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Not Much Fun: The Lost Poems of Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker. New York. 1996. Scribner. Compiled & With an Introduction by Stuart Y. Silverstein. 256 pages. hardcover. 0684818558

DESCRIPTION - Dorothy Parker wrote more than three hundred poems and verses for a variety of popular magazines and newspapers during the early years of her literary career. She collected most of these pieces in three volumes of poetry, Enough Rope, Sunset Gun and Death and Taxes. It is the remaining poems and verses, the ones that she failed to collect and whose very existence has been unknown to most of the general public for more than half a century, that comprise this volume. Eclectic and exuberant, the 122 forgotten poems and verses display the raw talent and dexterity of America's most renowned cynic. Some are topical, providing gimlet-eyed commentary on urban life from the First World War through the mid-twenties. With incomparable wit, Parker dissects contemporary fads and, in the raucous "Hate Verses," gleefully maligns most facets of humanity and popular culture, from husbands and wives to bohemians, slackers, summer resorts and movies. Some of the pieces are rare examples of Parker's experimentation with structured poetic forms. Others are more personal, celebrating her love of animals or scrutinizing the perils of passion. Notoriously - and irrationally - critical of her own work, Parker chose not to include this poetry in her previous collections. Nonetheless, many of the lost poems compare with her best, and nearly all display the distinctive wit, irony and precision that continue to attract succeeding generations of readers. In an authoritative and immensely entertaining introduction, Stuart Y. Silverstein recounts Parker's celebrated career.

  Dorothy Parker (August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured.

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Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter. New York. 1969. Simon & Schuster. hardcover. 215 pages. Jacket design by Graham Percy. 

DESCRIPTION - 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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Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said. New York. 1993. Knopf. 381 pages. Jacket painting: 'The Representatives of the Foreign Powers Coming to Hail the Republic as a Token of Peace', 1907; Paris, Louvre; Donation Picasso; Giraudon/Art Resource, New York. Jacket design by Megan Wilson. 0394587383. February 1993.

DESCRIPTION - The extraordinary reach of Western imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the most astonishing facts in all of geopolitical history. Neither Rome, nor Byzantium, nor Spain at the height of its glory came close to the imperial scope of France, the United States, and particularly Great Britain in these years. But while the rule of these vast dominions left scarcely a corner of life untouched in either the colonies or the imperialist capitals, its profound influence upon the cultural products of the West has been largely ignored. In this dazzling work of historical inquiry, Edward Said shows how the justification for empire-building was inescapably embedded in the Western cultural imagination during the Age of Empire, and how even today the imperial legacy colors relations between the West and the formerly colonized world at every level of political, ideological, and social practice. Probing some of the great masterpieces of the Western tradition—including Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS, Austen’s MANSFIELD PARK, Verdi’s Aida, and Camus’s L’ETRANGER—Said brilliantly illuminates how culture and politics cooperated, knowingly and unknowingly, to produce a system of domination that involved more than cannon and soldiers—a sovereignty that extended over forms, images, and the very imaginations of both the dominators and the dominated. The result was a ‘consolidated vision’ that affirmed not merely the Europeans’ right to rule but their obligation, and made alternative arrangements unthinkable. Pervasive as this vision was, however, it did not go unchallenged. Said also traces the development of an ‘oppositional strain’ in the works of native writers who participated in the perilous process of cultural decolonization. Working mainly in the languages of their colonial masters, these writers – including William Butler Yeats, Salman Rushdie, Aime Cesaire, and Chinua Achebe - identified and exposed the mechanisms of control and repression. In so doing, they reclaimed for their peoples the right of self-determination in history and literature. In today’s post-colonial world, Said argues, imperialist assumptions continue to influence Western politics and culture, from the media’s coverage of the Gulf War to debates over what histories and literatures are worth teaching in our schools. But his vision reveals a hopeful truth: if the West and its former subject peoples are to achieve a meaningful, harmonious coexistence, it will depend upon the development of a humanistic historical understanding that all cultures are interdependent, that they inevitably borrow from one another. Finally, this passionate and immensely learned book points the way beyond divisive nationalisms toward an awareness that the true human community is global. ‘Readers accustomed to the precision and elegance of Edward Said’s analytical prowess will not be disappointed by CULTURE AND IMPERIALISM. Those discovering Said for the first time will be profoundly impressed. ’ – TONI MORRISON.

An internationally renowned literary and cultural critic, Edward W. Said was University Professor at Columbia University. He is the author often previous books, including ORIENTALISM, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate by Diego Gambetta. Princeton. 2009. Princeton University Press. 5 line illustrations. 3 tables. 368 pages. 9780691119373. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - How do criminals communicate with each other? Unlike the rest of us, people planning crimes can't freely advertise their goods and services, nor can they rely on formal institutions to settle disputes and certify quality. They face uniquely intense dilemmas as they grapple with the basic problems of whom to trust, how to make themselves trusted, and how to handle information without being detected by rivals or police. In this book, one of the world's leading scholars of the mafia ranges from ancient Rome to the gangs of modern Japan, from the prisons of Western countries to terrorist and pedophile rings, to explain how despite these constraints, many criminals successfully stay in business. Diego Gambetta shows that as villains balance the lure of criminal reward against the fear of dire punishment, they are inspired to unexpected feats of subtlety and ingenuity in communication. He uncovers the logic of the often bizarre ways in which inveterate and occasional criminals solve their dilemmas, such as why the tattoos and scars etched on a criminal's body function as lines on a professional résumé, why inmates resort to violence to establish their position in the prison pecking order, and why mobsters are partial to nicknames and imitate the behavior they see in mafia movies. Even deliberate self-harm and the disclosure of their crimes are strategically employed by criminals to convey important messages by deciphering how criminals signal to each other in a lawless universe, this gruesomely entertaining and incisive book provides a quantum leap in our ability to make sense of their actions.

Diego Gambetta is Official Fellow of Nuffield College and professor of sociology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection and editor of Making Sense of Suicide Missions.

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Why Not Socialism? by G. A. Cohen. Princeton. 2009. Princeton University Press. 92 pages. 9780691143613. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Is socialism desirable? Is it even possible? In this concise book, one of the world's leading political philosophers presents with clarity and wit a compelling moral case for socialism and argues that the obstacles in its way are exaggerated. There are times, G. A. Cohen notes, when we all behave like socialists. On a camping trip, for example, campers wouldn't dream of charging each other to use a soccer ball or for fish that they happened to catch. Campers do not give merely to get, but relate to each other in a spirit of equality and community. Would such socialist norms be desirable across society as a whole? Why not? Whole societies may differ from camping trips, but it is still attractive when people treat each other with the equal regard that such trips exhibit. But, however desirable it may be, many claim that socialism is impossible. Cohen writes that the biggest obstacle to socialism isn't, as often argued, intractable human selfishness--it's rather the lack of obvious means to harness the human generosity that is there. Lacking those means, we rely on the market. But there are many ways of confining the sway of the market: there are desirable changes that can move us toward a socialist society in which, to quote Albert Einstein, humanity has ‘overcome and advanced beyond the predatory stage of human development.’

G. A. Cohen was emeritus fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. His books include Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, and Rescuing Justice and Equality.

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

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

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

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The Vampire of Curitiba and Other Stories by Dalton Trevisan. New York. 1972. Knopf. Translated From The Portuguese By Gregory Rabassa. 269 pages. Jacket illustration by Ann Dalton. Jacket design by Lidia Ferrara.  039446645x. November 1972. Translations taken from the following collections: Novelas Nada Exemplares, Cemiterio de Elefantes, O Vampiro de Curitiba, and A Guerra Conjugal). 

DESCRIPTION - THIS IS THE FIRST English-language collection of the best stories by the best story writer in contemporary Brazil-selected from his entire published work and superbly translated by Gregory Rabassa. THE narratives and sketches that make up THE VAMPIRE OF CURITIBA AND OTHER STORIES speak for the lost and the lonely, the irresponsible and unfaithful, the people who are the odds-and-ends of life. They are revealed, and reveal themselves, at the point of confrontation: with one another, with death, with memories and illusions. A woman’s rantings about her husband, whose sight, sound, smell, and touch she cannot bear, are counterposed to the absent offender’s barroom eloquence. Fraught with the exaggerated sensibility of four o’clock in the morning, an insomniac’s anti-paean to his surroundings is interrupted by an encounter with a cockroach, a fellow sufferer. A young man seeks solace not so much for his father’s death as for his absence from it. A young couple struggle unsuccessfully for privacy from a beer-drinking granny who hears all. A father and son confront each other across a chasm of mutual blame and derision. A woman, mortally ill, resists the dying of her lamp’s flame. A man separated from his wife and daughter attempts to impose his own reality on an uncooperative world. An anonymous, repeated accusation of unfaithfulness is the bit of dirt which grinds to a halt the shaky machinery of a marriage. Two men quarrel violently over a debt, While the children of the debtor look and listen. The truth about a multiple rape elusively changes form as the story is seen from varying points of view. A young man sits over a cognac watching women pass by and addresses a silent, lusty, bittersweet monologue to each in turn. With a style that is deceptively simple, chillingly casual, Dalton Trevisan, in each of these direct yet subtle tales, impales on a single moment the fears and passions and despairs of men.

DALTON TREVISAN was born in Curitiba, Brazil, in 1925. He studied law but soon abandoned the profession in favor of his family’s ceramic business. In 1945 an accident in the factory brought him close to death and led him to begin his writing career. He published a literary magazine called Joaquim from 1946 to 1948, worked as a police reporter and film critic for Curitiba newspapers, and published his own stories in cheap newsprint editions. In 1959 José Olympic published his first collection, Novelas Nada Exemplares, which was quickly followed by Morta na Praca, Cemitério de Elefantes, 0 Vampire de Curitiba, Desastres do Amer, and A Cuerra Conjugal. 

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The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse. New York. 1995. Bantam Books. Translated from the German & With An Introduction by Jack Zipes. 266 pages. Jacket illustration by David Frampton. 0553100238. November 1995.

DESCRIPTION - To read Hermann Hesse’s fairy tales is to enter a fabulous world of dreams and visions, philosophy and passion. This landmark collection contains twenty-two of Hesse’s finest stories in this genre, most translated into English here for the first time. Drawing on both Eastern and Western fairy-tale traditions, Hesse captures the innate power of this ancient form as he spins wondrous stories that both entertain us and penetrate beneath the surface of our conscious mind. Full of visionaries and seekers, princesses and wandering poets, his fairy tales speak to the place in our psyche that inspires us with deep spiritual longing; that compels us to leave home, and inevitably to return; and that harbors the greatest joys and most devastating wounds of our heart. Containing all the themes common to Hesse’s great novels - SIDDHARTHA, STEPPENWOLF and DEMIAN - and mirroring events in his own life, these exquisite short pieces exhibit the same mystical and romantic impulses that contribute to the haunting brilliance of his major works. Several stories, including ‘The Poet,’ ‘The Fairy Tale About the Wicker Chair,’ and ‘The Painter,’ examine the dilemma of the artist, torn between the drive for perfection and the temptations of pleasure and social success. Other tales reflect changes and struggles within society: in ‘Faldum,’ a city is irrevocably transformed when each resident is granted his or her fondest wish; in ‘Strange News from Another Planet,’ ‘If the War Continues,’ and ‘The European,’ nightmarish landscapes convey Hesse’s devastating critiques of nationalism, barbarism, and war. Strikingly original in both substance and style, these richly symbolic works resonate with timeless themes: the fundamental duality of existence, the isolation of the artist, and the decline of Western civilization. Hesse’s lyrical prose is deceptively simple, like a Zen koan, often camouflaging profound enigmas. What is the meaning of the killing of the blind leader in ‘The Forest Dweller’? Why does the guide leap off the mountain in ‘The Difficult Path’? By making us ask these provocative questions, Hesse invites us to undertake a quest for personal and cultural enlightenment that is as relevant today as it was to readers in his own time. Illuminating and inspiring, THE FAIRY TALES OF HERMANN HESSE will challenge and enchant readers of all ages. A distinguished and historic publication, this fine translation by Jack Zipes captures their subtlety and elegance for decades to come.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HERMANN HESSE was born at Calw, Germany, July 2, 1877. He started life as a bookseller at Tubingen and Basle, and began to publish poetry at the age of 21. Five years later he had his first great success with his novels on youth and educational problems: first PETER CAMENZIND, then UNTERM RAD (THE PRODIGY), followed by SIDDHARTHA, ROSSHALDE, DEMIAN, and others. All of them sold by the hundred-thousand; and when, as a protest against German militarism in the First World War, he settled permanently in Switzerland, he was established as one of the greatest literary figures of the German-speaking world. His deep humanity, his searching philosophy developed further in such novels as DER STEPPENWOLF and NARZISS UND GOLDMUND (GOLDMUND), while his poems and critical writings won him a leading place among contemporary thinkers. The Nazis abhorred and suppressed his books; the Swiss honoured him by conferring on him the degree of Ph.D.; the world finally, by bestowing upon him in 1946 the Nobel Prize for Literature, an award richly deserved by his great novel MAGISTER LUDI (DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL).

Jack Zipes, a professor of German at the University of Minnesota, is an authority on folklore and fairy tales as well as an acclaimed translator. Active as a storyteller in public schools, he has worked with children’s theaters in France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. His publications include BREAKING THE MAGIC SPELL, FAIRY TALES AND THE ART OF SUBVERSION, THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, DON’T BET ON THE PRINCE, THE COMPLETE TALES OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, SPELLS OF ENCHANTMENT, and THE OUTSPOKEN PRINCESS AND THE GENTLE KNIGHT.

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Masters of the Dew by Jacques Roumain. New York. 1947. Reynal & Hitchcock. Translated From The French By Langston Hughes & Mercer Cook. 180 pages.

DESCRIPTION -  The genre of the peasant novel in Haiti reaches back to the nineteenth century and this is one of the outstanding examples. Manuel returns to his native village after working on a sugar plantation in Cuba only to discover that it is stricken by a drought and divided by a family feud. He attacks the resignation endemic among his people by preaching the kind of political awareness and solidarity he has learned in Cuba. He goes on to illustrate his ideas in a tangible way by finding water and bringing it to the fields through the collective labor of the villagers. In this political fable, Roumain is careful to create an authentic environment and credible characters. Readers will be emotionally moved as well as ideologically persuaded.

Jacques Roumain, the son of a wealthy Haitian family, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1907. After being educated in Europe he identified with the resistance movement against the American occupation. He started Le Revue Indigene and published various books including La Montagne Ensorcelee He founded the Haitian Communist Party in 1934, was arrested and, after three years in prison, traveled in Europe and the United States until his return in 1941 when he established the Bureau d'Ethnologie in an effort to legitimise the study of Haiti's peasantry. He was sent in 1943 to the Haitian Embassy in Mexico. It was there that he completed this book Gouverneurs de la Rosee a few months before his sudden death in 1944.

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Question of Power by Bessie Head. New York. 1974. Pantheon Books. 206 pages. Jacket illustration by Kurt Vargo. 0394491556. April 1974. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A Question of Power is rich in irony, anger, and passion, both emotional and intellectual. It emerges as one of the most exciting works to come from southern Africa since the writings of Doris Lessing. In this powerful and complex novel, Elizabeth, a young colored woman fleeing the mean degradation of South Africa, comes with her young son to a village in Botswana, an African enclave within the borders of the Republic that has independence of a kind. She rejoins her own people and sets to work on the land. The country attracts the aid of European and American whites, who come to help build and plant. In undertaking the simplest and most humble kind of labor, Elizabeth discovers the mental peace that has previously evaded her.

Bessie Emery Head (6 July 1937 – 17 April 1986) is usually considered Botswana's most influential writer. Bessie Emery Head was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the child of a wealthy white South African woman and a black servant when interracial relationships were illegal in South Africa. It was claimed that her mother was mentally ill so that she could be sent to a quiet location to then give birth to Bessie without the neighbors knowing. However, the exact circumstances are disputed, and some of Bessie Head's comments, though often quoted as straight autobiography, are in fact from fictionalized settings. In the 1950s and '60s she was a teacher, then a journalist for the South African magazine Drum. In 1964 she moved to Botswana (then still the Bechuanaland Protectorate) as a refugee, having been peripherally involved with Pan-African politics. It would take 15 years for Head to obtain Botswana citizenship. Head settled in Serowe, the largest of Botswana's ‘villages’ (i.e. traditional settlements as opposed to settler towns). Serowe was famous both for its historical importance, as capital of the Bamangwato people, and for the experimental Swaneng school of Patrick van Rensburg. The deposed chief of the Bamangwato, Seretse Khama, was soon to become the first President of independent Botswana. Her early death in 1986 (aged 48) from hepatitis came just at the point where she was starting to achieve recognition as a writer and was no longer so desperately poor. Most of Bessie Head's important works are set in Serowe, in particular the three novels When Rain Clouds Gather, Maru, and A Question of Power. One of her best works is When Rain Clouds Gather, in which she writes about a troubled young man called Makhaya who runs away from his birthplace, South Africa, to become a refugee in a little village called Golema Mmidi, in the heart of Botswana. Here he is faced with many challenges, one of which is the fact that Chief Matenge does not allow his presence in the village. He meets a white man named Gilbert and starts a whole new journey into the unknown. Head also published a number of short stories, including the collection The Collector of Treasures. She published a book on the history of Serowe, the village she settled in, called Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind. Her last novel, A Bewitched Crossroad, is historical, set in nineteenth-century Botswana. She had also written a story of two prophets, one wealthy and one who lived poorly called ‘Jacob: The Faith-Healing Priest’. Head's work, which emphasised the value of ordinary life and humble people, was more in touch with an earlier trend in African writing than many recent writers, who have made overtly political comments. Her writing has endured nonetheless. Religious ideas feature prominently at times, as in the work A Question of Power. It is interesting to note that Head was initially brought up as a Christian; however, she was later influenced by Hinduism (to which she was exposed through South Africa's Indian community). Most of her writing took place while she was in exile in Botswana. An exception is the early novel The Cardinals (published posthumously), written before she left South Africa. In some ways Bessie Head remained an outsider in her adopted country, and some discern she had something of a love-hate relationship with it. At times she suffered mental health problems and on one occasion put up a public notice making bizarre and shocking allegations about then President Sir Seretse Khama, which led to a period in Lobatse Mental Hospital. A Question of Power is based partly on those experiences. In 2007 the Bessie Head Heritage Trust was established, along with the Bessie Head Literature Awards. In July 2007 the library in Pietermaritzburg was renamed the Bessie Head library in her honor. In 2003 she was awarded the South African ‘Order of Ikhamanga in Gold’ for her ‘exceptional contribution to literature and the struggle for social change, freedom and peace.’

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