fable: A Satirical Revaluation (1934) with William Gerhardi, What They Said At The Time (1935) anthology, Parents and Children (1936) anthology; Brave Old World (1936) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, A Pre-View Of Next Year's News (1937) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Skye High: The Record Of A Tour Through Scotland In The Wake Of The Samuel Johnson And James Boswell.(1937) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, Made On Earth (1937) anthology on marriage, The English Genius: a survey of the English achievement and character (1938) editor, essays by W. R. Inge, Hilaire Belloc, Hesketh Pearson, William Gerhardi, E .S. P. Haynes, Douglas Woodruff, Charles Petrie, J. F. C. Fuller, Alfred Noyes, Rose Macaulay, Brian Lunn, Rebecca West, K. Hare, T. W. Earp, D. H. Lawrence (1938) biography, Next Year's News (1938) humour, with Malcolm Muggeridge, Courage (1939) anthology, Johnson Without Boswell: A Contemporary Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1940) editor, The Fall (1940), This Blessed Plot (1942) travel, with Hesketh Pearson, The Poisoned Crown (1944) essays on genealogies, Talking Of Dick Whittington (1947) travel, with Hesketh Pearson), The Progress Of A Biographer (1949), The High Hill of the Muses (1955) anthology, The Best of Hugh Kingsmill: Selections from his Writings (1970) edited by Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, His Life and Personality.
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Open Doors and Three Novellas by Leonardo Sciascia. New York. 1992. Knopf. hardcover. 295 pages. August 1992. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson. Translated from the Italian by Marie Evans. Joseph Farrell & Sacha Rabinovitch. 0394589793.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
From the late Leonardo Sciascia, four brief but virtuoso novellas that confirm his preeminence as one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers. Using past and present real-life events as the points of departure for his fiction, Sciascia’s self- styled racconti-inchiesti, or investigative tales, are as emotionally condensed as they are linguistically rich. In the title novella, Sciascia transports us to Palermo; it is 1937. It is here that the politics of fascism, with its policy of ‘closed doors,’ collide with those of socialism, whose doors are ostensibly open. As we ponder the fate of a man on trial for the triple murder of his wife, his former employer, and the successor to his job, it is not so much the verdict that keeps us in suspense as the sentence the accused may face from the presiding judge. In Death and the Knight, a police deputy wearily approaching the end of his career finds himself in confrontation with a radical student group—an encounter that leads him down a path of fear and paranoia, the repercussions of which linger long after the story’s chilling conclusion. The ironically titled A Straightforward Tale presents, in an astonishingly brief period of time, every possible perspective on the mysterious death of a diplomat who has been found slumped over his desk, pen in hand, the piece of paper in front of him containing nothing but the words ‘I have found.’ And in 1912 + 1, a wealthy and beautiful contessa is put on trial for the murder of the handsome young orderly who had forced his attentions on her. In writing that is beautifully textured, an brilliantly incorporating psychological suspense and indelible character portraits into the larger spheres of politics and history, Leonardo Sciascia reemerges, once and for all, as an enduring and eloquent voice in contemporary Italian literature.
The late novelist and essayist Leonardo Sciascia (1921-1989) was one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers, His critically acclaimed fiction has been translated into a number of languages and has also been turned into films, the most recent of which, Open Doors, based on the novella contained in this quartet, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1990.
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Two Murders In My Double Life by Josef Skvorecky. New York. 2001. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. 175 pages. Jacket design by Lynn Buckley. His 1st Novel Written In English. 0374280258.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
In Josef Škvorecký’s first novel written in English, the narrator lives in two radically dissimilar worlds: the exile world of the post-Communist Czech Republic where old feuds, treacherous betrayals, and friendships persevere; and the comfortable, albeit bland world of middle-class Canada. Murder intrudes upon both world. One features a young female sleuth, a college beauty queen, jealousy in the world of academia, and a neat conclusion. The other is a tragedy caused by evil social forces and philosophies, in which a web of lies insidiously entangles Sidonia, the narrator’s wife. A brilliantly stylish tour de force in which the bright, sarcastic comedy of one tale sharply contrasts with the dark, elegiac bitterness of the other, TWO MURDERS IN MY DOUBLE LIFE confirms Škvorecký’s reputation as a versatile and engaging writer. Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada.
JOSEF SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.
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Every Day Drinking by Kingsley Amis. London. 1983. Hutchinson & Company. hardcover. 119 pages. Cover illustration by Merrily Harpur. Text illustrations by Merrily Harpur. 0091547105.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Apart from being one of Britain’s most distinguished living writers, Kingsley Amis is recognized as a considerable expert on the art and pleasure of drinking. His interest in the subject is not the limited one of the wine snob, devoted to the fine vintages of Burgundy and Bordeaux, but ranges over the whole field of everyday drinking, from British beer to the most exotic apentifs and liqueurs and from the distillation of single malt whisky and the mixing of the perfect martini to the effective handling of wine waiters and the nursing of a hangover. The pieces in this delightful and informative collection, in short, are concerned with the whole business of drink and drinking, from the manufacture and preparation of the alcoholic substances themselves to the pleasure - and occasional pain - of consuming them, all described with Kingsley Amis’s characteristic blend of knowledge and wit.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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I Want It Now by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1969. Harcourt Brace & World. hardcover. 255 pages.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Ronnie Appleyard’s stock-in-trade as a successful and ambitious TV interviewer is sincerity, a quality he’s an expert on though values little, Yet a stab at candour seems in order when confronted by the altogether unnerving strangeness of Simon Quick, the girl he discovers at a party - barefoot, boyise and heiress to uncountable millions. As he accompanies her through the Hades of lavish, under-catered parties and submits to the dispiriting global entertainments of the extremely rich and their calculated patronage, Ronnie is for once uncertain of his motives, Surely it must be Simon’s money he’s after? What is there about this wild, erratic girl but her money that could possibly puncture his resilient cynicism? I WANT IT NOW is Kingsley Amis’s funniest book since LUCKY JIM. At its centre is a relationship which, in its struggle to overcome the self-consciousness and the clichés of the so-called ‘permissive’ society, illuminates with devastating accuracy and wit the precarious role of honesty in a success-addicted age.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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Stanley And The Women by Kingsley Amis. New York. 1985. Summit Books. hardcover. 256 pages. September 1985. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino. 0671603175.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
The hero of Kingsley Amis’s comedy is Stanley Duke. Attractive, prosperous and happily remarried, Stanley leads a life that is positively enviable-that is, until it becomes apparent that his teenage son, Steve, is going mad. It isn’t that Steve suddenly tears up a copy of Bellow’s HERZOG, or cranks his stereo to ear-shattering levels. that’s normal. It’s his pursuit by cosmic forces that concerns his father. Stanley’s confrontation with his son’s madness give Amis the opportunity to pull off a comic masterpiece.
Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.
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Fireworks by Angela Carter. London. 1974. Quartet Books. hardcover. 122 pages. Jacket design by The Green Bay Packers Art Co. 0704320436.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Here is the ritualism of Tokyo where lovers ponder the intangible reflections of themselves, ‘reflections of nothing but appearances, in a city dedicated to seeming’, and ‘the velvet nights spaked with menace’ of a wasted London, poised on the brink of destruction. In these extraordinary tales Angela Carter pinpoints the symbolism of the city streets and weaves allegories around forests and jungles of strange and erotic landscapes of the imagination.
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.
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Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter. New York. 1969. Simon & Schuster. hardcover. 215 pages. Jacket design by Graham Percy.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
An allegorical post-Apocalyptic novel, in which three surviving social groups—the Professors, the Barbarians, and the Out People—come into conflict when a Professor’s daughter is captured and becomes the bride of a Barbarian. The novel is set in a future Dark Ages, but its opening is a clever parody of ‘Emma.’
Angela Carter (7 May 1940 – 16 February 1992) was an English novelist and journalist, known for her feminist, magical realism, picaresque and science fiction works. In 2008, The Times ranked Carter tenth, in their list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945’ Born Angela Olive Stalker in Eastbourne, in 1940, Carter was evacuated as a child to live in Yorkshire with her maternal grandmother. As a teenager she battled anorexia. She began work as a journalist on the Croydon Advertiser, following in the footsteps of her father. Carter attended the University of Bristol where she studied English literature. She married twice, first in 1960 to Paul Carter. They divorced after twelve years. In 1969 Angela Carter used the proceeds of her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her husband and relocate for two years to Tokyo, Japan, where she claims in NOTHING SACRED (1982) that she ‘learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised.’ She wrote about her experiences there in articles for New Society and a collection of short stories, FIREWORKS: NINE PROFANE PIECES (1974), and evidence of her experiences in Japan can also be seen in THE INFERNAL DESIRE MACHINES OF DOCTOR HOFFMAN (1972). She then explored the United States, Asia and Europe, helped by her fluency in French and German. She spent much of the late 1970s and 1980s as a writer in residence at universities, including the University of Sheffield, Brown University, the University of Adelaide, and the University of East Anglia. In 1977 Carter married Mark Pearce, with whom she had one son. As well as being a prolific writer of fiction, Carter contributed many articles to The Guardian, The Independent and New Statesman, collected in SHAKING A LEG. She adapted a number of her short stories for radio and wrote two original radio dramas on Richard Dadd and Ronald Firbank. Two of her fictions have been adapted for the silver screen: The Company of Wolves (1984) and THE MAGIC TOYSHOP (1987). She was actively involved in both film adaptations, her screenplays are published in the collected dramatic writings, The Curious Room, together with her radio scripts, a libretto for an opera of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, an unproduced screenplay entitled The Christchurch Murders (based on the same true story as Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures) and other works. These neglected works, as well as her controversial television documentary, The Holy Family Album, are discussed in Charlotte Crofts' book, Anagrams of Desire (2003). Her novel NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS won the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for literature. At the time of her death, Carter was embarking on a sequel to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre based on the later life of Jane's stepdaughter, Adèle Varens. However, only a synopsis survives. Angela Carter died aged 51 in 1992 at her home in London after developing lung cancer.
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Manuel Puig and The Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions by Suzanne Jill Levine. New York. 2000. Farrar Straus Giroux. hardcover. 448 pages. Jacket design by Jonathan D. Lippincott. Jacket photograph by Mario Fenelli. Photograph of author and Manuel Puig, 1981, by Lydia Rubio. 0374281904.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Manuel Puig (1932-1990), Argentinian author of KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN and pioneer of high camp, stands alone in the pantheon of contemporary Latin American literature. Strongly influenced by Hollywood films of the thirties and forties, his many-layered novels and plays integrate serious fiction and popular culture, mixing political and sexual themes with B-movie scenarios. When his first two novels were published in the late sixties, they delighted the public but were dismissed as frivolous by the leftist intellectuals of the Boom; his third novel was banned by the Peronist government for irreverence. His influence was already felt though-even by writers who had dismissed him-and by the time the film version of KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN became a worldwide hit, he was a renowned literary figure. Puig’s way of life was as unconventional as his fiction: he spoke of himself in the female form in Spanish, renamed his friends after his favorite movie stars, referred to his young male devotees as ‘daughters,’ and, as a perennial expatriate, lived (often with his mother) everywhere from Rome to Rio de Janeiro. Suzanne Jill Levine, his principal English translator, draws upon years of friendship as well as copious research and interviews in her remarkable book, the first biography of this inimitable writer.
SUZANNE JILL LEVINE is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a noted translator of contemporary Latin American literature. She is the author of three books, including THE SUBVERSIVE SCRIBE.
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James Joyce: A Passionate Exile by John McCourt. London. 2000. Orion Books. hardcover. 112 pages. Front cover: James Joyce by Augustus John courtesy of the artist estate, Bridgernan Art Library. Back: James Joyce in Zurich 1938, Hulton Getty. 0752818295.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
JAMES JOYCE: A PASSIONATE EXILE is a revealing new account of the life, times and writings of the twentieth century’s most distinguished novelist. Combining words with an extraordinary collection of contemporary photographs and other images, it depicts his family’s fall from riches to rags and his experience of growing up in late nineteenth century Dublin. Author and Joyce scholar John McCourt also examines Joyce’s relationship with his life-long partner, Nora Barnacle and casts new light on their 40-year voluntary exile in Europe, first in the cosmopolitan Adriatic port of Trieste, then in lively wartime Zurich, and finally in Paris, the artistic centre of the world in the 1920s and 30s. Exile from Ireland was a necessary condition for Joyce to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race in his magnificent short story collection DUBLINERS, in his intense bildungsroman A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN and in his modern epic ULYSSES.
John McCourt is from Dublin. He was educated at Belvedere College and University College, Dublin, where he obtained his PhD for a thesis on Joyce’s Trieste experiences. He has been living and working in Trieste since 1991. He is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Trieste, where he is also programme director of the university’s annual Trieste Joyce School.
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The Moon and the Bonfires by Cesare Pavese. New York. 1953. Farrar Straus & Young. hardcover. 206 pages. Translated from the Italian by Marianne Ceconi. Foreword by Paolo Milano.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
Anguila, the narrator, is a successful businessman lured home from California to the Piedmontese village where he was fostered by peasants. But, after twenty years, much has changed. Slowly, through the power of memory, he is able to piece together the past and relates it to what he finds left in the present. He looks at the lives and sometimes violent faces of the villagers he has known from childhood, setting the poverty, ignorance or indifference that binds them to these hills and valleys against the beauty of the landscape and the rhythm of the seasons. With stark realism and muted compassion, Pavese weaves the strands together and brings them to a stark and poignant climax.
Cesare Pavese (9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator; he is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country. Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He started infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style was devoid of all rhetoric. As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public. Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into ‘confino’, internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there. Pavese was living in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato.He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio. Pavese gave her the American edition of SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY, which came out in Pivano's Italian translation in 1943.After the war Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità. The bulk of his work was published during this time. Toward the end of his life, he would frequently visit Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel was dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates in 1950. That year he had won the Strega Prize for La Bella Estate, comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline'(1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949). Leslie Fiedler wrote of Pavese's death ‘. .for the Italians, his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us, a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age.’ The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, mimic the last scene of Tra Donne Sole (AMONG WOMEN ONLY), his penultimate book. His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES by Louise Sinclair in 1952.
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Old Tales From Spain by Felipe Alfau. Garden City. 1929. Doubleday Doran. hardcover. 207 pages. Illustrated by Rhea Wells.
FROM THE PUBLISHER -
A collection of children's stories from the author of LOCOS: A COMEDY OF GESTURES and CHROMOS.
Felipe Alfau (1902–1999), was a Spanish American (Catalan American) novelist and poet. Like his contemporaries Luigi Pirandello and Flann O'Brien, Alfau is considered a forerunner of later postmodern writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, and Gilbert Sorrentino. Born in Barcelona, Alfau emigrated with his family at the age of fourteen to the United States, where he lived the remainder of his life. Alfau earned a living as a translator; his sparse fictional and poetic output remained obscure throughout most of his life. Alfau wrote two novels in English: LOCOS: A COMEDY OF GESTURES and CHROMOS. LOCOS — a metafictive collection of related short stories set in Toledo and Madrid, involving several characters that defy the wishes of the author, write their own stories, and even assume each others' roles — was published by Farrar and Rinehart in 1936. The novel, for which Alfau was paid $250, received some critical acclaim, but little popular attention. The novel was republished in 1987 after an editor for the small publisher Dalkey Archive Press found the book at a barn sale in Massachusetts, read it, and contacted Alfau after finding his telephone number in the Manhattan phone book. The novel's second incarnation was modestly successful, but Alfau refused payment, instructing the publisher to use the earnings from LOCOS to fund some other unpublished work. When asked if he had written any other books, Alfau provided the manuscript for CHROMOS, which had been resting in a drawer since 1948. CHROMOS, a comic story of Spanish immigrants to the United States contending with their two cultures, went on to be nominated for the National Book Award in 1990. Alfau also wrote a book of poetry in Spanish, SENTIMENTAL SONGS (La poesia cursi), written between 1923 and 1987 and published in 1992, and a book of children's stories, OLD TALES FROM SPAIN, written in 1929.
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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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