DESCRIPTION - One of the premier Japanese novels of the twentieth century, THE WOMEN IN THE DUNES combines the essence of myth, suspense, and the existential novel. In a remote seaside village, Niki Jumpei, a teacher and amateur entomologist, is held captive with a young woman at the bottom of a vast sand pit where, Sisyphus-like, they are pressed into shoveling off the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten the village.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KOBO ABE (1924-1993) was one of Japan's most prominent contemporary writers. Born in Japan but raised in Manchuria, he is perhaps best known for his 1962 novel, THE WOMAN IN THE DUNES, though he was also a prominent screenwriter, producer, and director. Like Samuel Beckett's and Eugene Ionesco's, Abe's plays address universal and contemporary concerns, often with an eye for the absurd. While his American reputation rests largely on his fictional works, Abe was one of the best-known playwrights in Japan. For many years he ran his own theater company, which presented highly accomplished productions of his works.
DESCRIPTION - Chinua Achebe's first novel portrays the collision of African and European cultures in people's lives. Okonkwo, a great man in Igbo traditional society, cannot adapt to the profound changes brought about by British colonial rule. Yet, as in classic tragedy, Okonkwo's downfall results from his own character as well as from external forces. From PUBLISHERS WEEKLY - Achebe's powerful critique of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS as a racist mirror of Eurocentric attitudes leads off this challenging collection of essays on art, literature and social issues. The famed Nigerian novelist (THINGS FALL APART ) views literature as a medium that can help Africa regain a belief in itself to replace a posture of self-abasement instilled by its traumatic historical encounter with the West. Tributes to novelists Amos Tutuola and Kofi Awoonor, as well as discerning appraisals of writers such as V. S. Naipaul and James Baldwin, reflect his belief in the power of fiction to give us a 'handle on reality.' Overall, these concise essays deliver a forceful commentary on Afro-American life and letters. Summing up Nigeria's recent sociopolitical history as 'a snatching of defeat from the jaws of victory,' Achebe calls active participation in the political process a prerequisite for his country's, and Africa's, regeneration.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chinua Achebe (16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
DESCRIPTION - THINGS FALL APART centers on Okonkwo, a self-made and successful man striving for an ascendant position in his village. The story takes place in a Nigerian village in the late 19th Century, and in it, Chinua Achebe, a young Nigerian writing in English, has dramatized the coherent, patterned past of his people and the effects of Western civilization upon it. Through Okonkwo's menage of three wives and many children, his ambitions and especially his honor and fierce prowess in battle, we are made to share the African's experience with his gods, his superstitions and customs, even his weather. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of his novel is that it succeeds in presenting a way of life, unknown and alien to us, from the inside. It is a story simultaneously absorbing in its strangeness and compelling in its compassionate observation of human nature. The background of the story is the life of the village - its feasts, wrestling matches, betrothal celebrations, and also its shrouded oracles and masked gods and the net of fear that can separate a mother from her child, a man from his heir. The story culminates with the arrival of the emissaries (of both races) of the Western world, who bring their religion, government, and skill in fragmentary form to be dispersed and dismembered once more among an uncomprehending people - half hostile, half curious. Achebe writes clear, level, almost understated prose, and it is partly through his tautly controlled style that the power of the book is achieved.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chinua Achebe (16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, and critic who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature. His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature and remains the most widely studied, translated, and read African novel. Along with Things Fall Apart, his No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) complete the "African Trilogy". Later novels include A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). In the West, Achebe is often referred to as the "father of African literature", although he vigorously rejected the characterization.
DESCRIPTION - Communism, capitalism, work, crisis, and the market, described in simple storybook terms and illustrated by drawings of adorable little revolutionaries. Once upon a time, people yearned to be free of the misery of capitalism. How could their dreams come true? This little book proposes a different kind of communism, one that is true to its ideals and free from authoritarianism. Offering relief for many who have been numbed by Marxist exegesis and given headaches by the earnest pompousness of socialist politics, it presents political theory in the simple terms of a children's story, accompanied by illustrations of lovable little revolutionaries experiencing their political awakening. It all unfolds like a story, with jealous princesses, fancy swords, displaced peasants, mean bosses, and tired workers–not to mention a Ouija board, a talking chair, and a big pot called the state. Before they know it, readers are learning about the economic history of feudalism, class struggles in capitalism, different ideas of communism, and more. Finally, competition between two factories leads to a crisis that the workers attempt to solve in six different ways (most of them borrowed from historic models of communist or socialist change). Each attempt fails, since true communism is not so easy after all. But it's also not that hard. At last, the people take everything into their own hands and decide for themselves how to continue. Happy ending? Only the future will tell. With an epilogue that goes deeper into the theoretical issues behind the story, this book is perfect for all ages and all who desire a better world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bini Adamczak is a Berlin-based social theorist and artist. She writes on political theory, queer politics, and the past future of revolutions.
DESCRIPTION - First published in nine volumes from 1889-91 and long out of print, Henry Adams' History of The United States is truly one of the greatest historical works written in English. Adams' History traces the formative period of American nationality from the rise of Thomas Jefferson's Republican party through the War of 1812. Hoping to keep the United States out of Europe's Napoleonic wars, Jefferson's pacificism instead antagonizes both France and England, the two greatest military powers in the world. While the states threaten to duplicate the map of Europe by dissolving into separate, squabbling sections, Madison leads the country into a war with British regulars and Indian tribes that he is ill-equipped to fight. Yet time is on the side of the American people - who, despite statesmen and generals, emerge from the conflict a single nation ready to flex its burgeoning muscles. In Adams' ironic narrative, personalities like Bonaparte and Aaron Burr, William 'Tippecanoe' Harrison and Andrew Jackson, Shawnee leader Tecumseh and Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture act their glittering parts against a background of inexorable historical forces that transform the United States from a pre-industrial backwater into an emergent world power. The diplomatic documents that lace the history lend a novelistic intimacy to scenes such as Jefferson's conscientious introduction of democratic table manners into stuffily aristocratic state dinner parties. Written in a strong, lively style pointed with Adams' wit, the History chronicles the consolidation of American character, and poses questions about the future course of democracy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Brooks Adams (February 16, 1838 - March 27, 1918; normally called Henry Adams) was an American journalist, historian, academic and novelist. He was the grandson and great-grandson of John Quincy Adams and John Adams, respectively. He is best known for his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, and his History of the United States During the Administration of Thomas Jefferson. He was a member of the Adams political family.
DESCRIPTION - In this enthralling new novel, which the London Observer has called ‘the real successor to WATERSHIP DOWN,' Richard Adams moves us more deeply than he has ever done - with his impassioned vision of the fate of animals at our mercy, with his splendid tale of flight and pursuit, with the three wonderful creatures whose story he tells. Two dogs escape one night from an animal experimentation laboratory in the English Lake District. They are Snitter and Rowf. Snitter is a small black-and-white fox terrier, Rowf a large black mongrel. Each has been badly injured - in the name of science. Rowf, rough and brave, has been repeatedly immersed, nearly drowned, and revived, and now has a deathly fear of water. Snitter - playful, clever, gentle, has undergone drastic brain surgery, an operation designed to ‘confuse the subjective and objective in the animal's mind': he wavers between lucidity and spells of vivid hallucination - dreams, fragments of a lost past, strangely prophetic visions of the future. Weakened by their ordeals, unused to freedom, the two runaways are scarcely prepared for survival in the bleak landscape of crags and fells in which they find themselves. But they are befriended by a creature whose like they have never encountered before, an animal with a sharp, furtive, dangerous scent, trotting, preying, slinking through the darkness. It is the tod - the fox - a raffish wanderer with neither name nor ties, who speaks a lilting rogue's jargon, who lives by cunning and trickery, who mesmerizes them with his sardonic humor, his shifty vitality, his mysterious, exhilarating wildness
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard George Adams (born 9 May 1920) is an English novelist who is best known as the author of Watership Down. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. Afterward he completed his studies and then joined the British Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author.
DESCRIPTION - Watership Down is an adventure novel by English author Richard Adams, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. Set in Hampshire in southern England, the story features a small group of rabbits. Although they live in their natural wild environment, with burrows, they are anthropomorphised, possessing their own culture, language, proverbs, poetry, and mythology. Evoking epic themes, the novel follows the rabbits as they escape the destruction of their warren and seek a place to establish a new home (the hill of Watership Down), encountering perils and temptations along the way. A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for over thirty years, Richard Adams's WATERSHIP DOWN is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard George Adams (born 9 May 1920) is an English novelist who is best known as the author of Watership Down. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. Afterward he completed his studies and then joined the British Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author.
DESCRIPTION - Before Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois lifted the banner for black liberation and independence, Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) was at the forefront. He was the first black appointed as a combat major in the Union army during the Civil War. He was a Pan-Africanist and a crusader for black freedom and equality in the nineteenth century. For the past three decades, however, this precursor has been regarded only as a militant Black Nationalist and racial essentialist.' To his discredit, his ideas, programs, and accomplishments have been maintained as models of uncompromising militancy. Classifying Delany solely for his militant nationalist rhetoric crystalizes him into a one-dimensional figure. This study of his life and thought, the first critical biography of the pivotal African American thinker written by a historian, challenges the distorting portrait and, arguing that Delany reflects the spectrum of the nineteenth-century black independence movement, makes a strong case for bringing him closer to the center position of the political mainstream. He displayed a far greater degree of optimism about the future of blacks in America than has been acknowledged, and he faced pragmatic socio-economic realities that made it possible for him to be flexible for compromise. Focusing on neglected phases in his intellectual life, this book reveals Delany as a personality who was neither uncompromisingly militant nor dogmatically conservative. It argues that his complex strategies for racial integration were much more focused on America than on separateness and nationalism. The extreme characterization of him that has been prominent in the contemporary mind reflects ideologies of scholars who came of age during the civil rights era, the period that initially inspired great interest in his life. This new look at him paints a portrait of the ‘other Delany,' a thinker able to reach across racial boundaries to offer compromise and dialogue.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TUNDE ADELEKE, professor of history and director of African American studies at the University of Montana, Missoula, is the author of UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission and editor of Booker T Washington: Interpretive Essays. He is currently editing for publication a collection of Martin Delany's post-Civil War papers.
DESCRIPTION - Who can remember reading Aesop for the first time? These little tales, with their pleasantly sententious morals, have slipped quietly into universal mythology. They are as familiar as nursery rhymes. Whether Aesop was a Greek slave of the sixth century B.C. or merely a name tacked on to a tradition; whether morality, expediency, or plain entertainment was the intention, the tales ensure their own survival. S.A. Handford's translation recovers all the old magic of fables in which, too often, the fox steps forward as the cynical hero and a lamb is an ass to lie down with the lion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Aesop was an Ancient Greek fabulist or story teller credited with a number of fables now collectively known as Aesop's Fables. Although his existence remains uncertain and (if they ever existed) no writings by him survive, numerous tales credited to him were gathered across the centuries and in many languages in a storytelling tradition that continues to this day. Many of the tales are characterized by animals and inanimate objects that speak, solve problems, and generally have human characteristics. Scattered details of Aesop's life can be found in ancient sources, including Aristotle, Herodotus, and Plutarch. An ancient literary work called The Aesop Romance tells an episodic, probably highly fictional version of his life, including the traditional description of him as a strikingly ugly slave who by his cleverness acquires freedom and becomes an adviser to kings and city-states. Older spellings of his name have included Esop(e) and Isope. A later tradition (dating from the Middle Ages) depicts Aesop as a black Ethiopian.
DESCRIPTION - Ato Yawson, a young Ghanaian educated in the United States, returns home with his strong-willed Harlem-born wife, Eulalie, whom he married without telling his tradition-conscious family. Ato, in his ambivalence between twentieth-century black America and his African heritage, attempts to bridge the two worlds. Eulalie, bringing with her dreams of "belonging" to a heroic, hallowed land, painfully discovers that Africa is not all colorful birds and peaceful rhythms of deep, mysterious rivers. In these immediate clashes between the tribe and the individual, the primitive and the modern, Ato and Eulalie confront barriers and obstacles which time, custom, and culture have made nearly insurmountable. The Dilemma of a Ghost is a play classic in its dramatic construction, heeding all the principles of tragedy while going beyond the rise and fall of a single tragic hero to include the tragedy of community and culture unable to change or to understand.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Ama Ata Aidoo, nEe Christina Ama Aidoo (born 23 March 1940, Saltpond) is a Ghanaian author, playwright and academic. Born in Saltpond in Ghana's Central Region, she grew up in a Fante royal household, the daughter of Nana Yaw Fama, chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor, and Maame Abasema. Aidoo was sent by her father to Wesley Girls' High School in Cape Coast from 1961 to 1964. The headmistress of Wesley Girls' bought her her first typewriter. After leaving high school, she enrolled at the University of Ghana in Legon and received her Bachelor of Arts in English as well as writing her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, in 1964. The play was published by Longman the following year, making Aidoo the first published African woman dramatist. She worked in the United States of America where she held a fellowship in creative writing at Stanford University. She also served as a research fellow at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, and as a Lecturer in English at the University of Cape Coast, eventually rising there to the position of Professor. Aside from her literary career, Aidoo was appointed Minister of Education under the Provisional National Defence Council in 1982. She resigned after 18 months. She has also spent a great deal of time teaching and living abroad for months at a time. She has lived in America, Britain, Germany, and Zimbabwe. She is currently a Visiting Professor in the Africana Studies Department at Brown University. Aidoo's works of fiction particularly deal with the tension between Western and African world views. Her first novel, Our Sister Killjoy, was published in 1977 and remains one of her most popular works. Many of Aidoo's protagonists are women who defy the stereotypical women's roles of their time. Her novel Changes, won the 1992 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Africa). She is also an accomplished poet, and has written several children's books.
DESCRIPTION - Anna Akhmatova, who died in 1966, was among this century's greatest Russian poets. Andrei Sinyavsky writes of her: 'From the barest whisper to fiery eloquence, from downcast eyes to lightning and thunderbolts - such is the range of Akhmatova's inspiration and voice.' Richard McKane's moving English translations do justice to a poet whose famous cycle, 'Requiem', was recognized as a fitting memorial to the sufferings of millions of Russians under Stalin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966), one of twentieth-century Russia's greatest poets, was viewed as a dangerous element by post-Revolution authorities. One of the few unrepentant poets to survive the Bolshevik revolution and subsequent Stalinist purges, she set for herself the artistic task of preserving the memory of pre-Revolutionary cultural heritage and of those who had been silenced.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of six stories, five of which are published here in English for the first time. Kurosawa's movie adaptation of "Rashomon" actually is based mostly on another story by Akutagawa (also present here), "In a Grove." This story is a supernatural crime drama that offers several versions of the same event, from the differing perspectives of several characters, including, via a medium, the dead man himself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927) was one of the most famous Japanese writers of the last century and was the author of RASHOMON and other works. The Akutagawa Prize is named in his honor.
DESCRIPTION - WINNER, NAACP IMAGE AWARD. WINNER, CONSTITUTIONAL COMMENTARY AWARD. "Devastating.' - Forbes Magazine. "An instant classic." - CORNEL WEST. "The bible of a social movement." - San Francisco Chronicle. "[An] extraordinary book." - MARIAN WRIGHT EDELMAN. 'Striking. Alexander deserves to be compared to Du Bois in her ability to distill and lay out as mighty human drama a complex argument and history." - The New York Review of Books. Once in a great while a book comes along that changes the way we see the world and helps to fuel a nationwide social movement. The New Jim Crow is such a book. Praised by Harvard Law professor Lani Guinier as "brave and bold," this book directly challenges the notion that the election of Barack Obama signals a new era of colorblindness. With dazzling candor, legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." By targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control - relegating millions to a permanent second-class status - even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness. In the words of Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, this book is a "call to action.' Called "stunning" by Pulitzer Prize - winning historian David Levering Lewis, "invaluable" by the Daily KOS, "explosive" by Kirkus, and "profoundly necessary" by the Miami Herald, this updated and revised paperback edition of The New Jim Crow, now with a foreword by Cornel West, is a must-read for all people of conscience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHELLE ALEXANDER is an associate professor of law at Ohio State University and holds a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Formerly the director of the ACLU Racial Justice. Project in Northern California, Alexander served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. CORNEL WEST is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University.
DESCRIPTION - The first novel of the Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis, General Sun, My Brother appears here for the first time in English. Its depiction of the nightmarish journey of the unskilled laborer Hilarion and his wife from the slums of Port-au-Prince to the cane fields of the Dominican Republic has brought comparisons to the work of Emile Zola, Andre Malraux, Richard Wright, and Ernest Hemingway. Alexis, whose mother was a descendant of the Revolutionary General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was already a mature thinker when he published General Sun, My Brother (Compère GEnEral Soleil) in France in 1955. A militant Marxist himself, Alexis championed a form of the ‘marvelous realism' developed by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, who called for a vision of historical reality from the standpoint of slaves for whom the supernatural was as much a part of everyday experience as were social and other existential realities. General Sun, My Brother opens as Hilarion is arrested for stealing a wallet and imprisoned with an activist named Pierre Roumel-a fictional double for the novelist Jacques Roumain-who schools him in the Marxist view of history. On his release, Hilarion meets Claire-Heureuse and they settle down together. Hilarion labors in sisal processing and mahogany polishing while his partner sets up a small grocery store. After losing everything in a criminally set fire, the couple joins the desperate emigration to the Dominican Republic. Hilarion finds work as a sugarcane cutter, but the workers soon become embroiled in a strike that ends in the ‘Dominican Vespers,' the 1937 massacre pf Haitian workers by the Dominican army. The novel personifies the sun as the ally, brother, and leader of the peasants. Mortally wounded in crossing the Massacre River back into Haiti, Hilarion urges Claire-Heureuse to remarry and to continue to work for a Haiti where people can live in dignity and peace.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922–Mole St-Nicolas, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian Communist novelist. He is best known for his novels Compère General Soleil (1955), Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), and L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and for his collection of short stories, Romancero aux Etoiles (1960).
DESCRIPTION - In his third novel, IN THE FLICKER OF AN EYELID, Jacques Stephen Alexis brings his characteristically vivid scenes, political consciousness, and powerful characters to the dramatic age-old question of whether a prostitute can leave ‘the life' to find her own identity and true love. The racism of the U.S. military, the selfish and profit-oriented machinations of Haitian politicians, the oppression of workers by the Cuban dictator Batista, the exploitation of women, and the particularly noteworthy links between Haiti and Cuba all form the figurative backdrop for a novel driven by unforgettable characters. The Haitian novelist Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922-1961) had already gained international recognition for his four works of fiction when he returned to Haiti from Cuba in 1961 as part of a small invasion force. He disappeared and presumably died at the hands of Duvalier's Tontons Macoutes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Stephen Alexis (Gonaïves, Haiti, 22 April 1922–Mole St-Nicolas, Haiti, c. 22 April 1961) was a Haitian Communist novelist. He is best known for his novels Compère General Soleil (1955), Les Arbres Musiciens (1957), and L'Espace d'un Cillement (1959), and for his collection of short stories, Romancero aux Etoiles (1960).
DESCRIPTION - The interconnected stories that form this novel take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 Arabian Nights and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young ‘author.' ‘For them,' he complains, ‘reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against my almost heroic opposition. By the end of this book my characters are no longer a tool for my expression, but I am a helpless instrument of their whims and absurd contretemps. In short, my characters have taken seriously the saying that ‘truth is stranger than fiction' and I have failed in my attempts to convince them of the contrary.' These fables of identity are enchanting despite Alfau's frequent reminders that these are mere puppets, figures of the imagination; nor can the reader fail to find, despite Alfau' s mock warning, ‘beneath a more or less entertaining comedy of meaningless gestures, the vulgar aspects of a common tragedy.' First published in 1936 and undeservedly neglected for the last fifty years, LOCOS anticipated the ‘magic realism' of the Latin Americans as well as the inventions of such later writers as Jorge Luis Borges, Flann O'Brien, John Barth, and Donald Barthelme. Modern readers are now in a better position to appreciate Alfau's ingenuity and art, and to wonder how such a book, whose place in modem fiction is now so clear, could have gone unrecognized for so many years.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - In this book Saul Alinsky, America's most famous community organizer, tells the Have-Nots how they can organize to achieve real political power for the practice of true democracy. RULES FOR RADICALS is the distillation of Mr. Alinsky's more than forty years as a professional radical - from his early struggles in Chicago's Back of the Yards through his work with John L. Lewis and the C.I.O. to his organizing efforts in the ghettos of Chicago, Rochester, and other American Cities. This book is conceived essentially as a primer. It is addressed to the powerless everywhere - to poor black and whites, to students, to industrial and agricultural workers, to everyone who wants to effect radical change through the practical exercise of true democratic power. Machiavelli told the Haves how to maintain themselves in power. Saul Alinsky, in this book, tells the Have-Nots how to take this power away. His hard-headed tactical advice provides an alternative not only to the powerlessness that threatens our democracy but to the random violence and bitter alienation by which so much radical energy is wasted.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 - June 12, 1972) was an American community organizer and writer. He is generally considered to be the founder of modern community organizing. He is often noted for his book Rules for Radicals. In the course of nearly four decades of political organizing, Alinsky received much criticism, but also gained praise from many public figures. His organizing skills were focused on improving the living conditions of poor communities across North America. In the 1950s, he began turning his attention to improving conditions of the African-American ghettos, beginning with Chicago's and later traveling to other ghettos in California, Michigan, New York City, and a dozen other ‘trouble spots'. His ideas were later adapted by some U.S. college students and other young organizers in the late 1960s and formed part of their strategies for organizing on campus and beyond. Time magazine once wrote that ‘American democracy is being altered by Alinsky's ideas,' and conservative author William F. Buckley said he was ‘very close to being an organizational genius.'
DESCRIPTION - The Stupid family thinks they are dead when the lights go out.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Allard was born in Evanston, Illinois on January 27th. He grew up in California, Long Island, and Chicago. He graduated from Northwestern College in 1943 and then performed active duty in Korea. He then lived in Paris for several years and became so fluent in the language that he got a master's degree and then a Ph.D. in French from Yale in 1973. He taught French at the college level for many years. Upon his arrival in Boston, he met James Marshall, whose art and friendship inspired Allard's first book, The Stupids Step Out. This successful collaboration paved the way for the publication of other Stupids books and the Miss Nelson series. Miss Nelson is Missing was voted one of the most memorable books of the century. James Edward Marshall (October 10, 1942 - October 13, 1992) was an American illustrator and writer of children's books, probably best known for the George and Martha series of picture books (1972–1988). He illustrated books exclusively as James Marshall; when he created both text and illustrations he sometimes wrote as Edward Marshall. In 2007 the U.S. professional librarians posthumously awarded him the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for ‘substantial and lasting contribution' to American children's literature.
DESCRIPTION - The Stupids and their dog, Kitty, have a fun-filled day doing ridiculous things.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Allard was born in Evanston, Illinois on January 27th. He grew up in California, Long Island, and Chicago. He graduated from Northwestern College in 1943 and then performed active duty in Korea. He then lived in Paris for several years and became so fluent in the language that he got a master's degree and then a Ph.D. in French from Yale in 1973. He taught French at the college level for many years. Upon his arrival in Boston, he met James Marshall, whose art and friendship inspired Allard's first book, The Stupids Step Out. This successful collaboration paved the way for the publication of other Stupids books and the Miss Nelson series. Miss Nelson is Missing was voted one of the most memorable books of the century. James Edward Marshall (October 10, 1942 - October 13, 1992) was an American illustrator and writer of children's books, probably best known for the George and Martha series of picture books (1972–1988). He illustrated books exclusively as James Marshall; when he created both text and illustrations he sometimes wrote as Edward Marshall. In 2007 the U.S. professional librarians posthumously awarded him the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for ‘substantial and lasting contribution' to American children's literature.
DESCRIPTION - Robert L. Allen has written a profound and complete account of the awakening of oppressed black people in America's capitalist economy, and the inability of that economy to deal with proletarian dissatisfaction, agitation and revolution. In analyzing the most significant black movements, the author traces a history peopled by the most significant figures of the black awakening (LeRoi Jones, Harold Cruse, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others.) And through their pronouncements and political tactics he illuminates the most significant forces in America's revolutionary ferment. A lucid, impartial and courageous book, BLACK AWAKENING IN CAPITALIST AMERICA presents the colonial suppression of the black community in a society where racial prejudice is but one facet of an injustice largely spawned by corporate capitalism. The questions raised are not only about racial inequality, but whether our traditional capitalist morality can accommodate the needs of the underprivileged and alienated, not whether America is right or wrong, but whether or not it is a viable society for our drastically changing times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert L. Allen's journalistic background has given him ample experience to assume the role of chronicler of the black awakening. As a reporter for the Guardian, a political newspaper in San Francisco, he observed firsthand many of the most significant black movements.
DESCRIPTION - The Garcías - Dr. Carlos (Papi), his wife Laura (Mami), and their four daughters, Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía - belong to the uppermost echelon of Spanish Caribbean society, descended from the conquistadores. Their family compound adjoins the palacio of the dictator's daughter. So when Dr. García's part in a coup attempt is discovered, the family must flee. They arrive in New York City in 1960 to a life far removed from their existence in the Dominican Republic. Papi has to find new patients in the Bronx. Mami, far from the compound and the family retainers, must find herself. Meanwhile, the girls try to lose themselves - by forgetting their Spanish, by straightening their hair and wearing fringed bell bottoms. For them, it is at once liberating and excruciating being caught between the old world and the new, trying to live up to their father's version of honor while accommodating the expectations of their American boyfriends. Acclaimed writer Julia Alvarez's brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home - and not at home - in America. It's a long way from Santo Domingo to the Bronx, but if anyone can go the distance, it's the Garcia girls. Four lively latinas plunged from a pampered life of privilege on an island compound into the big-city chaos of New York, they rebel against Mami and Papi's old-world discipline and embrace all that America has to offer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia Alvarez is the author of five previous books of fiction, including HOW THE GARCIA GIRLS LOST THEIR ACCENTS and IN THE TIME OF THE BUTTERFLIES; a book of essays; five collections of poetry; and five books for children. She received the Hispanic Heritage Award in 2002. She lives in Vermont, where she is writer-in-residence at Middlebury College.
DESCRIPTION - Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands is a wonder - a book, a story, a heroine to fall in love with. Dona Flor is (literally) an adorable woman - with a body made for love, a mind of her own, a cozy disposition, a witty tongue, a kissable face, high moral principles - and she can cook, too. (Her cooking school is all the rage in Salvador.) One wants her to have everything. One wants her to escape from her monumental dragon of a mother into the arms of the best of husbands. One wants her to have - because she deserves it - all the honey and spice of life, ecstasy in bed, respect at all times, tenderness and tickles, a comfortable income, laughter, a sense of being always cared for. And she gets it all-but, alas, from two different men! The question: is it possible for a moral woman like Flor to enjoy two husbands at once? Yes! Thanks to the genius of Amado, who has found a way for Dona Flor to have both her husbands - without offending her own delicate scruples, or ours. How this is accomplished is told in a novel that is alive with joy and erotic hilarity, with the piquant color of life in Bahia, with hundreds of marvelous characters, from prominent ladies of high life and low life to political kingpins, underworld kings, poets, professors, babes, bouncers, and the devoted members of the Bahia Amateur Symphony Orchestra. And most marvelous, at its very center, Dona Flor herself - and her two husbands!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 30 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) in 1978. His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia.
DESCRIPTION - GOOD-NATURED, incompetent, friendly, and lustful-at sixty the crony of college students and high-living officials-Vasco Moscoso de Aragâo laments that his life as the son of a wealthy merchant has brought him no rank, degree, or title. So-though Vasco has never made a sea voyage-a friend gets him a license as a ship's captain. Moving to Periperi in the suburbs of Bahia, he takes up with relish the life of an honored, retired old sea dog surrounded by nautical instruments, sea-going uniforms, and listeners eager for his reminiscences' of the oceans and exotic lands that he has visited. Vasco is so endlessly and colorfully inventive that only a few of his canniest neighbors begin to suspect the truth. When the northbound good ship Ita comes into Bahia with her captain dead, Vasco-the only licensed captain in the area-is dragooned into completing the voyage up the coast to BelEm as master (with the understanding that he will be free to call on the first mate for all important decisions). On the voyage. Vasco enjoys himself, whiling away the time in social activities and in pursuing a lady passenger of forty, to whom he becomes engaged. But deceiving sailors turns out not to be so easy as dazzling landlubbers, and what happens then and thereafter is almost (but not quite) beyond belief. Written with the narrative grace, humor, ribaldry, compassion, tenderness, and constant inventiveness of Jorge Amado's popular GABRIELA, CLOVE AND CINNAMON, HOME IS THE SAILOR likewise rests (with Amado's thistledown touch) on a kind of philosophical or metaphysical background. ‘What is truth, what reality?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 30 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) in 1978. His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia.
DESCRIPTION - It is 1940. In Rio de Janeiro, a crisis is brewing. The brilliant womanizing poet, Antonio Bruno, has just died, and his seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters is vacant. Who will replace him? Colonel Agnaldo Sampaio Pereira, chief of security of the New State Dictatorship, who welcomed Nazi control with unqualified joy, resolves it shall be he. But he does not count on the resistance organized by two intrepid octogenarians who rally to their standard a powerful group as determined to keep the colonel out of the Academy as he is to get in. Thus battle is engaged, in which the international forces of Nazism and the national forces of reaction and totalitarianism unite against two old men and four remarkable women-a typically fiery actress, a dressmaker who is not averse to a little part-time paid companionship, the wife of one of Brazil's richest men, and an industrialist's radical daughter-all former mistresses of the poet Bruno. Amado subtitled his novel ‘A Fable to Kindle a Hope.' It is a just description, because this book, with its great, glorious doses of wit, is a ferocious and heartening cry for freedom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 30 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) in 1978. His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia.
DESCRIPTION - 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 and incorrectly posits a progression from the Greek and Roman classical world to Christian feudalism and the European capitalist system, Amin presents a sweeping reinterpretation that emphasizes the crucial historical role played by the Arab Islamic world. Throughout the work, Amin addresses a broad set of concerns, ranging from the ideological nature of scholastic metaphysics to the meanings and shortcomings of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samir Amin was born in Cairo, the son of two doctors, his father Egyptian and his mother French. He lived in Port Said in northern Egypt and attended the French lycee there, receiving his baccalaureate in 1947. Amin then enrolled at the Lycee Henri IV in Paris to study mathematics and at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques to study law, which at the time was the way to study economics. He received a diploma in political science in 1952 and a license in law and economics in 1953 and then opted to pursue a doctorate in economics. He also obtained a diploma in statistics from the Institut de Statistiques de L'universitE de Paris in 1956. In June 1957, Amin received a doctorate in economics under the direction of Maurice Bye and with the additional guidance of Francois Perroux. As a student, Amin spent much of his time as a militant with various student movements and from 1949 to 1953 helped publish the journal Etudiants Anticolonialistes, through which he met many of the future members of Africa's governing elite. From 1957 to 1960, Amin worked in Cairo on economic development issues for the Egyptian government, then moved to Bamako, Mali, where he was an adviser to the Malian planning ministry (1960-1963). In 1963 he moved to Dakar, Senegal, where he took a fellowship (1963-1970) at the Institut Africain de Developpement Economique et de Planification (IDEP). He became a director at IDEP (1970-1980) and subsequently was named director of the Third World Forum (1980–). Amin has at various times held professorships in Poitiers, Dakar, and Paris.
DESCRIPTION - Every Thursday night in certain parts of London, husbands kiss their wives and then hurry off to attend the weekly meeting of a certain exclusive learned society. Jekyll-like, these men shed their air of scholarly absorption as they near headquarters-a building situated at a specially selected hard-to-find address, where a plaque, inscribed in specially designed hard-to-decipher lettering, reads: METROPOLITAN EGYPTOLOGICAL SOCIETY. Should the reader be at first in some doubt as to the real nature of the activities of the Egyptologists, it is only to be expected. The members' expertise in camouflage and deception has baffled the most perceptive people, and at various times the Society has been suspected of engaging in espionage, in drug-smuggling, in the activity implied by its all-male membership-and even in Egyptology. Why does the Society protect itself so vigilantly against inquiring outsiders? What is the significance of the safeguards listed in Article 22 of its Constitution? And what goes on behind the locked doors of its Isis Room? Hint: if even a fraction of the lecherous males of the world adopted the brilliant masquerade conceived by the authors in this engaging farce, learned societies would proliferate by the thousands.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - Jim Dixon was one of those hapless individuals who bumble through life tripping over their own good intentions, As he caromed from fiasco to triumph to cataclysm, he was sustained only by his rare talent for creating a Face to suit every occasion. grimaces like his Mad- Peasant face or the Shot-in-the-Back face, smirks like the Evelyn Waugh or Sex-Life-in-Ancient-Rome. Jim held tenuously to a probationary instructorship at a small English university and his hopes for reappointment lay solely in his ability to butter up Professor Welch, the odious and vapid head of his department. Lurking like a neurotic thundercloud on Jim's already hazy horizon was Margaret Peel, a young woman of scant charm and suicidal tendencies, who was being harbored at the home of Professor Welch while convalescing from a surfeit of sleeping tablets taken in pique. As part of his hysterical campaign of apple polishing Jim accepted an invitation to one of Professor Welch's artistic week ends, After a French-play-reading, recorder-playing, madrigal-singing evening with a group of local intellectuals that included the professor's painter son, Bertrand (a bearded boor), poor Jim sought sanctuary at a nearby pub. Closing time found him launched on a monumental binge, the results of which were (a) an inconclusive but spirited attack on Margaret's virtue, (b) an incendiary episode with his bedclothes, (c) the formation of a new and delightfully surprising alliance with Christine Callaghan, the bearded Bertrand's current inamorata. From this point on the plot begins to congeal, with Jim caught like a shrimp in the aspic. Kingsley Amis, who wrote LUCKY JIM, has a rare wit that teeters between the hilariously nonsensical and the deeply serious, This delightful-if often quite mad-novel is his first.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - Throughout his notable career as a novelist, poet, and literary critic, Kingsley Amis was often concerned - the less understanding might say obsessed - with the use and abuse of English. Do we know what the words we employ really mean? Do we have the right to use them if we don't? Should an ‘exciting' new program be allowed to ‘hit' your television screen? Is ‘disinterest' a word, or is it ignorance? And just when is one allowed to begin a sentence with ‘and'? The enemies of fine prose may dismiss such issues as tiresome and pedantic, but Kingsley Amis, like all great novelists, depended upon these very questions to separate the truth from the lie, both in literature and in life. A Parthian shot from one of the most important figures in postwar British fiction, THE KING'S ENGLISH is the late Kingsley Amis's last word on the state of the language. More frolicsome than Fowler's MODERN USAGE, lighter than the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY, and replete with the strong opinions and acerbic wit that have made Amis so popular - and so controversial - this book is essential for anyone who cares about the way English is spoken and written.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - A memoir, a history, And a meditation on Stalin and his legacy. KOBA THE DREAD is the successor to Martin Amis's celebrated memoir, EXPERIENCE. It is largely political while remaining personal. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of twentieth-century thought: the indulgence of communism by intellectuals of the West. In between the personal beginning and the personal ending, Amis gives us perhaps the best ‘short course ever in Stalin: Koba the Dread, Iosif the Terrible. The author's father, Kingsley Amis, though later reactionary in tendency, was ‘a Comintern dogsbody' (as he would come to put it) from 1941 to 1956. His second-closest, and then closest friend (after the death of the poet Philip Larkin), was Robert Conquest, our leading Sovietologist, whose book of 1968, The Great Terror, was second only to Solzhenitsyn's THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO in undermining the USSR. Amis's remarkable memoir explores these connections. Stalin said that the death of one person was tragic, the death of a million a mere ‘statistic.' KOBA THE DREAD, during whose course the author absorbs a particular, a familial death, is a rebuttal of Stalin's aphorism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, including MONEY (1984) and LONDON FIELDS (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called ‘the new unpleasantness.' Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style. that constant demonstrating of his command of English,' and that the ‘Amis-ness of Amis will be recognizable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.'.
DESCRIPTION - There is a murderer, there is a murderee, and there is a foil. Everyone is always out there searching for someone and something, usually for a lover, usually for love. And this is a love story. But the murderee - Nicola Six - is searching for something and someone else: her murderer. She knows the time, she knows the place, she knows the motive, she knows the means. She just doesn't know the man. There is a foil, and there is a murderer. And there is a murderee. London Fields is a brilliant, funny and multi-layered novel by one of the most formidably talented writers at work today. It is a book in which the narrator, Samson Young, enters the Black Cross, a thoroughly undesirable public house, and finds the main players of his drama assembled, just waiting to begin. It's a gift of a story from real life. all Samson has to do is write it as it happens. Taking a small pocket of time and a richly diverse part of London, Martin Amis dissects the nature of a society as it hurtles towards the end of the millennium. You may be horrified or uplifted by the conclusions to which he draws you, but there will be no denying the originality and power of this extraordinary novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, including MONEY (1984) and LONDON FIELDS (1989). He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. The Times named him in 2008 as one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus been portrayed as the undisputed master of what The New York Times called ‘the new unpleasantness.' Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis called a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style. that constant demonstrating of his command of English,' and that the ‘Amis-ness of Amis will be recognizable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.'.
DESCRIPTION - With SELECTED STORIES by Benny Andersen, Curbstone Press presents the first selection of stories in English by one of Denmark's most recognized contemporary authors. These six stories, one of which is a key chapter from his recently published novel, On The Bridge, constitute a representative cross-section of Andersen's narrative works to date. The author's sense of humor, which often borders on the grotesque, his acute observation of social dynamics, and his psychological insight into the human personality are combined in a sharp' focus on the dark side of human conduct.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benny Andersen (born 7 November 1929 in Vangede), is a Danish song-writer, poet, author, composer and pianist. He is the most widely read, most often sung and best loved of modern Danish lyricists, often associated with his collaboration with Povl Dissing; together they released an album with Andersen's poems from the collection Svantes viser, Povl Dissing were singing. This album with Svantes viser has been canonized by the Danish Ministry of Culture in the category Popular music. His collected poems (Samlede digte) have sold over 100,000 copies. His best known work is Svante's Songs (Svantes viser) from 1972, which is included in the Danish Culture Canon. In 1971 he was awarded with the Ministry of Culture's children book prize (Kulturministeriets Børnebogspris). He has been a member of the Danish Academy (det Danske Akademi) since 1972.
DESCRIPTION - By turns fanciful, humorous, poignant, but always unforgettable, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales combine a penetrating insight into human nature with a powerfully unlimited imagination. Whether he was wilting of barnyard animals or mythic princesses, he succeeded in creating some of the world's grandest and most-loved literature. Now, eighty of Andersen's greatest tales join the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library in a sparkling, contemporary translation by the devoted Andersen scholar R.P. Keigwin. In contrast to many earlier editions, Keigwin's faithful rendering preserves the power of the original in all its nuances and shadings. Throughout his life, Andersen wrote for both children and adults, and the generous selection in this new edition offers untold pleasures for young listeners and for readers of all ages. Included are such well-known and memorable stories as ‘The Ugly Duckling; ‘The Emperor's New Clothes; ‘The Princess and the Pea,' ‘The Little Match Girl,' ‘Thumbelina; ‘The Little Mermaid;' and many others. But even lifelong Andersen lovers may discover some surprises. There are tales of satire, such as ‘The Gardener and the Squire'; of mysticism, such as ‘The Story of a Mother'; of prophetic vision, such as ‘In a Thousand Years Time'; as well as revealing self-portraits like ‘The Shadow.' Richly illustrated throughout with the enchanting artwork of Vilhelm Pedersen and Lorenz Frolich that appeared in the original Danish editions of Andersen's work, EIGHTY FAIRY TALES is a delight and a treasure no family's bookshelf should be without.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hans Christian Andersen, the son of a shoemaker, was born in the slums of Odense, Denmark, in 1805. At the age of fourteen he moved to Copenhagen, ‘in order to become famous.' He worked for a time with the Royal Theater, and then, in 1828, entered Copenhagen University. Andersen's first book was published in 1822, but it was not until 1835 that his first four tales for children were published. The tales were an almost immediate success, and he continued to write fairy tales and stories until 1872, completing 156 altogether. He died in 1875 at the age of 70.
DESCRIPTION - When three small-time country gangsters break jail, they return to the only way of life they know - small-town bank-robbing. And when the youngest of them falls in love with one of the older gangster's cousins it becomes a tale of love on the run with nowhere to hide and no hope of reprieve.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Ewell (Eddie) Anderson, novelist, the son of Edward Houston and Ellen Sara (Sexton) Anderson, was born on June 19, 1905, at Weatherford. His father, a country printer, worked in a number of small towns before settling in Ardmore, Oklahoma, where Eddie went through high school before he ran off with the mayor's son to a wheat harvest, fought one professional boxing match, played trombone a season in a carnival band, and, eventually, learned the reporter's trade at the Daily Ardmorite. Anderson worked on newspapers in Oklahoma, Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Worth, and Tyler, before settling for a time in Abilene in the late 1920s. While working for Max Bentley on the newly established Abilene Morning News, he covered the trial of Marshall Ratliff, ringleader in the Santa Claus Bank Robbery. In 1930 Anderson worked his passage on a freighter to Europe and back. He returned to Abilene, where his parents and three sisters had settled, to try seriously to write fiction. A year later he began collecting material for hobo fiction by riding freight cars across the nation. He returned to write a picaresque novel about an out-of-work musician hoboing aimlessly around the United States. He also wrote short stories about hoboes, and Story magazine accepted two of them. Anderson married Polly Anne Bates in Abilene in 1934. They went to New Orleans, where he sold pieces to detective magazines and worked on a New Orleans newspaper. His hobo novel, Hungry Men, was published by Doubleday, Doran, and Company in 1935. It won the Doubleday-Story Prize that year and was a Literary Guild selection. Anderson returned to Texas and lived in Kerrville, where he began work on a second novel about two desperadoes who resembled Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. By the time this second novel, Thieves Like Us (1937), was published, Anderson was working for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, where he also wrote a successful radio series. After good reviews of Thieves Like Us Anderson went to Hollywood, where he worked for B. P. Schulberg at Paramount and for Warner Brothers. When his screenwriting faltered, he worked for the Los Angeles Examiner and the Sacramento Bee. By then the Andersons had three children. Anderson returned to Texas after World War II and worked for the Associated Press and the Fort Worth Star Telegram, among other papers. His marriage ended in divorce in 1950. For a time he took to the road again and drifted almost as much as he had during the early 1930s. He wrote for an underground newspaper in New York at one time. He then drifted back to Texas and lived principally at Brownsville, where he eventually married a Mexican national named Lupe. They had a son and a daughter. Anderson's later fiction projects did not reach print.
DESCRIPTION - Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments?and why we can't see it. One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number probably would be even higher if we recognized most employers for what they are?private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives, on duty and off. We normally think of government as something only the state does, yet many of us are governed far more?and far more obtrusively?by the private government of the workplace. In this provocative and compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson argues that the failure to see this stems from long-standing confusions. These confusions explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, we still talk as if free markets make workers free?and why so many employers advocate less government even while they act as dictators in their businesses. In many workplaces, employers minutely regulate workers' speech, clothing, and manners, leaving them with little privacy and few other rights. And employers often extend their authority to workers' off-duty lives. Workers can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. Yet we continue to talk as if early advocates of market society?from John Locke and Adam Smith to Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln?were right when they argued that it would free workers from oppressive authorities. That dream was shattered by the Industrial Revolution, but the myth endures. Private Government offers a better way to talk about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom. Based on the prestigious Tanner Lectures delivered at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, Private Government is edited and introduced by Stephen Macedo and includes commentary by cultural critic David Bromwich, economist Tyler Cowen, historian Ann Hughes, and philosopher Niko Kolodny.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Anderson is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Imperative of Integration (Princeton) and Value in Ethics and Economics. She lives in Ann Arbor.
DESCRIPTION - The result of over ten years of research in this country and in Europe, this book uncovers evidence linking certain American conservatives and right-wing groups to racist and fascist movements around the globe through a shadowy organization called the World Anti-Communist League, linking League-affiliated figures from the death camps of Nazi Germany to the Reagan White House.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Scott Anderson is an American novelist, journalist, and a veteran war correspondent. He wrote novels Triage, Moonlight Hotel, The Man Who tried to Save the World, and War Zones. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Esquire, Men's Journal, Vanity Fair and other publications. Anderson grew up in East Asia, primarily in Taiwan and Korea, where his father was an agricultural advisor for the American government. His career began with a 1994 article in Harper's Magazine on the Northern Ireland events. The 2007 movie The Hunting Party starring Richard Gere and Terrence Howard, is partially based on his work in Bosnia. The 2009 drama film Triage starring Colin Farrell, Paz Vega and Sir Christopher Lee, is based on his novel. Lawrence in Arabia, his latest book, narrates the experiences of T. E. Lawrence in Arabia and explores the complexity of the Middle East. His brother is Jon Lee Anderson, an author and journalist, and they have co-authored two books together. In a September 2009 issue of GQ, Anderson wrote an article on Putin's role in the Russian apartment bombings, based in part on his interviews with Mikhail Trepashkin. The journal owner, CondE Nast, then took extreme measures to prevent an article by Anderson from appearing in the Russian media, both physically and in translation. According to the NPR, Anderson was asked not to syndicate the article to any Russian publications, but told GQ he would refuse the request. Jon Lee Anderson began working as a reporter in 1979 for the Lima Times in Peru. Throughout much of the 1980s, he covered Central America's political conflicts, first for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and later for Time magazine. He has also written for Harper's, Life, and the Nation, among other journals. He is the author of GUERRILLAS and has coauthored two nonfiction books with his brother, Scott Anderson. He lives in Spain with his wife and three children.
DESCRIPTION - The Week of Modern Art, the celebrated gathering of musicians, artists, and writer which took place in Sao Paulo in February 1922, heralded the beginning of the Brazilian Modernist Movement - Brazil's most significant literary event of this century. Mario de Andrade's HALLUCINATED CITY was the first book to come out of the movement - a milestone in Brazilian intelectual history and literature. After the appearance of his book of poems, with its ‘Extremely Interesting Preface'. Andrade was variously hailed as prophet, pope, and lawgiver of the movement. Andrade had crammed into his poems all that was vividly Brazil and specifically all that was Sao Paulo. The immediate influence on other Brazilian poets of the twenties was salutary. His poetry squelched their slavish imitation of then current European literary schools. It freed them from the shackles of meter and rhyme and the strictures of a formal Portuguese grammar. It brought them back to Brazilian themes and lively, idiomatic language. Professor Tomlins has provided what Raymond S. Sayers calls ‘a splendid translation of a very important book' for students of Brazilian literary history and for poetry-lovers alike.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mário Raul de Morais Andrade (October 9, 1893 - February 25, 1945) was a Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, and photographer. One of the founders of Brazilian modernism, he virtually created modern Brazilian poetry with the publication of his PaulicEia Desvairada (Hallucinated City) in 1922. He has had an enormous influence on modern Brazilian literature, and as a scholar and essayist - he was a pioneer of the field of ethnomusicology - his influence has reached far beyond Brazil. Andrade was the central figure in the avant-garde movement of São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline that was connected with São Paulo modernism, and became Brazil's national polymath. His photography and essays on a wide variety of subjects, from history to literature and music, were widely published. He was the driving force behind the Week of Modern Art, the 1922 event that reshaped both literature and the visual arts in Brazil, and a member of the avant-garde ‘Group of Five.' The ideas behind the Week were further explored in the preface to his poetry collection Pauliceia Desvairada, and in the poems themselves. After working as a music professor and newspaper columnist he published his great novel, Macunaíma, in 1928. Work on Brazilian folk music, poetry, and other concerns followed unevenly, often interrupted by Andrade's shifting relationship with the Brazilian government. At the end of his life, he became the founding director of São Paulo's Department of Culture, formalizing a role he had long held as the catalyst of the city's - and the nation's - entry into artistic modernity.
DESCRIPTION - A Brazilian masterpiece, now in English for the first time: a playfully profound chronicle of an urban sophisticate’s misadventures in the Amazon. My life’s done a somersault, wrote Mário de Andrade in a letter, on the verge of taking a leap. After years of dreaming about Amazonia, and almost fifty years before Bruce Chatwin ventured into one of the most remote regions of South America in In Patagonia, Andrade, the queer mixed-race pope of Brazilian modernism and author of the epic novel Macunaíma, finally embarks on a three-month steamboat voyage up the great river and into one of the most dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful corners of the world. Rife with shrewd observations and sparkling wit, and featuring more than a dozen photographs, The Apprentice Tourist not only offers an awed and awe-inspiring fish-out-of-water account of the Indigenous peoples and now-endangered landscapes of Brazil that he encounters (and, comically, sometimes fails to reach), but also traces his internal metamorphosis: The trip prompts him to rethink his ingrained Eurocentrism, challenges his received narratives about the Amazon, and alters the way he understands his motherland and the vast diversity of cultures found within it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) was a Brazilian modernist from São Paulo. A polymath of his era, he was trained as a musician but became equally influential in fiction, poetry, photography, and art criticism. He served as the founding director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture and helped organize and participated in the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) in 1922, an event that would be regarded as the birth of modernism in Brazil.
DESCRIPTION - George Andrzeyevski's novel is set in Ostrowiec, a pleasant provincial town in Poland, during the few days in the spring of 1945 while the final surrender of the German armies is being negotiated. The war has ended at last, but not all of the inhabitants of Ostrowiec are rejoicing. Some belong to the new elite of Communist fanatics who will rule the country with the help of the Red Army; some think of nothing but escape to the West. A degenerate group cashes in on the confusion and makes fortunes out of the black market; a band of fanatical young idealists hides in the woods and assassinates One of the new leaders in the hope of breaking the Russian stranglehold; an even younger group of boys commits murder, steals money and buys guns without any very clear idea of their goal. Many are still searching for relatives who disappeared in the concentration camps; a former magistrate who collaborated with the Germans lives in terror of being denounced; and the young man chosen to assassinate the Party Secretary falls in love for the first time. People stroll in the square listening to the wireless announcements, bathe in the river, plot in dilapidated, overcrowded rooms, dance in the town's one good hotel, attend political meetings, eat, drink, quarrel, make love and sleep while their fate is being decided. This is a thrilling, complex and moving story of what life was really like in Poland during those fateful few days when the war came to an end and the Communist rEgime which is still in power today took over the country.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GEORGE ANDRZEYEVSKI (or Jerzy Andrzejewski) was born in Warsaw in 1909 and has lived there all his life. His first book, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1936. Two years later his first novel won him two literary awards. Since the war Andrzeyevski's prolific output of novels, plays, short stories and articles has gained him a leading position among Polish writers, and his last novel to appear in English, The Inquisitors, was unanimously hailed by Polish critics as a major contribution to contemporary literature. The film version of ASHES AND DIAMONDS was awarded the International Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival of 1959, but the book has never before been translated into English.
DESCRIPTION - Maya Angelou has fascinated, moved, and inspired countless readers with the first three volumes of her autobiography, one of the most remarkable personal narratives of our age. Now, in her fourth volume, THE HEART OF A WOMAN, her turbulent life breaks wide open with joy as the singer-dancer enters the razzle-dazzle of fabulous New York City. There, at the Harlem Writers Guild, her love for writing blazes anew. Her compassion and commitment lead her to respond to the fiery times by becoming the northern coordinator of Martin Luther King's history-making quest. A tempestuous, earthy woman, she promises her heart to one man only to have it stolen, virtually on her wedding day, by a passionate African freedom fighter. Filled with unforgettable vignettes of famous characters, from Billie Holiday to Malcolm X, THE HEART OF A WOMAN sings with Maya Angelou's eloquent prose -- her fondest dreams, deepest disappointments, and her dramatically tender relationship with her rebellious teenage son. Vulnerable, humorous, tough, Maya speaks with an intimate awareness of the heart within all of us.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Ann Johnson; April 4, 1928) is an American author and poet. She has published six autobiographies, five books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning more than fifty years. She has received dozens of awards and over thirty honorary doctoral degrees. Angelou is best known for her series of autobiographies, which focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of seventeen, and brought her international recognition and acclaim. Angelou's list of occupations includes pimp, prostitute, night-club dancer and performer, castmember of the musical Porgy and Bess, coordinator for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, author, journalist in Egypt and Ghana during the days of decolonization, and actor, writer, director, and producer of plays, movies, and public television programs. Since 1991, she has taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she holds the first lifetime Reynolds Professorship of American Studies. She was active in the Civil Rights movement, and worked with both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Since the 1990s she has made around eighty appearances a year on the lecture circuit, something she continued into her eighties. In 1993, Angelou recited her poem ‘On the Pulse of Morning‘ at President Bill Clinton's inauguration, the first poet to make an inaugural recitation since Robert Frost at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. With the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou was one of the first African American women who was able to publicly discuss her personal life. She is respected as a spokesperson of Black people and women, and her works have been considered a defense of Black culture. Although attempts have been made to ban her books from some US libraries, her works are widely used in schools and universities worldwide. Angelou's major works have been labeled as autobiographical fiction, but many critics have characterized them as autobiographies. She has made a deliberate attempt to challenge the common structure of the autobiography by critiquing, changing, and expanding the genre. Her books center on themes such as racism, identity, family, and travel. Angelou is best known for her autobiographies, but she is also an established poet, although her poems have received mixed reviews.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A master navigator of the human psyche.' - Los Angeles Times. THE LAND AT THE END OF THE WORLD is the anguished tale of a Portuguese medic haunted by memories of war, the wrenching portrait of a psychologically traumatized and emotionally marooned man who, like the Ancient Mariner, will tell his tale to anyone who listens. The narrator, newly returned to Lisbon in the early 1970s after a hellish tour of duty in Angola, is so infected with despair that he now feels completely detached from the precisely ordered world of his privileged youth. Antonio Lobo Antunes's visceral prose creates an indelible portrait of a ‘newly resuscitated, disoriented Lazarus,' whose nightmarish visions of ‘the war [that] has made animals of us' fail to recede as he vainly attempts to reassemble the shards of his former life. Over an evening that unfolds like a fevered dream, he describes to a woman in Lisbon the war crimes of his fellow soldiers, men who stuffed their pockets ‘full of as many ears as they could cut off and made whores of the local women, who kept their ‘faces coldly averted like the women in certain Picasso paintings.' At the same time, he unflinchingly acknowledges his own cowardice in failing to oppose such atrocities. Published in Portugal in 1978 under the title Os Cus de Judas, and first translated into English in 1983, this was, in fact, Lobo Antunes's second novel. He had trained as a psychiatrist and, like the narrator, spent two years as a medic in Portugal's last colonial war, returning to Lisbon in 1973. This early novel, regarded by many critics as the author's most influential, created an international reputation for him, which has continued to grow. This new translation by award-winning Margaret Jull Costa introduces to a new generation of readers one of the greatest war novels of recent times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antonio Lobo Antunes (born 1 September 1942) is a Portuguese novelist and medical doctor. Antonio Lobo Antunes was born in Lisbon as the eldest of six sons of João Alfredo de Figueiredo Lobo Antunes (born 1915), prominent Neurologist and professor, close collaborator of Egas Moniz, Nobel prize of physiology, and wife Maria Margarida Machado de Almeida Lima (born 1917). At the age of seven he decided to be a writer, but when he was 16, his father sent him to the medical school of the University of Lisbon. He graduated as a medical doctor, later specializing in psychiatry. During this time he never stopped writing. By the end of his education, Lobo Antunes had to serve with the Portuguese Army to take part in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974). In a military hospital in Angola he became interested in the subjects of death and ‘the other.' Lobo Antunes came back from Africa in 1973. The Angolan war for independence was the subject of many of his novels. He worked many months in Germany and Belgium. In 1979, Lobo Antunes published his first novel, Memoria de Elefante (Elephant's Memory), in which he told the story of his separation. Due to the success of his first novel, Lobo Antunes decided to devote his evenings to writing. He has been practicing psychiatry as well, mainly at the outpatients' unit at the Hospital Miguel Bombarda of Lisbon. His style is considered to be very dense, heavily influenced by William Faulkner and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, and his books are also very large in size. He was granted the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint James of the Sword.
DESCRIPTION - 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 transition that does not come fast enough to help them. Appachana manages to capture the pervasive humor, poignancy, and self-delusion of the lives of the people she observes, but she does so without seeming to pass judgment on them. She focuses on unexpected moments, as if catching her characters off guard, lovingly exposing the fragile surfaces of respectability and convention that are so much a part of every society, but particularly strong in India, with its caste system, gender privileges, and omnipresent bureaucracies. One of the most unusual aspects of many of the stories is the way in which they are informed by but never ruled by the author's feminism. She never lectures her readers but lets us see for ourselves. Appachana's vision is unique, her writing superb. Readers will thank her for allowing them to enter territory that is at once distant and exotic and familiar and recognizable.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anjana Appachana graduated from Delhi University and Jawaharlal Nehru University. In 1984 she left India to live in the United States, where she graduated from Pennsylvania State University. One of the stories in this collection (‘Her Mother') won an O'Henry Festival prize in 1989. She now lives in Tempe, Arizona, and is working on a novel.
DESCRIPTION - THINKING IT THROUGH is a thorough, vividly written introduction to contemporary philosophy and some of the most crucial questions of human existence, including the nature of mind and knowledge, the status of moral claims, the existence of God, the role of science, and the mysteries of language. Noted philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah shows us what it means to ‘do' philosophy in our time and why it should matter to anyone who wishes to live a more thoughtful life. Opposing the common misconceptions that being a philosopher means espousing a set of philosophical beliefs - or being a follower of a particular thinker - Appiah argues that ‘the result of philosophical exploration is not the end of inquiry in a settled opinion, but a mind resting more comfortably among many possibilities, or else the reframing of the question, and a new inquiry.' Ideal for introductory philosophy courses, THINKING IT THROUGH is organized around eight central topics - mind, knowledge, language, science, morality, politics, law, and metaphysics. It traces how philosophers in the past have considered each subject (how Hobbes, Wittgenstein, and Frege, for example, approached the problem of language) and then explores some of the major questions that still engage philosophers today. More importantly, Appiah not only explains what philosophers have thought but how they think, giving students examples that they can use in their own attempts to navigate the complex issues confronting any reflective person in the twenty-first century. Filled with concrete examples of how philosophers work, THINKING IT THROUGH guides students through the process of philosophical reflection and enlarges their understanding of the central questions of human life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kwame Anthony Appiah (born May 8, 1954) is a British-born Ghanaian-American philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up in Ghana and earned a Ph.D. at Cambridge University. He is currently the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University.
DESCRIPTION - A classic study of African American slave revolts by Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker whose master's thesis examined Nat Turner's 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia. This copy inscribed and signed by Aptheker. Following several introductory chapters, the book is a chronological study of slave revolts from a 1526 revolt in a Spanish colonial settlement in what is now South Carolina up to the American Civil War including Gabriel Prosser's "Plot" of 1800 and Denmark Vesey's failed revolt of 1822.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herbert Aptheker was born in New York in 1915, and spent over fifteen years in assembling the material for this work. He has written widely on many subjects, but has specialized in the history of the Negro people in the United States. Among his books are AMERICAN NEGRO SLAVE REVOLTS, ESSAYS IN THE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO, THE NEGRO PEOPLE IN AMERICA, and TO BE FREE. In 1940 Dr. Aptheker received the history award of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and in 1946-47 he was given a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has contributed to such periodicals as the American Historical Review, Political Science Quarterly, Pennsylvania Magazine of History, The Journal of Negro History, The Journal of Negro Education, Phylon, Mainstream, New masses, Opportunity, Negro Digest, etc. He has taught history for several years at the Jefferson School of Social Science in New York, and was Associate Editor of Masses & Mainstream. He served for over four years in the Field Artillery during the Second World War, and rose from the rank of Private to that of Major.
DESCRIPTION - This powerful, poetic novel, set in the Peruvian Andes, has long resisted translation; its publication in English is truly a literary event. Jose Maria Arguedas draws upon his own Peruvian boyhood in portraying ‘the sad and powerful current that buflets children who must face, all alone, a world fraught with monsters and fire, and great rivers. Ernesto, the narrator of DEEP RIVERS, is a child with origins in two worlds. The son of a wandering country lawyer, he is brought up by Indian servants until he enters a Catholic boarding school at age 14. In this urban Spanish environment he is a misfit and a loner. The conflict of the Indian and the Spanish cultures is acted out within him as it was in the life of Arguedas. For the author, the final resolution was his suicide in 1969. For the boy Ernesto, salvation is his world of dreams and memories. The games, music, insects, and flowers of his Andean childhood are more vividly alive for Emesto than the disturbing world of the present. This nostalgia helps to explain the novel's lyrical purity and its poetic, reminiscent tone. A major theme in Deep Rivers is the boy's strong link with the natural world, which is humanized to an extent that surpasses simple metaphor and becomes almost magical. Two of the novel's main episodes-the insurrection of the marketwomen and the suffering of the Indians during a typhus plague-involve conflict between the Indians and their Spanish masters. Ernesto observes these events, bewildered by the violence with which the two cultures clash. As Mario Vargas Llosa points out in the afterword, DEEP RIVERS records historical events and social problems at a personal level, ‘the only way literary testimony can be living and not crystallize into dead symbols.' Texas Pan American Series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jose María Arguedas Altamirano (18 January 1911 - 28 November 1969) was a Peruvian novelist, poet, and anthropologist. Arguedas was a mestizo of Spanish and Quechua descent who wrote novels, short stories, and poems in both Spanish and Quechua. Generally remembered as one of the most notable figures of 20th century Peruvian literature, Arguedas is especially recognized for his intimate portrayals of indigenous Andean culture.
DESCRIPTION - Transposed to Chalate, a small town in rural El Salvador, you are intrigued from 530 AM, when you meet Lupe-the grandmother of the Guardado family and chief narrator of One Day of Life-who is up and about doing her chores, until 5: 00 PM., when you arrive at the disturbing resolution of the Civil Guard's search for and interrogation of Lupe's adolescent granddaughter, Adolfina. Told almost entirely from the point of view of the resilient women of the family, this novel is not only an affecting and inspiring evocation of the nitty-gritty of peasant life in El Salvador after fifty years of military rule. It is also a mercilessly accurate dramatization of the relationship of the peasants to both the Catholic Church and the State. In view of the deeply disturbing rise of political violence in El Salvador, and the highly controversial increase of U.S. involvement in that country's civil war, ONE DAY OF LIFE is as timely a novel as there could ever be. Awesome for the authenticity of its vernacular style and for the incandescence of its lyricism, this compact tour de force goes beyond geopolitical rant to describe one day in the life of a typical peasant family caught up in the all-too-ordinary tenor and corruption, the sheer bad news, of El Salvador today. In ONE DAY OF LIFE-written by a Salvadoran who was forced into exile by his government as a result of this book, which has already been published in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands-the collective voice of the people of El Salvador, terrifying and irrepressible, sings about hope for social justice in the future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manlio Argueta (November 24, 1935-) is a Salvadoran writer, critic, and novelist born in 1935. Although he considers himself first and foremost a poet, he is known in the English speaking world for his book One Day of Life. Argueta was born in San Miguel (El Salvador) on November 24, 1935. Argueta has stated that his exposure to ‘poetic sounds' began during his childhood and that his foundation in poetry stemmed from his childhood imagination. Argueta's interest in literature was strongly influenced by the world literature he read as a teenager. Argueta began his writing career by the age of 13 as a poet. He cites Pablo Neruda and García Lorca as some of his early poetic influences.
DESCRIPTION - This book is an account both of the old Mafia of the Godfather and of its transformation into a network of gangsters and capitalists today, posing a major threat to democratic politics. The new Mafia combines large-scale business and banking activity with drug dealing, political corruption and widespread violence. Powerful, ruthless and rich, it has convulsed Southern Italy with a spate of murders. Its victims include an MP, a celebrated general, judges and prosecutors, policemen and ordinary citizens. It has turned itself into an entrepreneurial machine of a formidable kind, enjoying advantages denied to ordinary capitalist companies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Giuseppe Arlacchi, also known as Pino, (February 21, 1951) is an Italian sociologist and is well known worldwide for his studies and essays about the Mafia. Currently he represents the Italian Democratic Party and is a member of the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) parliamentary group since 2010. On September 1, 1997 he was appointed Director-General of the United Nations Office at Vienna and Executive Director of the Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP), with the rank of Under-Secretary-General. Currently, he is a full professor of sociology at the University of Sassari.
DESCRIPTION - Mad Toy, Arlt's most acclaimed novel, is set against the chaotic background of Buenos Aires in the early twentieth century. Set in the badlands of adolescence, where acts of theft and betrayal become metaphors for creativity. Mad Toy is equal parts pulp fiction, realism, detective story, expressionist drama, and creative memoir. An immigrant son of a German father and an Italian mother, Arlt as a youth was poor, often hungry, and dropped out of school in the third grade. In MAD TOY he brings his personal experience to bear on the lives of his characters. Published in 1926 as El Juguete Rabioso, the novel follows the adventures of Silvio Artier, a poverty-striken and frustrated youth who is drawn to gangs and a life of petty crime. As Silvio struggles to bridge the gap between exuberant imagination and the sordid reality around him, he becomes fascinated with weapons, explosives, vandalism, and thievery, despite a desperate desire to rise above his origins. Flavored with a dash of romance, a hint of allegory, and a healthy dose of irony, the novel's language varies from the cultured idiom of the narrator to the dialects and street slang of the novel's many colorful characters. MAD TOY has appeared in numerous Spanish editions and has been adapted for the stage and for film. It is the second of his novels to be translated into English. ‘Roberto Arlt is the greatest Argentine writer of the twentieth century. ‘- Ricardo Piglia.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was an Argentine writer. He was born Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt in Buenos Aires on April 2, 1900. His parents were both immigrants: his father Karl Arlt was a Prussian from Posen (now Poznan in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking. German was the language commonly used at their home. His relationship with his father was stressful, as Karl Arlt was a very severe and austere man, by Arlt's own account. The memory of his oppressive father would appear in several of his writings. For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, Arlt became an autodidact and worked at all sorts of different odd jobs before landing a job on at a local newspaper: as clerk at a bookstore, apprentice to a tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, manager in a brick factory, and dock worker.
DESCRIPTION - Here, for the first time in English, is a seminal masterpiece of Latin American literature: Roberto Arlt's novel, THE SEVEN MADMEN, a swirling story as vital today as when it first exploded in Buenos Aires. Behind the flood of recent Latin American novels, behind Borges, Márquez, Fuentes, Sábato, and others, lies the work of Roberto Arlt, who died in 1942. THE SEVEN MADMEN, written in the years Joyce was bringing out Ulysses piecemeal, and first published in 1929, is a fundamental modern book. Arlt said of his novel, in one of those deft ironical ripostes artists sometimes use to deflect questions about their work, that in it he has ‘done nothing more than reproduce a state of anarchy latent in the breast of every misfit or crackpot.' Remo Erdosain, a bill collector, has embezzled six hundred pesos and six centavos. On the same day he is found out, his wife leaves him. Demoralized, frantic for someone to front him the money he needs to avoid jail, he falls in with a revolutionary plot led by the Astrologer, a weird and muddled fanatic. The proposed scheme - a terrorist conspiracy to help the unemployed that will lure workers to mountain stronghold factories and enslave them - is mad but plausible. For start-up capital, a chain of bordellos is proposed. To finance these, the murder of Erdosain's wife's rich cousin is planned. But to summarize even part of the plot of this bizarre masterwork trivializes it. The book swirls, coils, sets off bombs in the mind. THE SEVEN MADMEN has long since taken its rightful place in European letters; it has been translated into several major European languages. To publish it at last in a fine American translation is an homage to a great writer and a belated gift to English-speaking readers the world around.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roberto Arlt (1900–1942) was an Argentine writer. He was born Roberto Godofredo Christophersen Arlt in Buenos Aires on April 2, 1900. His parents were both immigrants: his father Karl Arlt was a Prussian from Posen (now Poznan in present-day Poland) and his mother was Ekatherine Iobstraibitzer, a native of Trieste and Italian speaking. German was the language commonly used at their home. His relationship with his father was stressful, as Karl Arlt was a very severe and austere man, by Arlt's own account. The memory of his oppressive father would appear in several of his writings. For example, Remo Erdosain (a character at least partially based on Arlt's own life) often recalls his abusive father and how little if any support he would give him. After being expelled from school at the age of eight, Arlt became an autodidact and worked at all sorts of different odd jobs before landing a job on at a local newspaper: as clerk at a bookstore, apprentice to a tinsmith, painter, mechanic, welder, manager in a brick factory, and dock worker.
DESCRIPTION - Ines Arredondo (1928-1989) published just three slim volumes of stories over twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, 'a necessary writer', is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the Absolute through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably, the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child), aging, death, or public morality. Set at the beginning of the twentieth century in the tropical northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, the stories collected in "Underground River and Other Stories" focus on female subjectivity. Arredondo's adult male characters are often predators, depraved collectors of adolescent virgins, like the plantation owners in "The Nocturnal Butterflies" and "Shadows in the Shadows" and the dying uncle in "The Shunammite", who is kept alive by incestuous lust. Since the young female protagonists rarely have fathers to protect them, the only thing standing between them and these lechers are older women. Perversely, these older women act as accomplices-along with the extended family and the Roman Catholic Church-in the sordid age-old traffic in women. "Underground River and Other Stories" is the first appearance of Arredondo's stories in English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ines Arredondo (1928-1989) was the most important Mexican woman short-story writer of the twentieth century. She published just three slim volumes of stories over a period of twenty-three years, yet her reputation as a great writer, ‘a necessary writer,' is firmly established in Mexico. Her works dwell on a few central obsessions: erotic love, evil, purity, perversion, prostitution, tragic separation, and death. Most of her characters are involved in ill-fated searches for the absolute, through both excessively passionate and sadomasochistic relationships. Inevitably the perfect, pure dyad of two youthful lovers is interrupted or corrupted, through the interference of a third party (a rival lover or a child
DESCRIPTION - This biting commentary on the follies of man by a noted Mexican author cuts deeply, yet leaves the reader laughing - at himself as well as at his neighbors. With his surgical intelligence, Juan Jose Arreola exposes the shams and hypocrisies, the false values and vices, the hidden diseases of society. CONFABULARIO TOTAL, 1941-1961, of which this book is a translation, combines three earlier books - Varia Invencion (1949), Confabulario (1952), Punta de Plata (1958) - and numerous new pieces. The glittering satire of CONFABULARIO TOTAL is expressed in a veritable smorgasbord of literary forms - short stories, fables, vignettes, parodies, diaries, sketches, letters. Some of the author's assaults on the almost infinite ability of human beings to rationalize are frontal and obvious; some are devious and subtle; some aie surprise sallies aimed at unsuspected weak spots in the human defense. The kind of language used by Arreola also makes its contribution to effective expression of his attitudes - his detestation of human frailties and his scornful view of many human relationships - as, by turns, it bites, stings, slashes, rasps with ironic irritation, devastates with an unanswerable and disdainful laugh, soothes, persuades with an artful grin. The strategy is always effective, the style delightful.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Jose Arreola Zúñiga (September 21, 1918 - December 3, 2001) was a Mexican writer and academic. He is considered Mexico's premier experimental short story writer of the twentieth century. Arreola is recognized as one of the first Latin American writers to abandon realism; he uses elements of fantasy to underscore existentialist and absurdist ideas in his work. Although he is little known outside his native country, Arreola has served as the literary inspiration for a legion of Mexican writers who have sought to transform their country's realistic literary tradition by introducing elements of magical realism, satire, and allegory. Alongside Jorge Luis Borges, he is considered one of the masters of the hybrid subgenre of the essay-story.
DESCRIPTION - Organized by major themes such as creation stories, and resistance to oppression, this collection gather works of imagination, politics and history, religion, and culture from many societies and across recorded time. Asante and Abarry marshal together ancient, anonymous writers whose texts were originally written on stone and papyri and the well-known public figures of more recent times whose spoken and written words have shaped the intellectual history of the diaspora. Within this remarkably wide-ranging volume are such sources as prayers and praise songs from ancient Kemet and Ethiopia along with African American spirituals; political commentary from C.L.R. James, Malcolm X, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Joseph Nyerere; stirring calls for social justice from David Walker, Abdias Nacimento, Franzo Fanon, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Featuring newly translated texts and documents published for the first time, the volume also includes an African chronology, a glossary, and an extensive bibliography. With this landmark book, Asante and Abarry offer a major contribution to the ongoing debates on defining the African canon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Molefi Kete Asante is Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Temple University and author of several books, including THE AFROCENTRIC IDEA and THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL ATLAS OF AFRICAN AMERICANS. Abu S. Abarry is Assistant Chair of African American Studies at Temple University.
DESCRIPTION - A new, definitive English translation of the celebrated story collection regarded as a landmark of Norwegian literature and culture. The extraordinary folktales collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe began appearing in Norway in 1841. Over the next two decades the publication of subsequent editions under the title Norske folkeeventyr made the names Asbjørnsen and Moe synonymous with Norwegian storytelling traditions. Tiina Nunnally's vivid translation of their monumental collection is the first new English translation in more than 150 years - and the first ever to include all sixty original tales. Magic and myth inhabit these pages in figures both familiar and strange. Giant trolls and talking animals are everywhere. The winds take human form. A one-eyed old woman might seem reminiscent of the Norse god Odin. We meet sly aunts, resourceful princesses, and devious robbers. The clever and fearless boy Ash Lad often takes center stage as he ingeniously breaks spells and defeats enemies to win half the kingdom. These stories, set in Norway's majestic landscape of towering mountains and dense forests, are filled with humor, mischief, and sometimes surprisingly cruel twists of fate. All are rendered in the deceptively simple narrative style perfected by Asbjørnsen and Moe - now translated into an English that is as finely tuned to the modern ear as it is true to the original Norwegian.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (15 January 1812 - 5 January 1885) was a Norwegian writer and scholar. He and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe were collectors of Norwegian folklore. They were so closely united in their lives' work that their folk tale collections are commonly mentioned only as "Asbjørnsen and Moe". Peter Christen Asbjørnsen was born in Christiania (now Oslo), Norway. He was descended from a family originating at Otta in the traditional district of Gudbrandsdal, which is believed to have come to an end with his death.
DESCRIPTION - Considered by many Machado's greatest work, DOM CASMURRO is a novel of love and suspected betrayal. It traces the flowering and destruction of a childhood romance. In Portuguese, casmurro means a morose, tight-lipped man, withdrawn within himself. Bento Santiago, hero and narrator of this novel, is such a person, ironically called ‘Dom Casmurro' by his friends. The darkness and shadows of the present dissipate as Bento sketches his memories of youth. We are introduced to his childhood friend Capitu, (with her beautiful hair and ‘her eyes like the tide') and we see her change from playmate to sweetheart. The dilemma of young love is made poignant through the efforts of the young people to resist Bento's mother's intention to make him a priest. The quarrels, the desire for each other, so clumsy and youthful, the complex evasion of adult watchfulness, are described so adroitly that the reader feels his own life being told. But Bento's tragedy is already implicit in these apparently idyllic moments. He is a man born to be deceived or to deceive himself. The startlingly original denouement of this novel permits either interpretation. Those who read DOM CASMURRO will not easily forget it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.'
DESCRIPTION - Satirical, witty, completely human in feeling, EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER is that rarest of works, a book which is at the same time both profound and thoroughly delightful. It tells the story of Braz Cubas, a wealthy Carioca, or rather it is Braz, now dead, who tells his story. For EPITAPH OF A SMALL WINNER is a posthumous memoir, the memories of a ghost, a man who now beyond life can view it with dispassion - the illicit love affairs, the political ambitions, the jealousies and hatreds which comprised his sixty-four years. But though the grave has given Braz distance, it has not dampened his sense of humor. On the contrary, it has sharpened it; Braz Cubas is certainly the wittiest ghost in literature. Most ghosts take themselves far too seriously; but not Braz. If he has returned to haunt mankind, it is by means of laughter. He is the spirit of satire moving among us, pointing out our idiosyncrasies and foibles. ‘Machado de Assis, son of a poor mulatto of Rio, became the most illustrious of Brazilian writers. His work brings to mind at once Anatole France and Lawrence Sterne, yet is nonetheless original.' - Andre Maurois. ‘A master of psychology and of an ironic brand of humour.' - Samuel Putnam.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.'
DESCRIPTION - A landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation. A progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil's greatest writer. This majestic translation combines all his short-story collections appearing in his lifetime and reintroduces de Assis as a literary giant who must be integrated into the world literary canon. To Machado, your identity and the contours of your world are formed not just by your circumstances but by what you think about habitually. You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely. These stories are a spectacular place to start. - The New York Times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.'
DESCRIPTION - The modern Brazilian short story begins with the mature work of Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908), acclaimed almost unanimously as Brazil's greatest writer. Collectively, these nineteen stories are representative of Machado's unique style and world view, and this translation doubles the number of his stories previously available in English. The stories in this volume reflect Machado's post-1880 emphasis on social satire and experimentation in psychological realism. If he had continued to produce the moralistic love stories and parlor intrigues of his earlier fiction, Machado's legacy would have been an entertaining but inconsequent body of work. However, by 1880 he had begun a devastating satirical assault on society through his fiction. In spite of his ruthlessness, Machado does at times reveal an ironic sympathy for his characters. He is not indifferent to human conflict but uses humor and irony to stress the absurdity of these conflicts, acted out against the backdrop of an indifferent universe. Such a spectacle creates a sense of helplessness that can only inspire wistful amusement. In his technical mastery of the short story, Machado was decades ahead of his contemporaries and can still be considered more modern than most of the modernists themselves. That his stories elicit such strong and diverse reactions today is a tribute to their richness, complexity, and significance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.'
DESCRIPTION - The first collection of the short stories of Machado de Assis to appear in English. These twelve stories by Brazil's greatest writer are penetrating psychological vignettes, and witty ironic satires on science, politics, the gambling instinct, the professorial mind, as well as that of the lady of easy virtue, sadism, envy, and other human foibles and vanities. Here is Machado de Assis' humor in both its mild and mordant form; all the stories, no matter how grim the message, contain powerful comic elements and are cast in the mold of comedy. The locale of all the stories is Rio de Janeiro or its outskirts. ‘Machado de Assis was a literary force transcending nationality and language, comparable certainly to Flaubert, Hardy, or James.' - Dudley Fitts. ‘One of the great writers of all time. a novelist with whom we have none to compare.' ‘He comes bringing the gift of temperament, a highly personalized view of life and the world which still is broad as the world, as deep and dark and mystery-laden as life itself,' - Samuel Putnam. ‘As a novelist and writer of short stories, he admits of no peers either in Spanish or in his own language.' - Arturo Torres-Rioseco.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, often known as Machado de Assis, Machado, or Bruxo do Cosme Velho, (June 21, 1839, Rio de Janeiro-September 29, 1908, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian novelist, poet and short-story writer. He is widely regarded as the most important writer of Brazilian literature. However, he did not gain widespread popularity outside Brazil in his own lifetime. Machado's works had a great influence on Brazilian literary schools of the late 19th century and 20th century. Jose Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag and Harold Bloom are among his admirers and Bloom calls him ‘the supreme black literary artist to date.'
DESCRIPTION - A triumphant new novel from award-winner Kate Atkinson: a breathtaking story of families divided, love lost and found, and the mysteries of fate. Case One: Olivia Land, youngest and most beloved of the Land girls, goes missing in the night and is never seen again. Thirty years later, two of her surviving sisters unearth a shocking clue to Olivia's disappearance among the clutter of their childhood home. Case Two: Theo delights in his daughter Laura's wit, effortless beauty, and selfless love. But her first day as an associate in his law firm is also the day when Theo's world turns upside down. Case Three: Michelle looks around one day and finds herself trapped in a hell of her own making. A very needy baby and a very demanding husband make her every waking moment a reminder that somewhere, somehow, shed made a grave mistake and would spend the rest of her life paying for it--until a fit of rage creates a grisly, bloody escape. As Private Detective Jackson Brodie investigates all three cases, startling connections and discoveries emerge. Inextricably caught up in his clients grief, joy, and desire, Jackson finds their unshakable need for resolution very much like his own. Kate Atkinson's celebrated talent makes for a novel that positively sparkles with surprise, comedy, tragedy, and constant, page-turning delight.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - Welcome to Rook Hall. The stage is set. The players are ready. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed. In his sleepy Yorkshire town, ex-detective Jackson Brodie is staving off boredom and malaise. His only case is the seemingly tedious matter of a stolen painting. But Jackson soon uncovers a string of unsolved art thefts that lead him down a dizzying spiral of disguise and deceit to Burton Makepeace, a formerly magnificent estate now partially converted into a hotel hosting Murder Mystery weekends. As paying guests, impecunious aristocrats and old friends collide, we are treated to Atkinson’s most charming and fiendishly clever mystery yet, one that pays homage to the masters of the genre—from Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers to the modern era of Knives Out and Only Murders in the Building.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - On a beautiful summer day, crowds lined up outside a theater witness a sudden act of extreme road rage: a tap on a fender triggers a nearly homicidal attack. Jackson Brodie, ex-cop, ex-private detective, new millionaire, is among the bystanders. The event thrusts Jackson into the orbit of the wife of an unscrupulous real estate tycoon, a washed-up comedian, a successful crime novelist, a mysterious Russian woman, and a female police detective. Each of them hiding a secret, each looking for love or money or redemption or escape, they all play a role in driving Jackson out of retirement and into the middle of several mysteries that intersect in one sinister scheme. Kate Atkinson ‘writes such fluid, sparkling prose that an ingenious plot almost seems too much to ask, but we get it anyway,' writes Laura Miller for Salon. With a keen eye for the excesses of modern life, a warm understanding of the frailties of the human heart, and a genius for plots that turn and twist, Atkinson has written a novel that delights and surprises from the first page to the last.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - It's a day like any other for Tracy Waterhouse, working security at the local shopping center to supplement her pension from the police force. Then she makes a purchase she hadn't bargained on. One moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger and the first sparks of love. Witnesses to Tracy's Faustian exchange are Tilly, an elderly actress teetering on the brink of her own disaster, and Jackson Brodie, the reluctant detective whose own life has been stolen and who has now been hired to find someone else's. Variously accompanied, pursued, or haunted by neglected dogs, unwanted children, and keepers of dark secrets, soon all three will learn that the past is never history - and that no good deed goes unpunished. Brimming with wit, wisdom, and a fierce moral intelligence, STARTED EARLY, TOOK MY DOG confirms Kate Atkinson's status as one of the most original and entertaining writers of our time. ‘Uncategorizable, unputdownable, Atkinson's books are like Agatha Christie mysteries that have burst at the seams - they're taut and intricate but also messy and funny and full of life.' - LEV GROSSMAN, TIME.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - On a hot and beautiful day in the English countryside, six-year-old Joanna Mason witnesses an appalling crime. Thirty years later, the man convicted of the crime is released from prison. Sixteen-year-old Reggie works as a nanny for a doctor devoted to her new young son. But Dr. Hunter has gone missing, and Reggie, no stranger to bad luck and worse, seems to be the only person who is worried. Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe is also looking for a missing person, unaware that hurtling toward her is an old friend - Jackson Brodie - himself on a journey that becomes fatally interrupted. As lives and histories intersect, as past mistakes and current misfortunes collide, Jackson is caught up in the most personal, and dangerous, investigation of his life. With her fiercely observant, deeply sympathetic eye for both the absurdity and poignancy of everyday life, Kate Atkinson delivers a tour de force of surprise and suspense, a novel that amply confirms her status as one of the most inventive and delightful writers at work today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kate Atkinson (born December 20, 1951) is an English author. She was born in York, and studied English Literature at the University of Dundee, gaining her Masters Degree in 1974. She subsequently studied for a doctorate in American Literature. She has often spoken publicly about the fact that she failed at the viva (oral examination) stage. After leaving university, she took on a variety of jobs from home help to legal secretary and teacher. She lived in Whitby, North Yorkshire, for a time, but now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year ahead of Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh and Roy Jenkins's biography of William Ewart Gladstone. It went on to be a Sunday Times bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - One of the great modern poets, no one is held in greater esteem than W.H. Auden. In the opinion of many, he is regarded as the foremost poet of of the Modern Library make this book available tour time. It is with particular pride, therefore, that the publisherso the large number of readers who have long wished for such a volume. This book contains a generous selection of Auden's poetry. Here the reader will find constant enjoyment in the spirited wit, the wide-ranging intellect, the emotional power, and the unsurpassed artistry that are among Auden's characteristics.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 - 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.
DESCRIPTION - This book reaches back through two thousand years of Western literature to discover how the writer from age to age has solved the most intriguing problem of his craft—the serious portrayal of everyday reality. It is obvious that Odysseus and Mrs. Dalloway were created by minds which were worlds apart in their conception of realism, but no one has ever traced the revolutions in feeling and taste that separate them. Erich Auerbach, professor of romance languages at Yale, has succeeded in making this extraordinary exploration into the literary imagination at work on existence. He shows how the ancient and persistent tendency to keep everyday reality separate from the treatment of the tragic and the sublime has twice been re- versed—once by the Gospels and again by the rise of modern realism around 1800. The study of these two revolutions—their origin, development, consequences, and the differences be- tween them—is based on passages from writers in twenty periods of our civilization. Homer, Petronius, Ammianus, Gregory of Tours, Chrétien de Troyes, Dante, Boccaccio, Antoine de la Sale, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Moliere, Abbé Prevost, Goethe, Schiller, Stendhal, the de Goncourts, Zola, Virginia Woolf, Proust—these and others are represented here. The passages quoted, both in the original language and in translation, are analyzed with a sympathy and skill that reveal the creative mind caught up in the excitement and struggle of composition. Since its original publication in Berne in 1946, Mimesis has been translated also into Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew, and promises to be one of the classics of our time in the field of humanistic studies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 - October 13, 1957) was a philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times and frequently cited as a classic in the study of realism in literature. Auerbach, who was Jewish, was born in Berlin. Exiled from Nazi Germany, he took up residence in Istanbul, Turkey, where he wrote Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), generally considered his masterwork. He moved to the United States in 1947, teaching at Pennsylvania State University and then working at the Institute for Advanced Study. He was appointed professor of Romance philology at Yale University in 1950, a position he held until his death in 1957 in Wallingford, Connecticut. While at Yale, Auerbach supervised Fredric Jameson's doctoral work.
DESCRIPTION - 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. Soon after Sir Thomas absents himself on estate business in Antigua (the family's investment in slavery and sugar is considered in the Introduction in a new, post-colonial light), Mary Crawford and her brother Henry arrive at Mansfield, bringing with them London glamour, and the seductive taste for flirtation and theatre that precipitates a crisis. While MANSFIELD PARK appears in some ways to continue where PRIDE AND PREJUDICE left off, it is, as Kathryn Sutherland shows in her illuminating Introduction, a much darker work, which challenges ‘the very values (of tradition, stability, retirement and faithfulness) it appears to endorse'. This new edition provides an accurate text based, for the first time since its original publication, on the first edition of 1814.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Austen (16 December 1775 - 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism and biting social commentary have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics. Austen lived her entire life as part of a close-knit family located on the lower fringes of the English landed gentry.
DESCRIPTION - THE RANDOM HOUSE BOOK OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY FRENCH Poetry is the most comprehensive and up-to-date bilingual anthology of modern French poetry ever published. It includes substantial selections from the work of forty-eight poets, ranging from Apollinaire, Jacob, Larbaud, Fargue, Cendrars, St.-John Perse and Reverdy through Tzara, Breton, Eluard, Aragon, Desnos, Michaux and Ponge, to Follain, Char, Jabes, Bonnefoy, Dupin and the leading younger poets of today. A virtual history of poetry in French in our century, this book is also far more, for the translations facing the original French have been selected from the many excellent modern English renderings of these poets. As editor Paul Auster writes in his lively and instructive introduction, ‘Since the twenties, American and British poets have been steadily translating their French counterparts - not simply as a literary exercise, but as an act of discovery and passion.' Indeed, many of the leading contemporary poets in our language have translated from the French, and the impressive list of those whose work appears in these pages includes Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens, Beckett, Dos Passos, MacNeice, Rexroth,Spender, Fitzgerald, Ashbery, Bly, Bowles, Ferlinghetti, Kinnell, Howard, James Wright, Levertov, Merton, Merwin, Wilbur and Simic, to name only some of the best known. But these poets have not only translated the French, they have also been deeply influenced by them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It was the summer that men first walked on the moon. I was very young back then, but I did not believe there would ever be a future. I wanted to live dangerously, to push myself as far as I could go, and then see what happened to me when I got there.' Thus begins the mesmerizing narrative of Marco Stanley Fogg - orphan, child of the sixties, a quester by nature, both spiritually and physically. MOON PALACE is his story, a novel that spans three generations, from the early years of this century to the first lunar landings, and that moves from the canyons of Manhattan to the cruelly beautiful landscape of the American West. Filled with suspense, unlikely coincidences, wrenching tragedies, and marvelous flights of lyricism and erudition, the novel carries the reader effortlessly along with Marco on his search for love, for his unknown father, and for the key to the elusive riddle of his origin and his fate. The metaphorical richness and literary accomplishment of Moon Palace is astonishing. In territory and spirit, it recalls the great novels of Dickens, Fielding, and Twain, yet it is also unmistakably the work of a marvelously original modern writer whose every sentence reverberates with rich harmonies of meaning.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
DESCRIPTION - In his first full-length prose work Paul Auster has created a distinctive form through which he probes the elusive materials which compose a life. ‘Portrait of an Invisible Man,' the first section of THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE is a meditation on the life and sudden death of his father. In the course of sifting through his effects, attending to business affairs, and remembering as he goes, Auster accidentally uncovers a sixty year old family murder mystery which comes to shed light on his father's character. The perspective shifts from identity as son to the anomalies of fatherhood in ‘The Book of Memory' a scrupulously-constructed mosaic of images, coincidences, and associations, as ‘A.' broods over his separation from his young son and nurses his dying grandfather, the amateur magician.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
DESCRIPTION - Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Benjamin Auster (February 3, 1947 – April 30, 2024) was an American writer, novelist, memoirist, poet, and filmmaker. His notable works include The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002), The Brooklyn Follies (2005), Invisible (2009), Sunset Park (2010), Winter Journal (2012), and 4 3 2 1 (2017). His books have been translated into more than 40 languages.
DESCRIPTION - In the early years of the twentieth century, with revolution sweeping the Mexican countryside, Demetrio Macias, a poor, illiterate Indian, is forced to join the rebels in order to save his family. His courage and charisma earn him important friends - and a generalship in the army of the legendary Pancho Villa - but in the face of mounting defeats and increasing factionalism, Demetrio begins to feel estranged from the cause, coming up against a crisis of resolve he hoped he would never have to confront. Mariano Azuela's stirring novel about the first great revolution of the twentieth century is a powerful portrait of the disillusionment of war, an authentic representation of Mexico's peasant life, and an iconic novel. ‘Azuela, more than any other novelist of the Mexican Revolution, lifts the heavy stone of history to see what there is underneath it.' - Carlos Fuentes, from the Foreword.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mariano Azuela González (January 1, 1873 - March 1, 1952) was a Mexican author and physician, best known for his fictional stories of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He wrote novels, works for theatre and literary criticism. Azuela wrote many pieces including the newspaper piece ‘Impressions of a Student' in 1896, the novel Andres Perez, maderista in 1911, and Los de abajo, (or The Underdogs), in 1915. Azuela was born in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco. During his days in the Mexican Revolution, Azuela wrote about the war and its impact on Mexico. He served under president Francisco I. Madero as chief of political affairs in Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco - his home town. After Madero's death, he joined the military forces of Julián Medina, a follower of Pancho Villa, where he served as a field doctor. He later was forced for a time to emigrate to El Paso, Texas. There he wrote Los de abajo, a first-hand description of combat during the Mexican revolution, based on his experiences in the field. In 1917 he moved to Mexico City where for the rest of his life he continued his writing and worked as a doctor among the poor. In 1942 he received the Mexican national prize for literature. On April 8, 1943 he became a founding member of Mexico's National College. In 1949 he received the Mexican national prize for Arts and Sciences. He died in Mexico City March 1, 1952.
DESCRIPTION - The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel appears as the most authoritative and complete edition of his fiction ever published. Babel was best known for his mastery of the short story form-in which he ranks alongside Kafka and Hemingway-but his career was tragically cut short when he was murdered by Stalin's secret police. Edited by his daughter Nathalie Babel and translated by award-winner Peter Constantine, this paperback edition includes the stunning Red Cavalry Stories; The Odessa Tales, featuring the legendary gangster Benya Krik; and the tragic later stories, including 'Guy de Maupassant.' This will be the standard edition of Babel's stories for years to come.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel (13 July 1894 – 27 January 1940) was a Soviet writer, journalist, playwright, and literary translator. He is best known as the author of Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, and has been acclaimed as "the greatest prose writer of Russian Jewry". Babel was arrested by the NKVD on 15 May 1939 on fabricated charges of terrorism and espionage, and executed on 27 January 1940.
DESCRIPTION - This classic work on control of the modern media describes the digital revolution and reveals startling details of a new communications cartel within the United States. 'An eye-opening attack on the growing concentration of major media.' -Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ben Haig Bagdikian (born January 26, 1920, Mara?, Ottoman Empire; modern-day Turkey) is an Armenian-American educator and journalist. Bagdikian has made journalism his profession since 1941. He is a significant American media critic and the dean emeritus of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. In 1983, Bagdikian published The Media Monopoly, which revealed the fast-moving media conglomeration that was putting more and more media corporations in fewer and fewer hands with each new merger. This work has been updated through six editions (through 2000) before being renamed The New Media Monopoly and is considered a crucial resource for knowledge about media ownership. Bagdikian is credited with the observation that 'Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's 'St. Matthew Passion' on a ukulele.' In 1971, whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg gave Bagdikian - then an editor at the Washington Post - portions of the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret classified history of the Vietnam War. Bagdikian passed a copy of the documents to Senator Mike Gravel, who promptly read them into the Congressional Record.
DESCRIPTION - In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals - including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg - who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism. Weimar Germany and its culture, with its meld of eighteenth-century German classicism and twentieth-century modernism, provided served as a touchstone for this group of diverse talents and opinions. Weimar on the Pacific is the first book to examine these artists and intellectuals as a group. Ehrhard Bahr studies selected works of Adorno, Horkheimer, Brecht, Lang, Neutra, Schindler, Döblin, Mann, and Schoenberg, weighing Los Angeles's influence on them and their impact on German modernism. Touching on such examples as film noir and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Bahr shows how this community of exiles reconstituted modernism in the face of the traumatic political and historical changes they were living through.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Bahr received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been a member of the UCLA faculty since 1966. He is an internationally distinguished expert on Goethe, and specializes not only in 18th- century German Literature, but also in 20th-century literature and Critical Theory. Professor Bahr has published over 200 scholarly articles and reviews, as well as books on Goethe, the Marxist theoretician Georg Lukács, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, and the poet Nelly Sachs. He has also produced editions of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels (1982) and a three-volume history of German literature (1987-88). His co-edited volume on the French Revolution, The Internalized Revolution, appeared in 1992. He is a past President of the interdisciplinary German Studies Association and of the Goethe Society of North America. An additional special interest of Ted Bahr's is German exile culture in Los Angeles between 1933 and 1955. Besides authoring scholarly studies in this area, he recently served as a consultant to the exhibition 'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and at the Altes Museum in Berlin. Professor Bahr was also a consultant for the exhibition Exiles and EmigrEs at LACMA in 1997.
DESCRIPTION - The book describes the movement by African American authors from slave narratives and antebellum newspapers into fiction writing, and the subsequent developments of black genre fiction through the present. It analyzes works by modern African American mystery writers, focusing on sleuths, the social locations of crime, victims and offenders, the notion of "doing justice," and the role of African American cultural vernacular in mystery fiction. A final section focuses on readers and reading, examining African American mystery writers' access to the marketplace and the issue of the "double audience" raised by earlier writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frankie Y. Bailey, PhD is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice University at Albany (SUNY). She studies crime history, and crime and mass media/popular culture and material culture. She is the author of five mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lizzie Stuart and two police procedurals novels featuring Albany police detective Hannah Stuart.
DESCRIPTION - This is the first comprehensive collection in English from the works of the founder of anarchism - culled and newly translated from Bakunin's writings, published and unpublished - including manuscripts left unfinished or unrevised at the time of his death over a century ago. Throughout his eventful, indeed turbulent, life, Bakunin wrote voluminously, always in the interests of his struggle for a hearing and for action. ms selection, beginning with the early Appeal to the Slavs, includes such cornerstones of anarchist thought as his Revolutionary Catechism, God and the State, and Letters to a Frenchman; his blistering attacks on Marx's policies in the International; his prophetic writings on the Paris Commune; his formulations of revolutionary strategy; and other important expressions of Bakunin's vision of a stateless society, complementing and amplifying the themes of his classic Statism and Anarchy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin (18 May 1814 - 1 July 1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist, socialist and founder of collectivist anarchism. He is considered among the most influential figures of anarchism and a major founder of the revolutionary socialist and social anarchist tradition. Bakunin's prestige as a revolutionary also made him one of the most famous ideologues in Europe, gaining substantial influence among radicals throughout Russia and Europe.
DESCRIPTION - The crises and joys of adolescence have inspired some remarkable novels in our time - Forrest Reid's PETER WARING and Joyce's PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, for instance, come readily to mind. Now James Baldwin, a new American writer, has made this difficult but deeply rewarding theme the subject of his first novel. GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN takes us into the world of a young Negro boy who is approaching manhood. His mind is full of the echoes of childhood and magic, and those memories of parents and kinsfolk that have gone into making the boy himself and the world that presses in on him. The Deep South, Harlem, and their people are the raw material of this individual universe but the essential story is that of John Grimes, wrestling with the crises of growth: his father's terrifying power, his agonised discovery of sin, and his experience of ecstatic faith. This novel has already had an exciting reception In America. Orville Prescott, reviewing it in the New York Times, said: ‘As individually and authentically talented as Ralph Ellison, author of last year's THE INVISIBLE MAN, Mr Baldwin has made an equally auspicious debut. Readers interested in Negro fiction, an increasingly large number, will not want to miss GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN'; while John H. Hutchens wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that it is ‘A work of such insight and authoritative realism that it brings into focus an experience of life that outsiders can have been aware of only dimly.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - His remembrance shall perish from the earth and He shall have no name in the street. He shall be driven from light into darkness, and chased out of the world. This is James Baldwin's long-awaited statement on what has happened to America through the political and social agonies of her recent history. The prophecies of THE FIRE NEXT TIME have tragically been realized - through assassinations, urban riots and increased polarization of her deepest paranoias - and the hopes of justice, of simple human allowance of identity and needs, are more elusive than ever. Baldwin's apprehension of America's crisis in this wholly new work is generated by his own life - with remarkable candor, he tells of his years of self-exile and renewal abroad, of his participation in the civil rights movement in a southland of nightmarish identities, and, following the deaths of so many leaders and the passing of their hopes, of his painful route back to engagement, now with political realities that negate nonviolence and are played out in our courts and penitentiaries as well as our streets and legislatures. NO NAME IN THE STREET is James Baldwin's most eloquent, personal and complete expression on the subject of his times and society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, James Baldwin writes, is ‘part of a private log-book. It was written over the last six years, in various places, and in many states of mind.' It records the last months of a major American writer's long self-exile in Europe, his return to America and to Harlem. and his first trip South at the time when the school integration battle was exploding. It contains, too, Mr. Baldwin's controversial profiles of Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, and Ingmar Bergman, a well as his vigorous attack on Faulkner's defense of the old South, his portrait of Harlem which brought cries of outrage from those within Harlem and those without, and his essay prompted by the riot at the United Nations the day after Lumumba's murder - 'a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world.' ‘The question of color takes up much space in these pages. Mr. Baldwin writes, and many themes weave through NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME - the relations between blacks and whites, the role of the Negro in America and in Europe, the facing of truths about oneself and others, the question of sexual identity, and other themes the reader will discover for himself. And though the subjects Mr. Baldwin treats range wide, the entire book is informed by Mr. Baldwin's passion, his sense of controversy, and his instinct for truth - no matter who may be may be made uncomfortable by it. In the six years since the appearance of his book of essays, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, James Baldwin has, through the reception of GIOVANNI'S ROOM and the magazine publication of his essays, established himself beyond doubt as one of the leading writers of his time. NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME further enhances that reputation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Baldwin was born in 1924 in New York City, where he grew up and attended school, graduating from De Witt Clinton High School in 1942. He has, he reports, held ‘all kinds of jobs, mostly in New York, but one job in Paris, where I lived for nearly ten years.' Mr. Baldwin is the winner of a number of literary fellowships - a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust Award, a Rosenwald Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Institute of Art and Letters Fellowship, a Partisan Review Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation Grant-in-Aid. He is the author of many novels, including GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. His stories and essays have appeared in leading magazines here and in Europe.
DESCRIPTION - NOTES OF A NATIVE SON is a non-fiction book by James Baldwin. It was Baldwin's first non-fiction book, and was published in 1955. The volume collects ten of Baldwin's essays, which had previously appeared in such magazines as Harper's Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader. The essays mostly tackle issues of race in America and Europe. Since its original publication in 1955, this first nonfiction collection of essays by James Baldwin remains an American classic. His impassioned essays on life in Harlem, the protest novel, movies, and African Americans abroad are as powerful today as when they were first written. ‘A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity.' - Langston Hughes, The New York Times Book Review. ‘Written with bitter clarity and uncommon grace.' - Time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION is a revelation by an American literary master: a gathering of essays, articles, polemics, reviews, and interviews that have never before appeared in book form. James Baldwin was one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of tile past century, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in society. Prophetic and bracing, THE CROSS OF REDEMPTION is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, ‘If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - James Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME is a plea and a warning - a plea that all Americans look to the true state of their land one hundred years after Emancipation - a warning of what may happen if they do not. ‘If we,' James Baldwin writes, ‘do not falter in our duty now, we may be able. to end the racial nightmare. and change the history of the world.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - 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 insight, these personal, prophetic works have awakened our nation to the black experience. It is safe to say that white Americans would have understood far less about what it means to be black, and blacks about themselves, without Mr. Baldwin to guide us. The book contains the full texts of Baldwin's three great book-length essays, THE FIRE NEXT TIME, NO NAME IN THE STREET, and THE DEVIL FINDS WORK, along with dozens of other pieces, ranging from a 1948 review of RAINTREE COUNTY to a magnificent introduction to this book that, as so many of Mr. Baldwin's works do, combines his intensely private experience with the deepest examination of black-white relations today. In a way, the book is an intellectual history of the twentieth-century black American experience (and, by extension, of the white American experience); in another, it is autobiography of the highest order. There are scenes so vivid, so beautifully realized and evoked, that to read them is to remember them forever. There is anger and profound pain. But there is always the redemptive force of a humanity that, Baldwin suggests, lies at the core of all of us, black and white. No one writes more beautifully than James Baldwin. The power of his words reveals this country's soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JAMES BALDWIN was born in New York City on August 2, 1924. He was the first of nine children and grew up in Harlem where his father was a minister. For six years, after his graduation from high school in 1942, he found work in a variety of minor jobs. When he was twenty-four he left for Europe and lived there almost ten years. During this time, he wrote his first three books: GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, NOTES OF A NATIVE SON, and GIOVANNI'S ROOM. They firmly established him as one of America's outstanding young writers. In 1937, he returned to New York. , where he lived when not on one of his frequent trips abroad. In 1961, Mr. Baldwin's fourth book, the collection of brilliant essays entitled NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME, brought him broad public recognition as well as distinguished critical attention. Perhaps the most meaningful book ever to discuss being Negro in America, NOBODY KNOWS MY NAME was the recipient of numerous awards and a devoted following. The following year brought similar acclaim for his best-selling novel, ANOTHER COUNTRY. In 1963, the prophetic THE FIRE NEXT TIME jolted both the critical world and the bookbuying public and rushed to the top of all the best-seller lists. James Baldwin is also the author of three plays.
DESCRIPTION - In this splendid example of the ‘Scenes of Parisian Life' Balzac (1799-1850) brings to bear his encyclopaedic knowledge of finance, fashionable intrigue, and the ramifications both of the underworld and of the police system. The harlot of the title, elevated to the heights of luxury only to be reduced to the depths of misery, is no more than a pawn in what is essentially a duel of wits and ruthlessness fought between criminal masterminds. It is the figure of Vautrin, the Satanic genius at the heart of the web and one of the great characters of world literature, that effortlessly dominates the whole novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Perez Galdos, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
DESCRIPTION - ‘So many mysteries in one boarding house!' Not everyone who lodges with Madame Vauquer is quite what they seem. The penniless student Rastignac is poised to buy the finest waistcoat in Paris; old man Goriot, lodged in the cheapest room, is visited by two wealthy women; while the jovial merchant, Vautrin, makes clandestine midnight excursions. As the fates of the three intertwine, Rastignac faces terrible choices that will define the man he is to become. The keystone of Balzac's HUMAN COMEDY and his acknowledged masterpiece, OLD MAN GORIOT is the tale of an old man's obsession and a young man's ambition. Set in the wake of the Revolution, when old aristocracy and new wealth vied for supremacy, it portrays a world where love and money are tragically conjoined. This new translation by Olivia McCannon captures all the wit and adventure of the original, and includes detailed notes, a map, reading list and chronology. Graham Robb's introduction vividly sets the work in its literary and social context, considering its genesis, innovations and its influence on the novelists who followed in Balzac's footsteps.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The son of a civil servant, Honore de Balzac was born in 1799 in Tours, France. After attending boarding school in Vendôme, he gravitated to Paris where he worked as a legal clerk and a hack writer, using various pseudonyms, often in collaboration with other writers. Balzac turned exclusively to fiction at the age of thirty and went on to write a large number of novels and short stories set amid turbulent nineteenth-century France. He entitled his collective works The Human Comedy. Along with Victor Hugo and Dumas père and fils, Balzac was one of the pillars of French romantic literature. He died in 1850, shortly after his marriage to the Polish countess Evelina Hanska, his lover of eighteen years.
DESCRIPTION - THE BUREAUCRATS (Les Employes) stands out in Balzac's immense oeuvre by offering a compelling analysis of an important nineteenth-century French institution: the state bureaucracy. In the nearly one hundred novels and long stories that make up THE HUMAN COMEDY, Balzac considers a broad array of personal, social, and political phenomena that were undergoing significant change and conflict; marriage and the family, money, aristocracy and the legitimation of the middle class, Paris and the provinces, obsession, ambition, and failure are recurring elements of this vast portrait. In it Balzac detailed a number of distinctive institutions - journalism and publishing, banking, the church, law - but never did he concentrate his vision so precisely and so penetratingly on a distinctive modern institution as he did in THE BUREAUCRATS. The novel portrays the state bureaucracy and its ranks of civil servants in a biting critique of the bureaucratic mentality. The plot revolves around the efforts of one man, aided by his unscrupulous wife, to reorganize and streamline the entire system. Rabourdin's Plan, as it comes to be known in the novel, will halve the government's size while doubling its revenue. When the plan is leaked, Rabourdin's rival, an utter incompetent, nonetheless gains the overwhelming support of the frightened and desperate body of low-ranking employees. The novel contains recognizable themes of Balzac's work: obsessive ambition, conspiracy and human pettiness, a melodramatic struggle between social ‘good' and the evils of folly and stupidity. But this work is more than a typical nineteenth-century realist novel representing personal drama played out against the background of social and historical forces. It is also an unusual, dramatized analysis of a developing political institution and its role in shaping social class and mentality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Honore de Balzac (20 May 1799 - 18 August 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comedie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are complex, morally ambiguous and fully human. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Perez Galdos, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.
DESCRIPTION - Second of all is Velma: daughter, mother, wife, friend, worker - and an attempted suicide. She has survived self-slashed wrists and gassed lungs and now she sits on a stool in the Southwest Community Infirmary. For some reason she is not sure of, she did not die. And for another reason she is also not sure of, she is sitting on this stool in a radical medical center listening to a faith healer asking her ‘Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?' Thirdly is Minnie Ransom - fabulous healer in beige T-strap shoes - love and wisdom incarnate who (with her spirit-guide, Old Wife) marshals all of her gifts to help Velma deal with the things that made her thirsty for death: Was it Obie who did not love her well or enough? the friends who misunderstood her? the haunted quality of life itself since the bottoming-out of the Movement? But first of all are the Salt Eaters - the Black people who inhabit a city somewhere in the South called Claybourne, and who are connected to the healing taking place and who witness an event that alters their lives forever. M'Dear Sophie, Velma's godmother; Doc Serge, ex-pimp and neighborhood sage; Palma, Velma's sister and member of a singing troupe called the Seven Sisters of the Grain; Obie, head of the ominous 7 Arts Academy; Fred Holt, bus driver and mourner; Dr. Meadows, a ‘redbone' Black who is terrified of his own people. Whether Toni Cade Bambara sits us down at a healing, or moves us through Claybourne at carnival time or chills us with a mysterious thunderstorm, she locks us into the lives of the Salt Eaters. Some of them are centered, some are off balance; some are frightened, some are daring. But all are brilliantly drawn representatives of a people searching for the healing properties of salt.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995) was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
DESCRIPTION - Ten stories of Black life written with Ms. Bambara's characteristic vigor, sensibility and winning irony. The stories range from the timid and bumbling confusion of a novice community worker in ‘The Apprentice' to the love-versus-politics crisis of an organizer's wife, to the dark and bright notes of ‘The Sea Birds Are Still Alive,' about the passengers of a refugee ship from a war-torn Asian nation. Young girls, weary men, lovers, frauds and revolutionaries - Toni Cade Bambara handles them all with expertise, passion and huge talent. As the Chicago Daily News said, ‘Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat. she dazzles, she charms.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade (March 25, 1939 - December 9, 1995) was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
DESCRIPTION - FLAUBERT'S PARROT - a novel in disguise - is part literary criticism, part ironic fantasy, part biographical essay, part Pure Story, part scholarly sleuthing, part imaginary travelogue, and part Flaubert! It is a novel that constantly surprises. A novel whose inspiration, whose animating spirit, whose very raison d'etre is Flaubert himself - the man, the writer (in many ways the prototypical modern novelist), his works of fiction and his entire aesthetic legacy, his passions, his prejudices, and, of course, his parrot: the stuffed bird he borrowed from a local museum and kept on his desk as he was writing ‘A Simple Heart,' in which a parrot looms symbolically large. A novel peppered with clues to the truth about its enigmatic narrator: Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English physician and obsessive amateur Flaubert scholar, an intensely private man whose own moving story emerges through his highly idiosyncratic ordering and presentation of certain things he knows about Flaubert. A novel whose true (dual) protagonists - invisible but omnipresent - are Life and Art, in constant collision, strange. bedfellows on every page: as Flaubert's life is revealed to be mirrored in his art, as Braithwaite's art borrows from Flaubert's, as Flaubert's art encroaches on Braithwaite's life, and so on in ever more remarkable permutations. A novel that astonishes and entertains as it playfully dons a variety of masks, becoming for a while a dictionary, an interrogation, a story, a bestiary, an essay, a chronology, an exam. A novel that speaks to us about matters of love and infidelity, language and hubris, pedantry and progress, about the difficulty of ever really knowing another person, about the possible importance of books that remain forever unwritten, about the limits to our knowledge and understanding of the past, and about the extent to which all of us inherit (rather than create) our own identity. A dazzling act of literary legerdemain. A brilliantly original and imaginative work of fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is a contemporary English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (his late wife's surname), though has published nothing under that name for more than twenty-five years. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories. He was selected as the recipient of the 2011 David Cohen Prize for Literature. Barnes has also won several literary prizes in France, including the Prix Medicis for Flaubert's Parrot and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. Previously an Officier of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2004 he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honors also include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Shakespeare Prize, the San Clemente literary prize, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He received the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2012.
DESCRIPTION - The Tale of Tales, made up of forty-nine fairy tales within a fiftieth frame story, contains the earliest versions of celebrated stories like Rapunzel, All-Fur, Hansel and Gretel, The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. The tales are bawdy and irreverent but also tender and whimsical, acute in psychological characterization and encyclopedic in description. They are also evocative of marvelous worlds of fairy-tale unreality as well as of the everyday rituals of life in seventeenth-century Naples. Yet because the original is written in the nonstandard Neopolitan dialect of Italian - and was last translated fully into English in 1932 - this important piece of Baroque literature has long been inaccessible to both the general public and most fairy-tale scholars. Giambattista Basile's 'The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones' is a modern translation that preserves the distinctive character of Basile's original.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Giambattista Basile (1566 - 23 February 1632) was a Neapolitan poet, courtier, and fairy tale collector. Born to a Neapolitan middle-class family, Basile was, during his career, a courtier and soldier to various Italian princes, including the doge of Venice. He is chiefly remembered for writing the collection of Neapolitan fairy tales titled Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenemiento de peccerille (Neapolitan for "The Tale of Tales, or Entertainment for Little Ones"), also known as Il Pentamerone published posthumously in two volumes by his sister Adriana in Naples, Italy in 1634 and 1636 under the pseudonym Gian Alesio Abbatutis. It later became known as the Pentamerone. Although neglected for some time, the work received a great deal of attention after the Brothers Grimm praised it highly as the first national collection of fairy tales.
DESCRIPTION - The colorful charts, graphs, and maps presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition by famed sociologist and black rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois offered a view into the lives of black Americans, conveying a literal and figurative representation of "the color line." From advances in education to the lingering effects of slavery, these prophetic infographics--beautiful in design and powerful in content--make visible a wide spectrum of black experience. W. E. B. Du Bois's Data Portraits collects the complete set of graphics in full color for the first time, making their insights and innovations available to a contemporary imagination. As Maria Popova wrote, these data portraits shaped how "Du Bois himself thought about sociology, informing the ideas with which he set the world ablaze three years later in The Souls of Black Folk."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Whitney Battle-Baptiste is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at University of Massachusetts Amherst and an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. She is the author of Black Feminist Archaeology. Britt Rusert is an assistant professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture .
DESCRIPTION - This Bantam dual-language book gives you - the finest works of one of France's greatest poets in the original language; a vivid, accurate English translation printed on facing pages; a critical - biographical introduction by the editor; notes on obscure references. Bantam Dual-Language Books are designed for everyone who wants to read good literature - everyone interested in a foreign language. A brilliant selection of Baudelaire's poetry and prose presented in both the original French and a new, authoritative English translation. Les Fleurs du mal (often translated The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire first published in 1857. It was important in the symbolist and modernist movements. The subject matter of these poems deals with themes relating to decadence and eroticism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Pierre Baudelaire (April 9, 1821 - August 31, 1867) was a French poet who produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe. His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century. Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarme among many others. He is credited with coining the term ‘modernity' (modernitE) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.
DESCRIPTION - FRANK COLLYMORE: A BIOGRPAHY is the first book-length biography of Frank Collymore, Barbadian, educator, poet, editor, stage actor, mentor and tireless promoter of West Indian Literature. Born at Woodville Cottage in Saint Michael in 1893, Collymore became an invaluable contributor to the arts and culture in Barbadian society, with his participation in the theatre group, the Bridgetown Players, his poetry and short stories, and most notable, his editing of the literary magazine, BIM. In this witty and endearing account of the life and times of one of Barbados' favourite sons, poet, scholar and long-time friend of Collymore, recounts the story of Collymore's rise in the literary world. Drawn from Collymore's letters, journals and interviews with friends, colleagues and, the many people whose lives he touched, FRANK COLLYMORE: A BIOGRAPHY captures this ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts' as he will always be remembered: with grace, wit and indomitable charm.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Baugh is Professor Emeritus of English, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He is the author of Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (Longman, 1978) and Derek Walcott (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Baugh was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica, the son of Edward Percival Baugh, Purchasing Agent and Ethel Maud Duhaney-Baugh. He began writing poetry at Titchfield High School. He won a scholarship to study English literature at the University College of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, and later did postgraduate studies at Queen's University in Ontario and the University of Manchester, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1964. He taught at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies from 1965 to 1967, then at the university's Mona campus from 1968 to 2001, eventually being appointed professor of English in 1978 and public orator in 1985. He has also held visiting appointments at the University of California, Dalhousie University, University of Hull, University of Wollongong, Flinders University, Macquarie University, University of Miami and Howard University. In 2012 he was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. His scholarly publications include West Indian Poetry 1900-1970: A Study in Cultural Decolonisation (1971); Critics on Caribbean Literature (1978); Derek Walcott: Memory as Vision (1978), the first book-length study of Walcott's work; and an annotated edition of Walcott's Another Life (2004), with Colbert Nepaulsingh. Chancellor, I Present (1998) collects a number of the addresses Baugh delivered as UWI's public orator on the occasion of the presentation on honorary degrees.
DESCRIPTION - 'With wit and careful analysis, Bayard makes a convincing case. This slim yet satisfying inquiry will make readers eager to pick up the classic mystery and test Bayard's methods for themselves.'-Los Angeles Times In his brilliant reinvestigation of the classic case of The Hound of the Baskervilles, Pierre Bayard uses the last thoughts of the murder victim as his key to unravel the mystery, leading the reader to the astonishing conclusion that Holmes-and, in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle-got things all wrong. Part intellectual entertainment, part love letter to crime novels, and part crime novel in itself, Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong turns one of our most beloved stories delightfully on its head.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pierre Bayard (born 1954) is a French author, professor of literature and connoisseur of psychology. Bayard's recent book Comment parler des livres que l'on n'a pas lus?, or ‘How to talk about books you haven't read', is a bestseller in France and has received much critical attention in English language press. A few of his books present revisionist readings of famous fictional mysteries. Not only does he argue that the real murderer is not the one that the author presents to us, but in addition these works suggest that the author subconsciously knew who the real culprit is. His 2008 book L'Affaire du Chien des Baskerville was published in English as Sherlock Holmes was Wrong: Re-opening the Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles. His earlier book Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? re-investigates Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. His book on Hamlet which argues that Claudius did not kill Hamlet's father remains untranslated into English.
DESCRIPTION - An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States is a 1913 book by American historian Charles A. Beard. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States argues that the structure of the Constitution of the United States was motivated primarily by the personal financial interests of the Founding Fathers; Beard contends that the authors of The Federalist Papers represented an interest group themselves. More specifically, Beard contends that the Constitutional Convention was attended by, and the Constitution was therefore written by, a "cohesive" elite seeking to protect its personal property (especially federal bonds) and economic standing. Beard examined the occupations and property holdings of the members of the convention from tax and census records, contemporaneous news accounts, and biographical sources, demonstrating the degree to which each stood to benefit from various Constitutional provisions. Beard pointed out, for example, that George Washington was the wealthiest landowner in the country, and had provided significant funding towards the Revolution. Beard traces the Constitutional guarantee that the newly formed nation would pay its debts to the desire of Washington and similarly situated lenders to have their costs refunded.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Austin Beard (November 27, 1874 - September 1, 1948) was, with Frederick Jackson Turner, one of the most influential American historians of the first half of the 20th century. He published hundreds of monographs, textbooks and interpretive studies in both history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the founding fathers of the United States, who he believed were motivated more by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, written with his wife Mary Beard, was the wide-ranging and bestselling The Rise of American Civilization (1927), which had a major influence on American historians. Beard was famous as a political liberal, but he strenuously opposed American entry into World War II, for which he blamed Franklin D. Roosevelt more than Japan or Germany. This stance helped to destroy his career, as his fellow scholars first repudiated his foreign policy and subsequently dropped his materialistic model of class conflict.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the first one-volume collection of some of the most important and representative works of Samuel Beckett, winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, who is considered by many to be the greatest writer alive. The volume offers not only a generous sampling of Beckett's work, but also many complete texts, and serves as an excellent introduction to one of the major writers of the twentieth century. Perhaps known primarily as a dramatist, Beckett is also a novelist, a master of the short story, a poet, and a critic, Included in this volume are the complete plays Waiting for Godot and Krapp's Last Tape. Selections from his novels include MURPHY, WATT, MOLLOY, THE UNNAMABLE, and MERCIER AND CAMIER, while among his short stories represented here are The Expelled, Imagination Dead Imagine, Lessness, and Dante and the Lobster. Also included are Cascando, Eh Joe, and Not I, as well as a new dramatic work never before published in the U.S., That Time. The volume also contains a selection of Beckett's poetry as well as a sample of his critical writing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 - 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour. Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the ‘Theatre of the Absurd‘. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career. Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation'.
DESCRIPTION - Opening a window onto a fascinating new world for English-speaking readers, this anthology offers popular and influential stories from over ten countries, chronologically ranging from 1862 to the present. Latin American and Spanish science fiction shares many thematic and stylistic elements with anglophone science fiction, but there are important differences: many downplay scientific plausibility, and others show the influence of the region's celebrated literary fantastic. In the 27 stories included in this anthology, a 16th-century conquistador is re-envisioned as a cosmonaut, Mexican factory workers receive pleasure-giving bio-implants, and warring bands of terrorists travel through time attempting to reverse the outcome of historical events. The introduction examines the ways the genre has developed in Latin America and Spain since the 1700s and studies science fiction as a means of defamiliarizing, and then critiquing, regional culture, history and politics-especially in times of censorship and political repression. The volume also includes a brief introduction to each story and its author, and an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary works. Cosmos Latinos is a critical contribution to Latin American, Spanish, popular culture and science fiction studies and will be stimulating reading for anyone who likes a good story.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ANDREA L. BELL is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Hamline University in Minnesota. YOLANDA MOLINA-GAVILÀN is Associate Professor of Spanish at Eckerd College in Florida and the translator of Rosa Montero's The Delta Function (1992).
DESCRIPTION - Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, a German-Jewish man of letters, was known to the discerning few as one of the most acute and original critical and analytical minds of his time. His work consisted of literary essays, general reflections, aphorisms, and probings into cultural phenomena. He achieved posthumous fame when a collected edition of his writings appeared in Germany fifteen years after his death. ILLUMINATIONS is the first publication, in English, of a selection from Benjamin's writings. It includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust, both of whom he translated, his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his noted, penetrating study on ‘Time Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,'' a cultural assessment of time interrelation of art, technology, and mass society, an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his theses on the philosophy of history. Hannah Arendt selected the essays for this volume and prefaced them with a substantial, admirably informed Introduction that presents Benjamin's personality and intellectual development as well as his work and his life in dark times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 - 26 September 1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term ‘auratic perception', denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays ‘The Task of the Translator' (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‘ (1936). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
DESCRIPTION - A new selection from the work of ‘the most important critic of the time.' - Hannah Arendt. A companion volume to ILLUMINATIONS, the earlier collection of Benjamin's writings, REFLECTIONS presents a new sampling of his wide-ranging work. In addition to his literary criticism, this book contains some of his autobiographical narrations, among them ‘A Berlin Chronicler' and Benjamin's travel pieces; a selection from his aphorisms, a form in which he excelled; and philosophical-theological speculations. Most of Benjamin's writings on Brecht and his celebrated essay on Karl Kraus are also included. With the passage of time, Benjamin, who committed suicide in 1940, has been recognized as one of the most acute analysts of literary and sociological phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 - 26 September 1940) was a German literary critic, philosopher, social critic, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist. Combining elements of German idealism or Romanticism, Historical Materialism and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory and Western Marxism, and is associated with the Frankfurt School. Among his major works as a literary critic are essays on Goethe's novel Elective Affinities; the work of Franz Kafka and Karl Kraus; translation theory; the stories of Nikolai Leskov; the work of Marcel Proust and perhaps most significantly, the poetry of Charles Baudelaire. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu. His turn to Marxism in the 1930s was partly due to the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose critical aesthetics developed epic theatre and its Verfremdungseffekt (defamiliarisation, alienation). An earlier influence was friend Gershom Scholem, founder of the academic study of the Kabbalah and of Jewish mysticism. Influenced by the Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815–87), Benjamin coined the term ‘auratic perception', denoting the aesthetic faculty by means of which civilization may recover an appreciation of myth. Benjamin's work is often cited in academic and literary studies, especially the essays ‘The Task of the Translator' (1923) and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‘ (1936). Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from the Nazis.
DESCRIPTION - A full history of the American Negro, from his origins in the great empires of the Nile Valley and the western Sudan through the Negro revolt of the 1960's. Mr. Bennett clarifies the role of Negro Americans during the Colonial period the Revolutionary War; the Slavery era, the Civil War, the years of Reconstruction, and the crucial epoch from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. His account is interspersed with portraits of the great figures like Benjamin Banneker, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois and others, as well as with reports on the exploits and contributions of many men and women whose names generally have been forgotten in the pages American history. In a special section of ‘Landmarks and Milestones,' he outlines the significant dates, events, and personalities of the American Negro history from 1492 to 1964.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lerone Bennett, Jr. (born 17 October 1928) is an African-American scholar, author and social historian, known for his revisionist analysis of race relations in the United States. His best-known works include BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER and FORCED INTO GLORY.
DESCRIPTION - Little Big Man is a 1964 novel by American author Thomas Berger. Often described as a satire or parody of the western genre, the book is a modern example of picaresque fiction. Berger made use of a large volume of overlooked first-person primary materials, such as diaries, letters, and memoirs, to fashion a wide-ranging and entertaining tale that comments on alienation, identity, and perceptions of reality. Easily Berger's best known work, Little Big Man was made into a popular film by Arthur Penn.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, descriptions he preferred to reject.
DESCRIPTION - In 1964, LITTLE BIG MAN gave us the reminiscences of Jack Crabb - a white orphan raised among the Cheyenne - who returns to ‘civilized' society, where (among other things) he tangles with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok, and ends up as the only white survivor of Custer's Last Stand Now in The Return of Little Big Man, the sequel to that bestselling literary classic, Jack Crabb, the foremost chronicler of the American West, continues his fabulous adventures. At the end of LITTLE BIG MAN, Jack's supposed death at age 111 cut short his tale. A Newly discovered manuscript, however, reveals that Jack had faked his death to get out Of his publishing contract, and he now picks up the story of his extraordinary action-packed life. Back in the saddle again, Jack gives a blow-by-blow eyewitness account of the assassination of Wild Bill Hickok, and reveals what really happened at the O.K. Corral. He meets, shoots, drinks, and rides with Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, Doc Holliday, and dozens of ordinary Western folk: teachers, bargirls, saloon owners, cowboys, trappers, and gunslingers. Jack even travels to Europe with Buffalo Bill Cody in his Wild West show, where he is embraced by Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales. And in a gut-wrenching final, Jack witnesses the murder of one of America's greatest heroes - Sitting Bull. As in LITTLE BIG MAN, Thomas Berger's meticulous research enriches his story with authenticity and historical accuracy. THE RETURN OF LITTLE BIG MAN is an astonishing literary achievement and a rollicking good read.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 - July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, descriptions he preferred to reject.
DESCRIPTION - For most of Sir Isaiah Berlin's life, the history of ideas has been the focal point of his interest and work and the background against which he has forged his own eloquent and deeply felt opposition to the fanaticism of the singleminded. His main theme in Against the Current is the importance in the history of thought of dissenters whose ideas still challenge conventional wisdom; Machiavelli, Vico, Montesquieu, Hamann, Herzen, and Georges Sorel are central examples. He is especially concerned with the phenomenon of originality, with the unpredictable capacity of men with exceptional minds to battle against the current of their times and contribute something entirely new to our intellectual heritage. This book is a celebration of some of the most original and influential, misunderstood, or neglected thinkers of the Western world. It is essential reading for anyone responsive to the force of ideas in history. ‘Berlin expounds the ideas of half-forgotten thinkers with luminous clarity and imaginative empathy. [These essays] are exhilarating to read.' - The Observer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 - 5 November 1997), British of Russian-Jewish origin, was a social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material.
DESCRIPTION - Isaiah Berlin is renowned the world over for his analysis of the ideas that have influenced or transformed societies. Deeply committed to individual and collective liberty, and to moral and political pluralism, he has devoted the half-century and more of his professional life as a teacher and lecturer to exploring the conditions that allow these ideals to flourish, and those that threaten them. Now this new collection brings together the latest in a series of brilliant essays that address some of the urgent social and political questions facing our changing world. With matchless authority, Berlin writes on such immense issues as nationalism, European unity, fascism, relativism, and cultural history. The range of essays collected here is wide, though they are all concerned with varieties of antirationalism. Five of these essays have never been published in a book, including the longest, an extensive study of the late-eighteenth-century thinker Joseph de Maistre and his connection to the origins of fascism. The essays are bound together by a firm rejection of tidy answers to the great social and political problems: as Kant once wrote, ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Isaiah Berlin (6 June 1909 - 5 November 1997), British of Russian-Jewish origin, was a social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas, ‘thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation'. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material.
DESCRIPTION - What is classical about Classical civilization? In one of the must audacious works of scholarship ever written, Martin Bernal challenges the whole basis of our thinking about the question. Classical civilization, he argues, has deep roots in Afroasiatic culture. But these Afroasiatic influnces have been systematically ignored, denied, or suppressed since the eighteenth century - chiefly for racist reasons. The popular view is that Greek civilization was the request of the conquest of a sophisticated but weak native population by vigorous Indo-European speakers - or Aryans - from the North. But The Classical Greeks, Bernal argues, knew nothing of this ‘Aryan' model. They did not see their political institutions, science, philosophy or religion as original, but as derived from the East in general, and Egypt in Particular. In intellectual history, and in etymological dictionaries, Classical Greece is usually the bedrock. The origins of Hellenic language and culture are supposed to lie in the second millenium B.C., when Indo-European-speaking invaders swept down into Greece from the North, and ultimately brought logic and democracy to the decadent Mediterranean. In BLACK ATHENA, Martin Bernal agrees that the Greek language came with invaders from the North. However, he argues that classical Greek culture does not spring from the arrival of these Northerners, but rather from the subsequent imposition upon them of Semitic and Egyptian culture. This is supposed to have happened in the 18th century B.C. when the Hyksos invasion of Egypt overflowed into Crete, and on through the Aegean to Greece. He attacks Classicists of the last two centuries for their whitewashing of classical Greece, and alleges that, assuming the racial superiority of Europeans, they ignored the swarthy races of the Western Mediterranean, and looked only at vigorous Northern barbarians as originators of Greek culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Bernal (10 March 1937 - 9 June 2013) was Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. The first two volumes of BLACK ATHENA: THE AFROASIATIC ROOTS OF CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION (1: THE FABRICATION OF ANCIENT GREECE, 1785-1985; and II: THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE), have been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, and Swedish and will soon be available in Greek and Japanese. David Chioni Moore is Assistant Professor of International Studies and English at Macalester College.
DESCRIPTION - This volume is the second in a projected four-part series concerned with the competition between two historical models for the origins of Greek civilization. The model current today is the Aryan Model, according to which Greek culture arose as the result of the conquest from the north by Indo-European speakers or ‘Aryans' of the native ‘pre-Hellenes.' The Ancient Model, which was the model maintained in Classical Greece, held that the native population of Greece had initially been civilized by Egyptian and Phoenician colonists and that more Near Eastern culture had been introduced to Greece by Greeks studying in Egypt and Southwest Asia. Martin Bernal proposes a Revised Ancient Model. According to this, the Indo-European aspects of Greek language and culture should be recognized as fundamental and the considerable non - Indo-European elements should be seen largely as Egyptian and Levantine additions to this basis. Volume II is concerned with the archaeological and documentary evidence for contacts between Egypt and the Levant on the one hand, and the Aegean on the other, during the Bronze Age from c. 3400 BC to c. 1100 BC. These approaches are supplemented by information from later Greek myths, legends, religious cults, and language. The author concludes that contact between the two regions was far more extensive and influential than is generally believed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Gardiner Bernal (10 March 1937 - 9 June 2013) was a British scholar of modern Chinese political history. He was a Professor of Government and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his work Black Athena, a controversial work which attempts to prove that Ancient Greek civilization and language are Egyptian in origin.
DESCRIPTION - In this major novel, Thomas Bernhard encompasses for us the terror, the psychosis, the struggle of the individual for sanity and mental survival in our postwar world with all its knowledge of the extremes of human existence. Correction is conducted in two voices. The first is that of the narrator, a solitary, nervous, high-strung intellectual come back to a remote hamlet in Austria to put in order the mass of papers left by his friend, a brilliant philosopher/ mathematician who has committed suicide. The second voice is that of the dead man himself, heard in his writings as they come to dominate the text. Through them, we experience the gradual breakdown of a genius, driven by a lifetime of tragedy that eventually overwhelms his extraordinary achievements, a genius whose most ambitious project— the construction of a wondrous building—brings about his own destruction. As the mysteries of the two men are revealed to us, we come to understand how a human mind can be driven to madness by its own terrifying powers of pure thought, constantly correcting and refining its own perceptions until it negates and betrays "the way things are."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 - February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called ‘the most significant literary achievement since World War II,' is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.
DESCRIPTION - GARGOYLES is Thomas Bernhard’s first novel to be translated into English. In it the uncompromising vision of life associated with Kafka, Musil, Beckett (with all of whom German critics link Bernhard's name) is given a further twist of intensity. The landscape is Austrian-a mountainous countryside, where the local doctor is taking his son, a student mining engineer, with him on his daily rounds. In a tavern a gratuitous killing has taken place. In a cottage a mad boy-a musical prodigy-is caged up. In a dilapidated hunting lodge from which he conducts his far-flung empire, a powerful industrialist-living, incestuously perhaps, alone with his sister-works on a momentous book, tearing it up as he writes it. On the miller's land some exotic birds have been murdered, their plumage left perfectly intact. In house after house the doctor and his son find a curious succession of solitaries and shut-ins filling their lives with feverish brooding and activity. The last of the ‘patients' is the district's great landowner, Prince Saurau, who walks his visitors along the ramparts of his mountaintop castle. As they look down on the valley from which they have just ascended, astonished by its beauty, they listen to the prince's brilliantly resonant monologue: his life and his ancient domain are crumbling; indeed, his son, who will inherit everything, is sure to destroy what took centuries to create. As the prince pours out his fears and indecisions, his fascinating mixture of acute perceptions and ominous confusions, the young man in particular feels that he is witnessing the very process of a man's mind stretching beyond its utmost and being rent asunder in an effort to accommodate an unacceptable, tortuous reality. Bernhard's vision seems to pierce through all the sharply delineated layers of observed reality to the secret hot core of consciousness itself, casting off the dead slag of its own decay as it suffers the birth pangs of new light.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 - February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called ‘the most significant literary achievement since World War II,' is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.
DESCRIPTION - The nightmarish brilliance of his new novel will serve further to enhance his steadily rising international reputation. A woman's brains are found scattered across the floor of an abandoned lime works. A half-frozen man crouches on the ground nearby. Who are they? How did they get there? Their story, the grotesque and compelling tale of two people insidiously bound to each other, emerges through a hypnotic weave of voices-the people of the small Austrian town nearby, the officials, the salesmen, the chimney sweep, the local gossips, the couple themselves. THE LIME WORKS makes us know the intricate complex of creativity and resourcefulness that the destructive personality marshals against itself, the psychic labyrinth where large ambition and persistent self-doubt murderously collide.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Bernhard (born Nicolaas Thomas Bernhard, February 9, 1931 - February 12, 1989) was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called ‘the most significant literary achievement since World War II,' is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.
DESCRIPTION - 2021 NAACP Image Award Nominee: Outstanding Literary Work - Non-Fiction. Honorable Mention for the 2021 Organization of American Historians Darlene Clark Hine Award. A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are - and have always been - instrumental in shaping our country. In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today. A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and associate dean of the Graduate School at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or co-editor of several previous books, including The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, winner of the 2017 SHEAR Book Award for Early American History. Kali Nicole Gross is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her previous books include Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America, winner of the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in nonfiction.
DESCRIPTION - Like its predecessor, Mission to Kala, Mongo Beti's new novel King Lazarus is centred round the changing customs and mores of a Bantu tribe under French administration. The year is 1948: and the hereditary Chief of the Essazam clan is, to all appearances, dying. As his life has been one long round of eating, drinking, and nocturnal exercises among his twenty-three wives, this is not, perhaps, altogether surprising. But his illness worries the Administration; he is a staunch prop of the European Establishment. An even more dangerous situation is produced when the Chief, against all expectation, very suddenly recovers - and the local Roman Catholic missionary, Le Guen, persuades him to renounce his tribal ways and adopt Christianity. The repercussions are complicated. To begin with a rumour spreads about - if not with Le Guen's connivance, at least with his tacit consent - that the Chief has had a miraculous return from the dead. Le Guen underlines this idea by proposing that he should take the Christian name of Lazurus to celebrate his conversion. Hardly less important is the Chief's Christian obligation to repudiate twenty-two out of his twenty-three wives. He chooses the youngest, which at once makes the Senior Wife his deadly enemy. The relations of the other wives - not to mention the village elders - also take offence; and things culminate in a ludicrous but dangerous riot, which brings down the Provincial Prefect from his distant Olympus. Mongo Beti has an almost unique gift for getting humour out of vitally serious subjects. Here, with gay but lethal pungency, he satirises in turn the Catholic Church, obsolete tribal customs, and French Colonialism, whether authoritarian or 'enlightened' according to the latest sociological textbooks. This breadth of outlook produces some superb comedy, mounting to the richly ironic climax when Le Guen is quietly removed in a flurry of pseudo-benevolence by the powers that be: but Africa, one feels, remains very much the same underneath. It is refreshing to find an African author at last beginning to explore the true literary potential of his country. Pliny said that something new always came out of Africa: he might have had Mongo Beti in mind.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country.
DESCRIPTION - Here, at last, is an African novel untinged by political pleading, richly exuberant, vivid, humorous and disarming. The hero, Medza, is a young Negro from the French Cameroons who has just failed his exams at college, and returns to his native village in some fear of his father's reaction. He finds the whole place humming with scandal; a man's wife has gone off with a member of an up-country tribe. Someone must go and get her back. In these parts a scholar (even a failed one) has extraordinary prestige, and Medza finds himself saddled with this delicate mission. When he reaches the woman's village he has to wait for her return from another adventure, so he stays with some colourful and eccentric relations who pass him off as a prodigy of learning. Medza is entertained, given every luxury, and consulted like an oracle. Even though his canny uncle filches half the presents he receives, Medza does very well. Naturally, the girls flock round him, but he can't summon up enough courage to admit that the more sophisticated and enterprising among them frighten him out of his wits. How Medza finds himself married, how he comes to the end of his mission and what - surprisingly - happens then, is told in this delightful book. Characters, background and customs are described with infectious gaiety and the sharply original style rounds off an achievement which proves that here is a new African novelist of indisputable talent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandre Biyidi Awala (30 June 1932 - 8 October 2001), known as Mongo Beti, was a Cameroonian writer. Though he lived in exile for many decades, Beti's life reveals an unflagging commitment to improvement of his home country.
DESCRIPTION - The world-renowned psychoanalyst and child psychologist here gives us an unprecedented reading of Freud - and an exhilarating vision of the true uses of psychoanalysis. He demonstrates that the English translations of Freud's writings not only distort some of the central concepts of psychoanalysis but actually make it impossible for the reader to recognize that Freud's ultimate concern was man's soul, the basic element of our common human what it is, how it manifests itself in everything we do and dream. And he shows that these translations, by masking much of the essential humanism of Freud's work, have led to a tragic misunderstanding and widespread misuse of psychoanalysis, particularly in America. Reminding us that Freud analyzed his own dreams, his own slips of the tongue, and the reasons he himself made mistakes, Dr. Bettelheim makes clear that Freud created psychoanalysis not so much as a method of analyzing the behavior of other people but as a way for each of us to gain access to (and, where possible, control of) his own unconscious - a goal impeded by English translations in which Freud becomes impersonal esoteric, abstract, ‘scientific' translations that discourage the reader from embarking on his own voyage of self-discovery and that make it easy for him to distance himself from what Freud sought to teach about the inner life of man and of the reader himself. Startling examples are given of mistranslations. Dr. Bettelheim (who is, as Freud was, a German-speaking Viennese) reveals how in the English versions nearly all of Freud's references to the soul have been corrupted (for example, Seelentätigkeit - ‘activity of the soul' - is translated as ‘mental activity') He demonstrates that Freud's English translators, because of their determination to perceive psychoanalysis as a medical science, have consistently resorted to the technical Greco-Latinisms of the medical profession - with such terms as ‘parapraxis,' ‘cathexis,' and ‘scopophilia' - in rendering German words that Freud chose specifically for their humanistic resonance, for their power to evoke in his German readers not only an intellectual but also an emotional response. And Dr. Bettelheim makes us realize how these mistranslations - perhaps most notable among them the rendering into ‘English' of the homely German words ich and es with the distant Latin ego and id - have had a profound effect on both the practice and the history of psychoanalysis. This eloquent, passionately argued, deeply illuminating book is urgent reading for everyone interested in psychoanalysis and for all who seek a humanistic approach to psychology - so central to Freud and so unrecognizable in the English translations of his writings. It is certain to take its place among the classic works of Bruno Bettelheim.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna in 1903, received his doctorate at the University of Vienna, and came to America in 1939. He was distinguished Professor of Education Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of both psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
DESCRIPTION - If we could only put aside our civil pose and say what we really thought, the world would be a lot like the one alluded to in The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. There, a bore is a person who talks when you wish him to listen, and happiness is an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another. This is the most comprehensive, authoritative edition ever of Ambrose Bierce's satiric masterpiece. It renders obsolete all other versions that have appeared in the book's ninety-year history. A virtual onslaught of acerbic, confrontational wordplay, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary offers some 1,600 wickedly clever definitions to the vocabulary of everyday life. Little is sacred and few are safe, for Bierce targets just about any pursuit, from matrimony to immortality, that allows our willful failings and excesses to shine forth. This new edition is based on David E. Schultz and S. T. Joshi's exhaustive investigation into the book's writing and publishing history. All of Bierce's known satiric definitions are here, including previously uncollected, unpublished, and alternative entries. Definitions dropped from previous editions have been restored while nearly two hundred wrongly attributed to Bierce have been excised. For dedicated Bierce readers, an introduction and notes are also included. Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is a classic that stands alongside the best work of satirists such as Twain, Mencken, and Thurber. This unabridged edition will be celebrated by humor fans and word lovers everywhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War veteran. His book The Devil's Dictionary was named as one of "The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature" by the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration.
DESCRIPTION - A RUSSIAN DOLL AND OTHER STORIES, published in Spanish in 1991 as Una muñeca rusa, is the ninth collection of short fiction by one of this century's premier Argentinian writers who, with his fellow countrymen Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges, helped change the world's perception of Latin American literature. Bioy Casares' narratives are elegant and urbane, his style precise and streamlined, as he paces his characters through seriocomic traps of fate-ensnared by love, impelled by lust, ambition, or plain greed, even metamorphosed by pharmaceuticals. These are not stories in a psychological mode but like the image of the Russian doll of the title piece are carefully wrought congeries of intractable selves within selves. Suzanne Jill Levine, Professor of Latin American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is well known as the translator of Bioy Casares, Manuel Puig, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante, among others. Her book on literary translation, The Subversive Scribe, was published in 1992 by Graywolf Press. ‘[Bioy Casares] has a charm and a sinister wit and a sudden sadness that only an assured literary performer could deliver.' - John Updike, THE NEW YORKER. In addition to his short stories, Bioy Casares is the author of six novels, three books of essays, and several collaborative works with Borges. His first novel, THE INVENTION OF MOREL (1940), inspired Robbe-Grillet's script for Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad. In 1990 he was awarded Spain's most prestigious literary award, the Cervantes Prize, for his life's work. CONTENTS: A Russian Doll; A Meeting in Rauch; Cato; The Navigator Returns to His Country; Our Trip (A Diary); Underwater; Three Fantasies in Minor Key; MARGARITA OR THE POWER OF PHARMACEUTICALS; REGARDING A SMELL; LOVE CONQUERED. Originally published in Spanish in 1991 as Una muñeca rusa - Tusquets Editores, S.A., Barcelona. The stories ‘The Navigator Returns to His Country' and ‘A Meeting in Rauch' first appeared in Rostonia, the quarterly magazine published by Boston University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 - March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel.
DESCRIPTION - The Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares,' writes translator Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘is an urbane comedian, a parodist who turns fantasy and science fiction inside out to explore the banality of our scientific, intellectual, and especially erotic pretensions. Behind his post-Kafka, pre-Woody Allen sense of nonsense is a metaphysical vision, particularly of life's brevity and the slippery terrain of love.' His Selected Stories, chosen from various collections published from the mid-'50s to the late ‘80s, is aptly divided into two parts, ‘The Labyrinth of Love' and ‘Adverse Miracles,' ample frames for the author's amatory tales and wry magical realism. It is a fine introduction to one of Latin America's leading modern writers-and a choice retrospective of the master storyteller who won the 1990 Cervantes Prize, Spain's most prestigious literary award, for his lifetime work. CONTENTS: Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine; I. Levine - A Secret Casanova; An Affair; Women Are All the Same; Men Are All the Same; Pearls Before Swine; Trio; II. ADVERSE MIRACLES - The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; Flies and Spiders; Resurrection; About the Shape of the World; The Hero of Women; I THE LABYRINTH OF LOVE; Souvenir from the Mountains; A Roman Fable. The stories in this collection Were selected from the following books by Adolfo Bioy Casares: from Guirnalda con alnores (‘Garland of Loves,' 1959), ‘A Roman Fable,' ‘A Secret Casanova,' ‘An Affair,' ‘Women Are All the Same,' ‘Men Are All the Same,' ‘Souvenir from the Mountains,' ‘The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice,' ‘Flies and Spiders,' ‘Resurrection'; from El grab seraji'n (‘The Great Seraphim,' 1967) ‘Pearls Before Swine'; from El hEroe de las snujeres (‘The Hero of Women,' 1978(, ‘About the Shape of the World' and ‘The Hero of Women'; from Historias desaforadas (‘Tales from the Wild Side,' 1986), ‘Trio,' ‘The Noumenon,' ‘An Unexpected Journey.' Some of the translations were first published in the following books and magazines: The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, Descant, Fiction, The New Boston Review, and Persea, The translated epigraphs on pages 1 and 81 are taken, respectively, from Guirnalda con ainores and ABC (1989).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 - March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel.
DESCRIPTION - When THE INVENTION OF MOREL was first published in Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges rejoiced that the author had brought ‘a new genre to our land and language.' This fine translation of Adolfo Bioy Casares' novella demonstrates that it is equally unique when transformed into English. THE INVENTION OF MOREL won for its author in 1941 the Primer Premio Municipal Award in Buenos Aires. It is joined in this volume by six equally arresting short stories originally published together in a book entitled La trama celeste. THE INVENTION OF MOREL is the offspring of a fantastic, sometimes perverse, always persuasive imagination. Borges, perhaps Argentina's greatest writer, says in his Prologue to the story that its plot is of such superior quality that ‘to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole.' Bioy Casares' indisputable originality, so apparent in the novella, is equally evident in the six short stories, all of which have a strong affinity with The invention. Each story is an achievement of realism with curious surrealist overtones. In each, as in the novella, the author employs suspense delicately and with mounting tension. In style, narrative technique, and off-beat imaginative insight, they coalesce to make a book which is bound to have a powerful unified impact on the reader. This volume is enhanced by drawings by Norah Borges de Torre, sister of Jorge Luis Borges. The translator, Ruth L. C. Simms, has traveled extensively in South America and is well acquainted with Spanish and Latin American literature; her sensitive use of the English language has enabled her to transfer these unusual stories into English with their unique qualities unimpaired.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 - March 8, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer, journalist, and translator. He was a friend and collaborator with his fellow countryman Jorge Luis Borges, and wrote what many consider one of the best pieces of fantastic fiction, the novella The Invention of Morel.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A great story - how modernism brought down the regime of censorship - told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page.' - Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club. For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom's day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as ‘obscene, lewd, and lascivious.' Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce's inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce's years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce's deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life. Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce's master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom's head. Birmingham's archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding Ulysses. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to Ulysses.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kevin Birmingham received his PhD in English from Harvard, where he is a Lecturer in History & Literature and an instructor in the university's writing program. His research focuses on twentieth-century fiction and culture, literary obscenity and the avant-garde. He was a bartender in a Dublin pub featured in Ulysses for one day before he was unceremoniously fired. This is his first book.
DESCRIPTION - From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The Sinner and the Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story—and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his day condemned him to a long Siberian exile. There, he spent years studying the criminals that were his companions. Upon his return to St. Petersburg in the 1860s, he fought his way through gambling addiction, debilitating debt, epilepsy, the deaths of those closest to him, and literary banishment to craft an enduring classic. The germ of Crime and Punishment came from the sensational story of Pierre François Lacenaire, a notorious murderer who charmed and outraged Paris in the 1830s. Lacenaire was a glamorous egoist who embodied the instincts that lie beneath nihilism, a western-influenced philosophy inspiring a new generation of Russian revolutionaries. Dostoevsky began creating a Russian incarnation of Lacenaire, a character who could demonstrate the errors of radical politics and ideas. His name would be Raskolnikov. Lacenaire shaped Raskolnikov in profound ways, but the deeper insight, as Birmingham shows, is that Raskolnikov began to merge with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was determined to tell a murder story from the murderer’s perspective, but his character couldn’t be a monster. No. The murderer would be chilling because he wants so desperately to be good. The writing consumed Dostoevsky. As his debts and the predatory terms of his contract caught up with him, he hired a stenographer to dictate the final chapters in time. Anna Grigorievna became Dostoevsky’s first reader and chief critic and changed the way he wrote forever. By the time Dostoevsky finished his great novel, he had fallen in love. Dostoevsky’s great subject was self-consciousness. Crime and Punishment advanced a revolution in artistic thinking and began the greatest phase of Dostoevsky’s career. The Sinner and the Saint now gives us the thrilling and definitive story of that triumph.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Book Review, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
DESCRIPTION - The quality of Elizabeth Bishop's prose is as distinctive and natural as that of her poems. This collection compiled by Robert Giroux, is arranged in two parts - stories and memoirs of persons and places. Of her eight published stories, three appeared in The New Yorker - ‘In the Village,' the extraordinary account of a Nova Scotia childhood; ‘Gwendolyn', about the death of a little girl; and ‘The Housekeeper', published under the pseudonym of Sarah Foster. The others are ‘Memories of Uncle Neddy,' ‘The Sea & Its Shore,' ‘The Baptism' ‘The Farmer's Children' and ‘In Prison.' The non-fiction pieces, with the exception of her Introduction to THE DIARY OF HELEN MORLEY and her essay on the primitive painter ‘Gregorio Valdes', were found among her papers after her death in 1979. The long and witty memoir of Marianne Moore, ‘Efforts of Affection', is a portrait of the older poet and her mother. It recalls visits to Brooklyn, to the circus, to a poets' gathering for the Sitwells and other adventures. ‘To the Botequim & Back' and ‘A Trip to Vigia' are set in Brazil, Elizabeth Bishop's home for years. Key West is the setting of ‘Mercedes Hospital', where the author encounters ambiguities surrounding a living saint. ‘The U.S.A. School of Writing' is a seriocomic account of the poet's first job, and there are two priceless memoirs of childhood - 'Primer Class,' life in a one-room school in Canada, and ‘The Country Mouse,' a six-year-old's unhappy days as an orphan in her grandparents' large house. The book reflects the author's lifelong devotion to questions of memory and travel. As a companion volume to THE COMPLETE POEMS: 1927-1979, It reinforces James Merrill's conclusion that Elizabeth Bishop is ‘our greatest national treasure.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970.
DESCRIPTION - This volume gathers the poetry - work of three decades - by one of the master poets of the age. In 1955 Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the combined edition of NORTH & SOUTH and A COLD SPRING, a volume Randall Jarrell called ‘one of the best books an American poet has written.' In this book NORTH & SOUTH and A COLD SPRING are followed by her subsequent collection, QUESTIONS OF TRAVEL (1965), excepting the story ‘In the Village,' which Miss Bishop is reserving for a future collection of her fiction. There is a group of translations of two contemporary Brazilian poets, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto. And the book concludes with a group of Miss Bishop's own distinctive poems, all previously uncollected.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979) was an American poet, short-story writer, and recipient of the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956 and the National Book Award winner in 1970.
DESCRIPTION - In 1832, the great Sauk leader Black Hawk was defeated at the Battle of Bad Axe, ending his struggle against white encroachment on his people's lands in western Illinois. Vanquished but far from broken, he related the story of his extraordinary life and the culture on whose behalf he had fought so valiantly, producing one of the most vivid extant portraits of Native American life. His Life is the first published account by the object of an American war of extermination - the first adversarial work about frontier hostilities that Anglo American readers had ever confronted. Like nothing that had come before it, his transcribed autobiography remains a fascinating narrative and an invaluable historical document. ‘LIFE OF BLACK HAWK is a powerful personal account of tragic eloquence, and the introduction by Gerald Kennedy provides readers with an emotionally engaging, intellectually compelling orientation to the story of Black Hawk told so well about himself and his people.' - Kerry A. Trask, Professor of History, University of Wisconsin Colleges, and author of BLACK HAWK: THE BATTLE FOR THE HEART OF AMERICA.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Black Hawk, born Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, (1767 - October 3, 1838) was a war leader and warrior of the Sauk American Indian tribe in what is now the Midwest of the United States. Although he had inherited an important historic medicine bundle from his father, he was not a hereditary civil chief. Black Hawk earned his status as a war chief or captain by his actions: leading raiding and war parties as a young man, and a band of Sauk warriors during the Black Hawk War of 1832. During the War of 1812, Black Hawk had fought on the side of the British against the U.S., hoping to push the latter's settlers away from Sauk territory. Later he led a band of Sauk and Fox warriors, known as the British Band, against European-American settlers in Illinois and present-day Wisconsin in the 1832 Black Hawk War. After the war, he was captured by U.S. forces and taken to the eastern U.S. He and other war leaders were taken on tour of several cities. Shortly before being released from custody, Black Hawk told his story to an interpreter; aided also by a newspaper reporter, he published Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation. in 1833 in Cincinnati, Ohio. The first Native American autobiography to be published in the U.S., his book became an immediate bestseller and has gone through several editions. Black Hawk died in 1838 (at age 70 or 71) in what is now southeastern Iowa. He has been honored by an enduring legacy: his book, many eponyms, and other tributes.
DESCRIPTION - This book furnishes a panoramic view of slavery and emancipation in the Americas from the conquests and colonization of the sixteenth century to the ‘century of abolition' that stretched from 1780 to 1888. Tracing the diverse responses of African captives, THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE argues that while slave rebels and abolitionists made real gains, they also suffered cruel setbacks and disappointments, leading to a momentous radicalization of the discourse of human rights. In it, Robin Blackburn explains the emergence of ferocious systems of racial exploitation while rejecting the comforting myths that portray emancipation as somehow already inscribed in the institutions and ideas that allowed for, or even fostered, racial slavery in the first place, whether the logic of the market, the teachings of religion or the spirit of nationalism. Rather, Blackburn stresses, American slavery was novel - and so too were the originality and achievement of the antislavery alliances which eventually destroyed it. The Americas became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, and emancipation. The exotic commodities produced by the slave plantations hoped to transform Europe and North America, raising up empires and stimulating industrial revolution and ‘market revolution' to bring about the pervasive commodification of polite society work and everyday life in parts of Europe and North America. Fees, salaries and wages fostered consuming habits so that capitalism based on free wage labour in the metropolis became intimately dependent on racial slavery in the New World. But by the Late eighteenth century the Atlantic boom had sown far and wide the seeds of subversion, provoking colonial rebellion, slave conspiracy and popular revolt, the aspirations of a new black peasantry and ‘picaresque proletariat, and the emergence of a revolutionary doctrine: the ‘rights of man'. The result was a radicalization of the principles of the Enlightenment, with the Haitian Revolution rescuing and reshaping the ideals memorably proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. Blackburn charts the gradual emergence of an ability and willingness to see the human cost of the heedless consumerism and to challenge it. The anti-slavery idea, he argues brought together diverse impulses - the ‘free air' doctrine maintained by the common people of Europe, the critique of the philosophes and the urgency of slave resistance and black witness. The anti-slavery idea made gains thanks to a succession of historic upheavals. But the remaining slave systems - in the U.S. South, Cuba and Brazil - were in many ways as strong as ever. They were only overturned thanks to the momentous clashes unleashed by the U.S. Civil War, Cuba's fight for independence and the terminal crisis of the Brazilian Empire.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin Blackburn is the author of THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492-1800 and THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, 1776-1848. He teaches at the University of Essex in the UK and at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is a contributor to New Left Review and a member of its editorial committee.
DESCRIPTION - At the time when European powers colonized the New World the institution of slavery had almost disappeared from Europe itself. Having overcome an institution widely regarded as oppressive and unfortunate why did they sponsor the construction of racial slave systems in their new colonies? Robin Blackburn traces European doctrines of race and slavery from medieval times to the early modern epoch, and finds that the stigmatization of the ethno-religious Other was given a callous twist by a new culture of consumption, freed from an earlier moral economy. THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY, argues that independent commerce, geared to burgeoning consumer markets, was the driving force behind the rise of plantation slavery. The baroque state sought - successfully - to batten on this commerce, and - unsuccessfully - to regulate slavery and race. Successive chapters of the book consider the deployment of slaves in the colonial possessions of the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch, the English and the French. Each are shown to have contributed something to the eventual consolidation of racial slavery and to the plantation revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is shown that plantation slavery emerged from the impulses of civil society rather than from the strategies of the individual states. Robin Blackburn argues that the organization of slave plantations placed the West on a destructive path to modernity and that greatly preferable alternatives were both proposed and rejected. In the colonies the planters always had to reckon with the efforts of the enslaved to resist their fate and to construct the elements of a new creole identity. Finally he shows that the surge of Atlantic trade, premised on the killing toil of the plantation made a decisive contribution to both the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin Blackburn (born June 3, 1940) is editor of New Left Review and the author of THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY. During the course of writing this book he was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., and a Visiting Professor at FLACSO (Facultad Latinamericano de Ciencias Sociaies), Quito, Ecuador.
DESCRIPTION - This is the first book to tell the story of how New World colonial slavery was overthrown in the Age of Revolution, In 1770 a handful of European nations ruled the Americas, drawing from them a stream of exotic products and popular pleasures Some two and a half million black slaves, imprisoned in plantation colonies, toiled to produce the sugar, coffee, cotton, ginger and indigo craved by the Europeans. By 1848 the major systems of colonial slavery had been swept away - challenged and overthrown by independence movements, by slave revolts, by Abolitionist movements, or by some combination of all three. Robin Blackburn explains how it was that in some cases colonial rule was overthrown but slavery flourished - as in the South of the United States and Brazil; in others, slavery was suppressed but colonial rule conserved - as in the British West Indies and the French Windwards; while in French St Domingue, the future Haiti, and in Spanish South and Central America both colonialism and slavery were defeated. The author argues that although colonial slavery had been promoted by the advance of capitalism in Europe it was undermined by the Atlantic boom and the class struggles of an emergent bourgeois society. This narrative of slave liberation and American independence highlights the pivotal role of the ‘first emancipation' in the French Antilles in the 1790s, the parallel action of slave resistance and metropolitan Abolitionism and the contradictory implications of slaveholder Patriotism. The dramatic events of this epoch are examined from an unexpected vantage point showing how the torch of anti-slavery passed from the medieval communes to dissident Quakers, from African maroons to radical pirates, from Granville Sharp and Ottobah Cuguano to Toussaint L'Ouverture, from the black Jacobins to the Liberators of South America and from the African Baptists in Jamaica to the Revolutionaries of 1848 in Europe and the Caribbean. THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY offers a challenging new interpretation of crucial episodes in the making of the modern world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin Blackburn (born June 3, 1940) is the Editor of New Left Review. He has taught and researched at the universities of London, Havana, Boston and Mexico. He has also edited the collections IDEOLOGY IN SOCIAL SCIENCE and REVOLUTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE.
DESCRIPTION - This book furnishes a panoramic view of slavery and emancipation in the Americas from the conquests and colonization of the sixteenth century to the ‘century of abolition' that stretched from 1780 to 1888. Tracing the diverse responses of African captives, THE AMERICAN CRUCIBLE argues that while slave rebels and abolitionists made real gains, they also suffered cruel setbacks and disappointments, leading to a momentous radicalization of the discourse of human rights. In it, Robin Blackburn explains the emergence of ferocious systems of racial exploitation while rejecting the comforting myths that portray emancipation as somehow already inscribed in the institutions and ideas that allowed for, or even fostered, racial slavery in the first place, whether the logic of the market, the teachings of religion or the spirit of nationalism. Rather, Blackburn stresses, American slavery was novel - and so too were the originality and achievement of the antislavery alliances which eventually destroyed it. The Americas became the crucible for a succession of fateful experiments in colonization, silver mining, plantation agriculture, racial enslavement, and emancipation. The exotic commodities produced by the slave plantations hoped to transform Europe and North America, raising up empires and stimulating industrial revolution and ‘market revolution' to bring about the pervasive commodification of polite society work and everyday life in parts of Europe and North America. Fees, salaries and wages fostered consuming habits so that capitalism based on free wage labour in the metropolis became intimately dependent on racial slavery in the New World. But by the Late eighteenth century the Atlantic boom had sown far and wide the seeds of subversion, provoking colonial rebellion, slave conspiracy and popular revolt, the aspirations of a new black peasantry and ‘picaresque proletariat, and the emergence of a revolutionary doctrine: the ‘rights of man'. The result was a radicalization of the principles of the Enlightenment, with the Haitian Revolution rescuing and reshaping the ideals memorably proclaimed by the American and French revolutions. Blackburn charts the gradual emergence of an ability and willingness to see the human cost of the heedless consumerism and to challenge it. The anti-slavery idea, he argues brought together diverse impulses - the ‘free air' doctrine maintained by the common people of Europe, the critique of the philosophes and the urgency of slave resistance and black witness. The anti-slavery idea made gains thanks to a succession of historic upheavals. But the remaining slave systems - in the U.S. South, Cuba and Brazil - were in many ways as strong as ever. They were only overturned thanks to the momentous clashes unleashed by the U.S. Civil War, Cuba's fight for independence and the terminal crisis of the Brazilian Empire.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin Blackburn is the author of THE MAKING OF NEW WORLD SLAVERY: FROM THE BAROQUE TO THE MODERN, 1492-1800 and THE OVERTHROW OF COLONIAL SLAVERY, 1776-1848. He teaches at the University of Essex in the UK and at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is a contributor to New Left Review and a member of its editorial committee.
DESCRIPTION - A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. In accounts of American history, Indigenous peoples are often treated as largely incidental—either obstacles to be overcome or part of a narrative separate from the arc of nation-building. Blackhawk. [shows] that Native communities have, instead, been inseparable from the American story all along.—Washington Post Book World, Books to Read in 2023. The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England’s crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk’s retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. He lives in New Haven, CT.
DESCRIPTION - in 1932, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon spoke to a crowd of black Chicagoans at the old Jack Johnson boxing ring, rallying their support for emigration to West Africa. in 1937, Celia Jane Allen traveled to Jim Crow Mississippi to organize rural black workers around black nationalist causes. in the late 1940s, from her home in Kingston, Jamaica, Amy Jacques Garvey launched an extensive letter-writing campaign to defend the Greater Liberia Bill, which would relocate 13 million black Americans to West Africa. Gordon, Allen, and Jacques Garvey--as well as Maymie De Mena, Ethel Collins, Amy Ashwood, and Ethel Waddell--are part of an overlooked and understudied group of black women who take center stage in Set the World on Fire, the first book to examine how black nationalist women engaged in national and global politics from the early twentieth century to the 1960s. Historians of the era generally portray the period between the Garvey movement of the 1920s and the Black Power movement of the 1960s as an era of declining black nationalist activism, but Keisha N. Blain reframes the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Cold War as significant eras of black nationalist--and particularly, black nationalist women's--ferment. in Chicago, Harlem, and the Mississippi Delta, from Britain to Jamaica, these women built alliances with people of color around the globe, agitating for the rights and liberation of black people in the United States and across the African diaspora. As pragmatic activists, they employed multiple protest strategies and tactics, combined numerous religious and political ideologies, and forged unlikely alliances in their struggles for freedom. Drawing on a variety of previously untapped sources, including newspapers, government records, songs, and poetry, Set the World on Fire highlights the flexibility, adaptability, and experimentation of black women leaders who demanded equal recognition and participation in global civil society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Keisha N. Blain teaches history at the University of Pittsburgh.
DESCRIPTION - SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND OF EXPERIENCE are Blake's most familiar poems. A few examples, such as ‘The Tyger' and ‘The Chimney Sweeper,' frequently appear in anthologies of English literature, in which the poems are often printed without Blake's evocative engravings. But Blake made collections of his Songs, first the INNOCENCE group alone in 1789, and then EXPERIENCE in 1794, combining the two in that year to make up a single volume. This facsimile edition is based on a unique copy in the collection of the Huntington Library that shows how Blake used coloring style and pen and ink additions to make a unified book out of fifty-four individual engravings. Based on new digital photography, this edition also captures the designs and coloring as closely as possible. The plates are followed by a transcription of the poems. Robert N. Essick's commentary includes a brief biography of Blake and interprets each poem in dialogue with the other Songs. Essick also explores the political and historical contexts of the poems. Newcomers to Blake will find a thorough grounding in his unusual art and language, while experts will encounter fresh discoveries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Blake (28 November 1757 - 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form ‘what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language'. His visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him ‘far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced'. Although he lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in Felpham he produced a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced the imagination as ‘the body of God', or ‘Human existence itself'. Considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of both the Romantic movement and ‘Pre-Romantic', for its large appearance in the 18th century. Reverent of the Bible but hostile to the Church of England - indeed, to all forms of organised religion - Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American revolutions, as well as by such thinkers as Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg. Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Rossetti characterised Blake as a ‘glorious luminary,' and as ‘a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors'. Robert N. Essick, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Riverside, is the author of numerous books on William Blake.
DESCRIPTION - Though he inspired a generation of Russian poets, including Pasternak, Alexander Blok has yet to be widely recognized in the West. Torn between accepting the Revolution, with its attendant excesses, and betraying his ideals, he chose to stay in Russia until he died in 1921, although he was regarded with suspicion by both sides and suffered increasing disillusionment. This collection of poems from every stage of his life, jointly translated by a linguist and a poet, aims to introduce the English reader to the distinctive and influential voice of Alexander Blok. Penguin Modern European Poets includes selected work by the following poets - Akhmatova, Amichai, Apollinaire, Blok, Bobrowski/Bienek, Celan, Ekelöf, Enzensberger, Four Greek Poets: Cavafy/Elytis/ Gatsos/Seferis, Grass, Guillevic, Haavikko/ Transtromer, Holan, Holub, Kovner/Sachs, Montale, Pavese, Pessoa, Popa, PrEvert, Quasimodo, Rilke, Three Czech Poets: Nezval/Bartusek/ Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Weores/Juhász, Yevtushenko. The verse translations are by, among others, W. H. Auden, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Hamburger, Ted Hughes, J. B. Leishman, Christopher Middleton and David Wevill.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (28 November 1880 - 7 August 1921) was a Russian lyrical poet. Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg State University. After his parents' separation, Blok lived with aristocratic relatives at the manor Shakhmatovo near Moscow, where he discovered the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov, and the verse of then-obscure 19th-century poets, Fyodor Tyutchev and Afanasy Fet. These influences would affect his early publications, later collected in the book Ante Lucem. In 1903 he married Lyubov (Lyuba) Dmitrievna Mendeleeva, daughter of the renowned chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. Later, she would involve him in a complicated love-hate relationship with his fellow Symbolist Andrei Bely. To Lyuba he dedicated a cycle of poetry that made him famous, Stikhi o prekrasnoi Dame (Verses About the Beautiful Lady, 1904). During the last period of his life, Blok emphasized political themes, pondering the messianic destiny of his country (Vozmezdie, 1910–21; Rodina, 1907–16; Skify, 1918). Influenced by Solovyov's doctrines, he had vague apocalyptic apprehensions and often vacillated between hope and despair.
DESCRIPTION - Is the United States a force for democracy? From China in the 1940s to Guatemala today, William Blum provides the most comprehensive study of the ongoing American holocaust, serving up a forensic overview of U.S. foreign policy spanning sixty years. Covering U.S. intervention in more than 50 countries, KILLING HOPE describes the grim role played by the U.S. in overthrowing governments, perverting elections, assassinating leaders, suppressing revolutions, manipulating trade unions and manufacturing "news." For those who want the details on our most famous -actions (Chile, Cuba, Vietnam, to name a few), and for those who want to learn about our lesser-known efforts (France, China, Bolivia, Brazil, for example), this book provides a window on what our foreign policy goals really are. William Blum is the author of Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower .Remarks from the previous edition: "Far and away the best book on the topic." - Noam Chomsky "A valuable reference for anyone interested in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy." - Choice "I enjoyed it immensely." - Gore Vidal "The single most useful summary of CIA history." - John Stockwell "Each chapter I read makes me more and more angry." - Helen Caldicott "A very useful piece of work, daunting in scope, important." - Thomas Powers, author and Pulitzer Prize--winning journalist "A very valuable book. The research and organization are extremely impressive." - A.J. Langguth, author and former New York Times bureau chief.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Blum (born 6 March 1933) is an American author, historian, and critic of United States foreign policy. He worked in a computer related position at the United States Department of State in the mid-1960s. Initially an anti-communist with dreams of becoming a foreign service officer, he became disillusioned by the Vietnam War. He lives in Washington, DC. Blum left the State Department in 1967 and became a founder and editor of the Washington Free Press, the first "alternative" newspaper in the capital. In 1969, he wrote and published an exposE of the CIA in which were revealed the names and addresses of more than 200 CIA employees. He has worked as freelance journalist in the United States, Europe and South America. In 1972–1973 Blum worked as a journalist in Chile where he reported on the Allende government's "socialist experiment". In the mid-1970s, he worked in London with ex-CIA officer Philip Agee and his associates "on their project of exposing CIA personnel and their misdeeds". He supports himself with his writing and speaking engagements on college campuses. In his books and online columns, Blum devotes substantial attention to CIA interventions and assassination plots. Noam Chomsky has called Blum's book on the CIA, "far and away the best book on the topic." He has supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns. He circulates a monthly newsletter by email called "The Anti-Empire Report". Blum has described his life's mission as: "If not ending, at least slowing down the American Empire. At least injuring the beast. It's causing so much suffering around the world."
DESCRIPTION - This history deals with the twenty-year period between 1880 and 1900, when virtually all of Africa was seized and occupied by the Imperial Powers of Europe. Eurocentric points of view have dominated the study of this era, but in this book, one of Africa's leading historians reinterprets the colonial experiences from the perspective of the colonized.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Albert Kwadwo Adu Boahen (May 24, 1932 - May 24, 2006) was a Ghanaian academic, historian, and politician. He was an academic at the University of Ghana from 1959 to 1990, since 1971 as a professor. As a politician, he notably was a candidate in the 1992 Ghanaian presidential election, representing the main opposition New Patriotic Party.
DESCRIPTION - Both the poets included in this volume were born in East Germany and have experienced the desolation of exile. Bobrowski, whose international reputation was established by 1965 when he died, describes the essence of his homeland in language that is controlled, precise and stark. Bienek, the younger poet, is at present living in West Germany. His poetry, not previously published in England, probes the wounds inflicted by four years in a Russian prison camp.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johannes Bobrowski was born in 1917 in Tilsit in East Prussia, and educated in Rastenburg, Konigsberg and at Humboldt University in Berlin. His first book of poetry was published in 1961 and quickly established his international reputation. He wrote four volumes of poetry, two novels, and several collections of short stories. A selection of these stories, DARKNESS AND A LITTLE LIGHT, was published by New Directions. Bobrowski died in East Berlin in 1965. Horst Bienek (May 7, 1930, Gleiwitz - December 7, 1990, Munich) was a German novelist. Born in Gleiwitz, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland), Bienek was forced to leave there in 1945, when Germans were expelled from Silesia. He resettled in the eastern part of Germany. For a time, he was a student of Bertolt Brecht. In 1951, he was arrested by NKVD and sentenced to 25 years of labour in Vorkuta, a gulag. When he was released as the result of an amnesty in 1955, he settled in West Germany. Bienek was the winner of numerous prizes, including the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1981. His best known work is the four-volume series of novels dealing with the prelude to World War II and the war itself, Gleiwitz, Eine oberschlesische Chronik in vier Romanen.
DESCRIPTION - Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño's life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa - a fictional Juárez - on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed ‘by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time' (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),' and as ‘the real thing and the rarest' (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Romulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
DESCRIPTION - New Year's Eve, 1975: Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, founders of the visceral realist movement in poetry, leave Mexico City in a borrowed white Impala. Their quest: to track down the obscure, vanished poet Cesárea Tinajero. A violent showdown in the Sonora desert turns search to flight; twenty years later Belano and Lima are still on the run. The explosive first long work by ‘the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time' (Ilan Stavans, Los Angeles Times), THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES follows Belano and Lima through the eyes of the people whose paths they cross in Central America, Europe, Israel, and West Africa. This chorus includes the muses of visceral realism, the beautiful Font sisters; their father, an architect interned in a Mexico City asylum; a sensitive young follower of Octavio Paz; a foul-mouthed American graduate student; a French girl with a taste for the Marquis de Sade; the great-granddaughter of Leon Trotsky; a Chilean stowaway with a mystical gift for numbers; the anorexic heiress to a Mexican underwear empire; an Argentinian photojournalist in Angola; and assorted hangers-on, detractors, critics, lovers, employers, vagabonds, real-life literary figures, and random acquaintances. A polymathic descendant of Borges and Pynchon, Roberto Bolaño traces the hidden connection between literature and violence in a world where national boundaries are fluid and death lurks in the shadow of the avant-garde. THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES is a dazzling original, the first great Latin American novel of the twenty-first century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Author of 2666 and many other acclaimed works, Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003) was born in Santiago, Chile, and later lived in Mexico, Paris, and Spain. He has been acclaimed ‘by far the most exciting writer to come from south of the Rio Grande in a long time' (Ilan Stavans, The Los Angeles Times),' and as ‘the real thing and the rarest' (Susan Sontag). Among his many prizes are the extremely prestigious Herralde de Novela Award and the Premio Romulo Gallegos. He was widely considered to be the greatest Latin American writer of his generation. He wrote nine novels, two story collections, and five books of poetry, before dying in July 2003 at the age of 50.
DESCRIPTION - In her prologue to HOUSE OF MIST, Maria-Luisa Bombal writes: I wish to inform the reader that even though this is a mystery, it is a mystery without murder. He will not find here any corpse, any detective; he will not even find a murder trial, for the simple reason that theft will be no murderer. Theft will be no murderer and no murder, yet there will be. crime. And there will be fear. Those for whom fear has an attraction; those who are interested in the mysterious life people live in their dreams during sleep; those who believe that the dead are not really dead; those who are afraid of the fog and of their own hearts. they will perhaps enjoy going back to the early days of this century and entering into the strange house of mist that a young woman, very much like all other women, built for herself at the southern end of South America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - María Luisa Bombal Anthes (Viña del Mar, 8 June 1910 - 6 May 1980) was a Chilean author. Daughter of Martín Bombal Videla and Blanca Anthes Precht. Her work is now highly regarded, incorporating themes of eroticism, surrealism and feminism, and she ranks among a small number of Latin American female authors whose works received worldwide acclaim. Following the death of her father, Martín Bombal Videla, in 1922, the twelve-year-old María Luisa was sent to Paris, where she studied at the college Sainte Geneviève. At the institute for literature at the University of Paris she studied literature and philosophy until her return to South America. She had also attended the LycEe La Bruyère and the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. After her return, she married Elogio Sánchez, who did not share her interest in literature. During their marriage, Bombal began to suffer from depression, and shot her husband after a failed suicide attempt, although he survived. With the help of friends, María Bombal fled the country to Argentina, where in 1933 she met Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires. In 1940, she and her third husband emigrated to the USA, where she lived until 1971, when she returned to South America; living first in Argentina and then in Viña del Mar, Chile. There, the 18th September 1976, Bombal again met Jorge Luis Borges. She remained in Chile until her death in 1980.
DESCRIPTION - As night was beginning to fall, slowly her eyes opened. Oh, a little, just a little, It was as if, hidden behind her long lashes, she was trying to see.' ‘And in the glow of the tall candles, those who were keeping watch leaned forward to observe the clarity and transparency in that narrow fringe of pupil death had failed to slim. With wonder and reverence, they leaned forward, tin- aware that she could see them, ‘For she was seeing, she was feeling. ‘ In the same delicately haunting style she used in HOUSE OF MIST, Maria-Luisa Bombal tells the story of a beautiful and violent woman, who sees clearly, only after death, the intricate pattern which her passing made in the lives of those who were close to her, The spell of the mists and shadows of Chile and of the colorful people of that strange and romantic country is woven compellingly to create a tale as vivid as a dream.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - María Luisa Bombal Anthes (Viña del Mar, 8 June 1910 - 6 May 1980) was a Chilean author. Daughter of Martín Bombal Videla and Blanca Anthes Precht. Her work is now highly regarded, incorporating themes of eroticism, surrealism and feminism, and she ranks among a small number of Latin American female authors whose works received worldwide acclaim. Following the death of her father, Martín Bombal Videla, in 1922, the twelve-year-old María Luisa was sent to Paris, where she studied at the college Sainte Geneviève. At the institute for literature at the University of Paris she studied literature and philosophy until her return to South America. She had also attended the LycEe La Bruyère and the Sorbonne at the University of Paris. After her return, she married Elogio Sánchez, who did not share her interest in literature. During their marriage, Bombal began to suffer from depression, and shot her husband after a failed suicide attempt, although he survived. With the help of friends, María Bombal fled the country to Argentina, where in 1933 she met Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda in Buenos Aires. In 1940, she and her third husband emigrated to the USA, where she lived until 1971, when she returned to South America; living first in Argentina and then in Viña del Mar, Chile. There, the 18th September 1976, Bombal again met Jorge Luis Borges. She remained in Chile until her death in 1980.
DESCRIPTION - Following the evolution of mass market publishing - cover to cover to cover - in this delightful celebration of paperback books. From the wonderfully lurid covers of the forties and fifties (featuring ‘fleshy female victims of mayhem and murder') to today's specialized genre styles, this fascinating history focuses on paperback covers - the crucial factor in catching the eye and selling the book. The splendid illustrations and the odd facts, colorful anecdotes, and insider's insights make Under Cover a rare treat for pop-culture buffs, designers, collectors, and book people of all kinds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas L. Bonn, Librarian at the State University of New York, College at Cortland, is the author of Paperback Primer: A Guide for Collectors and Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks.
DESCRIPTION - Marita Bonner (1899-1971), prize-winning author of short stories, plays, and essays, is virtually unknown today. Born and educated in Boston and Cambridge, a writer and member of Georgia Douglas Johnson's "S" Street Salon in Washington, D.C., and a teacher, wife, and mother in Chicago, Bonner is one of America's most vital twentieth-century black writers. Here for the first time in book form are her collected works. Bonner's stories, essays, and plays, many of which were originally published in the black magazines "Crisis" and "Opportunity" between 1925 and 1941, describe black working-class life in Chicago. The setting is Frye Street, Bonner's fictional neighborhood, a melting pot where many different ethnic groups struggle to survive in the face of extreme poverty, racism, and violence. Listen to how she evokes the atmosphere of the place in the story "Nothing New": "You have been down on Frye Street. You know how it runs. from freckled-faced tow heads to yellow Orientals; from broad Italy to broad Georgia, from hooked nose to square black noses. How it lisps in French, how it babbles in Italian, how it gurgles in German, how it drawls and crawls through the Black Belt dialects. Frye Street flows nicely together. It is like muddy water. Like muddy water in a brook." "Frye Street and Environs" is a rich and rewarding collection. Opening with two essays, the most famous of which is the poignant autobiographical "One Being Young--a Woman--and Colored," the book also contains three plays and 22 short stories. "The Purple Flower," an experimental dramatic allegory about the back quest for freedom and happiness in the post-Emancipation U.S., is probably the best know of her plays. Her short stories--works like "The Prison-Bound," "Drab Rambles," "Tin Can," "The Makin's," and "Hate Is Nothing"--offer an extraordinary glimpse into the lives of working-class blacks, exploring the interlocking themes of color prejudice, alienation of the Southern black migrant, ethnic clashes, tensions in interracial romance, the psychological devastation of racism, poverty, thwarted ambition, and the problems of black female aspiration. "There is only one Frye Street," wrote Marita Bonner, but "all the world is there." Until now, Bonner's fictional universe has been known to only a select few. With the publication of "Frye Street and Environs," her audience will grow as many readers encounter for the first time the thoughts and passions of the people in this unforgettable neighborhood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marita Bonner (June 16, 1899 - December 7, 1971), also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew.
DESCRIPTION - The best writer of short stories in Spanish today, perhaps the best of the century, Jorge Luis Borges was co-winner of the International Publishers Prize for 1961. This award, the current publication of his work in book form in the United States, and the publication of his complete works in German translation and several volumes in French at last bring him the international renown many have long believed should be his. Borges was formed by influences as diverse as those of German Expressionism and scientific rationalism. As the translator of Gide, Kafka, Faulkner, Whitman, Melville, and Virginia Woolf, he is at home in the literatures of Germany, France, England, and the United States, as well as those of Spain and his native South America. Compacted of these international materials, his stories have an astonishing range of allusion and thought. Despite their many-layered character, these stories are readily accessible and attractive on first approach. Borges' Poe-like tales have turned up in the pages of the Ellery Queen annual of mystery stories. He writes with a fine edge of irony that delights lovers of good satire. His style - laconic, incisive - has attracted a following of pursuers of the best in writing. His easy handling of many backgrounds, leaping from Prague under the heel of the Third Reich to the Dublin of the Irish Revolutionary Army and back to his native Argentina, lends an intriguing diversity of setting to his stories. The International Publishers Prize was established in 1960 by outstanding publishers from six countries: Librairie Gallimard of France, Giulio Einaudi of Italy, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag of Germany, Weidenfeld & Nicolson of Britain, Editorial Seix Barral of Spain, and Grove Press, Inc. of the United States. It provides an award of $10,000 to an author of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, have a lasting influence on the development of modern literature. The aim of the prize, in addition to recognition of exceptional merit, is to bring the author's work to the attention of the largest possible international audience. The 1961 award, the first made, was shared by Samuel Beckett, for his novel Comment C'est, and Jorge Luis Borges for Ficciones. JORGE LUIS BORGES was born in 1899 in Buenos Aires. He was educated in Europe, and returned to Argentina in 1921, where he pioneered ultraismo, the Spanish equivalent of German Expressionism. In poetry, the new idea was close to that of Imagism: intensity of image and replacement of rhyme. In the story form, Borges became the chronicler of the harsh life of the slums. With Ricardo Güiraldes, he founded the journal Proa. His later work shows evidence of concern with metaphysics and the Occult, as well as with the detective story and the work of James Joyce. Borges lost his sight from an inherited sickness but, with the secretarial help of his mother, has continued to write. ‘Once the outside world interfered too much,' he has said. ‘Now the world is all inside me. And I see better, for I can see all the things I dream.' Since the fall of Juan Peron, whom he opposed, Borges has been Director of the National Library of Argentina.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of stories and essays introduces to America one of the leading figures of Latin American literature, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his preface Andre Maurois writes: ‘Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention and their tight, almost mathematical style.' LABYRINTHS contains thirty-eight of Borges finest ‘fictions,' essays and parables. The stories, which have been compared to those of Kafka, might be classed as ‘highbrow science fiction' or ‘intellectual detective stories' were it not for the undertones of deeper meaning which place them at a far higher level. Borges has been recognized around the world as a writer of the first rank. He shared with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers' Prize in 1961. The translations are by Harriet de Onis, Anthony Kerrigan and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as a bibliography of Borges' writings.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre.
DESCRIPTION - Tadeusz Borowski was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Dachau from 1943 to 1945. Collections of his concentration-camp stories were published in 1946 and 1948 and were highly acclaimed in Polish literary circles. He committed suicide in Warsaw a few years later. His stories are testimony to the kind of normality that must develop from even the most abnormal and horrifying situations. Prisoners eat, work, sleep, make friends, and even fall in love just a few yards from where thousands are systematically murdered every hour of every day; there were an athletic field and a brothel alongside the crematoria in Auschwitz. The most atrocious events become an accepted part of daily routine if they happen often enough: the ‘selections' for the gas chambers, the perpetual orange glow against the sky. ‘There is no crime that man will not commit to save himself,' he observes. The will to survive overrules every humane instinct, destroying mutual loyalty and love so that mothers deny their children and sons send fathers to their death. At the end of the book, the author has been liberated. Free and bewildered in the chaotic aftermath of the war, he is disgusted by his dulled sensibilities and lost humanity; his life is without meaning to him. Tadeusz Borowski was a fine and sensitive writer. His stories convey a situation which would seem beyond endurance and explain how humans adapted to endure it. But more than this, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen stands in its own right as a superbly written and indelible literary work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tadeusz Borowski was born in Zytomierz, Poland, in 1922. His early childhood was spent in the Ukraine, but he returned with his family to Warsaw in 1933. He studied Polish literature at Warsaw University and published his first volume of verse, Wherever the Earth, in 1942. The following year he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where he remained until 1945. In 1946 he returned to Warsaw, resumed his studies at the University, and also lectured as an assistant professor. A second volume of poetry, The Names of Currents, was published in 1945, and in 1946 the first of three collections of concentration-camp stories appeared in Munich. The other two collections, Farewell to Maria and A World of Stone, were published in Poland in 1948. Mr. Borowski also wrote for Polish literary magazines and was active in youth and social organizations. In July 1951 Tadeusz Borowski took his own life by turning on the gas - a fate he had miraculously escaped in Auschwitz.
DESCRIPTION - A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF THE 1970s FOR THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD. ‘The importance of the 1970s in explaining contemporary America and large parts of the world cannot be overstated. Borstelmann makes a clear and compelling point about how the decade's developments shaped or played out over the remainder of the century and beyond. The breadth of the book's material is extremely impressive and utterly up-to-date.' - Thomas Bender, author of A Nation Among Nations. The 1970s looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, Thomas Borstelmann creates a new framework for understanding that period and its legacy today. He demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more - and less - equal. Borstelmann explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America: Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the civil rights movement grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. Developments were not limited to the United States - many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China. Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective, The 1970s shows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations in American society and the world stage that continue to resonate in the present.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Borstelmann is the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. His other books include The Cold War and the Color Line and Apartheid's Reluctant Uncle. America in the World, Sven Beckert and Jeremi Suri, Series Editors.
DESCRIPTION - The term "Mexican Drug War" misleads. It implies that the ongoing bloodbath, which has now killed well over 100,000 people, is an internal Mexican affair. But this diverts attention from the U.S. role in creating and sustaining the carnage. It's not just that Americans buy drugs from, and sell weapons to, Mexico's murderous cartels. It's that ever since the U.S. prohibited the use and sale of drugs in the early 1900s, it has pressured Mexico into acting as its border enforcer--with increasingly deadly consequences. Mexico was not a helpless victim. Powerful forces within the country profited hugely from supplying Americans with what their government forbade them. But the policies that spawned the drug war have proved disastrous for both countries. Written by two award-winning authors, one American and the other Mexican, A Narco History reviews the interlocking twentieth-century histories that produced this twenty-first century calamity, and proposes how to end it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carmen Boullosa has published fifteen novels, most recently Tejas, La virgen y el violín, El complot de los románticos and Las paredes hablan. Her novels in English translation are Texas: The Great Theft; They're Cows, We're Pigs; Leaving Tabasco and Cleopatra Dismounts. She has received the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize in Mexico, the Anna Seghers and Liberaturpreis in Germany, and the Cafe Gijon Prize in Madrid. She is a member of Mexico's Sistema Nacional de Creadores. Mike Wallace, Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center, and founder of the Gotham Center for New York City History, won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford University Press), co-written with Edwin Burrows. He is a co-founder of the Radical History Review and author of the essay collection Mickey Mouse History (1996).
DESCRIPTION - 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 prose fiction in modern American letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
DESCRIPTION - Eccentric, adventurous Christina Goering Meets the anxious but equally enterprising Mrs. Copperfield at a party. Two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves, they go in search of salvation: Mrs. Copperfield visits Panama with her husband, where she finds solace among the women who live and work in its brothels; while Miss Goering becomes involved with various men. At the end the two women meet again, each changed by her experience. Mysterious, profound, anarchic and very funny, TWO SERIOUS LADIES is a daring, original work that defies analysis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jane Bowles (born Jane Sydney Auer; February 22, 1917 - May 4, 1973) was an American writer and playwright. Born into a Jewish family in New York, Jane Bowles spent her childhood in Woodmere, New York, on Long Island. She developed tuberculous arthritis of the knee as a teenager and her mother took her to Switzerland for treatment, where she attended boarding school. As a teenager she returned to New York, where she gravitated to the intellectual bohemia of Greenwich Village. She married writer and composer Paul Bowles in 1938. In 1943 her novel Two Serious Ladies was published. The Bowleses lived in New York until 1947, when Paul moved to Tangier, Morocco; Jane followed him in 1948. While in Morocco, Jane had an intense and complicated relationship with a Moroccan woman named Cherifa. She also had a close relationship with torch singer Libby Holman. Jane Bowles wrote the play In The Summer House, which was performed on Broadway in 1953 to mixed reviews. Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery considered her to be one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction. Bowles, who suffered from alcoholism, had a stroke in 1957 at age 40. Her health continued to decline, despite various treatments in England and the United States, until she had to be admitted to a clinic in Málaga, Spain, where she died in 1973.
DESCRIPTION - Despite the fact that many of them have appeared in out-of-the-way places, the stories of Paul Bowles have already created a sensation among critics and low and fellow-writers. Of the seventeen stories in this volume, all but one are set in Arab North Africa, the Far East or Latin America. They share an almost Gothic preoccupation with violence - particularly that violence arising out of the clash of the Westerner with the alien world of the East.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Frederic Bowles (December 30, 1910 - November 18, 1999) was an American expatriate composer, author, and translator. Following a cultured middle-class upbringing in New York City, during which he displayed a talent for music and writing, Bowles pursued his education at the University of Virginia before making various trips to Paris in the 1930s. He studied music with Aaron Copland, and in New York wrote music for various theatrical productions, as well as other compositions. He achieved critical and popular success with the publication in 1949 of his first novel The Sheltering Sky, set in what was known as French North Africa, which he had visited in 1931. In 1947 Bowles settled in Tangier, Morocco, and his wife, Jane Bowles followed in 1948. Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) during the early 1950s, Tangier was his home for the remaining 52 years of his life. Paul Bowles died in 1999 at the age of 88. His ashes are buried in Lakemont Cemetery in upstate New York.
DESCRIPTION - Fictional scientist's memoir of a distopian totalitarian state, of which he is a cog, having developed a drug used to destroy privacy of thought - a 'truth serum'. The author, born in 1900, took her own life in 1941. First published in Swedish in 1940, after the author visited Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; much later nominated for a Retro-Hugo award, filmed as a television miniseries in 1981, often compared to 1984 and Brave New World.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karin Maria Boye (October 26, 1900 - April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist. Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, ‘Clouds' (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish ClartE League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist. In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated ‘The Waste Land‘. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be ‘Yes, of course it hurts' (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and ‘In motion' (I rörelse) from her collections of poems ‘The Hearths' (Härdarna), 1927, and ‘For the sake of the tree' (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Boye's novel ‘Crisis' (Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels ‘Merit awakens' (Merit vaknar) and ‘Too little' (För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel Kallocain. Inspired by her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 and her visit to Germany during the rise of Nazism, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Orwell's magnum opus). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum. Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to another ClartE member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye. During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933 she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as ‘her wife'. Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping pills after leaving home on 23 April 1941. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on April 27, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone. Margot Hanel committed suicide shortly thereafter. Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem ‘Dead Amazon' (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as ‘Very dark and with large eyes'. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled ‘Dead friend' (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain. A literary association dedicated to her work was created in 1983, keeping her work alive by spreading it among new readers. In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named in her honour.
DESCRIPTION - From a brilliant young novelist who has already been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Tom Robbins, here is a hilarious and pyrotechnic yarn about marijuana farming in northern California. Its hero is Felix, an oddly attractive 31-year-old wastrel who has taken a left turn from the mainstream but is still powered by its illusions. He has run out on practically everything in his life - the Boy Scouts, graduate school, his wife - and now he has hit a solitary low point. As he tells it, ‘I woke alone, I flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone.' He is, in short, ready to be talked into farming a crop of sinsemilla by his enterprising friend Vogelsang, an entrepreneur who collects antique esoterica, cases of dry red wine from little vineyards with names like Goat's Crouch, and girls like the punkette Aorta, a singer with an all-female group called the Nostrils. Felix enlists two other lost souls in this pastoral labor: an old school Friend named Phil Cherniske and Phil's 200-pound housemate, Gesh. Together the three of them set off for the lonely hills of northern California where - sustained by booze, exotic chemicals, masculine conversation, and the occasional woman - they propose, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, to carry off a major agricultural coop worth more than a million dollars. But they haven't reckoned with the not-so-benevolent neighborliness of the farmer on the next hill and his mentally unbalanced son, or the depredations of wildlife (ranging from rats to a bear) and the vicissitudes of nature, or the havoc wrought on their necessarily hermetic solitude by the lusts of the flesh. And most of all they haven't prepared for the fact that Felix will undertake - on behalf of a wayward sculptress with whom he has fallen improbably in love - a one-man vendetta against a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak. What follows is an irresistible, exuberant narrative that brings its author's full-throttle wit and dazzling gift for storytelling into balance with deeply sympathetic characterizations and an affirmative moral vision. As Salman Rushdie said of WATER MUSIC, Mr. Boyle's first novel, ‘Gulp it down; it beats getting drunk.'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
DESCRIPTION - Haunted by the burden of his family's traitorous past, woozy with pot, cheap wine, and sex, and disturbed by a frighteningly real encounter with some family ghosts, Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history. It will lead Walter to search for his lost father. And it will send the story into the past of the Hudson River Valley, from the late 1960s back to the anticommunist riots of the 1940s, to the late seventeenth century, where the long-hidden secrets of three families--the aristocratic Van Warts, the Native-American Mohonks, and Walter's own ancestors, the Van Brunts--will be revealed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.
DESCRIPTION - Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague - and the imagined homelands of exiles - Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From JURASSIC PARK to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Svetlana Boym (April 29, 1966, Saint Petersburg, Russia - August 5, 2015, Boston, MA) was the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literatures at Harvard University, and a media artist, playwright and novelist. She was an associate of the Graduate School of Design and Architecture at Harvard University. Much of her work focused on developing the new theoretical concept of the off-modern. Boym was born in Leningrad, USSR. She studied Spanish at the Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad. She received an M.A. from Boston University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. Boym's written work explored relationships between utopia and kitsch, memory and modernity, and homesickness and the sickness of home. Her research interests included 20th-century Russian literature, cultural studies, comparative literature and literary studies. In addition to teaching and writing, Boym also sat on the Editorial Collective of the interdisciplinary scholarly journal Public Culture. Boym was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Cabot Award for Research in Humanities, and an award from the American Council of Learned Societies. She won a Gilette Company Fellowship which provided her half a year study at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2006, Boym's media art exhibit opened in Factory Rog Art Space in Ljubljana during the City of Women Festival. She also curated the exhibit "Territories of Terror: Memories and Mythologies of Gulag in Contemporary Russian-American Art" at Boston's University Art Gallery. Boym died on August 5, 2015, aged 56, in Boston, Massachusetts, following a year-long battle with cancer.
DESCRIPTION - In the past, collections of Bradbury's works have juxtaposed stories with no indication as to the different time periods in which they were written. Even the mid- and late-career collections that Bradbury himself compiled contained stories that were written much earlier--a situation that has given rise to misconceptions about the origins of the stories themselves. In this new edition, editors William F. Touponce and Jonathan R. Eller present for the first time the stories of Ray Bradbury in the order in which they were written. Moreover, they use texts that reflect Bradbury's earliest settled intention for each tale. By examining his relationships with his agent, editor, and publisher, Touponce and Eller's textual commentaries document the transformation of the stories--and Bradbury's creative understanding of genre fiction--from their original forms to the versions known and loved today. Volume 1 covers the years 1938 to 1943 and contains thirteen stories that have never appeared in a Bradbury collection. For those that were previously published, the original serial forms recovered in this volume differ in significant ways from the versions that Bradbury popularized over the ensuing years. By documenting the ways the stories evolved over time, Touponce and Eller unveil significant new information about Bradbury's development as a master of short fiction. Each volume in the proposed eight-volume edition includes a general introduction, chronology, summary of unpublished stories, textual commentary for each story, textual apparatus, and chronological catalog. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited to the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association's seal of approval for scholarly editions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films. Jonathan R. Eller is Chancellor's Professor of English, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and senior textual editor of the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. He coedited Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury with founding editor emeritus William F. Touponce, with whom he also coauthored Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (The Kent State University Press, 2004). Eller is author of Becoming Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury Unbound (forthcoming), extensive studies of Bradbury's early and middle career.
DESCRIPTION - The original versions of an American master's best-known tales. Ray Bradbury spent decades refashioning many of his early pulp and mainstream magazine stories to form the intricate story-cycle tapestries of The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine; other tales were revised or rewritten for such timeless collections as Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and The October Country. These volumes represent wonderful and enduring fictional masks for the author, but they are not his original masks. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury series returns to the earliest surviving forms of his oldest published tales, presenting many of them in versions not seen since the 1940s and early 1950s, when the Golden Age of the American magazine began to pass into history. The restoration of these texts is a scholarly enterprise, including searches through long-lost typescripts, hundreds of elusive magazine issues, and thousands of textual variants, seeking to restore the author's earliest intentions for his first published stories. Jonathan R. Eller's textual commentaries document the history of the composition and publication of the stories - and Bradbury's emerging understanding of genre fiction - from their original forms to the versions best known today. The second volume of the series includes twenty-five stories written between April 1943 and March 1944, and it contains eight stories that Bradbury never placed in his own story collections. These tales document an incredibly productive year that saw the twenty-three-year-old writer move ever closer to becoming a masterful teller of timeless stories. For many of them, the original serial forms recovered in this volume differ significantly from the versions Bradbury popularized in his subsequent collections. For three of these stories, the original typescripts survive, making it possible to establish the critical text directly from the author's unstyled spellings and punctuation. By documenting the way the stories evolved over time, Eller reveals crucial new information about Bradbury's maturing creativity and poetic prose style. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited in compliance with the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association's seal of approval for scholarly editions. Each volume includes a general introduction, biographical timeline, summary of unpublished stories, historical commentaries for each story, textual apparatus, and a chronological catalog.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films. Jonathan R. Eller is Chancellor's Professor of English, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and senior textual editor of the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. He coedited Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury with founding editor emeritus William F. Touponce, with whom he also coauthored Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (The Kent State University Press, 2004). Eller is author of Becoming Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury Unbound (forthcoming), extensive studies of Bradbury's early and middle career.
DESCRIPTION - Though it highlights just one year of writing, this third volume of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury represents a crucial moment at the midpoint of his first full decade as a professional writer. The original versions of the 1940s stories recovered for The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury, presented in the order in which they were written and first sent off to find life in the magazine market, suggest that Bradbury's masks didn't always appeal to his editors. The Volume 3 stories were all written between March 1944 and March 1945, and the surviving letters of this period reveal the private conflict raging between Bradbury's efforts to define a distinct style and creative vision at home in Los Angeles and the tyranny of genre requirements imposed by the distant pulp publishing world in New York. Most of the twenty-two stories composed during this pivotal year in his development reflect the impact of these creative pressures. This period also produced important markers in his maturing creativity with The Miracles of Jamie, Invisible Boy, and Ylla, which were among the first wave of Bradbury tales to reach the mainstream markets. The early versions of Bradbury's stories recovered for Volume 3, some emerging from his surviving typescripts and several that restore lost text preserved only in the rare Canadian serial versions, provide an unprecedented snapshot of his writing and his inspirations. Underlying this year of creativity was the expanding world of readings in modern and contemporary literature that would prove to be a crucial factor in his development as a master storyteller. The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury is edited in compliance with the highest scholarly standards by the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies and bears the Modern Language Association's seal of approval for scholarly editions. Each volume includes a general introduction, biographical timeline, summary of unpublished stories, historical commentaries for each story, textual apparatus, and a chronological catalog.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films. Jonathan R. Eller is Chancellor's Professor of English, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, and senior textual editor of the Institute for American Thought at Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis. He coedited Volume 1 of The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury with founding editor emeritus William F. Touponce, with whom he also coauthored Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction (The Kent State University Press, 2004). Eller is author of Becoming Ray Bradbury and Ray Bradbury Unbound (forthcoming), extensive studies of Bradbury's early and middle career.
DESCRIPTION - Here are sixteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin - visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness, the sight of gray dust selling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere, the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Ray Bradbury's THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster's premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world. Drops four stories from earlier American edition and adds two stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, science fiction, horror and mystery fiction writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction and horror stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into comic books, television shows and films.
DESCRIPTION - The legends say something happened in Chaneysville. THE CHANEYSVILLE INCIDENT is the powerful story of a man's obsession with discovering what that something was, what it had to do with the deaths of his slave great-grandfather and his moonshiner father, and what it has to do with him. John Washington has a doctorate in history and is a professor at a major university, an escapee from his small-town black origins. He is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call telling him that Old Jack Crawley is dying. To the people of John's home town Jack Crawley is the strange, unkempt old man who shines shoes and lives in a shack in the woods. To John he is the man who was his father's best friend and the person who became his spiritual mentor when his father died a mysterious death. He taught John to hunt and fish, to become an expert woodsman, and most of all he told John stories. He told John of his father, who began as a moonshiner and ended as the wealthy and most influential black member of the community. And he told the tales that had been passed on about his forebears and the troubled history of his small, rural Pennsylvania town. Before Jack dies he tells John one more story. And we realize that John really has not escaped his home town, nor his own past, nor can he escape the strange bequest left him on Old Jack's passing. Slowly John comes to know that he can never come to terms with his feelings for his father, his relationship with a warm, loving white woman; indeed, he cannot go on with his life until he can solve the dual mysteries of how his father died and what dark secret of his family's past his father was trying to uncover when he died. Once John sets out to untangle the twisted skein of his family history, an obsessive, almost demonic force is set into motion. And there is no release until the final page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Henry Bradley, Jr., born September 7, 1950 in Bedford, Pennsylvania, is an associate professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon and author of South Street and the The Chaneysville Incident, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1982. The Chaneysville Incident, inspired in part by the real-life discovery of the graves of a group of runaway slaves on a farm near Chaneysville in Bedford County, PA, where Bradley was born, also earned Bradley a 1982 Academy Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Bradley has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in periodicals and newspapers such as Esquire, Redbook, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. He also appeared on the June 12, 2011 episode of 60 Minutes in a segment regarding the censored version of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
DESCRIPTION - In his own words, Tom is an insignificant man, powerless to affect changes even in himself let alone in others. He is pathologically normal, with ‘something of Buster Keaton' to him. Yet an initially harmless fabrication motivated by his love for a woman will move him to center stage in one of the 20th century's most infamous conflicts and will ultimately change the course of history. Tom is in love with Tola, an actress of the Warsaw stage. Tola, sadly, loves another, a celebrated and charismatic actor named Cezar. But despite his unrequited love, Tom cannot help being concerned for Tola. Following the Nazi occupation of Warsaw at the outset of WWII, when she tells him she wishes to enlist in the Polish Resistance, he conceives of an imaginary political cadre, ‘Rondo,' and cleverly conscripts his beloved actress into it. The idea is innocent at first, little more than a flight of Tom's fantasy designed to protect his beloved from the tribulations of the real Resistance. But through its own comic momentum, Rondo unexpectedly becomes a major force in the Polish underground. When Tom is drawn into the internal politics of the Resistance, the results are not only highly entertaining but telling of the eternal follies of war. Can a game, an innocent falsehood, become reality? Can a man in love who is otherwise ordinary in every way change history? In Rondo, a modern classic now available for the first time in paperback, Brandys explores many of the obsessions of twentieth century literature, giving us an eloquent statement on politics, war, and personal exile while telling a story that is nothing if not a touching and enthralling love story. One of the century's great literary figures, Brandys's voice has ‘quickened the conscience and enriched the writing of the twentieth century' (Time).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kazimierz Brandys was born in Poland in 1916. He was awarded numerous prizes, including the Jurzykowski (1982), Prato-Europa (1986) and Ignazio Silone (1986). He was made a member of the French Order of Fine Arts and Literature in 1993. Brandys died in France in 2000. Jaroslaw Anders immigrated to the United States from Poland in 1981. Since 1984 he has been an editor, writer and producer for Voice of America. His translations include Malcolm Bradbury's HOMO HISTORICUS and Hannah Krall's THE SUBTENANT.
DESCRIPTION - From the Abbey Lubbers (minor devils who were detailed to tempt monks to drunkenness, gluttony, and lasciviousness) to ‘Young Tam Lin' (the most important of the supernatural ballads) , An Encyclopedia of Fairies is a wonderful companion to the world of make-believe. Spanning ten centuries, this guided tour will enthrall anyone who has ever believed or even half-believed in supernatural creatures. In recent years, there has been an astonishing growth of interest in fairy tales and the magic world they represent. For adults as well as children, fairy tales have had the same appeal - and created many of the same worlds - as modern science fiction. From the Tolkien fans to the readers of Pantheon's Grimm's Fairy Tales or the Opies' book of classical fairy tales, to the serious university students of folklore and authors like Bruno Bettelheim, we see an increasing fascination with this mythological world. As a reference work, An Encyclopedia of Fairies is the first and only one, of its kind. But it is also a marvelous anthology, in which fairy tales are recounted as well as examined. In it one can not only learn about the appearance and customs of the varied inhabitants of the fairy world, but also read short essays on questions of the fairy economy, their food, their sports, their varying sizes and powers. One learns how to distinguish evil fairies from good ones (though even the good fairies can be formidable) ; the ways people traditionally protected themselves against the dangers of night travel - the piece of bread in the pocket, the ashen gad, the handful of salt, the turned jacket; the delightful spectacles which may be encountered accidentally ; and the manners and qualities which endear mortals to fairies. Twenty-one plates, 39 text figures, an extensive bibliography, and an index of types and motifs complete this fascinating journey through the land of enchantment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Katharine Briggs was born in 1898, one of the three daughters of Ernest Briggs, the water-colorist. She studied English at Oxford, earning her Ph.D. with a thesis on folklore in seventeenth-century literature, and became a D.Litt., Oxon., in 1969. Her writings include The Personnel of Fairyland, The Anatomy of Puck, Folktales of England, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, and the much-loved children's story Hobberdy Dick. She has been President of the English Folklore Society, has taught and lectured in American universities, and has made friends in many parts of the world.
DESCRIPTION - Very scarce novel set in Southern California in the 1920s, and a lost classic. One modern-day commentator has observed that the book was "killed by neglect" (receiving only a single review -- a pan -- in the Saturday Review of Literature), but as Kevin Starr relates in "Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s," its fate may have been a bit more complicated than that. The book was, in fact, a scabrously satirical portrait of Southern California's bohemian community, and in particular of prominent L.A. bookman Jake Zeitlin and his circle of friends and associates (who included Merle Armitage, Edward Weston and others). Since it was Zeitlin himself who had originally introduced the author to this group, he understandably viewed the book as an "insulting betrayal" (Starr's words). Zeitlin in fact took legal action against it. Starr observes that Brinig's caricature of Zeitlin ("Sol Mosier" in the book) was anti-Semitic "even by the most forgiving of standards," and Zeitlin, having seen a set of galleys prior to publication, threatened a lawsuit and thereby succeeded in having the most offensive passages removed from the book prior to publication. In spite of (or maybe because of) being out of print for over eighty years, the book has achieved a kind of quasi-mythic reputation, and has been cited as both a landmark in Southern California fiction and an early gay novel. David Fine, who discusses it at some length in his book Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, describes it as possibly "the strangest novel to come out of the territory -- a novel not set in Hollywood or dealing with the making of movies, but saturated with every fantasy and dream associated with the region." It has also been admired for its apocalyptic finale, in which the state of California is struck by a massive earthquake and falls into the ocean -- "not the first or the last time," writes Starr, "this fate would be dealt by fictionists to the Pacific Coast."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Myron Brinig (December 22, 1896 - May 13, 1991) was a Jewish-American author who wrote twenty-one novels from 1929 to 1958. Brinig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Romanian parents, but grew up in Butte, Montana. Brinig began studying at New York University in 1914, where poet Joyce Kilmer gave him lectures on writing. He then studied at Columbia University and started his career by writing short stories for magazines. Brinig's first novel, Madonna Without Child, was released in 1929. Published by Doubleday, the novel tells the story of a woman who is obsessed with another woman's baby. Many of Brinig's early novels depicted the settlement and development of Montana, the state he grew up in. These novels include Singermann (1929), Wide Open Town (1931), This Man Is My Brother (1932), and The Sun Sets in the West (1935). Brinig based the main character of these novels, Singermann, on his father, Maurice Brinig, who was a Romanian immigrant and shopkeeper. Brinig's novels often depicted miners, labor organizers, farmers, and businessmen living in Montana. These usually became bestsellers in the United States and were praised by critics of The New York Times. One of the best-selling novels, The Sisters, was adapted to a feature-length film in 1938, starring Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Brinig's novels often dealt with homosexuality, likely because he was a homosexual himself (although he was publicly closeted all his life). According to the Gay & Lesbian Literary Heritage, Brinig was the "first American Jewish novelist to write in any significant way about the gay experience." In 1951, The New York Times Book Review said Brinig's "sentimental streak and his sympathetic touch with characters usually lend his books a warm glow of humanity, if not of art." At the beginning of his career, Brinig was praised by critics for his "artistry and inventiveness in narrative, character and incident." In the early 1930s, he was described as one of the leading young writers in America. Brinig's last novels, however, were met with mixed reviews from critics, who criticized them for their "verbosity and banality." Brinig died on May 13, 1991. The cause of his death was gastrointestinal hemorrhage.
DESCRIPTION - Airing on ABC from 1957 to 1962, Maverick appeared at a key moment in television Western history and provided a distinct alternative to the genre's usual moralistic lawmen in its hero, Bret Maverick. A non-violent gambler and part-time con man, Maverick's principles revolved around pleasure and not power, and he added humor, satire, and irony to the usually grim-faced Western. In this study of Maverick, author Dennis Broe details how the popular series mocked, altered, and undermined the characteristics of other popular Westerns, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. Broe highlights the contributions made by its creators, its producer, Roy Huggins, and its lead actor, James Garner, to a format that was described as the American fairy tale. Broe describes how Garner and Huggins struck blows against a feudal studio system that was on its last legs in cinema but was being applied even more rigidly in television. He considers Maverick as a place where multiple counter-cultural discourses converged - including Baudelaire's Flaneur, Guy DeBord's Situationists, and Jack Kerouc's Beats - in a form that was acceptable to American households. Finally, Broe shows how the series' validation of Maverick's outside-the-law status punctured the Cold War rhetoric promoted by the adult Western. Broe also highlights the series' female con women or flaneuses, who were every bit the equal of their male counterparts and added additional layers to the traditional schoolteacher/showgirl Western dichotomy. Broe demonstrates the progressive nature of Maverick as it worked to counter the traditional studio mode of production, served as a locus of counter-cultural trends, and would ultimately become the lone outpost of anti–Cold War and anti-establishment sentiments within the Western genre. Maverick fans and scholars of American television history will enjoy this close look at the classic series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dennis Broe's books include Class, Crime and International Film Noir: Globalizing America's Dark Art; Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood; Cold War Expressionism: Perverting the Politics of Perception; and the forthcoming The End of Leisure and the Birth of the Binge: Hyperindustrialism and Television Seriality. His television criticism segment, ‘Broe on the Global Television Beat' appears on Arts Express on WBAI in New York and on the Pacifica Radio Network. He is a professor of film and television studies at Long Island University.
DESCRIPTION - In these poems of contemporary Negro life a new and talented young writer relates with sincerity, perception and stunning power her feelings about her people. A Street in Bronzeville is the collected impression of the small, everyday matters which make up the substance of experience in a large city - the poignant illumination of a Negro Sunday with its small possible pleasures, its isolation, the turning to one another; the people of the city - Satin-Legs Smith, the genial man about town, the queen of the blues, the modest madonna of the inviolate breasts whose man no longer comes to call. There are the sharply etched impressions of a Bronzeville street - the preacher behind his sermon, the hunchback girl who thinks of heaven, the memories of a vacant lot, the huddled life of a kitchenette. Here are poems in ballad form, displaying the author's versatility in mood and metre. Here are vivid comments on Army life in which the author shows her ability to handle thoughtfully and clearly a further aspect of American Negro experience. In this, her first book, Gwendolyn Brooks proves herself an accomplished artist. She is never sentimental, never obvious, but maintains a standard of sincerity and perception of skillful integration of mood and expression not often found among contemporary poets. Her poetry has the true flavor of Negro life and at the same time its meaning is associated with the whole content of experience in this country. Richard Wright has written of her work: ‘She is a real poet. There is no self-pity here, nor a striving for effects. She takes hold of reality as it is and renders it faithfully. She easily catches the pathos of petty destinies; the whimper of the wounded; the tiny accidents that plague the lives of the desperately poor and the problem of color prejudice.' William Rose BenEt wrote: ‘A Street in Bronzeville by Gwendolyn Brooks is the work of a remarkable young poet. Her book, throughout has dramatic vigor and unusually expressive phrase. Miss Brooks is as originals as dynamic as Langston Hughes. She is saliently individual.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and was educated at the Englewood High School and Wilson Junior College in Chicago. Living in Chicago since early childhood she has watched the life of her people there and has reflected it in her poems which have appeared an magazines like The Negro Quarterly, Poetry, Common Ground, Harper's and the New York Herald Tribune.
DESCRIPTION - Whenever we imagine a world without war or injustice, we are engaging in speculative fiction. Radicals and activists devote their lives to envisioning such worlds, and then go about trying to create them. This collection brings together 20 such stories, as well as essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Named for the great Octavia Butler, giant of science fiction and a rare woman of colour in her field, this engaging and enlightening collection is the first book to explore the connections between radical science fiction and movements for social change.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walidah Imarisha: Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator and spoken word artist. She is the author of the collection of poetry Scars/Stars. Imarisha has also facilitated writing workshops, for students in grades three through twelve, in community centers, youth detention facilities, and women’s prisons. Adrienne Maree Brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit. She has also received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler based science fiction writing workshops. Adrienne has helped launch a loose network of Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategy Reading Groups for people interested in reading Octavia’s work from a political and strategic framework, and is building with Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network on other ways of extending Butler’s work.
DESCRIPTION - Frank London Brown's posthumously published novel The Myth Maker (1969) demonstrates an interest in Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist novel. An unjustly neglected classic from the author of the 1959 novel Trumbull Park, an account of the struggles facing African American families attempting to integrate a Chicago housing development. Published posthumously by Path Press, one of the earliest Black-owned publishing houses in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FRANK LONDON BROWN (October 7, 1927, Kansas City, MO - March 12, 1962) was born in Kansas City, but moved to Chicago at age twelve. Educated at Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, Brown worked numerous jobs to support his literary ambitions. Most significant of these was his work as an organizer and program officer for the United Packing-house Workers of America and other labor unions. Brown was profoundly impacted by the musical culture of African American Chicago, most significantly jazz, but also gospel and blues. A devotee of bebop, Brown published a seminal interview with Thelonious Monk in Downbeat and pioneered in the reading of fiction to jazz accompaniment. Many critics have also noted the importance of a trip Brown made as a journalist to cover the Emmett Till murder case. At the time of his death, he was an accomplished writer on the Chicago scene and a regular contributor to Negro Digest and various literary magazines. He was also a candidate for a PhD from the University of Chicago's Committee on Social Thought and was director of the Union Research Center. His reputation is largely based upon his 1959 novel, Trumbull Park, an account of the struggles facing African American families attempting to integrate a Chicago housing development. However, his short fiction and especially his 1969 posthumous novel, The Myth Maker, deserve greater attention. Trumbull Park was typical of social realist fiction in the style of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, while The Myth Maker demonstrates an interest in Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the existentialist novel. Both texts are clearly influenced by the work of Richard Wright. Their great accomplishment is the detailed description of the everyday of urban African American experience, excellent attention to vernacular speech and dialect, and a philosophically sophisticated account of the rise of despair in the ghetto and the continuing deprecatory impact of institutionalized racism. Both novels are occasionally limited by deficient character and plot development. Trumbull Park has received a moderate amount of critical attention and The Myth Maker none. Brown's occasional short stories also reveal attention to language and a strong commitment to realism as a mode of expression and investigation. His most popular story, McDougal (Abraham Chapman, Black Voices, 1968) is noteworthy for its sympathetic treatment of a white trumpet player attempting to succeed as a jazz musician within the very environment of Chicago's 58th Street that Brown had long chronicled. In addition to the accomplishment of his two novels, Brown's reputation should also be enhanced by his exploration of the possibility of an artistic life irreducibly connected to a life of social action. His participation in leftist political activity and counter-cultural artistic movements at the height of McCarthyism and the Cold War is suggestive of a courageous intellect. His succumbing to leukemia in March of 1962 just prior to the dawning of the Black Arts movement in Chicago is one of the major tragedies of contemporary African American literature.
DESCRIPTION - Frank London Brown's powerful debut novel, originally published in 1959. fictionalizes the real-life ordeals of the first black families to integrate Chicago's Trumbull Park public housing project in the 1950s. Protagonist Buggy Martin tells the first-person story of moving with his wife and two children from a rotting tenement on the South Side to the new development, where the family is besieged by angry whites. They endure the strain of living with racial violence - until the day Buggy and a friend refuse police protection and walk home together through the white mob. ‘Brown has probed the psychology of people under fire. The real drama in this novel is not found in what white people tried to do to their Negro neighbors: it comes from tile self-restraining heroism in the Negroes.' - R. L. Duffus, New York Times Book Review. ‘How in the end, determination and decency seem about to triumph, is the theme of this story, unfolded in terms of characters terribly alive and real.' - Langston Hughes, New York Herald Tribune Book Review. ‘[This story] will shame white Americans. but it is not grimly accusatory. That is one of Brown's great achievements, that hatred did not guide his pen.' - Alan Paton, Chicago Sunday Tribune.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FRANK LONDON BROWN (October 7, 1927 - March 12, 1962) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and his family moved to Chicago when he was twelve. An associate editor of Ebony, he also wrote THE MYTH MAKER, a novel, as well as numerous articles and short stories published in Down Beat, Negro Digest, Chicago Review, Ebony, and Southwest Review. Brown also worked as a machinist, bartender, loan interviewer, postal clerk, union organizer, and jazz singer, and he was the first writer to read his short stories to jazz accompaniment. MARY HELEN WASHINGTON is Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the editor of INVENTED LIVES: NARRATIVES OF BLACK WOMEN, 1860-1960 and MEMORY OF KIN: STORIES ABOUT FAMILY BY BLACK WRITERS. RICHARD YARBOROUGH, editor of the Northeastern library of Black Literature, is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - Attempts to change the opinions of others are as old as human speech, but in recent years we have come to fear that our thoughts and feelings are open to manipulation by new methods and hidden techniques. To the pressures of the ‘admen' are added a whole battery of hsi nao (literally ‘wash brain') techniques. Here is a timely and much-needed survey of the whole area of persuasion. Dr Brown, the author of Freud and the Post-Freudians, ranges from political propaganda, religious conversion, and commercial advertising, through a detailed appraisal of the intentions and effects of the mass media, to a cool look at the spectacular case histories of indoctrination and confession. But TECHNIQUES OF PERSUASION is more than the only available review of the phenomena of persuasion: it also contains a lucid analysis of the concept of personality itself. Only if we understand first the development of the central personality can we understand and judge realistically the importance of attempts to change it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Alexander Campbell Brown (1911–1965) was a psychiatrist who was born in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He took a degree in medicine at Edinburgh University. He later traveled to mainland Europe where he studied in many countries. During the Second World War, he was a specialist in psychiatry in the Middle East. As well as practicing in the army, he also gained experience in mental hospitals, prisons and selection boards. Later he became interested in the normal individual's adjustment to society. He joined a large industrial concern after the war, where he worked for seven years. Even though he learned in a school of thought which considered mental illness mainly as an individual and biological problem, he later regarded it basically as a social one. He took the view that the mental conflicts of the neurotic are in large part induced by the sick society in which he or she lives. Thus, he felt that the efficiency of industry cannot be weighed solely in terms of the amount goods it produces or its financial profits, but also considering at what cost of human health and happiness the goods were produced. He expressed this view in his work The Social Psychology of Industry (1954).
DESCRIPTION - Originally serialized in McGirt's Magazine between 1907 and 1909, THE BLACK SLEUTH is one of the earliest African American fictional works to depict a black detective. Now published for the first time in book form, this fascinating yet idiosyncratic mystery centers on its West African protagonist, Sadipe Okukenu. The tale follows his student years, his successful career as a brilliant sleuth in England and on the continent, and his investigation of the theft of a large, flawless diamond. But THE BLACK SLEUTH is much more than a detective story. John Edward Bruce employs conventions from popular fiction and an extended ‘African-abroad' plot to boldly attack and ridicule white prejudice and racial injustice in the United States and elsewhere. His narrative not only counters the dominant Eurocentric view of the world with a Black Atlantic perspective, but also educates his black readers about Africa, Western Imperialism, and, perhaps most important, themselves. Bruce's novel ultimately suggests that even the most talented black sleuth. cannot break up the greatest conspiracy of all-that of prejudice against people of color in the United States and abroad. Instead, its defeat can apparently be attained only through black solidarity and coordinated resistance.' - from the Introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN EDWARD BRUCE (February 22, 1856, Piscataway, MD - August 7, 1924, New York City, NY) was born a slave in Maryland and given a hero's funeral in Harlem. He briefly studied at Howard University before beginning a career as a journalist, editor, historian, and public speaker. He was the cofounder with Arthur A. Schomburg of the Negro Society for Historical Research.'.
DESCRIPTION - The author's second novel and often considered his best work. Set in 1944, the plot follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's perpetually unemployed, alcoholic alter ego, who has been rejected from the World War II draft and makes his way from one menial job to the next (hence a factotum). Set in the 1940s, the plot follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's perpetually unemployed, alcoholic alter ego, who has been rejected from the World War II draft and makes his way from one menial job to the next (hence a factotum). After getting into a fight with his father, Chinaski drifts through the seedy city streets of lower-class Los Angeles and other American cities in search of a job that will not come between him and his first love: writing. Much of the novel is dedicated to describing various menial jobs that Chinaski temporarily holds during the USA’s WWII economic boom. Even though some of Chinaski's jobs and colleagues are described with great detail, they all eventually end with him either abruptly leaving or being fired. He is consistently rejected by the only publishing house he respects, but is driven to continue by the knowledge that he could do better than the authors they publish. Chinaski begins sleeping with fellow barfly Jan, a kindred spirit he meets while drowning his sorrows at a bar. When a brief stint as a bookie finds him abandoned by the only woman with whom he is able to relate, a fling with gold-digging floozie Laura finds him once again falling into a morose state of perpetual drunkenness and unemployment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Charles Bukowski (born Heinrich Karl Bukowski; August 16, 1920 - March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles. It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. In 1986 Time called Bukowski a ‘laureate of American lowlife'. Regarding Bukowski's enduring popular appeal, Adam Kirsch of The New Yorker wrote, ‘the secret of Bukowski's appeal. [is that] he combines the confessional poet's promise of intimacy with the larger-than-life aplomb of a pulp-fiction hero.'.
DESCRIPTION - The time is the 1920's. The place is Moscow. The story begins as the Devil appears with a retinue including a naked girl vampire with red hair and phosphorescent eyes and a huge black cat that smokes cigars and is a dead shot with a Browning automatic. Havoc descends on the city. The Devil kills some, drives others insane, spirits some to distant places, holds a witches' Sabbath where women rub their bodies with magic ointment and fly naked through the air on broomsticks. The Devil's antics bring out the worst in everyone - weakness, greed, cowardice - as Bulgakov lampoons the institutions he hated most: medicine, the theater, the clique-ridden literary world, bureaucracy and orthodoxy. Only two defy the demonic trickery - the Master, a writer dedicated to the search for truth, who has put all his wisdom into a book on Christ and Pilate that no publisher will accept, and Margarita, who literally goes through hell to save the Master's sanity (he has voluntarily entered a mental hospital) so that he may rewrite the masterpiece he has burned in despair. Their integrity and devotion defy and defeat the Devil's power. Each reader will enjoy and interpret this bizarre and comic fantasy in his own way. Its rich and uproarious black humor, its devastating satire on the effect of evil on human beings, its tragic yet triumphant and powerful story of good and truth are many stories in one. A stunning modern parable, it is in the great tradition of Russian literature. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: THE MASTER AND MARGARITA, regarded as Bulgakov's greatest work, was published in the winter of 1966-67, in two issues of Moskva. About 23,000 words, some in brief phrases, some in extended passages, which were omitted from the Moskva version, have been restored throughout, as they are in the Harvill-Collins British edition and the Einaudi Italian edition also.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eldest son of a professor at the Kiev Theological Academy, Mikhail Afanasievich Bulgakov was born in that city in 1891. After graduating in. medicine at Kiev University, Bulgakov was sent in 1916 (as an alternative to army service) to his first practice in a remote country region of one of the north-western provinces of Russia. There he worked for two years in sole charge of a local govenment clinic serving a large and scattered rural population. Late in 1918, after a spell as a hospital intern, Bulgakov returned to his native Kiev, where he set up in private practice as a specialist in venereology. Driven out, it seems, by the intolerable strains imposed on a doctor in a city racked by civil war, he left Kiev for the Caucasus; it was at this time, in 1919 or 1920, that Bulgakov resolved to give up medicine for a full-time literary career. Moving north to Moscow in the early twenties, Bulgakov endured a period of hardship and struggle to gain recognition as a writer. His first success was his novel The White Guard, originally published in serial form in 1925 and based on his experience of Kiev in the civil war, which he turned into a play for the Moscow Arts Theatre with the altered title of The Days of the Titrbins. From then on Bulgakov's career was intimately bound up with the stage, in particular with the Moscow Arts Theatre under the joint direction of Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, where he worked as an. assistant producer and resident dramatist until his break with Stanislavsky in 1936. After some time spent as an opera librettist with the Bolshoi Theatre, he was reduced to literary impotence by Stalin's increasingly harsh censorship. Bulgakov fell ill with a painful kidney complaint in 1939, went blind as a result of the disease and died in March 1940.
DESCRIPTION - OTHER CITIES HAVE HISTORIES. LOS ANGELES HAS LEGENDS. Midcentuny Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as ‘the white spot of America,' a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world's most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of ‘pleasure girls and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men - one L.A.'s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief - each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city. Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin ‘Bugsy' Siegel's enforcer, then as his protege. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood's favorite gangster - and L.A.'s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul. William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy ‘Combination' - a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker's life mission became to topple it - and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city - a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction or Raymond Chandler and movies such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the battle between the underworld and the police played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hills, from the gritty streets of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The outcome of this decades-long entanglement shaped modern American policing - for better and for worse - and helped create the Los Angeles we know today. A fascinating examination of Los Angeles's underbelly, the Mob, and America's most admired - and reviled - police department, L.A. NOIR is an enlightening, entertaining, and richly detailed narrative about the city originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles, ‘The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN BUNTIN is a staff writer at Governing magazine, where he covers crime and urban affairs. A native of Mississippi, Buntin graduated from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and has worked as a case writer for Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A former resident of Southern California, he now lives in Washington, D.C., with his family.
DESCRIPTION - He was the deadliest gun in the West. Or was he? Ringo: the very name has come to represent the archetypal Western gunfighter and has spawned any number of fictitious characters laying claim to authenticity. John Ringo's place in western lore is not without basis: he rode with outlaw gangs for thirteen of his thirty-two years, participated in Texas's Hoodoo War, and was part of the faction that opposed the Earp brothers in Tombstone, Arizona. Yet his life remains as mysterious as his grave, a bouldered cairn under a five-stemmed blackjack oak. Western historian Jack Burrows now challenges popular views of Ringo in this first full-length treatment of the myth and the man. Based on twenty years of research into historical archives and interviews with Ringo's family, it cuts through the misconceptions and legends to show just what kind of man Ringo really was.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jack Burrows (May 28, 1918 - September 9, 2014) was a professor at San Jose College in the History Department. He was a true historian and author, especially passionate about the Old West and Native American history. Jack was born in Murphys, a little-known town in the low Sierras, where he spent his time listening to the Miwok Indians and enjoying the outdoors and wildlife. Jack left "home" when he was deployed in the first round of WWII Army soldiers. He spent 42 months on the frontlines in the South Pacific jungle, where few survived. Using the GI bill, he was able to complete degrees at both UCSB and Stanford - resulting in a 33 year career as a Professor at San Jose City College.
DESCRIPTION - A monumental literary enterprise, DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA is the most comprehensive anthology ever attempted of oral and written literature by women of African descent, the world over throughout the ages. From the ancient Egyptian queen Hatshepsut to contemporary writers such as Terry McMillan, Alice Walker, and Buchi Emecheta, DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA aims to chart a new literary canon. Arranged chronologically, this anthology brings together the works of more than two hundred authors from Africa, North America, the Caribbean, Latin America, Europe, and Asia. It offers translations not only from African languages but from, among others, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. It draws from a wealth of genres: autobiography, memoirs, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels (experimental, historical, science fiction), poetry, drama, humor, non-fiction (political, feminist, anthropological), journalism, speeches, essays, folklore. DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA includes a substantial introduction, biographical headnotes, annotation, and bibliographies of sources and further readings. A signal achievement - and cause for joyous celebration of unity in diversity - DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA intends to reclaim a place in literary history for women of African descent by capturing the immense range of their accomplishments.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MARGARET BUSBY is a leading figure in Black and literary cultural forums in Britain. Born in Ghana, she gained an Honours degree in English from London University, after which she co-founded publishers Allison & Busby and was Editorial Director from 1967 to 1987. She was Editorial Director of Earthscan Publications from 1987 to 1990. She broadcasts on radio and television and has written articles and reviews for many publications, including the Guardian, New Statesman & Society, Africa Forum, West Africa, Third World Quarterly, and South.
DESCRIPTION - The companion to the classic anthology Daughters of Africa - a major international collection that brings together the work of more than 200 women writers of African descent, celebrating their artistry and showcasing their contributions to modern literature and international culture. Twenty-five years ago, Margaret Busby's Daughters of Africa was published to international acclaim and hailed as an extraordinary body of achievement. a vital document of lost history (Sunday Times) and the ultimate reference guide (Washington Post). New Daughters of Africa continues that tradition for a new generation. This magnificent follow-up to the original landmark anthology brings together fresh and vibrant voices that have emerged from across the globe in the past two decades, from Antigua to Zimbabwe and Angola to the United States. Key figures, including Margo Jefferson, Nawal El Saadawi, Edwidge Danticat, and Zadie Smith, join popular contemporaries such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Imbolo Mbue, Yrsa Daley-Ward, Taiye Selasi, and Chinelo Okparanta in celebrating the heritage that unites them. Each of the pieces in this remarkable collection demonstrates an uplifting sense of sisterhood, honors the strong links that endure from generation to generation, and addresses the common obstacles female writers of color face as they negotiate issues of race, gender, and class and address vital matters of independence, freedom, and oppression. A glorious portrayal of the richness, magnitude, and range of these visionary writers, New Daughters of Africa spans a range of genres - autobiography, memoir, oral history, letters, diaries, short stories, novels, poetry, drama, humor, politics, journalism, essays, and speeches - demonstrating the diversity and extraordinary literary achievements of black women who remain underrepresented, and whose contributions continue to be underrated in world culture today. CONTRIBUTORS include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie • Yrsa Daley Ward • Edwidge Danticat • Phillippa Yrsa De Villiers • Esi Edugyan • Eve Ewing • Nikki Finney • Roxane Gay • Margo Jefferson • Barbara Jenkins • Imbolo Mbue • Nnedi Okorafor • Chinelo Okparanta • Minna Salami • Zadie Smith • and more!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Margaret Busby OBE was born in Ghana and educated in Britain. She co-founded Allison & Busby, publishing C.L.R. James, Buchi Emecheta, Nuruddin Farah amongst many others, and became Director of Earthscan. She has been a literary awards judge, including the Caine, Baileys and Commonwealth prizes, served on the boards of PEN, Wasafiri and the Royal Literary Fund, and collected many honors, including the 2015 Henry Swanzy Award. She lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - ‘There was or there was not, neither here nor there. ' The magic words are uttered over cardamom-scented coffee in the men's tent, or in the shady courtyard of the women's quarters, and a wonderful new storyteller's world, full of mischief and valor, romance and ribaldry, opens before us. Through the bounty of Allah a man may be blessed with sons like fresh dates, or a daughter with arms as smooth as bolts of silk - but beware, for hair-raising Ghouls and evil Djinn hide in every well and wadi to test the mettle of brave heroes or heroines. Who knows what other surprises await? Even a dusty camel may reveal an enchanted lover beneath its hairy skin. Out of the alleys of Cairo and Beduin camps comes a brand-new selection of one hundred and thirty tales of the desert, palace, village, and bazaar: a vibrant tapestry as huge and exotic as the sprawling Arab world it covers, from North Africa to the Holy Land. Drawing from archival and living sources, Inca Bushing has translated each story afresh, giving lyrical voice to the words of the Moroccan laborer, the Nubian porter, and the Syrian cook who first told their stories to archaeologists in the last century or folklorists in this one. In their tales of magnanimous caliphs and sly peasants, marriages and mismatches, and the wisdom of the fool, we can find an intimate introduction to Aral, attitudes about the important facts of life and living. A treasure chest of surprises, ARAB FOLKTALES is a worthy successor to THE COMPLETE GRIMM'S, RUSSIAN FAIRY TALES, ANDERSEN'S EIGHTY FAIRY TALES, Calvino's ITALIAN FOLKTALES, and the other classics in the Pantheon Fairy Tale and Folklore Library.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Inea Bushnaq was born in Jerusalem, and educated there and in Damascus and London. She has a degree in classics from Cambridge University; and has translated works from both French and Arabic, including THE ARABS IN ISRAEL, BETRAYAL AT THE VEL d'HIV, and contemporary Arabic short stories. She lives in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - A poet of both the body and spirit, the work of Romulo Bustos Aguirre often explores the nature of existence at the turn of the twenty-first century - humankind's relationship to itself and the universe, the meaning or purpose, if any, of human existence, and the daunting task of discerning that meaning. Critics have described his poetry as highly refined lyricism, metaphysical, existential, and at times erotic. Semantics of the World introduces the English-speaking world to the exciting work of Romulo Bustos Aguirre, one of Colombia's most celebrated living writers. This selection of extraordinary poems, edited and translated by Nohora Arrieta Fernández and Mark A. Sanders, presents Bustos Aguirre's works in Spanish alongside their English translations and features the critical apparatus necessary for making Bustos Aguirre's poetry more accessible to students, scholars, and the general reading public. The volume offers the perfect introduction to Romulo Bustos Aguirre and his poetry for critical and popular audiences throughout the Anglosphere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Romulo Bustos Aguirre teaches literature at the University of Cartagena. He is the author of ten major collections of poetry and is one of Colombia's most celebrated writers. He has been awarded numerous awards including, most recently, the National Poetry Prize by the Ministry of Culture. Nohora Arrieta Fernández is a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA. She has published essays and articles on Latin American literature and visual arts, comics, and the Afro-Latin American Diaspora. Mark A. Sanders is a professor of English and Africana studies at the University of Notre Dame. His works include A Black Soldier's Story: The Narrative of Ricardo Batrell and the Cuban War of Independence and Afro-Modernist Aesthetics and the Poetry of Sterling A. Brown.
DESCRIPTION - Octavia E. Bitter once gleefully described her eerie novella ‘Bloodchild', the title piece of BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES as her ‘pregnant man story.' ‘Bloodchild' explores the paradoxes of power and inequality and starkly portrays the experience of a class who, like women throughout most of history, are valued chiefly for their reproductive capacities. After it appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, SF's highest honors. ‘Speech Sounds', which also won the Hugo Award, and ‘Crossover', Butler's first published story, both describe women continuing to endure after their lives have become unbearable. ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night' wrestles with the double - edged sword of illness and talent. ‘Near of Kin', Butler's only non - SF story, describes a young woman coming to terms with the death of the mother who abandoned her. Also included here are two autobiographical pieces by Butler on what she calls ‘the art, the craft, and the business of writing.' BLOODCHILD AND OTHER STORIES brings together for the first time Butler's entire output of shorter work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavia E. Butler is the author of ten published novels. They are PATTERNMASTER, MIND OF MY MIND, SURVIVOR, KINDRED, WILD SEED, CLAY'S ARK, DAWN, ADULTHOOD, RITES, IMAGO, and PARABLE OF THE SOWER. She has won both of science fiction's highest awards, the Hugo Award twice and the Nebula Award. In 1995, she was the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. As one of the only African American women writing science fiction, she has received widespread praise for her exploration of feminist and racial themes. She describes herself as ‘a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist always, a Black, a quiet egoist, a former Baptist, and an oil-and - water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive. About her writing, she says, ‘I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out that it was called science fiction.'.
DESCRIPTION - One terrible winter, King Leander leads his troop of bears down the mountains of Sicily in search of food. Along their treacherous and sometimes heartbreaking journey, the bears encounter an army of wild boars, a wily professor who may or may not be a magician, ghosts, snarling Marmoset the Cat, and, worst of all, treachery within their own ranks. If THE BEARS' FAMOUS INVASION OF SICILY sounds too distressing to read alone, that's because it is.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dino Buzzati-Traverso (14 October 1906 – 28 January 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel The Tartar Steppe, although he is also known for his well-received collections of short stories. Buzzati was born in San Pellegrino, Belluno, in his family's ancestral villa. Buzzati's mother, a veterinarian by profession, was Venetian and his father, a professor of international law, was from an old Bellunese family. Buzzati was the second of his parents' four children. One of his brothers was the well-known Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso. In 1924, he enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Milan, where his father once taught. As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain employed until his death. He began in the editorial department. Later he worked as a reporter, special correspondent, essayist, editor, and art critic. It is often said that his journalistic background informs his writing, lending even the most fantastic tales an aura of realism.
DESCRIPTION - A winner of the Italian Academy Award, this distinguished literary creation weaves a gentle nightmare spell about the reader, taking him into an uncharted land where he seems to have been before. Some place where blue mountains touch a northern desert, Fort Bastiani guards a frontier pass. No enemy has ever come through the pass but one day the Tartan will surely attack. After all, there have been signs of human activity, far away across the steppe on the northern horizon. So, Lieutenant Drogo, after a short interlude in the city with the girl he used to love, returns to the fort, to the days and then the years of dedicated waiting for the enemy who never comes. Until, in the end, he discovers that the bravest way is not always the obvious way, that it is possible to die a hero's death alone and unrecognized. The London Times said of THE TARTAR STEPPE: ‘With obvious affinities to Kafka's THE CASTLE, it is a serener and more immediately rewarding book, excellently translated.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dino Buzzati-Traverso (14 October 1906 – 28 January 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel The Tartar Steppe, although he is also known for his well-received collections of short stories. Buzzati was born in San Pellegrino, Belluno, in his family's ancestral villa. Buzzati's mother, a veterinarian by profession, was Venetian and his father, a professor of international law, was from an old Bellunese family. Buzzati was the second of his parents' four children. One of his brothers was the well-known Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso. In 1924, he enrolled in the law faculty of the University of Milan, where his father once taught. As he was completing his studies in law, he was hired, at the age of 22, by the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera, where he would remain employed until his death. He began in the editorial department. Later he worked as a reporter, special correspondent, essayist, editor, and art critic. It is often said that his journalistic background informs his writing, lending even the most fantastic tales an aura of realism.
DESCRIPTION - Amlcar Cabral, born in 1921 in Guinea-Bissau, had his early education in Guinea and did his university studies in Portugal. Cabral found himself active in the nationalist struggle, a political context that enabled him to reflect on several aspects of the armed struggle. He developed his understanding and theories of the national liberation struggle in the political context of militant nationalism; he fought as he wrote incisively about that struggle, and passionately struggled as he wrote. This dialectical experience enriched his theoretical understanding of the aims, goals, strategies and ideologies that informed the nature of political involvement in the movement for national liberation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral (12 September 1924 - 20 January 1973) was a Guinea-Bissauan and Cape Verdean agricultural engineer, writer, and a nationalist thinker and political leader. He was also one of Africa's foremost anti-colonial leaders. Also known by his nom de guerre Abel Djassi, Cabral led the nationalist movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands and the ensuing war of independence in Guinea-Bissau. He was assassinated on 20 January 1973, about eight months before Guinea-Bissau's unilateral declaration of independence. He was deeply influenced by Marxism, and became an inspiration to revolutionary socialists and national liberatonalists world-wide.
DESCRIPTION - This brilliantly inventive novel, which has been acclaimed in Europe and Latin America, is an extraordinary work of imagination and language. Set against the rhythmic, kaleidoscopic world of Havana night life in the 1950s, the characters are many and they appear and reappear in bars, night clubs, cars, bedrooms and the street. Writers, prostitutes, singers, homosexuals, photographers, tourists, lovers are all part of a world of fantasy and reality, imagery and truth-a world created, sustained, transported and connected by a dazzling collage of language which is alternately cerebral, exotic, humorous and sad. Meanings within meanings, puns, satire, jokes and rhythms are all part of the verbal pyrotechnics which create a mood that is exotic, suspenseful and always fascinating. THREE TRAPPED TIGERS won the Biblioteca Breve prize in Spain in 1964, was a finalist in the Formentor Prize in 1965, and in 1970 won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in Paris. It is a remarkable and original work of fiction that propels the reader into a new dimension of experience and reality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Guillermo Cabrera Infante (April 22, 1929 - February 21, 2005) was a Cuban novelist, essayist, translator, and critic; in the 1950s he used the pseudonym G. Caín. A one-time supporter of the Castro regime, Cabrera Infante went into exile to London in 1965. He is best known for the novel Tres Tristes Tigres (literally ‘three sad tigers', but published in English as Three Trapped Tigers), which has been compared favorably to James Joyce's Ulysses. Born in Gibara in Cuba's former Oriente Province (now part of Holguín Province), in 1941 he moved with his parents, to Havana, which would be the setting of nearly all of his writings other than his critical works. His parents were founding members of the Cuban Communist Party. Originally he intended to become a physician, but abandoned that in favor of writing and his passion for the cinema. Starting in 1950, he studied journalism at the University of Havana. In 1951 he founded the Cinemateca de Cuba, the Cuban Film Library, of which he remained director until its closure was ordered by Fulgencio Batista in 1956. Under the Batista regime he was arrested and fined in 1952 for publishing a short story which included several English-language profanities. His opposition to Batista later cost him a short jail term. He married for the first time in 1953. From 1954 to 1960 he wrote film reviews for the magazine Carteles, using the pseudonym G. Caín; he became its editor in chief, still pseudonymously, in 1957. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 he was named director of the Instituto del Cine. He was also head of the literary magazine Lunes de Revolucion, a supplement to the Communist newspaper Revolucion; however, this supplement was prohibited in 1961 by Fidel Castro.
DESCRIPTION - As much a storyteller as an ethnographer, Lydia Cabrera was captivated by a strange and magical new world revealed to her by her Afro-Cuban friends in early twentieth-century Havana. In AFRO-CUBAN TALES this world comes to teeming life, introducing English-speaking readers to a realm of tenuous boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, deities and mortals, the spiritual and the seemingly inanimate. Here readers will find a vibrant, imaginative record of African culture transplanted to Cuba and transformed over time, a passionate and subversive alternative to the dominant Western culture of the Americas. In this charmed realm of myth and legend, imaginative flights, and hard realities, Cabrera shows us a world turned upside down. In this domain guinea hens can make dour Asturians and the king of Spain dance; little fat cooking pots might prepare their own meals; the pope can send encyclicals about pumpkins; and officials can be defeated by the shrewdness of turtles. The first English translation of one of the most important writers on African culture in the Americas, the collection provides a fascinating view of how African traditions, myths, stories, and religions traveled to the New World - of how, in their tales, Africans in the Americas created a New World all their own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lydia Cabrera (May 20, 1899, Havana, Cuba - September 19, 1991, Miami, FL) was a legendary Cuban ethnographer of Afro-Cuban culture and the author of many books, including El Monte and Vocabulario Congo. Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes is a professor and chair of the Spanish department at Davidson College. Lauren Yoder is James Sprunt Professor of French at Davidson College. Isabel Castellanos is one of the foremost scholars on Afro-Cuban culture.
DESCRIPTION - First published by Doubleday in 1932 in the depth of the Great Depression, an era whose seamy side it depicts, and only recently rediscovered, Fast One by Paul Cain (one of the mystery men of American literature) explodes into real life with the story of one of the toughest characters ever to emerge in American fiction. Paul Cain is the pseudonym of Peter Ruric, a man who emerged from nowhere in the 1930s, wrote Fast One and several short stories and movie scripts, and then disappeared. Nothing more has been heard of him. Gerry Kells, the antihero of his shocking, brutal novel, is equally mysterious. A loner with a reputation but without a visible past, Kells simply appears, re; arranges the lives of the Los Angeles underworld, and then is heard no more. Only the strong prosper in the world of the depression. Seemingly amoral, Kells does prosper. He strikes to survive, kills without conscience, with; out time for conscience. But he never becomes a mere killing machine. His integrity, his humanity, abides in a code demanding that he pay for all services: those rendered for him, those rendered against him. Fast paced and very readable, the novel limns a true character who should take his place in our national literature, if only for his representation of the individual will to survive in one of the toughest times in American life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Cain was the pen name used by George Caryl Sims (born May 30, 1902 in Des Moines, Iowa, died June 23, 1966 in North Hollywood, California), an American pulp fiction author and screenwriter. George Carol Sims' writing career was spent under two distinct pseudonyms. As Paul Cain he wrote a remarkable series of 17 hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine ‘Black Mask' beginning in early 1932. His character, gambler Gerry Kells, was so popular that the first five stories were combined in book form as ‘Fast One' in 1933 and remains today as one of the best examples of the genre. His other coinciding writing career was spent as screenwriter Peter Ruric; his most notable script was for The Black Cat (1934), a lesser Boris Karloff classic. The son of a police detective, Sims was born in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents separated in 1908 and he spent the next decade living in a tough neighborhood in Chicago. Sims ended up in southern California in 1918 and became fascinated with the film industry, eventually gaining work as a production assistant and uncredited scenarist. On a trip to New York City in the early 1930s he met hard-drinking actress Gertrude Michael and together they returned to Hollywood in 1932, where she had a brief run at A-movie stardom at Paramount that was derailed by the studio's financial trouble and her alcoholism. Their relationship was really a three-way co-dependent affair with the bottle and Michael, whose once-promising acting career had nosedived by 1935, left him after he wrote a widely-read, thinly-veiled account of her. Sims eventually scripted nine films for major studios, but his increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936. His Hollywood career ended at the chaotically run RKO Studios in 1944 and Sims would spend much of the late 1940s and 1950s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959 but found that his reputation kept the doors of the crumbling studio system closed to him. He contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
DESCRIPTION - Seven brutally ingenius tales of murder passionate and cold-blooded, written by a poet of the hard-boiled. There's Black, a stranger in town, who gets drafted into a gang war just because he had the bad luck to trip over a corpse on his way from the station. There's the glamorous Bella, whose boyfriends have the distressing habit of stabbing one another while she naps in the next room. And of course there's Johnny Doolin, who hires himself out as a bodyguard - only to find that his client has no interest in staying alive. The men and women in Seven Slayers are exactly what the title promises: people who kill for love or money or for the sheer, perverse joy of homicide. And this riveting collection is one of the few surviving books by Paul Cain (aka Peter Ruric, aka George Sims), a hard-drinking, enigmatic writer of the 1930s who had as many pseudonyms as he had wives and of whom Raymond Chandler wrote that he had reached in his fiction 'a high point in the hard-boiled manner.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Cain was the pen name used by George Caryl Sims (born May 30, 1902 in Des Moines, Iowa, died June 23, 1966 in North Hollywood, California), an American pulp fiction author and screenwriter. George Carol Sims' writing career was spent under two distinct pseudonyms. As Paul Cain he wrote a remarkable series of 17 hard-boiled detective novelettes for the pulp magazine ‘Black Mask' beginning in early 1932. His character, gambler Gerry Kells, was so popular that the first five stories were combined in book form as ‘Fast One' in 1933 and remains today as one of the best examples of the genre. His other coinciding writing career was spent as screenwriter Peter Ruric; his most notable script was for The Black Cat (1934), a lesser Boris Karloff classic. The son of a police detective, Sims was born in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents separated in 1908 and he spent the next decade living in a tough neighborhood in Chicago. Sims ended up in southern California in 1918 and became fascinated with the film industry, eventually gaining work as a production assistant and uncredited scenarist. On a trip to New York City in the early 1930s he met hard-drinking actress Gertrude Michael and together they returned to Hollywood in 1932, where she had a brief run at A-movie stardom at Paramount that was derailed by the studio's financial trouble and her alcoholism. Their relationship was really a three-way co-dependent affair with the bottle and Michael, whose once-promising acting career had nosedived by 1935, left him after he wrote a widely-read, thinly-veiled account of her. Sims eventually scripted nine films for major studios, but his increasing problems with alcoholism killed off his pulp career by 1936. His Hollywood career ended at the chaotically run RKO Studios in 1944 and Sims would spend much of the late 1940s and 1950s in Europe. He attempted a Hollywood comeback in 1959 but found that his reputation kept the doors of the crumbling studio system closed to him. He contracted cancer and died in a cheap apartment in Hollywood in the summer of 1966.
DESCRIPTION - COSMICOMICS is a phantasmagoria on Creation, an enchantingly ingenious idea which translates theories about the evolution of the Universe into stories and makes ‘characters' out of mathematical formulae and simple cellular structures. The narrator, Qfwfq, spends his childhood in the soundless, timeless void; among the incandescent colors of stellar explosions, he plays with hydrogen atoms like marbles and, sitting astride a galaxy, chases his friend Pfwfp around the firmament, Or, as an adolescent on the new Earth, he has his first shy love affairs with Ayl, LII, and Mrs. Vhd Vhd; climbs up to the moon on a ladder as it looms hypnotically bright over him; watches the planet flood with its first color as an atmosphere forms; migrates as an adventurous young vertebrate from sea to land; or wanders the deserted plateaus as the last, lonely dinosaur, desperately wanting to belong. Most dazzling of all, Qfwfq thinks back on his state as a mollusk evolving, eyeless himself, a shell to delight all eyes. The result of this entrancing union of mathematics and poetic imagination is pure delight. But more than this: the infinities of time and space contract, becoming momentarily acceptable to the finite mind, and the reader glimpses his own infinitesimal significance as part of the complex vastness of the cosmos.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - ‘The catalogue of forms is endless.' This quotation from Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES applies equally to his imaginative flights in the present novel, his first In many years. Far from being a dead form, the novel here is shown as capable of endless mutations. IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, author, ambiance, style; each breaks off with the first chapter, at a moment of suspense. A labyrinth, no less, in which two readers, male and female, pursue the story lines that Intrigue them. Thus, ‘If on a winter's night a traveler' by Italo Calvlno gets Inextricably mixed up with ‘Outside the town of Malbork,' a work of unquestionably Polish origin, redolent of somewhat carbonized onions. As the book branches out into known and unknown literatures, including a translation from an extinct language, the author, not without malice, rings the changes of contemporary literature with virtuoso versatility. The two be- wildered readers tie their own knots and end up in a king-size bed for parallel readings. They are the true heroes of the tale: for what would writing be without responsive readers? Would it be at all?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo--Tartar emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts the emperor with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. Soon it becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - Who but Italo Calvino could have selected two hundred of Italy's traditional folktales and retold them so wondrously? The reader is lured into a world of clearly Italian stamp, where kings and peasants, saints and ogres - along with an array of the most extraordinary plants and animals - disport themselves against the rich background of regional customs and history. Whether the tone is humorous and earthy, playful and nonsensical, or noble and mysterious, the drama unfolds strictly according to the joyous logic of the imagination. Chosen one of the "New York Times's" ten best books in the year of its original publication, "Italian Folktales" immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In this collection Calvino combines a sensibility attuned to the fantastical with a singular writerly ability to capture the visions and dreams of a people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - Qfwfq, the protean hero of COSMICOMICS dexterously moving through time and space, solar systems and geological eras, takes on a new dimension in these tales, Though keeping to his playful ways, he heightens the sense of linkage between prehuman and present-day experience, the biological depth, as it were, of our species. We meet him as a commuter from New Jersey, juggling the potentialities of a geological happening with the actualities of the scene around him, We see him go over a cliff on a weekend outing, sea becoming blood and blood the sea, in a mixture of modern and immemorial experience. In Paris Qfwfq falls in love with a freckled girl named Priscilla, in what may be called an intercellular relationship. In the latter part of the book, Qfwfq drops from view and Calvino takes fiction one bound further into the realm of logic and mathematics. Man, lion, and arrow deal dizzyingly with the time/space problem; a chase with intent to murder during rush-hour traffic traces the ultimately saving method in the madness; cross lovers are further crossed by the crazy pattern of highway driving - and so it goes. The mind is stretched and dazzled by Calvino's fantastic application of scientific concepts to modern life and letters, tossed off airily in impeccably lucid prose that is translated with congenial wizardry by William Weaver, recipient of the National Book Award for Translation for his English version of COSMICOMICS.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - In 1767, when he was twelve years old, a rebellious Italian nobleman, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondè, reacted against his father's authoritarianism and the injustice of being forced to eat macabre dishes - beheaded snails among them - prepared by his diabolical sister Battista. He climbed a tree, as boys that age are wont to do. Unlike other boys, Cosimo never came down. THE BARON IN THE TREES is the wonderfully witty novel of Cosimo's unique arboreal existence. From the trees, Cosimo explained, he could see the earth more clearly. Free from the humdrum routine of an earthbound existence, the Baron had fantastic adventures with pirates, women and spies, and still had time to read, study, and ponder the deeper issues of the period. He corresponded with Diderot and Rousseau, became a military strategist, and outstared Napoleon when the Emperor paid him a visit. Dispensing truth and justice from wherever he might be, the Baron was friend to fruit thieves and noblemen alike. He converted the most feared bandit in the area into a dedicated bookworm, whose passion for literature led to his professional downfall. Women were quite willing to go out on a limb for Cosimo. The most daring of all was Viola, the exotic blonde whose love affair with Cosimo is one of the most intense and extraordinary in fiction. This beautifully written novel is a highly imaginative satire of eighteenth-century life and letters. Reminiscent of Voltaire's satirical romances, THE BARON IN THE TREES displays to dazzling effect Italo Calvino's sure sense of the sublime and the ridiculous.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - These two novellas together with Calvino's previously published novel, THE BARON IN THE TREES, make a witty trilogy of allegorical fantasy. Recently republished in Italy under the title OUR ANCESTORS, they reflect the unique mind of one of Italy's leading young writers, whose satire of medieval times is highly relevant to the contemporary scene. THE NONEXISTENT KNIGHT is an earthy parody of chivalry and knighthood. Agilulf, the improbable hero of this tale, is an empty suit of armor, yet he is the essence of military perfection, resented by his fellow paladins, loved by Bradamante, a dashing female knight, and admired by Raimbaut, an idealistic volunteer who is eager for the glamour of war. In order to retain his knightly rank, Agilulf is forced to scour Europe to verify the chastity of a virgin he rescued fifteen years before. His quest, a burlesque of the time-honored rituals of medieval romance, finds him evading the seductive charms of the widow Priscilla, and rescuing the reluctant virgin from a Sultan's harem. The author's ironic scrutiny surveys war, love, male vanity and female duplicity. An irreverent view of the human condition is Calvino's aim, and he succeeds brilliantly. THE CLOVEN VISCOUNT, set in the late Middle Ages, is the grisly tale of Viscount Medardo di Terralba, who in his first battle against the Turks is neatly cut in half by a cannon shot. He returns to his lands in Austria - literally half a man - and becomes the personification of evil, provides children with poison mushrooms, banishes his faithful nurse to a leper colony, and carries on a ghoulish courtship with a beautiful shepherdess. When the other half of the Viscount miraculously appears on the scene and tries to undo the damage, a weird conflict develops, and the happy ending is no less startling than the story itself. As an allegory of modern man - alienated and mutilated - this novel has profound overtones. As a parody of the Christian parables of good and evil, it is both witty and refreshing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979).
DESCRIPTION - Tracking the saga of the Norse across the North Atlantic to America, Norse America sets the record straight about the idea that the Vikings 'discovered' America. The journey described is a continuum, with evidence-based history and archaeology at one end, and fake history and outright fraud at the other. In between there lies a huge expanse of uncertainty: sagas that may contain shards of truth, characters that may be partly historical, real archaeology that may be interpreted through the fictions of saga, and fragmentary evidence open to responsible and irresponsible interpretation. Norse America is a book that tells two stories. The first is the westward expansion of the Norse across the North Atlantic in the tenth and eleventh centuries, ending (but not culminating) in a fleeting and ill-documented presence on the shores of the North American mainland. The second is the appropriation and enhancement of the westward narrative by Canadians and Americans who want America to have had white North European origins, who therefore want the Vikings to have 'discovered' America, and who in the advancement of that thesis have been willing to twist and manufacture evidence in support of claims grounded in an ideology of racial superiority.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gordon Campbell is Fellow in Renaissance Studies at the University of Leicester, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. In January 2012 he was presented with the Longman History Today Trustees Award (for lifetime contribution to history). He has authored and edited many books for OUP including The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance (2003); Renaissance Art and Architecture (2004); John Milton: Life, Work and Thought (2008; co-author); Bible: the Story of the King James Version, 1611-2011 R(2010); and IThe Hermit in the Garden: from Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome (2013). He most recently edited The Oxford Illustrated History of the Renaissance for OUP.
DESCRIPTION - Published to critical acclaim, the central argument of this book is that the historical play must be studied as a genre separate from tragedy and comedy. Just as there is in Shakespearean tragedies a dominant ethical pattern of passion opposed to reason, so there is in the history plays a dominant political pattern characteristic of the political philosophy of the age. From the 'troublesome reign' of King John to the 'tragical doings' of Richard III, Shakespeare wove the events of English history into plots of universal interest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lily Bess Campbell was born on June 20, 1883 in Ada, Ohio. She received her B. Litt. in 1905 and her MA in 1906 from the University of Texas. After a long period of ill health, she began her professional career as Instructor in English at the University of Wisconsin (1911-1918) and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1921. Though her first published work treated Victorian poetry (The grotesque in the poetry of Robert Browning. 1907), her major contributions to the academic field were made as scholar of Renaissance drama and an eminent Shakespearean authority. Campbell taught at UCLA from 1922 until she retired in 1950 (among the many students she influenced was dancer-choreographer Agnes De Mille). In 1923, she published Scenes and machines on the English stage during the Renaissance, a Classical revival, a work based on her 1921 dissertation. Her next important book was Shakespeare's tragic heroes : slaves of passion (1930). She went on to produce the first modern edition of The mirror for magistrates, based on originals in the Huntington Library in 1938. In his "Dedicatory Preface" to Essays critical and historical, dedicated to Lily B. Campbell (1950), Louis B. Wright (Folger Shakespeare Library scholar) wrote, "Miss Campbell's edition of the Mirror and its later augmentations perhaps will stand as her most enduring contribution to the advancement of Renaissance learning" (vii). Campbell later published Shakespeare's "Histories" : mirrors of Elizabethan policy (1947). In addition to her scholarly work, she published a satirical novel in 1929 entitled, These are my jewels. Lily Bess Campbell is remembered as a strong and early leader in the development of the Department of English and in UCLA's transition from an undergraduate college to a research university. While at UCLA, she served on the Faculty Senate. When the University of Chicago celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1941, Campbell was chosen as one of the 50 most distinguished American scholars and was granted an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. She also received a Litt.D from Ohio Northern University in 1940 and an LL.D from UC Berkeley in 1951. Campbell won the achievement award from the American Association of University Women in 1960, and was named Woman of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in 1962. Lily Bess Campbell died on February 18, 1967, leaving a sizable bequest to the university to provide assistance for doctoral students working on their dissertations. UCLA's Campbell Hall is named after her.
DESCRIPTION - Nellie Campobello is the contemporary of a series of extraordinary women: Maria Izquierdo, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Lupe Mann, Nahui Olin, Maria Asünsolo, Dolores del Rio. She belongs to a Mexico in the process of discovering itself and fascinated by itself and fascinating other seers, this Mexico-divine-Narcissus, this Mexico-creole-Ulysses, this Mexico-Prometheus-enchained, Mexico naming itself and appearing on the face of the earth, Mexico of the creation and of the seventh day, that without ado sets out to name the things of the earth, to turn them over to see how and of what they are made, to spread them out in the evening like Carlos Pellicer who with his Brother Sun places the evenings any old where, sky up and earth down like the great Olmec heads scattered like meteorites in Tabasco's jungles. The Mexican Revolution is an authentic popular movement; some women also stand tall and toss their angry heads long before any feminist movement in Latin America. Splendid figures like Concha Michel, Benita Galeana, and Magdalena Mondragon, although their works are not the equal of their heroic profiles. A northerner like Nellie, Magdalena Mondragon is the nonconformist author of Los presidentes me dan risa, banned in the bookstores as subversive. CONTENTS: Introduction by Elena Poniatowska; Catucho (translated by Doris Meyer); Translator's Note; Men of the North; The Executed; Under Fire; My Mother's Hands; (translated by Irene Matthews); Translator's Note.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nellie Francisca Ernestina Campobello Luna, born María Francisca Moya Luna (born November 7, 1900 - d. July 9, 1986), was a Mexican writer. Like her half-sister Gloria, a well-known ballet dancer, she was also known as an enthusiastic dancer and choreographer.
DESCRIPTION - This novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1957, is a work of extraordinary power. When THE PLAGUE was first published in French, the Times Literary Supplement wrote: ‘No doubt translations will soon appear. Then it may be that the book will be recognized as the most important which has appeared in France since the impressive novels of M. Malraux.' The subject is the devastation of the town of Oran in our own times. Through the eyes of Dr. Rieux the progress of the plague is described with a dramatic detail that calls to mind Defoe, But Dr. Rieux's narrative embraces more than local calamity. His is a humane and courageous philosophy of life, In quarantine from the rest of the world, the citizens of Oran are thrown back upon their own resources. While the procrastinating town authority tries over many months to cope with a crisis beyond its competence, the mood of the citizens changes from disbelief to terror, then to hope, indifference, and finally relief, For each one the tragedy of isolation and death has a personal aspect. Dr, Rieux himself works day and night under the strain of being forcibly parted from his wife whom he knows to be dying. Among his friends are Tarrou, an old fighter against the injustices of the world, who is glad of this last opportunity to devote his life to the struggle; Rambert, the journalist, who learns wisdom through his vain attempts to escape back to Paris ; the faithful clerk, Joseph Grand, who is forever recasting the first sentence of the perfect book he means to write; and Cottard, the only man for whom the epidemic is a blessing, because it postpones his arrest. From their companionship in suffering arises a new ideal of human sainthood, but without religion, In the face of disaster, the toiling dignity of man is revealed, In Tarrou's words to Dr. Rieux: ‘This epidemic has taught me nothing new, except that I must fight it at your side, Each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth, is free from it, We must keep endless watch on ourselves lest in a careless moment we breathe in somebody's face and fasten the infection on him.' Seldom has a fateful theme been more compellingly handled.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. The son of a working-class family, he spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. In occupied France in 1942 he published THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and THE STRANGER, a philosophical essay and a novel that first brought him to the attention of intellectual circles. THE STRANGER has since gained an international reputation and is one the most widely read novels of this century. Among his other works of fiction are THE PLAGUE, THE FALL, and EXILE AND THE KINGDOM. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.
DESCRIPTION - Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, THE STRANGER (L'Etranger) , has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story of an ordinary man who unwittingly gets drawn into a senseless murder on a sun-drenched Algerian beach, Camus was exploring what he termed ‘the nakedness of man faced with the absurd.' Now, in an illuminating new American translation (the only English version available for more than forty years was done by a British translator), the original intent of The Stranger is made more immediate, as Matthew Ward captures in exact and lucid language precisely what Camus said and how he said it, thus giving this haunting novel a new life for generations to come. Albert Camus, son of a working-class family, was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs - in the weather bureau, in an automobile-accessory firm, in a shipping company - to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. He then turned to journalism as a career. His report on the unhappy state of the Muslims of the Kabylie region aroused the Algerian government to action and brought him public notice. From 1935 to 1938 he ran the ThEâtre de L'Equipe, a theatrical company that produced plays by Malraux, Gide, Synge, Dostoevski, and others. During World War II he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and editor of ‘Combat', then an important underground newspaper. Camus was always very active in the theater, and several of his plays have been published and produced. His fiction, including THE STRANGER, THE PLAGUE, THE FALL, and EXILE AND THE KINGDOM; his philosophical essays, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND THE REBEL; and his plays have assured his preeminent position in modern French letters. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His sudden death on January 4, 1960 cut short the career of one of the most important literary figures of the Western world, when he was at the very summit of his powers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. The son of a working-class family, he spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he worked at various jobs to help pay for his courses at the University of Algiers. In occupied France in 1942 he published THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS and THE STRANGER, a philosophical essay and a novel that first brought him to the attention of intellectual circles. THE STRANGER has since gained an international reputation and is one the most widely read novels of this century. Among his other works of fiction are THE PLAGUE, THE FALL, and EXILE AND THE KINGDOM. In 1957 Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident.
DESCRIPTION - Like traditional fairy tales, Capek's fantastic parables contain marvels and supernatural beings, fairies, elves, and talking animals; their plots stem from folk traditions where innocence triumphs. At the same time, Capek infuses these tales with dazzling wordplay, an abundant sense of the absurd, and surprising futuristic twists. Fact and imagination, satire and fantasy are blended so skillfully that the line between logic and plausible nonsense is nearly indiscernible. These are not just children's tales but modern parables. "These pages sparkle with whimsical and droll ideas and even the most fantastic situation is so artfully embroidered that it attains a humorous reality of its own." - News Chronicle. The charm of these fairy tales lies in the fact that they people our everyday world with fairies, pigmies, dragons, and magicians, and altogether they discover in modern life more wonders than we should expect. They possess the creative freshness of the spoken word, and the zest with which they were written is infectious both for the young listener and for the grown-up reader. Brothers Capek have this in common with Mr. Chesterton that their borderland of reality, although phantastic enough, enjoys the sunshine of sanity and good humour.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Male Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Josef ?apek (23 March 1887 - April 1945) was a Czech artist who was best known as a painter, but who was also noted as a writer and a poet. He invented the word robot, which was introduced into literature by his brother, Karel ?apek. ?apek was born in Hronov, Bohemia (Austria-Hungary, later Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic) in 1887. First a painter of the Cubist school, he later developed his own playful primitive style. He collaborated with his brother Karel on a number of plays and short stories; on his own, he wrote the utopian play Land of Many Names and several novels, as well as critical essays in which he argued for the art of the unconscious, of children, and of 'savages'. He was named by his brother as the true inventor of the term robot. As a cartoonist, he worked for LidovE Noviny, a newspaper based in Prague.
DESCRIPTION - The stories in MONEY AND OTHER STORIES (1929) by Karel Capek are mainly concerned with middle-class man's efforts to break out of the narrow circle of destiny and grasp ultimate values. It is no accident that the decisive role in almost all the stories is played by money. The characters in these books are, for the most part, helpless victims of forces that have overwhelmed them. Author's first book of short stories in the English language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Male Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.
DESCRIPTION - R.U.R. - written in 1920 - garnered worldwide acclaim for its author and popularized the word ‘Robot.' Mass produced, efficient, and servile labor, Capek's robots remember everything, but lack creative thought, and the Utopian life they provide ultimately lacks meaning. When the robots revolt, killing all but one of their masters, they must attempt to learn the secret of self-duplication. But their attempts at replication leave them with nothing but bloody chunks of meat. It is not until two robots fall in love and are christened ‘Adam' and ‘Eve' by the last surviving human that Nature emerges triumphant. ‘It is time to read Capek again for his insouciant laughter, and the anguish of human blindness that lies beneath it.' - Arthur Miller.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in MalE Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.
DESCRIPTION - A highly adaptable kind of newt has been discovered by an old captain, and his discovery is taken up by an international syndicate for the exploitation of cheap labour. The curve of prosperity of mankind rises, while the newts become more and more civilized. Finally the balance begins to tilt, the newts gain the upper hand, and the world crumbles under their homogeneous power, Such is the outline of the story, but within its frame all the burning problems of today, political, social, scientific, cultural, the problem of everyday life, are tackled, projected in caricatures, in ghastly visions, or in the humble discourses of unimportant people. The actuality of this utopia is tremendous. The style is intentionally that of leading articles, of B.B.C. announcements, of the daily shockers, but it exerts the same subtle influence and fascination. If ever this world could be saved through a utopia, Mr. Capek's latest imaginative achievement would stand high on the list. ‘A fantastic satire, bitterly delicious, stinging, merciless, funny, a sort of literary cat-o'- nine-tails by which Mr. Capek takes his crack at the colossal and tragic follies of modern civilisation. It is a fearless and fearful book.' - Morning Post.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in MalE Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.
DESCRIPTION - An illustrated guide to more than 850 gestures and their meanings around the world, from a nod of the head to a click of the heels. Gestures convey meaning with a flourish. A vigorous nod of the head, a bold jut of the chin, an enthusiastic thumbs-up: all speak louder than words. Yet the same gesture may have different meanings in different parts of the world. What Americans understand as the A-OK gesture, for example, is an obscene insult in the Arab world. This volume is the reference book we didn't know we needed - an illustrated dictionary of 850 gestures and their meanings around the world. It catalogs voluntary gestures made to communicate openly - as distinct from sign language, dance moves, involuntary tells, or secret handshakes - and explains what the gesture conveys in a variety of locations. It is organized by body part, from top to bottom, from head (nodding, shaking, turning) to foot (scraping, kicking, playing footsie). We learn that to oscillate the head while gently throwing it back communicates approval in some countries even though it resembles the headshake of disapproval used in other countries; that to tap a slightly inflated cheek constitutes an erotic invitation when accompanied by a wink; that the middle finger pointed in the air signifies approval in South America. We may already know that it is a grave insult in the Middle East and Asia to display the sole of one's shoe, but perhaps not that motorcyclists sometimes greet each other by raising a foot. Illustrated with clever line drawings and documented with quotations from literature (the author, Francois Caradec, was a distinguished and prolific historian of literature, culture, and humorous oddities, as well as a novelist and poet), this dictionary offers readers unique lessons in polylingual meaning.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois Caradec (June 18, 1924, Quimper, France - November 13, 2008, Paris, France) was a French writer and a member of both the CollEge de 'Pataphysique and the Oulipo. His voluminous oeuvre includes biographies of Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry, as well as an encyclopedia of practical jokes and a dictionary of French slang. Caradec was a devoted specialist in Alphonse Allais, compiling and editing his collected works, and was one of the first historians of the bande dessinEe in France.
DESCRIPTION - High in the Coast Range of Northern California, between the snowy peaks called the Yolla Bollies and the coastal redwood forests, lie several fertile valleys which were the traditional home- lands of the Yuki, Wailaki, Huchnom, Lassik, and other Indian tribes. In this idyllic setting, particularly in Round Valley in northeastern Mendocino County, occurred some of the most horrible scenes in California history. This exciting account draws on primary sources to tell for the first time the fascinating and shocking truth about the early settlers of this California frontier. The first six chapters of Genocide and Vendetta present the history of the Yolla Bolly Country up to 1865, describing the region, the culture of the Yuki and their neighbors, and the depredations of the white settlers. In twenty-five years the native populations were nearly extirpated by the whites' murderous raids and wholesale kidnappings of Indian women and children and by the fraud and malfeasance of the California Indian Superintendent and his subagents. The second part of the book, covering the years from 1865 to 1905, is about the lives and fortunes of the white men and women who settled in the Yolla Bolly Country-among them the Asbill brothers, who first discovered Round Valley; Kate Robertson As- bill; and Cattle King George E. White, whose outlaw buckeroos murdered and rustled to establish for him one of the richest cattle empires in the West. When two of White's former workers dared to operate their own spread deep in White's territory, one of them was shot and lynched by White's henchmen. This was the culmination of what reporters called ‘the bitterest quarrel of all the West,' ‘the only deadly feud in California.' The cowardly and brutal act and the drawn-out murder trials that followed make sensational reading. After an allegation of (unintentional) plagiarism was leveled against the section written by Estle Beard, the publisher investigated, agreed with the complaint, and withdrew the book from sale. Since both authors have since passed away, it seems unlikely that this book will ever be republished or converted into an e-book. The original hardcover is the only way to read about this troubled era in Northern California's history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LYNWOOD CARRANCO was Professor of English in College of the Redwoods, Eureka, California, and the author of several books and many articles on California history. ESTLE BEARD was a retired cattle rancher and history buff in Covelo, California.
DESCRIPTION - In UNCHAINED VOICES, Vincent Carretta has assembled the most comprehensive anthology ever published of writings by eighteenth-century people of African descent, enabling many of these authors to be heard dearly for the first time in two centuries. Their writings reflect the surprisingly diverse experiences of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic - America, Britain, the West Indies, and Africa - between 1760 and 1798. Letters, poems, captivity narratives, petitions, criminal autobiographies, economic treatises, travel accounts, and antislavery arguments were produced during a time of various and changing political and religious loyalties. Although the theme of liberation from physical or spiritual captivity runs throughout the collection, freedom also dearly led to hardship and disappointment for a number of these authors. Briton Hammon, James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Ignatius Sancho Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano told their stories as Afro-Britons who recognized the sovereignty of George III; Johnson Green, Belinda, Benjamin Banneker, and Venture Smith spoke and wrote as African Americans in the United States; Phillis Wheatley, initially an Afro-British poet, later chose an African-American identity; Francis Williams and George Liele wrote in Jamaica; David George and Boston King, who served with the British forces in the American Revolution and later lived in Canada, composed their narratives as British subjects in the newly established settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa. In his introduction, Carretta reconstructs the historical and cultural context of the works, emphasizing the constraints of the eighteenth-century genres under which these authors wrote. The texts and annotations are based on extensive research in both published and manuscript holdings of archives in the United States and the United Kingdom. Appropriate for undergraduates as well as for scholars, UNCHAINED VOICES gives a dear sense of the major literary and cultural issues at the heart of writings in English by people of African descent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta, professor of English literature at the University of Maryland, is the author of several books on eighteenth-century literature and, most recently, the editor of Olaudah Equiano's THE INTERESTING NARRATIVE AND OTHER WRITINGS.
DESCRIPTION - Until fairly recently, critical studies and anthologies of African American literature generally began with the 1830s and 1840s. Yet there was an active and lively transatlantic black literary tradition as early as the 1760s. Genius in Bondage situates this literature in its own historical terms, rather than treating it as a sort of prologue to later African American writings. The contributors address the shifting meanings of race and gender during this period, explore how black identity was cultivated within a capitalist economy, discuss the impact of Christian religion and the Enlightenment on definitions of freedom and liberty, and identify ways in which black literature both engaged with and rebelled against Anglo-American culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta, professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the editor of Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century. Philip Gould, associate professor of English at Brown University, is the co-editor of Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism.
DESCRIPTION - A controversial look at the most renowned person of African descent in the eighteenth-century. In this widely aclaimed biography, historian Vincent Carretta gives us the authoritative portrait of Olaudah Equiano (c.1745–1797), the former slave whose 1789 autobiography quickly became a popular polemic against the slave trade and a literary classic. Sailor, entrepreneur, and adventurer, Equiano is revealed here as never before, thanks to archival research on an unprecedented scale - some of which even indicates that Equiano may have lied about his origins to advance the antibondage struggle with which he became famously identified. A masterpiece of scholarship and writerly poise, this book redefines an extraordinary man and the turbulent age that shaped him. Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, has edited scholarly editions of the works of Equiano and of Equiano's contemporaries Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Phillis Wheatley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His most recent books are EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: BIOGRAPHY OF A SELF-MADE MAN, winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize, and THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILIP QUAQUE, THE FIRST AFRICAN ANGLICAN MISSIONARY, coedited with Ty M. Reese.
DESCRIPTION - With POEMS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, RELIGIOUS AND MORAL (1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman - of any race or background - to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. In PHILLIS WHEATLEY, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status. A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, marketing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vincent Carretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of more than ten books, including scholarly editions of the writings of Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, and Ottobah Cugoano. His most recent books are EQUIANO, THE AFRICAN: BIOGRAPHY OF A SELF-MADE MAN, winner of the Annibel Jenkins Prize, and THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF PHILIP QUAQUE, THE FIRST AFRICAN ANGLICAN MISSIONARY, coedited with Ty M. Reese.
DESCRIPTION - Mircea Cartarescu, born in 1956, is one of Romania's leading novelists and poets. This translation of his 1989 novel NOSTALGIA, writes Andrei Codrescu, ‘introduces to English a writer who has always had a place reserved for him in a constellation that includes the Brothers Grimm, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Bruno Schulz, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, and Milorad Pavic, to mention just a few.' Like most of his literary contemporaries of the avant-garde Eighties Generation, his major work has been translated into several European languages, with the notable exception, until now, of English. Readers opening the pages of NOSTALGIA should brace themselves for a verbal tidal wave of the imagination that will wash away previous ideas of what a novel is or ought to be. Although each of its five chapters is separate and stands alone, a thematic, even mesmeric harmony finds itself in children's games, the music of the spheres, humankind's primordial myth-making, the origins of the universe, and in the dilapidated tenement blocks of an apocalyptic Bucharest during the years of communist dictatorship.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mircea C?rt?rescu (born 1 June 1956) is a Romanian poet, novelist and essayist. Born in Bucharest, he graduated from the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Letters, Department of Romanian Language And Literature, in 1980. Between 1980 and 1989 he worked as a Romanian language teacher, and then he worked at the Writers' Union and as an editor at the Caiete Critice magazine. In 1991 he became a lecturer at the Chair of Romanian literary history, part of the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters. At present (2010), he is an associate professor. Between 1994-1995 he was a visiting lecturer at the University of Amsterdam.
DESCRIPTION - Angela Carter reexamines fairy tales from a feminist perspective in her collection of fairy tales ‘The Bloody Chamber.' Carter, who has made the distinction between folk tales as a pre-capitalist folk form and fairy tales as a bourgeois art form, uses intertextuality to explore the nuances of sexuality and gender relations in short stories such as ‘The Bloody Chamber' and ‘The Snow Child.' By changing the cultural context of established fairy tales such as ‘Bluebeard' and ‘Snow White,' Carter creates a new perspective.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I know nothing. I am a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper, an unhatched egg. I have not yet become a woman, although I possess a woman's shape. Not a woman, no: both more and less than a real woman. Now I am a being as mythic and monstrous as Mother herself. New York has become the City of Dreadful Night where dissolute Leilah performs a dance of chaos for Evelyn. But this young Englishman's fate lies in the arid desert, where a many-breasted fertility goddess will wield her scalpel to transform him into the new Eve.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - THE BERN BOOK is Vincent Carter's meandering reflection on being the only black man in the town of Bern, Switzerland, where he lived for over 30 years. He had gone there from Kansas City, via Paris (he first thought of actually settling in Paris, but found the noise level too great). Carter had a desperate need to write-but not about black power, which was then the only subject one expected of a black writer. He rather needed to explore himself, as so many other expatriates had done before him. The book is more akin to Robert Burton's 17th-century AN ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLy than to Jimmy Baldwin's THE FIRE NEXT TIME. After a number of attempts to help get Carter's manuscript published, the literary biographer, Herbert Lottman, wrote an essay on this author that appeared in a cultural quarterly. Then, a New York publisher decided to bring out THE BERN BOOK after all-using Lottman's essay as an introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VINCENT O. CARTER was born in Kansas City in 1924. At seventeen he was drafted into the U.S. Army. He landed on a Normandy beachhead and took part in the drive toward Paris. Back in the United States, he earned a college degree from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and spent a graduate year at Wayne State in Detroit. Eventually he returned to Europe, spending time in Paris, Munich, and Amsterdam before settling in Bern, where he spent the rest of his life in a sort of self-imposed exile. His only work published during his lifetime was THE BERN BOOK: A RECORD OF THE VOYAGE OF THE MIND (1973), a memoir of his life in the Swiss capital during the 1950s. He completed a draft manuscript for SUCH SWEET THUNDER in 1963. Despite receiving enthusiastic support from some in the literary world, the manuscript did not deliver what publishers expected from ‘Negro literature' at the time, and after enduring a round of rejections Carter shelved the project. He died in Bern in 1983.
DESCRIPTION - This haunting and moving novel was voted the best work of fiction the year it was published in Mexico. In it Rosario Castellanos combines the myth of the nine ancient Mayan villages Southern Mexico with the reality of a modern Indian uprising during the time of the agra- reforms instituted by President Cardenas. Only native a Mexican could interpret with such sensitivity and strength both the dignity and revolt of the Indians and the graciousness and traditions of the landed families. Across the panorama of a disintegrating culture move these memorable characters: the bewildered landowner, Don Cesar, who pits his will against the rising forces of change; Nana, the devout nurse, warm in her affection, strict in her observance of custom; Mario, an inquisitive boy with the inimitable charm of breeding, part of the peesent but formed by the past; Ernesto, Don Cesar's bastard nephew, surging with conflict and indecision; Matilde, a sex-starved half cousin; Juana, the wife of the Indian rebel; Felipe, leader of the insurgents, loyal and rigid as the dry earth. Though set in a remote district of Mexico, THE NINE GUARDIANS is a universal novel. Its human problems, its pathos, its tenderness, its conflicts are known to all peoples in all parts of the world. And they are interpreted with a lyric yet earthy quality as vivid as that of Conrad Richter or Willa Cather. ROSARIO CASTELLANOS is one of a group of young Mexican writers whose works are being more and more widely acclaimed beyond their native land. The young author of the prize-winning THE NINE GUARDIANS is at once novelist, poet, and philosopher, and the present novel is a fine testament to her skill and insight in all three fields. As a child, Miss Castellanos knew intimately the background she describes. Later she traveled widely in Europe as well as in the Americas. Her experiences are reflected in THE NINE GUARDIANS, which, though intensely Mexican in character, has within it a universality of understanding and feeling that appeals to the minds and hearts of readers everywhere. (original title: Balun-Canan, 1957 - Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico City).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rosario Castellanos (25 May 1925 - 7 August 1974) was a Mexican poet and author. Along with the other members of the Generation of 1950 (the poets who wrote following the Second World War, influenced by Cesar Vallejo and others), she was one of Mexico's most important literary voices in the last century. Throughout her life, she wrote eloquently about issues of cultural and gender oppression, and her work has influenced feminist theory and cultural studies. Though she died young, she opened the door of Mexican literature to women, and left a legacy that still resonates today.
DESCRIPTION - Jacket painting sections by Ana Castillo. Keywords: Latina Culture Politics Latin America. ISBN: 0826315542. The ‘I' in these critical essays by novelist, poet, scholar, and activist/curandera Ana Castillo is that of the Mexic-Amerindian woman living in the United States. The essays are addressed to everyone interested in the roots of the colonized woman's reality. Castillo introduces the term Xicanisma in a passionate call for a politically active, socially committed Chicana feminism. In ‘A Countryless Woman,' Castillo outlines the experience of the brown woman in a racist society that recognizes race relations mostly as a black and white dilemma. Essays on the Watsonvi lie strike, the early Chicano movement, and the roots of machismo illustrate the extent to which women still struggle against male dominance. Other essays suggest strategies for opposing the suppression of women's spirituality and sexuality by institutionalized religion and the state. These challenging essays will be a provocative guide for those who envision a new future for women as we face a new century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana Castillo (born 15 June 1953) is a Mexican-American Chicana novelist, poet, short story writer, essayist, editor, playwright, translator and independent scolar. Considered as one of the leading voices in Chicana experience, known for her daring and experimental style as a Latino novelist. Her works offer pungent and passionate socio-political comment that is based on established oral and literary traditions. Castillo's interest in race and gender issues can be traced throughout her writing career. Her novel, Sapogonia was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She is the editor of ‘La Tolteca', an arts and literary magazine. Castillo held the first Sor Juana InEs de la Cruz Endowed Chair at DePaul University. She has attained a number of awards including an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for her first novel, ‘The Mixquiahuala Letters', a Carl Sandburg Award, a Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in fiction and poetry and in 1998 Sor Juana Achievement Award by the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum in Chicago.
DESCRIPTION - An extraordinary literary event: the simultaneous publication of a brilliant and vivid new rendering of C. P. Cavafy's COLLECTED POEMS and the first-ever English translation of the poet's thirty UNFINISHED POEMS, both featuring the fullest literary commentaries available in English - by the acclaimed critic, scholar, and award-winning author of THE LOST. No modern poet brought so vividly to life the history and culture of Mediterranean antiquity; no writer dared break, with such taut energy, the early-twentieth-century taboos surrounding homoerotic desire; no poet before or since has so gracefully melded elegy and irony as the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy (1863–1933). Now, after more than a decade of work and study, and with the cooperation of the Cavafy Archive in Athens, Daniel Mendelsohn - a classics scholar who alone among Cavafy's translators shares the poet's deep intimacy with the ancient world - is uniquely positioned to give readers full access to Cavafy's genius. And we hear for the first time the remarkable music of his poetry: the sensuous rhymes, rich assonances, and strong rhythms of the original Greek that have eluded previous translators. The more than 250 works collected in this volume, comprising all of the Published, Repudiated, and Unpublished poems, cover the vast sweep of Hellenic civilization, from the Trojan War through Cavafy's own lifetime. Powerfully moving, searching and wise, whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poetry brilliantly makes the historical personal - and vice versa. He brings to his profound exploration of longing and loneliness, fate and loss, memory and identity the historian's assessing eye as well as the poet's compassionate heart. With its in-depth introduction and a helpful commentary that situates each work in a rich historical, literary, and biographical context, this revelatory new translation, together with THE UNFINISHED POEMS, is a cause for celebration - the definitive presentation of Cavafy in English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Constantine Petrou Cavafy, widely recognized as the greatest of modern Greek poets, was born in Alexandria in 1863 into a family originally from Constantinople. After some childhood years spent in England and a stay in Constantinople in the early 1880s, he lived his entire life in Alexandria. It was there that he would write and (for the most part) self-publish the poems for which he became known, working all the while as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Egyptian government. His poetry was first brought to the attention of the English-speaking public in 1919 by E. M. Forster, whom he had met during the First World War. Cavafy died in Alexandria on April 29, 1933, his seventieth birthday; the first commercially published collection of his work appeared posthumously, in Alexandria, in 1935.
DESCRIPTION - At last, an ample English-language selection of one of contemporary poetry's most vibrant voices. Any hall she has ever read her poetry in is invariably filled to the gills. Women like her, girls like her, and men like her, too. In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wistawa Szymborska is in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli that she has written the most intensely ‘ethical' poetry in Italian literature of the twentieth century. One could add that it is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, My Poems Won't Change the World is her first substantial American anthology. The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, now freshly translated by an illustrious group of American poets, some of them already familiar with her work: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi, Rosanna Warren, Geoffrey Brock, J. D. McClatchy, and David Shapiro. Gini Alhadeff's translations, which make up half the book, are the result of a five-year collaboration with Cavalli. This edition includes the original Italian language poems alongside the English translation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi, Umbria, and now lives in Rome. She has published six collections of poetry: Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo; Il cielo (The Sky); Poesie 1974–1992 (Poems); L'io singolare proprio mio (The All Mine Singular I); Sempre aperto teatro (The Forever Open Theater); and Pigre divinità e pigra sorte (Lazy Gods, Lazy Fate). She has also published translations of Shakespeare and Molière. Gini Alhadeff published a memoir, The Sun at Midday: Tales of a Mediterranean Family, and a novel, Diary of a Djinn. She was born in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents. She is completing The Magic Horn, about a Swiss-American psychiatrist and her therapeutic sculpture garden at Bellevue Hospital.
DESCRIPTION - Celan saw his poems as ‘messages in a bottle'. They could be picked up or lost - the risk involved was as essential for him as the need to communicate. Although influenced by early Expressionism, Celan occupies an isolated position in German literature. His work is characterized by a sense of horror - a legacy of his experiences under the Nazis, - a belief that poetry must be open to the unexpected and unpredictable, and by • his search for a redefinition of reality. Celan's poetic progression is conveyed by his use of images, not by argument, and the difficulty and paradox are couched in a unique purity of form and diction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Celan (November 23, 1920 - approximately April 20, 1970) was the most frequently used pseudonym of Paul Antschel, one of the major poets of the post-World War II era. Celan was born in 1920 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Cernauti, Bukovina, then part of Romania (now part of Ukraine). His father, Leo Antschel, was a Zionist who advocated his son's education in Hebrew at Safah Ivriah, an institution previously convinced of the wisdom of assimilation into Austrian culture, and one which favourably received Chaim Weizmann of the World Zionist Organization in 1927. Celan became a French citizen in 1955 and lived in Paris. Celan's sense of persecution increased after the widow of his friend the French-German poet Yvan Goll accused him of plagiarising her husband's work. Celan committed suicide by drowning in the Seine river in late April 1970.
DESCRIPTION - "Here's the truth, simply stated. bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales." So begins the imaginary interview that comprises this novel. Professor Y, the interviewing academic, asks questions that allow CEline, a character in his own book, the chance to rail against convention and defend his idiosyncratic methods. In the course of their outrageous interplay, CEline comes closer to defining and justifying his poetics than in any of his other novels. But this is more than just an interview. As the book moves forward, Professor Y reveals his real identity and the characters travel through the streets of Paris toward a bizarre climax that parodies the author, the critic, and, most of all, the establishment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis-Ferdinand Celine was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 - 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Celine was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.
DESCRIPTION - Few first novels have had the impact of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932). Written in an explosive style that fairly jumps off the page, the book shocked most critics but found immediate success with the French reading public, which responded enthusiastically to the violent misadventures of its petit-bourgeois antihero, Bardamu, and his scabrous nihilism. His military experiences in the first years of World War I, his travels to colonial French West Africa, New York, and Detroit, his return to postwar France and his beginning medical practice in the slums of suburban Paris—all these have some parallels with the real life of the author. However, repeated attempts to prove the novel strictly autobiographical have become exercises in academic futility: the picaresque extravagance of this twentieth-century classic clearly marks it as a forerunner of absurdist black humor. The publication of Ralph Manheim's translation of Journey to the End of the Night follows some years after his rendering into English of its companion novel, Death on the Installment Plan. Manheim, more than any other translator, has been able to capture the savage energy of Céline's French, drawn from the Parisian argot he made his own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Louis-Ferdinand Celine was the pen name of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 - 1 July 1961). He was a French novelist, pamphleteer and physician. The name Celine was the first name of his grandmother. He is considered one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, developing a new style of writing that modernized both French and world literature.
DESCRIPTION - Cellini's autobiographical memoirs, which he began writing in Florence in 1558, give a detailed account of his singular career, as well as his loves, hatreds, passions, and delights, written in an energetic, direct, and racy style. They show a great self-regard and self-assertion, sometimes running into extravagances which are impossible to credit. He even writes in a complacent way of how he contemplated his murders before carrying them out. Parts of his tale recount some extraordinary events and phenomena; such as his stories of conjuring up a legion of devils in the Colosseum, after one of his not innumerous mistresses had been spirited away from him by her mother; of the marvelous halo of light which he found surrounding his head at dawn and twilight after his Roman imprisonment, and his supernatural visions and angelic protection during that adversity; and of his being poisoned on two separate occasions. The autobiography has been translated into English by Thomas Roscoe, by John Addington Symonds, and by A. Macdonald. It has been considered and published as a classic, and commonly regarded as one of the most colourful autobiographies (certainly the most important autobiography from the Renaissance). Cellini also wrote treatises on the goldsmith's art, on sculpture, and on design.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benvenuto Cellini (3 November 1500 - 13 February 1571) was an Italian goldsmith, sculptor, painter, soldier and musician, who also wrote a famous autobiography.
DESCRIPTION - Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read DON QUIXOTE. ‘Though there have been many valuable English translations of Don Quixote, I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.' - From the Introduction by Harold Bloom
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (29 September 1547 (assumed) - 22 April 1616) was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His magnum opus, Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern European novel, is a classic of Western literature, and is regarded amongst the best works of fiction ever written. His influence on the Spanish language has been so great that the language is often called la lengua de Cervantes (‘the language of Cervantes'). He was dubbed El Príncipe de los Ingenios (‘The Prince of Wits'). In 1569, Cervantes moved to Rome where he worked as chamber assistant of Giulio Acquaviva, a wealthy priest who became a cardinal during the following year. By then, Cervantes had enlisted as a soldier in a Spanish Navy infantry regiment and continued his military life until 1575, when he was captured by Algerian corsairs. After five years of slavery he was released on ransom from his captors by his parents and the Trinitarians, a Catholic religious order. He subsequently returned to his family in Madrid. In 1585, Cervantes published a pastoral novel named La Galatea. Because of financial problems, Cervantes worked as a purveyor for the Spanish Armada, and later as a tax collector. In 1597, discrepancies in his accounts of three years previous landed him in the Crown Jail of Seville. In 1605, he was in Valladolid, just when the immediate success of the first part of his Don Quixote, published in Madrid, signaled his return to the literary world. In 1607, he settled in Madrid, where he lived and worked until his death. During the last nine years of his life, Cervantes solidified his reputation as a writer; he published the Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels) in 1613, the Journey to Parnassus (Viaje al Parnaso) in 1614, and in 1615, the Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses and the second part of Don Quixote. Carlos Fuentes noted that, ‘Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be written.'
DESCRIPTION - This volume makes available for the first time in English the most important political essay by the father of ‘Negritude' as concept and as movement. Cesaire's Discourse on Colonialism was first published in 1955, and did much to shape the emergent Third World view of Europe and the United States. Included as well is an interview with Cesaire about his ideas and work, conducted by the Haitian poet Rene Depestre in Havana in 1967. Cesaire is already well known to the English-reading public through his plays and poetry, especially RETURN TO MY NATIVE LAND, which Andre Breton called ‘nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of all time.' These political essays make available his pathbreaking contributions to the revolt of the Third World. The main subject of these writings is the barbarism of the colonizer and the unhappiness of the colonized, the destruction of civilizations that were dignified and fraternal by the colonizer's machine for exploitation. Cesaire praises as healthy contact between the peoples of the world. But between the colonizer and the colonized there is no contact; there is only intimidation, police, taxes, thievery, rape, contempt, mistrust, and the morgue. it is not human contact, but the contact between dehumanized elites and degraded masses. Far from seeing the end of the era of formal colonization as the end of the problem, Cesaire singles out the American form of imperialism as the only variety of oppression that surpasses that of Europe. Barbarism's hour, he says, has arrived - modern barbarism, the American hour. Like Fanon, who was also born in Martinique and educated in France, Cesaire turned to Africa for values he could counterpose to the Europe he came to despise. The ‘humanism' of Europe he denounced as a pseudo-humanism, with a sordidly racist conception of the rights of man. European and United States civilization he saw as sick; morally weakened by its use of force against the subjugated, and by its justifications of imperialism, it calls down upon itself its own punishment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - AIME CESAIRE (1913-2008) was a poet, playwright, statesman, and cultural critic, and is best known as the creator of the concept of negritude. His books include AIME CESAIRE: THE COLLECTED POETRY, NOTEBOOK OF A RETURN TO THE NATIVE LAND, and DISCOURSE ON COLONIALISM.
DESCRIPTION - The Complete Poetry of Aime Cesaire gathers all of Cesaire's celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Cesaire's poetic œuvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poesie, Theâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists. To prepare the English translations, the translators started afresh from this French edition. Included here are translations of first editions of the poet's early work, prior to political interventions in the texts after 1955, revealing a new understanding of Cesaire's aesthetic and political trajectory. A truly comprehensive picture of Cesaire's poetry and poetics is made possible thanks to a thorough set of notes covering variants, historical and cultural references, and recurring figures and structures, a scholarly introduction and a glossary. This book provides a new cornerstone for readers and scholars in 20th century poetry, African diasporic literature, and postcolonial studies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Aime Cesaire (1913–2008) was best known as the co-creator (with Leopold Senghor) of the concept of negritude.
DESCRIPTION - The Great Camouflage translates and assembles in one volume the seven articles Suzanne CEsaire wrote for the cultural journal Tropiques. CEsaire engages anthropology, esthetics, surrealism, history, and poetry as she grapples with questions of power and deception, self-deception, the economic slipknot of a post-slavery debt system, identity and inauthenticity, bad faith, psychological and affective aberration, and cultural zombification. All are caught in the web of "the great camouflage." The collection provides a multifaceted portrait of CEsaire, and includes short writings from others who wrote passionately about her, including Andre Breton, Andre Masson, Rene MEnil, Daniel Maximin, and her husband AimE CEsaire and daughter, Ina CEsaire.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Suzanne Cesaire [nee Roussi] (11 August 1915 - 16 May 1966), born in Martinique, an overseas department of France, was a French writer, teacher, scholar, anti-colonial and feminist activist, and Surrealist. Her husband was the poet and politician Aime Cesaire.
DESCRIPTION - In this unusual collection of stories and fables, 1992 Goncourt prize-winner Patrick Chamoiseau re-creates in truly magical language the stories he heard as a child in Martinique in his first book to be published in the U.S. Included are delightfully coarse and lively folktales incorporating European and African motifs and stories apparently handed down from the time of slavery. In one, ‘Ti-Jean Horizon,' the eponymous hero repeatedly outwits his Beke (white) master, as does Conquering John in African American tales. Others warn of the danger of foolish behavior, as in ‘Nanie-Rosette the Belly-Slave,' of whom the storyteller remarks ‘Quite a pretty name for a disaster with an abyss for a stomach, a riverbed for a throat. In short, Nanie-Rosette loved to eat, oh yes.' Her gluttony leads to her downfall at the hands of a devil. The lyric language here is often bawdy, even in a uniquely Martinique variant of the Cinderella tale. Witty asides enrich these fables and allegories, though their protagonists are poor, enslaved people striving to survive in a politically hostile world. The stories have a contemporary edge that transcends their colonial roots.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Patrick Chamoiseau is a French author from Martinique known for his work in the crEolitE movement. Chamoiseau was born on December 3, 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he currently resides. After he studied law in Paris he returned to Martinique inspired by Edouard Glissant to take a close interest in Creole culture. Chamoiseau is the author of a historical work on the Antilles under the reign of NapolEon Bonaparte and several non-fiction books which include Eloge de la crEolitE (In Praise of Creoleness), co-authored with Jean BernabE and Raphaël Confiant. Awarded the Prix Carbet (1990) for Chemins d'enfance. His novel Texaco was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 1992, and was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It has been described as ‘a masterpiece, the work of a genius, a novel that deserves to be known as much as Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth and Cesaire's Return to My Native Land'. Chamoiseau may also safely be considered as one of the most innovative writers to hit the French literary scene since Louis-Ferdinand CEline. His freeform use of French language - a highly complex yet fluid mixture of constant invention and ‘creolism' - fuels a poignant and sensuous depiction of Martinique people in particular and humanity at large.
DESCRIPTION - At six feet five, Moose Malloy was as inconspicuous as a tarantula on angel food and about as dangerous. But Marlowe never was the kind of guy to walk away from trouble when it slapped him in the face, and Moose's girl had disappeared, a mere eight years ago. All Marlowe had to do was find her. Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds himself involved with more than extortion. Kidnapping, pornography, seduction, and murder are just a few of the complications he gets caught up in.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - A wealthy Pasadena widow with a mean streak, a missing daughter-in-law with a past, and a gold coin worth a small fortune - the elements don't quite add up until Marlowe discovers evidence of murder, rape, blackmail, and the worst kind of human exploitation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - A couple of missing wives - one a rich man's and one a poor man's - become the objects of Marlowe's investigation. One of them may have gotten a Mexican divorce and married a gigolo and the other may be dead. Marlowe's not sure he cares about either one, but he's not paid to care.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - A movie starlet with a gangster boyfriend and a pair of siblings with a shared secret lure Marlowe into the less than glamorous and more than a little dangerous world of Hollywood fame. Chandler's first foray into the industry that dominates the company town that is Los Angeles.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - Raymond Chandler's ingenious novel finds Philip Marlowe constantly on the move with a case involving a war scarred drunk and his nymphomaniac wife. A psychotic gangster's on his trail; he's in trouble with the cops, and an unequaled number of corpses turns up.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - In writing about Raymond Chandler, Somerset Maugham once said: ‘He has an admirable aptitude for that typical product of the quick American mind, the wisecrack, and his sardonic humour has an engaging spontaneity. I do not know who can succeed him.' Here are twelve crackling detective stories by the acknowledged master of the hard-boiled school. Although Chandler wrote other stories, these are the ones he called ‘authorized'; they are his personal selection and collection. Philip Marlowe, Chandler's famous private investigator, whom Charles Rob has called ‘the most authentically American sleuth in contemporary fiction,' appears in the first and last stories. Mr. Chandler has also written an introduction to this collection, and the epilogue contains his memorable essay on detective fiction, ‘The Simple Art of Murder,' from which the hook gains its name. The two pieces, candid and thoughtful, can stand as Chandler's autobiography as a writer. ‘Chandler's name will certainly go down among the dozen or so mystery writers who were also innovators and stylists; who, working the common vein of crime fiction, mined the gold of literature.' - The Times (London). ‘A star of the first magnitude.' - Erie Stanley Gardner.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raymond Thornton Chandler (July 23, 1888 - March 26, 1959) was an American novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at age forty-four, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, ‘Blackmailers Don't Shoot‘, was published in 1933 in Black Mask, a popular pulp magazine. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. In addition to his short stories, Chandler published just seven full novels during his lifetime (though an eighth in progress at his death was completed by Robert B. Parker). All but Playback have been made into motion pictures, some several times. In the year before he died, he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died on March 26, 1959, in La Jolla, California. Chandler had an immense stylistic influence on American popular literature, and is considered by many to be a founder, along with Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and other Black Mask writers, of the hard-boiled school of detective fiction. His protagonist, Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett's Sam Spade, is considered by some to be synonymous with ‘private detective,' both having been played on screen by Humphrey Bogart, whom many considered to be the quintessential Marlowe. Some of Chandler's novels are considered important literary works, and three are often considered masterpieces: Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1953). The Long Goodbye is praised within an anthology of American crime stories as ‘arguably the first book since Hammett's The Glass Key, published more than twenty years earlier, to qualify as a serious and significant mainstream novel that just happened to possess elements of mystery'.
DESCRIPTION - Manfred ‘Shotgun' Coen, detective first grade, New York City Police Department, master of flick shots, phony spins and the penholder, is a ping-pong freak, as fast with his serve as he is in a shoot-out. He is a special kind of cop, a loner, who wears magenta socks, eats at Cuban restaurants and refuses to live on Long Island with his fellow policemen. Coen is also the boyhood friend of Cesar Guzmann, a gambler and whorehouse entrepreneur, whose family migrated to the Bronx via Peru many years, ago, and who prays to Moses, John the Baptist and Saint Jerome (to keep his options open). Because of his special knowledge of the Peruvian underworld, Coen is assigned to investigate the disappearance of Caroline Child, niece of a prominent theatrical producer, who may (or may not) have run away from school with her friend Odile. Odile is New York's porno queen, mistress of The Dwarf, a notorious Village lesbian bar, and an employee of the Guzmann family. Coen's search takes him to Mexico and back to New York for a final ping-pong match with a ‘downtown' shark hired at $100 an hour to defeat Coen at his own game.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
DESCRIPTION - The new novel about a kind of Jewish Popeye Doyle and his rampant daughter, by a ‘marvelous' (New York Times Book Review) author who ‘forces one deep into his inimitable world of tough-talking fuzz' (New York Times) that ‘makes the friends of Eddie Coyle look like choirboys' (Publishers Weekly). Isaac Sidel (known to his detractors as Isaac the Pure) was a cop - the toughest, hardest and most incorruptible in the business; and he ruled the meanest kingdom of the city - the Lower East Side. The only one he couldn't handle was Marilyn the Wild, his daughter and the only person he truly loved. Also, Rupert, the brilliant vindictive son of Isaac's oldest friend, who in an alliance with a kung-fu expert and a fiery teen-age ‘mama' formed the Lollipop Gang, dedicated to the violent end of Isaac's sway. When his gang was finally broken, Rupert then stalked Isaac's softest spot, Marilyn, in one of the best page-turning finales ever written. This high voltage novel pulls the reader into America's urban underbelly - wild, terrifying and wondrously tender in its fashion. Its people and their remarkable histories will not let you go. not even long after the very last page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
DESCRIPTION - Beginning with BLUE EYES, and continuing with MARILYN THE WILD and THE EDUCATION OF PATRICK SILVER, Jerome Charyn developed a true American original, Isaac Sidel, First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York City - of Big City Anywhere, America, really - a wounded romantic whose heart is ravaged by too much love for his fellow lesser-man, whose guts are on fire with too much rage at the well-placed killers of his City's dreams. Now in SECRET ISAAC Mr. Charyn (about whose most recent novel John Leonard in The New York Times said, ‘It's as if The Sound and the fury had been written by Candide') allows the reader to discover the essential Isaac, the secret Isaac, trailing him from New York City's political halls and lower depths to Dublin's Joycean underworld as he pursues villainy, true love and terrible revenge, and along the way creates a masterwork.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the capstone to Jerome Charyn's contemporary ‘brilliantly conceived crime-and-punishment trilogy' (Time) begun with BLUE EYES and continued with MARILYN THE WILD - together building a cosmos of big city folks placed high and low, in hot pursuit of life in extremis. wonderful, terrible, true. At the center is Patrick Silver, defrocked cop, ex-colleague and now antagonist of Isaac Sidel, the First Deputy Police Commissioner of New York, also known as ‘the Blue Godfather' Patrick Silver's present beat is an Irish synogogue, his enemies are fearsome, his constituents are suspicious, his love and just reward, finally, is Odile Leonhardy, a teen-age sorceress whose office is the Plaza, whose favors are a blessing. Crime-punishment-reward form the education of Patrick Silver, and the trilogy of Jerome Charyn's extraordinary achievement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome Charyn (born May 13, 1937) is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him ‘one of the most important writers in American literature.' New York Newsday called Charyn as ‘a contemporary American Balzac,' and the Los Angeles Times described him as ‘absolutely unique among American writers.' Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published 30 novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year. Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been named Commander of Arts and Letter (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres) by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn was Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris until 2009, when he retired from teaching. In addition to his writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top 10 percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, ‘The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong.' Charyn lives in Paris and New York City.
DESCRIPTION - 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 and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked the scandal of the times; it was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave, and that Jefferson fathered a slave family, many of whose descendents, known and unknown, are alive today. In this moving novel, which spans two continents, sixty years, and seven presidencies, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates a love story, based on the documents and evidence of the day but giving free rein to the novelist's imagination. The story opens in the Paris of 1787, two scant years before the French Revolution and but a decade after the start of our own, where Thomas Jefferson is serving as the American ambassador to the court of France. A widower, Jefferson had brought his elder daughter, Martha, to France with him, but now he decides to bring over his younger daughter, Polly, as well. Sent with her as maid and servant is fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings. Over the next several months Jefferson grows increasingly infatuated with his slave, and before long becomes her lover. Highly intelligent and sensitive, and increasingly educated and sophisticated through her Paris sojourn, Sally Hemings could have opted not to return to America when Jefferson was called home, could have chosen freedom on the basis that slavery had been abolished on French soil. Bit she did return with Jefferson to Monticello, thus reenslaving herself to him. She never left Monticello again, and Jefferson, despite pressures to do so, did not remarry; the reason, no doubt, was Sally Hemings. Woven into this rich and complex narrative of love and enslavement is the story of the early Republic and of the personages of Aaron Burr, Dolley and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and John Trumbull. And like a series of somber counterpoints to the compelling love story are three salient themes: the slave rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner; murders, those of George Wythe, Jefferson's old professor and benefactor, and of George, the Lewis slave in Kentucky; and, above all, survival, that of Sally Hemings but also that of her indomitable mother, Elizabeth. Here were two generations of slave mistresses: Sally Hemings, mistress to a president, and her mother, mistress to a president's father-in-law. The strange and complex ties between these two American families - the Jeffersons and the Hemingses, one white, one black - form in a sense the underside of our history. In this brilliant novel, Barbara Chase-Riboud presents the remarkable love story of Jefferson and Hemings as a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable addendum to the history of the races, and of the sexes, in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining' of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
DESCRIPTION - Realistic and highly sensitive, Anton Chekhov's plays revolve around a society which is on the brink of a tremendous upheaval. His dramatic works present the actions of ordinary people - in his own words, ‘as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life'. Chekhov avoids any explicit political treatment, but the depth and subtlety of his art has generated a wealth of interpretation. His representation of human relationships is infinitely sympathetic. Still, despite Chekhov's eminence as a playwright, many feel that his short stories represent the greater achievement. Chekhov once said that a writer should not provide solutions but describe a situation so truthfully that the reader can no longer evade it. In his stories he deals with a variety of themes - religious fanaticism and sectarianism, megalomania, scientific controversies of the time - as well as provincial life in all its tedium and philistinism. And through his expressive portraits of men and women afflicted with inertia, selfishness and spiritual emptiness, he illuminates the social and philosophical questions of his day. Despite the current of pessimism, Chekhov never abandons his belief in the capacity for human progress through education and knowledge. VOLUME I: The Steppe (1888), Lights (1888), An Awkward Business (1888), The Beauties (1888), The Party (1888), The Seizure (1888), The Cobbler and the Devil (1888), The Bet (1889), The Princess (1889), A Dreary Story ((1889), Thieves ((1890), Gusev (1890), Peasant Women (1891). VOLUME II: The Duel (1891), My Wife (1892), The Butterfly (1982), After the Theatre (1892), Fragment (1892), The Story of a Commercial Venture (1892), In Exile (1892), From a Retired Teacher's Notebook (1892), A Fishy Affair (1892), Neighbours (1892), Ward Number Six (1892), Terror (1892), An Anonymous Story (1893). VOLUME III: The Two Volodyas (1893), The Black Monk (1894), A Woman's Kingdon (1894), Rothschild's Fiddle (1894), The Student (1894), The Russian master (1894), At a Country House (1894), The Head Gardener's Story (1894), Three Years (1895), His Wife (1895), Patch (1895), The Order of St Anne (1895), Murder (1895), Ariadne (1895), The Artist's Story (1896). VOLUME IV: My Life (1896), Peasants (1897), The Savage (1897), Home (1897), In the Cart ((1897), All Friends Together (1898), A Hard Case (1898), Gooseberries (1898), Concerning Love (1898), Doctor Startsev (1898), A Case History (1898), Angel (1899), New Villa (1899), On Official Business (1899), A Lady With a Dog (1899), At Christmas (1900), In the Hollow (1900), The Bishop (1902), A Marriageable Girl (1903).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife', he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.' Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood' and a ‘submerged life in the text.' Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.
DESCRIPTION - What is it like to be the first black as well as the first woman to run for President? With the striking candor and straightforward style for which she is famous, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm tells the story of her unique campaign of 1972. But THE GOOD FIGHT is more than the story of a battle waged with virtually no funds, no professional organization and with outspoken or oblique opposition from members of her own party and race. It is also the story of her continuing struggle for the reform of American politics. In blunt language she describes how politicians operate, from the wheeling and dealing that accompanied the primaries to the final dramatic maneuvering at the 1972 Democratic national convention. She writes of her relationships with black political leaders Walter Fauntroy, Louis Stokes, Ron Dellums, and Julian Bond, of the innate conservatism and piety she regards as characteristic of the black majority and what this meant in terms of her candidacy, and what direction she feels black politics should take in the years to come. Deeply committed to the cause of equal justice for blacks and for women, she refused to become the captive of either faction, a position that precipitated a bitter power struggle between members of both groups. Scrupulously honest about the errors in her own campaign, she does not hesitate to criticize George McGovern for the arrogance of his campaign staff and its failure to make contact with minority groups, women, labor, older voters, and non-college young people. Interlaced throughout the book are many lively and humorous anecdotes of her experiences on the ‘campaign trail' - including a particularly memorable account of her hospital visit with George Wallace. A firm believer in coalition politics, she offers some practical approaches for achieving this, as well as her own ideas on the future of the Democratic Party and her explicit opinions on the second-term Nixon. Shirley Chisholm sees her campaign as an extension of her role in politics as an idealist without illusions and as a potential voice for all the out-groups and minorities. This book bears the stamp of her remarkable personality; in it she tells the truth as she sees it regardless of its effect on her political future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (November 30, 1924 - January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
DESCRIPTION - In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman to be elected to the Congress of the United States. She won this unique designation the hard way - against the odds of her race and sex, and against all the ground rules of the political game. This is Mrs. Chisholm's own story of how she got there and how she assesses her role as a black woman in politics. Her story begins with a sharply perceived self-portrait of growing up in Brooklyn where her Barbadian parents, long on discipline but strong on love, survived the depths of depression poverty to give their children college educations. It was during these formative years that her nascent racial awareness gathered into a resolve to do something concrete for the black community. Her career in politics started In the early 1950s at the lowest rung on the political ladder, in Brooklyn's boss-run Democratic clubhouses. Persistently challenging the inequities of the machine, she came to be regarded as a troublemaking maverick - but one to be reckoned with. Her rise from local clubhouse worker to New York State Assemblywoman in Albany on to representative in the U.S. Congress was accomplished by the will of a dynamic, fighting woman with an unswerving belief in her own purpose: to put the needs of her people before political expediency. ‘Unbought and Unbossed' was Mrs. Chisholms street-corner campaign slogan when she won the election away from the odds-on favorite, former CORE director James Farmer. Since her fiery, precedent-breaking first months in Congress, she has continued to work under this system-bucking banner. Congresswoman Chisholm speaks out and she speaks straight - on a Congress bogged down by ‘the senility system.' the Nixon administration's failure to grapple with the priority problems of poverty. She expresses her hopes for the women's liberation movement and the younger generation in rightful rebellion. She tells how she has managed to combine a political life with a happy marriage. She explains her relations with the militant blacks and her reasons for choosing to work within the political system. With singular fervor and understanding, she has shaped her life and convictions in an attempt to bridge the gaps of generation, sex, and race. Her story has immediate relevance for all Americans.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shirley Anita St. Hill Chisholm (November 30, 1924 - January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. She was a Congresswoman, representing New York's 12th Congressional District for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1968, she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress. On January 25, 1972, she became the first major-party black candidate for President of the United States and the first woman to run for the Democratic presidential nomination (Margaret Chase Smith had previously run for the 1964 Republican presidential nomination). She received 152 first-ballot votes at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.
DESCRIPTION - From World War II until the 1980s, the United States reigned supreme as both the economic and the military leader of the world. The major shifts in global politics that came about with the dismantling of the Eastern Bloc have left the United States unchallenged as the pre-eminent military power, but American economic might has declined drastically in the face of competition, first from Germany and Japan and more recently from the newly prosperous countries elsewhere. In this book, Noam Chomsky points to the potentially catastrophic consequences of this imbalance. He reveals a world in which the United States exploits its advantage ruthlessly to enforce its national interests - and in the process destroys weaker nations. Deterring Democracy offers a devastating analysis of American Imperialism, drawing alarming connections between its repression of information inside the US and its aggressive empire-building abroad. 'One of the West's most influential intellectuals in the cause of peace.' - Independent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. Between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the ‘world's top public intellectual' in a 2005 poll. Chomsky has also been described as the ‘father of modern linguistics' and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. After the publication of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and has since continued to publish books of political criticism. He has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media. He describes his views as ‘fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism,' and often identifies with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
DESCRIPTION - What role do the media play in a capitalist democracy? Based on the Massey Lectures, delivered in Canada in November 1 988, Necessary Illusions argues that, far from performing a watchdog role, the ‘free press' serves the needs of those in power. With this book, Chomsky rips away the mask of propaganda that portrays the media as advocates of free speech and democracy: In short, the major media are corporations ‘selling' privileged audiences to other businesses. Media concentration is high, and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media. belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values. Those who fail to conform will be weeded out. - from the Massey Lectures. This book applies the propaganda model Chomsky has developed with Edward Herman to media coverage of the diplomatic process in Central America and the Middle East, human rights issues, terrorism, and other topics, revealing the crucial function of the media and educated elites in limiting democracy in the United States. Rigorously documented, Necessary Illusions is an invaluable tool for understanding how democracy functions in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books. Between 1980 and 1992, Chomsky was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar, and eighth overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period. He has been described as a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the ‘world's top public intellectual' in a 2005 poll. Chomsky has also been described as the ‘father of modern linguistics' and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory and psychology. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem. After the publication of his first books on linguistics, Chomsky became a prominent critic of the Vietnam War and has since continued to publish books of political criticism. He has become well known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy, state capitalism and the mainstream news media. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media. He describes his views as ‘fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism,' and often identifies with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
DESCRIPTION - From the Red Scare of 1919-1920 to the McCarthy period of the 1950s to the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) era of the 1960s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has operated primarily as America's political police. Set against this sordid background. the complex of FBI operations conducted against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, including murder, kidnapping, and a range of other illegal activities, provides a shocking indictment of the lawlessness of the ‘law enforcers.' Contrary to official announcements that COINTELPRO-type activities ended in 1971, Churchill and Vander Wall demonstrate that the FBI not only continued them, but in some cases actually increased their levels of intensity and violence. Agents of Repression concludes with consideration of recent FBI attempts to disrupt or destroy the Puerto Rican Independence movement and the Central America sanctuary and solidarity movements. Profusely illustrated and indexed, Agents of Repression will undoubtedly serve as the benchmark text for those concerned with under- standing not only what happened to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, but the functional reality of America's political police. ‘This study gives a chilling account of the government attack against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party, placed in the context of the traditional use of the FBI for domestic political repression. It is a powerful indictment, with far-reaching implications concerning the treatment of political activists, especially those that are black or native American, and the functioning of our political institutions generally.' - Noam Chomsky.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ward Churchill is a member of the Governing Council of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement, Coordinator of American Indian Studies for the University of Colorado/Boulder, and author of From a Native Son. Jim Vander Wall is an active supporter of the struggles of Native People for sovereignty and has written several articles on FBI. He is co-author, with Ward Churchill, of Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars on the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988) and an editor of New Studies on the Left.
DESCRIPTION - Chosen an ‘Outstanding Book on the Subject of Human Rights in the United States' by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. In this volume of incisive essays, Ward Churchill looks at representations of American Indians in literature and film, delineating a history of cultural propaganda that has served to support the continued colonization of Native America. During each phase of the genocide of American Indians, the media has played a critical role in creating easily digestible stereotypes of Indians for popular consumption. Literature about Indians was first written and published in order to provoke and sanctify warfare against them. Later, the focus changed to enlisting public support for ‘civilizing the savages,' stripping them of their culture and assimilating them into the dominant society. Now, in the final stages of cultural genocide, it is the appropriation and stereotyping of Native culture that establishes control over knowledge and truth. The primary means by which this is accomplished is through the powerful publishing and film industries. Whether they are the tragically doomed ‘noble savages' walking into the sunset of Dances With Wolves or Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan, the exotic mythical Indians constitute no threat to the established order. Literature and art crafted by the dominant culture are an insidious political force, disinforming people who might otherwise develop a clearer understanding of indigenous struggles for justice and freedom. This book is offered to counter that deception, and to move people to take action on issues confronting American Indians today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ward LeRoy Churchill (born October 2, 1947) is an American author and political activist. He was a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1990 to 2007. The primary focus of his work is on the historical treatment of political dissenters and Native Americans by the United States government. His work features controversial and provocative views, written in a direct, often confrontational style. In January 2005, Churchill's work attracted publicity because of the widespread circulation of a 2001 essay, ‘On the Justice of Roosting Chickens‘. In the essay, he claimed that the September 11 attacks were a natural and unavoidable consequence of what he views as unlawful US policy, and he referred to the ‘technocratic corps' working in the World Trade Center as ‘little Eichmanns‘. In March 2005 the University of Colorado began investigating allegations that Churchill had engaged in research misconduct; it reported in June 2006 that he had done so. Churchill was fired on July 24, 2007, leading to a claim by some scholars that he was fired because of the ‘Little Eichmanns' comment. Churchill filed a lawsuit against the University of Colorado for unlawful termination of employment. In April 2009 a Denver jury found that Churchill was wrongly fired, awarding him $1 in damages. In July 2009, a District Court judge vacated the monetary award and declined Churchill's request to order his reinstatement, deciding the university has ‘quasi-judicial immunity'. In February 2010, Churchill appealed the judge's decision. In November 2010, the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the lower-court's ruling. In September 10, 2012, the Colorado Supreme Court upheld the lower courts' decisions in favor of the University of Colorado. On April 1st, 2013, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
DESCRIPTION - An economist explains five laws that confirm our worst fears: stupid people can and do rule the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlo M. Cipolla (15 August 1922 - 5 September 2000) was an Italian economic historian. As a young man, Cipolla wanted to teach history and philosophy in an Italian high school, and therefore enrolled at the political science faculty at the University of Pavia. While a student there, thanks to professor Franco Borlandi, a specialist in medieval economic history, he discovered his passion for economic history. He graduated from Pavia in 1944. Subsequently he studied at the University of Paris and the London School of Economics. Cipolla obtained his first teaching post in economic history in Catania at the age of 27. This was to be the first stop in a long academic career in Italy (Venice, Turin, Pavia, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and Fiesole) and abroad. In 1953 Cipolla left for the United States as a Fulbright fellow and in 1957 became a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later he obtained a full professorship. Cipolla produced two essays on economics, circulated (in English) among friends in 1973 and 1976, then published in 1988 (in Italian) under the title Allegro, ma non troppo ("Forward, but not too fast" or "Happy, but not too much", from the musical phrase meaning "Quickly, but not too quick"). The first essay, "The Role of Spices (and Black Pepper in Particular) in Medieval Economic Development" ("Il ruolo delle spezie (e del pepe nero in particolare) nello sviluppo economico del Medioevo", 1973), traces the curious correlations between spice import and population expansion in the late Middle Ages, postulating a causation due to a supposed aphrodisiac effect of black pepper. The second essay, "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" ("Le leggi fondamentali della stupidità umana", 1976), explores the controversial subject of stupidity. Stupid people are seen as a group, more powerful by far than major organizations such as the Mafia and the industrial complex, which without regulations, leaders or manifesto nonetheless manages to operate to great effect and with incredible coordination.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed by Toni Morrison as 'required reading, a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by 'the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States' (The New York Observer). 'This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.' In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation's history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of 'race,' a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates's attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son - and readers - the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children's lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward. Praise for Between the World and Me - 'Powerful and passionate. profoundly moving. a searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today.' - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times. 'Brilliant. a mature writer entirely consumed by a momentous subject and working at the extreme of his considerable powers at the very moment national events most conform to his vision.' - The Washington Post. 'I've been wondering who might fill the intellectual void that plagued me after James Baldwin died. Clearly it is Ta-Nehisi Coates. The language of Between the World and Me, like Coates's journey, is visceral, eloquent, and beautifully redemptive. As profound as it is revelatory.' - Toni Morrison. 'Coates has distilled four hundred years of history and his own anguish and wisdom into a prayer for his beloved son and an invocation to the conscience of his country. An instant classic and a gift to us all.' - Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns. 'I know that this book is addressed to the author's son, and by obvious analogy to all boys and young men of color as they pass, inexorably, into harm's way. I hope that I will be forgiven, then, for feeling that Coates was speaking to me, too, one father to another.' - Michael Chabon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ta-Nehisi Coates (born September 30, 1975) is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans. Coates has worked for The Village Voice, Washington City Paper, and Time. He has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, O, and other publications. In 2008 he published a memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. His second book, Between the World and Me, was released in July 2015. It won the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. He was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2015.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life.'--THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE. THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world--all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Cafe de la Terrasse--a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution--lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada--and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as ‘eros (women),' ‘internet(s),' and ‘war.' Throughout, it is written in the belief ‘that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He was Mac Curdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University from 1984 until his retirement in 2009.
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.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - G. A. Cohen (1941-2009) was emeritus fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford. His books include Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (Princeton), If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich?, and Rescuing Justice and Equality.
DESCRIPTION - Though Anita Scott Coleman was born in Mexico and reared in New Mexico, her stories appeared frequently in The Crisis and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. Reflecting and illuminating the movement's major themes, her often award-winning stories, delicate and understated, offer subtle commentary on the status of black women, their role in black society, and the position of African Americans in an overwhelmingly white society.As a young woman in New Mexico, Anita Scott graduated from New Mexico Teachers College and enjoyed a brief teaching career until she married. Later she moved to California, where despite her distance from Harlem she wrote her last nine published stories, polished examples of the Renaissance's finest short fiction, including 'Unfinished Masterpieces.' As one by one the journals of the Harlem Renaissance ceased publication, Coleman's career itself remained regrettably unfinished. By 1960, when she died at age seventy, the literary legacy of this masterful southwestern storyteller was forgotten.What Champion and Glasrud have recovered in this collection is more than Coleman's complete collected short fiction. It is a road map of African American life in the Southwest and West during the movement's glory days, etching not only indelible glimpses of character and culture but also the farthest reaching evidence of the Harlem Renaissance's success in sharing ideals and goals across a nation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anita Scott Coleman was a relatively unknown but important western contributor to the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico in 1890, Coleman's mother, Mary Ann, met her father, William Henry Scott, near Fort Elliott, Texas where he served as a buffalo soldier. He retired and they subsequently moved to Mexico. Following Anita's birth the family returned to the U.S. Southwest. Coleman grew up on a ranch in New Mexico, matriculated at New Mexico Teachers College in Silver City, and taught school. Her teaching career ended in 1916 when she married James Harold Coleman, a printer and photographer born in Virginia. Anita Scott Coleman became a published writer who produced more than thirty short stories as the Harlem Renaissance emerged. Though never a resident of Harlem, she epitomized the goals of its writers. She published her earliest work, thirteen short stories, in New Mexico between 1919 and 1925. The most famous of these, The Little Grey House, appeared in 1922. She later moved to Los Angeles, California in 1926 to join her husband James who moved looking for work two years earlier. There she raised four children, ran a boarding house, and published her most sophisticated stories over an eight-year period between 1926 and 1933. Anita Scott Coleman died in relative obscurity in Los Angeles in 1960 but her writing reminds us that the Harlem Literary Renaissance was national in its scope and impact.
DESCRIPTION - The Moonstone, a priceless yellow diamond, is looted from an Indian temple and maliciously bequeathed to Rachel Verinder. On her eighteenth birthday, her friend and suitor Franklin Blake brings the gift to her. That very night, it is stolen again. No one is above suspicion, as the idiosyncratic Sergeant Cuff and Franklin piece together a puzzling series of events as mystifying as an opium dream and as deceptive as the nearby Shivering Sand. T. S. Eliot famously described The Moonstone as 'the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels', but, as Sandra Kemp discusses in her Introduction, it offers many other facets, which reveal Collins's sensibilities as untypical of his era. His women and servants - like the luckless Rosanna - are treated as individuals capable of anger and passion. He unmasks a restrictive society in his depiction of sexual and imperial domination. Finally through his manipulation of the narrative itself, facts, identities and memory become question marks. With constantly shifting perspectives, the marvellously intricate mystery of the Moonstone unfolds.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Wilkie Collins (8 January 1824 - 23 September 1889) was an English novelist, playwright, and author of short stories. His best-known works are The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Armadale, and No Name. Collins was born into the family of painter William Collins in London. He received his early education at home from his mother. He then attended an academy and a private boarding school. He also traveled with his family to Italy and France, and learned the French and Italian languages. He served as a clerk in the firm of the tea merchants Antrobus & Co. His first novel Iolani, or Tahiti as It Was; a Romance, was rejected by publishers in 1845. His next novel, Antonina, was published in 1850. In 1851 he met Charles Dickens, and the two became close friends. A number of Collins's works were first published in Dickens's journals All the Year Round and Household Words. The two collaborated on several dramatic and fictional works, and some of Collins's plays were performed by Dickens's acting company. Collins published his best known works in the 1860s, achieving financial stability and an international reputation. During this time he began suffering from gout, and developed an addiction to opium, which he took (in the form of laudanum) for pain. He continued to publish novels and other works throughout the 1870s and 80s, but the quality of his writing declined along with his health. He died in 1889.
DESCRIPTION - Frank Collymore was at the centre of the West Indian literary renaissance of the forties and fifties. He was a master of the short story, bringing together a mordant wit and a sympathetic understanding of human failings to tackle subjects ranging from the eccentric to the psychotic. This collection includes ‘Shadows', a sombre depiction of alienation, a satirical dissection of social climbing in ‘RSVP to Mrs Bush-Hall', and in ‘The Snag' a young boy's growing pains are written about with gentle irony.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Appleton Collymore MBE (7 January 1893 - 17 July 1980) was a famous Barbadian literary editor, author, poet, stage performer and painter. His nickname was ‘Barbadian Man of the Arts'. He also taught for 50 years at Combermere School, where he sought out and encouraged prospective writers in his classes, notably George Lamming. Collymore was born at Woodville Cottage, Chelsea Road, Saint Michael, Barbados (where he lived all his life). Aside from being a student at Combermere School (from 1903 until 1910), he was also one of its staff members until his retirement in 1958, up to which point he was its Deputy Headmaster. After this, he often returned to teach until 1963. On the stage, he became a member of the ‘Bridgetown Players', which began in 1942. As an artist, he made many drawings and paintings to illustrate his own writings. He called them ‘Collybeasts' or ‘Collycreatures'. In 1942, he began the famous Caribbean literary magazine BIM (originally published four times a year), for which he is most well-known, and was also its editor until 1975. John T. Gilmore has written of Collymore: ‘As a lover of literature, he was also a dedicated and selfless encourager of the work of others, lending books to aspiring writers from their schooldays onwards, publishing their early work in Bim, the literary magazine he edited for more than fifty issues from the 1940s to the 1970s, and helping them to find other markets, especially through the relationship he established with Henry Swanzy, producer of the influential BBC radio programme Caribbean Voices.' Three literary awards have been named after him.
DESCRIPTION - 'Communism,' wrote Brecht, "is the simple idea so hard to achieve,' Common Cause tells the hard story of this simple idea, from the Garden of Eden to the French Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a brave and original history of utopia, revolution and hope. It is a study in verse of the Communist movement in the twentieth-century, the men and women who led it, like Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky and Gramsci, as well as some of the artists who marched in their ranks, like Mayakovsky; Picasso and Brecht. Common Cause is a 'history Of the defeated?, a book about enthusiasm and illusion, heroes and martyrs, saints and sinners. It is an epic, a tragedy and a manifesto for the utopian imagination. "I've never seen another book like it it's a thesis about history, it a roll-call revolutionary martyrs during or three millennia, it includes many jokes, it's an intimate confession – not of an individual penitent, but the wounded body era set of political beliefs, it’s a prayer book of hopes, and, finally, its chapbook, like those once sold by pedlars. As soon as it's in your hands, you recognize it. It’s book that innumerable people have been waiting to read. It’ll be passed, I think, from hand to hand.’ - John Berger.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The French poet Francis Combes has published fifteen books of poetry; including La Fabrique du Bonheur, Cause Commune, Le Carnet Bleu de Chine and La Clef du Monde est dans l'Entrée Gauche. He has translated several poets into French, including Heine, Brecht, Mayakovsky and Attila Joszef. He has also published two novels and, with his Wife Patricia Latour, Conversation avec Henri Lefebvre. He is a founder of the radical publishing Cooperative, Le Temps des Cerises, and was for many years responsible for putting poems on the Palis Metro. Alan Dent is a poet, translator and critic. He edits the radical cultural journal Penniless Press. His anthology of contemporary French counter-cultural poetry, When the Metro is Free, is published by Smokestack.
DESCRIPTION - A powerful novel of Africa's history and the men and women who determined its fate. From the East came Islam. From the West, the slave trade. The battle for Africa's soul had begun. ‘A wondrous novel about a period of African history few other writers have addressed. Much of the novel's radiance comes from the lush descriptions of a traditional life that is both exotic and violent.' -THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. ‘Segu is an overwhelming accomplishment. It injects into the density of history characters who are as alive as you and I. Passionate, lusty, greedy, they are in conflict with themselves as well as with God and Mammon. Maryse Conde has done us all a tremendous service by rendering history so compelling and exciting. Segu is a literary masterpiece I could not put down.' -LOUISE MERIWETHER.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maryse Conde (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycee Fenelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Conde, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Conde had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Conde's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolite, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Conde has admitted: ‘I could not write anything. unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.' Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Conde's paternal great-grandmother.
DESCRIPTION - For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch -- hero, maverick, nighthawk -- the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam ‘tunnel rat' who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell. Now, Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city to the torturous link that must be uncovered, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Joining with an enigmatic and seductive female FBI agent, pitted against enemies inside his own department, Bosch must make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, as he tracks down a killer whose true face will shock him.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
DESCRIPTION - Narcotics officer Cal Moore's orders were to look into the city's latest drug killing. Instead, he ends up in a motel room with his head in several pieces and a suicide note stuffed in his back pocket. Years ago, Harry Bosch learned the first rule of the good cop: don't look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together. Now, Harry's making some very dangerous connections, starting with one dead cop and leading to a bloody string of murders that winds from Hollywood Boulevard's drug bazaar to the dusty back alleys south of the border and into the center of a complex and lethal game -- one in which Harry is the next and likeliest victim. In this fast-paced sequel to THE BLACK ECHO, LAPD detective Harry Bosch continues to investigate the drug-trafficking underworlds of inner-city Los Angeles and the wastelands of Mexico. When he discovers the body of a fellow police officer in a sleazy hotel, Harry gets entangled in a brutal web of violence and drugs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
DESCRIPTION - Edgar Award-winner Michael Connelly brings back Detective Harry Bosch in a breathtaking breakthrough novel, a supercharged thriller that thrusts us into a blistering courtroom battle and a desperate search for a killer who should already be dead. Harry Bosch is sure that the man he killed was the sadistic serial murderer known as the Dollmaker, and that the killing was justified. Even if the dead man's widow wins her civil suit, it's the city of Los Angeles that will pay. Harry has already been exonerated in an internal investigation. The trial-and Harry's certainty that he shot the right man-are torn apart when a corpse is discovered beneath the concrete floor of a building that burned during the L.A. riots. It's the body of a woman, and all indications are that this is another of the Dollmaker's victims. But the autopsy report is unequivocal: this woman was killed after Harry shot the man he believes was the Dollmaker. Into the L.A. night Harry takes his investigation. By day the trial continues excruciatingly, with the prosecuting attorney focusing on Bosch's violent past and portraying him as a vigilante murderer protected by his badge. By night he reinvestigates the infamous Dollmaker case, frantically trying to understand where he went wrong-and what he can do to keep this murderer from carrying out his threats to make Harry his next victim. Edgar Award-winning Michael Connelly delivers a supercharged thriller. Four years ago, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch shot the notorious serial killer 'The Dollmaker.' Now Harry is accused of killing the wrong man--just as a new body turns up that has all the hallmarks of a Dollmaker slaying. To clear his name, Harry searches for a copycat killer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
DESCRIPTION - Harry Bosch's life is a mess. His new house has been condemned because of earthquake damage. His girlfriend has left him. He's drinking too much. And he's even had to turn in his badge: he attacked his commanding officer and is suspended indefinitely pending a psychiatric evaluation. At first Bosch resists the LAPD shrink, but finally he recognizes that something is troubling him, a force that may have shaped his entire life. In 1961, when Harry was twelve, his mother was brutally murdered. No one was ever even accused of the crime. Harry opens up the decades-old file on the case and is irresistibly drawn into a past he has always avoided. It's clear that the case was fumbled. His mother was a prostitute, and even thirty years later the smell of a coverup is unmistakable. Someone powerful was able to keep the investigating officers away from key suspects. Even as he confronts his own shame about his mother, Harry relentlessly follows up the old evidence, seeking justice or at least understanding. Out of the broken pieces of the case he discerns a trail that leads upward, toward prominent people who lead public lives high in the Hollywood hills. And as he nears his answer, Harry finds that ancient passions don't die. They cause new murders even today. The bestselling author of The Concrete Blonde delivers another Harry Bosch book, one that delves more psychologically into Bosch's past. In 1961, 12-year-old Harry lost his murder in a brutal murder. As he begins his relentless investigation, Harry uncovers a trail that leads upward, toward prominent people who want to protect their reputation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
DESCRIPTION - Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is ready for a challenge. But his first case is a little more than he bargained for. It starts with the body of a Hollywood producer in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head at close range - what looks like 'trunk music,' a Mafia hit. But the LAPD's organized crime unit is curiously uninterested, and when Harry follows a trail of gambling debts to Las Vegas, the case suddenly becomes more complex - and much more personal. A rekindled romance with an old girlfriend opens new perspectives on the murder, and he begins to glimpse a shocking triangle of corruption and collusion. Yanked off the case, Harry himself is soon the one being investigated. But only a bullet can stop Harry when he's searching for the truth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Connelly (born July 21, 1956) is an American author of detective novels and other crime fiction, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus ‘Harry' Bosch and criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller. His books, which have been translated into 36 languages, have garnered him many awards. Connelly was the President of the Mystery Writers of America from 2003 to 2004.
DESCRIPTION - The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled 'collective' farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a 'terror-famine,' inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I. Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Robert Acworth Conquest, CMG (born 15 July 1917) - known as Robert Conquest - is 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 is currently a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
DESCRIPTION - This provocative collection of essays reveals the passionate voice of a Native American feminist intellectual. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a poet and literary scholar, grapples with issues she encountered as a Native-American in academia. She asks questions of critical importance to tribal people: who is telling their stories, where does cultural authority lie, and most important, how is it possible to develop an authentic tribal literary voice within the academic community?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (born 1930 in Fort Thompson, South Dakota) is a Crow Creek Lakota Sioux editor, essayist, poet, novelist, and academic, whose trenchant views on Native American politics, particularly tribal sovereignty, have caused controversy. Cook-Lynn co-founded Wícazo Ša Review (‘Red Pencil'), an academic journal devoted to the development of Native American studies as an academic discipline. She retired from her long academic career at Eastern Washington University in 1993, returning to her home in Rapid City, South Dakota. She has held several visiting professorships since retirement. In 2009, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas.
DESCRIPTION - A collection of essential writings from the iconic foremother of Black women’s intellectual history, feminism, and activism, who helped pave the way for modern social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper brings together, for the first time, Anna Julia Cooper’s major collection of essays, A Voice from the South, along with several previously unpublished poems, plays, journalism and selected correspondences, including over thirty previously unpublished letters between Anna Julia Cooper and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Portable Anna Julia Cooper will introduce a new generation of readers to an educator, public intellectual, and community activist whose prescient insights and eloquent prose underlie some of the most important developments in modern American intellectual thought and African American social and political activism. Recognized as the iconic foremother of Black women’s intellectual history and activism, Cooper (1858-1964) penned one of the most forceful and enduring statements of Black feminist thought to come of out of the nineteenth century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (August 10, 1858 – February 27, 1964) was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. In 1924, she received her PhD from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. Cooper made contributions to social science fields, particularly in sociology. Her first book, A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South, is widely acknowledged as one of the first articulations of Black feminism, giving Cooper the often-used title of "the Mother of Black Feminism."
DESCRIPTION - James Fenimore Cooper's classic American novel, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1826), was first published by Charles Scribner's Sons with N. C. Wyeth's magnificent illustrations in 1919. The original canvases have been newly photographed and reproduced with exceptional fidelity for this new edition. The second volume in Cooper's famed saga, The Leatherstocking Tales, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS remains a moving tale of adventure, treachery, and friendship in the battle-torn wilderness of eighteenth-century upstate New York. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), one of America's first great men of letters, is best known for The Leatherstocking Tales, a series of five novels of which THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS is the second. N. C. Wyeth was born in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1882 and created more than 4,000 illustrations, murals, and easel paintings. He was one of the greatest of the distinguished artists who worked during the ‘golden years' of illustration in America. Wyeth's dynamic paintings for TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, ROBINSON CRUSOE, THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS, and other great adventure stories of Western literature are among his most famous and lasting work. N. C. Wyeth died in 1945.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 - September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century. His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature. He lived most of his life in Cooperstown, New York, which was established by his father William. Cooper was a lifelong member of the Episcopal Church and in his later years contributed generously to it. He attended Yale University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society, but was expelled for misbehavior. Before embarking on his career as a writer he served in the U.S. Navy as a Midshipman which greatly influenced many of his novels and other writings. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among naval historians Cooper's works on the early U.S. Navy have been well received, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.
DESCRIPTION - Radical glossary of the vocabulary of policing that redefines the very way we understand law enforcement. It doesn't take firsthand experience to learn the meaning of pain compliance or rough ride. Police: A Field Guide is an illustrated handbook to the methods, mythologies, and history that animate today's police. It is a survival manual for encounters with cops and police logic, whether it arrives in the shape of officer friendly, Tasers, curfews, non-compliance, or reformist discourses about so-called bad apples. In a series of short chapters, each focusing on a single term, such as the beat, order, badge, throw-down weapon, and much more, authors David Correia and Tyler Wall present a guide that reinvents and demystifies the language of policing in order to better prepare activists - and anyone with an open mind - on one of the key issues of our time: police brutality. In doing so, they begin to chart a future free of this violence - and of police.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Correia is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico. Tyler Wall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.
DESCRIPTION - This book 's radical theory of police argues that the police demand for order is a class order and a racialized and patriarchal order, by arguing that the police project, in order to fabricate and defend capitalist order,must patrol an imaginary line between society and nature, it must transform nature into inert matter made available for accumulation. Police don 't just patrol the ghetto or the Indian reservation, the thin blue line doesn 't just refer to a social order, rather police announce a general claim to domination--of labor and of nature. Police and police violence are modes of environment-making. This edited volume argues that any effort to understand racialized police violence is incomplete without a focus on the role of police in constituting and reinforcing patterns of environmental racism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Correia is an associate professor of American studies and geography & environmental studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico, and coauthor with Tyler Wall of Police: A Field Guide. Tyler Wall is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the coauthor with David Correia of Police: A Field Guide.
DESCRIPTION - By any measure, this is an extraordinary novel. In Hopscotch, one man's exasperated search for what his life is about takes the reader on a series of adventures so extravagant, yet so immediate, that the line between literature and the daily realities of life itself seems often to disappear. Such a response is intended; it is partly what Julio Cortázar's novel is about. Opening in Paris, with a love affair that never really ends throughout its almost six hundred pages, the novel moves gradually to Buenos Aires, where Oliveira is employed first as a salesman, then as the keeper of a calculating circus cat which can truly count, and finally as an attendant in a mental asylum owned by his friends. But the episodes that lie between these shifts of scene are the heart of Hopscotch. They range from. bizarre sexual encounters to absurdly long intellectual discussions of life and art, or the death of a child recounted with a brutal reality, all the more poignant for its unrelenting lack of compassion. All are blocks torn from the enormous structure that Oliveira is systematically demolishing behind him as he moves toward its original blueprint. What emerges is a book that will be compared to the classics of our time - books that shocked, amused, provoked, and opened new horizons.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 - February 12, 1984) was a Belgian-born Argentine intellectual and author of experimental novels and short stories.
DESCRIPTION - The appearance of THE WINNERS in the United States is a major literary event, introducing an outstanding writer of remarkable scope and presenting an absorbing and altogether irresistible novel that will attain a notable position among the best works of fiction of our day. A widely assorted group of people win as a lottery prize a cruise-destination unknown. Their journey reads like-and is-a superb story of suspense that ranges from the most unconventional of love affairs to the violent death of one of the passengers. Part of the suspense revolves around the fact that the passengers are forbidden to cross over to the ship's stern, ostensibly because there is an epidemic among the mysterious crew. ‘What is the danger, the plague? Does it really exist? ‘Where are the consolations of authority to comfort them? If this is a pleasure cruise, why are they virtual prisoners? And the lines are drawn, the passengers divide into a ‘war' party and a ‘peace' party. But which one will insist upon breaking through the barriers and which one will bow to the ship's law? The novel's climax is their shocking confrontation with the question of who the winners really are, and what are their prizes. This book is the world in miniature, and some of contemporary fiction's most memorable characters inhabit it: a young unmarried couple whose first lovemakings are anything but what they had expected; a sophisticated architect traveling with a beautiful redhead whom the other passengers assume to be his mistress; a delightfully pompous schoolteacher whose devotion to bureaucracy is complete. These and others are forced to a deadly knowledge of themselves through Julio Cortázar's profound skill in creating a novel that has many levels of meaning yet thoroughly entertains with the pleasure of its narrative alone.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julio Cortázar (August 26, 1914 - February 12, 1984) was a Belgian-born Argentine intellectual and author of experimental novels and short stories.
DESCRIPTION - Not that the little people are to be found exclusively in the little nations such as Egypt. Quite the contrary. For the moment, however, it is not the little people so much in whom we are interested as the forgotten people of the world. They exist everywhere, mostly in the big nations, and often in the biggest cities. They are lodged in the heart of civilization, like a cancer. They are the people you seldom notice when you go for a walk, or when the innumerable street lamps begin to blaze. As Cossery says, ‘that is how civilization makes itself felt, as lights which it scatters around it to blind the people.' - HENRY MILLER. Albert Cossery was born in Cairo in 1913, the son of middle-class parents. He studied law in Paris before the outbreak of the last war. During the war Cossery served in the Egyptian Merchant Navy. He now lives in Paris, devoting his time completely to literary work. THE LAZY ONES was his 2nd novel; a book of short stories about Egyptian life, Men God Forgot, was published in the United States by George Leite. His novel, THE HOUSE OF CERTAIN DEATH, appeared in the Directions Series in 1949.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Albert Cossery (3 November 1913 - 22 June 2008) was an Egyptian-born French writer of Greek Orthodox Syro-Lebanese descent, born in Cairo. He is considered by some to be the last genuine ‘anarchist' or free thinking writer of western culture by his humorous and provocative although lucid and profound view of human relations and society. His writing style does not submit to an academic or experimental approach which makes him a vivid, catchy storyteller, without the boredom nor artificial ambiguity of some classical (which he is) or avantgarde writers. The sageness of his works are monuments to the freedom of being and thought against materialism, the contemporary obsession with consumption and productivity, the arrogance and abuse of authority, the vanity of social formalities and the injustice of the wealthy towards the poor. In 1990 Cossery was awarded the Grand Prix de La Francophonie de l´AcadEmie française and in 2005 the Grand Prix Poncetton de la SGDL. The first of his books translated in English are Men God Forgot (first translated by Harold Edwards of Faruk University, Alexandria, Egypt, not by Henry Miller, whose note on Cossery appeared on a later 1963 City Lights Books edition, and published in the USA in 1946 by George Leite's Circle Editions of Berkeley), The House of Certain Death (New Directions, 1949), The Lazy Ones (New Directions, 1952), and Proud Beggars (Black Sparrow Press, 1981). Three more of Cossery's novels have since been published in English translation: Anna Moschovakis' The Jokers (NYRB Classics) and Alyson Waters' A Splendid Conspiracy and The Colors of Infamy (New Directions). As of 2012, Une ambition dans le dEsert and Les FainEants dans la vallEe fertile remain untranslated into English.
DESCRIPTION - Argentine Everyman, 41-year-old Francisco Sanctis, is on his way home from work one afternoon in Buenos Aires when he is detoured by a strange scheme. It is November 1977, and Argentina is in the midst of the ‘dirty war,' with its repression, censorship, paramilitary groups, kidnappings, and submerged terror An old girl friend mysteriously reappears and enlists Francisco Sanctis in a mission to contact and warn two innocent youths who are in imminent peril of being kidnapped and probably killed by secret agents of the Air Force. Step by step during the next ten hours, we follow Sanctis - indeed, we are in his skin- along the stations of his via crucis, sharing his conflicts and fantasies, his encounters, and observing Argentine society. Wandering in nocturnal Buenos Aires, all the time longing to be home with his wife and kids, Sanctis struggles a with his dilemma: should he mind his own business or get mixed up with questionable politics? With humor, irony, and on-target sketches of his characters, Argentine writer Humberto Costantini conveys the predicament of the ordinary middle-class man in Argentina, his quest for security, his uneasy conscience, his determination not to get involved and its deadly consequences. Written with a sure hand, Costantini's second novel to be published in English is a powerful and moving, not to say timely, contribution to contemporary Latin American literature. A small gem of a political novel. Born in Buenos Aires in 1924, HUMBERTO COSTANTINI is the highly acclaimed author of THE GODS, THE LITTLE GUYS AND THE POLICE, as well as of several collections of short stories, books of poetry, and plays, all published in his native Argentina, to which he returned recently after years of exile in Mexico City.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Humberto ‘Cacho' Costantini (April 8, 1924 - June 7, 1987) was an Argentine writer and poet whose work is filled with the rich slang (porteño) of Buenos Aires. Except for his years of exile in Mexico, his life was lived in and around Buenos Aires. Costantini was born and died in Buenos Aires, the only child of Italian Jewish immigrants who lived in the barrio of Villa Pueyrredon.
DESCRIPTION - In the spring of 1945, as the Allied victory in Europe was approaching, the shape of the postwar world hinged on the personal politics and flawed personalities of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin. ROOSEVELT'S LOST ALLIANCES captures this moment and shows how FDR crafted a winning coalition by overcoming the different habits, upbringings, sympathies, and past experiences of the three leaders. In particular, Roosevelt trained his famous charm on Stalin, lavishing respect on him, salving his insecurities, and rendering him more amenable to compromise on some matters. Yet, even as he pursued a lasting peace, FDR was alienating his own intimate circle of advisers and becoming dangerously isolated. After his death, postwar cooperation depended on Harry Truman, who, with very different sensibilities, heeded the embittered ‘Soviet experts' his predecessor had kept distant. A Grand Alliance was painstakingly built and carelessly lost. The Cold War was by no means inevitable. This landmark study brings to light key overlooked documents, such as the Yalta diary of Roosevelt's daughter Anna; the intimate letters of Roosevelt's de facto chief of staff, Missy LeHand; and the wiretap transcripts of estranged adviser Harry Hopkins. With a gripping narrative and subtle analysis, ROOSEVELT'S LOST ALLIANCES lays out a new approach to foreign relations history. Frank Costigliola highlights the interplay between national political interests and more contingent factors, such as the personalities of leaders and the culturally conditioned emotions forming their perceptions and driving their actions. Foreign relations flowed from personal politics--a lesson pertinent to historians, diplomats, and citizens alike.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Costigliola is professor of history at the University of Connecticut and former president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. He is the author of FRANCE AND THE UNITED STATES AND AWKWARD DOMINION.
DESCRIPTION - A CHILDHOOD is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews's earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him - and destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural south Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay. At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A CHILDHOOD not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world ‘in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Eugene Crews (7 June 1935 - 28 March 2012) was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935 and served in the Marines during the Korean War. He attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, but dropped out to travel. Eventually returning to the university, Harry finally graduated and moved his wife, Sally, and son, Patrick Scott, to Jacksonville where he taught Junior High English for a year. Crews returned to Gainesville and the university to work on his master's in English Education. It was during this period that he and Sally divorced for the first time. Harry continued his studies, graduated, and - denied entrance into UF's Creative Writing program - took a teaching position at Broward Community College in the subject of English. It was here in south Florida that Harry convinced Sally to return to him, and they were re-married. A second son, Byron, was born to them in 1963. He returned to University of Florida in 1968 not as a student, but as a member of the faculty in Creative Writing. Crews formerly taught in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. In 1964, Patrick Scott drowned in a neighbor's pool. This proved to be too heavy a burden on the family, and Harry and Sally were once again divorced. His first published novel, The Gospel Singer, appeared in 1968. His novels include: A Feast of Snakes, The Hawk is Dying, Body, Scar Lover, The Knockout Artist, Karate Is A Thing of the Spirit, All We Need of Hell, The Mulching of America, Car, and Celebration. He published a memoir in 1978 titled A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Crews wrote essays for Esquire, Playboy, and Fame. He had a column in Esquire called ‘Grits' for fourteen months in the 1970s, where he covered such topics as cockfighting and dog fighting. Harry had a tattoo on his right arm which said: ‘How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death' (from the poem Buffalo Bill's by e.e. cummings) beneath a skull. The University of Georgia acquired Harry Crews's papers in August 2006. The archive includes manuscripts and typescripts of his fiction, correspondence, and notes made by Crews while on assignment. He died 28 March 2012, from complications of neuropathy.
DESCRIPTION - Marvin Molar was born with teensy tadpole legs - three inches around. His elephant arms make up for it. They're twenty-two inches in diameter and so thong he can (and does) balance on the end of one finger. He's deaf, too; and dumb. But worst of all, he is cursed with the Gypsy's Curse: Que encuentres un cono a tu medida! The cono he finds belongs to Hester, who is normal. Hester insists on moving into Al Molarski's Fireman's Gym, where Marvin has lived since he was abandoned as a baby (the note attached to him said: ‘We are your normal people and we caint stand it'). Marvin resists. Al Molarski resists. The two punch-drunk fighters who live and work out there are stupefied and excited by the idea. But what Hester wants, Hester gets - and the stage is set for catastrophe. What renders THE GYPSY'S CURSE unique and memorable is the startling tension between the frenzy and seaminess of Marvin's experience and the elegance of his mind - his strange, haunting understanding of human panic and pain, the bizarre integrity of his professional life as the best and most grotesque hand-balancer around (‘Everything has to be special I'm not bitter and I don't cheat. I give dollar value for dollar paid'), the thin line he lives on - poised between utter helplessness and an almost savage control. His life appalls, but his quality appeals. The novels of Harry Crews (among them NAKED IN GARDEN HILLS, KARATE IS A THING OF THE SPIRIT, THE GOSPEL SINGER) have consistently been praised for their mysterious and convincing grasp of the recognizably human feelings that lodge amidst the demonic and the strange, in what The New York Times Book Review has called a ‘Hieronymus Bosch landscape.' Here, his remarkable talents bring us even further into the realm of unexpected emotional possibilities - leaving us moved, even almost charmed rather than horrified, by the dreadful and implacable fulfillment of THE GYPSY'S CURSE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Eugene Crews (7 June 1935 - 28 March 2012) was an American novelist, playwright, short story writer and essayist. He was born in Bacon County, Georgia in 1935 and served in the Marines during the Korean War. He attended the University of Florida on the GI Bill, but dropped out to travel. Eventually returning to the university, Harry finally graduated and moved his wife, Sally, and son, Patrick Scott, to Jacksonville where he taught Junior High English for a year. Crews returned to Gainesville and the university to work on his master's in English Education. It was during this period that he and Sally divorced for the first time. Harry continued his studies, graduated, and - denied entrance into UF's Creative Writing program - took a teaching position at Broward Community College in the subject of English. It was here in south Florida that Harry convinced Sally to return to him, and they were re-married. A second son, Byron, was born to them in 1963. He returned to University of Florida in 1968 not as a student, but as a member of the faculty in Creative Writing. Crews formerly taught in the creative writing program at the University of Florida. In 1964, Patrick Scott drowned in a neighbor's pool. This proved to be too heavy a burden on the family, and Harry and Sally were once again divorced. His first published novel, The Gospel Singer, appeared in 1968. His novels include: A Feast of Snakes, The Hawk is Dying, Body, Scar Lover, The Knockout Artist, Karate Is A Thing of the Spirit, All We Need of Hell, The Mulching of America, Car, and Celebration. He published a memoir in 1978 titled A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Crews wrote essays for Esquire, Playboy, and Fame. He had a column in Esquire called ‘Grits' for fourteen months in the 1970s, where he covered such topics as cockfighting and dog fighting. Harry had a tattoo on his right arm which said: ‘How do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death' (from the poem Buffalo Bill's by e.e. cummings) beneath a skull. The University of Georgia acquired Harry Crews's papers in August 2006. The archive includes manuscripts and typescripts of his fiction, correspondence, and notes made by Crews while on assignment. He died 28 March 2012, from complications of neuropathy.
DESCRIPTION - For one young intelligence officer stationed in Vienna, the assumptions and realities of life-both professional and private-seem utterly clear. Confident and cosmopolitan, he is rapidly advancing in his country's service. Combining an ambitious self-assurance with a detached thoroughness, he is, seemingly, well prepared for his latest and most dangerous assignment: the compromising of a well-placed enemy agent. But, as he proceeds with his carefully conceived plan, he discovers that the challenge before him is far more complex and hazardous than he had ever imagined. The jealous head of embassy security is determined to trip him up; his prey, it becomes clear, is far too cunning to be taken lightly; and, finally, a Bulgarian ambassador's beautiful daughter unleashes in him a totally unexpected passion. When all these forces collide, events accelerate beyond his control as he forgets the most fundamental credo of his profession-that, sometimes, things are not quite what they seem. Writing with skill and a winning intelligence, William Crisp plunges his all-too-human spy into a deadly world of superpower intrigue, a perilous arena where the crucial jockeying for power and profit can extend from the posh boardrooms of multinationals down to the dark and forgotten side streets of cosmopolitan Vienna. In the end, SPYTRAP is a thoroughly entertaining, and surprisingly moving, story of a dedicated man suddenly engulfed in the most dangerous currents of international espionage, and swept along toward a trap that few will see coming.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Crisp, a native of Suffolk, Virginia, worked in Vienna as the East European specialist for business International. SPYTRAP is his first novel.
DESCRIPTION - Little, Big tells the epic story of Smoky Barnable - an anonymous young man who meets and falls in love with Daily Alice Drinkwater, and goes to live with her in Edgewood, a place not found on any map. In an impossible mansion full of her relatives, who all seem to have ties to another world not far away, Smoky fathers a family and tries to learn what tale he has found himself in - and how it is to end.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Crowley (born December 1, 1942) is an American author of fantasy, science fiction and mainstream fiction. He studied at Indiana University and has a second career as a documentary film writer. He is best known as the author of Little, Big (1981), which received the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and has been called ‘a neglected masterpiece' by Harold Bloom and his Aegypt series of novels which revolve around the same themes of Hermeticism, memory, families and religion.
DESCRIPTION - One Of the most exciting, original, and beautifully written thrillers it has ever been our privilege to publish! Simon Guerney has a singular profession: the international rescue of kidnap victims. Well paid for this dangerous and often violent work, he is the last resort of the rich and desperate. But this assignment is different, ominous. What at first seems to be the straightforward abduction of the son of a millionaire and his estranged alcoholic wife is not what it appears. And when the unknown kidnappers demand that Guerney travel to London to await instructions, he realizes that the game has turned, and that he is not hunter—but prey. Indeed, David Paschini is no ordinary teenager, and this is no ordinary kidnapping. For he has a strange and terrible telepathic power, a power to give Guerney ' 'visions" of his whereabouts—and to aid his kidnappers in an assassination that could change the political face of the western world. Written with a poet's command of style and a master storyteller's skill in pace and action, Crows' Parliament is startlingly original in its combination of power-politics, the growing menace of not-for-ransom kidnappings and the disturbing but very real world of extrasensory powers. Tough, brilliantly plotted, mesmerizingly suspenseful, this is a thriller on the very highest level, a thriller which will take its place alongside such classics as The Manchurian Candidate and the early works of Graham Greene.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jack Curtis lives in London and Cornwall. His thrillers are published in the UK and the USA and have been translated into fourteen languages.
DESCRIPTION - One of the strangest stories ever found in a little-known corner of history, this is a human and military account of a war waged between a ragged religious mystic and the government of Brazil. It was a peculiarly personal war that had much in common with old-time Kentucky feuds and uprisings on the American frontier and it ended only when 5,200 houses and every man, woman, and child who had lived in them had been totally destroyed! This is the story of Antonio Conselheiro, the fanatic street preacher-Messiah to thousands-who led the rebellion in a primitive backwoods community of desert and mountains from December, 1896, to October, 1897. Mr. Putnam, in his excellent Introduction, reminds us that it required three months for a federal army of some 6,000 men to advance 100 yards against a handful of backwoodsmen. ‘Here is guerrilla warfare in its pristine form,' he says, ‘with the ‘scorched earth' and all the other accompaniments. a months-long house-to-house battle that recalls the contemporary epic of Stalingrad.' Universally known as Brazil's greatest book, Os Sertoes is now in its sixteenth Brazilian edition and has been translated into several foreign languages. ‘Os Sertoes is a Genesis which in epic accents tells of the meeting of civilization and barbarism,' says Afrânio Peixoto. It is a book that represents a moment in the history of humanity; and, thanks to its style, its art, and its science, that ephemeral moment is destined to be eternal.' Carleton Beals calls it ‘that great document, which, though not a novel, reads like fiction.' Stefan Zweig, in BRAZIL, LAND OF THE FUTURE, calls it a ‘great national epic. destined to outlive countless books that are famous today, by its dramatic significance, its spectacular wealth of spiritual wisdom, and the wonderful humanitarian touch Cunha himself called his book ‘a cry of protest' against what he regarded as - a crime and an act of madness on the part of the newly formed republican government of Brazil. Os Sertöes is a document against oppression of the weak by the strong-in current language, against totalitarianism. Cunha has been called a ‘son of the soil, madly in love with it,' but be was also a scientist, a military engineer by profession, a sociologist, a reporter, and a man of letters. In the first two chapters of his book he describes with precision and passion the geographic and geologic composition of the backlands, its botany, climate, and soil, all, however, as interpretation of the mestizo backwoodsman and his way of life. Cunha's hook was originally published in Rio in 1902. It bad an immediate and terrific impact upon Brazil-indeed, so much so that Cunha's assassination in 1909 by a soldier was said to be in retaliation for the exposures of the army in Os Sertöes and in fear of another book which Cunha was writing at the time of his death. This, the first translation of Os Sertöes into English, because of its importance to better understanding between South and North America, has had aid in publication from the Office of the Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs. REBELLION IN THE BACKLANDS is Mr. Putnam's twenty-fifth full-length published book translation. He has made available to American readers many of the great books from the French, Italian, and Portuguese. (original title: Os Sertoes).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Euclides da Cunha (January 20, 1866 - August 15, 1909) was a Brazilian journalist, sociologist and engineer. His most important work is Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands), a non-fictional account of the military expeditions promoted by the Brazilian government against the rebellious village of Canudos, known as the War of Canudos.
DESCRIPTION - MIGUEL MÁRMOL was first published in Spanish in the early seventies: the memoirs of this grand revolutionary became an Immediate success in Latin America. A second edition was published by EDUCA in Costa Rica in 1982, and editions have appeared in Cuba and Russia. This first English edition of MIGUEL MARMOL includes part of a retrospective interview with Mármol conducted by the translators in Cuba, October 1986. MIGUEL MARMOL is a fascinating story for the general reader, and would also be a suitable text to use in the study of labor history, Central American history, Latin American literature and sociology. MIGUEL MÁRMOL was born in San Salvador in 1905 and worked as a shoemaker, trade unionist and revolutionary. Left for dead after a mass execution in El Salvador in 1932, the year in which 30,000 peasants were massacred, he crawled out from under a corpse and into history. He has become a legendary figure among the Salvadoran people and was the first official delegate of the Salvadoran organized workers' movement to a worldwide communist trade union conference in Moscow. He was imprisoned in Cuba under Machado. Upon his return to El Salvador, he was again imprisoned and tortured several times. Among his many other activities, he helped organize the workers' movement in Guatemala and was a peasant leader in El Salvador in the 60's. As Manlio Argueta says, ‘At eighty-one years of age, Miguel Mármol continues to live in political exile. He has survived not only ‘32, but ‘45, ‘52, ‘60, ‘80. He is the living document of a history that is changing through the efforts of the Salvadorans.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roque Dalton García (San Salvador, El Salvador, 14 May 1935 - Quezaltepeque, El Salvador, 10 May 1975) was a Salvadoran poet and journalist. He is considered one of Latin America's most compelling poets. He wrote emotionally strong, sometimes sarcastic, and image-loaded works dealing with life, death, love, and politics.
DESCRIPTION - 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.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - When Haitians tell a story, they say ‘Krik?' and the eager listeners answer ‘Krak!' In Krik? Krak! In her second novel, Edwidge Danticat establishes herself as the latest heir to that narrative tradition with nine stories that encompass both the cruelties and the high ideals of Haitian life. They tell of women who continue loving behind prison walls and in the face of unfathomable loss; of a people who resist the brutality of their rulers through the powers of imagination. The result is a collection that outrages, saddens, and transports the reader with its sheer beauty. Since the publication of her debut work Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994, Edwidge Danticat has won praise as one of America's brightest, most graceful and vibrant young writers. In this novel, and in her National Book Award-nominated collection of stories, Krik? Krak!, Danticat evokes the powerful imagination and rich narrative tradition of her native Haiti, and in the process records the suffering, triumphs, and wisdom of its people. Author Paule Marshall has said of Danticat, ‘A silenced Haiti has once again found its literary voice.'. Born in Haiti in 1969, Danticat, like the protagonist of her novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, at the age of twelve left her birthplace for New York to reunite with her parents. She earned a degree in French Literature from Barnard College, where she won the 1995 Woman of Achievement Award, and later an MFA from Brown University. More recently, she has received an ongoing grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Foundation. Critical acclaim and awards for her first novel included a Granta Regional Award for the Best Young American Novelists, a Pushcart Prize and fiction awards from Essence and Seventeen magazines. She was chosen by Harper's Bazaar as one of 20 people in their twenties who will make a difference, and was featured in a New York Times Magazine article that named ‘30 Under 30' creative people to watch. This winter, Jane magazine named her one of the ‘15 Gutsiest Women of the Year.'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
DESCRIPTION - These translations of Mahmoud Darwish's marvelous poems reveal the lifelong development of a major world poet. The book is a gift to other poets and lovers of poetry. It's also an important contribution to current and future discourse on culture and politics.'-Adrienne Rich, author of Fox: Poems, 1996-2000 ‘At this critical moment in world relations, cultural, creative projects feel more necessary than ever. Celebrate this most comprehensive gathering of Mahmoud Darwish's poetry ever translated into English. Darwish is the premier poetic voice of the Palestinian people, and the collaboration between translators Akash and Forche is a fine mingling of extraordinary talents. The style here is quintessential Darwish-lyrical, imagistic, plaintive, haunting, always passionate, and elegant-and never anything less than free-what he would dream for all his people.'-Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 - 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet. In his work, Palestine became a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting ‘the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry'.
DESCRIPTION - Tiw, Woden, Thunor, Frig. these ancient northern deities gave their names to the very days of our week. Nevertheless, most of us know far more of Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and the classical deities. Recent researches in archaeology and mythology have added to what was already a fairly consistent picture (largely derived from a twelfth-century Icelandic account) of the principal Scandinavian gods and goddesses. This new study - the first popular treatment of the subject to appear in English for many years - is the work of a scholar who has long specialized in Norse and Germanic mythology. She describes the more familiar gods of war, of fertility, of the sky and the sea and the dead, and also discusses those puzzling figures of Norse mythology - Heimdall, Balder, and Loki. All these deities were worshipped in the Viking Age, and the author has endeavoured to relate their cults to daily life and to see why these pagan beliefs gave way in time to the Christian faith. The cover shows a twelfth-century embroidery.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hilda Roderick Ellis Davidson (born Hilda Roderick Ellis, 1 October 1914 - January 2006) was an English antiquarian and academic, writing in particular on Germanic paganism and Celtic paganism. Davidson used literary, historical and archaeological evidence to discuss the stories and customs of Northern Europe. Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin Books, 1964) is considered one of the most thorough and reputable sources on Germanic mythology. Like many of her publications, it was credited under the name H. R. Ellis Davidson. Davidson was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and was president of the Council of the Folklore Society from 1974 to 1976, and served on the council from 1956 to 1986. Davidson has been cited as having 'contributed greatly' to the study of Norse mythology.
DESCRIPTION - In LEFT OF KARL MARX, Carole Boyce Davies assesses the activism, writing, and legacy of Claudia Jones (1915-1964), a pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist. Jones is buried in London's Highgate Cemetary, to the left of Karl Marx - a location that Boyce Davies finds fitting given how Jones expanded Marxism-Leninism to incorporate gender and race in her political critique and activism. ‘Carole Boyce Davies has rendered a unique service in restoring to proper recognition the life and achievements of the Trinidad-born political activist and feminist Claudia Jones. From the turbulent struggles of Harlem, U.S.A. in the 1930s and 1940s to London in the 1950s and 1960s, Claudia Jones became a symbol of resistance and the standard by which others would measure their own integrity of commitment. LEFT OF KARL MARX is the biography of an era of the most intense ideological combat - where reputations were assassinated and careers erased by a single rumor of incorrect political affiliation. Here is the story of a singular triumph whose legacy has nourished the lives of another generation.' - George Lamming, author of IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN and THE PLEASURES OF EXILE. ‘This book fills a lacuna in the historical understanding of black left radicalism and socialist-oriented feminism in the United States and the Caribbean. In this era of twenty-first-century corporate globalization, it reunites us with a transnational radical and anti-capitalist past through the examination of the extraordinary life, work, and political philosophy of Claudia Jones. This work reminds us that the U.S. and British radical traditions had diverse memberships, which included black, communist, and feminist women of whom Trinidad-born Claudia Jones was a remarkable example. Carole Boyce Davies has given us a well researched, detailed analysis of this communist, feminist, intellectual, activist, and artistic woman of Caribbean origin. This is a long-awaited treasure for which many will be eternalh grateful.' - Rhoda E. Reddock, author of INTERROGATING CARIBBEAN MASCULINITIES. ‘Carole Boyce Davies has vividly brought to life the work and struggles of Claudia Jones in the U.S.A. and Great Britain in her new book, LEFT OF KARL MARX. Boyce Davies possesses that unique combination of being both a scholarly researcher and a writer capable of clear and persuasive language. The reader is presented with a remarkably readable and informative study of a woman who was equally adept in her writing and public speaking on feminism, and as a social pioneer, a political analyst, and an avowed adversary of racism. This book removes Claudia Jones from the shadow of the great bust of Marx to the front row of the black activists and thinkers of the twentieth century, and that is where she belongs.' - Donald Hinds, author of JOURNEY TO AN ILLUSION: THE WEST INDIAN IN BRITAIN.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carole Boyce Davies is a professor of English and Africana Studies. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University.
DESCRIPTION - In reality, conjuring is nothing more than the subtle art of misdirecting an audience's attention. Its practitioners succeed by creating a reality of their own, a mythical moment out of a person's life in time during which he can extend his faith in his beliefs, unafraid. Dunstan Ramsay does not, on the surface, display any such skill as conjuring requires. He is a quiet, devoted, somewhat dumpy history professor, retiring after forty-five years of service to a Canadian boys' school. Though, not deceived by the illusions a magician can create, he is nonetheless fascinated with them. His students and colleagues take him for a doddering, dim old scholar with a wooden leg and an eccentric preoccupation with hagiography: he is obsessed with the search for and charting of saints, having shared his only intimate friendship with one of them, though it was an intimacy tainted by guilt. Compelled to write his memoirs in the form of a dryly indignant letter to the school's headmaster, Ramsay reveals the truly unique, sometimes eerie, always complicating role he has played during his life. Or, rather, during his lives. For Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross, and destined to live within the probing psychological borderlines between history and myth, reality and surreal ity. As Ramsay tells it, it becomes increasingly evident that, from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvements in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Robertson Davies has created a deeply civilized, yet theatrical portrait of a dark and witty man who, while moving in a world where questions have more meaning than answers, comes to the knowledge that the marvelous is but an aspect of the real, and that the mystery of his own self, once untangled, provides him with a crystalline insight into the energies and mysteries of the universe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Robertson Davies, CC, OOnt, FRSC, FRSL (August 28, 1913 - December 2, 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished ‘men of letters', a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
DESCRIPTION - David Staunton, a most successful criminal lawyer, is, above all, a tidily rational man. Even so, it is perhaps not so odd that he should feel a touch of madness and plunge himself into Jungian analysis as a result of his father's accidental (suicidal? homicidal?) death. The father, a model of flawed respectability, has, in an absentee fashion, done the ‘right thing' by his only male child, the result being the kind of filial reverence which only a demi-stranger can elicit. As his analysis progresses, David learns a good deal about that father, about the schoolmasterish Ramsay, about the libidinous Liesl, about the giftedly warped Eisengrim - about himself. For those who have read Robertson Davies' FIFTH BUSINESS, this new novel will enrich the earlier one. For those who have not, THE MANTICORE will make for the totally satisfying experience of reading the work of a man who is master of transmuting exquisite English prose into high melodrama. man'ti-core: a fabulous monster having the body of a lion, the head of a man, and the tail or sting of a scorpion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Robertson Davies, CC, OOnt, FRSC, FRSL (August 28, 1913 - December 2, 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished ‘men of letters', a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
DESCRIPTION - A movie is being made at a castle in Switzerland, directed by the great Swedish director Jurgen Lind. It stars a magician, Magnus Eisengrim, who plays the part of a celebrated illusionist. Off-camera and after the shooting sessions, Lind - together with the producer, the cameraman, the mysterious hostess Liesl, and Dunstan Ramsay (the crusty Canadian schoolmaster who is our narrator) - listens as Magnus Eisengrim tells his life story, a story as rich in color, drama, comedy, and gripping tension as any in recent fiction. It is the story of a cruelly maimed yet in the end liberating youth spent in the tawdry confines of a traveling carnival; of a conflicted young actor who crawls out of the gutter to some kind of salvation with a touring company run by Sir John Tresize, an actor-manager of the old school; finally, of a master magician whose triumphant Soiree of Illusions brings him not only international fame but a return to the Canadian mystery at the heart of his life. Magnus is not allowed to tell his story without interruption. Each one of his listeners has an opinion on what Magnus insists is the truth. Together, their evenings of exploration into the past - and into each others' lives - form perhaps the richest and most compelling of all Robertson Davies' novels. ‘His writing has a wholly Dickensian flavor, but Davies, being of our time, goes much further than Dickens could. There is a sense of new psychological vistas opening up all the time, abetted by language which is not afraid of elegant candor. Davies administers his shocks coolly, without stylistic straining. He is, to say the least, a mature and wise writer. He claims the right to be a literary citizen of Britain, hence of Europe, as much as of North America. This is altogether sane, and it produces sane and civilized writing.' - ANTHONY BURGESS.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Robertson Davies, CC, OOnt, FRSC, FRSL (August 28, 1913 - December 2, 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best-known and most popular authors, and one of its most distinguished ‘men of letters', a term Davies is variously said to have gladly accepted for himself and to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
DESCRIPTION - An in-depth study of women and race explores the complex relationship between racism and sexism, analyzes the role of women and race, and traces the historical connection between sexism, racism, and class consciousness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.
DESCRIPTION - With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America's giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power. One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals such as Black Panthers George Jackson, Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale and Erica Huggins, this book is not only an account of Davis's incarceration and the struggles surrounding it, but also perhaps the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the prison system of the United State. Since the book was written, the carceral system in the US has seen unprecedented growth, with more of America's black population behind bars than ever before. The scathing analysis of the role of prison and the policing of black populations offered by Davis and her comrades in this astonishing volume remains as pertinent today as the day it was first published. Featuring contributions from George Jackson, Bettina Aptheker, Bobby Seale, James Baldwin, Ruchell Magee, Julian Bond, Huey P. Newton, Erika Huggins, Fleeta Drumgo, John Clutchette, and others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. She emerged as a nationally prominent activist and radical in the 1960s, as a leader of the Communist Party USA, and had close relations with the Black Panther Party through her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement despite never being an official member of the party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department. Her research interests are in feminism, African-American studies, critical theory, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness, and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons. Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California. She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s.
DESCRIPTION - For fourteen million tourists each year, San Diego is the fun place in the sun that never breaks your heart. But America's seventh largest city has a dark side. Behind Sea World, the Zoo, the Gaslamp District, and the beaches of La Jolla hides a militarized metropolis, boasting the West Coast's most stratified economy and a tumultuous history of municipal corruption, virulent anti-unionism, political repression and racial in justice. Though its boosters tirelessly promote an image of a carefree beach town, the real San Diego shares dreams and nightmares with its violent twin, Tijuana. This alternative civic history deconstructs the mythology of ‘America's finest city,' exposing its true undergirdings of militarism, racism, and economic inequality. Acclaimed urban theorist Mike Davis documents the secret history of the domineering elites who have turned a weak city government into a powerful machine for private wealth. Jim Miller tells the story from the other side: chronicling the history of protest in San Diego from the Wobblies to today's ‘Globalphobics.' Kelly Mayhew, meanwhile, presents the voices of paradise's forgotten working people and new immigrants. San Diego, America's most invisible large city, has never had a noir cloud in its sky. until now. UNDER THE PERFECT SUN is an anti-tourist guide that debunks the sunshine myth for locals and visitors alike.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022).
DESCRIPTION - A magisterial, riveting movement history of Los Angeles in the Sixties. Los Angeles in the sixties was a hotbed of political and social upheaval. The city was a launchpad for Black Power - where Malcolm X and Angela Davis first came to prominence and the Watts uprising shook the nation. The city was home to the Chicano Blowouts and Chicano Moratorium, as well as being the birthplace of Asian American as a political identity. It was a locus of the antiwar movement, gay liberation movement, and women's movement, and, of course, the capital of California counterculture. Mike Davis and Jon Wiener provide the first comprehensive movement history of L.A. in the sixties, drawing on extensive archival research and dozens of interviews with principal figures, as well as the authors' storied personal histories as activists. Following on from Davis's award-winning L.A. history, City of Quartz, Set the Night on Fire is a historical tour de force, delivered in scintillating and fiercely beautiful prose. Authoritative and impressive. –Los Angeles Times. Monumental. –Guardian.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022). Jon Wiener is a longtime Contributing Editor at the Nation and host and producer of Start Making Sense, the magazine's weekly podcast. He is an Emeritus Professor of U.S. history at UC Irvine, and his books include Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files and How We Forgot the Cold War: A Historical Journey across America. He lives in Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The ultimate world historical significance - and oddity - of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. The same place, as Brecht noted, symbolizes both heaven and hell. Correspondingly, it is an essential destination on the itinerary of any late-twentieth-century intellectual, who must eventually come to take a peep and render some opinion on whether ‘Los Angeles Brings It All Together' (the city's official slogan) or is, rather, the Nightmare at the terminus of American history. In this taut and compulsive exploration, Mike Davis recounts the story of Los Angeles with passion, wit and an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust and, often, the dangerous. As the Joshua trees are ripped from the desert by developers of walled communities protected by ‘armed response' security, as yet more concrete is poured to defend Japanese real estate from desperate migrants without work or hope, as a stew of greed, megalomania and corruption wreaks ever more havoc on his native city, Davis's elegiac tale points to a future in which the sublime and the dreadful are inextricable. That future does not belong to Southern California alone. Terrifyingly, it belongs to us all. Unlike most writers on Southern California, Mike Davis is a native son. He was born in Fontana in 1946 and grew up in Bostonia, a now ‘lost' hamlet east of San Diego. A former meatcutter and long-distance truckdriver, he teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is co-editor of The Year Left: An American Socialist Yearbook and author of Prisoners of the American Dream (Verso 1986). He is married with one child. A native Minnesotan, Robert Morrow finds that the ice-fishing in Southern California leaves something to be desired. He has compensated by taking photographs of rifle ranges, barbed wire, bullet-ridden police cars, derelict factories, big dogs, and other symbols of daily life in Los Angeles's suburban badlands.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022).
DESCRIPTION - In a gripping reconnaissance into the urban future, Mike Davis, a provocative interpreter of the American metropolis unravels the secret history of disaster, real and imaginary, in Southern California and shows how these tragedies could have been avoided. As he surveys the earthquakes of Santa Monica, the burning of Koreatown, the invasion of 'man-eating' mountain lions, the movie 'Volcano', and even Los Angeles' underrated tornado problem, he exposes the deep complicity between social injustice and perceptions of natural disorder. Arguing that paranoia about nature obscures the fact that Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm's way, Davis reveals how market-driven urbanization has for generations transgressed against environmental common sense. And he shows that the floods, fires, and earthquakes reaped by the city were tragedies as avoidable -- and unnatural -- as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022).
DESCRIPTION - Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. LATE VICTORIAN HOLOCAUSTS focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022).
DESCRIPTION - Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis's brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world s most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Ryan Davis (March 10, 1946 – October 25, 2022) was an American writer, political activist, urban theorist, and historian based in Southern California. He is best known for his investigations of power and social class in works such as City of Quartz and Late Victorian Holocausts. His last two non-fiction books are Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, co-authored by Jon Wiener, and The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism (Feb 2022).
DESCRIPTION - Every time Pig gets angry he literally loses his head and has quite a time recovering it. The story about a pig who comes to terms with being himself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laurent de Brunhoff (30 August 1925 – 22 March 2024) was a French author and illustrator, known primarily for continuing the Babar the Elephant series of children's books that was created by his father, Jean de Brunhoff. Laurent de Brunhoff was born in Paris on 30 August 1925. The children's classic Babar began as a bedtime story that Cécile de Brunhoff told her young sons, Laurent and Mathieu, in 1930, when they were five and four years old, respectively. They loved the story about the little elephant and told their father, Jean de Brunhoff, about the story. Jean de Brunhoff, who was an artist, drew pictures for them of the elephant world their mother had described and eventually created a book, Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), which was published in 1931 by Le Jardin des Modes, a family-run publishing house. Jean de Brunhoff created six more Babar books, but two of them were only partially colored when he died.
DESCRIPTION - In this intellectual biography Sebastian de Grazia presents a new Machiavelli-in a way that gives an almost uncanny sense of the great Florentine thinker's presence. After telling the story of Machiavelli's childhood and the period of personal crisis that followed his imprisonment and torture, the book turns to The Prince. Thenceforth the facts of biography-Machiavelli's home, journeys, fears and joys, works, friends, and loves-never cease to weave in and out of the narrative as his ideas gather power and come together to form a unified vision of humankind and the world. Convinced that a good political leader or ‘prince new' would have to engage in acts of cruelty and bad faith, Machiavelli faces a predicament: how to justify this evil to prospective leaders themselves and to people at large. He cannot dispense with their fear of God's judgment, for he holds it to be essential to political community. MACHIAVELLI IN HELL offers a profound and skillful exploration of how he penetrated this difficulty. To do so, he had to work out a new statecraft, invent a new moral reasoning, and redimension heaven and hell. Drawing on all of Machiavelli's writings, from carnival songs to major political works, de Grazia bases the book on Machiavelli's own words. He uses his own translations of Machiavelli, including many passages never before translated into English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sebastian de Grazia (August 11, 1917, Chicago, IL - 2001, Princeton, NJ) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. Born in Chicago, he received his bachelor's degree and a doctorate in political science from the University of Chicago. During World War II he served in the Office of Strategic Services, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst. In 1962-1988 he taught political philosophy at Rutgers University. He received the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for his 1989 book Machiavelli in Hell.
DESCRIPTION - An early example of Modernism's challenge to the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction, Mist (later translated as ‘Fog') shocked critics but delighted readers with its formal experimentation and existential themes. This revolutionary novel anticipates the work of Sartre, Borges, Pirandello, Nabokov, Calvino, and Vonnegut. The novel's central character, Augusto, is a pampered, aimless young man who falls in love with Eugenia, a woman he randomly spots on the street. Augusto's absurd infatuation offers an irresistible target for the philosophical ruminations of Unamuno's characters, including Eugenia's guardian aunt and ‘theoretical anarchist' uncle, Augusto's comical servants, and his best friend, Victor, an aspiring writer who introduces him to a new, groundbreaking type of fiction. In a desperate moment, Augusto consults his creator about his fate, arguing with Unamuno about what it means to be ‘real.' Even Augusto's dog, Orfeo, offers his canine point of view, reflecting on the meaning of life and delivering his master's funeral oration. Mist is a comedy, a tragic love story, a work of metafiction, and a novel of ideas. After more than a century, Unamuno's classic novel still moves us, makes us laugh, and invites us to question our assumptions about literature, relationships, and mortality. Unamuno scholars such as J.A.G. Ardila, have contended that Mist was inspired by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's work Diary of a Seducer, a novella in Either/Or.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (29 September 1864, Bilbao, Biscay, Basque Country, Spain - 31 December 1936, Salamanca, Salamanca, Castile and Leon, Spain) was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright and philosopher. His major philosophical essay was The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), and his most famous novel was Abel Sánchez: The History of a Passion (1917), a modern exploration of the Cain and Abel story.
DESCRIPTION - In his first science fiction novel in nearly nine years, four-time Nebula Award-winning writer Samuel R. Delany has created his most masterful and monumental work since his classic Dhalgren. Set centuries in the future, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a saga of political intrigue and personal struggle that unfolds against a vast and varied interstellar tomorrow. Rat Korga was a virtual slave on a planet terrified of all knowledge, where he'd led a life completely devoted to the most demanding physical labor. But when that planet is destroyed, Korga is rescued and thrust into public attention by the Web, a shadowy organization that controls the flow of information between worlds. Identified with the long-dead tyrant Vondramach Okk, Korga develops a charisma capable of commanding the attention of billions of people. Heir to all the advantages of a high data culture, Marq Dyeth is an industrial diplomat who has traveled between the stars since the age of ten. He comes from an old and respected ‘nurture stream, of humans and aliens both, and, though hundreds of years ago his seven-times great grandmother had been a spy for Vondramach Okk, his name now stands for all that is new and noble in this dazzling. egalitarian future. The unlikely bond between Rat Korga and Marq Dyeth becomes an explosive destabilizing factor in the struggle between two rival factions, the Family and the Sygn, for control of interstellar society - while a mysterious alien race, who already may have destroyed all life on one planet, draws nearer and nearer to theirs. Filled with exotic landscapes, strange cultures, tense political maneuvering and Delany's dazzling, lyrical prose, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a daring, thought-provoking speculation on the future of human culture. It is a magnificent tour de force that brings new depth and maturity to the work of one of science fiction's most innovative and provocative writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip', is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.
DESCRIPTION - EINSTEIN INTERSECTION is a novel of a strange far future when this world of Einsteinian laws, having intersected with a universe following a different set of rules, has changed - changed strangely, wonderfully, incredibly. This is the story of Lobey, an alien Orpheus, and his adventures across a weird sumptuous world, marvelously haunted. Along his questing trail, he meets Spider, the driver of dragons; Kid Death, the red-headed killer from the sea; the Dove, fabulous love image of a world obsessed; Green-eye, victim of a ritual invented by a race dead for millenia; and Friza - the dark, silent girl Lobey searched for over deserts, through jungles of carnivorous flowers, from a quiet village to a furious city, to the shores of death, and beyond.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., also known as ‘Chip', is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes a number of novels, many in the science fiction genre, as well as memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society. His science fiction novels include BABEL-17, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION (winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively), NOVA, DHALGREN, and the RETURN TO NEVÈRŸON series. After winning four Nebula awards and two Hugo awards over the course of his career, Delany was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Between 1988 and 1999 he was a professor of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Between 1999 and 2000 he was a professor of English at SUNY Buffalo. Since January 2001 he has been a professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University in Philadelphia, where he is Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program.
DESCRIPTION - Rene Depestre is a black Haitian poet and a Marxist, who has lived in Cuba since 1959. This volume includes the first major translation of his most important collection of poetry, with a critical introduction. ‘Rise up my poems, your place is in the streets' - Depestre is a poet of negritude, inspired as much by the Haitian popular religious tradition as by politics and Marxism. He views the clash between the black and the white worlds as a source of new synthesis, a truly human society. A Rainbow for the Christian West presents this view in a sequence of poems and prose poems in which the poet, strengthened by the concept of negritude and drawing on the wealth of Voodoo symbolism, intrudes into the white man's world - conflict and transformation ensue. Joan Dayan's introduction traces the evolution of Depestre's poetry, incorporating translations of pertinent poems and explaining the Voodoo background. Her commentary is based on rare documents as well as on field work in Haiti, where she was able to talk with Voodoo priests and observe their secret rites. The text includes a complete bibliography of Depestre's works, plus a selection on negritude, Haitian culture, Voodoo, and African philosophy. ‘In my opinion this effort constitutes a remarkable analysis which places Ms. Dayan among the best critics of Caribbean literature' - Rene Belance, Brown University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rene Depestre (born 29 August 1926 Jacmel, Haiti) is a Haitian poet and former communist activist. He lived in Cuba as an exile from the Duvalier regime for many years and was a founder of the Casa de las Americas publishing house. He is best known for his poetry.
DESCRIPTION - It is seldom that a publisher has a chance to present a book like ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR. In England, Mr. Desani's book has already entered the literary scene as a succès d'estime on a prodigious scale. T. S. Eliot called it ‘Certainly a remarkab1e book. In all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it. It is amazing that anyone should be able to sustain a piece of work in this style and tempo at such length.' And other British critics, in an attempt to label this new Anglo-Indian writer, have said almost everything possible: ‘A literary hellzapoppin' (The Tribune); ‘riotously funny. Mr. Desani is the playboy of the English language. the Danny Kaye of literature' (Harold Brighouse in the Manchester Guardian); ‘Joyce, Sterne, Rabelais. Miller, Runyon and Saroyan - dash of them all, but unique enough to stand on its feet' (Life and Letters). The author explains H. HATTERR simply as a portrait of a man. He is the popular mind expressing itself at its best, at its worst, now bawdy, then vulgar, but important because he's us.' H. HATTERR is Desani's imaginary Anglo-Indian, who, by recounting amusing tales of his life, gives depth and viewpoint to the author's own philosophical beliefs. This is a book of many ‘morals,' some of which are accepted as moral. But Desani's underlying feeling seems to be that life is tragic only because it is a joke of which we cannot see the point. Desani uses an unconventional style that is not ‘streams of consciousness' but emphasizes the informal conversational approach of Hatterr, and aids in exaggerating the minor tragedies in the comedy of life. But the only way to approach ALL ABOUT H. HATTERR is to read it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - G. V. Desani was born on July 8, 1909 in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of an Indian merchant, and was reared in India. In the late 1930s, and throughout the war, he was a BBC broadcaster and lectured on India throughout England. All About H. Hatterr was written and published in 1948, causing an immediate sensation and eventually achieving permanent fame as one of the greatest Anglo-Indian novels of the century. From the early 1950s to the mid-1960s, Mr. Desani studied Buddhism and Hindu culture in seclusion in India and Burma. He came to the United States in 1970 to teach at Boston University and subsequently the University of Texas at Austin, where he was Professor Emeritus of religion and philosophy. Dr. Desani died in November, 2000.
DESCRIPTION - At the time of his arrest by the Gestapo, on February 22, 1944, Robert Desnos was forty-three years old, the author of thousands of lines of poetry, novels, and a full length study of the erotic in literature, plus scores of reviews and appreciations of film, records, art, and literature. Born at the beginning of a century whose horrors are still unfolding, Robert Desnos was one of millions of victims of a force that still threatens: the will of the modern state. However benevolent any state may become, we will never return to the freedom of field, farm, and countryside; the magic of a little building in the corner of a square, dark side streets, beautiful moons rising over our cities. That world has been dead since 1939. What, then, of the message of Robert Desnos's greatest poems? - that life is good, that we can be happy if we are content to live fully through our senses, in unison with the seasons of earth and the seasons of our lives? In a time of terrible excess and cynical despair, these poems seem innocent. Yet, even if they are, they may have the power to light up that tiny space inside each of us that still remembers the hope we felt as children, the sense of glory in the colors of the earth, joy in the blue sky. - From the Introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born on July 4, 1900, in Paris, Robert Desnos was the son of a cafe owner. He attended commercial college, and then worked as a clerk before becoming a literary columnist for the newspaper Paris-Soir. He first published poems in the Dadaist magazine LittErature in 1919, and in 1922 he published his first book, Rrose Selavy, a collection of surrealistic aphorisms. While on leave in Morocco from his mandatory two years in the French Army, Desnos befriended poet Andre Breton. Together with writers Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, Breton and Desnos would form the vanguard of literary surrealism.
DESCRIPTION - The autobiography of an Irish 1960s radical. Though she disclaims writing about herself, she does. But the book at its heart attempts to explain the conditions under which the people of Northern Ireland lived, and which resulted in her becoming a key figure in the protest movements of 1968-69. She memorably describes the book's title as "not the price for which I would be prepared to sell out, but rather the price we all must pay in life to preserve our own integrity." In the spring of 1969, Bernadette Devlin, age 21, was elected to Parliament - the youngest MP since Pitt. Her book makes you understand exactly why Northern Ireland is in convulsion - and how it was that this young woman became a force to be reckoned with.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josephine Bernadette McAliskey (nEe Devlin; born 23 April 1947), usually known as Bernadette Devlin or Bernadette McAliskey, is an Irish civil rights leader and former politician. She served as Member of Parliament for Mid Ulster from 1969 to 1974.
DESCRIPTION - Philosophically engaged and darkly moving, the twenty stories in Nest in the Bones span three decades from Antonio di Benedetto's wildly various career. From his youth in Argentina to his exile in Spain after enduring imprisonment and torture under the military dictatorship during the so-called dirty war to his return in the 1980s, Benedetto's kinetic stories move effortlessly between genres, examining civilization's subtle but violent imprint on human consciousness. A late-twentieth century master of the short form and revered by his contemporaries, Nest in the Bones is the first comprehensive volume of Benedetto's stories available in English. PRAISE: This collection from renowned Argentinean author Di Benedetto (Zama) showcases his short stories' development from sparse and experimental into melancholic, deeply affecting fables… These stories bolster Di Benedetto's reputation as a visionary talent, and serve as a worthy introduction to one of Latin America's most influential writers. - Publishers Weekly. [B]lends the fantastic sensibilities of Borges and Kafka with the profound pessimism of Dostoyevsky… Di Benedetto's view of the world is gloomy, his writing precise and poetic. It's a winning combination. - Kirkus Reviews. an impressive swath of subjects, emotions and perspectives. Readers with a love of Latin American authors will find Di Benedetto a welcome addition to the canon that's available in English. - Noah Cruickshank, the Field Museum, in Shelf Awareness. In every story, the Argentine journalist confronts bare suffering with a linguistic precision and a talent for imagery that his translator, Martina Broner, captures effortlessly… Nest in the Bones offers a whirlwind introduction to a writer whose enormous weight in Latin America is finally becoming palpable outside its borders. - Harvard Review. Very well translated… displays to perfection…the range of [Di Benedetto's] experiments with strangeness…Di Benedetto's characters, with their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony,' are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka. - London Review of Books. [NEST IN THE BONES is] a sampling of the Argentine's short fiction… demonstrating an extraordinary experimental and emotional range that Zama - largely confined as it is to the perspective of a single self-centered narrator - could only hint at. - Public Books. Di Benedetto has written indispensable pages that have moved and continue moving me. - Jorge Luis Borges. One of the greatest Argentinean writers and one of the greatest writers of Latin America. - Roberto Bolaño.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antonio di Benedetto (2 November 1922 in Mendoza - 10 October 1986 in Buenos Aires) was an Argentine journalist and writer. Di Benedetto began writing and publishing stories in his teens, inspired by the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Luigi Pirandello. Mundo Animal, appearing in 1952, was his first story collection and won prestigious awards. A revised version came out in 1971, but the Xenos Books translation uses the first edition to catch the youthful flavor. Antonio di Benedetto wrote five novels, the most famous being the existential masterpiece Zama (1956). El Silenciero (The Silencer, 1964) is noteworthy for expressing his intense abhorrence of noise. Critics have compared his works to Alain Robbe-Grillet, Julio Cortázar and Ernesto Sábato.
DESCRIPTION - The first volume of the definitive five-book set of the complete collected stories of the twentieth-century's greatest SF author, a matchless display of Philip K. Dick's quirky, humorous, idiosyncratically philosophical world view. With one exception, all the stories here were written over a nine-month period between 1951 and 1952, when Dick was in his early twenties and making his first impact as a writer. CONTENTS: Stability; Roog; The Little Movement; Beyond Lies the Wub; The Gun; The Skull; The Defenders; Mr. Spaceship; Piper in the Woods; The Infinites; The Preserving Machine; Expendable; The Variable Man; The Indefatigable Frog; The Crystal Crypt; The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford; The Builder; Meddler; Paycheck; The Great C; Out in the Garden; The King of the Elves, Colony; Prize Ship; Nanny.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - BOUNTY HUNTER, 1992 A.D. World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins Rick Decard, bounty hunter, stalked in search of his renegade android prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser gun, he dreamed of owning a live animal - the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of non-human life. Then, one bleak January day, Rick got his chance. He was assigned to kill six Nexus-6 androids, representing a total bounty of six thousand dollars. But in Rick's world, things were never that simple. His assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge, deceit - and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted. 'The most consistently brilliant SF writer in the world' - JOHN BRUNNER. 'Dick is quietly producing serious fiction in a popular form and there can be no greater praise' - MICHAEL MOORCOCK.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - What humans imagine ends as reality: once conceived, construction is inevitable; constructed, the mechanism will be used; loosed, the forms will metamorphose. What is human? What is a machine? How do they differ? Or do they? Philip K. Dick addresses these questions in these 12 stories of humans and machines and his answers differ with each story. In the fictional world and in the exploring mind of Dick the only certainty is change - but he does provide some guidelines: "To be human, one must maintain his intellectual and spiritual freedom at a" costs. He must refuse obedience to any ideology; he must remain unpredictable, unfettered by patterns and routines." Machines, not humans, are predictable, repetitious, free from error. Often the fictional worlds Dick creates are frightening; no other contemporary writer so consistently creates metaphorical visions of the fears of our atomic age. Typically he presents a post holocaust world of ash and desolation where tattered humans and other forms struggle to survive. All manner of beings tumble from his imagination: humans who behave like machines, robots who think they are human, androids that long for electric pets, doors that talk, suitcases that give psychiatric counseling, taxicabs that chat with their passengers. There are papoola, swibbles, swabbles - an endless parade of mechanical shocks and delights. Living entities are constantly in the process of being turned into things while nonliving entities take on the qualities of living creatures. The editors argue that "Dick can best be described as a prose poet; the power of his fiction comes from his creation of brilliant metaphors that capture the essence of our fears. and anxieties. Like the metaphysical poets whom he admired so much, he often yokes contraries in complex tortured metaphors that seem about to explode. He had mastery of this metaphorical power from the very beginning, as 'Second Variety' demonstrates. Deadly, vicious claws whirr above the gray ash of a destroyed landscape, programmed to seek out and destroy human flesh. These mechanical blades strike terror in the heart. Then across the desolate landscape comes a small boy dragging his teddy bear, and the reader's heart is filled with compassion. Pity and terror are yoked together. But the reader soon discovers his sympathy is misplaced. Appearances are not to be trusted."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975.
DESCRIPTION - Philip K. Dick was a master of science fiction, but he was also a writer whose work transcended genre to examine the nature of reality and what it means to be human. A writer of great complexity and subtle humor, his work belongs on the shelf of great twentieth-century literature, next to Kafka and Vonnegut. Collected here are twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers. In ‘The Days of Perky Pat,' people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. ‘Adjustment Team' looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In ‘Autofac,' one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in ‘I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon,' we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as ‘The Minority Report,' the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and ‘We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,' the basis for the film Total Recall. Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations. CONTENTS: Beyond Lies the Wub; Roog; Paycheck; Second Variety; Imposter; The King of the Elves; Adjustment Team; Foster, You're Dead; Upon the Dull Earth; Autofac; The Minority Report; The Days of Perky Pat; Precious Artifact; A Game of Unchance; We Can Remember It for You Wholesale; Faith of Our Fathers; The Electric Ant; A Little Something for Us Tempunauts; The Exit Door Leads In; Rautavaara's Case; I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip K. Dick was born in Chicago in 1928 and lived most of his life in California. He briefly attended the University of California, but dropped out before completing any classes. In 1952 he began writing professionally, going on to write thirty-six novels, including MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, A SCANNER DARKLY, and UBIK, and five short-story collections. He won the 1963 Hugo Award for best novel for THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE and the 1975 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel of the year for FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID. Philip K. Dick died in 1982.
DESCRIPTION - The fourth and penultimate volume of Dick's collected stories covers a much wider span of years than its predecessors - from late 1954 through to 1963. These were the years when Dick began to write novels prolifically, so his short story output became much more sparse. Some of these stories went on to inspire novels - "The Mold of Yancy" suggested The Penultimate Truth, while the title story was the seed from which one of Dick's greatest works, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, later grew. Philip K. Dick is shown in his prime in this collection, writing stories which stand alongside famous novels like The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - This third volume of Philip K. Dick's stories is drawn, like Second Variety, from his most prolific period as a short story writer: the 23 items were written in little more than a year, before his first novel appeared. Many of them are previously uncollected, but also included are several of his most famous stories, such as ‘Foster, You're Dead' - a powerful extrapolation of nuclear war hysteria - and ‘The Golden Man', a very different story about a super-evolved mutant human. Once again, this is a marvelously varied and entertaining collection by a writer whose reputation continues to grow and grow. CONTENTS: Fair Games; The Hanging Stranger; The Eyes Have It; The Golden Man; The Turning Wheel; The Last of the Masters; The Father-Thing; Strange Eden; Tony and the Beetles; Null-O; To Serve the Master; Exhibit Piece; The Crawlers; Sales Pitch; Shell Games; Upon the Dull Earth; Foster, You're Dead; Pay for the Printer; War Veteran; The Chromium Fence; Misadjustment; A World of Talent; PSI-Man Heal My Child!; Notes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - The final volume of the collected stories of Philip K. Dick covers the period from 1963 to 1981, the year before he died. It was a period which produced some of Dick's finest novels, including The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. Among the 25 stories in this collection, the title story provided the seed for his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while We Can Remember It For You Wholesale has recently been filmed under the title Total Recall. This collection shows Philip K. Dick at the height of his considerable powers. CONTENTS: The Little Black Box; The War with the Fnools; A Game of Unchance; Precious Artifact; Retreat Syndrome; A Terran Odyssey; Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday; Holy Quarrel; We Can Remember It For You Wholesale; Not By Its Cover; Return Match; Faith of Our Fathers; The Story to End All Stories For Harlan Ellison's Anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS; The Electric Ant; Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked; A little Something For Us Tempunauts; The Pre-Persons; The Eye of the Sibyl; The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree. The Exit Door Leads In; Chains of Air, Web of Aether; Strange Memories of Death; I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon; Rautavaara's Case; The Alien Mind.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - The single most resonant and carefully imagined book of Dick's career. - New York Times. It's America in 1962. Slavery is legal once again. The few Jews who still survive hide under assumed names. In San Francisco, the I Ching is as common as the Yellow Pages. All because some twenty years earlier the United States lost a war - and is now occupied by Nazi Germany and Japan. This harrowing, Hugo Award-winning novel is the work that established Philip K. Dick as an innovator in science fiction while breaking the barrier between science fiction and the serious novel of ideas. In it Dick offers a haunting vision of history as a nightmare from which it may just be possible to wake.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - The second volume of Philip K. Dick's Collected Stories brings together 27 stories written in an incredible eight-month burst of energy. Included are such famous Dick masterpieces as the title story, with its endless war being fought by ever more cunning and sophisticated robot weapons; "Impostor", in which a man is accused of being an alien spy and finds his whole identity called into question; and "Prominent Author", in which a fracture in space/time enables an ordinary future commuter to achieve unexpected literary fame. Again and again in these stories - written and published while America was in the grip of McCarthyism - Dick speaks up for ordinary people and against militarism, paranoia and xenophobia. But first and foremost these are marvellously varied and entertaining stories from a writer overflowing with ideas.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.
DESCRIPTION - Who is Ubik? What is Ubik? Where is Ubik? You'll never guess, You'll have to find out, as the extraordinary Philip K. Dick opens up new dimensions in science fiction adventure.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series. Patricia S. Warrick is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Center, Fox Valley. She has written numerous articles and books on the subjects of science fiction and artificial intelligence including The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Martin H. Greenberg, Associate Professor in the College of Community Services at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, is a frequent author/editor in the area of popular culture.
DESCRIPTION - BLEAK HOUSE opens in a London shrouded by an all - pervading fog - a fog that swirls about the Court of Chancery, where the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce lies lost in endless litigation. This drawn - out lawsuit over an inheritance stands at the center of a scathing portrayal of a moribund legal system and of a society permeated with greed, deception, delusion, and guilt. In no other work are the many facets of Dickens' genius - his powers of characterization, dramatic construction, social satire, and poetic evocation - so memorably combined. Peopled by an immense gallery of vivid characters, major and minor, comic and tragic, in settings which range from the mansion of a fear - haunted noblewoman to the squalor of the London slums, this superb example of narrative art has been ranked by Edmund Wilson as 'The masterpiece of [Dickens'] middle period.' Geoffrey Tillotson writes: 'BLEAK HOUSE. is, all told, the finest literary work the nineteenth century produced in England. Dickens was the supreme literary genius of his time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
DESCRIPTION - The central theme of GREAT EXPECTATIONS- How do men know who they are? - is one that preoccupied Dickens towards the end of his life. The story of orphan Pip and the mysterious fortune which falls into his lap, his snobbish rejection of his old friends and his growth through pain and mishap into true maturity is the basis for a story where violence and guilt jostle with sharp and grotesque comedy. From the moment the child Pip meets Magwitch the convict on the eerie Kent marshes, to the last encounter with Estella, the beautiful, heartless woman who has so fruitlessly haunted Pip's emotions, the reader is sucked into a drama whose moral and psychological intensity never slackens. Comic, tragic, vital, full of bitter pathos and haunting memories of childhood fairytales with an added twist, GREAT EXPECTATIONS is a novel which, as Graham Greene comments, is full of secret prose giving us ‘the sense of a mind speaking to itself with no one to listen'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
DESCRIPTION - The 'terrible mistake' was the contemporary utilitarian philosophy, expounded in Hard Times (1854) as the Philosophy of Fact by the hard-headed disciplinarian Thomas Gradgrind. But the novel, Dickens's shortest, is more than a polemical tract for the times; the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father is one of Dickens's triumphs. When Louisa, trapped in a loveless marriage, falls prey to an idle seducer, the crisis forces her father to reconsider his cherished system. Yet even as the development of the story reflects Dickens's growing pessimism about human nature and society, Hard Times marks his return to the theme which had made his early works so popular: the amusements of the people. Sleary's circus represents Dickens's most considered defence of the necessity of entertainment, and infuses the novel with the good humour which has ensured its appeal to generations of readers. Hard Times--Dickens's shortest novel and one of his major triumphs--tells the tragic story of Louisa Gradgrind and her father.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 - 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's most memorable fictional characters and is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period. During his life, his works enjoyed unprecedented fame, and by the twentieth century his literary genius was broadly acknowledged by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to be widely popular.
DESCRIPTION - Denis Diderot (1713-1784) was among the greatest writers of the Enlightenment, and in 'Jacques the Fatalist', he brilliantly challenged the artificialities of conventional French fiction of his age. Riding through France with his master, the servant Jacques appears to act as though he is truly free in a world of dizzying variety and unpredictability. Characters emerge and disappear as the pair travel across the country, and tales begin and are submerged by greater stories, to reveal a panoramic view of eighteenth-century society. But, while Jacques seems to choose his own path, he remains convinced of one philosophical belief: that every decision he makes, however whimsical, is wholly predetermined. Playful, picaresque and comic, Diderot's novelis a compelling exploration of Enlightment philosophy. Brilliantly original in style, it is one of the greatest precursors to post-modern literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 - July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the EncyclopEdie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based.
DESCRIPTION - It was 1961 when President John F Kennedy unveiled his hopeful Alliance for Progress for Latin America with the motto: ‘Progress, Si, Tyranny, No!' But Time correspondent for Central America Bernard Diederich had been aware of the unsettling link between progress and tyranny in that troubled part of the world since he first met the old patriarch of Nicaragua's Somoza family, Tacho Somoza Garcia (Tacho I), in 1952. Today Diederich's point of view remains remarkably prescient. He is both a seasoned reporter and an intimate of the land and its people. No single name better evokes what ‘progress' has meant to Nicaragua and the rest of Central America than Somoza. With this family as the focus, Diederich sets the record straight on crucial points in Nicaragua's chaotic struggle for control of its own destiny - a prototype of the conflicts that now embroil the rest of Central America. Although American involvement in Central America, and Nicaragua in particular, goes back to the days of the Gold Rush, never was it as openly and enthusiastically embraced as by the three presidents of the flamboyant Somoza clan. Tacho I even offered Nicaragua as a base for raids into neighboring Guatemala as a gesture of the ‘shared concern' of the United States and the Somoza regime over the ‘growing threat of communism' in Central America. After the devastation of the 1972 earthquake in Managua, Nicaraguan outrage at government mismanagement and greed began to build-and so did the membership and repute of the anti-Somoza Sandinista movement. But it was the general indignation at the killing of newspaper editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, a lifelong Somoza enemy, that sparked the revolt that ultimately led to revolution. The public outcry that followed placed the blame on Anastasio Somoza Debayle (Tacho II, the last and perhaps most notorious Somoza president) for the editor's death. From the safety of his custom-made Bunker Tacho failed to gauge the wrath of his people and counted heavily on United States support to quell dissension. But the anti-Somoza cause had a new and important martyr, and the battle lines were irreversibly drawn. After years of sporadic guerrilla action, full-scale revolution in Nicaragua became a reality. Diederich, who knew many of the revolutionaries from the early days of their struggle, went inside both the Bunker and the Sandinista hideouts for an unprecedented scrutiny of a revolution in progress. It was a revolution that would not become real to American audiences until, months later, they saw a videotape of ABC newsman Bill Stewart being ordered to lie prostrate to be shot in cold blood by a government soldier. America could no longer ignore Somoza's ‘excesses.' One month later, Anastasio Somoza had fled Nicaragua. Anastasio Somoza's assassination in exile in Paraguay in 1980 may have ended the Somoza dynasty (although some Somoza followers still hope that Tacho III will mount a counterrevolution), but the future of Nicaragua, intrinsically tied to the fate of El Salvador, Guatemala and the rest of Central America, has yet to be decided. In this timely book, Bernard Diederich anticipates some of the problems and terrors inherent in that future. He looks at the ideals and pitfalls of both the Alliance for Progress and President Carter's human rights commitment and perhaps, most important, the crucial need at this time for an informed, intelligent response to the mistakes of history. ‘Bernard Diederich. proves himself an indispensable historian for Central America.' - GRAHAM GREENE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bernard Diederich (born 1926), is a New Zealand-born author, journalist, and historian, who currently resides in Miami. Diederich studied in England in the early postwar years after having participated in World War II in the Pacific. In 1949, Diederich started a sailing trip with two friends that brought him to Haiti, a country that since stayed close to his heart. He stayed and settled down, while his partners continued their trip. In Port-au-Prince, he founded and edited the Haiti Sun, a weekly English newspaper about Haitian events. As a journalist he also became a non-staff correspondent for a number of news media including the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Daily Telegraph. In 1961 he covered the assassination of Rafael Trujillo in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Two years later, after having displeased Haiti's dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, he was imprisoned and expelled. In the Dominican Republic he established himself as a foreign staff correspondent for Time-Life News. In 1966 Diederich moved to Mexico working for Time Magazine covering Caribbean affairs. In 1981 the office was moved to Miami, and he worked there until his retirement in 1989. The author continued to publish after retirement with the focus on the political and historical developments in the Caribbean, notably in Haiti.
DESCRIPTION - In this first-ever anthology of Indigenous science fiction Grace Dillon collects some of the finest examples of the craft with contributions by Native American, First Nations, Aboriginal Australian, and New Zealand Maori authors. The collection includes seminal authors such as Gerald Vizenor, historically important contributions often categorized as 'magical realism' by authors like Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie, and authors more recognizable to science fiction fans like William Sanders and Stephen Graham Jones. Dillon's engaging introduction situates the pieces in the larger context of science fiction and its conventions. Organized by sub-genre, the book starts with Native slipstream, stories infused with time travel, alternate realities and alternative history like Vizenor's 'Custer on the Slipstream.' Next up are stories about contact with other beings featuring, among others, an excerpt from Gerry William's The Black Ship. Dillon includes stories that highlight Indigenous science like a piece from Archie Weller's Land of the Golden Clouds, asserting that one of the roles of Native science fiction is to disentangle that science from notions of 'primitive' knowledge and myth. The fourth section calls out stories of apocalypse like William Sanders' 'When This World Is All on Fire' and a piece from Zainab Amadahy's The Moons of Palmares. The anthology closes with examples of biskaabiiyang, or 'returning to ourselves,' bringing together stories like Eden Robinson's 'Terminal Avenue' and a piece from Robert Sullivan's Star Waka. An essential book for readers and students of both Native literature and science fiction, Walking the Clouds is an invaluable collection. It brings together not only great examples of Native science fiction from an internationally-known cast of authors, but Dillon's insightful scholarship sheds new light on the traditions of imagining an Indigenous future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Grace L. Dillon is an associate professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies program at Portland State University in Oregon. She is also the editor of Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest.
DESCRIPTION - Behind the covert, international anti-terrorist network responsible for South America's worst human rights abuses. President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.-1970 CIA internal memo. Operation Condor, set up by Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, was a secret alliance among six Southern Cone intelligence agencies that waged an international dirty war against internal enemies. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people were tortured and murdered as the operation, with funding and operational support from the CIA, ranged across national borders to destroy ‘subversion.' Award-winning journalist John Dinges, who was himself interrogated at a secret Chilean torture camp, draws on hundreds of interviews and newly opened secret police files to prove the extent of cooperation between Operation Condor and the United States government. Revolutionaries, spies and military officers-many speaking out for the first time-retell the brutal struggle between Condor and its enemies, alongside the suspenseful present-day narrative of the lawyers and judges whose relentless efforts to end the impunity of Condor's perpetrators led to Pinochet's arrest and changed international human rights law forever.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN DINGES has written about South and Central America for many years for a variety of publications, including The Washington Post, TIME, ABC and NPR. He is currently a foreign editor at National Public Radio. He holds a master's degree in latin American Studies from Stanford University and studied theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. He was a recipient of an Interemerican Press Association grant in 1972. His first book, Assassination on Embassy Row (Pantheon, 1980), received an Edgar Award. As editor of NPR's special reports on the Iran-Contra Affair, he received the Corporation far Public Broadcasting Public Affairs-Events Coverage Award and the Ohio State Achievement of Merit Award.
DESCRIPTION - Why did the city of Los Angeles erupt in flames over the police beating of a black man named Rodney King? How could the worst American insurrection of the twentieth century take place under the nose of the most powerful and omnipresent police department in the nation? How could even Mayor Tom Bradley - a twenty-one-year veteran of the LAPD - fail to change the force's sacred credo:. Give no slack and take no shit from anyone. Confront and command. Control the streets at all times. Always be aggressive. Stop crimes before they happen. Seek them out. Shake them down. Make that arrest. And never, never admit the department has done anything wrong. Joe Domanick brings a historian's perspective and a novelist's eye to this story of the LAPD in its mythic years, a force canonized by 'Dragnet' as America's Cops. He brings us the real story behind the City of Angels, first known as 'Peoria with palms' and settled by the sons and daughters of the American heartland. In the years before World War II, James E. Davis was police chief. His blue-gray eyes stared out like two piercing bullets, leading a reporter to comment that 'even if he hadn't been a policeman, you'd wonder if you had forgotten to hide the body.' During his reign the LAPD began writing the book on big-muscle law enforcement. But it was his successor, William H. Parker, who built the force into the formidable corps that Joseph Wambaugh called the New Centurions. Bill Parker, so unbending that Star Trek creator and ex-LAPD officer Gene Roddenberry was said to have based the character of Spock on him, ran the department during the 1950s - the LAPD's golden age. Los Angeles was then a buttoned-down community where a family could go out for dinner at Bob's Big Boy and leave its doors unlocked. And Chief Parker could boast that 'the Police Commission doesn't run the police department. I run the police department.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joe Domanick (born February 10, 1943) is an award-winning investigative journalist and author, described in the Los Angeles Times as "one of the most outspoken of the breed. a muckraking journalist. [who] continues to pound away at police officials. and other civic center hotshots. In pen and in person he's got a tough and hungry manner that makes them uncomfortable." He is a Senior Fellow in Criminal Justice at the University of Southern California Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism. His last book, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD's Century of War in the City of Dreams (1994), won the 1995 Edgar Award for Best True Fact Crime.
DESCRIPTION - This landmark exposE of the dark history of repressive police operations in American cities offers a richly detailed account of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms over the past century. In an incisive examination of undercover work in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia as well as Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Haven, Baltimore, and Birmingham, Frank Donner reveals the underside of American law enforcement. Protectors of Privilege spotlights the repressive police tactics of the past thirty years, particularly the urban intelligence operations and abuses that burgeoned during the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Donner examines the open police violence and corruption in Chicago; the power-hungry Frank Rizzo, whose fear mongering polarized Philadelphia in the 1970s and 1980s; the ties between the police department and right-wing movements in Los Angeles; and the tarnished professionalism of New York's finest. Meticulously documented, Protectors of Privilege traces the history of countersubversion and police misconduct from the late nineteenth century through the twentieth, beginning with the Gilded Age repression of economic protest and anarchist activities. Donner exposes the machinations of City Hall to curb organized labor early in this century, overheated police behavior during World War I, the ideological response to the Depression and its consequences, and police misconduct during the Cold War. More than just a description of police intelligence and abuse of power, Protectors of Privilege demonstrates how patterns of police behavior accord with patterns of city politics as a whole and uncovers the ties between police departments, the CIA, and private right-wing groups. Donner first documents the shift in police interest from crime to countersubversion and then traces the connections between police corruption and countersubversive activities, probing, for example, the role of infiltrators and agents provocateurs in stimulating the violence they then exposed. Protectors of Privilege offers the most comprehensive account yet published of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms in America. In a period when protest movements and ghetto unrest could spur a renewal of police abuses, this book speaks to all Americans.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frank Donner (November 25, 1911 - June 10, 1993) was a civil liberties lawyer, author and the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) Project on Political Surveillance. Beginning in 1980, Donner headed the Project on Political Surveillance for the ACLU. During that time he wrote several books outlining official use of domestic surveillance and the use of Red Squads, programs like COINTELPRO, and other agencies to infiltrate organizations suspected of political dissent. Donner also cited the government's use of scapegoats to divert attention from government criticism onto other political groups.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Spanish-American literature is an enterprise of the imagination. We are resolved to invent our own reality. Our dreams are waiting for us around the corner.' So Octavio Paz introduces this epochal collection of poetry, fiction, and critical essays by the leading writers in Latin America today. Included are short stories and extracts from novels by Ernesto Sabato, Juan Jose Arreola, Jorge Luis forges, Dalton Trevisan, Miguel Asturias, Carlos Morena, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa, as well as pieces by young writers whose work is just beginning to be known. The poets represented are Cesar Vallejo, Javier Heraud, Octavio Paz, Carlos German Belli, Pablo Neruda, Enrique Lihn, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicanor Parra, Carlos Saavedra, Rafael Pineda, Enrique Molina, Marco Antonio Montes de Oca, and Jose Emilio Pacheco. In addition, there are short anthologies of Cuban, Peruvian, Argentine, Paraguayan, Mexican, and Chilean poetry. This is an indispensable anthology for anyone interested in Latin America and its rich and unpredictable literature. Contributors include: Jose-Luis Appleyard, Homero Aridjis, Juan Jose Arreola, Miguel Arteche, Miguel Angel Asturias, Juan Banuelos, Miguel Barnet, Efrain Barquero, Edgar Bayley, Carlos German Belli, Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel Angel Bustos, Esteban Cabanas, Alfonso Calderon, Cesar Calvo, Antonio Cisneros, Julio Cortazar, Rene Davalos, Washington Delgado, Marco Antonio, Montes de Oca, Eliseo Diego, Ramiro Dominguez, Clayton Eshleman, Pablo Armando Fernandez, Aldofo Ferriero, Isabel Fraire, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Gelman, Armando Tejada Gomez, Miguel Grinberg, Oscar Hahn, Javier Heraud, Juan Jose Hernandez, Fayad Jamis, Vincente Lenero, Enrique Lihn, Jose Lezama Lima, Clarice Lispector, Joaquin Sanchez Macgregor, Leopoldo Marechal, Francisco Perez Maricevich, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gonzalo Millan, Sergio Mondragon, Enrique Molina, Rodriguez Monegal, Carlos J. Moneta, Carlos Martinez Moreno, Pablo Neruda, Julio Ortega, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Herberto Padilla, Basilia Papastamatiu, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Rafael Pineda, Nelida Pinon, Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Gonzalo Rojas, Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Juan Gonzalo Rose, Alberto Rubio, Carlos Castro Saavedra, Ernesto Sabato, Ruben Bareiro Saguier, Gustavo Sainz, Horacio Salas, Jose Maria Gomez, Sanj urjo, Maximo Simpson, Jorge Teillier, Dalton Trevisan, Cesar Vallejo, Roque Vallejos, and Maria Vargas Llosa. ‘. a treasure house of all that is new and best in Latin America' - JOHN MURCHISON, translator. ‘an extraordinary job of translation' - RAFAEL PINEDA.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - About the Editors - Jose Donoso Yáñez (October 5, 1924–December 7, 1996) was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States (Iowa) and mainly Spain.
DESCRIPTION - Recent years have witnessed an astonishing eruption in the literary output of writers in Latin America, a phenomenon that the Latin Americans themselves refer to as the Boom. This book is a fascinating account of this exciting period in Latin American letters by the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso. Mr. Donoso's latest novel, The Obscene Bird of Night, was published in the United States and received an extraordinary frontpage review in the New York Times Book Review; his short stories and novellas will appear in English translation this year. Himself a product of the era he describes, Mr. Donoso provides a personal history and critique of the Boom that has brought a number of outstanding writers to the forefront. Among the writers Mr. Donoso discusses in his account are Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Luis Borges. Originally published in Spain, this book recounts Mr. Donoso's own psychic and literary liberation from intellectual provinciality and tells how the so-called Boom actually came to be. Placing this ‘fortunate explosion' in perspective, the author links significant changes in the contemporary Spanish American novel to a process of internationalization and to a growing sophistication and cosmopolitanism on the part of young Latin American writers. He deflates the myths surrounding this new crop of writers-particularly their ‘literary cocktail circuit' reputation-and provides glimpses into the literary lives of many of Latin America's most celebrated authors. Written by a charming, keen, and self-aware observer, The Boom is a valuable as well as an entertaining commentary on the riches of contemporary Spanish American literature. The book will find an audience among students, specialists, and general readers interested in a literature that is now taking its place in the consciousness of Americans both North and South. Foreword by Ronald Christ. A Center for Inter-American Relations Book. Chilean novelist Jose Donoso is the author of The Obscene Bird of Night and the forthcoming Sacred Families and The Charleston and Other Stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jose Donoso Yáñez (October 5, 1924–December 7, 1996) was a Chilean writer. He lived most of his life in Chile, although he spent many years in self-imposed exile in Mexico, the United States (Iowa) and mainly Spain. Although he had left his country in the sixties for personal reasons, after 1973 he said his exile was also a form of protest against the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. He returned to Chile in 1981 and lived there until his death. Donoso is the author of a number of remarkable stories and novels, which contributed greatly to the Latin American literary boom. The term 'Boom' was coined in his 1972 essay Historia personal del ‘boom'.
DESCRIPTION - Nothing could seem more innocent than Babar the Elephant, the Lone Ranger, Donald Duck, or the Reader's Digest. Yet, in this daring book, Ariel Dorfman explores the hidden political and social messages behind the smiling faces that inhabit these familiar books, comics, and magazines. In so doing, he provides a stunning map to the secret world inside the most successful cultural symbols of our time. Dorfman first examines the meteoric rise of Babar the Elephant from orphan to king of the jungle and the way stories like his teach the young a rosy version of underdevelopment and colonialism. He then turns to purely American comic-book figures and shows how Donald Duck, the Lone Ranger, Superman, and other heroes offer a set of simple, disarming answers to the deepest dilemmas of our time without ever calling an established value into question. Along the way, with wit and a wily style, he raises a series of always provocative questions: Why does the Lone Ranger really have that mask? Why do Disney comics teem with uncles and nephews but no mothers and fathers? How could a comic book help overthrow a government? How does an adult's' magazine like the Reader's Digest continually transform us into children? Here is a book that will appeal to those who want to understand the connection between politics and culture, between Ronald Reagan and Mickey Mouse, between economic theories of development and children's literature. It is for those who are fascinated by the mass media, for parents and teachers who are worried about what their children are watching and reading, for anyone who wants to understand the way ideas are produced and manipulated in the twentieth century. Born in 1942, Ariel Dorfman was a professor of journalism and literature in Chile during the Allende period, where he also produced popular television shows, new comic books, a magazine for adolescents, his own novels, essays, and poetry, and co-authored the popular HOW TO READ DONALD DUCK, which has now appeared in thirteen languages around the world. Since the 1973 coup against Allende, he has been in exile and now lives in the Washington, D.C. area. He contributes regularly to the leading newspapers of Latin America and Europe as well as to the Village Voice and other publications here. Pantheon is also publishing Widows, his novel about disappeared' people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vladimiro Ariel Dorfman (born May 6, 1942) is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist. A citizen of the United States since 2004, he has been a professor of literature and Latin American Studies at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina since 1985.
DESCRIPTION - 18 classic stories of Tibet's legendary rascal. AUTHOR'S NOTE - Many people in the world especially in the West. Believe Tibet is a land of ‘magic saints' where all the people spend their time meditating. Although this is an exaggeration, it is true that many Tibetans are very devoted to the Buddhist religion. While all the stories in this book deal directly with Tibetan Buddhist culture, they also reflect the ways in which Tibetans laugh and enjoy life. The stories were told to me while I was a yak herder boy between the ages of six and twelve. Until now, none of them have ever appeared in print. They were all written down by me from memory. I always enjoyed hearing the stories of Uncle Tompa, who is known as Agu Tompa in Tibet. According to many people's guesses, Uncle Tompa was born in southern Tibet around the 13th century. I could not find any proof of this, however. This book was written informally using plain language about sexual matters as Tibetans always do when joking in their own tongue. I hope you won't find this offensive. Many people are writing and translating Tibetan books, but I have yet to see one on humor. I hope in reading my book you will find both laughter and relaxation. I would like to thank my friend Terry Ellingson for his help in correcting my English and Addison Smith who drew the illustrations.' - Rinjing Dorje, 1973.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rinjing Dorje is the son of Sherab Dorje from Kham, eastern Tibet, and Choe Gyalmo, a nomad lady from the foothills of the Himalayas. Sherab Dorje was recognized as the reincarnation of a Sherpa lama, Khamsum Wangdu, and in the 1930s he moved from his native land to northern Nepal. Sherab Dorje was a highly esteemed practitioner of Tibetan medicine in healing the mentally ill. His uniquely unconventional techniques made him prominent throughout the region. Although the practice itself was a traditional Tibetan one, he formulated his own method, which called for keeping the patient in total darkness providing only light from a flickering butter lamp. He would then walk on the patient while reciting incantations and burning an intoxicating incense of Gugul, a powerfully scented sap.
DESCRIPTION - Not since CRIME AND PUNISHMENT was first introduced to the English-speaking world eighty years ago has there been a new translation as important as this. Bringing to their task a far stronger combined knowledge of Russian and English than any predecessor, and working in the context of an up-to-date, modern critical understanding of Dostoevsky's unusual and surprising text, Pevear and Volokhonsky capture all the rich stylistic idiosyncrasy of the Russian original. As Mr. Pevear writes in his foreword, ‘the life of a novel is not in the conception but in the performance. In every cadence, every tone, the realization of every character and scene of this densely composed ‘work of poetry,' Dostoevsky shows his mastery.' The Pevear- Volokhonsky work brings us as close to experiencing the genius of Dostoevsky's astounding psychological thriller as any translation can. This superlative accomplishment will make Dostoevsky's most widely read novel an entirely fresh experience for new generations of readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOHONSKY are known for their highly acclaimed translation of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, which was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize. They are married and live in France.
DESCRIPTION - Completed in 1872, DEMONS is rivaled only by THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV for the place of Dostoevsky's greatest work. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose acclaimed translations of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, and NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND have become the standard versions in English, now give us a brilliant new rendering of this towering masterpiece, previously translated as THE POSSESSED. Dostoevsky first conceived of the book as a ‘novel-pamphlet' in which he intended to ‘say everything' about the new Russian nihilists, the growing group of anti-czarist political terrorists. The present novel grew out of an actual event in the winter of 1869: Ivan Ivanov, a student at the Petrov Agricultural Academy in Moscow and a man of strong character, had broken with his fellow young revolutionaries and was subsequently murdered by a small group of them headed by Sergei Nechaev. Around this crime and the ensuing trial of the Nechaevists in the summer of 1871, Dostoevsky constructed this superbly nuanced work, inexhaustibly rich in character and circumstance, which he also intended as a broad condemnation of the legion of ideas, or ‘demons,' that had migrated from the West and were threatening the soul of the Russian nation. His magnificent achievement has, proven to be one of the most powerfully prophetic statements about Russia's political destiny, not only in his own day but in ours as well. Like all of Dostoevsky's great novels, Demons is also a ‘philosophical tale.' As it reveals its many faces-comic, satirical, symbolic, and tragic-it enacts the drama of the promethean revolt of modern humanity against the institutions and values of tradition, and offers a brilliant investigation into the workings of the human will and the nature of evil. With this glorious new version all the stunning idiosyncrasies of the Russian original are available to English readers for the first time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. They are married and live in France. (original title: Besy, 1872). This translation has been made from the Russian text of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition, volumes ten and eleven.
DESCRIPTION - Published in 1864, NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND is considered the author's first masterpiece - the book in which he ‘became' Dostoevsky - and is seen as the source of all his later works. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose acclaimed translations of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and CRIME AND PUNISHMENT have become the standard versions in English, now give us a superb new rendering of this early classic. Presented as the fictional apology and confession of the underground man - formerly a minor official of mid-nineteenth-century Russia, whom Dostoevsky leaves nameless, as one critic wrote, ‘because ‘I' is all of us' - the novel is divided into two parts: the first, a half-desperate, half-mocking political critique; the second, a powerful, at times absurdly comical account of the man's breakaway from society and descent ‘underground.' The book's extraordinary style - brilliantly violating literary conventions in ways never before attempted - shocked its first readers and still shocks many Russians today. This magnificent new translation captures for the first time all the stunning idiosyncrasy of the original. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. They are married and live in France.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
DESCRIPTION - Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, THE KARAMAZOV BROTHERS (1880), is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons - the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha - are all at some level involved. Bound up with this intense family drama is Dostoevsky's exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, the question of human freedom, the collective nature of guilt, the disastrous consequences of rationalism. The novel is also richly comic: the Russian Orthodox Church, the legal system, and even the author's most cherished causes and beliefs are presented with a note of irreverence, so that orthodoxy and radicalism, sanity and madness, love and hatred, right and wrong are no longer mutually exclusive. Rebecca West considered it ‘the allegory for the world's maturity', but with children to the fore.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
DESCRIPTION - From award-winning translators, a masterful new translation - never before published - of the novel in which Fyodor Dostoevsky set out to portray a truly beautiful soul. Just two years after completing CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Dostoevsky produced a second novel with a very different man at its center. In THE IDIOT, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate to murder, as Dostoevsky's ‘positively beautiful man' clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his innocence and moral idealism. THE IDIOT is both a powerful indictment of that society and a rich and gripping masterpiece.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
DESCRIPTION - POOR FOLK was Dostoyevsky's first great triumph in fiction and the work that looks forward to the double-acts and obsessions of his later genius. It takes place in a world of office, lodging-house and seamstress's rooms and consists of an impoverished love affair in letters between a copy clerk and a young girl who lives opposite him. Poor Folk, sometimes translated as Poor People,[note] is the first novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845. Dostoyevsky was in financial difficulty because of his extravagant living and his developing gambling addiction; although he had produced some translations of foreign novels, they had little success, and he decided to write a novel of his own to try to raise funds. Inspired by the works of Gogol, Pushkin, and Karamzin, as well as English and French authors, Poor Folk is written in the form of letters between the two main characters, Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova, who are poor second cousins. The novel showcases the life of poor people, their relationship with rich people, and poverty in general, all common themes of literary naturalism. A deep but odd friendship develops between them until Dobroselova loses her interest in literature, and later in communicating with Devushkin after a rich widower Mr. Bykov proposes to her. Devushkin, a prototype of the clerk found in many works of naturalistic literature at that time, retains his sentimental characteristics; Dobroselova abandons art, while Devushkin cannot live without literature. Contemporary critics lauded Poor Folk for its humanitarian themes. While Vissarion Belinsky dubbed the novel Russia's first "social novel" and Alexander Herzen called it a major socialist work, other critics detected parody and satire. The novel uses a complicated polyphony of voices from different perspectives and narrators. Initially offered by Dostoyevsky to the liberal-leaning magazine Fatherland Notes, the novel was published in the almanac, St. Petersburg Collection, on January 15, 1846. It became a huge success nationwide. Parts of it were translated into German by Wilhelm Wolfsohn and published in an 1846/1847 magazine. The first English translation was provided by Lena Milman in 1894, with an introduction by George Moore, cover art design by Aubrey Beardsley and publication by London's Mathews and Lane.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
DESCRIPTION - Winter Notes on Summer Impressions is an essay by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in Vremya, a monthly magazine edited by Dostoyevsky himself. The essay consists of the travel notes of Dostoevsky's 1862 trip to Europe as well as his reflections on perception of Russians in Europe. It is regarded as an early statement of some of Dostoyevsky's favourite concepts. Dostoevsky, while not a Marxist, agreed with some of Karl Marx's criticisms of Europe. A believer in Pan-Slavism, Dostoevsky disliked European culture for its corruption and criticized those of his countrymen who tried to imitate it. During his travels, Dostoevsky observed both Protestants (in England) and Catholics. He believed that the Anglicans were "proud and rich…pompously and seriously [believing] in their own solidly moral virtues and in their right to preach a staid and complacent morality." Meanwhile, Dostoevsky thought Catholic priests used charity to manipulate the poor into conversion. Elsewhere Dostoevsky argued that Orthodoxy was superior to both, protecting, but not forcing, unity within the church. Dostoevsky's observations about English and French national characteristics reverse those of most travelers during his era. He suggests that the French are hypocritical as well as irrational, also considering the France populace to be repressed by the presence of the French secret police. The English, conversely, are proud. Well-to-do Englishmen consider themselves too elevated to attend to the plight of the poor, who are desperate and violent. Dostoevsky admitted weaknesses in Winter Notes, chiefly because he traveled too quickly through some parts of Europe (notably Germany) to properly appreciate them. Even friendly critics have recognized that Dostoevsky's style in this work is poor. The work, however, contains motifs that would later appear in Notes from Underground, and some critics consider it a first draft of that later, more successful book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature.
DESCRIPTION - Dostoyevsky said he wrote THE VILLAGE OF STEPANCHIKOVO (1859) ‘for the sheer pleasure of prolonging the adventures of my new hero and enjoying a good laugh at him. This hero is not unlike myself. ‘ Dostoyevsky's narrator has been summoned to his uncle Colonel Rostanev's remote country estate in the hope that he will act as decoy and rescue Rostanev's former ward, Nastenka Yezhevikin, from the tyranny of Opiskin, a despot and charlatan who has the whole household under his thumb. Forty-eight hours of explosive comic drama unfold, culminating in a violent confrontation between Opiskin and the ineffectual Rostanev. Dostoyevsky conveys a delight in life's wild absurdities to rival that of Gogol, yet at the same time in Opiskin, a comic monster of Russian literature, he creates an unflattering portrait of his mentor. Here we recognize the genesis of the characters and the revelatory dramatic scenes of THE IDIOT and THE KARAMAZOV BROTHERS. ‘A lively rendering of an unjustly neglected work' - The Times Literary Supplement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (11 November 1821 - 9 February 1881), sometimes transliterated Dostoevsky, was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist and philosopher. Dostoyevsky's literary works explore human psychology in the context of the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmosphere of 19th-century Russia. He began writing in his 20s, and his first novel, Poor Folk, was published in 1846 when he was 25. His major works include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). His output consists of eleven novels, three novellas, seventeen short novels and numerous other works. Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest and most prominent psychologists in world literature. VICTOR TERRAS is a professor of Slavic languages and chairman of the Department of Slavic languages at Brown University. He has also taught at the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin. Among his many publications as THE YOUNG DOSTOEVSKY, and translations of Dostoevsky's Notebooks for THE POSSESSED and A RAW YOUTH. EDWARD WASIOLEK is chairman of the Committee on Comparative Studies in Literature, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, and Avalon Foundation Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. He edited and translated Dostoevsky's Notebooks for CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and edited the Notebooks for THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and A RAW YOUTH. He is the author of DOSTOEVSKY: THE MAJOR FICTION, coauthor of NINE SOVIET PORTRAITS, and author or editor of numerous other works.
DESCRIPTION - Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is Frederick Douglass' third autobiography, published in 1881, revised in 1892. Because of the emancipation of American slaves during and following the American Civil War, Douglass gave more details about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery in this volume than he could in his two previous autobiographies (which would have put him and his family in danger). It is the only one of Douglass' autobiographies to discuss his life during and after the Civil War, including his encounters with American presidents such as Lincoln and Garfield, his account of the ill-fated "Freedman's Bank", and his service as the United States Marshall of the District of Columbia. Sub-title: Complete History to the Present Time. Including His Connection with the Anti-Slavery Movement; His Labor in Great Britain as well as in His Own Country; His Experience in the Conduct of an Influential Newspaper; His Connection with the Underground Railroad; His Relations with John Brown and the Harper's Ferry Raid; His Recruiting the 54th and 55th Mass. Colored Regiments; His Interviews with Presidents Lincoln and Johnson; His Appointment by Gen. Grant to Accompany the Santo Domingo Commission; Also to a Seat on the Council of the District of Columbia; His Appointment as a United States Marshall by President R.B. Hayes; Also His Appointment by President J.A. Garfield to be Recorder of Deeds in Washington; with Many Other Interesting and Important Events of His Most Eventful Life, with an Introduction by Mr. George L. Ruffin of Boston, Hartford, Conn., Park Publishing Co., 1881. Born in slavery, largely self-educated and self- liberated, Frederick Douglass rose against formidable odds to become a great American leader. not only in the fight for the abolition of slavery, but in the general cause of human rights. After the Civil War. Douglass. utilizing his unique gifts as writer and orator, fought for equal rights for Negroes as zealously as he had fought for emancipation. He was actively associated with the campaign for equal rights for women. He was a champion of free education for ‘every poor man from Maine to Texas.' He played an important role in the early Negro labor movement. He was involved in the temperance crusade. Having attained the distinguished position as advisor to President Lincoln. Douglass reached the apex of his astonishing career with his appointment as Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti. His autobiography is a unique chronicle of seventy-eight crucial years in American history, and a provocative and impressive self-portrait of an uncommon man. it is. above all, an eloquent tribute to the persistent hope that, despite the imperfections of our democracy. any American - however disadvantaged - may aspire to greatness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 - February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.
DESCRIPTION - Appearing in 1855, My Bondage and My Freedom is the second autobiography written by Frederick Douglass (1818-95), a man who was born into slavery in Maryland and who went on to become the most famous antislavery author, orator, philosopher, essaysist, historian, intellectual, statesman and freedom-fighter in US history. An instant bestseller, Douglass's autobiography tells the story of his early life as lived in 'bondage' and of his later life as lived in a 'freedom' that was in name only. Recognizing that his body and soul were bought and sold by white slaveholders in the US South, he soon realized his story was being traded by white northern antislavery campaigners. Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom is a literary, intellectual and philosophical tour-de-force in which he betrays his determination not only to speak but to write 'just the word that seemed to me the word to be written by me.' This new edition examines Douglass's biography, literary strategies and political activism alongside his depiction of Black women's lives and his narrative histories of Black heroism. This volume also reproduces Frederick Douglass's only work of fiction, The Heroic Slave, published in 1853.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, c. February 1818 - February 20, 1895) was an African-American social reformer, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing.
DESCRIPTION - Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former U .S. Poet Laureate, introduces readers to the most significant and compelling poems of the past hundred years. Selecting from the canon of American poetry throughout the twentieth century, Dove has created an anthology that represents the full spectrum of aesthetic sensibilities-from styles and voices to themes and cultures-while balancing important poems with significant periods of each poet. Featuring poems both classic and contemporary, this collection reflects both a dynamic and cohesive portrait of modern American poetry and outlines its trajectory over the past century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing
DESCRIPTION - This monumental edition promises to be the most important new contribution to Sherlock Holmes literature since William Baring-Gould's 1967 classic work. In this boxed set, Leslie Klinger, a leading world authority, reassembles Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 classic short stories in the order in which they appeared in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century book editions. Inside, readers will find a cornucopia of insights: beginners will benefit from Klinger's insightful biographies of Holmes, Watson, and Conan Doyle; history lovers will revel in the wealth of Victorian literary and cultural details; Sherlockian fanatics will puzzle over tantalizing new theories; art lovers will thrill to the 800-plus illustrations, which make this the most lavishly illustrated edition of the Holmes tales ever produced. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes illuminates the timeless genius of Arthur Conan Doyle for an entirely new generation of readers. 700+ illustrations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. Leslie S. Klinger is considered one of the foremost Holmes authorities in the world. The author of numerous books, including The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library, he lives in Los Angeles, California.
DESCRIPTION - The four classic novels of Sherlock Holmes, heavily illustrated and annotated with extensive scholarly commentary. The publication of Leslie S. Klinger's brilliant new annotations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's four classic Holmes novels in 2005 created a Holmes sensation. Available again in an attractively-priced edition identical to the first, except this edition has no outer slipcase. Klinger reassembles Doyle's four seminal novels in their original order, with over 1,000 notes, 350 illustrations and period photographs, and tantalizing new Sherlockian theories. Inside, readers will find: A STUDY IN SCARLET (1887), a tale of murder and revenge that tells of Holmes and Dr. Watson's first meeting; THE SIGN OF FOUR (1889), a chilling tale of lost treasure. and of how Watson met his wife; THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1901), hailed as the greatest mystery novel of all time; and THE VALLEY OF FEAR (1914), a fresh murder scene that leads Holmes to solve a long-forgotten mystery. Whether as a stand-alone volume or as a companion to the short stories, this classic work illuminates the timeless genius of Conan Doyle for an entirely new generation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 - 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Thus we spent the day burning and spoiling the country,' wrote Puritan John Underhill, an eyewitness to Captain John Endicott's 1636 expedition of vengeance against the Pequot Indians of Connecticut. The destruction of the Pequots is emblematic, to Richard Drinnon, of the fate of other victims of the Anglo-American westward movement. From New England to Indochina, the author follows the white invaders and finds striking continuities in both actions and attitudes. Facing West draws upon the words and lives of selected individuals - ‘the living substance of history' - to trace the course of American racism and imperialism. In the early republic, Drinnon finds Jefferson and Monroe the first advocates of Indian removal to territory west of the Mississippi. He also uncovers the fascinating and often tortuous views of less well known figures - novelists James Kirke Paulding and William G. Simms and an early head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Thomas L. McKenney, who helped set up mission schools in order to break the family and tribal ties of young Indians. By the late nineteenth century American aims ranged beyond the west coast. A popular lecturer during the Centennial years was John Fiske, an advocate of social Darwinism and global empire who stirred audiences with his call for the Manifest Destiny of the ‘English race.' For Drinnon the same patterns of thought underlie the letters that Henry Adams wrote during an excursion to Samoa and the imperial acquisitions of his friend John Hay, secretary of state under McKinley and Roosevelt. The bloody ‘pacification' of the Philippines at the turn of the century and the American war in Vietnam - amplified in the career of CIA counterinsurgent Edward Geary Lansdale bring Drinnon's book to a close. In the lives of Thomas Morton of Merrymount, novelist Mary Austin, George Catlin, Melville, and Thoreau, Drinnon finds a deeper understanding of the American Indian. Yet he maintains that the dominant mode in American thought and action, from the Connecticut River to Tippecanoe to My Lai, was the creed described by Melville as the ‘metaphysics of Indian-hating.' Frederick ackson Turner's frontier - ‘the meeting point between savagery and civilization - Drinnon sees as a collision point between nature, on the one hand, and fraud, cant, and conquest on the other. ‘No one seriously concerned with American history,' says Henry Nash Smith, ‘will be able to avoid coming to terms with this book.'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard T. Drinnon (born January 4, 1925, in Portland, Oregon; died April 19, 2012 in Port Orford, Oregon) was professor emeritus of history at Bucknell University. He received his PhD from the University of Minnesota. In 1961, while Drinnon was a professor at the University of California, he was discovered by police to be the next person on the target list of John Harrison Farmer, who felt that he was on a mission from God to kill people that he believed were associated with communism. During the Columbia University protests of 1968, Drinnon participated in a student walkout of a speech at Bucknell University by Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, when Humphrey blamed protesters for disorder on the campus. Drinnon shouted 'This is a disgrace' and walked out along with about 30 students.
DESCRIPTION - W. E. B. Du Bois was a public intellectual, sociologist, and activist on behalf of the African American community. He profoundly shaped black political culture in the United States through his founding role in the NAACP, as well as internationally through the Pan-African movement. Du Bois's sociological and historical research on African-American communities and culture broke ground in many areas, including the history of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. Du Bois was also a prolific author of novels, autobiographical accounts, innumerable editorials and journalistic pieces, and several works of history. First published in 1899 at the dawn of sociology, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study is a landmark in empirical sociological research. Du Bois was the first sociologist to document the living circumstances of urban Black Americans. The Philadelphia Negro provides a framework for studying black communities, and it has steadily grown in importance since its original publication. Today, it is an indispensable model for sociologists, historians, political scientists, anthropologists, educators, philosophers, and urban studies scholars. With a series introduction by editor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Lawrence Bobo, this edition is essential for anyone interested in African American history and sociology.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880.
DESCRIPTION - 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 to looking at the Reconstruction of the south after its defeat in the American civil war. On the whole, the book takes a Marxist approach to looking at reconstruction. The essential argument of the text is that the Black and White laborers, who are the proletariat, were divided after the civil war on the lines of race, and as such were unable to stand together against the white propertied class, the bourgeoisie. This to Du Bois was the failure of reconstruction and the reason for the rise of the Jim Crow laws, and other such injustices. In addition to creating a landmark work in early U.S. Marxist sociology, at the time Dubois' historical scholarship and use of the techniques of primary source data research on the post war political economy of the former Confederate States' were equally ground breaking. He performed the first systematic and rigorous analysis of the political economy of the reconstruction period of the southern states; based upon actual data collected during period. This research completely disestablished the anecdotal, racist bromides which had come to form the basis of the so-called ‘scholarship' of the reconstruction period. Dubois' research discredited forever the notion that the post-emancipation and post-Appomattox south had degenerated into either economic or political chaos, and had been kept in a state of chaos by the armed forces of the Union, through their military occupation. On the contrary, the reconstruction state governments had for example, established their states' first, universal primary education systems. They did this because the reconstruction state constitutions (which they had written) had, for the first time, established as a right, the free public primary schooling of their states' children. These governments had also been the first to establish public health departments to promote public health and sanitation, and to combat the spread of epidemic disease that is inherent in the semi-tropical climate of the south. And when the redeemer government's seized power in later years and re-wrote these states' constitutions to reestablish ‘race law' and the Jim-Crow system, they did not touch the education and public health and welfare laws and constitutional principles that the reconstruction governments had established.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880.
DESCRIPTION - Here is a personal narrative dealing with the stormy events during the past year in the life of the distinguished scholar. The highlight of the story is the trial and acquittal of Dr. Du Bois and his colleagues of the former Peace Information Center on charges of failing to register as "foreign agents." Here is the story, set down by a masterful pen, of that monstrous frame-up attempt which reverberated around the globe, and of the victory that brought joy and new hope to millions. And there is more - much more. IN BATTLE FOR PEACE describes the background of Dr. Du Bois' work for peace and its relation to his life-long crusade for Negro freedom and colonial liberation. Here is a dramatic sequel to his classic writings - The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, Dusk of Dawn, The World and Africa, etc. The book includes comment by Shirley Graham (Mrs. Du Bois), who took a leading part in the successful fight to vindicate her husband and his associates. There is wit, humor, and heart-stirring appeal in these informal contributions by the author of There Once Was a Slave, Your Most Humble Servant, and other works. This exciting human document has an urgent message for the American people at this hour. Dr. Du Bois unmasks the warmakers. He shows how peace can be won.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860 - 1880. He also wrote other major fiction, including DARK PRINCESS.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience and interest may show the strange meaning of being black. The meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.' Thus the keynote is struck for an extraordinary work which is even more pertinent today than it was when it was first published in 1903. W. E. B. Du Bois was a black- power advocate in an age of absolute white supremacy, and in THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK he previewed the racial strife and conflicts which are exploding today. Over sixty years ago Du Bois urged the establishment of an ‘all-black party' and preached the need for black ‘conscious self-realization' and for the separate autonomy of the black community. At the same time he stressed the White man's responsibility for correcting racial inequality and pleaded for mutual understanding, for a nonviolent solution to a centuries-old dilemma. As Alvin F. Poussaint declares in one of the two notable introductions to this volume, THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK is ‘a monument to the black man's struggle in this country.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860-1880.
DESCRIPTION - DuBois never relented in attacks upon imperialism, especially in Africa. (His book entitled THE WORLD AND AFRICA was written as a contradiction to the pseudo-historians who consistently omitted Africa from world history.) In 1945 he served as an associate consultant to the American delegation at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. He charged the world organization with planning to be dominated by imperialist nations and not intending to intervene on the behalf of colonized countries. He announced that the fifth Pan-African Congress would convene to determine what pressure could be applied to the world powers. W.E.B. Du Bois' THE WORLD AND AFRICA, which refutes the racist thesis primarily associated with Eurocentric historians that of all the continents, Africa had made no contribution to world history and civilization. Du Bois's main objectives in this celebratory book, as in his classic SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, were threefold: to write the history and culture of the people of Africa and African descent; to enable African Americans to identify with Africa as a proud and dignified source of identity that could be placed on an equal footing with Europe, Asia, and North America; and to posit Africa's humanism and rich heritage as a compelling argument against racism and colonialism. Du Bois believed that freedom was whole and indivisible, that Black people in America would not be completely free until Africa was liberated and emancipated in modernity; his Pan-Africanism was born out of the consciousness of freedom as a common goal for Black and Brown people. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 - August 27, 1963) was a black civil rights activist, leader, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, educator, historian, writer, editor, poet, and scholar. He became a naturalized citizen of Ghana in 1963 at the age of 95. David Levering Lewis, a biographer, wrote, ‘In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism - scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.' W. E. B. Du Bois was born on Church Street on February 23, 1868, in Great Barrington, at the south-western edge of Massachusetts, to Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt Du Bois, whose February 5, 1867, wedding had been announced in the Berkshire Courier. Alfred Du Bois had been born in Haiti. Their son was born 5 months before the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, and added to the U.S. Constitution. Alfred Du Bois was descended from free people of color, including the slave-holding Dr. James Du Bois of Poughkeepsie, New York, a physician. In the Bahamas, James Du Bois had fathered three sons, including Alfred, and a daughter, by his slave mistress. Du Bois was also the great-grandson of Elizabeth Freeman (‘Mum Bett‘), a slave who successfully sued for her freedom, laying the groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery in Massachusetts. Du Bois was born free and did not have contact with his biological father. He blamed his maternal grandparents for his father's leaving because they did not take kindly to him. Du Bois was very close to his mother Mary, who was from Massachusetts. Du Bois moved frequently when he was young, after Mary suffered a stroke which left her unable to work. They survived on money from family members and Du Bois' after-school jobs. Du Bois wanted to help his mother as much as possible and believed he could improve their lives through education. Some of the neighborhood whites noticed him, and one allowed Du Bois and his mother to rent a house from him in Great Barrington. While living there, Du Bois performed chores and worked odd jobs. Du Bois did not feel differently because of his skin color while he was in school. In fact, the only times he felt out of place were when out-of-towners would visit Great Barrington. One such incident occurred when a white girl who was new in school refused to take one of his fake calling cards during a game. The girl told him she would not accept it because he was black. He then realized that there would always be some kind of barrier between whites and others. Young Du Bois may have been an outsider because of his status, being poor, not having a father and being extremely intellectual for his age; however, he was very comfortable academically. Many around him recognized his intelligence and encouraged him to further his education with college preparatory courses while in high school. This academic confidence led him to believe that he could use his knowledge to empower African Americans. Du Bois was awarded a degree from Fisk University in 1888. During the summer following graduation from Fisk, Du Bois managed the Fisk Glee Club. The club was employed at a grand luxury summer resort on Lake Minnetonka in suburban Minneapolis, Minnesota. The resort was a favorite spot for vacationing wealthy American Southerners and European royalty. Du Bois and the other club members doubled as waiters and kitchen workers at the hotel. Observing the drinking, rude and crude behavior and sexual promiscuity of the rich white guests of the hotel left a deep impression on the young Du Bois. Du Bois entered Harvard College in the fall of 1888, having received a $250 scholarship. He earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Harvard in 1890. In 1892, received a stipend to attend the University of Berlin. While a student in Berlin, he travelled extensively throughout Europe, and came of age intellectually while studying with some of the most prominent social scientists in the German capital, such as Gustav von Schmoller. In 1895, Du Bois became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard University. After teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio and the University of Pennsylvania, he established the department of sociology at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). Du Bois wrote many books, including three major autobiographies. Among his most significant works are The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), John Brown (1909), Black Reconstruction (1935), and Black Folk, Then and Now (1939). His book The Negro (1915) influenced the work of several pioneer Africanist scholars, such as Drusilla Dunjee Houston and William Leo Hansberry. In 1940, at Atlanta University, Du Bois founded Phylon magazine. In 1946, he wrote The World and Africa: An Inquiry Into the Part that Africa has Played in World History. In 1945, he helped organize the historic Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester, England. While prominent white voices denied African American cultural, political and social relevance to American history and civic life, in his epic work, Reconstruction Du Bois documented how black people were central figures in the American Civil War and Reconstruction. He demonstrated the ways Black emancipation - the crux of Reconstruction - promoted a radical restructuring of United States society, as well as how and why the country turned its back on human rights for African Americans in the aftermath of Reconstruction. This theme was taken up later and expanded by Eric Foner and Leon F. Litwack, the two leading contemporary scholars of the Reconstruction era. In total, Du Bois wrote 22 books, including five novels, and helped establish four journals. Du Bois was the most prominent intellectual leader and political activist on behalf of African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. A contemporary of Booker T. Washington, the two carried on a dialogue about segregation and political disenfranchisement. He was labeled ‘The Father of Pan-Africanism.' In 1905, Du Bois along with Minnesota attorney Fredrick L. McGhee and others helped to found the Niagara Movement with William Monroe Trotter. The Movement championed, among other things, freedom of speech and criticism, the recognition of the highest and best human training as the monopoly of no caste or race, full male suffrage, a belief in the dignity of labor, and a united effort to realize such ideals under sound leadership. The alliance between Du Bois and Trotter was, however, short-lived, as they had a dispute over whether or not white people should be included in the organization and in the struggle for Civil Rights. Du Bois felt that they should, and with a group of like-minded supporters, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. In 1910, he left his teaching post at Atlanta University to work as publications director at the NAACP full-time. He wrote weekly columns in many newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier and the New York Amsterdam News, three African-American newspapers, and also the Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle. For 25 years, Du Bois worked as Editor-in-Chief of the NAACP publication, The Crisis, which then included the subtitle A Record of the Darker Races. He commented freely and widely on current events and set the agenda for the fledgling NAACP. Its circulation soared from 1,000 in 1910 to more than 100,000 by 1920. Du Bois published Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. As a repository of black thought, the Crisis was initially a monopoly, David Levering Lewis observed. In 1913, Du Bois wrote The Star of Ethiopia, a historical pageant, to promote African-American history and civil rights. The seminal debate between Booker T. Washington and Du Bois played out in the pages of the Crisis with Washington advocating a philosophy of self-help and vocational training for Southern blacks while Du Bois pressed for full educational opportunities. Du Bois thought blacks should seek higher education, preferably liberal arts. Du Bois believed blacks should challenge and question whites on all grounds, but Washington believed assimilating and fitting into the ‘American' culture is the best way for Blacks to move up in society. While Washington states that he didn't receive any racist insults until later on his years, Du Bois said Blacks have a ‘Double-Conscious' mind in which they have to know when to act ‘White' and when to act ‘Black'. Booker T. Washington felt that teaching was a duty but Du Bois felt it was a calling. Du Bois became increasingly estranged from Walter Francis White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, and began to question the organization's opposition to racial segregation at all costs. Du Bois thought that this policy, while generally sound, undermined those black institutions that did exist, which Du Bois thought should be defended and improved, rather than attacked as inferior. By the 1930s, Lewis said, the NAACP had become more institutional and Du Bois, increasingly radical, sometimes at odds with leaders such as Walter White and Roy Wilkins. In 1934, after writing two essays in the Crisis suggesting that black separatism could be a useful economic strategy, Du Bois left the magazine to return to teaching at Atlanta University. In 1909, W. E. B. Du Bois addressed the American Historical Association (AHA). According to David Levering Lewis, ‘His would be the first and last appearance of an African American on the program until 1940.' In a review of the second book in Lewis's biographies of Du Bois, Michael R. Winston observed that, in understanding American history, one must question ‘how black Americans developed the psychological stamina and collective social capacity to cope with the sophisticated system of racial domination that white Americans had anchored deeply in law and custom.' Winston continued, ‘Although any reasonable answer is extraordinarily complex, no adequate one can ignore the man (Du Bois) whose genius was for 70 years at the intellectual epicenter of the struggle to destroy white supremacy as public policy and social fact in the United States.' Du Bois was investigated by the FBI, who claimed in May 1942 that ‘[h]is writing indicates him to be a socialist,' and that he ‘has been called a Communist and at the same time criticized by the Communist Party.' Du Bois visited Communist China during the Great Leap Forward. Also, in the March 16, 1953 issue of The National Guardian, Du Bois wrote ‘Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.' Du Bois was chairman of the Peace Information Center at the start of the Korean War. He was among the signers of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, which opposed the use of nuclear weapons. In 1950, at the age of 82, he ran for the U.S. Senate on the American Labor Party ticket in New York and received 4% of the vote. Although he lost, Du Bois remained committed to the progressive labor cause and in 1958, joined Trotskyists, ex-Communists and independent radicals in proposing the creation of a united left-wing coalition to challenge for seats in the elections for the New York state senate and assembly. He was indicted in the United States under the Foreign Agents Registration Act and acquitted for lack of evidence. W. E. B. Du Bois became disillusioned with both black capitalism and racism in the United States. In 1959, Du Bois received the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1961, at the age of 93, he joined the Communist Party USA. Du Bois was invited to Ghana in 1961 by President Kwame Nkrumah to direct the Encyclopedia Africana, a government production, and a long-held dream of his. When, in 1963, he was refused a new U.S. passport, he and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, became citizens of Ghana, renouncing his US citizenship. Du Bois' health had declined in 1962, and on August 27, 1963, he died in Accra, Ghana at the age of ninety-five, one day before Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ‘I Have a Dream‘ speech. At the March on Washington, Roy Wilkins informed the hundreds of thousands of marchers and called for a moment of silence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was internationally renowned as a writer, scholar, and activist. Among his published works are THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLKS, JOHN BROWN, and BLACK RECONSTRUCTION: AN ESSAY TOWARD A HISTORY OF THE PART WHICH BLACK FOLK PLAYED IN THE ATTEMPT TO RECONSTRUCT DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, 1860 - 1880. He also wrote other major fiction, including DARK PRINCESS.
DESCRIPTION - A child has been murdered. The official solution of the crime does not satisfy the inspector. He sets out on his own to find the bestial killer. Suspense mounts as the story turns into a bizarre tale of guilt and justice. The story of the sex maniac's crime makes for harrowing reading, but the account of the detective's decay as a citizen and a man constitutes an arresting and deeply moving human drama. He is driven by his pledge toward a stratagem as questionable as the crime itself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Friedrich Dürrenmatt (January 5, 1921 - December 14, 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire.
DESCRIPTION - The importance of this book is that with it was invented a new fiction method, the monologue intErieur, which has revolutionized the modern novel and which, one could even say, has given new depth to our understanding of experience. Forgotten soon after its publication in 1887, Dujardin's novel, called in French Les lauriers son coupEs, was read first by James Joyce in 1902; it was republished in 1924 after Joyce had freely acknowledged that it was the inspiration for his stream-of-consciousness method. It has since had direct and indirect influence on many writers of the first order, and without it one can scarcely understand twentieth century literature. The story of a young man-about-town in love with a Parisian actress, We'll to the Woods No More recounts what goes on in his mind during an April evening when he hopes she will finally be ‘his. Told with insight and irony, it is a charming tale, and a few perceptive readers saw something more in it from the beginning. George Moore, a friend of Dujardin's wrote of the poetry of the book's treatment, while Mallarme described it as ‘the instant seized by the throat.' In a new introduction for this edition, Professor Leon Edel, critic and editor, discusses the book itself, earlier experiments which led to Dujardin's method and our indebtedness to it today. The translation is by Stuart Gilbert, author of books on Joyce and the editor of his letters. (original title: Les lauriers son coupes, 1887).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edouard Dujardin (10 November 1861 - 31 October 1949) was a French writer, one of the early users of the stream of consciousness literary technique, exemplified by his 1888 novel Les Lauriers sont coupes.
DESCRIPTION - Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas' epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s. Robin Buss' lively translation is complete and unabridged, and remains faithful to the style of Dumas' original. This edition includes an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870), one of the most popular writers of all time, is the author of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and THE THREE MUSKETEERS), along with dozens of other works of every genre. His remains were recently removed to the Pantheon, the highest honor that can be bestowed on a French writer. Julie Rose's many translations include an acclaimed version of Racine's PHÈDRE, as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. Rose was recently awarded the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize and the PEN medallion for translation. Lorenzo Carcaterra is the author of STREET BOYS and SLEEPERS, among other books. He lives in New York.
DESCRIPTION - Henry Dumas was a first-rate writer with first-order intelligence. The publication of his short stories, ARK OF BONES, and poetry, PLAY EBONY PLAY IVORY, was received with spectacular acclaim. Now a novel has been discovered that will satisfy the appetites whetted by these earlier works. JONOAH AND THE GREEN STONE is a story about what it was like for a young Black man from Arkansas to deal with the turbulence of the sixties. Beginning in 1938, floating on a johnnyboat in the middle of a Mississippi flood that has just orphaned him, the narrator takes us on a journey of a man hunted down in cane fields and haunted by his own conscience - until finally, once again, he finds himself on the Mississippi River, certain he is going to die. JONOAH AND THE GREEN STONE was in draft at the time of Dumas' death, but even in that stage (and with help from Eugene Redmond) it is the most haunting, the most beautiful, the most moving piece of fiction published in a long, long time. Dumas' talent has that rare ingredient: authority.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HENRY DUMAS, a prize-winning writer, was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, on July 20, 1934, and moved to New York City when he was ten years old. His life was ended abruptly on May 23, 1968, by bullets from the gun of a New York Transit policeman in the subway. Reasons for the killing have remained vague and unsatisfactory. Before his death Dumas had been active on the ‘little' magazine circuit as well as in the initial opening scene of the Black Arts Movement, publishing his stories and poems in Negro Digest/Black World, Rutgers' Anthologist, the Hiram Poetry Review, Umbra and Black Fire. Since his death his reputation and writings have attracted a large and international community of readers. On the heels of the publication of ARK OF BONES AND OTHER STORIES and PLAY EBONY PLAY IVORY, writers, artists and students gathered in several largely Black areas of the country to read from the works and proclaim the genius of Dumas. Among the anthologies and periodicals which have printed his work since his death are: Black Scholar, Essence, Brothers and Sisters, Confrontation, Galaxy of Black Writing, You Better Believe it, Open Poetry and Giant Talk: An Anthology of Third World Writings. Just before his death, Dumas was employed by Southern Illinois University's Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis. His widow, Loretta Dumas, and his sons, David and Michael, make their home in Willingboro, New Jersey. Eugene B. Redmond is a native of East St. Louis, Illinois, and it was there that he met Henry Dumas at SIU's Experiment in Higher Education, where they were both employed as teacher-counselors. Redmond has published five books of poetry and recorded one LP of his poetry to musical accompaniment. For two years he served as Senior Consultant to Katherine Dunham at SIU's Performing Arts Training Center in East St. Louis, where he founded Black River Writers Press. From 1969 to 1970 Redmond served as Writer-in-Residence at Oberlin College and he has taught at numerous other institutions, including Southern University, Webster College, Sacramento's Oak Park School of Afro-American Thought, and California State University, Sacramento, where he is currently Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence in Ethnic Studies. In 1974 he edited Dumas' poetry (PLAY EBONY PLAY IVORY) and stories (ARK OF BONES AND OTHER STORIES). Redmond's critical articles and poetry have appeared in dozens of journals, anthologies and newspapers, and his critical history of Black poetry, DRUMVOICES: THE MISSION OF AFRO-AMERICAN POETRY, will be published this year. In 1974 Redmond developed a stage play from Dumas' poems and stories; the play MUSIC AND I HAVE COME AT LAST! was performed by the Sons/ Ancestors Players in December of that same year at CSUS.
DESCRIPTION - Unpacks the twenty-one most common myths and misconceptions about Native Americans. In this enlightening book, scholars and activists Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker tackle a wide range of myths about Native American culture and history that have misinformed generations. Tracing how these ideas evolved, and drawing from history, the authors disrupt long-held and enduring myths such as: Columbus Discovered America; Thanksgiving Proves the Indians Welcomed Pilgrims; Indians Were Savage and Warlike; Europeans Brought Civilization to Backward Indians; The United States Did Not Have a Policy of Genocide; Sports Mascots Honor Native Americans; Most Indians Are on Government Welfare; Indian Casinos Make Them All Rich; Indians Are Naturally Predisposed to Alcohol. Each chapter deftly shows how these myths are rooted in the fears and prejudice of European settlers and in the larger political agendas of a settler state aimed at acquiring Indigenous land and tied to narratives of erasure and disappearance. Accessibly written and revelatory, All the Real Indians Died Off challenges readers to rethink what they have been taught about Native Americans and history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations' headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is the policy director and a senior research associate at the Center for World Indigenous Studies and teaches American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos. She is the coauthor, with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, of All the Real Indians Died Off and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. She lives in San Clemente, California.
DESCRIPTION - The first history of the United States told from the perspective of indigenous peoples. Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million Native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the US settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history. Now, for the first time, acclaimed historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz offers a history of the United States told from the perspective of Indigenous peoples and reveals how Native Americans, for centuries, actively resisted expansion of the US empire. With growing support for movements such as the campaign to abolish Columbus Day and replace it with Indigenous Peoples' Day and the Dakota Access Pipeline protest led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is an essential resource providing historical threads that are crucial for understanding the present. In An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military. Shockingly, as the genocidal policy reached its zenith under President Andrew Jackson, its ruthlessness was best articulated by US Army general Thomas S. Jesup, who, in 1836, wrote of the Seminoles: The country can be rid of them only by exterminating them. Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples' history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is a 2015 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LEILA ABOUZEID is a pioneer among Moroccan women writers. She studied at Mohammed V University in Rabat and at the University of Texas at Austin. She began her career as a radio and TV journalist and also worked as a press assistant in government ministries and in the prime minister's office. In 1992 she left journalism to dedicate herself to writing. Abouzeid's fiction has been translated from Arabic into English, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Maltese, French, Turkish, and Urdu. BARBARA PARMENTER is a lecturer in the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Department at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
DESCRIPTION - With President Trump suggesting that teachers arm themselves, with the NRA portrayed as a group of "patriots" helping to Make America Great Again, with high school students across the country demanding a solution to the crisis, everyone in America needs to engage in the discussion about our future with an informed, historical perspective on the role of guns in our society. America is at a critical turning point. What is the future for our children? Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is a deeply researched - and deeply disturbing - history of guns and gun laws in the United States, from the original colonization of the country to the present. As historian and educator Dunbar-Ortiz explains, in order to understand the current obstacles to gun control, we must understand the history of U.S. guns, from their role in the "settling of America" and the early formation of the new nation, and continuing up to the present.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is an American historian, writer and feminist. Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1939 to an Oklahoma family, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in Central Oklahoma, daughter of a sharecropper and a half-Native American mother.
DESCRIPTION - Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States. Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US's history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity - founded and built by immigrants - was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good - but inaccurate - story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception. While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women's Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations' headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This volume is indispensable for a full understanding of Durkheim's thought.' - AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW. This famous study of the development of socialism, by the greatest of French sociologists, continues to be a rich source of insight into both socialist thought and Durkheim's theories. This important and influential work treats socialism in its most dynamic sense: as a social and moral philosophy, a way of life and thought. It provides a useful perspective on the nature of socialist thought before Lenin, carefully defining the differences between communism and socialism. This first English translation of Le Socialisme reveals Saint-Simon's profound influence upon the author's thinking. Durkheim devotes a major part of the book to an examination of the doctrines of this early nineteenth-century socialist, the common ancestor of such notable theorists as Comte, Marx, and the author himself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 - November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology. Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being.
DESCRIPTION - VOLUME 1: PLAYS - The Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–90) was one of the most important literary figures of the second half of the twentieth century. During the years of the cold war, arguably only Beckett, Camus, Sartre, and Brecht rivaled him as a presence in European letters. Yet outside Europe, this prolific author is primarily known for only one work, THE VISIT. With these long-awaited translations of his plays, fictions, and essays, Dürrenmatt becomes available again in all his brilliance to the English-speaking world. Dürrenmatt's concerns are timeless, but they are also the product of his Swiss vantage during the cold war: his key plays, gathered in the first volume of SELECTED WRITINGS, explore such themes as guilt by passivity, the refusal of responsibility, greed and political decay, and the tension between justice and freedom. In The Visit, for instance, an old lady who becomes the wealthiest person in the world returns to the village that cast her out as a young woman and offers riches to the town in exchange for the life of the man, now its mayor, who once disgraced her. Joel Agee's crystalline translation gives a fresh lease to this play, as well as four others: THE PHYSICISTS, ROMULUS THE GREAT, HERCULES AND THE AUGEAN STABLES, and THE MARRIAGE OF MR. MISSISSIPPI. VOLUME 2: FICTIONS - This second volume of SELECTED WRITINGS reveals a writer who may stand as Kafka's greatest heir. Dürrenmatt's novellas and short stories are searing, tragicomic explorations of the ironies of justice and the corruptibility of institutions. Apart from THE PLEDGE, a requiem to the detective story that was made into a film starring Jack Nicholson, none of the works in this volume are available elsewhere in English. Among the most evocative fictions included here are two novellas: THE ASSIGNMENT and TRAPS. THE ASSIGNMENT tells the story of a woman filmmaker investigating a mysterious murder in an unnamed Arab country and has been hailed by Sven Birkerts as ‘a parable of hell for an age consumed by images.' TRAPS, meanwhile, is a chilling comic novella about a traveling salesman who agrees to play the role of the defendant in a mock trial among dinner companions - and then pays the ultimate penalty. VOLUME 3: ESSAYS - Dürrenmatt's essays, gathered in this third volume of SELECTED WRITINGS, are among his most impressive achievements. Their range alone is astonishing: he wrote with authority and charm about art, literature, philosophy, politics, and the theater. The selections here include Dürrenmatt's best-known essays, such as ‘Theater Problems' and ‘Monster Essay on Justice and Law,' as well as the notes he took on a 1970 journey in America (in which he finds the United States ‘increasingly susceptible to every kind of fascism'). This third volume of SELECTED WRITINGS also includes essays that shade into fiction, such as ‘The Winter War in Tibet,' a fantasy of a third world war waged in a vast subterranean labyrinth - a Plato's Cave allegory rewritten for our own troubled times. Dürrenmatt has long been considered a great writer - but one unfairly neglected in the modern world of letters. With these elegantly conceived and expertly translated volumes, a new generation of readers will rediscover his greatest works.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Friedrich Dürrenmatt (January 5, 1921 - December 14, 1990) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire.
DESCRIPTION - Nineteen ninety-five is the 500th anniversary of the first shipment of Native American slaves to Europe by Christopher Columbus. In Enrique Dussel's powerful analysis, even the glorifying of the indigenous people as ‘the noble savage' was a cunning tactic of repression and domination just as was - according to Edward Said - the romanticizing of the Middle Eastern Arab world under the rubric ‘Orientalism.' Both these motifs were expressions of the European Ego's effort to cover over the ‘Other' in the guise of assisting and improving the lot of these ‘fascinating' but fundamentally ‘under-developed' peoples. Features such as Eurocentric philosophical texts (especially those of Hegel), Christianization through colonization (even at the price of violence), as well as the imposition of slavery (blatant or disguised) - all were means of bringing about the ‘modernization' of these ‘Others.' After elaboration these themes, Enrique Dussel reverses his analyses and interprets world history from the view of the conquered. And in that perspective, not the Euro-flattering Reformation and Renaissance, but the conquest of Mexico constitutes the origin of Modernity with all its abuses and ambiguities. This book is a brilliant interlacing of critical theory, liberation theology, and the decentering of authentic humanism among so-called first world nations with their legacy of sanctimonious hubris.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Enrique Domingo Dussel Ambrosini (born December 24, 1934) is an Argentine-Mexican writer and philosopher. Dussel was born in Argentina, but since he was attacked with a bomb in his house by a military group in 1973, he was forced into exile in Mexico in 1975, and today he is a Mexican citizen. He is a professor in the Department of Philosophy in the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), Campus Iztapalapa in Mexico City and has also taught at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
DESCRIPTION - Mikhail Dyomin was only 16 when he went to jail for the first time, for evading a compulsory wartime work order. But it was the beginning for him of a 15-year career as a professional criminal, as an inhabitant of one of the strangest and least-known societies on the face of the earth - the Soviet underworld. This extraordinary first-person account of his life there - as a thief, as a convict, as a writer of prison ballads sung in camps from Magadan to the Aral Sea - is an authentic voice out of Russia's lower depths, brilliantly evocative of the color and violence that still lurk behind Communism's stolid gray facade, an engrossing tale of adventure, and probably the fullest picture yet given of life on the wrong side of the law in the Soviet Union. Here in riveting detail are the realities of outlaw existence: the battles in prison (fought to the death with axes and pikes); the tricks of housebreaking, con games, train robbery; the arcana of convict life, from instructions for making a deck of cards out of blood and bread, to tips on eating nettles. Here are the gypsy camps, the brothels and thieves' dens, the black markets and village fairs and long, lonely trains howling into the Asian night, the whole exotic rogue's-world of crime. And here are the characters Dyomin encountered, fought with, loved: Queen Margo, the sophisticated and monumentally connected Grande Dame of Crime; Saloma the Onanist, ultimate prison camp escapist; Khasan, the homicidal cardshark, with his court of cutthroat lovers; the author's deadly enemy Snuffles, whom he finally kills, and dozens more. Dyomin's first robbery (‘like first love, unforgettable'), his attendance at the all-European Thieves' Conference in Lvov, his chilling run-in with political terrorists, his narrow escapes, murders, love affairs, imprisonments - adventure piled on adventure, and all recounted with the energy, style, and rolling pace of a born storyteller. THE DAY IS BORN OF DARKNESS ends with the author's discharge from a Siberian labor camp, his dream of becoming a published poet about to come true. Once on the outside, he went on to write five more books under the name Dyomin (his real name is Georgy Trifonov - the pen name comes from the forged papers he used in his criminal life), becoming a popular and successful writer. In 1971, he quietly defected during a visit to Paris.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Dyomin took his writing name from the forged identity papers he was forced to use while in hiding within the Soviet criminal underground. He was born Georgy Trifonov in 1926. His mother belonged to the pre-revolutionary nobility; his father, a top Red Army commissar in the Civil War, fell into disfavor and was persecuted during the Stalinist era. Dyomin was first arrested in 1942, at the age of sixteen, for disobeying a compulsory work order. Sentenced to two years of hard labor in a Moscow foundry, he was finally given a medical discharge. He worked for a while as an advertising artist, until an office-wide investigation by the secret police sent him fleeing, without identity papers, into the underground. There he lived for several years, working with a pickpocket gang and ‘riding the rails.' After his arrest, he spent six years in some of the most notorious Arctic camps - as a member of the criminal elite - and during this time earned a name for himself as a ‘scribbler' of prison songs and poems. Dyomin's first literary scholarship was earned upon his release from the Siberian camp, when his fellow inmates took up a collection to see him through his first book.
DESCRIPTION - After World War II the German language, distorted by propaganda and shattered by lies, seemed lost as a vehicle for literary expression. It was Gunter Eich, a soldier and prisoner of war, who most of all among his generation began to resurrect his native tongue as a language for poetry. He accomplished this by an honesty and simplicity that developed into increasingly complex poetic structures and the prose poems, ‘moles', of his late phase. While he is probably Germany's most important postwar poet, his work is still little know outside Germany, a situation which this first book-length collection of his poems in English should help to remedy. Stuart Freibert, David Walker and David Young are editors of FIELD and active translators, from German and from other languages. Over a period of some fifteen years they have been translating Gunter Eich's poems, often in consultation with the author until his death in 1972.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Günter Eich (1 February 1907 - 20 December 1972) was a German lyricist, dramatist, and author. His collected works were published in four volumes in 1991. Eich received numerous literary prizes after World War II, including one from the literary association of which he was a member, Gruppe 47, in 1950. In 1953, he won the Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden for his radio play Die Andere und ich (The Other and I). Eich also won the Georg-Büchner-Preis in 1959 and the Schiller-Gedächtnispreis in 1968.
DESCRIPTION - Written by one of modern Sweden's most highly praised poets, GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD is a major work of poetry now translated into English for the first time. The first two volumes of the trilogy which this book concludes were translated by the poet W. H. Auden and Professor Leif Sjoberg and published as SELECTED POEMS by Gunnar Ekelof Describing the third volume, Lesser writes: ‘In the underworld there is no boundary between past and present, between the speaker and his speech, between the personae and the poet. GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD is synonymous with Ekelof, just as Pausanias is with Guide to Greece. As Virgil guided Dante through the inferno, so Ekelof guides us through his (and our own) underworld of dreams and visions, an underworld peopled by the voice of nameless shadows.' Rika Lesser's translation, parts of which have been published in poetry magazines, has received the following endorsement from the noted poet James Tate: ‘I am convinced that Rika Lesser has done not just a responsible and scholarly piece of work here, but she has arrived at the true tone and diction of the original. The poem, the last great work of Ekelof's career, was written in a rather simple and 'universal' language - hence, the clarity of his arguments. Lesser has chosen to render the poem into English that best corresponds to the texture and tone of the Swedish. A proud addition to the translations already on the University of Massachusetts Press list.' Gunnar Ekelof (1907-1968) published numerous books of poems, a few books of translations, and several books of essays. The trilogy which concludes with GUIDE TO THE UNDERWORLD was a Byzantine triptych concerned with love absorbed in mystical identification. Ekelof referred to it as his ‘Diwan Trilogy' and considered this book ‘the central arch of the ruin Diwan.' Rika Lesser has published Holding Out, a book of poems rendered from the German of Rilke, and a translation of Hermann Hesse's poems, entitled HOURS IN THE GARDEN AND OTHER POEMS. Her translations and original poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry, and other journals.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Ekelöf (Stockholm, 15 September 1907 - Sigtuna, 16 March 1968) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.
DESCRIPTION - Gunnar Ekelöf, Sweden's most important contemporary poet, whose work expresses an obsessive involvement with oriental mysticism, attracted the attention of many leading European writers and critics. A selection from two of his finest books, THE TALE OF FATUMEH and DIWÄN OVER THE PRINCE OF EMGION, is presented here in English by W. H. Auden and Leif Sjoberg, who have also contributed a foreword to this volume.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Ekelöf (Stockholm, 15 September 1907 - Sigtuna, 16 March 1968) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.
DESCRIPTION - These are four long poems, in a new form described by Mr. Eliot as ‘quartets.'. The first of the four poems is Burnt Norton, which was published as the concluding poem of Mr. Eliot's COLLECTED POEMS, 1909-1935. Burnt Norton heralded a sequence; in due course it was followed by East Coker (i94o), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1943). FOUR QUARTETS presents a distinct phase of Mr. Eliot's poetry.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965) was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and ‘arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century'. Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915 - is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
DESCRIPTION - For decades Western imperialists have waged wars and destroyed local populations in the name of civilization and democracy. From 1952 to 1960, after a violent uprising by native Kenyans, the British detained and brutalized hundreds of thousands of Kikuyu - the colony's largest ethnic group - who had demanded their independence. In the eyes of the British colonizers, the men and women who fought in the insurgency - Mau Mau as it was then called - weren't freedom fighters but rather savages of the lowest order. The British felt justified, in the name of civilization, in crushing those who challenged colonial rule, even if it meant violating their basic human rights. Later, to cover up this stain on its past, the British government ordered all documentation relating to detention and torture during its last days of rule in Kenya destroyed. In a groundbreaking debut, Harvard historian Caroline Elkins has recovered the lost history of the last days of British colonialism in Kenya. In a compelling narrative that draws upon nearly a decade of painstaking research - including hundreds of interviews with Kikuyu detention camp survivors and their captors - Elkins reveals for the first time what Britain so desperately tried to hide. In the aftermath of World War II and the triumph of liberal democracy over fascism, the British detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population - some one and a half million people - for more than eight years. Inside detention camps and barbed-wire villages, the Kikuyu lived in a world of fear, hunger, and death. Their only hope for survival was a full denunciation of their anti-British beliefs. IMPERIAL RECKONING is history of the highest order: meticulously researched, brilliantly written, and powerfully dramatic. An unforgettable act of historical re-creation, it is also a disturbing reminder of the brutal imperial precedents that continue to inform Western nations in their drive to democratize the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CAROLINE ELKINS is an assistant professor of history at Harvard University. Her research in various aspects of the late colonial period in Africa has won numerous awards, including the Fulbright and Andrew W. Mellon fellowships, as well as a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She and her work were the subjects of a BBC documentary entitled Kenya: White Terror. This is her first book.
DESCRIPTION - THE DISCOVERY THE UNCONSCIOUS is, without doubt, one of the finest and most exciting works of creative scholarship in its field. Out of a dozen years of exhaustive research - frequently into previously unknown or little used sources - Henri F. Ellenberger has produced nothing less than a new, integrated view of man's long search for an understanding of the inner reaches of his mind. Dr. Ellenberger demonstrates the long chain of development through the exorcists, magnetists, and hypnotists - that led to the fruition of dynamic psychiatry in the psychological systems of Janet, Freud, Adler, and Jung. Here, the achievement of these great figures is seen in a fresh historical perspective and in the light of newly discovered information. ‘This is a broad, objective, no-nonsense history of the great dynamic psychiatric systems,' writes Publishers' Weekly in an early review. ‘It is a huge book, ranging from a look at the healing practices of primitive peoples to the influence of Darwin and Marx on the ultimate development of modern dynamic psychiatry. Included are the first biographical study in any language of the pioneer, Janet, and the most complete collection of interviews with Sigmund Freud on record. There is also new material on both Adler and Jung. Ellenberger's distinction is his avoidance of any note of ‘hero-worship,' his mistrust of the accepted coinage of speculation. His analysis of dynamic psychiatry from 1893 to 1945, relating its growth to the great events of this period, is particularly astute.' Through the brilliant achievement of Henri Ellenberger, our understanding of one of man's most urgent and important quests is permanently enriched.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henri FrEdEric Ellenberger (Nalolo in Barotseland, Rhodesia, 6 November 1905 - Quebec, 1 May 1993) was a Canadian psychiatrist, medical historian, and criminologist, sometimes considered the founding historiographer of psychiatry. Ellenberger is chiefly remembered for The Discovery of the Unconscious, an encyclopedic study of the history of dynamic psychiatry published in 1970.
DESCRIPTION - Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN is a monumental novel, one that can well be called an epic of modern American Negro life. It is a strange story, in which many extraordinary things happen, some of them shocking and brutal, some of them pitiful and touching - yet always with elements of comedy and irony and burlesque that appear in unexpected places. It is a book that has a great deal to say and which is destined to have a great deal said about it. After a brief prologue, the story begins with a terrifying experience of the hero's high school days, moves quickly to the campus of a Southern Negro college and then to New York's Harlem, where most of the action takes place. The many people that the hero meets in the course of his wanderings are remarkably various, complex and significant. With them he becomes involved in an amazing series of adventures, in which he is sometimes befriended but more often deceived and betrayed - as much by himself and his own illusions as by the duplicity or the blindness of others. INVISIBLE MAN is not only a great triumph of storytelling and characterization; it is a profound and uncompromising interpretation of the Negro's anomalous position in American society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - RALPH ELLISON was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of INVISIBLE MAN (1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. He published two volumes of nonfiction, SHADOW AND ACT (1964) and GOING TO THE TERRITORY (1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as THE COLLECTED ESSAYS OF RALPH ELLISON IN 1995. For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, on Riverside Drive in Harlem in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - Here is the first complete biography of Joyce written since his death. It presents Joyce as son, lover, husband, and father-but always as writer. Although the author's method is ostensibly chronological, it is also thematic: each chapter is a spot of time and a state of mind. By narrative, by reports of conversation, by many unpublished as well as published letters, by anecdote, and by comment, Mr. Ellmann captures the personality of the most elusive of contemporary artists. In the process of creating this masterpiece of literary biography, the author obtained access in many countries to unexpected new Joyce material. His search took him to Dublin, London, Zurich, Trieste, Paris, and other cities in Europe as well as to many parts of this continent. In his travels he talked to such people as Joyce's son George, Joyce's brother Stanislaus, his three sisters, Mrs. Joyce's sister, Dr. Carl Jung, and an old blind man who knew all the turnings in Dublin. Mr. Ellmann's literary detective work discovered, among other things, the actual woman who inspired the character of Molly Bloom, and the old man in a junk shop on the quays who in part was the model for Hugh (‘Blazes') Boy Ian in ULYSSES. He uncovers the raw material in Joyce's waits and shows how Joyce converted it into fiction. The book gives a fascinating account of literary life in Europe in Joyce's lifetime, telling of his relations with Yeats, Shaw, Eliot, Hemingway, Proust, and Pound, among others, and paints an altogether fresh picture of Joyce's acquaintances - writes, artists, and musicians. It reveals new details of Joyce's meeting with his future wife Nora Barnacle, of their life together, and of her quizzical attitude toward his writings. Light is thrown on his break with the Roman Catholic Church, and on his relationship with his emotionally disturbed daughter, Lucia. Altogether, the book presents Joyce dramatically and completely, good and bad combined. It shows that Joyce the man and Joyce the artist were products of the same central energy. The biographer's point of view is unobtrusive, but in the end the reader is persuaded into an understanding of Joyce and his works. Mr. Ellmann's scholarly odyssey also turned up many photographs which have never before been published in a book. A rare picture of Joyce and Nora Barnacle on their wedding day is included in the 16 pages of half-tone illustrations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard David Ellmann (March 15, 1918 - May 13, 1987) was a prominent American literary critic and biographer of the Irish writers James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and William Butler Yeats. He won the U.S. National Book Award for Nonfiction for James Joyce (1959), which is one of the most acclaimed literary biographies of the 20th century; its 1982 revised edition was similarly recognised with the award of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A liberal humanist, Ellmann's academic work generally focused on the major modernist writers of the twentieth century.
DESCRIPTION - L.A. CONFIDENTIAL is an epic crime novel that stands as a steel-edged time capsule - Los Angeles in the 1950s, a remarkable era defined in dark shadings. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law - three cops treading quicksand in the middle. Detective Ed Exley wants glory. Haunted by his father's success as a policeman, he will pay any price, break any law to eclipse him. Detective Bud White watched his own father murder his mother - he is now bent on random vengeance, a time bomb with a badge. Celebrity cop Jack Vincennes shakes down movie stars for a scandal magazine. An old secret possesses him - he'll do anything to keep it buried. Three cops in a spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, a nightmare that offers no mercy, allows for no survivors. Here is James Ellroy's masterpiece. darkness to haunt you in shades of red, gray, and black.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz - were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine's Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - Los Angeles, 1950. Red crosscurrents and a string of brutal killings. Three men caught up in a massive web of ambition, perversion and deceit. The characters: Danny Upshaw--a sheriff's deputy stuck with a bunch of snuffs that nobody cares about. Mal Considine--DA's office brass, climbing on the Red scare bandwagon to advance his own career. Buzz Meeks-- bagman, ex-goon and pimp for Howard Hughes, a man who fights communism for the money. All three have purchased tickets to a nightmare worse than their darkest dreams.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz - were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine's Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - On January 15, 1947, the torture-ravished body of a beautiful young woman is found in a vacant lot. The victim makes headlines as the Black Dahlia–and so begins the greatest manhunt in California history. Caught up in the investigation are Bucky Bleichert and Lee Blanchard. Both are obsessed with the Dahlia–driven by dark needs to know everything about her past, to capture her killer, to possess the woman even in death. Their quest will take them on a hellish journey through the underbelly of postwar Hollywood, to the core of the dead girl's twisted life, past the extremes of their own psyches–into a region of total madness. This fictionalized version of Hollywood's most notorious murder case takes readers on a hellish journey through the movie capital and into a region of total madness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels - The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz - were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine's Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - A scrumptious satire about business, greed, ambition and cheese - Edam's great moment in world literature. Frans Laarmans is a humble shipping clerk. One day he is suddenly elevated to the position of chief agent for a Dutch cheese company, with responsibility for Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Thrilled at the change in his status, he goes on leave, sets up am office at home, and takes delivery of ten thousand full-cream Edams. But, running a business is not as straightforward as he thought. As the bulk of the twenty tons of cheese sits in storage, crates and crates of it, it starts to haunt him. And when his employer, the brusque Mr. Hornstra, wires to say he is coming to Antwerp to settle the first accounts, Laarmans begins to panic. CHEESE is a comic classic in Holland and Belgium - the equivalent of THREE MEN IN A BOAT or THE DIARY OF A NOBOBY. It is a delightful period piece, but also timeless in its skewering of the pretensions and pomposity of businessmen. Willem Elsschot's deliciously dry, Low Countries humor has retained it freshness and bite.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.
DESCRIPTION - In awarding Odysseus Elytis the 1979 Nobel Prize in literature, the Swedish Academy declared that he had been selected ‘for his poetry, which, against the background of Greek tradition, depicts with sensuous strength and intellectual clearsightedness modern man's struggle for freedom and creativeness.' Elytis was largely unknown outside his native Greece before winning literature's highest honor, and much of his work has not been widely available in English. The Collected Poems is the first collection in any language, including Greek, of Elytis's complete poetry, a body of work marked by a profound love of hope, freedom, beauty, and Greek tradition. Twenty years in preparation, this volume includes his early poems, influenced in equal parts by surrealism and the landscape and climate of Greece and the Aegean Sea; his long, epic poem connecting Greece's--and his own--Second World War experience to the myth of the eternal Greek hero, Song Heroic and Mourning for the Lost Second Lieutenant of the Albanian Campaign; his most ambitious work, The Axion Esti, which the Swedish Academy praised as ‘one of 20th-century literature's most concentrated and ritually faceted poems'; and his mature poetry, from Maria Nephele, a poem in two voices, to his last collection, West of Sorrow, written the summer before his death in 1996 at age 84. Throughout his long career as a poet, Elytis remained true to his vision of a poetry that addresses the power of language and links Greece's two thousand years of myth and history with the social and psychological demands of the modern age. Renowned for their astonishing lyricism and profound optimism, Elytis's poems employ surreal imagery and a remarkable variety of forms to capture the natural, sun-soaked beauty of Greece and to give voice to the contemporary Greek--and to a more universally human--consciousness. PRAISE FOR ODYSSEUS ELYTIS: ‘Perhaps the most pervasive presence throughout his work. is the physical experience of Greece: the sun's intense illumination, the seas strewn with jewel-like islands, the life of its proud people beneath the invasion of 20th-century culture and politics. From these Elytis crafts powerful and sparkling lyrics, sometimes bitter, often full of wonder and celebration.' -- Christian Science Monitor. ‘Elytis is a paragon of enthusiasm, of protean moods, multiple forms; his purpose, in essence: the deification of the sun and the body of man.' -- Hudson Review. ‘A poet of large achievement. His work. has a kind of passionate optimism about the possibilities of his small Aegean world.' -- New York Review of Books.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ODYSSEUS ELYTIS (November 2, 1911, Heraklion, Greece - March 18, 1996, Athens, Greece) was born in Heraklion, Crete, in 1911. He studied law at the University of Athens. His poems began to appear in periodicals in 1935; since the publication of his first book of poems in 1940, ten further volumes of his poetry have appeared. He has also published three collections of essays, and translations from a wide range of modern writers including Rimbaud, Genet, Mayakovsky, Lorca, Ungaretti and Brecht.
DESCRIPTION - At the age of twenty-two, Buchi Emecheta left her husband and found herself alone with five small children to support in cold and foggy North London - a long way from her native Nigeria. She had few qualifications and no prospects - how was she to keep her head above water? By becoming a writer, she decided - and that, despite setbacks, was what she became. Sheer determination won her a degree in Sociology and a decent place to live, and her dream seemed to come true when, in 1972, the New Statesman started to serialize her work and her first book, In the Ditch, was published. Since then, her writing has brought her all the acclaim she desired, but her account of her struggle to establish herself - subject to the whims of publishers and the vagaries of the Establishment - evokes with wry humour and raw feeling just what it means to be poor, black and unrecognized in London. 'Buchi Emecheta is a natural born writer' - SUNDAY TIMES.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Buchi Emecheta (born 21 July 1944, in Lagos) is a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta once described her stories as ‘stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.'
DESCRIPTION - This selection draws on Hans Magnus Enzensberger's three published volumes and also includes a number of other poems. The poet is a German - although uniquely cosmopolitan in outlook and range of sympathies - who was shaped by the Second World War and who expresses an awareness of the ideology responsible for that war and of the breakdown which followed it. His social and moral criticism owes much to Marxism, yet is free from party allegiance. As direct and accessible as graffiti on a wall, his poems are the most striking to emerge from post-war Germany. Penguin Modern European Poets is designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of this century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series already includes Yevtushenko, Rilke, Apollinaire, Prevert, Quasimodo, a volume of Greek poets, Miroslav Holub, and Zbigniew Herbert.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER is a German author, poet, translator and editor. His books include LIGHTER THAN AIR MORAL POEMS (2000) and CIVIL WARS: FROM L.A. TO BOSNIA (1994). Enzensberger's work has been translated into more than 40 languages.
DESCRIPTION - As AMERICAN DESERT opens, the novel's hero, Theodore Street, is driving toward the ocean, there he plans to walk into the waves and drown himself. But on his way, he is hit headlong by an oncoming van. He sails through the windshield, and although his face is unscratched and his bones unbroken, his head is sliced cleanly from his body. At his funeral three days later, he sits up in his coffin, the sloppy stitching that binds his head and body together clearly visible. The mourners are horrified by his resurrection, and the story makes instant headlines throughout the world. He becomes a source of fear and embarrassment to his daughter, an object of derision and morbid curiosity to the press, a prized specimen for scientists, and Satan incarnate to an obscure religious cult. In this fascinating, satirical and wildly funny novel, critically acclaimed author Percival Everett wrestles with the assumptions of a culture whose priorities are out of whack, lampooning the press, religion, and academia, and offering, ultimately, a meditation on what it is to be alive. Written by a master storyteller and a keen social critic, AMERICAN DESERT is an enthralling novel that confirms Everett's place in the highest firmament of American letters.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PERCIVAL EVERETT is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of fourteen previous novels, including ERASURE, GLYPH, FRENZY, THE BODY OF MARTIN AGUILERA, WATERSHED, AND WALK ME TO THE DISTANCE. He is a recent recipient of the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction. He resides in California and British Columbia.
DESCRIPTION - A baffling triptych of murder mysteries by the author of I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Ogden Walker, deputy sheriff of a small New Mexico town, is on the trail of an old woman's murderer. But at the crime scene, his are the only footprints leading up to and away from her door. Something is amiss, and even his mother knows it. As other cases pile up, Ogden gives chase, pursuing flimsy leads for even flimsier reasons. His hunt leads him from the seamier side of Denver to a hippie commune as he seeks the puzzling solution. In Assumption, his follow-up to the wickedly funny I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is in top form as he once again upends our expectations about characters, plot, race, and meaning. A wild ride to the heart of a baffling mystery, Assumption is a literary thriller like no other.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
DESCRIPTION - Avant-garde novelist, college professor, woodworker, and fly fisherman - Thelonious (Monk) Ellison has never allowed race to define his identity. But as both a writer and an African American, he is offended and angered by the success of WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO, the exploitative debut novel of a young, middle-class black woman who once visited some relatives in Harlem for a couple of days. Hailed as an authentic representation of the African American experience, the book is a national bestseller and its author feted on the Kenya Dunston television show. The book's success rankles all the more as Monk's own most recent novel has just notched its seventh rejection. Even as his career as a writer appears to have stalled, Monk finds himself coping with changes in his personal life. Forced to assume responsibility for a mother rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's, Monk leaves his home in Los Angeles to return to the Washington D. C. house in which he grew up. There he must come to terms with his ailing mother, his siblings, his own childhood and youth, and the legacy of his physician father, a suicide some seven years before. In need of distraction from old memories, new responsibilities, and his professional stagnation, Monk composes, in a heat of inspiration and energy, a fierce parody of the sort of exploitative, ghetto wanna-be lit represented by WE'S LIVES IN DA GHETTO. But when his agent sends this literary indictment (included here in its entirety) out to publishers, it is greeted as an authentic new voice of black America. Monk - or his pseudonymous alter ego, Stagg R. Leigh - is offered money, fame, success beyond anything he has known. And as demand begins to build for meetings with and appearances by Leigh, Monk is faced with a whole new set of problems. Percival Everett's most recent novel, the academic satire GLYPH, was hailed b the New York Times as ‘both a treatise and a romp. This new novel combines a touching story of a man coming to terms with his family heritage and a satiric indictment of race and publishing in America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).
DESCRIPTION - With this wildly inventive new novel, Percival Everett has created his unlikeliest hero to date. Mute by choice, and able to read complex philosophical treatises and compose passable short stories while still in the crib, baby Ralph does not consider himself a genius - because he is unable to drive. Plenty of others, however, want a stake in this precocious child prodigy. Among the most fiendish are Dr. Steimmel, the psychiatrist to whom his bewildered parents first take him, and her assistant Boris; Dr. Davis and her illegal chimps; and not-so-sweet Nanna, the secret agent. All have plans for Ralph, and no one wants to share the poor infant who misses his mother and who does not take kindly to his new role as ‘Defense Stealth Operative.' Throughout the ensuing nation-wide chase of which he is the center, Ralph ponders on the theories of literary form - and comes to some surprising conclusions of his own that perhaps only a baby could dream up. A narrative to question narrative, a highly original analysis of analysis, Everett's tour de farce prompts one to acknowledge that his is the true genius.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).
DESCRIPTION - In his stunning new novel GOD'S COUNTRY Percival Everett offers a wickedly funny rewrite of the Great American Western. The unlikely narrator through this tale of misadventures is one Curt Marder: gambler, drinker, cheat, and would-be womanizer. He has lost his farm, his wife, and his dog to a band of marauding hooligans. With nothing to live on but a desire to recover what is rightfully his, Marder is forced to enlist the help of the best tracker in the West: a black man named Bubba. This odd couple is soon joined by Jake, a wayward child determined to join the hunt. As Jake and Marder follow Bubba across desolate, unsettled land, they meet Indians, settlers, and soldiers. Aiming to keep a low profile, they nevertheless find themselves in all kinds of trouble, including run-ins with a scurrilous preacher, a flamboyant prostitute, and General Custer in a nightgown. A natural coward, Marder only survives these incidents because of Bubba's reluctant heroism. However, even after their final, chilling exchange, Marder fails to realize that Bubba's secrets extend beyond his ability to track footprints on the prairie. GOD'S COUNTRY is hilarious and haunting by turns, a slam-bang parable of the way things were in 1871.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett is Professor of English at the University of Southern California. His 13 previous books include FRENZY (1997), WATERSHED (1996), and SUDER (1983).
DESCRIPTION - When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon (Oprah Daily), and one of the most decorated writers of our lifetime, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
DESCRIPTION - An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone. Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Percival Everett (born December 22, 1956) is an American writer[2] and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He is best known for his novels Erasure (2001), I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), and The Trees (2021), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Erasure was adapted as the film American Fiction (2023), written and directed by Cord Jefferson, starring Jeffrey Wright, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams.
DESCRIPTION - On a windswept landscape somewhere north of Denver, Robert Hawks, a feisty and dangerously curious hydrologist, finds himself enmeshed in a fight over Native American treaty rights. What begins for Robert as a peaceful fishing interlude, ends in murder and the disclosure of government secrets. Why was the impossibly short Louise Yellow Calf hitching a ride on a snowy, deserted road following the discovery of two FBI agents murdered on the reservation? And what is the female FBI agent doing in Robert's shower? As our reluctant hero fits together the pieces in the all too rapidly unfolding drama, connections emerge to his own family's long-standing civil rights battles - battles that he has thus far managed to avoid. In WATERSHED, Percival Everett has created an original mystery that crackles with tension and sly wit. Robert Hawks is revealed as someone who has been indelibly defined by the history of our country's racial relationships, and the one man uniquely qualified to take us with him through this complex and contested territory.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PERCIVAL EVERETT is the author of BIG PICTURE, a collection of short stories published by Graywolf Press. He has written eight other books, most recently God's Country, about which the New York Times Book Review said: ‘Mr. Everett is successful in combining heart with rage. Now he's hit his stride.' He lives with his wife on a farm in Southern California and is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
DESCRIPTION - Frederick Exley had the bad luck to be the son of a fabled high school athlete in Watertown, New York - a town that takes its high school athletes seriously. Although Fred had no literal ambitions toward being an athlete, it still hurt him to realize, during the course of this book, that he was merely a fan. Obsessed with the New York Giants, Exley's autumn weeks centered on those blessed hours when he sat in bars, drinking and watching the Giants on TV. A Giant victory would succeed, for a few hours, in justifying his misshapen life. In between football games and drinking bouts and shock treatments and insulin therapy, Exley went out into the world to play at being a normally-on-the-make young man. Unfortunately, he was just no good at the game; each adventure in public relations or door-to-door selling made him insane again. Yet on the road from nowhere to nowhere he developed an attitude toward himself and his environment, and mastered an almost hypnotic style to describe his point of view and the wild, sometimes hilarious events in his life. For instance, there is the elderly, totally demented door-to-door salesman of aluminum siding who is prepared to drop to the ground and do fifty consecutive pushups at anybody's request. For instance, there is the girl Exley met in Chicago who was so much the embodiment of the American man's sexual fantasy that she totally incapacitates him. The young man's memoir is in fashion these days, as we all know, but this book is a good deal more than that. It is a full and rich creation. A FAN'S NOTES is both a pleasure and an education; it is the high mark of Mr. Exley's maturity as a writer that you lay the book down knowing, finally and ironically, that it is not about Exley or football at all: It is about America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Earl ‘Fred' Exley (March 28, 1929 - June 17, 1992) was an American writer best known as the author of the fictional memoir A Fan's Notes.
DESCRIPTION - PAGES FROM A COLD ISLAND begins with the death of Edmund Wilson. The news teaches Fred Exley even as he is rereading Wilson's Hecate County to determine its suitability for a writing class he is going to teach at Iowa. The effect of Wilson's death is overwhelming. Thus begins a personal odyssey, an obsessive journey that takes him from his own ‘roots' (his mother's home in Alexandria Bay on the St. Lawrence) to a small hot resort island off Florida and, finally, to the climax of the book at the Iowa Writers' Workshop-an obsessed and sometimes hilarious search, if you will, to find a way to write the very book you are reading. It is an utterly absorbing journey which moreover touches much of the crippled creative life in America. Raunchy, drunken, by turns wildly sexual and close to suicide, Exley memorably evokes a real life by using the most skillful techniques of the born novelist, For Exley is here not merely recording the already fascinating pattern of his days, but literally overwhelms the reader with a bombardment of scenes, insights and unsettling observations, interweaving his own personal and marvelously entertaining sense of the world around him with outrageous encounters with such personalities as Gloria Steinem and Norman Mailer, But the guiding metaphor here, the one strong, steady light in a murky literary landscape, is Edmund Wilson. Exley's search for the essence of this man-and his own personal quest for the guts of this book-is the sane center of a story whose irrepressible energy and candid confession will hold readers absorbed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frederick Earl ‘Fred' Exley (March 28, 1929 - June 17, 1992) was an American writer best known as the author of the fictional memoir A Fan's Notes.
DESCRIPTION - Set in Oslo, Norway, Adam's Diary (Adams Dagbok) transcends geographical boundaries in its depiction of lovers victimized by social roles and sexual stereotypes. It was recognized as a major novel on publication in Norway in 1978, and its translation into English will raise Knut Faldbakken to the rank of world-class writer. The modern Adam is a composite of Thief, ‘Dog,' and Prisoner. These are the personas of the three male narrators who love, fear, and hate the same woman, a divorcee who waits tables in a restaurant. The thief is her lover, afraid of any commitment; the ‘dog' is an abandoned summer sweetheart, reduced to a shadow of his former self, and the prisoner is her former husband, thoroughly average in his machismo. For these narrators, the woman serves as a mirror. They have been shaped by a society that engenders the dominance of role over self, of power over eros. In each case, the relationship between man and woman turns into a mockery: love becomes a prelude to mutual deception, sex involves power plays, and communication gives way to sordid betrayal and ritual violence. Only the woman holds out a promise of something different and better. In her quest for a more fulfilling life, she seems to follow an uncompromising ideal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Knut Faldbakken (born Hamar, 31 August 1941) is a Norwegian novelist. Faldbakken studied psychology at Oslo University, and then worked as a journalist. He visited a number of countries, working variously as a bookkeeper, sailor, and factory worker, and began writing books in 1967 while living in Paris. He was editor of the literary magazine Vinduet (THE WINDOW) between 1975 and 1979.
DESCRIPTION - THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH (French: Les Damnes de la Terre, first published 1961), Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule, it analyses the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, explored the psychological effect of colonization on the psyche of a nation as well as its broader implications for building a movement for decolonization. Showing how decolonization must be combined with building a national culture, this passionate analysis of relations between the West and the Third World is still illuminating about the world today. A controversial introduction to the text by Jean-Paul Sartre presents the thesis as an advocacy of violence (which Sartre had also examined in his voluminous Critique of Dialectical Reason). This focus derives from the book's opening chapter 'Concerning Violence' which is a caustic indictment of colonialism and its legacy. It discusses violence as a means of liberation and a catharsis to subjugation. Homi K. Bhabha argues that Sartre's opening comments have led to a limited approach to the text that focuses on the promotion of violence. Further reading reveals a thorough critique of nationalism and imperialism which also develops to cover areas such as mental health and the role of intellectuals in revolutionary situations. Fanon goes into great detail explaining that revolutionary groups should look to the lumpenproletariat for the force needed to expel colonists. The lumpenproletariat in traditional Marxist theories are considered the lowest, most degraded stratum of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked class consciousness. Fanon uses the term to refer to those inhabitants of colonized countries who are not involved in industrial production, particularly peasants living outside the cities. He argues that only this group, unlike the industrial proletariat, has sufficient independence from the colonists to successfully make a revolution against them. Also important is Fanon's view of the role of language and how it molds the position of ‘natives‘, or those victimized by colonization. The original title of the book is an allusion to the opening words of The Internationale.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in Fort-de-France, Martinique. He studied medicine in France, and later specialized in psychiatry. Out of his experiences in a hospital in Algeria during the French-Algerian war, his sympathies turned toward the rebels. He joined the revolution and became its most articulate spokesman. His book, THE WRETCHED OF THE EARTH, has become a manifesto for the Third World.
DESCRIPTION - Ask the Dust is the most popular novel of Italian-American author John Fante, first published in 1939 and set during the Great Depression-era in Los Angeles. It is one of a series of novels featuring the character Arturo Bandini as Fante's alter ego, a young Italian-American from Colorado struggling to make it as a writer in Los Angeles. The novel is widely regarded as an American classic, regularly on college syllabi for American literature. The book is a roman à clef, much of it rooted in autobiographical incidents in Fante's life. The novel influenced Charles Bukowski significantly. In 2006, screenwriter Robert Towne adapted the novel into a film, Ask the Dust, starring Salma Hayek and Colin Farrell.Initial publication of the novel followed Fante's successful publication of Wait Until Spring, Bandini and his short stories in prominent publications, like The American Mercury. The first edition of the novel was only printed with 2,200 copies. Though sales were not extensive, a paperback edition was issued by Bantam in 1954. But the novels popularity didn't reach its peak until poet Charles Bukowski led the reissue of the novel by Black Sparrow Press in 1980, alongside a foreword by Bukowski. Fante's most popular novel by far, the semi-autobiographical Ask the Dust is the third book in what is now referred to as "The Saga of Arturo Bandini" or "The Bandini Quartet". Bandini served as his alter ego in a total of four novels: Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), The Road to Los Angeles (chronologically, this is the first novel Fante wrote but it was unpublished until 1985), Ask the Dust (1939) and, finally, Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). The last Fante dictated to his wife, Joyce, towards the end of his life after complications from diabetes brought about blindness and the amputation of both legs. Fante's use of Bandini as his alter ego can be compared to Charles Bukowski's character, Henry Chinaski. Recurring themes in Fante's works are poverty, Catholicism, family life, Italian-American identity, sports, and the life of a writer. Ask the Dust has been referred to over the years as a monumental Southern California/Los Angeles novel by many (e.g.: Carey McWilliams, Charles Bukowski, and The Los Angeles Times Book Review). More than sixty years after it was published, Ask the Dust appeared for several weeks on the New York Times' Bestseller's List.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, WAIT UNTIL SPRING, BANDINI, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include THE ROAD TO LOS ANGELES and ASK THE DUST. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published DREAMS FROM BUNKER HILL, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.
DESCRIPTION - This first novel by the author of PLUM BUN AND THE CHINABERRY TREE shows a prescient awareness of the black middle class's quest for social equality in the early years of the twentieth century and, in particular, of the choices confronting black women in the urban North. Set in Philadelphia some sixty years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect. The novel also explores the limited vocational alternatives available to women of that era, both white and black, and shows the ways in which many were able to escape society's norms to make better lives for themselves and their families.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882-1961) wrote numerous stories, poems, and reviews in addition to four novels. From 1919 to 1926 she was the literary editor of Crisis magazine, where she published and promoted the early work of major voices of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book', said Johnson of Tom Jones; and there were those who held it responsible for the two earthquake shocks which hit London shortly after its publication in 1749. Few readers will nowadays subscribe to such a view. For most readers this is one of the great comic novels in the English language, a vivid Hogarthian panorama of eighteenth-century life, with a plot which Coleridge described as one of the three most perfect ever planned, in addition Tom Jones possesses an underlying seriousness and all the rich and generous humanity of its author. THE PENGUIN ENGLISH LIBRARY - Planned to take its place alongside the Penguin Classics, this series will eventually include attractive and authoritative editions of the best work to have appeared in English since the fifteenth century. The following authors are so far represented: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, Bunyan, Samuel Butler, Cobbett, Wilkie Collins, Congreve, Defoe, Dickens, George Eliot, Etherege, Fielding, Gissing, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, Melville, Meredith, Middleton, Poe, Smollett, Sterne, Swift, Tourneur, Trollope, Twain, Webster, and Wycherley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 - 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist known for his rich earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Aside from his literary achievements, he has a significant place in the history of law-enforcement, having founded (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners, using his authority as a magistrate. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer.
DESCRIPTION - In an iconoclastic and controversial new study, Norman G. Finkelstein moves from an interrogation of the place the Holocaust has come to occupy in American culture to a disturbing examination of recent Holocaust compensation agreements. It was not until the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, when Israel's evident strength brought it into line with US foreign policy, that memory of the Holocaust began to acquire the exceptional prominence it enjoys today. Leaders of America's Jewish community were delighted that Israel was now deemed a major strategic asset and, Finkelstein contends, exploited the Holocaust to enhance this new-found status. Their subsequent interpretations of the tragedy are often at variance with actual historical events and are employed to deflect any criticism of Israel and its supporters. Recalling Holocaust hoaxers such as Jerzy Kosinski and Binjamin Wilkomirski, as well as the demagogic constructions of writers like Daniel Goldhagen, Finkelstein contends that the main danger posed to the memory of Nazism's victims comes not from the distortions of Holocaust deniers but from self-proclaimed guardians of Holocaust memory. Drawing on a wealth of untapped sources, he exposes the double shakedown of European countries as well as legitimate Jewish claimants, and concludes that the Holocaust industry has become an outright extortion racket. Thoroughly researched and closely argued, THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY is all the more disturbing and powerful because the issues it deals with are so rarely discussed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Norman Gary Finkelstein (born December 8, 1953) is an American political scientist, activist, professor and author. His primary fields of research are the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust, an interest motivated by the experiences of his parents who were Jewish Holocaust survivors. He is a graduate of Binghamton University and received his Ph.D in Political Science from Princeton University. He has held faculty positions at Brooklyn College, Rutgers University, Hunter College, New York University, and, most recently, DePaul University, where he was an assistant professor from 2001 to 2007. In 2007, after a highly publicized row between Finkelstein and a notable opponent of his, Alan Dershowitz, Finkelstein's tenure bid at DePaul was denied. Finkelstein was placed on administrative leave for the 2007–2008 academic year, and on September 5, 2007, he announced his resignation after coming to a settlement with the university on generally undisclosed terms. An official statement from DePaul strongly defended the decision to deny Finkelstein tenure, stated that outside influence played no role in the decision.
DESCRIPTION - Are the Iliad and the Odyssey just charming poetic fantasies? Or do they give a more or less accurate picture of the Mycenaean period, the early Dark Age or Homer's own era? Do archaeological discoveries like Schliemann's excavations at Troy bear out Homer's account of the Trojan War? The World of Odysseus is a concise and penetrating account of the society that gave birth to the Iliad and the Odyssey--a book that provides a vivid picture of the Greek Dark Ages, its men and women, works and days, morals and values. Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Moses I. Finley (May 20, 1912–June 23, 1986) was an American professor, whose prosecution by the McCarran Security Committee led to his move to England, where he became English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable work is The Ancient Economy (1973), where he argued that status and civic ideology governed the economy in antiquity rather than rational economic motivations.
DESCRIPTION - Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney's fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts - copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of docu-poetry. The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the insurgent sensualist, hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead. The tenderness of a father's handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl's fountainhead takes over every page. One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing. Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NIKKY FINNEY is the author of four books of poetry, including Head Off & Split (Northwestern University Press, 2011), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. She is the John H. Bennett, Jr., Chair in Creative Writing and Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Finney has received the Art for Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation and currently serves as an ambassador for the University of Arizona Poetry Center's Art for Justice Project.
DESCRIPTION - Originally published in 1932, this book is the first known mystery novel written by an African-American. Rudolph Fisher, one of the principal writers of the Harlem Renaissance, becomes a ‘conjure-man', a fortune teller, a mysterious figure who remains shrouded in darkness while his clients sit directly across from him, singly bathed in light. It is in this configuration that one of these seekers of the revelation of fate discovers he is speaking to a dead man. Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge', appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge', appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37. John McCluskey, Jr., is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Adjunct Professor of English at Indiana University. He has contributed articles to a number of journals, including Black World, CLA journal, and American Literature. He is the author of two novels, LOOK WHAT THEY DONE TO MY SONG (Random House, 1974) and MR. AMERICA'S LAST SEASON BLUES (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), and a number of short stories.
DESCRIPTION - Lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fishers' characters--including the prejudiced Miss Cramp who ‘takes on causes the way sticky tape picks up lint, ‘ Merritt's housekeeper Linda, and Shine, his piano mover--provide an invaluable view of the social and philosophical milieu of the times.Thematically, Fisher focuses on the idea of black unity and discovery of the self.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge', appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37. John McCluskey, Jr., is Professor of Afro-American Studies and Adjunct Professor of English at Indiana University. He has contributed articles to a number of journals, including Black World, CLA journal, and American Literature. He is the author of two novels, LOOK WHAT THEY DONE TO MY SONG (Random House, 1974) and MR. AMERICA'S LAST SEASON BLUES (Louisiana State University Press, 1983), and a number of short stories.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I now nothing more noble', wrote Flaubert, ‘than the contemplation of the world.' His acceptance of all the realities of life (rather than his remorseless exposure of its illusions) principally recommends what many regard as a more mature work than MADAME BOVARY, if not the greatest French novel of the last century. In Robert Baldick's new translation of this story of a young man's romantic attachment to an older woman, the modern English reader can appreciate the accuracy, the artistry and the insight with which Flaubert (1821-80) reconstructed in one masterpiece the very fibre of his times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 - May 8, 1880) was an influential French writer who is counted among the greatest novelists in Western literature. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary (1857), for his Correspondence, and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style. The celebrated short story writer Maupassant was a protEgE of Flaubert.
DESCRIPTION - 'Peter Fleming is one of the world's leading analysts of work. In Resisting Work, his stunning tour de force, he lifts the lid on neoliberalism's bullying use of biopower to control our lives and how we think of happiness, sadness, and everything in between. And he does so with lively prose, telling anecdotes, and a compelling blend of empirical and theoretical materials. ' - Toby Miller, author of Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. A job is no longer something we 'do,' but instead something we 'are. ' As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power - biopower - where life itself is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes - from our consumer tastes, downtime, and sexuality - into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor. Fleming suggests that the corporation then turns to communal life - what he calls the common - in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Fleming is a Professor of Business and Society at Cass Business School, City University London. He is the co-author of several books, including Contesting the Corporation: Struggle, Power and Resistance in Organizations (with Andre Spicer), Dead Man Working (with Carl Cederström), and The End of Corporate Social Responsibility: Crisis and Critique (with Marc T. Jones).
DESCRIPTION - This landmark anthology, the first of its kind, takes it impulse from the words of Bertolt Brecht: ‘In these dark times, will there also be singing? / Yes, there will be singing. / About the dark times.' Bearing witness to extremity - whether of war, torture, exile, or repression - the volume encompasses more than 140 poets from five continents, over the span of this century from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square. ‘Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality - thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard. Carolyn ForchE's AGAINST FORGETTING is itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice. It bears witness to the evil we would prefer to forget, but never can - and never should.' - Nelson Mandela. ‘In a class by itself, edited and and introduced with precise passion and Olympian breadth, AGAINST FORGETTING encapsulates both the horrors of our century and the power of musical language to make a place to live, breathe, hope, love.' - Calvin Bedient. ‘From every continent comes the news that our age is an age of murder and repression on a scale unimagined before. And yet I can't peruse this book without marveling at what beauty these writers have made of the calamity called the Twentieth Century. I would not have thought a poetry anthology could be so stirring.' - Arthur Miller.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carolyn ForchE, poet, translator, and activist, teaches writing at George Mason University. She has published two award-winning volumes of poetry, GATHERING THE TRIBES and THE COUNTRY BETWEEN US. In 1990 Ms. ForchE received a Lannan Literary Award, granted to poets and writers of literary excellence ‘whose work promotes a truer understanding of contemporary life.'
DESCRIPTION - Ford Madox Ford has been among the neglected writers of the first quarter of this century. His tragic novel, THE GOOD SOLDIER, in which he portrays, in the stoical but fallible figure of Edward Ashburnham, an example of the English landed gentry at its best, was written just before the First World War. (It is a curious detail that 4 August, the date of the outbreak of war, is made a date of recurring significance in the characters' lives.) This unembittered story of deceit and hatred was readily termed ‘great', ‘a piece of art and therefore an enlightenment', and ‘beautiful and moving' by contemporary reviewers. A more modern estimate of its worth is expressed by Walter Allen in Tradition and Dream: ‘Ford's finest novel is probably THE GOOD SOLDIER (1915), as formally perfect a novel as any in English and an amazingly subtle account, by one of them, of the lives of four people who appear to live in harmony and friendship. ‘.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ford Madox Ford (17 December 1873 - 26 June 1939), born Ford Hermann Hueffer, was an English novelist, poet, critic and editor whose journals, The English Review and The Transatlantic Review, were instrumental in the development of early 20th-century English literature.
DESCRIPTION - Fabulous, wildly comic, and Ulysses-like, DIVINE DAYS explores the mythical world of Leon Forrest's literary kingdom, Forest County. It is a huge oratorio of the sacred and the profane, set in bars, churches, and barbershops over a crucial seven-day period in the life of would-be playwright Joubert Jones during February 1966. DIVINE DAYS creates a profound microcosm of African-American life. It is the most prodigious literary creation since Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN forty years ago. Joubert Jones - playwright, journalist, bartender, lover - confronts and transcends the power of a fantastic group of bar denizens whose personalities run the gamut of classical myths, Shakespearean heros, Shakespearean villains, religious true-believers, and ghetto dwellers. Joubert is evolving a memory from the yeasty material of his friend and mentor Sugar-Groove into a play. Sugar-Groove is a world traveler, a mythical lover, who has twenty nicknames connected with his prowess. He is trickster-as-angel. Joubert's volatile and fragile girlfriend, Imani, is desperately searching for her abandoned siblings, a meaningful self-definition of her Blackness, and a place to settle her warring spirit. Joubert also encounters the powerful presence of his Aunt Eloise and the ever-haunting phantasmagoric W. A. D. Ford, the demonic trickster and manipulator of bodies and souls. Ford is the Mephistopheles of Forest County, and he comes to represent the forces of cosmic evil in the world. The neighborhood of Joubert's imagination becomes a theater enraptured with the voices of the living and the dead, acted out in Aunt Eloise's Night Light Lounge. The critic John Cawelti has called this novel: ‘the Ulysses of the South Side.' In the tradition of Joyce's Dedalus, Ellison's invisible narrator, Bellow's Augie March, and Heller's Yossarian, Joubert's voice emerges clearly upon DIVINE DAYS's ebullient stage. Most copies of the original edition published by Another Chicago Press were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the book was later re-issued jointly by this publisher and W.W. Norton. The first edition is very scarce.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leon Forrest was born in Chicago in 1937 and is considered one of the most important African American writers of his generation. He taught English and African American studies at Northwestern University until his death in 1997. His novels include There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden (Random House, 1973), The Bloodworth Orphans (Random House, 1977), Divine Days (Another Chicago Press, 1992), and Two Wings to Veil My Face (Asphodel, 1997).
DESCRIPTION - Containing a wealth of new scholarship and rare primary documents, The Black Jacobins Reader provides a comprehensive analysis of C. L. R. James's classic history of the Haitian Revolution. In addition to considering the book's literary qualities and its role in James's emergence as a writer and thinker, the contributors discuss its production, context, and enduring importance in relation to debates about decolonization, globalization, postcolonialism, and the emergence of neocolonial modernity. The Reader also includes the reflections of activists and novelists on the book's influence and a transcript of James's 1970 interview with Studs Terkel. Contributors. Mumia Abu-Jamal, David Austin, Madison Smartt Bell, Anthony Bogues, John H. Bracey Jr., Rachel Douglas, Laurent Dubois, Claudius K. Fergus, Carolyn E. Fick, Charles Forsdick, Dan Georgakas, Robert A. Hill, Christian Høgsbjerg, Selma James, Pierre Naville, Nick Nesbitt, Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Matthew Quest, David M. Rudder, Bill Schwarz, David Scott, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Matthew J. Smith, Studs Terkel. "This is the most authoritative confirmation to date of the intellectual stature of C. L. R. James and the prophetic grandeur of his great classic, The Black Jacobins. Some eighty years after its first publication, readers of different generations and across a diversity of national origins document their admiration of the depth and spontaneity of James's analytical interpretation of the Haitian Revolution. It was the first and only example in modern history of a successful slave revolt when a population of enslaved Africans defeated three European armies and converted a slave plantation into the Independent Republic of Haiti. The nineteenth century had judged it inconceivable; and ever since it has survived a universal silence." (George Lamming). "The Black Jacobins, with its unforgettable story of Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, is one of the great books of the twentieth century. The Black Jacobins Reader provides us with a rich selection of reflections on C. L. R. James's achievement and his own rethinkings over time. Whether understood as a cultural history of revolution before cultural history; a classic text for revolutionaries; a meditation on universal history; a pioneering Marxist analysis of the slave trade, slavery, and modern capitalism; an inspiration for generations of historians; an exploration of what it means to be 'West Indian'; a disruption of orthodox notions of historical temporality or a provocation to think about the relation between the past and the present; or indeed any combination of these; it is undoubtedly a book that continues to inspire many. Black activists in U.S. prisons, writers, and historians are amongst those who remind us, in different ways, of the power of a text such as this - one that wrote the history of a people supposedly without history." (Catherine Hall).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Christian Høgsbjerg is Teaching Fellow in Caribbean History at University College London's Institute of the Americas. Robert A. Hill is Research Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - During the Middle Ages insanity was in many respects considered a part of everyday life. Fools and madmen walked the streets much as they appear in the plays of Shakespeare and in Don Quixote. At some point in history, the West's attitude toward madness changed and these people began to be considered a threat. Asylums were built for the first time; madmen were put away, and an attempt was made to put a wall between the insane and the rest of humanity. In recent years the question of madness and how to define it has become the center of a great deal of discussion, partly social and psychological - reports show that a vast majority of New Yorkers are neurotic in varying degrees - but also judicial: how can one decide who is to be put away? This is the question that Dr. Foucault seeks to answer in an analysis of the history of madness from roughly 1500 to 1800. Basing himself on vast research into medical as well as theological thought, economics as well as literature, he has created a unique and highly relevant work, a masterpiece of research, understanding, and imagination.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.
DESCRIPTION - A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern. We have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, as Harry Frankfurt writes, ‘we have no theory.' Frankfurt, one of the world's most influential moral philosophers, attempts to build such a theory here. With his characteristic combination of philosophical acuity, psychological insight, and wry humor, Frankfurt proceeds by exploring how bullshit and the related concept of humbug are distinct from lying. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University.
DESCRIPTION - Hector Cabot was known to e the life of every party he attended in Istanbul: a famous rascal, an incorrigible womanizer, a good-for-nothing charmer, a loser of geese. That last attribute was commemorated each year on ‘Hector Cabot Goosebuying Day' in honor of the famous binge in 1962 when he went downtown to buy a goose for Christmas dinner and returned three days later completely naked except for a Turkish flag. Hector taught at Woodrow College perched above the Bosphorus. Other members of the expatriate circle, though not quite as flamboyant as Hector, were avid spectators of, if not participants in, the decadence: Meredith Lacey, who stalked married men like wild game; her husband, Leslie, melancholy in his repressed homosexuality; Stella Ashe, lover of Hector and mother of his child; Stella's husband, Thomas, the quarry of Meredith Lacey. Those also featured in Maureen Freely's astonishing cast include Hector's demonic Greek mother, Aspasia, whose life is devoted to taunting her daughter-in-law, Amy, the long-suffering victim of Hector's philandering and hijinks; Emin Bey, the elegant and educated Turk who is friend and admirer of Hector; and his nephew Ismet, a secret policeman whose ambition leads him to invent dark secrets about the crowd of fast-living Westerners. Maureen Freely superbly portrays the expatriate party dwindling to its end against the backdrop of Turkeys own internal tensions. This is a marvelous, rich, funny book - full of life - peopled with engaging, sharply drawn characters, offering a sensitive portrait of the clash of cultures. Maureen Freely's vitality and precision as a writer, her ability to capture the niceties of social comedy and tragedy, make THE LIFE OF THE PARTY a novel of breathtaking assurance, wholly fulfilling the promise of her wickedly amusing first novel, MOTHER'S HELPER.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maureen Freely was born in Neptune, New Jersey, in 1952, the oldest of three children. When she was eight, her family moved to Istanbul, Turkey. It was here that she spent the remainder of her childhood, with the exception of one year in London, one year at a boarding school in Beirut, and many summers with her family on the Greek Island of Naxos. After graduating from Radcliffe College in 1974. she returned to Europe to live with her husband, the American writer Paul Spike. Their first child was born in late 1978.
DESCRIPTION - How can we explain man's lust for cruelty? In a world in which violence in every form seems to be increasing, Erich Fromm - the author of numerous best-selling books - has treated this haunting question with depth and in the most original and far-reaching work of his brilliant career. Fromm goes beyond the present battle lines of controversy between instinctivists like Lorenz, who argue that man's destructiveness has been inherited from his animal ancestors, and behaviorists like Skinner, who maintain that there are no innate human traits since everything is the result of social conditioning. Conceding that there is a kind of aggression which man shares with animals, Fromm shows that it is defensive in nature, designed to insure survival. On the other hand, malignant aggression, or destructiveness, in which man kills without biological or social purpose, is peculiarly human and not instinctive; it is part of human character, one of the passions, like love, ambition, and greed. From this theoretical position Fromm studies both the conditions that elicit defensive aggression and those that cause genuine destructiveness. Drawing on the most significant findings of neurophysiology, prehistory, anthropology, and animal psychology, he presents a global and historical study of human destructiveness that enables readers to evaluate the data for themselves. Although deeply indebted to Freud, Fromm emphasizes social and cultural factors as well. Destructiveness is seen in terms of the dreams and associations of many patients and of historical figures such as Stalin - an extreme example of sadism; Himmler - an example of the bureaucratic-sadistic character; and Hitler. The analysis of Hitler, following a detailed clinical discussion of necrophilia as a form of malignant aggression, offers a detailed analytical understanding of Hitler's character, in a masterful new form of psychobiography that is one of the high points of this brilliant book. With the concepts of a malignant Oedipus complex and of necrophilia, Fromm revises Freud's "death instinct" and makes a significant contribution to psychoanalytic theory. An appendix on the history of Freud's theories on aggression will be welcome to all those who wish to know the development of the master's thought on this subject. Utilizing anthropological evidence, Fromm also argues that primitive societies - the hunters and food-gatherers - were the least aggressive, and that exploitation and war result from the growth of civilization and the advent of patriarchal societies. Certain to arouse controversy because of its criticism of various contemporary doctrines, this book will nevertheless be welcomed for its solid, triumphant vindication of human dignity and for its appeal to men and women to change their lives and the social-political environment in order to create new possibilities for human growth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erich Seligmann Fromm (March 23, 1900 - March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
DESCRIPTION - A thoroughly unpalatable character is found murdered with a weapon so unspeakable that the police will not reveal what it is to the press, By an extraordinary web of circumstance suspicion falls on a scion of Turin's high society and his woman friend, much to the embarrassment of the local police. The investigator, a suave Sicilian, matches the subtlety of the charmingly snobbish suspects, for whom a man of his type is a beguiling novelty, as they are for him. It would be a mistake to label this book a murder mystery. It is a marvelously rich novel with fully rounded, indeed, unforgettable characters, structured around a murder case. The visceral curiosity about ‘who done it' furnishes the suspense on the surface level, At the same time, however, the reader is constantly delighted by the wit and charm with which the two authors handle the inquiry. Two love stories, one escalating, the other disintegrating, are brought to beginning and end in the wake of the murder, generating their own suspense. This may well be the most delightful and sophisticated entertainment of this and many seasons. A pair of remarkably acute Italian writers have written a joyful book around a grim happening, and in the process given us the portrait of an Italian city - Turin - and its society, high, low, and dubious. Here, at long last, is a true novel whose scenes and people have real, continuing life, a novel that one reads with avidity and hates to put down. Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini, who live in Turin, have been literary collaborators for fifteen years, editing, among other works, anthologies of American literature and science fiction. For their first supersleuth novel, THE SUNDAY WOMAN, they were awarded Italy's ‘Book-of-the-Year' prize.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Franco Lucentini (December 24, 1920 - August 5, 2002) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies. Born in Rome on December 24, 1920 to Emma Marzi and Venanzio Lucentini, a miller from the village of Visso, in the Marche region, and later the owner of a bakery in Rome. Carlo Fruttero (19 September 1926 - 15 January 2012) was an Italian writer, journalist, translator and editor of anthologies. Fruttero was born in Turin. He is mostly known for his joint work with Franco Lucentini, especially as authors of crime novels. The duo was also editor of the science fiction series Urania from the 1960s to the 1980s, and of the comics magazine Il Mago. Fruttero died in Castiglione della Pescaia in 2012, aged 85.
DESCRIPTION - In an astonishing turnabout, Carlos Fuentes follows his most recent novel, the huge, complex, baroque, historical fantasy TERRA NOSTRA, with what is probably the first Third World spy thriller, an action-filled, quick-paced, terse novel of intrigue as contemporary as a headline. One fateful morning, Felix Maldonado, a minor official in the Mexican bureaucracy, steps into a nightmare world in which he is ensnared in a murder he never intended: the assassination of the President. As he is gradually divested of his identity, he struggles between his Dostoevskian frenzy for affirmation and the Kafkaesque passivity of oblivion others try to impose on him: the Director General of his Ministry, who first proposes that Felix surrender his name in exchange for his life; the fat economics professor, Bernstein, who believes a man is recognized only when he is not being hunted down; and the ambiguous master spy, ‘Timon,' who prefers defeat to success. They are surrounded by a cast of twilight figures: Ayub, a Lebanese punk; the posturing coward Rossetti and his ambitious wife, Angelica, a lady with a penchant for adventures in swimming pools; Licha, a sensual but unsatisfied nurse; the teenage Mexican agents Rosita and Emiliano; and the women in Felix's life, all three Jewish: Ruth, his wife; Sara Klein, a survivor of the Holocaust; and Mary Benjamin, who tortures her ugly merchant husband with her infidelities. Set in the houses of the rich and in sleazy hotels and sinister hospitals in Mexico City, in the steamy Gulf ports of Coatzacoalcos and Galveston and the luxury clubs and corporate offices of Houston, THE HYDRA HEAD has a constant political reality as backdrop: the permanent tension in the Middle East and the vast new oil resources of Mexico. Behind the individual drives for power, justice, money, love, or simple survival lurk the cold imperatives of the international chessboard and its masked players. Felix is caught between both, making it impossible to know where his lust for Mary, his tenderness for Ruth, and his love for Sara stop and the hard facts of political reality begin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 - May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world' and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s', while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist'. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
DESCRIPTION - Carlos Fuentes has long been concerned with the Mexico of Pancho Villa. As Mexico's greatest living novelist - one whose work is suffused with the weight of history - it is not surprising that in his new novel, THE OLD GRINGO, he brings the Mexico of 1914 uncannily to life. But Fuentes also knows a great deal about the United States, and his novel is, most of all, about the tragic history of these two cultures in conflict. THE OLD GRINGO tells the story of Ambrose Bierce, the American writer, soldier, journalist, and his last mysterious days in Mexico among Villa's soldiers. In particular, the book is about the encounter between Bierce (the ‘old gringo' of the title) and Tomás Arroyo, one of Villa's generals. The novel also concerns Harriet Winslow, an American woman in Mexico, whose relations with Bierce and Arroyo become crucial to the book's conclusion. In the end, the incompatibility of Mexico and the United States (or, paradoxically, their intimacy) claims both Bierce and Arroyo. THE OLD GRINGO is a wise book, full of toughness and humanity. It is without question one of the finest works of modern Latin American fiction. Fuentes is a master storyteller, and he has written a book of enormous ambition in a way that is at once challenging and accessible. THE OLD GRINGO is a profound work about politics, love, the human tragedy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 - May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world' and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s', while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist'. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.
DESCRIPTION - Carlo Emilio Gadda is universally regarded as the most interesting and original writer in contemporary Italian literature, and this novel, his major work, is recognized throughout Europe as a masterpiece of baroque magnificence and savage, black humor. Most of the Pasticciaccio - as the novel is called familiarly after its Italian title - takes place on the via Merulana, ‘an unlikely setting for a great novel,' as William Weaver says in his Introduction, and ‘the least romantic street in Rome: a long, straight thoroughfare with square, solid, ugly buildings, constructed for the square, solid bourgeoisie of half a century ago.' In a large apartment house on this stolid street, an apartment house occupied mostly by the upper-middle-class, some rich, and some not so rich, two crimes are committed within three days of each other. After an armed hold-up in which a consideab1e sum in jewels and money is stolen, a young woman is found savagely murdered in a different apartment on the same landing, and the police investigation begins. The novel thus is, at least on the surface, a wryly amusing, exciting, exceedingly involved and, in the end, unsolved murder mystery. But the author is concerned with much more than its unraveling. Indeed, the murder mystery seems merely a rich device to expose the Rome of 1927, a society of rich ‘profiteers' and pompous minor bureaucrats that hid behind Mussolini's bragging rhetoric. Gadda's great novel may therefore be seen as a profound and vast allegory of Italy's descent into corruption and violence during the dark years of Fascist rule. In English, one could only compare Gadda to Joyce. His novel, it seems likely, will eventually have the same prominence and renown in the English-speaking world that it already has in Italy, France and Germany, in fact all over Europe. Gadda is above all close to Joyce in the power of his intellect, in the overflowing richness of cultural learning he brings to his writing, and in the great range in mood and tone of his style. As one Roman critic said on the novel's first appearance in Italy, ‘Seasoned like a classic, the Pasticciaccio is not only the highest peak of Gadda's art, but it is also one of the great works of XXth century Italian literature.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlo Emilio Gadda (November 14, 1893 - May 21, 1973) was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay. Gadda was a practising engineer from Milan, and he both loved and hated his job. Critics have compared him to other writers with a scientific background, such as Primo Levi, Robert Musil and Thomas Pynchon - a similar spirit of exactitude pervades some of Gadda's books.
DESCRIPTION - Capturing a nineteenth-century Spanish world of political tumult and personal obsession, Benito Perez Galdos's FORTUNATA AND JACINTA tells of two women who love the same man unfailingly - one as his mistress, the other as his wife. In this new and complete translation, Agnes Moncy Gullon presents the detailed realism, the diversity of character and scene that have placed FORTUNATA AND JACINTA alongside the voluminous works of Charles Dickens and HonorE de Balzac. Galdos's Madrid, recast from his youthful wanderings through the city's slums and cafEs, includes the egg sellers and faded bullfighters surrounding Fortunata as well as the quieter, sequestered milieu of Jacinta's upbringing. Through Juanito, the lover of both women, the writer reveals Spain as a variegated fabric of delicate traditions and established vices, of shaky politics and rich intrigue. In this vast and colorful world, resonant of Dickens's London and Balzac's France, Galdos presents his characters with a depth, ambiguity, and humor born of the multiplicity of his scene. Galdos's novels enjoyed, for a time, a wide and attentive readership in Spain. As his reputation grew, however, hostility toward his achievements, envy of his success, and political squabbling hampered his progress, stalling his election to the Royal Academy and, in 1912, thoroughly derailing his nomination as Spain's candidate for the Nobel Prize. Though the political controversies that surrounded Galdds's works have long been calmed, this translation by Agnes Moncy Gullon brings alive the tempestuous era in which he lived and wrote, allowing English readers to hear the percussive yet often melodic tones of nineteenth-century Madrid in the correct and casual speech of Jacinta, in the pretty but empty words of Juanito, and in the painfully proper, sometimes vulgar language of Fortunata.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benito Perez Galdos (May 10, 1843 - January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19thc. Spain. Galdos was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and galdosistas (Galdos researchers) considered him Spain's equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. As recently as 1950, few of his works were available translated to English, although he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world. While his plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre. The Galdos museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, features a portrait of the writer by Joaquín Sorolla.
DESCRIPTION - THE SHADOW (La Sombra) is the first novel by Benito Perez Galdos, Spain's foremost author after Cervantes. Composed in 1866 or 1867, it was published in serial form in 1870. It was long ignored by critics, who found it difficult to fit within the established stereotypes of nineteenth century Realism, and has only recently attracted the attention it deserves. The novel is a curious blend of a sort of gothic supernaturalism and of the scientific rationalism of emergent literary Realism, a dichotomy reflected in and strengthened by the novelistic mode employed by the author. There are two first-person narrators in the work. The first is an unnamed person who, if not actually Galdos himself, is at least the spokesman for enlightened rationalism and diurnal realities. The other, Anselmo is the one to whom the events happened in his youth: and since the first narrator has no knowledge of those events, he quickly fades to a secondary position, allowing Anselmo to give his own interpretation of the matter. Anselmo was an unstable young man who entered into an arranged marriage with a lovely girl named Elena, whom he barely knew. He soon became enamored of her, then insanely jealous. There was in the house a picture of Paris and Helen of Troy. According to Anselmo, the figure of Paris first laughed at him, then disappeared from the canvas, and finally became a real - though still supernatural - person to such extent that they even fought a duel. The upshot of Anselmo's erratic behavior was Elena's death, after which, the reason for jealousy having been eliminated, Paris vanished. Although the original narrator has the last word, his lack of absolute conviction, combined with the fantastic surroundings and the extraordinary nature of Anselmo's relation, leave the novel open to more than one possible reading, and make it of considerable importance for any balanced view of literary development in the nineteenth century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Benito Perez Galdos (May 10, 1843 - January 4, 1920) was a Spanish realist novelist. Some authorities consider him second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist. He was the leading literary figure in 19thc. Spain. Galdos was a prolific writer, publishing 31 novels, 46 Episodios Nacionales (National Episodes), 23 plays, and the equivalent of 20 volumes of shorter fiction, journalism and other writings. He remains popular in Spain, and galdosistas (Galdos researchers) considered him Spain's equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. As recently as 1950, few of his works were available translated to English, although he has slowly become popular in the Anglophone world. While his plays are generally considered to be less successful than his novels, Realidad (1892) is important in the history of realism in the Spanish theatre. The Galdos museum in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, features a portrait of the writer by Joaquín Sorolla. Karen O. Austin is Associate Professor of Foreign Languages, University of Southern Mississippi.
DESCRIPTION - ‘. truly a majestic book. It drives ahead with a great emotional and intellectual power. The range and depth of Galeano's knowledge is stupendous. His style is superb and fits his perfect grasp of this vast mass of material which at the same time is admirably and competently organized. There is not a minute's letdown. He is as remorseless as a tornado and rips away every defense of imperialism with a determined yet quiet rage. This book surpasses any I have ever read on the theme, and it will endure through all the years to come. It is truly a great book.'- Carleton Beals. ‘This book may in time rival all others in providing general ideas for analyses of both the colonial and modern periods. Although a writer-journalist by trade, Galeano possesses a grasp of history and historicism that is often missing in the writings of persons trained in the field. He is brilliant in his description of poverty in the cities, the international system of domination suffered by each country, and the reproduction of similar systems within each of them. a dazzling barrage of words and ideas' - History. ‘Eminent Latin American author Galeano is both impassioned and a hard-nosed scholar in this well-documented, Marxist-oriented history of Latin America as an exploited continent from the time of Columbus to the present. Galeano focuses on the despoliation of the land, people and culture of those countries. Gold, silver, cocoa, cotton, rubber, coffee, fruit, sugar, oil, iron, tin, copper and nitrates are among the open veins' whose drainage Galeano traces and analyzes ‘ - Publishers' Weekly. cover art: From a woodcut of The Gnat, the Lion, and the Spiderweb' by Antonio Frasconi, a Uruguayan artist who lives in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eduardo Hughes Galeano (born 3 September 1940) is a Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist. His best known works are Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire Trilogy, 1986) and Las venas abiertas de AmErica Latina (Open Veins of Latin America, 1971) which have been translated into 20 languages and transcend orthodox genres: combining fiction, journalism, political analysis, and history. The author himself has proclaimed his obsession as a writer saying, ‘I'm a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia.'
DESCRIPTION - A little monster, having disobeyed his mother by eating the watermelon intended for the family's dessert, suffers for his greed in a subsequent dream.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jack Gantos has written novels for adults, young adults, and middle grade readers, as well as over twenty books for primary readers, including twelve titles chronicling the misadventures of Rotten Ralph. He lives in Santa Fe, NM. Nicole Rubel is an author/illustrator known for her uniquely colorful illustrations and charming stories. She has over fifty books to her credit and is the co-creator of the popular Rotten Ralph series. Raised in Coral Gables, Florida, Ms. Rubel received a Bachelor of Science in Art Teaching from the Boston Museum School in association with Tufts University. Ms. Rubel's debut book, Rotten Ralph, earned her the Children's Book Showcase Award for Outstanding Graphic Design. She has since received awards from The American Books Association, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, and American Booksellers. She is a finalist for the Oregon Book award for No More Vegetables 20003. Twice as Nice has won a 2005 Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Book Award and will be featured in the 13th edition of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio. Her first novel for ages 10 and up, ‘It's Hot and Cold in Miami,' was received with glowing reviews in 2007. Ms. Rubel's books It Came From The Swamp, Pirate Jupiter and the Moondogs, and Goldie have been adapted for CD-ROM by Vtech and IBM. Her Rotten Ralph books are the basis of a new television series, which began airing on Fox Family channel in 1999. Ms. Rubel's art style was inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and the art deco architecture of her hometown of Miami. Her imaginative, poignant and sometimes comical storylines are often derived from growing up with her identical twin sister, Bonnie. As a child she let her sister speak for her. Through the encouragement of an insightful teacher, Ms. Rubel learned to speak and write for herself. Therefore, a significant theme in her stories is finding oneself and learning to express one's feelings and thoughts. She currently resides with her husband on a farm in Aurora, Oregon. Cougar the cat, Fang the dog, their horses Dancer and Hippo and their sheep Lilly and Pansy keep them busy with mischief.
DESCRIPTION - In desperation, Sarah sends Rotten Ralph to feline finishing school. Will Ralph's mischief finally be a thing of the past? Rotten Ralph has been doing really rotten things for more than thirty years. Even when he's been at his rottenest, his owner Sarah still manages to love him. Kids everywhere have loved reading about Ralph's rotten-but loveable-antics.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jack Gantos (born July 2, 1951) is an American author of children's books. He is best known for the fictional characters Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza. Rotten Ralph is a cat who stars in ten picture books written by Gantos and illustrated by Nicole Rubel from 1976 to 2011. Joey Pigza is a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), featured in four novels from 1998 to 2007. Gantos won the 2012 Newbery Medal from the American Library Association (ALA), recognizing Dead End in Norvelt as the previous year's ‘most distinguished contribution to American literature for children'. Dead End also won the 2012 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and made the Guardian Prize longlist in Britain. His 2002 memoir Hole in My Life was a runner up for the ALA Printz Award and Sibert Medal. Previously Gantos was a finalist for the U.S. National Book Award and a finalist for the Newbery Medal for two Joey Pigza books. Nicole Rubel is an author/illustrator known for her uniquely colorful illustrations and charming stories. She has over fifty books to her credit and is the co-creator of the popular Rotten Ralph series. Raised in Coral Gables, Florida, Ms. Rubel received a Bachelor of Science in Art Teaching from the Boston Museum School in association with Tufts University. Ms. Rubel's debut book, Rotten Ralph, earned her the Children's Book Showcase Award for Outstanding Graphic Design. She has since received awards from The American Books Association, The American Institute of Graphic Arts, and American Booksellers. She is a finalist for the Oregon Book award for No More Vegetables 20003. Twice as Nice has won a 2005 Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Platinum Book Award and will be featured in the 13th edition of the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio. Her first novel for ages 10 and up, ‘It's Hot and Cold in Miami,' was received with glowing reviews in 2007. Ms. Rubel's books It Came From The Swamp, Pirate Jupiter and the Moondogs, and Goldie have been adapted for CD-ROM by Vtech and IBM. Her Rotten Ralph books are the basis of a new television series, which began airing on Fox Family channel in 1999. Ms. Rubel's art style was inspired by the paintings of Henri Matisse and the art deco architecture of her hometown of Miami. Her imaginative, poignant and sometimes comical storylines are often derived from growing up with her identical twin sister, Bonnie. As a child she let her sister speak for her. Through the encouragement of an insightful teacher, Ms. Rubel learned to speak and write for herself. Therefore, a significant theme in her stories is finding oneself and learning to express one's feelings and thoughts. She currently resides with her husband on a farm in Aurora, Oregon. Cougar the cat, Fang the dog, their horses Dancer and Hippo and their sheep Lilly and Pansy keep them busy with mischief.
DESCRIPTION - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ established his literary reputation more than twenty years ago with the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a legendary book that has been read by millions of people around the world. It was followed by other works, each of which drew new readers and new praise from the critics-culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. Now Garcia Marquez has written a book that takes its place alongside that earlier, famous work, in the company of the true masterpieces of modern literature. ‘It was inevitable. ‘ So begins this story set in a country on the Caribbean coast of South America-a story that ranges from the late nineteenth century to the early decades of our own, tracing the lives of three people and their entwined fates. And yet, at first nothing seems inevitable, for this is a tale of unrequited love. Fifty years, nine months, and four days' worth, to be exact. For that is how long Florentino Ariza has waited to declare, once again, his undying love to Fermina Daza, whom he courted and almost won so many years before. He has the bad grace, however, to make his declaration at the funeral of her husband, one of the most illustrious men of his time, a patron of the arts, distinguished professor of medicine, and leader in the fight against the cholera epidemics that once ravaged the country. Shaken by Florentino's bold speech, Fermina banishes him from her house. But that is only the beginning. With the craft, humor, and accumulated wisdom of a master of fiction, Garcia Márquez transports them (and the reader) back to those early days when they first met, courted, and were forced apart. He shows them going their very different ways-Florentino with his poetry, his rise to prominence in business, and (his devotion to Fermina Daza notwithstanding) his constant pursuit of women. And we see Fermina as she is wooed by the most sought-after bachelor of their time, Doctor Juvenal Urbino de la Calle; as they wed; as they experience all the events and emotions-honeymoon, passion, children, small betrayals, separations, dependencies, and adventures-that constitute a long, sturdy marriage. And then, at what might seem the end of their lives, Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza are brought together once more, in a meeting whose outcome is as fateful, as suspenseful, as any in literature. As the title suggests, Garcia Marquez has written a novel about love, love in all its guises: young love, married love, romantic love, carnal love, even love with the symptoms of cholera. More than that, he has written a work of art radiant with humanity that readers will savor and will remember for the rest of their lives.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He is the author of many novels and collections of stories-including NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL AND OTHER STORIES, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH, INNOCENT ERËNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES, IN EVIL HOUR, LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES, CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Garcia Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
DESCRIPTION - A best seller and critical success in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. It is a rich and brilliant chronicle of life and death and the tragicomedy of man. In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendia family one sees all mankind, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility-the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth-these, the universal themes, dominate the novel. Whether lie is describing an affair of passion or the voracity of capitalism and the corruption of government, Garcia Marquez always writes with the simplicity, ease, and purity that are the mark of a master. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, alive with unforgettable men and women, and with a truth and understanding that strike the soul, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is a masterpiece of the art of fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He is the author of many novels and collections of stories-including NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL AND OTHER STORIES, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH, INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES, IN EVIL HOUR, LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES, CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Garcia Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.
DESCRIPTION - RECOLLECTIONS OF THINGS TO COME is a first novel - but the reader forgets this after a very few pages, because it is also, as John Brushwood says in Mexico in Its Novel, ‘mature, profound, sensitive, and written with professional assurance that is apparent from beginning to end.' Octavio Paz, the internationally recognized poet and critic, has called it ‘truly an extraordinary work, one of the most perfect creations in contemporary Latin American literature.' The setting of Recollections is the small Mexican town of Ixtepec; the time is during the cristero revolts that broke out in the latter part of the 1920's. The town has been occupied by General Francisco Rosas and his troops, and when Rosas orders the closing of the church, the ensuing struggle-often clandestine-of the townspeople against the government forces leads to a climactic series of tragic events. Closely interwoven with the main narrative are the stories of Rosas and his mistress Julia, the Moncada and Melendez families, the amiable lunatic Juan Cariño, and other vividly realized characters. Miss Garro creates scene after scene with a realism that can range from starkness to almost lyrical evocation. Now and then she introduces an element of outright fantasy, but with such skill that it never seems out of keeping with the overall tone of the novel. These realities and unrealities are expressively suggested by the thirty illustrations which Alberto Beltrán, the well-known Mexican artist, has prepared for this translation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elena Garro (December 11, 1920 - August 22, 1998) was a Mexican writer. She was once married to writer Octavio Paz.
DESCRIPTION - SATAN narrates the epic of mankind and the part he has played therein. From the dim days of the remote Ice Age he watches the growth of the world, the coming of man, the part played by love and passion. He gives his version of the stories of Adam and Eve, the destruction of Sodom, the adventures of Jonah, the tribulation of Job ; he recalls the great days of history when he possessed Tiberius, Nero, the Caliph of Bagdad, Cromwell, Marie Antoinette, Napoleon, and many another. Finally, he arrives at a Bayswater boardinghouse, an old man and very weary. He has his last great adventure, makes his last possession, and then his mortal remains are taken for cremation to Golders Green. FROM Futurian War Digest, a sci-fi/fantasy fanzine published in Leeds during the Second World War by J. Michael Rosenblum - (from Issue 13 (Vol. 2, Number 1), dated October 1941: ‘The Memoirs of Satan' collated by William Gerhardie and Brian Lunn, (Cassell & Co 1932) is a surprising sort of book altogether. According to this, Satan was a collaborator of God, chosen to look after this earth because of his free and independent spirit. Mankind is due to an infatuation of his for a primitive she-ape, and he continually bemoans the fact that he did not choose a more sensible animal, such as the whale, to half endow with his divine nature. Due to his failure with this planet, Satan is finally punished by the All-Highest with the withdrawal of his immortality, and he dies, leaving the notes of his eon-long existence in a Bloomsbury hotel. '
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e' in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM). Brian Lunn (1893–1956) was a British writer. He was born in Bloomsbury, London to Methodist parents. He had a somewhat Puritanical upbringing, his father Henry Simpson Lunn (1859-1939, founder of Lunn's Travel agency that would become Lunn Poly) having strong religious beliefs which were in conflict with his talent as a businessman. Arnold Lunn and Hugh Kingsmill were his brothers. His most important work as a writer was 'Switchback', his autobiography published in 1948. Its highlight is Brian's description of a mental breakdown he had while serving in Mesopotamia in the 11th Black Watch. T
DESCRIPTION - This is the first novel by William Gerhardie, first published in 1922, and it was made famous by H. G. Wells, who described it as 'true, devastating - a wonderful book'. Based on Gerhardie's own experiences as a member of the British Military Mission to Siberia shortly after the October Revolution, Futility paints a picture of contemporary Russian society which deserves comparison with the writing of Chekhov. At the centre of the story is Nicolai Vasilievich, who trails across Russia in the wake of the British Mission in the perpetual and unrealistic hope of seeing his fortunes improve, even though they steadily deteriorate. In counterpoint to Nicolai's comic progression, Gerhardie tells the story of his narrator's hopeless love for Nina, the second of Nicolai's three bewitching adolescent daughters. 'William Gerhardie is one of our immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' Olivia Manning 'He is a comic writer of genius. but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e' in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM).
DESCRIPTION - Written with a rare candour, this enchanting and entertaining book describes the early life of this ‘unique, isolated and important figure in English letters.' William Gerhardie has been quoted as saying that his hopes lie in ‘ever being discovered astonishingly anew.' Mr Gerhardie writes about his grandparents and parents, and about his childhood in St Petersburg where his father, a British cotton manufacturer settled in the 1890s. He joined the Scots Greys in the First World War, was commissioned and posted to the British Embassy at Petrograd, where he saw the Russian Revolution in various stages. MEMOIRS OF A POLYGLOT is illustrated with photographs, many of them charming examples from family albums. At Oxford, he wrote FUTILITY, the first of his novels. MEMOIRS OF A POLYGLOT wonderfully illuminates the literary personality and the enduring works of this author, of whom C. P. Snow has said: ‘He is a comic writer of genus. but his art is profoundly serious. William Gerhardie was the friend some of the most interesting people of the 1920s and 1930s - from Beaverbrook to the Sitweils - and writes brilliantly, and amusingly about the literary and political scene. As Michael Ivens has commented, William Gerhardie's life has been full of ‘odd and incredible events' and these - including many travels - are described in MEMOIRS OF A POLYGLOT with zest, humour and remarkable insight.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e' in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM).
DESCRIPTION - THE POLYGLOTS, Gerhardie's comic masterpiece, is the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East through the uncertain years after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during his military mission to the East. Filled with a host of bizarre characters - depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, sex maniacs, hypochondriacs - Gerhardie paints a wonderfully absurd and directionless world where the comic and tragic are irrevocably entwined.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e' in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM).
DESCRIPTION - ‘Resurrection' is fiction and autobiography merged into one. For though, in its passionate argument for the resurrection of the body, it presents the entire truth of the author's experience, it remains fiction in its technique and in its surface of names and pattern. A brilliant London ball furnishes the setting. Here are encountered the singular and bright individuals whose lives and thoughts have contributed to the reality of the author's existence. Throughout this affair, dancing, falling in love, conversing, eating, he is driven by the powerful conviction that has lately come to him - the conviction that we do not die. This belief so colors and compels each moment, that he has the force to relive his entire life in the course of the evening. More than half of the book is given to an extraordinary recital, during which the author summons up the experiences he had in one year that was unusually crowded with adventure of every sort, a year of travel when he visited America, Greece, Egypt, India. Returning to the ball at last, he returns to his present and to the bewildering contrast that his new belief in an after-life provides. The whole last section is a record of the personal conflict, subtly played out in the setting with which the novel begins. New in treatment as in story, this represents William Gerhardi's most mature contribution to fiction. The style and signature are unmistakable; and they are the same that distinguished such novels as FUTILITY and THE POLYGLOTS.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Alexander Gerhardie (1895-1977) was a British (Anglo-Russian) novelist and playwright. Gerhardie (or Gerhardi: he added the ‘e' in later years as an affectation) was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting (or attempting to fight) the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of ‘waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece (although some argue for DOOM).
DESCRIPTION - THE VIOLENT WEST, Zulfikar Ghose's third book of poems, begins with the sequence ‘Westward Flight', poems, which are both descriptive and meditative. The poet, looking at the new world in which he finds himself, observes it and meditates upon his existence in it. Memories of the previous worlds he inhabited intermingle and illumine the present and, finally, engage the poet's imagination in a contemplation of ‘The Other World', which is the last poem of the sequence. In the second section, ‘A Private Lot', man's isolation in a hostile world is the dominating theme. These poems are imbued with a sense of emotional and spiritual exhaustion: the landscapes here, whether drawn from experiences of the desert in the Punjab or in Arizona, are real and yet each possesses a quality of terror and becomes the landscape of the mind. ‘Tyrannies' is the third section of the book. The title alludes to the first and the last poems in the section in which the tyrannies are social and political. But emotions - arising, for example, from observing a mother suffer from illness - are also tyrannies which must be endured. To the reader familiar with Zulfikar Ghose's earlier work, THE VIOLENT WEST will represent a bold advance. The images are powerful and evocative as they have always been in his poetry; but his language now has a greater range and precision; the complexity of the ideas is impressive; there is a striking verbal richness; the total gain is one of authenticity, forcing the reader to admit the truths of his imagination. Zulfikar Ghose received a Poetry Bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1967.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zulfikar Ghose (born March 13, 1935, Sialkot, India (now Pakistan) is a Pakistani American English language writer. He was born in 1935 in Pakistan and moved to Bombay in 1942. After the partition of British India into Pakistan and the present India, he migrated to England teaching at Ealing Mead School and then to the United States in 1969. He lives in Texas and teaches at The University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Ghose has written poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction) equally. The Loss of India, Jets from Orange, The Violent West, A Memory of Asia and Selected Poems are some of his poetry books. He has written short stories, novels, biographies and five books of literary criticism.
DESCRIPTION - In the little, normal-seeming town of Rams Horn, once famous for its healing mud and its fine fossil bed, wreathed in legends and close to the poisonous swamps that mark the mouth of the River Sheep, things are decidedly abnormal: a seer who has waited years for her drowned husband to appear is suddenly besieged by her own demons; an African sailor arrives from the sea to ravage and plunder the widow and her daughter who have (unwittingly?)sheltered him; a group of small boys plot kidnapping and sexual violation; a doctor, unhinged by his desire for the voluptuous seer, turns to a medicine older than his own for a cure. There is lust, madness, a disappearance - we might be on the edge of tragedy or chaos. But because of the uncanny skill and vision of the author, we have instead a fabulous brew of mystery, sex and fairy-tale enchantment that leaves the reader smiling, uplifted, overjoyed: indeed, dancing with mermaids. Miles Gibson has worked a miracle of style and craft. DANCING WITH MERMAIDS is a book of dreams - dreams great writers sometimes get on midsummer nights.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miles Gibson (born 1947) is a reclusive English novelist, poet and artist. Gibson was born in a squatters camp at an abandoned World War II airbase - RAF Holmsley South in the New Forest and raised in Mudeford, Dorset. He was educated at Sandhills Infant School, Somerford Junior School and Somerford Secondary Modern. Upon leaving school he migrated to London and worked in advertising as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson after winning a place in their ten most ingenious undergraduate writers in Britain today competition, despite lacking the primary qualification of a university education. He later flirted with Fleet Street as a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph Magazine under the brilliant editorship of John Anstey. He was the Telegraph's runner-up Young Writer of the Year, in 1969. Gibson's darkly satirical writing has been described as both 'magic realism' and 'absurdist fiction.' Although his narratives remain linear in construction his employment of black humour, pastiche, and untrustworthy narrators places him firmly among the postmodernists. When the Huffington Post ran a list of their favorite literary novelists to take the plunge into genre fiction, they included Gibson's Einstein: 'Miles Gibson, one of the very few British authors to successfully pen a magical realism novel based in the UK, is known for his toying with genre. Maybe his most notable genre piece came in 2004 with sci-fi comedy Einstein, one of the genre's forgotten treasures.' His works include two collections of poetry, The Guilty Bystander (1970) and Permanent Damage (1973), as well as the novels The Sandman (1984), Dancing with Mermaids (1985), Vinegar Soup (1987), Kingdom Swann (1990), Fascinated (1993), The Prisoner of Meadow Bank (1995), Mr Romance (2002) and Einstein (2004). His works for children include Say Hello to the Buffalo, illustrated by Chris Riddell (1994), Little Archie (2004) and Whoops - There Goes Joe, illustrated by Neal Layton (2006). Kingdom Swann was adapted by David Nobbs as the feature-length comedy drama Gentlemen's Relish for BBC TV, starring Billy Connolly, Sarah Lancashire and Douglas Henshall (2001). He has written drama for BBC Radio 4 and his essays, poetry and short stories have appeared in various newspapers, journals and anthologies.
DESCRIPTION - In the fragrant, steamy kitchen of the Hercules Cafe in a seedy London district Gilbert Firestone, loving and faithful family-man to his common-law wife, Olive, and foundling son, Frank, cooks up simple stews and elaborate dreams. He yearns to travel the world and capture the adventure-paradise he and his soul mate, Sam Pilchard, sought during their salad days, wandering the world, saucepans in hand. When Olive dies, drowned in a pan of meat soup, he seizes the chance to make his dream come true. With Frank and the cafe's sexy punk waitress, Veronica, in tow, Gilbert heads for remote Bilharzia in West Africa to join Sam at his jungle hotel. What he finds there is a world far more dangerous and corrupt than the one he imagines he left behind - a dizzying quagmire of madness and decay. Sensuous, outrageously funny and wildly inventive, HOTEL PLENTI is an entertainment of the highest order - one that elicits whoops and belly laughs while delivering a deceptively poignant and penetrating fable of the universal quest for more. The New Yorker called Gibson's DANCING WITH MERMAIDS ‘a wild, poetic exhalation that sparkles and hoots and flies.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miles Gibson (born 1947) is a reclusive English novelist, poet and artist. Gibson was born in a squatters camp at an abandoned World War II airbase - RAF Holmsley South in the New Forest and raised in Mudeford, Dorset. He was educated at Sandhills Infant School, Somerford Junior School and Somerford Secondary Modern. Upon leaving school he migrated to London and worked in advertising as a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson after winning a place in their ten most ingenious undergraduate writers in Britain today competition, despite lacking the primary qualification of a university education. He later flirted with Fleet Street as a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph Magazine under the brilliant editorship of John Anstey. He was the Telegraph's runner-up Young Writer of the Year, in 1969. Gibson's darkly satirical writing has been described as both 'magic realism' and 'absurdist fiction.' Although his narratives remain linear in construction his employment of black humour, pastiche, and untrustworthy narrators places him firmly among the postmodernists. When the Huffington Post ran a list of their favorite literary novelists to take the plunge into genre fiction, they included Gibson's Einstein: 'Miles Gibson, one of the very few British authors to successfully pen a magical realism novel based in the UK, is known for his toying with genre. Maybe his most notable genre piece came in 2004 with sci-fi comedy Einstein, one of the genre's forgotten treasures.' His works include two collections of poetry, The Guilty Bystander (1970) and Permanent Damage (1973), as well as the novels The Sandman (1984), Dancing with Mermaids (1985), Vinegar Soup (1987), Kingdom Swann (1990), Fascinated (1993), The Prisoner of Meadow Bank (1995), Mr Romance (2002) and Einstein (2004). His works for children include Say Hello to the Buffalo, illustrated by Chris Riddell (1994), Little Archie (2004) and Whoops - There Goes Joe, illustrated by Neal Layton (2006). Kingdom Swann was adapted by David Nobbs as the feature-length comedy drama Gentlemen's Relish for BBC TV, starring Billy Connolly, Sarah Lancashire and Douglas Henshall (2001). He has written drama for BBC Radio 4 and his essays, poetry and short stories have appeared in various newspapers, journals and anthologies.
DESCRIPTION - Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called ‘the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.' Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results–a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number off incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the ‘three strikes' law–pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is a member of the founding collective of Critical Resistance, one of the most important national anti-prison organizations in the United States.
DESCRIPTION - In RACISM 101, Nikki Giovanni indicts higher education for the inequities it perpetuates, contemplates the legacy of the l960s, provides a survival guide for black students on predominantly white campuses (complete with razor-sharp comebacks to the dumb questions constantly asked of black students) and excoriates Spike Lee while offering her own ideas for a film about Malcolm X. And that is just for starters. She also writes about W. E. B. Du Bois, gardening, Toni Morrison, Star Trek, affirmative action, space exploration, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the role of griots, and the rape and neglect of urban schools. But to reduce Nikki Giovanni's essays to their subjects is to miss altogether their significance. As Virginia C. Fowler writes in her Foreword, ‘These pieces are artistic expression of a particular way of looking at the world, featuring a performing voice capable of dizzying displays of virtuosity.' Profoundly personal and blisteringly political angry and funny, lyrical and blunt, RACISM 101 will add an important chapter to the debate on American national values.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikki Giovanni (born June 7, 1943), one of America's most widely read living poets, has earned a reputation for being outspoken and controversial - mostly because she always speaks her mind. She entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom. A recording of her poems was one of the best-selling albums in the country; all but one of her nearly twenty books are still in print with several having sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Named woman of the year by three different magazines, including Ebony, and recipient of a host of honorary doctorates and awards, Nikki Giovanni has read from her work and lectured at colleges around the country. Her books include BLACK FEELING, BLACK TALK/BLACK JUDGEMENT; MY HOUSE; THE WOMEN AND THE MEN; COTTON CANDY ON A RAINY DAY; THOSE WHO RIDE THE NIGHT WINDS; and SACRED COWS. AND OTHER EDIBLES. Nikki Giovanni is a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic.
DESCRIPTION - When Nikki Giovanni's poems first emerged from the Black Rights Movement in the late 1960s, she immediately took a place among the most celebrated and controversial poets of the era. Finally, here is the first compilation of Nikki Giovanni's poetry. It is the testimony of a life's work from one of the commanding voices to grace America's political and poetic landscape at the end of the twentieth century. From the revolutionary 'The Great Pax Whitie' and 'Poem for Aretha' to the sublime 'Ego Tripping' and the tender 'My House,' these 150 mind-speaking, truth-telling poems are at once powerful yet sensual, angry yet affirming. Arranged chronologically, they reflect the changes Giovanni has endured as a Black woman, lover, mother, teacher, and poet. Here is the evocation of a nation's past and present - intensely personal and fiercely political - from one of our most compassionate, outspoken observers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikki Giovanni, one of America's most widely read living poets, has earned a reputation for being outspoken and controversial - mostly because she always speaks her mind. She entered the literary world at the height of the Black Arts Movement and quickly achieved not simple fame but stardom. A recording of her poems was one of the best-selling albums in the country; all but one of her nearly twenty books are still in print with several having sold more than a hundred thousand copies. Named woman of the year by three different magazines, including Ebony, and recipient of a host of honorary doctorates and awards, Nikki Giovanni has read from her work and lectured at colleges around the country. Her books include BLACK FEELING, BLACK TALK/BLACK JUDGEMENT; MY HOUSE; THE WOMEN AND THE MEN; COTTON CANDY ON A RAINY DAY; THOSE WHO RIDE THE NIGHT WINDS; and SACRED COWS. AND OTHER EDIBLES. Nikki Giovanni is a professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic.
DESCRIPTION - Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of fugitive pedagogy—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage. There is perhaps no better exemplar of this heritage than Carter G. Woodson - groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged: Woodson’s first teachers were his formerly enslaved uncles; he himself taught for nearly thirty years; and he spent his life partnering with educators to transform the lives of Black students. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the mis-education of the Negro by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today. As departments…scramble to decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges.—Boston Review. Informative and inspiring…An homage to the achievement of an often-forgotten racial pioneer.—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier. A long-overdue labor of love and analysis…that would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.—Randal Maurice Jelks, Los Angeles Review of Books. Fascinating, and groundbreaking. Givens restores Carter G. Woodson, one of the most important educators and intellectuals of the twentieth century, to his rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.—Imani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jarvis R. Givens is Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2020–2021, he was the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
DESCRIPTION - From the moment when Thaël, the young man from the mountains, is summoned to join a group of revolutionaries in the town in order to perform a political murder, to his tragic return to mountain savagery, we are enveloped in the seething tropical atmosphere of the Caribbean. THE RIPENING is much more than the story of a murder or of a political uprising. In microcosm, it is the saga of a whole people on their Caribbean island - their past, their future, the interweaving of the magic spells of old and the far-reaching potentialities of the future. Complementing and, in effect, shaping their destiny, is the vital force of the tropical island itself, the dark mountains, the sweltering plains, the surging sea, and the river Lizard, leading to the outside world. In this climate, conviction and passion take on an earthy taste and are as tangible as the landscape. It is against this background that the young Martinique author, Edouard Glissant, introduces his group of youthful conspirators. Their search for a synthesis of past and present, over their aspirations for the future, and their gradual development of self-awareness and self-expression, are interwoven with the drama of the birth of an entire people. THE RIPENING, a first novel, was awarded the Renaudot Prize in 1958. It has been acclaimed by French critics as a masterpiece', a novel of ‘epic stature.'. EDOUARD GLISSANT was born in 1928 in Sainte-Marie, Martinique. He now lives in France, where he studied at the Sorbonne and the Musee. de l'Homme. He had already made his name as a poet before publication of THE RIPENING, which was titled La LEzarde in the French edition. (original title: La Lezarde, 1958 - Editions du Seuil).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edouard Glissant (21 September 1928 - 3 February 2011) was a Martinican writer, poet and literary critic. He is widely recognised as one of the most influential figures in Caribbean thought and cultural commentary.
DESCRIPTION - The Sorrows of Young Werther brings to life an idyllic German village where a youth on vacation meets and falls for lovely Charlotte. The tragedy unfolds in the letters Werther writes to his friend about Charlotte's charms, even after he realizes his love will remain unrequited.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 - 22 March 1832) was a German writer, artist, and politician. His body of work includes epic and lyric poetry written in a variety of metres and styles; prose and verse dramas; memoirs; an autobiography; literary and aesthetic criticism; treatises on botany, anatomy, and colour; and four novels. In addition, numerous literary and scientific fragments, and more than 10,000 letters written by him are extant, as are nearly 3,000 drawings.
DESCRIPTION - Erving Coffman is widely regarded as the most original new force in modern sociology; Presentation of Self, considered his central work, is published here for the first time in hardcover. Using the metaphor of the stage as a frame of reference, Dr. Coffman deals with the important theme of human interaction in social situations. Role-playing is now recognized as not merely the province of the stage performer and the maladjusted neurotic but an integral and necessary function of daily living for all of us. Stating his case clearly, Dr. Goffman explores the concept of self in the relation of actor to audience. Social techniques of self-presentation are illuminated by examples taken from detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions and a variety of occupational levels. One of the most interesting aspects of this study is its revelation of the many roles that must be assumed by everyone engaged in even the simplest life-situations. In the course of any day one may easily play a half-dozen parts: with the boss, with fellow-workers, with friends, with one's spouse, and so on. Dr. Goffman's perceptive analogy details exactly how "acting" techniques are used in the most common everyday circumstances; it bares the mainsprings of manipulation that keep society moving. One of a small number of contemporary classics in sociology, the work provides critical social-psychological insights to both layman and student.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Erving Goffman (11 June 1922 - 19 November 1982), a Canadian-born sociologist and writer, was considered 'the most influential American sociologist of the twentieth century'. In 2007 he was listed by The Times Higher Education Guide as the sixth most-cited author in the humanities and social sciences, behind Anthony Giddens and ahead of Jürgen Habermas. Goffman was the 73rd president of the American Sociological Association. His best-known contribution to social theory is his study of symbolic interaction. This took the form of dramaturgical analysis, beginning with his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman's other major works include Asylums (1961), Stigma (1963), Interaction Ritual (1967), Frame Analysis (1974), and Forms of Talk (1981). His major areas of study included the sociology of everyday life, social interaction, the social construction of self, social organization (framing) of experience, and particular elements of social life such as total institutions and stigmas.
DESCRIPTION - When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry!. I still haven't recovered." — More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol (1809-52), Russian writer, whose plays, short stories, and novels rank among the great masterpieces of 19th-century Russian realist literature.
DESCRIPTION - Includes the essays - Anarchism: What It Really Stands For; Minorities Versus Majorities; The Psychology of Political Violence; Prisons: A Social Crime and Failure; Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty; Francisco Ferrer and The Modern School; The Hypocrisy of Puritanism; The Traffic in Women; Woman Suffrage; The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation; Marriage and Love; The Drama: A Powerful Dissimenator of Radical Thought. Anarchism was central to Emma Goldman's view of the world and she is today considered one of the most important figures in the history of anarchism. First drawn to it during the persecution of anarchists after the 1886 Haymarket affair, she wrote and spoke regularly on behalf of anarchism. In the title essay of her book ANARCHISM AND OTHER ESSAYS, she wrote: ‘Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.' Goldman's anarchism was intensely personal. She believed it was necessary for anarchist thinkers to live their beliefs, demonstrating their convictions with every action and word. ‘I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct,' she once wrote. ‘I care if his spirit of today is correct.'Anarchism and free association were to her logical responses to the confines of government control and capitalism. ‘It seems to me that these are the new forms of life,' she wrote, ‘and that they will take the place of the old, not by preaching or voting, but by living them.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anarchist and feminist EMMA GOLDMAN (1869-1940) is one of the towering figures in global radicalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in Lithuania, she emigrated to the United States as a teenager, was deported in 1919 for her criticism of the U.S. military draft in World War I, and died in Toronto after a globetrotting life. An early advocate of birth control, women's rights, and workers unions, she was an important and influential figure in such far-flung geopolitical events as the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. Among her many books are My Disillusionment in Russia (1925) and Living My Life (1931).
DESCRIPTION - Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), novelist, essayist, and playwright, was one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. A candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he was described by Milan Kundera as ‘one of the great novelists of our century' and by John Updike as ‘one of the profoundest of the late moderns.' Gombrowicz's works were considered scandalous and subversive by the ruling powers in Poland and were banned for nearly forty years. He spent his last years in France teaching philosophy; this book is a series of reflections based on his lectures. Gombrowicz discusses Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Heidegger in six ‘one-hour' essays and addresses Marxism in a shorter ‘fifteen-minute' piece. The text-a small literary gem full of sardonic wit, brilliant insights, and provocative criticism-constructs the philosophical lineage of his work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), novelist, essayist, and playwright, was one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. A candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he was described by Milan Kundera as ‘one of the great novelists of our century' and by John Updike as ‘one of the profoundest of the late moderns.' Gombrowicz's works were considered scandalous and subversive by the ruling powers in Poland and were banned for nearly forty years. He spent his last years in France teaching philosophy.
DESCRIPTION - Just before the outbreak of World War II, young Witold Gombrowicz left his home in Poland and set sail for South America. In 1953, still living as an expatriate in Argentina, he began his Diary with one of literature's most memorable openings: ‘Monday Me. Tuesday Me. Wednesday Me. Thursday Me.' Gombrowicz's DIARY grew to become a vast collection of essays, short notes, polemics, and confessions on myriad subjects ranging from political events to literature to the certainty of death. Not a traditional journal, DIARY is instead the commentary of a brilliant and restless mind. Widely regarded as a masterpiece, this brilliant work compelled Gombrowicz's attention for a decade and a half until he penned his final entry in France, shortly before his death in 1969. Long out of print in English, DIARY is now presented in a convenient single volume featuring a new preface by Rita Gombrowicz, the author's widow and literary executor. This edition also includes ten previously unpublished pages from the 1969 portion of the diary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), novelist, essayist, and playwright, was one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. A candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he was described by Milan Kundera as ‘one of the great novelists of our century' and by John Updike as ‘one of the profoundest of the late moderns.' Gombrowicz's works were considered scandalous and subversive by the ruling powers in Poland and were banned for nearly forty years. He spent his last years in France teaching philosophy.
DESCRIPTION - In this bitterly funny novel by the renowned Polish author Witold Gombrowicz, a writer finds himself tossed into a chaotic world of schoolboys by a diabolical professor who wishes to reduce him to childishness. Originally published in Poland in 1937, FERDYDURKE became an instant literary sensation and catapulted the young author to fame. Deemed scandalous and subversive by Nazis, Stalinists, and the Polish Communist regime in turn, the novel (as well as all of Gombrowicz's other works) was officially banned in Poland for decades. It has nonetheless remained one of the most influential works of twentieth-century European literature. FERDYDURKE is translated here directly from the Polish for the first time. Danuta Borchardt deftly captures Gombrowicz's playful and idiosyncratic style, and she allows English speakers to experience fully the masterpiece of a writer whom Milan Kundera describes as ‘one of the great novelists of our century.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969), novelist, essayist, and playwright, was one of the most important Polish writers of the twentieth century. A candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968, he was described by Milan Kundera as ‘one of the great novelists of our century' and by John Updike as ‘one of the profoundest of the late moderns.' Gombrowicz's works were considered scandalous and subversive by the ruling powers in Poland and were banned for nearly forty years. He spent his last years in France teaching philosophy.
DESCRIPTION - Once upon a time (in the nineteenth century, actually), a young woman wandered into the Sicilian countryside and gathered wonderful stories from peasant women, Like a character from fiction, Laura Gonzenbach died young, leaving behind only these delightful entertainments, which quickly disappeared from view. Now, in one of the most startling literary discoveries of recent years, Jack Zipes has uncovered this neglected treasure trove of Sicilian folk and fairy tales. Gonzenbach collected wonderful stories - some on subjects that readers will know from the Grimms or Perrault, some entirely new - and published them in German. Her early death and the destruction of her papers in the Messina earthquake of 1908 only add to the mystery behind her achievement. Beautiful Angiola is an instant classic. Gonzenbach's tales delight us with heroines and princes, sorcery and surprise, the deeds of the brave and the treacherous, and the magic of the true storyteller. ‘The Green Bird', ‘The Humiliated Princess', ‘Sorfarina' , ‘The Magic Cane, the Golden Donkey, and the Little Stick that Hits' are titles destined to become new favorites for readers everywhere. Yet while the stories enchant us, the wry taglines with which they often end (‘And so they remained rich and consoled, while we keep sitting here and are getting old') gently bring us back to earth. BEAUTIFUL ANGIOLA is the richest of gifts, a genuine literary surprise.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laura Gonzenbach (1842–1878) was a Swiss folklorist, active in Messina, who collected fairy tales in a number of Sicilian dialects. Gonzenbach was born in a Swiss-German community of Sicily, to a German-speaking mercantile family, her sister, Magdelena, began a school in Messina. She became well educated and gained renown for the stories she gathered from a diverse range of sources, often other women. After the prompting of Otto Hartwig for material to append to a historical survey of the country, she produced what would become an important two volume collection, Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian folk-tales), published in 1870. Her seminal works collected tales given verbally, by peasants or other working and middle classes, and is noted as one of the few major collections of the nineteenth century to be compiled by a woman Jack Zipes, one of the world's experts on fairy tales and folklore, is the acclaimed translator of the COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHRS GRIMM (Bantam), editor of the OXFORD COMPANION TO FAIRY TALES, and the author of more than a dozen books on children's literature and culture, including DON'T BET ON THE PRINCE, STICKS AND STONES, and CREATIVE STORYTELLING. He is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota.
DESCRIPTION - In 2003 Jack Zipes translated Beautiful Angiola, the first half of Laura Gonzenbach's astonishing treasury of folk and fairy tales, told and retold by generations of Sicilian peasants. Now the Gonzenbach collection is complete in English: The Robber with the Witch's Head presents almost fifty new stories about demons and clever maidens and princes. Bursting with life, The Robber with the Witch's Head is a storyteller's dream, full of adventure and magic, expertly rendered by the translator of the Brothers Grimm.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laura Gonzenbach (1842–1878) was a Swiss folklorist, active in Messina, who collected fairy tales in a number of Sicilian dialects. Gonzenbach was born in a Swiss-German community of Sicily, to a German-speaking mercantile family, her sister, Magdelena, began a school in Messina. She became well educated and gained renown for the stories she gathered from a diverse range of sources, often other women. After the prompting of Otto Hartwig for material to append to a historical survey of the country, she produced what would become an important two volume collection, Sicilianische Märchen (Sicilian folk-tales), published in 1870. Her seminal works collected tales given verbally, by peasants or other working and middle classes, and is noted as one of the few major collections of the nineteenth century to be compiled by a woman Jack Zipes, one of the world's experts on fairy tales and folklore, is the acclaimed translator of the COMPLETE FAIRY TALES OF THE BROTHRS GRIMM (Bantam), editor of the OXFORD COMPANION TO FAIRY TALES, and the author of more than a dozen books on children's literature and culture, including DON'T BET ON THE PRINCE, STICKS AND STONES, and CREATIVE STORYTELLING. He is Professor of German at the University of Minnesota.
DESCRIPTION - DARK PASSAGE, published in 1946, is a novel by David Goodis which was the basis for the 1947 film noir of the same name. In DARK PASSAGE, Vincent Parry, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife, escapes from prison and is taken in by Irene Jansen, an artist with an interest in his case. Helped by a friendly cabbie, Parry gets a new face from a plastic surgeon, thereby enabling him to dodge the authorities and find his wife's real killer. He has difficulty staying hidden, in part because Madge Rapf, the spiteful woman whose testimony sent him up to prison, and who has an unhealthy interest in Irene, keeps stopping by. DARK PASSAGE was adapted for film in 1947, with a screenplay by Delmer Daves, who also directed. It reunited Bogart and Bacall onscreen, and co-starred Agnes Moorehead and Bruce Bennett.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair.
DESCRIPTION - When a cop goes bad, he can always become a crook. When a crook goes bad - that's when the Night Squad wants him. David Goodis's irresistibly readable study of corruption is a masterly portrait of a man clawing his way back from betrayal - and betraying countless others along the way.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Loeb Goodis (March 2, 1917 - January 7, 1967) was an American writer of crime fiction, noted for his prolific output of short stories and novels epitomizing the noir fiction genre. A native of Philadelphia, Goodis alternately resided there and in New York City and Hollywood during his professional years. Yet, throughout his life he maintained a deep identification with the city of his birth, Philadelphia. Goodis cultivated the skid row neighborhoods of his home town, using what he observed to craft his hard-boiled sagas of lives gone wrong, realized in dark portrayals of a blighted urban landscape teeming with criminal life and human despair.
DESCRIPTION - The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Texas native. Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed - herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s - forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all. Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story. Reworking the traditional Alamo framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself. In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: AN AMERICAN FAMILY, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award. She holds three appointments at Harvard University: professor of law at Harvard Law School, professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. A MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, she is also the author of THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS: AN AMERICAN CONTROVERSY; the coauthor with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., of VERNON CAN READ!; and the editor of RACE ON TRIAL: LAW AND JUSTICE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. She lives in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - Rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings have circulated for two centuries. It remains, among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, perhaps the most hotly contested topic. With THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS, Annette Gordon-Reed promises to intensify this ongoing debate as she identifies glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars evaluations of the existing evidence. She has assembled a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place been denied a fair hearing. Friends of Jefferson sought to debunk the Hemings story as early as 1800, and most subsequent historians and biographers have followed suit, finding the affair unthinkable based upon their view of Jefferson's life, character, and beliefs. Gordon-Reed responds to these critics by pointing to numerous errors and prejudices in their writings, ranging from inaccurate citations, to impossible time lines, to virtual exclusions of evidence - especially evidence concerning the Hemings family. She demonstrates how these scholars may have been misguided by their own biases and may even have tailored evidence to serve and preserve their opinions of Jefferson. Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Her analysis is accessible, with each chapter revolving around a key figure in the Hemings drama. The resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships - relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself. THOMAS JEFFERSON AND SALLY HEMINGS is a controversial new look at a centuries-old question that should fascinate general readers and historians alike. It promises to be the definitive word on the subject for years to come.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ANNETTE GORDON-REED (born November 19, 1958), a graduate of Harvard Law School, is an Associate Professor of Law at New York Law School.
DESCRIPTION - Jaguars' Tomb is a novel in three parts, written by three interconnected characters. Part one, "Hidden Variables" by María Celina Igarzábal, is narrated by Bruno Seguer. Seguer in turn is the author of the second part, "Recounting from Zero" ("Contar desde zero"), in which Evelynne Harrington, author of the third, is a central character. Harrington, finally, is the author of "Uncertainty" ("La incertidumbre"), whose protagonist is the dying Igarzábal. Each of the three parts revolves around the octagonal room that is alternately the jaguars' tomb, the central space of the torture center, and the heart of an abandoned house that hides an adulterous affair. The novel, by Argentine author Angélica Gorodischer, is both an intriguing puzzle and a meditation on how to write about, or through, violence, injustice, and loss. Among Gorodischer's many novels, Jaguars' Tomb most directly addresses the abductions and disappearances that occurred under the Argentine military dictatorship of 1976–83. This is the fourth of Gorodischer's books translated into English. The first, Kalpa Imperial—translated by Ursula Le Guin—was selected for the New York Times summer reading list in 2003.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer is the Argentine author of seventeen novels and several story collections. Gorodischer's literary awards include the Gilgamesh Prize; the Platinum Konex; the Dignity Award from the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights; the Silvina Bullrich Award from the Argentina Writers' Society; and the Esteban Echeverría Award from Gente de Letras, Argentina. Her work has previously been translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin, Sue Burke, and Amalia Gladhart. Amalia Gladhart is a professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.
DESCRIPTION - Ursula K. Le Guin chose to translate this novel which was on the New York Times Summer Reading list and winner of the Prix Imaginales, Más Allá, Poblet and Sigfrido Radaelli awards. This is the first of Argentinean writer Angélica Gorodischer's award-winning books to be translated into English. In eleven chapters, Kalpa Imperial's multiple storytellers relate the story of a fabled nameless empire which has risen and fallen innumerable times. Fairy tales, oral histories and political commentaries are all woven tapestry-style into Kalpa Imperial: beggars become emperors, democracies become dictatorships, and history becomes legends and stories. But this is much more than a simple political allegory or fable. It is also a celebration of the power of storytelling. Gorodischer and translator Ursula K. Le Guin are a well-matched, sly and delightful team of magician-storytellers. Rarely have author and translator been such an effortless pairing. Kalpa Imperial is a powerful introduction to the writing of Angélica Gorodischer, a novel which will enthrall readers already familiar with the worlds of Le Guin.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer (1928-2022) was born in Buenos Aires and lived in Rosario from 1936 on. She published many novels and short story collections including Kalpa Imperial, Mango Juice, and Trafalgar, as well as a memoir, History of My Mother. Her work has been translated into many languages and her translators include Ursula K. Le Guin and Alberto Manguel. With certain self-satisfaction she claimed to never have written plays or poems, not even at 16 when everybody writes poems, especially on unrequited love. She received two Fulbright awards as well as many literary awards around the world, including the Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Awards and a 2014 Konex Special Mention Award.
DESCRIPTION - Prodigies explores the story of the poet Novalis's birthplace in the German town of Weissenfels after it is converted into a boarding house. Moving, subtle, and full of wit, irony, and dreams, this novel fills the house with the women who lived there throughout the nineteenth century, and across the flow of history constructs the secret drama of their destinies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer is the Argentine author of seventeen novels and several story collections. Gorodischer's literary awards include the Gilgamesh Prize; the Platinum Konex; the Dignity Award from the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights; the Silvina Bullrich Award from the Argentina Writers' Society; and the Esteban Echeverría Award from Gente de Letras, Argentina. Her work has previously been translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin, Sue Burke, and Amalia Gladhart. Amalia Gladhart is a professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.
DESCRIPTION - Don't rush Trafalgar Medrano when he starts telling you about his latest intergalactic sales trip. He likes to stretch things out over precisely seven coffees. No one knows whether he actu-ally travels to the stars, but he tells the best tall tales in the city, so why doubt him? Trafalgar is Angélica Gorodischer's second novel to be translated into English. Her first, Kalpa Imperial, was selected for the New York Times summer reading list.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Angélica Gorodischer is the Argentine author of seventeen novels and several story collections. Gorodischer's literary awards include the Gilgamesh Prize; the Platinum Konex; the Dignity Award from the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights; the Silvina Bullrich Award from the Argentina Writers' Society; and the Esteban Echeverría Award from Gente de Letras, Argentina. Her work has previously been translated into English by Ursula K. Le Guin, Sue Burke, and Amalia Gladhart. Amalia Gladhart is a professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon.
DESCRIPTION - A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution - from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality - and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike - either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He is the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper's Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park made Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020. David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of several books, including What Makes Civilization?. Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East.
DESCRIPTION - From bestselling writer David Graeber, a powerful argument against the rise of meaningless, unfulfilling jobs, and their consequences. Does your job make a meaningful contribution to the world? In the spring of 2013, David Graeber asked this question in a playful, provocative essay titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs. It went viral. After a million online views in seventeen different languages, people all over the world are still debating the answer. There are millions of people - HR consultants, communication coordinators, telemarketing researchers, corporate lawyers - whose jobs are useless, and, tragically, they know it. These people are caught in bullshit jobs. Graeber explores one of society's most vexing and deeply felt concerns, indicting among other villains a particular strain of finance capitalism that betrays ideals shared by thinkers ranging from Keynes to Lincoln. Bullshit Jobs gives individuals, corporations, and societies permission to undergo a shift in values, placing creative and caring work at the center of our culture. This book is for everyone who wants to turn their vocation back into an avocation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.
DESCRIPTION - The groundbreaking international best-seller that turns everything you think about money, debt, and society on its head - from the brilliant, deeply original political thinker David Graeber (Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things to Me). Before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors - which lives on in full force to this day. So says anthropologist David Graeber in a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Renaissance Italy to Imperial China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like guilt, sin, and redemption) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.
DESCRIPTION - Everywhere anarchism is on the upswing as a political philosophy - everywhere, that is, except the academy. Anarchists repeatedly appeal to anthropologists for ideas about how society might be reorganized on a more egalitarian, less alienating basis. Anthropologists, terrified of being accused of romanticism, respond with silence. What if they didn't?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.
DESCRIPTION - From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives. Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence? To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber - one of our most important and provocative thinkers - traces the peculiar and unexpected ways we relate to bureaucracy today, and reveals how it shapes our lives in ways we may not even notice…though he also suggests that there may be something perversely appealing - even romantic - about bureaucracy. Leaping from the ascendance of right-wing economics to the hidden meanings behind Sherlock Holmes and Batman, The Utopia of Rules is at once a powerful work of social theory in the tradition of Foucault and Marx, and an entertaining reckoning with popular culture that calls to mind Slavoj Zizek at his most accessible. An essential book for our times, The Utopia of Rules is sure to start a million conversations about the institutions that rule over us - and the better, freer world we should, perhaps, begin to imagine for ourselves.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Rolfe Graeber (February 12, 1961 - September 2, 2020) was an American anthropologist, anarchist activist, and author known for his books Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), The Utopia of Rules (2015) and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018). He was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. As an assistant and later associate professor of anthropology at Yale University from 1998 to 2007, Graeber specialized in theories of value and social theory. Yale's decision not to rehire him when he would otherwise have become eligible for tenure sparked an academic controversy. He went on to become, from 2007 to 2013, reader in social anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His activism included protests against the 3rd Summit of the Americas in Quebec City in 2001, and at the 2002 World Economic Forum in New York City. Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement, and is sometimes credited with having coined the slogan "We are the 99%". He accepted credit for the description "the 99%" but said that others had expanded it into the slogan.
DESCRIPTION - Eurocentrism influences virtually all established historical writing. With the rise of Prussia and, by extension, Europe, eurocentrism became the dominant paradigm for world history. Employing the approaches of Gramsci and Foucault, Peter Gran proposes a reconceptualization of world history. He challenges the traditional convention of relying on totalitarian or democratic functions of a particular state to explain and understand relationships of authority and resistance in a number of national contexts. Gran maintains that there is no single developmental model but diverse forms of hegemony that emerged out of the political crisis following the penetration of capitalism into each nation. In making comparisons between seemingly disparate and distinctive nations and by questioning established canons of comparative inquiry, Gran encourages people to recognize the similarities between the West and non-West nations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Gran is professor of history at Temple University. He is the author of Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760-1840 and Beyond Eurocentrism: A New Modern World History, both published by Syracuse University Press.
DESCRIPTION - "The rise of the west has long been the accepted doctrine for framing analysis for world history. Privileging a Eurocentric approach, this traditional paradigm obscures the significance of the indigenous rich in non-Western regions and fails to recognize the contributions of the Orient. In this book, Peter Gran seeks to reframe current historical debates, presenting a model of analysis based on the rise of the rich. Gran outlines the structure of this new paradigm, building upon meta-narrative concepts from Marxism to liberalism. Rather than a history of clashing civilizations, he identifies a history of resolving conflicts through negotiations among wealthy classes in various regions. Fundamental to his theory is the assumption of non-European ruling classes with power in interregional affairs. Far-reaching in its historical scope, Gran's work lays the foundation for a critical rethinking of world history and offers a vital contribution the field.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Gran is professor of history at Temple University. He is author of Islamic Roots of Capitalism: Egypt, 1760–1840 and Beyond Eurocentrism: A New View of Modern World History.
DESCRIPTION - In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that occurred as a result of the First World War. Written after the war and as he was leaving his birthplace, he thought, forever, Good-Bye to All That bids farewell not only to England and his English family and friends, but also to a way of life. Tracing his upbringing from his solidly middle-class Victorian childhood through his entry into the war at age twenty-one as a patriotic captain in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, this dramatic, poignant, often wry autobiography goes on to depict the horrors and disillusionment of the Great War, from life in the trenches and the loss of dear friends, to the stupidity of government bureaucracy and the absurdity of English class stratification.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Graves was born on July 24, 1895, in Wimbledon, near London. His father, Alfred Perceval Graves, was a Gaelic scholar and minor Irish poet.By the 1950's, Graves had won an enormous international reputation as a poet, novelist, literary scholar, and translator. In 1962, W. H. Auden went as far as to assert that Graves was England's ‘greatest living poet.' In 1968 he received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. During his lifetime he published more than 140 books, including fifty-five collections of poetry (he reworked his COLLECTED POEMS repeatedly during his career), fifteen novels, ten translations, and forty works of nonfiction, autobiography, and literary essays. From 1961 to 1966, Graves returned to England to serve as a professor of poetry at Oxford. In the 1970s his productivity fell off; and the last decade of his life was lost in silence and senility. Robert Graves died in Majorca in 1985, at the age of ninety.
DESCRIPTION - At his brother Hugh's wedding in October 1934, Greene had drunkenly persuaded Barbara to go with him on a trip to Liberia. Armed with a copy of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Graham set off with Barbara on a cargo boat from London. Journey Without Maps, his account of their west African adventure, ranks as one of the great travel books of the 20th century. Barbara wrote her own account of their trip, entitled Land Benighted. Many consider it a masterpiece of comic observation and mock-heroic misadventure. Privately, Greene thought Barbara's account superior to his own.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Barbara Greene was born in 1907 into an environment of great affluence, made possible by her millionaire father, a hugely successful commodity broker known as Eppy, who built his fortune trading coffee in Brazil. She did not study at university, instead deciding to become a nurse. Following her trip to Liberia with her cousin Graham, Barbara found herself trapped in Berlin during World War II, as the fiancEe of an aristocratic German diplomat. To survive she skivvied as a char, protected by a family friend, Paul Schmidt, who happened to be Hitler's long-standing interpreter.
DESCRIPTION - From Brian Greene, one of the world's leading physicists, comes a grand tour of the universe that makes us look at reality in a completely different way. Space and time form the very fabric of the cosmos. Yet they remain among the most mysterious of concepts. Is space an entity? Why does time have a direction? Could the universe exist without space and time? Can we travel to the past? Greene uses these questions to guide us toward modern science's new and deeper understanding of the universe. From Newton's unchanging realm in which space and time are absolute, to Einstein's fluid conception of spacetime, to quantum mechanics' entangled arena where vastly distant objects can bridge their spatial separation to instantaneously coordinate their behavior or even undergo teleportation, Greene reveals our world to be very different from what common experience leads us to believe. Focusing on the enigma of time, Greene establishes that nothing in the laws of physics insists that it run in any particular direction and that ‘time's arrow' is a relic of the universe's condition at the moment of the big bang. And in explaining the big bang itself, Greene shows how recent cutting-edge developments in superstring and M-theory may reconcile the behavior of everything from the smallest particle to the largest black hole. This startling vision culminates in a vibrant eleven-dimensional ‘multiverse,' pulsating with ever-changing textures, where space and time themselves may dissolve into subtler, more fundamental entities. Sparked by the trademark wit, humor, and brilliant use of analogy that have made THE ELEGANT UNIVERSE a modern classic, Brian Greene takes us all, regardless of our scientific backgrounds, on an irresistible and revelatory journey to the new layers of reality that modern physics has discovered lying just beneath the surface of our everyday world. With 146 illustrations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Brian Greene received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He joined the physics faculty of Cornell University in 1990, was appointed to a full professorship in 1995, and in 1996 joined Columbia University where he is professor of physics and mathematics. He has lectured at both a general and a technical level in more than twenty-five countries and is widely regarded for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in superstring theory. He lives in Andes, New York, and New York City.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1959, OUR MAN IN HAVANA is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. Conceived as one of Graham Greene's ‘entertainments,' it tells of MI6's man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. To keep his job, he files bogus reports based on Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare and dreams up military installations from vacuum-cleaner designs. Then his stories start coming disturbingly true.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 - 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or 'entertainments ' as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
DESCRIPTION - Three men meet on a ship bound for Haiti, a world in the grip of the corrupt ‘Papa Doc' and the Tontons Macoute, his sinister secret police. Brown the hotelier, Smith the innocent American, and Jones the confidence man - these are the ‘comedians' of Greene's title. Hiding behind their actors' masks, they hesitate on the edge of life. They are men afraid of love, afraid of pain, afraid of fear itself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 - 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or 'entertainments ' as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
DESCRIPTION - Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN is a study of New World hope and innocence set in an old world of violence, a modern variant on a theme which in the last century attracted Mark Twain and other writers. In all Mr. Greene's recent serious novels, from BRIGHTON ROCK through THE END OF THE AFFAIR, a major theme was Catholicism. Now, he indicates, he has entered a new vein, starting with THE QUIET AMERICAN, where religion plays little or no part. The scene is Saigon in the violent recent years when the French were desperately trying to hold their footing in the Far East. The principal characters are a skeptical British journalist, his attractive Vietnamese mistress, and an eager young American sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission. Local intrigue, a night in a beleaguered outpost, a perilous venture behind the Communist lines - these are ingredients of the outward story. But - as is usual with Graham Greene - the story is deeply enriched by psychological tensions and battles of conflicting personalities. If the quiet American's motives come off less well than some American readers might wish, the author at least has not played favorites. The other nationals, including the British, are just as sharply exposed by his critical scalpel. At once a story of personal love, of physical danger, and of international rivalries, this novel will be regarded as one of Graham Greene's major works.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henry Graham Greene (2 October 1904 - 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or 'entertainments ' as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
DESCRIPTION - 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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').
DESCRIPTION - Michael O'Sullivan. Keywords: America Autobiography Sixties. ISBN: 0434305755. Ringolevio is a New York street game, a violent game, ‘a game to be fought rather than played'. It was Emmett Grogan's preparation for life. Who is Emmett Grogan? He's a freckle-faced Irish-American from Brooklyn who got hooked on ‘junk' while still at school and had to support his habit by petty theft and robbery with violence. He's been professional burglar, convict, playboy traveller, film-maker, Soho porn-broker, saboteur, and a U.S. Defense Department certified schizophrenic who deliberately sent himself amphetamine crazy on a military bazooka range. He's the founder and chief inspiration of the legendary Diggers of San Francisco, who were dedicated to creating a genuine alternative lifestyle and spent years ‘acquiring' and passing out free food, free clothes, free theatre and more to hundreds of poor and needy in the Haight-Ashbury and the city ghettoes. He's America's most famous invisible man, who, determined to keep his identity anonymous, has fed deceptions to the press and let others use his name to the point where some people even think he doesn't actually exist, assuming the name is a symbol for all who work outside the system (‘Whenever a Digger identifies himself as ‘Emmett Grogan', it means nothing, since all Diggers call themselves Emmett Grogan. ') reported the San Francisco Chronicle. He's a brilliantly gifted natural writer whose RINGOLEVIO is perhaps the single most exciting book ever to come out of the American underground, an autobiography that explodes with sheer adventure and a revolutionary social vision.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emmett Grogan (c. 1943–1978) was a founder of the Diggers, a radical community-action group of Improv actors in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, California. The Diggers took their name from the English Diggers (1649-1650), a radical movement opposed to feudalism, the Church of England and the British Crown. The San Francisco Diggers were a legendary group that evolved out of two radical traditions that thrived in the Bay Area in the mid-1960s: the bohemian/underground art/theater scene, and the New Left/civil rights/peace movement. The Diggers combined street theater, direct action, and art happenings in their social agenda of creating a Free City. Their most famous activities revolved around distributing free food (‘Free because it's yours!') every day in the park, and distributing ‘surplus energy' at a series of Free Stores (where everything in stock was without a price tag).
DESCRIPTION - Widely acclaimed and hotly debated, this provocative and original look at current trends in the United States presents a grim forecast of a possible totalitarian future. The author shows how the chronic problems faced by the U.S. in the late twentieth century require increasing collusion between Big Business and Big Government in order to ‘manage' society in the interests of the rich and powerful. This ‘friendly fascism,' Gross argues, will probably lack the dictatorships, public spectacles, and overt brutality of the classic varieties of Germany, Italy, and Japan, but has at its root the same denial of individual freedoms and democratic rights. No one who cares about the future of democracy, in this country and around the world, can afford to ignore the frightening possibilities for Friendly Fascism. ‘At a time of escalating political uncertainty, when the forces of totalitarianism threaten once more to crawl out of the American woodwork, Friendly Fascism is a powerful tool - better yet, a weapon - that can help us avert a distinctly unfriendly future.' - Alvin Toffler. ‘First-rate. a fascinating, provocative job. Bertram Gross has written an important book, and it deserves the widest possible audience.' - Michael Harrington. ‘This is the best thing I've seen on how America might go fascist democratically. Friendly Fascism offers a very clear exposition of where America is, and how we got there.' - William Shirer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bertram Myron Gross (1912 in Philadelphia - March 12, 1997 in Walnut Creek, California) was an American social scientist, Federal bureaucrat and Professor of Political Science at Hunter College (CUNY). He is known from his book Friendly Fascism from 1980 and as primary author of the Humphrey–Hawkins Full Employment Act.
DESCRIPTION - Through the work of this prolific Breton poet we come close to the very heart of nature in all its rich complexity. Detached, Guillevic contemplates his subjects and awaits for them to communicate with him. He is, as Teo Savory writes in her introduction, at once 'enjoyable and shocking, obtuse and aggravating, humane and inhuman. The world he has created is compulsive and remarkably easy to enter. And the admiration for his skill as an artist is international.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eugène Guillevic (August 5, 1907 Carnac - March 19, 1997 Paris) was one of the better known French poets of the second half of the 20th century. Professionally, he went under just the single name ‘Guillevic'. He was born in the rocky landscape and marine environment of Brittany. His father, a sailor, was a policeman and took him to Jeumont (Nord) in 1909, Saint-Jean-BrEvelay (Morbihan) in 1912, and Ferrette (Haut-Rhin) in 1919. After a BA in mathematics, he was placed by the exams of 1926, in the Administration of Registration (Alsace, Ardennes). Appointed in 1935 to Paris as senior editor at the Directorate General at the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, he was assigned in 1942 to control the economy. He was from 1945 to 1947 in the Cabinets of Ministers Francis Billoux (National Economy) and Charles Tillon (Reconstruction). In 1947 after the ouster of Communist ministers, he returned to the Inspector General of Economics, where his work included studies of the economy and planning, until his retirement in 1967. He was a pre-war friend of Jean Follain, who introduced him to the ‘Sagesse' group. Then he belonged to the ‘School of Rochefort'. He was a practicing Catholic for about thirty years. He became a communist sympathizer during the Spanish Civil War, and in 1942 joined the Communist Party when he joined with Paul Eluard, and participated in the publications of the underground press (Pierre Seghers, Jean Lescure).
DESCRIPTION - ‘Isolated and off the beaten path' beyond the black cliffs of northwestern Iceland lies Syvendeaa - Bjarni's farm, and scene of one of the most sensational murders in Icelandic history. Bjarni's story is told by the Reverend Eiulv who ‘had never met a man like Bjarni. standing there tall and powerful. he touched my heart more than I can say: it was just like being put eye to eye with your fate.' And throughout the trial, Eiulv who had initiated the proceedings with his deposition, felt an increasing sense of kinship and a growing responsibility to God for this man who ‘had the bad luck to kill Jon Thorgrimsson.' In 1928, ten years after he first saw Syvendeaa and had thoroughly studied maps of the area and records of the trial, Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote Svartfugl (THE BLACK CLIFFS), essentially as a psychological study of human reactions to the events and personalities involved with the crime. Born in 1889 in eastern Iceland, Gunnarsson published two collections of poems in Icelandic in 1906 and composed his first story in Danish the following year while en route to school in Denmark. Realizing that writing in Icelandic could neither support him financially nor gain him a European audience, he elected to write in Danish. Completion of The Family from Borg (Af Borgslaegtens Historie) in four volumes in 1914 established his reputation in Scandinavia. A series of pessimistic books followed on the heels of World War I, then historical novels, and between 1923 and 1928, five volumes of an extensive, fictionalized autobiography, The CHURCH ON THE MOUNTAIN (Kirken paa Bjerget), probably his major work. Immediately after completing this great hymn to life, Gunnarsson addressed himself to the story of the black and brutal Syvendeaa crime, and published Svartfugl in 1929. Since his return to Iceland in 1939 he has written in his native tongue and has worked on the Icelandic translation-edition of his complete works, having published twenty-one volumes between 1941 and 1963. He is now living in Reykjavik. NORDIC TRANSLATION SERIES - From Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden this series presents a selection of important works of modern Nordic authors - novels, short stories, and plays. None of these works has previously been available in English and all have introductions which place them in the perspective of modern European literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gunnar Gunnarson (May 18, 1889 - November 21, 1975) was a prolific Icelandic novelist, dramatist, essayist, and poet, largely self-educated as a writer, whose work celebrate the courage and dignity of the common people of the North. Gunnarsson published his books in Danish to gain a wider audience and to break out the geographical and linguistic isolation. With Kristmann Guðmundsson (1901-1983) and Halldor Killian Laxness (1902-1998), Gunnarsson was among the first internationally known authors of his country. Gunnarsson's fiction was austere in tone and show a deep psychological understanding, individualism, and religious mysticism.
DESCRIPTION - By no means a work of science fiction, Gaga is a variation on the Don Quixote theme - about a man gone crazy on too much reading. Set in Reykjavik, Iceland, the story takes the reader on a psychotic journey to Mars. In Icelandic, `gaga' means `crazy.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - OLAFUR GUNNARSSON was born in Iceland in 1948. Besides the present volume he has published three novels and two books of poetry. The Icelandic editions of his works are published by Forlagid, Reykjavik. DAVID MCDUFF was born in 1945. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh, where he took his Ph.D. in 1971 with a thesis on the poetry of the Russian modernist, Innokenty Annensky. JUDY PENNANEN is a Canadian artist and book illustrator whose work has frequently accentuated Penumbra Press publications.
DESCRIPTION - A revolutionary novel, inspired by the experiences of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The Eagle and the Serpent (El águila y la serpiente, 1928) depicts the Mexican Revolution and its political aftermath both of which Guzman was familiar with, having contributed both to revolutionary agitation and to the formation of the new revolutionary government.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martín Luis Guzmán Franco (October 6, 1887 - December 22, 1976) was a Mexican novelist and journalist. Guzmán was born in Chihuahua, Chihuahua. Along with Mariano Azuela, he is considered a pioneer of the revolutionary novel, a genre inspired by the experiences of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. His novels La sombra del caudillo (1929) and El águila y la serpiente (1928) depict the Mexican Revolution and its political aftermath, both of which the author was familiar with, having contributed both to revolutionary agitation and to the formation of the new revolutionary government. For several months in 1914, he was under the direct orders of General Francisco ‘Pancho' Villa. He later wrote a five-volume biography of Villa, Memorias de Pancho Villa (1936-1951). Martin Luis Guzmán died suddenly on December 22, 1976 in Mexico City due an acute myocardial infarction. His widow Ana West, died seven years after him, on October 21st, 1983. She was 95 years old when, after being hospitalized for some days due to an acute bilateral pneumonia, she suffered a cardiac arrest and died.
DESCRIPTION - The 1950s saw a major breakthrough in Finnish poetry when such modernists as Paavo Haavikko turned away from national idealism. The poetry of Haavikko, who has emerged as the most original of these poets, is remarkable for its lyricism and exceptionally direct imagery. Tomas Tranströmer, a contemporary Swedish poet, draws on a long tradition of Swedish nature poetry, and combines a wide viewpoint with a sharp focus on particular details. This selection ranges from his early, somewhat mystical poems to his later, more explicit work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paavo Haavikko (January 25, 1931, Helsinki - October 6, 2008) was a Finnish poet and playwright, considered one of the country's most outstanding writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1984. From 1967 to 1983, he was literary director of the Otava publishing company, and from 1989 to his death owner of the Art House publishing company. Tomas Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden, in 1931, and spent his career as a psychologist. The author of a dozen books of poetry, TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER (April 15, 1931, Stockholm, Sweden - March 26, 2015, Stockholm, Sweden) was one of the most celebrated and influential poetic figures of his generation. He was born in Stockholm in 1931 and educated at Södra Latin School and the University of Stockholm, where he received a degree in psychology. He began his psychology career in the early 1960s at a juvenile corrections institute in Sweden, and worked for several decades in the field. He is one of the world's most translated poets, with books appearing in numerous editions in over fifty languages. In addition to his renown as a poet, Tranströmer was also a highly regarded amateur pianist and entomologist.
DESCRIPTION - A prize-winning scholar rewrites 400 years of American history from Indigenous perspectives, overturning the dominant origin story of the United States. There is an old, deeply rooted story about America that goes like this: Columbus discovers a strange continent and brings back tales of untold riches. The European empires rush over, eager to stake out as much of this astonishing New World as possible. Though Indigenous peoples fight back, they cannot stop the onslaught. White imperialists are destined to rule the continent, and history is an irreversible march toward Indigenous destruction. Yet as with other long-accepted origin stories, this one, too, turns out to be based in myth and distortion. In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals. From the Iroquois in the Northeast to the Comanches on the Plains, and from the Pueblos in the Southwest to the Cherokees in the Southeast, Native nations frequently decimated white newcomers in battle. Even as the white population exploded and colonists’ land greed grew more extravagant, Indigenous peoples flourished due to sophisticated diplomacy and leadership structures. By 1776, various colonial powers claimed nearly all of the continent, but Indigenous peoples still controlled it—as Hämäläinen points out, the maps in modern textbooks that paint much of North America in neat, color-coded blocks confuse outlandish imperial boasts for actual holdings. In fact, Native power peaked in the late nineteenth century, with the Lakota victory in 1876 at Little Big Horn, which was not an American blunder, but an all-too-expected outcome. Hämäläinen ultimately contends that the very notion of colonial America is misleading, and that we should speak instead of an Indigenous America that was only slowly and unevenly becoming colonial. The evidence of Indigenous defiance is apparent today in the hundreds of Native nations that still dot the United States and Canada. Necessary reading for anyone who cares about America’s past, present, and future, Indigenous Continent restores Native peoples to their rightful place at the very fulcrum of American history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pekka Hämäläinen is Rhodes Professor of American History at the University of Oxford and the author of The Comanche Empire, winner of the Bancroft Prize, and Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power. He lives in Oxford, England.
DESCRIPTION - The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history. This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then - in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion - as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pekka Hämäläinen is the Rhodes Professor of American History and Fellow of St. Catherine's College at Oxford University. He has served as the principal investigator of a five-year project on nomadic empires in world history, funded by the European Research Council. His previous book, The Comanche Empire, won the Bancroft Prize in 2009.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 2009 Bancroft Prize, given by Columbia University. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the high tide of imperial struggles in North America, an indigenous empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in historical accounts. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches. It is a story that challenges the idea of indigenous peoples as victims of European expansion and offers a new model for the history of colonial expansion, colonial frontiers, and Native-European relations in North America and elsewhere. Pekka Hämäläinen shows in vivid detail how the Comanches built their unique empire and resisted European colonization, and why they fell to defeat in 1875. With extensive knowledge and deep insight, the author brings into clear relief the Comanches' remarkable impact on the trajectory of history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pekka Hämäläinen is associate professor of history, University of California, Santa Barbara. He lives in Santa Barbara.
DESCRIPTION - When a prostitute and her ill-fated lover are killed in a gruesome double murder, seasoned investigator Detective Hanash is called in. The case draws him into Casablanca's slums, blighted by criminality, religious extremism, and despair. Hanash's years on the job have made him intimately familiar with the city's seedy underbelly, but this time he harbors a personal connection to one of the victims, one he must conceal at all costs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Mekne s, Morocco in 1958, Abdelilah Hamdouchi is one of the first writers of police fiction in Arabic and a prolific, award-winning screenwriter of police thrillers, including Whitefly and The Final Bet. He lives in Rabat, Morocco. Benjamin Smith holds a PhD from Harvard University, and is currently assistant professor of Arabic at Swarthmore College, in the US.
DESCRIPTION - A serial killer taunts Casablanca's most famous detective, Hanash, in this nail-biting Moroccan noir, a follow-up to Bled Dry. A series of gruesome murders shakes the city of Casablanca. The killer knows exactly how the police will pursue him and how to obliterate evidence that could lead them to identify his victims. Fear spreads throughout the city as rumors abound that a serial killer is on the loose. Detective Hanash, despite his reputation, has hit a dead end. But he knows the killer will make a mistake, and it is up to him and his team to hunt down and capture this brutal criminal. Then comes the most audacious homicide yet: the victim is found on the first day of the Eid holiday, directly outside the police headquarters in the center of town. Is the killer taunting the police and its famous detective? And could this be the crime that contains the clue that Hanash has been waiting for?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Mekne s, Morocco in 1958, Abdelilah Hamdouchi is one of the first writers of police fiction in Arabic and a prolific, award-winning screenwriter of police thrillers, including Whitefly and The Final Bet. He lives in Rabat, Morocco. Benjamin Smith holds a PhD from Harvard University, and is currently assistant professor of Arabic at Swarthmore College, in the US.
DESCRIPTION - This major contribution to children's literature brings the fascinating range of American black folktales and humor to all children. In this treasury we hear the voice of Newbery Medal winner Virginia Hamilton - a voice that echoes the slaves and fugitives from her own American black ancestry as she tells the stories that kept their culture alive. Here are the spirited trickster tales where the wily Bruh Rabbit outwits larger and stronger animals; robust tall tales filled with riddles and laughter; spine-chilling ghost and devil tales; and finally the moving tales of freedom, including true slave narratives as well as fantasy escapes exemplified by the hauntingly beautiful title story, ‘The People Could Fly.' In their forty stunning illustrations, Caldecott Medal winners Leo and Diane Dillon richly evoke the vitality, humor, and beauty of these unique stories, making this a book to linger over and look at again and again. Together, these twenty-four selections represent the main body of black folklore and bring us close to the hearts and minds of the people who first told them and passed them on to us. Written in such a way that all readers and storytellers can capture the fullness and rhythm of each tale, THE PEOPLE COULD FLY is a celebration of the human spirit.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Virginia Esther Hamilton (March 12, 1936 - February 19, 2002) was an African-American children's books author. She wrote 41 books, including M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), for which she won the U.S. National Book Award in category Children's Books and the Newbery Medal in 1975. For lifetime achievement Hamilton won the international Hans Christian Andersen Award for writing children's literature in 1992 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for her contributions to American children's literature in 1995.
DESCRIPTION - Sam Spade- the toughest man you'll meet in any novel. His most treacherous, emotional, deadly case- The Maltese Falcon. Never has there been a more intriguing, captivating story of crime, obsession, and murder. Dashiell Hammett's masterpiece novel inspired countless readers, a classic movie, and numerous imitators.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Dashiell Hammett (May 27, 1894 - January 10, 1961) was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, a screenplay writer, and political activist. Among the enduring characters he created are Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). In addition to the significant influence his novels and stories had on film, Hammett 'is now widely regarded as one of the finest mystery writers of all time' and was called, in his obituary in The New York Times, 'the dean of the. 'hard-boiled' school of detective fiction.' Time magazine included Hammett's 1929 novel Red Harvest on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
DESCRIPTION - ‘All this happened while I was walking about starving in Christiania - a strage city no one escapes from until it has left its mark on him. ' This was the first sentence of an incomplete novel which Knut Hamsun, himself in dire straits, took to a publisher in 1888. It appeared in magazine form that year, and two years later the complete novel was published. Hunger immediately established Hamsun as one of the leading Scandinavian writers. Along with his GROWTH OF THE SOIL, MYSTERIES, VICTORIA, and PAN, it had a revolutionary impact on much European writing of the first part of the century, and won for Hamsun the Nobel Prize in 1920. HUNGER is the semi-delirious confession of a young writer living on the edge of starvation and existing on the puny and erratic income he gets from his occasional articles for the local newspaper. The physical privations he undergoes are always secondary to the internal psychology of a man whose faculties are slipping beyond control. Black depression alternates with fantastic mirth, clear reasonableness is suddenly replaced by hallucinations, lassitude by sudden spurts of energy, morbid sensitivity by arrogance and pride. The setting of the novel is, in effect, not Christiania at all, but that border area between despair and madness that lies in all men's minds. HUNGER, first published here in 1920, has been out of print and difficult to obtain for many years. The noted poet and translator Robert Bly has now prepared an entirely new translation, and he has done a brilliant job of it. His version is colloquial, fresh, extremely readable; it breathes new life into Hamsun's classic. And Isaac Bashevis Singer, who counts Hamsun among the major influences on his own writing, has provided a memorable introduction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KNUT HAMSUN was born in 1859 in the Gudbransdal Valley of central Norway, and died in 1952, at the age of ninety-three. In 1920 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.
DESCRIPTION - A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present. In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of Virginia bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival led to the barbaric and unprecedented system of American chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more than that: It is the source of so much that still defines the United States. The New York Times Magazine's award-winning 1619 Project issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together eighteen essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with thirty-six poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance. The essays show how the inheritance of 1619 reaches into every part of contemporary American society, from politics, music, diet, traffic, and citizenship to capitalism, religion, and our democracy itself. This is a book that speaks directly to our current moment, contextualizing the systems of race and caste within which we operate today. It reveals long-glossed-over truths around our nation's founding and construction - and the way that the legacy of slavery did not end with emancipation, but continues to shape contemporary American life. Featuring contributions from: Leslie Alexander • Michelle Alexander • Carol Anderson • Joshua Bennett • Reginald Dwayne Betts • Jamelle Bouie • Anthea Butler • Matthew Desmond • Rita Dove • Camille T. Dungy • Cornelius Eady • Eve L. Ewing • Nikky Finney • Vievee Francis • Yaa Gyasi • Forrest Hamer • Terrance Hayes • Kimberly Annece Henderson • Jeneen Interlandi • HonorEe Fanonne Jeffers • Barry Jenkins • Tyehimba Jess • Martha S. Jones • Robert Jones, Jr. • A. Van Jordan • Ibram X. Kendi • Eddie Kendricks • Yusef Komunyakaa • Kevin M. Kruse • Kiese Laymon • Trymaine Lee • Jasmine Mans • Terry McMillan • Tiya Miles • Wesley Morris • Khalil Gibran Muhammad • Lynn Nottage • ZZ Packer • Gregory Pardlo • Darryl Pinckney • Claudia Rankine • Jason Reynolds • Dorothy Roberts • Sonia Sanchez • Tim Seibles • Evie Shockley • Clint Smith • Danez Smith • Patricia Smith • Tracy K. Smith • Bryan Stevenson • Nafissa Thompson-Spires • Natasha Trethewey • Linda Villarosa • Jesmyn Ward.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for The New York Times. In 2017 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and in 2020 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the controversial The 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she will also found the Center for Journalism and Democracy.
DESCRIPTION - A RAISIN IN THE SUN is a play by Lorraine Hansberry that debuted on Broadway in 1959. The title comes from the poem ‘Harlem' (also known as ‘A Dream Deferred‘) by Langston Hughes. The story is based upon a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago's South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased husband's insurance money comes through, Mama dreams of moving to a new home and a better neighborhood in Chicago. Walter Lee, a chauffeur, has other plans, however: buying a liquor store and being his own man. Beneatha dreams of medical school. The tensions and prejudice they face form this seminal American drama. Sacrifice, trust and love among the Younger family and their heroic struggle to retain dignity in a harsh and changing world is a searing and timeless document of hope and inspiration. Winner of the NY Drama Critic's Award as Best Play of the Year, it has been hailed as a ‘pivotal play in the history of the American Black theatre.' by Newsweek and ‘a milestone in the American Theatre.' by Ebony. ‘A beautiful, lovable play. It is affectionately human, funny and touching. A work of theatrical magic in which the usual barrier between audience and stage disappears.' - John Chapman, New York News. ‘An honest, intelligible, and moving experience.' - Walter Kerr, New York Herald Tribune. ‘Miss Hansberry has etched her characters with understanding, and told her story with dramatic impact. She has a keen sense of humor, an ear for accurate speech and compassion for people.' - Robert Coleman, New York Mirror. ‘A Raisin in the Sun has vigor as well as veracity.' - Brooks Atkinson, New York Times. ‘It is honest drama, catching up real people. It will make you proud of human beings.' - Frank Aston, New York World-Telegram & Sun. ‘A wonderfully emotional evening.' - John McClain, New York Journal American.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lorraine Vivian Hansberry (May 19, 1930 - January 12, 1965) was an American playwright and writer. Hansberry inspired Nina Simone's song 'To Be Young, Gifted and Black'. She was the first black woman to write a play performed on Broadway. Her best known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of Black Americans living under racial segregation in Chicago.
DESCRIPTION - At age 65, Emmett Dalton, the sole survivor of the infamous Dalton gang makes a living by selling his outrageous adventure stories to Hollywood. Desperadoes details his memories of the murders, bootlegging and thievery he and his posse committed. The grit and excitement of these violent times are expertly evoked by the sharp pen and authentic voice of HarperCollins' bestselling author Ron Hansen.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ron Hansen (born December 8, 1947) is an American novelist, essayist, and professor. Hansen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, attended a Jesuit high school, Creighton Preparatory School and earned a Bachelor's degree in English from Creighton University in Omaha in 1970. Following military service, he earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1974 and held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University. He later earned an M.A. in Spirituality from Santa Clara University. Hansen has received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hansen is the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he teaches courses in writing and literature. He is married to the writer Bo Caldwell and is the stepfather of her two children, John Scott ‘Scotty' Caldwell Arnold and Kate Arnold. Scotty attends Hansen's place of employment, Santa Clara University, and Kate is pursuing her medical degree at Georgetown University. In January 2007, Hansen was ordained as a permanent deacon of the Catholic Church. In May 2009, Hansen was inducted to the college of fellows at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Hansen frequently writes about the Old West, mixing history with morality and drama.
DESCRIPTION - To American black newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s Ollie Harrington was a prolific contributor of humorous and editorial cartoons. He emerged as an artist during the Harlem Renaissance and created Bootsie, the popular cartoon figure that became a fixture in black newspapers. Langston Hughes praised Harrington as America's greatest black cartoonist. After serving as a war correspondent in Italy, he returned to his homeland and the impediment of racism that pervaded American life. As director of public relations for the NAACP, he crusaded against America's policies of institutionalized racism, openly supporting leftist reform leaders. Upon hearing in this era of red-baiting that he was targeted for investigation, Harrington left America. In the culturally rich American community on the Left Bank in Paris that would come to include Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, he became a fixture. In 1961 he found himself trapped behind the Berlin Wall, but he chose to remain in East Germany. His cartoons appeared in East German magazines and in the American Communist newspaper The Daily World. Although he became a favorite with Eastern Bloc students and intellectuals, in America Harrington was mainly forgotten. The autobiographical pieces included in WHY I LEFT AMERICA AND OTHER ESSAYS, written mainly during the 1960s and 1970s, detail Oliver W. Harrington's experiences as an African American artist in exile. One theme that persists in these writings and his cartoons is his intolerance of racism. Hence, as an artist, he has found it impossible not to be political. ‘Although I believe that ‘art for art's sake' has its merits,' he says. ‘I personally feel that my art must be involved, and the most profound involvement must be with the Black liberation struggle.' One essay, from Ebony magazine, fuels speculation about the mysterious circumstances in the death of his friend Richard Wright. In another piece Harrington details how he created the celebrated Bootsie. He writes in others of his life in New York during the Harlem Renaissance and in Paris with fellow black expatriate figures. Why did this African American choose to live in exile for over forty years? In an affectionate foreword to this volume Richard Wright's daughter Julia gives clues to the answer. Her insights, along with M. Thomas Inge's introductory essay about Harrington's life and achievements, bring special focus to the experiences of an outstanding African American artist and social critic who has been virtually without recognition in his homeland.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Oliver Wendell 'Ollie' Harrington (February 14, 1912 - November 2, 1995) was an American cartoonist and an outspoken advocate against racism and for civil rights in the United States. Of multi-ethnic descent, Langston Hughes called him 'America's greatest African-American cartoonist'. Harrington requested political asylum in East Germany in 1961; he lived in Berlin for the last three decades of his life.
DESCRIPTION - Includes ‘Legends of the Fall,' ‘Revenge,' and ‘The Man who Gave Up His Name.' All three volumes issued in cream colored linen housed in a cream colored slipcase. The publication of this magnificent trilogy of short novels confirmed Jim Harrison s reputation as one of the finest American writers of his generation. These absorbing novellas explore the theme of revenge and survival, adding up to an extraordinary vision of the twentieth-century man. Set in the Rocky Mountains, Legends of the Fall is the epic tale of three brothers and their lives at the beginning of World War I. In Revenge, love causes the course of a man s life to be savagely and irrevocably altered. And in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, a man is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing, and food.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Harrison (December 11, 1937 - March 26, 2016) was an American writer known for his poetry, fiction, reviews, essays about the outdoors, and writings about food. He is best known for his 1979 novella "Legends of the Fall". He has been called "a force of nature", and his work has been compared to that of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Harrison's characters tend to be rural by birth and to have retained some qualities of their agrarian pioneer heritage which explains their sense of rugged intelligence and common sense. They attune themselves to both the natural and the civilized world, surrounded by excesses, but determined to live their lives as well as possible.
DESCRIPTION - Neoliberalism--the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action--has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is among the top twenty most cited authors in the humanities and is the world's most cited academic geographer. His books include The Limits to Capital, Social Justice and the City, and The Condition of Postmodernity, among many others.
DESCRIPTION - Poor Schweik. How simple-minded he is. Possibly even a lunatic. For how else could.he fail to recognize the matchless wisdom of his sergeant, his lieutenant, his colonel, and even his king, who all agree it is his noble duty to serve as a solid target for an enemy bullet. Can the author be so bold as to suggest that this miserable nobody, this disgraceful malingerer, this grain of sand in the great military machine, is the true hero of our times?. In all of the literature of war there is no more deadly weapon than Schweik's blank gaze as he listens to a vital order, then marches resolutely away in the wrong direction. For in Schweik's vision of the world -a world in which it is good to live and bad to die- lies a force that can topple empires and reduce the inspiring spectacle of war to bloody absurdity. The brilliant satire of this masterpiece does more than delight the reader; it casts the healing light of sanity upon the festering wounds of this war-torn century. ‘The reader is reminded of Swift, Gogol, Dickens. Hasek makes our present-day beatniks, bohemians, and would-be satirists seem very small beer by comparison.' -LONDON TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jaroslav Hašek (April 30, 1883 - January 3, 1923) was a Czech humorist, satirist, writer and anarchist best known for his novel The Good Soldier Švejk, an unfinished collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in World War I and a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures, which has been translated into sixty languages. He also wrote some 1,500 short stories. He was a journalist, bohemian, and practical joker.
DESCRIPTION - Composed nearly eight hundred years ago by an unnamed poet, THE NIBELUNGENLIED is the principal literary expression of those heroic legends of which Richard Wagner made such free use in The Ring. This great German epic poem of murder and revenge recounts with peculiar strength and directness the progress of Siegfried's love for the peerless Kriemnhild, the wedding of Gunther and Brunhild, the quarrel between the two queens, Hagen's treacherous murder of Siegfried, and Kriemhild's eventual revenge. A. T. Hatto's new translation transforms an old text into a story as readable and exciting as Homer's ILIAD.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arthur Thomas Hatto (11 February 1910 - 6 January 2010) was an eminent translator and scholar of German studies at the University of London and is best known for his translations of Tristan, Parzival, and The Nibelungenlied and his theory of epic heroic poetry. He retired in 1977, and in 1991 the British Academy elected him as a Senior Fellow.
DESCRIPTION - Beginning with Dashiell Hammett testifying before Senator Joseph McCarthy, Pulp Culture pursues the lives and work of crime writers who approached the genre at street level: David Goodis, Chester Himes, Jim Thompson, Dorothy B Hughes, Dolores Hitchens, Leigh Brackett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, Howard Browne, Gil Brewer, William B McGivern, Lionel White, Ross MacDonald, Horace McCoy, Charles Willeford and Charles Williams. Pulp Culture gives post-war crime fiction a political and irreverent reading, examining the politics of paranoia, private detection and criminality; the origins of crime fiction; the role of women in a male-dominated genre; and why the early 1960s marked the final days of classic hardboiled fiction. It also considers the genre's influence on contemporary crime writers and film-makers. Pulp Culture is essential reading for anyone interested in noir writing, films and the post-war era.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Detroit in 1945, Woody Haut grew up in Pasadena, CA, attended San Francisco State University, and has lived in the UK since the early 1970's. Presently a London journalist, he has worked as a college lecturer, cab driver and cinema programmer. He is the author of Heartbreak and Vine: The Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, Pulp Culture: Hardboiled Fiction and the Cold War and Neon Noir.
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - HEINEMANN AFRICAN WRITERS SERIES A PAPERBACK ORIGINAL 'I need a quiet backwater and a sense of living as though I am barely alive on the earth, treading a small, careful pathway through life.' Intense personal experiences of South Africa's brutal social system, a sense of stifled creativity and a distaste for politics made Bessie Head leave for Botswana on an exit permit at the age of 27. There, in her chosen rural 'haven' of Serowe, and despite a severe mental breakdown, she wrote the novels and stories that earned her international recognition as one of Africa's most remarkable and individual writers. A Woman Alone is a collection of autobiographical writings, sketches and essays which covers the entire span of Bessie Head's creative life, up to her death in 1986 at the age of 49. It reveals a woman of great sensitivity and vitality, inspired through her knowledge of suffering in a `reverence for ordinary people' and finding some healing for her own anguish in a quiet corner of Africa.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - 'His words give us the soil-reek of Ireland, the colourful violence of his childhood on a farm in Derry. The full-blooded energy of these poems makes Death of a Naturalist the best first book of poems 'I've read for some time.' C. B. Cox in the Spectator. 'What delights, in poem after poem, is the accuracy and freshness with which sense-impressions are recorded.' Richard Kell in the Guardian.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Seamus Justin Heaney (13 April 1939 - 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the early 1960s he became a lecturer in Belfast after attending university there, and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin from 1972 until his death. Heaney was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997 and its Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994 he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford and in 1996 was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres. Other awards that Heaney received include the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the PEN Translation Prize (1985), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). In 2012, he was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry. Heaney's literary papers are held by the National Library of Ireland. Robert Lowell called him ‘the most important Irish poet since Yeats‘ and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he was ‘the greatest poet of our age'. Robert Pinsky has stated that ‘with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller'. Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as ‘probably the best-known poet in the world'. Heaney's son Michael revealed at the funeral mass that his father's final words, ‘Noli timere' (have no fear), were texted to his wife, Marie, minutes before he died.
DESCRIPTION - THE BLIND OWL (1937) is Sadegh Hedayat's most enduring work of prose and a major literary work of 20th century Iran. Written in Persian, it tells the story of an unnamed pen case painter, the narrator, who sees in his macabre, feverish nightmares that ‘the presence of death annihilates all that is imaginary. We are the offspring of death and death delivers us from the tantalizing, fraudulent attractions of life; it is death that beckons us from the depths of life. If at times we come to a halt, we do so to hear the call of death. throughout our lives, the finger of death points at us.' The narrator addresses his murderous confessions to the shadow on his wall resembling an owl. His confessions do not follow a linear progression of events and often repeat and layer themselves thematically, thus lending to the open-ended nature of interpretation of the story. Iraj Bashiri, one of the two English translators of THE BLIND OWL, comments about the atmosphere of Hedayat's works: ‘The translation and the analysis of the works of Sadeq Hedayat occupied me for over ten years. That was some twenty years ago. It is wonderful that time heals what Times bring us. Otherwise, life itself would become the burden Hedayat speaks about. Hedayat's is a dark world when you are in it. It haunts you for some time after you leave it. Eventually, however, it leaves you alone, if you leave it alone.' THE BLIND OWL was written during the oppressive latter years of Reza Shah's rule (1925-1941). It was originally published in a limited edition in Bombay, during Hedayat's year-long stay there in 1937, stamped with ‘Not for sale or publication in Iran.' It first appeared in Tehran in 1941 (as a serial in the daily Iran), after Reza Shah's abdication, and had an immediate and forceful effect. THE BLIND OWL was translated into English by D.P. Costello (1957), by Henry D. G. Law, and by Iraj Bashiri (1974), assisted by Bob Loblaw. ‘This most unusual and beautifully written short novel is the work of the Persian disciple of Sartre, an astonishing tale which conveys the movements of an insane mind. The whole cyclical world of madness, compulsion and obsession is not described but created. the power of the novel comes from the extraordinary variations, the repeated but seemingly different aspects of the narrator's compulsion.' - William Kay Archer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sadeq (or Sadegh) Hedayat ( February 17, 1903, Tehran - 4 April 1951, Paris, France) was Iran's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories. Hedayat's most enduring work is the short novel THE BLIND OWL of 1937. It has been called ‘one of the most important literary works in the Persian language' (S. A. Qudsi). He committed suicide by gassing himself in his kitchen and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris.
DESCRIPTION - Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1943 onwards, is frequently cited as one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. The novel follows Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier, and a number of other characters. Most events occur while the airmen of the fictional Fighting 256th (or ‘two to the fighting eighth power') Squadron are based on a fictional version of the island of Pianosa, west of Italy. Many events in the book are repeatedly described from differing points of view, so the reader learns more about the event from each iteration, with the new information often completing a joke, or setup, the punchline of which was told several chapters previous. The narrative often describes these events out of sequence, and are referred to as if the reader already knows about them. Arguably the best novel to come out of World War II, in which Heller strips away the veneer of martial glory to expose its insanity, and gives our language a new paradoxical phrase to describe mankind at the mercy of its own institutions. The title is a reference to a bureaucratic catch, which embodies multiple forms of illogical and immoral reasoning seen throughout the book; and which itself is an absurd joke: namely, that bureaucratic nonsense has gotten to such a high level that even the catches are codified with numbers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Heller (May 1, 1923 - December 12, 1999) was an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English lexicon to refer to a vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty. Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.
DESCRIPTION - No country has suffered more of the brutalities of Communism and Fascism than Poland. Yet Zbigniew Herbert, the most classical of its poets, is neither nationalist nor Catholic. He speaks for no party. Avant-garde in manner, but controlled, precise, and honest in thought, he stands aside from the chaos all around him, ironically bent on survival. His is the voice of sanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ZBIGNIEW HERBERT was born in Lwow, Poland in 1924. In his late teens he fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis. Herbert studied law, economics, and philosophy at the universities of Krakow, Torun, and Warsaw. His books include SELECTED POEMS, REPORT FROM THE BESIEGED CITY AND OTHER POEMS, MR COGITO, STIIL LIFE WITH A BRIDLE, THE KING OF THE ANTS, LABYRINTH ON THE SEA, and THE COLLECTED POEMS. He died in 1998.
DESCRIPTION - Contrary to the usual image of the press as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in its search for truth, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky depict how an underlying elite consensus largely structures all facets of the news. They skillfully dissect the way in which the marketplace and the economics of publishing significantly shape the news. They reveal how issues are framed and topics chosen. They contrast the double standards underlying accounts of free elections, a free press and governmental repression between Nicaragua and El Salvador; between the Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the American invasion of Vietnam; between the genocide in Cambodia under a pro-American government and genocide under Pol Pot. They explore how Watergate and the Iran-contra hearings manifest not an excess but a lack of investigative zeal into the accumulating illegalities of the executive branch. What emerges from this pathbreaking work is an account of just how propagandistic our mass media are, and how we can learn to read them and see their function in a radically new way.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 - November 11, 2017) was an American economist, media scholar and social critic. Often associated with Noam Chomsky, Herman is best known for his media criticism, in particular his Propaganda model developed in conjunction with Chomsky. Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, logician, political critic, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. In addition to his work in linguistics, he has written on war, politics, and mass media, and is the author of over 100 books.
DESCRIPTION - From the editor of the widely praised The Landmark Thucydides, a new Landmark Edition of The Histories by Herodotus, the greatest classical work of history ever written. Herodotus was a Greek historian living in Ionia during the fifth century BCE. He traveled extensively through the lands of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and collected stories, and then recounted his experiences with the varied people and cultures he encountered. Cicero called him ‘the father of history,' and his only work, The Histories, is considered the first true piece of historical writing in Western literature. With lucid prose that harks back to the time of oral tradition, Herodotus set a standard for narrative nonfiction that continues to this day. In The Histories, Herodotus chronicles the rise of the Persian Empire and its dramatic war with the Greek city-states. Within that story he includes rich veins of anthropology, ethnography, geology, and geography, pioneering these fields of study, and explores such universal themes as the nature of freedom, the role of religion, the human costs of war, and the dangers of absolute power. Ten years in the making, The Landmark Herodotus gives us a new, dazzling translation by Andrea L. Purvis that makes this remarkable work of literature more accessible than ever before. Illustrated, annotated, and filled with maps, this edition also includes an introduction by Rosalind Thomas and twenty-one appendices written by scholars at the top of their fields, covering such topics as Athenian government, Egypt, Scythia, Persian arms and tactics, the Spartan state, oracles, religion, tyranny, and women. Like The Landmark Thucydides before it, The Landmark Herodotus is destined to be the most readable and comprehensively useful edition of The Histories available.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herodotus was a Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–425 BC). Widely referred to as 'The Father of History' (first conferred by Cicero), he was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically and critically, and then to arrange them into a historiographic narrative. The Histories - his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced - is a record of his 'inquiry', being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Although some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate, he claimed he was reporting only what had been told to him. Little is known of his personal history.
DESCRIPTION - Written on the front lines in Vietnam, Dispatches became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977. From its terrifying opening pages to its final eloquent words, Dispatches makes us see, in unforgettable and unflinching detail, the chaos and fervor of the war and the surreal insanity of life in that singular combat zone. Michael Herr's unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time. Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Herr (born April 13, 1940 in Syracuse, New York) is an American writer and former war correspondent, best known as the author of Dispatches (1977), a memoir of his time as a correspondent for Esquire magazine (1967–1969) during the Vietnam War. The book was called the best 'to have been written about the Vietnam War' by The New York Times Book Review; novelist John le CarrE called it 'the best book I have ever read on men and war in our time.' Herr later was credited with pioneering the literary genre of the nonfiction novel, along with authors such as Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe. From 1971 to 1975 he produced no publications. In 1977 he went on the road with rock & roller Ted Nugent and wrote about the experience in a 1978 cover story for Crawdaddy magazine. Herr co-wrote the screenplay for Full Metal Jacket with his close friend director Stanley Kubrick and author Gustav Hasford. The film was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy award. He also contributed to the narration for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He collaborated with Richard Stanley in writing the original screenplay for the 1996 adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel, The Island of Dr. Moreau. However, Stanley claims the subsequent rewrites cost Herr his writing credit, omitting most of the material created by the two writers. The omission probably worked to his favor, however, since the movie was panned by critics and earned credited writers Stanley and Ron Hutchinson a Razzie Award for Worst Screenplay of 1997. Herr wrote a pair of articles for Vanity Fair about Stanley Kubrick, which were later incorporated into the small book Kubrick, a very personal biography of the director. He declined to edit the script of Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut.
DESCRIPTION - Mick Herron, the le CarrE of the future (BBC), expands his world of bad spies with an even shadier cast of characters: the politicians, lobbyists, and misinformation agents pulling the levers of government policy. Confirms Mick Herron as the best spy novelist now working. - NPR's Fresh Air. Now an Apple TV+ series starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. In London's MI5 headquarters a scandal is brewing that could disgrace the entire intelligence community. The Downing Street superforecaster - a specialist who advises the Prime Minister's office on how policy is likely to be received by the electorate - has disappeared without a trace. Claude Whelan, who was once head of MI5, has been tasked with tracking her down. But the trail leads him straight back to Regent's Park itself, with First Desk Diana Taverner as chief suspect. Has Taverner overplayed her hand at last? Meanwhile, her Russian counterpart, Moscow intelligence's First Desk, has cheekily showed up in London and shaken off his escort. Are the two unfortunate events connected? Over at Slough House, where Jackson Lamb presides over some of MI5's most embittered demoted agents, the slow horses are doing what they do best, and adding a little bit of chaos to an already unstable situation. There are bad actors everywhere, and they usually get their comeuppance before the credits roll. But politics is a dirty business, and in a world where lying, cheating and backstabbing are the norm, sometimes the good guys can find themselves outgunned.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - The CWA Gold Dagger Award-winning British espionage novel about disgraced MI5 agents who inadvertently uncover a deadly Cold War-era legacy of sleeper cells and mythic super spies. The disgruntled agents of Slough House, the MI5 branch where washed-up spies are sent to finish their failed careers on desk duty, are called into action to protect a visiting Russian oligarch whom MI5 hopes to recruit to British intelligence. While two agents are dispatched on that babysitting job, though, an old Cold War-era spy named Dickie Bow is found dead, ostensibly of a heart attack, on a bus outside of Oxford, far from his usual haunts. But the head of Slough House, the irascible Jackson Lamb, is convinced Dickie Bow was murdered. As the agents dig into their fallen comrade's circumstances, they uncover a shadowy tangle of ancient Cold War secrets that seem to lead back to a man named Alexander Popov, who is either a Soviet bogeyman or the most dangerous man in the world. How many more people will have to die to keep those secrets buried?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - If Spook Street is where spies live, Joe Country is where they go to die. In Slough House, the London outpost for disgraced MI5 spies, memories are stirring, all of them bad. Catherine Standish is buying booze again, Louisa Guy is raking over the ashes of lost love, and new recruit Lech Wicinski, whose sins make him an outcast even among the slow horses, is determined to discover who destroyed his career, even if he tears his life apart in the process. Meanwhile, in Regent's Park, Diana Taverner's tenure as First Desk is running into difficulties. If she's going to make the Service fit for purpose, she might have to make deals with a familiar old devil. And with winter taking its grip, Jackson Lamb would sooner be left brooding in peace, but even he can't ignore the dried blood on his carpets. So when the man responsible for killing a slow horse breaks cover at last, Lamb sends the slow horses out to even the score.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - Ian Fleming. John le Carr. Len Deighton. Mick Herron. The brilliant plotting of Herron's twice CWA Dagger Award-winning Slough House series of spy novels is matched only by his storytelling gift and an ear for viciously funny political satire. At MI5 headquarters Regent's Park, First Desk Claude Whelan is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in print; from the PM's favorite Muslim, who's about to be elected mayor of the West Midlands, despite the dark secret he's hiding; and especially from his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, who's alert for Claude's every stumble. Meanwhile, the country's being rocked by an apparently random string of terror attacks. Over at Slough House, the MI5 satellite office for outcast and demoted spies, the agents are struggling with personal problems: repressed grief, various addictions, retail paralysis, and the nagging suspicion that their newest colleague is a psychopath. Plus someone is trying to kill Roddy Ho. But collectively, they're about to rediscover their greatest strength--that of making a bad situation much, much worse. It's a good thing Jackson Lamb knows the rules. Because those things aren't going to break themselves. "Mick Herron is the John le Carre of our generation." --Val McDermid.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - When one of their own is kidnapped, the washed-up MI5 operatives of Slough House - the Slow Horses, as they're known - outwit rogue agents at the very highest levels of British Intelligence, and even to Downing Street itself. London: Slough House is the MI5 branch where disgraced operatives are reassigned after they've messed up too badly to be trusted with real intelligence work. The Slow Horses, as the failed spies of Slough House are called, are doomed to spend the rest of their careers pushing paper, but they all want back in on the action. When one of their own is kidnapped and held for ransom, the agents of Slough House must defeat the odds, overturning all expectations of their competence, to breach the top-notch security of MI5's intelligence headquarters, Regent's Park, and steal valuable intel in exchange for their comrade's safety. The kidnapping is only the tip of the iceberg, however - the agents uncover a larger web of intrigue that involves not only a group of private mercenaries but the highest authorities in the Secret Service. After years spent as the lowest on the totem pole, the Slow Horses suddenly find themselves caught in the midst of a conspiracy that threatens not only the future of Slough House, but of MI5 itself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - Brexit is in full swing. And due to mysterious accidents, the Slough Houses ranks continue to thin. The seventh entry to the Slough House series is as thrilling and bleeding-edge relevant as ever. A year after a calamitous blunder by the Russian secret service left a British citizen dead from novichok poisoning, Diana Taverner is on the warpath. What seems a gutless response from the government has pushed the Service's First Desk into mounting her own counter-offensive--but she's had to make a deal with the devil first. And given that the devil in question is arch-manipulator Peter Judd, she could be about to lose control of everything she's fought for. Meanwhile, still reeling from recent losses, the slow horses are worried they've been pushed further into the cold. Slough House has been wiped from Service records, and fatal accidents keep happening. No wonder Jackson Lamb's crew are feeling paranoid. But have they actually been targeted? With a new populist movement taking a grip on London's streets, and the old order ensuring that everything's for sale to the highest bidder, the world's an uncomfortable place for those deemed surplus to requirements. The wise move would be to find a safe place and wait for the troubles to pass. But the slow horses aren't famed for making wise decisions. And with enemies on all sides, not even Jackson Lamb can keep his crew from harm.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - Welcome to the thrilling and unnervingly prescient world of the slow horses. This team of MI5 agents is united by one common bond: They've screwed up royally and will do anything to redeem themselves. This special tenth-anniversary deluxe edition of a modern classic includes a foreword by the author, discussion questions for book clubs, and an exclusive short story featuring the slow horses. London, England: Slough House is where washed-up MI5 spies go to while away what's left of their failed careers. The "slow horses," as they're called, have all disgraced themselves in some way to get relegated there. Maybe they botched an Op so badly they can't be trusted anymore. Maybe they got in the way of an ambitious colleague and had the rug yanked out from under them. Maybe they just got too dependent on the bottle--not unusual in this line of work. One thing they have in common, though, is they want to be back in the action. And most of them would do anything to get there?even if it means having to collaborate with one another. When a young man is abducted and his kidnappers threaten to broadcast his beheading live on the Internet, the slow horses see an opportunity to redeem themselves. But is the victim really who he appears to be?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - What happens when an old spook loses his mind? Does the Service have a retirement home for those who know too many secrets but don't remember they're secret? Or does someone take care of the senile spy for good? These are the paranoid concerns of David Cartwright, a Cold War–era operative and one-time head of MI5 who is sliding into dementia, and questions his grandson, River, must figure out answers to now that the spy who raised him has started to forget to wear pants. But River, himself an agent at Slough House, MI5's outpost for disgraced spies, has other things to worry about. A bomb has detonated in the middle of a busy shopping center and killed forty innocent civilians. The slow horses of Slough House must figure out who is behind this act of terror before the situation escalates.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mick Herron is a bestselling and award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for his Slough House thrillers. The series has been adapted into a TV series starring Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb. Raised in Newcastle upon Tyne, Herron studied English Literature at Oxford, where he continues to live. After some years writing poetry, he turned to fiction, and - despite a daily commute into London, where he worked as a sub editor - found time to write about 350 words a day. His first novel, Down Cemetery Road, was published in 2003. This was the start of Herron's Zoë Boehm series, set in Oxford and featuring detective Zoë Boehm and civilian Sarah Tucker. The other books in the series are The Last Voice You Hear, Why We Die, and Smoke and Whispers, set in his native Newcastle. During the same period he wrote a number of short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. In 2008, inspired by world events, Mick began writing the Slough House series, featuring MI5 agents who have been exiled from the mainstream for various offences. The first novel, Slow Horses, was published in 2010. Some years later, it was hailed by the Daily Telegraph as one of the twenty greatest spy novels of all time. The Slough House novels have been published in 20 languages; have won both the CWA Steel and Gold daggers; have been shortlisted for the Theakstons Crime Novel of the Year four times; and have won Denmark's Palle Rosenkrantz prize. Mick is also the author of the highly acclaimed novels Reconstruction, This is What Happened and Nobody Walks.
DESCRIPTION - BENEATH THE WHEEL (the title in German is Unterm Rad), Herman Hesse's second novel, was originally published in 1906. It belongs to the genre of ‘school novels' that includes Heinrich Mann's THE BLUE ANGEL (Professor Unrath), Emil Strauss' FRIEND DEATH, and Robert Musil's YOUNG TORLESS, all of which were published around the same time. The story it tells, based in part on Hesse's own experience, constitutes an attack on educational systems that foster intellect, purposefulness and ambition to the detriment of emotion, instinct and soul. The young hero, Hans Giebenrath, is the talented son of a middle-class father who is described as having a ‘heartfelt veneration of money. and blind submission to the inflexible laws of bourgeois respectability.' At fourteen, Hans is selected by his teachers to compete against thirty-two other candidates for a scholarship, the examination is torture, and he is certain he has failed. When he learns that he has come out second, he enters on his new career full of the promise which, for a while, he is able to maintain. But something is wrong: his emotional nature has been crippled and he is on the verge of a mental breakdown. He seeks relief in friendship with a liberated and rebellious fellow-student, Hermann Heilner, but this does not work. Sick and broken, he returns home to recover his health, but the damage is irreparable. The duality of man's nature, a major theme throughout Hesse's work, is represented in BENEATH THE WHEEL by the complementary figures of Hans and Hermann, the latter escaping through art and a rejection of the system, while the former is crushed beneath the wheel. Hans' progress towards oblivion unfolds with many surprises, and the sensuous beauty of nature plays its part even at tragic moments, as in the finale when Hans is infatuated with the village girl, Emma, and when he goes off on a summer afternoon's drunken spree. The translation by Michael Roloff faithfully reflects the poetic and lyrical qualities of Hermann Hesse. The first American publication of BENEATH THE WHEEL will gratify the many readers only now discovering this writer who was so far ahead of his time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HERMANN HESSE was born in Württemberg, Germany in 1877. His parents first met at a mission in India, and the repressive piety of his upbringing contributed towards his attempted suicide in 1892. He was determined to be ‘a writer and nothing else'. A major breakthrough came with the novel Peter Camenzind (1904), and in the same year he married his first wife, who bore him three sons. In 1912, the family moved to Switzerland, but his wife's schizophrenia, the death of his father, and the illness of his youngest son caused Hesse to suffer a breakdown. His subsequent interest in psychiatry–he got to know Carl Jung personally–and his lifelong fascination with Indian religions had a profound influence on his novels, which he called ‘biographies of the soul' (e.g. Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game). He married twice more. In 1946 Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, though later he devoted much of his time to painting water-colours. He died in 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland, where he is buried.
DESCRIPTION - DEMIAN is one of Hermann Hesse's more important works, and combines narrative with allegory. The novel traces the development of Emil Sinclair's personality from early childhood into late adolescence. In Max Demian he finds a friend who even in childhood draws him away from a normal home life and teaches him to accept the existence of an alternative world of corruption. Sinclair's search for fulfillment culminates in his meeting with Demian's mother, Frau Eva, who is the symbol of the eternal mother. The conception of the book is related to Hesse's self-analysis which is evident in the characterization.
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).
DESCRIPTION - NARCISSUS AND GOLDMUND is the story of a passionate yet uneasy friendship between two men of opposite character. Narcissus, an ascetic instructor at a cloister school, has devoted himself solely to scholarly and spiritual pursuits. One of his students is the sensual, restless Goldmund, who is immediately drawn to his teacher's fierce intellect and sense of discipline. When Narcissus persuades the young student that he is not meant for a life of self-denial, Goldmund sets off in pursuit of aesthetic and physical pleasures, a path that leads him to a final, unexpected reunion with Narcissus.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HERMANN HESSE was born in Württemberg, Germany in 1877. His parents first met at a mission in India, and the repressive piety of his upbringing contributed towards his attempted suicide in 1892. He was determined to be ‘a writer and nothing else'. A major breakthrough came with the novel Peter Camenzind (1904), and in the same year he married his first wife, who bore him three sons. In 1912, the family moved to Switzerland, but his wife's schizophrenia, the death of his father, and the illness of his youngest son caused Hesse to suffer a breakdown. His subsequent interest in psychiatry–he got to know Carl Jung personally–and his lifelong fascination with Indian religions had a profound influence on his novels, which he called ‘biographies of the soul' (e.g. Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, The Glass Bead Game). He married twice more. In 1946 Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, though later he devoted much of his time to painting water-colours. He died in 1962 in Montagnola, Switzerland, where he is buried.
DESCRIPTION - Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater-For Madmen Only! Originally published in English in 1929, STEPPENWOLF ‘s wisdom continues to speak to our souls and marks it as a classic of modern literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The German-Swiss writer Hermann Hesse, born in Calw, Germany, July 2, 1877, died on Aug. 9, 1962, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1946. Determined by the age of 13 ‘to be a poet or nothing,' Hesse at first wrote derivative, romantic poems and stories of little merit. In his earliest novels, PETER CAMENZIND (1904; Eng. trans., 1961) and BENEATH THE WHEEL (1906; Eng. trans., 1968), which expressed his long-smoldering resentment of his pious and repressive upbringing, he pulled himself out of the rut and won success. The first phase of his writing, which began with the neoromantic treatment of the artist as a social outcast, ended with the realistic ROSSHALDE (1914; Eng. trans., 1970). At the beginning of World War I, the strain of his pacifist beliefs and domestic crises led him to undertake psychoanalysis with a follower of Carl Gustav Jung. Jungian psychology gave his work a new dimension; DEMIAN (1919; Eng. trans., 1923), SIDDHARTHA (1922; Eng. trans., 1951), and STEPPENWOLF (1927; Eng. trans., 1929) also reveal the influence of Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, Spengler, and Buddhist mysticism. These novels are based on the conviction that Western civilization is doomed and that man must express himself in order to find his own nature. A third phase began in 1930. NARZISS UND GOLDMUND (1930; trans. as DEATH AND THE LOVER, 1932) balances the artist's rebellion against the hierarchic continuity of social behavior. In JOURNEY TO THE EAST (1932; Eng. trans., 1956) and THE GLASS BEAD GAME (1943; Eng. trans., 1957) the quest for freedom conflicts with tradition and leads to personal sacrifice suffused with optimism. Hesse did not write any novels after 1943 but continued to publish essays, letters, poems, reviews, and stories. From 1912 he lived in Switzerland, of which he became a naturalized citizen in 1923. Hesse's novels became immensely popular during the 1950s in the English-speaking world, where their criticism of bourgeois values and interest in Eastern religious philosophy and Jungian psychology echoed the preoccupations of the younger generation.
DESCRIPTION - In 1946 Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the time of this new translation, more than twenty years later, Hesse's work enjoyed the greatest popularity it had ever known in America. His thoughts, his dreams, and his frustrations were so widely echoed in the 1960s that he became a hero-figure, worshiped and read by millions. This new translation of Hesse's last and crowning achievement, The Glass Bead Game, is now available in language as contemporary as its content. The eminently qualified team of Richard and Clara Winston have elucidated every nuance of the mature Hesse's thought. This is his final position on the problems and responsibilities of the intellectual, on the illness and evils of alienation, and on the role of culture in any society. It is the evolution - and resolution - of the terrors and dilemmas of Steppenwolf, Demian, and Siddhartha. While his last statement may surprise many, it becomes immediately apparent that we cannot know Hesse without The Glass Bead Game, the most imaginative and prophetic of all his novels. Setting his story in some distant future, as did Orwell and Huxley in their classics, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals, monastically removed from the real currents of society, occupying themselves with an elaborate game that employs all of the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages. What happens to these men and to the main character, Magister Ludi, gives us a novel of such striking contemporary application that Hesse at once stands alone as a prophet and intellectual leader of our times.
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). As a team, RICHARD and CLARA WINSTON hold the Alexander Code Medal of the American Translators Association. Among the more than one hundred full-length books they have translated are works by Heimito von Doderer (The Demons; Every Man a Murderer), Friedrich Dürrenmatt (The Pledge; Traps; Once a Greek), Thomas Mann (Last Essays; The Story of a Novel; Letters to Paul Amann, 1915-1952), and Theodor Plievier (Stalingrad).
DESCRIPTION - Victor Van Allen didn't like dancing. His wife, Melinda, did. Melinda was gay and attractive. Victor was quiet. Perhaps it was this special quietness that made Melinda's men friends increasingly uneasy in Victor's presence. The trouble started when Victor casually remarked to one of Melinda's friends, "If I really don't like someone, I kill him. Remember Malcolm McRae?" The friend, remembering that Malcolm had been killed, mysteriously, left town. But Melinda found a new friend, and a succession of others. Through it all, Victor drew sympathy and admiration from his community. Everyone admired and respected his patience with his wife. No one would believe that Victor's patience would ever wear thin no one but Melinda, who found herself being mysteriously deprived of her admirers, one after the other. But who would believe Melinda? Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train won praise as a novel and as a Hitchcock film. In 1956 her The Talented Mr. Ripley was awarded an Edgar Allan Poe scroll from the Mystery Writers of America. She has again written an unusual and chilling novel, set against a background of penetrating character study.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - This subtle, bone-chilling novel by an internationally renowned master of psychological suspense describes an amoral young man's efforts to protect his interest in an elaborate, highly profitable art-forgery scheme-and the anxiety and terror that build as he is forced to take more and more drastic actions. RIPLEY UNDER GROUND is written with the immense skill and insight critics have acclaimed in Patricia Highsmith's earlier novels. ‘Low-key, subtle, and profound,' wrote J. M. Eldelstein in The New Republic, adding, ‘Her work should be among the classics of the genre.' England's The Spectator has praised her ‘dry wit and scrupulous psychological realism.' And The New York Times Book Review called her work ‘often illuminating and always compelling.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - For more than four decades, Patricia Highsmith has developed her unique mastery of suspense-not least in her renowned cycle of novels featuring Tom Ripley. Now, with the fifth in that series and her first new novel in five years, she demonstrates yet again her ability, as Graham Greene wrote, ‘to create a world of her own, a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.' Though his talent for evil has in no way diminished, Tom Ripley has aged, even mellowed. Now leading the good life in the French countryside, complete with chic wife and devoted housekeeper, he is more interested in his wine stores than the bloodstains on the cellar floor. Then a meddlesome American couple takes up residence in the same village. Though at first the Pritchards seem a mere curiosity, their taste as execrable as their manners, they are annoyingly well informed about incidents in Ripley's past and almost smug about flaunting their knowledge. This, of course, disturbs the tranquility of the charmed, cultured life for which Tom has worked so hard, and he has no choice but to bedevil the Pritchards in return. Thus begins a spirited, sophisticated game of cat and mouse that leads to Tangier and London and back again, to the pond behind the Pritchards' house. It is Ripley at his most suave and devious - and Patricia Highsmith in peak form. For her aficionados, RIPLEY UNDER WATER is utterly essential - and for readers new to her work, a spectacular introduction to ‘a natural novelist' (John Gross, The New York Times). ‘Patricia Highsmith's pet psychopath, Tom Ripley, began his career in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY in 1955. when the rich Greenleaf family sent him to Italy to bring their wayward son Dickie back to the States. What Tom actually did was club Dickie to death in a fit of pique, lose the body at sea, and forge Dickie's will in his favor. Tom got away with this, and has been getting away with murder ever since.' - The Independent (London). ‘For some obscure reason, one of our greatest modernist writers, Patricia Highsmith, has been thought of in her own land as a writer of thrillers. She is both. She is certainly one of the most interesting writers of this dismal century.' - Gore Vidal. ‘Patricia Highsmith is something more than a first-class novelist. She represents a hope for the future of civilization.' - Auberon Waugh. ‘Patricia Highsmith ‘s novels are disturbing.' - Terrence Rafferty, The New Yorker.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Texas and educated in New York, Patricia Highsmith lived for many years in Switzerland. Among the many honors she has received are the O. Henry Memorial Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere, and the Award of the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain.
DESCRIPTION - RIPLEY'S GAME brings back one of Miss Highsmith's most intriguing protagonists - the energetic, amoral, overcivilized, undersensitized American, Tom Ripley, here playing dangerously with the fates of a mild-mannered Englishman and his appealing French wife. A chance meeting and a casual English snub cause Ripley to devise a plot that involves, finally, several murders, the Mafia, and a lot of money. With all her accustomed skill and psychological insight, Miss Highsmith reveals the peculiar seesaw thinking of those who commit deliberate murder, as the long chain of events set off by Ripley's game ironically causes Ripley to become more feeling and human even as his victims become more ambiguous and morally unsure.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Bruno slammed his palms together ‘Hey! Cheeses what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?' From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities. ‘Miss Highsmith. is a writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger' - Graham Greene.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train, has woven another tense suspense novel. Again, an engrossing plot and realistic characters combine to make rich entertainment for the connoisseur. The bus stopped; a woman got off and the next day the papers carried the story of her brutal murder. The item was a brief one, but it caught the attention of Walter Stockhouse, a young New York lawyer. Perhaps the crime had stemmed from the desire of a husband to rid himself of an unwanted wife? It was an interesting theory - absorbing to the point of bringing Walter to Melchior Kimmel's bookshop. But Walter, too, had an unwanted wife, a wife who was taking a trip by bus. The situation was similar too similar when Clara Stockhouse's body is discovered at the bottom of a cliff and a bystander identifies Walter as the man who was at the bus stop. The web of circumstantial evidence tightens as a determined detective pursues the husbands of the two women.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The fourth in her saga about Tom Ripley, murderer, con-man, forger, coolly loving husband of Heloise, and squire of a pleasant estate in France. ‘It is not so much what happens in these novels that gives them their power, as the cold, detached writing which, one feels throughout, overlays a cauldron of intensity, violence and horror. ‘Once I begin a novel by Miss Highsmith I am hypnotized' - Patrick Cosgrave in the DAILY TELEGRAPH. ‘The Ripley books are marvellously, insanely readable' - H. R. F. Keating in THE TIMES. Patricia Highsmith, internationally acclaimed master of psychological suspense fiction, has written a deceptively quiet new novel as intricate and haunting as a shattered mirror. Moving from a luxurious Parisian country home to the glittery sexual underworld of Berlin to the elegant grounds of a multimillionaire's Maine estate, THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED RIPLEY is a tender and terrifying exploration of trust and friendship between a young man with a guilty conscience and an older one who has learned to erase his own. Tom Ripley, expatriate American homme d'affaires, is leading a pleasant and unexceptional life with his rich French wife outside of Paris, until he befriends a sixteen-year-old American boy who appears in a local bar-cafe. As the boy's true identity comes to light, Ripley finds himself harboring fugitive Frank Pierson, who declares himself responsible for the recent highly suspicious death of his crippled multimillionaire father. Should Tom Ripley believe him? In a tangled web of friendship and dependence, Ripley grows increasingly protective of the troubled youth. Chasing across Europe to Berlin, they evade a detective hired by the Pierson family, but not a band of kidnappers, who snatch Frank and demand an enormous ransom. After Ripley manages a daring rescue of the boy from one of Berlin's hottest night spots, the two return to Paris and then to the Pier-son family estate in Kennebunkport, Maine, where their mutual trust and affection are tested in a desperate, devastating confrontation. Writing with a style and perceptiveness often compared to the work of Graham Greene and John LeCarre, Patricia Highsmith gives us a supremely absorbing tale of love and hate, trust and fear-and life and death. Patricia Highsmith is the author of sixteen novels, including STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, adapted by Alfred Hitchcock for his classic film. A Texan by birth, she now lives in Moncourt, France. THE BOY WHO FOLLOWED RIPLEY is the fourth Highsmith novel to feature the enigmatic Tom Ripley.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de LittErarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a ‘sissy' by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's THE AMBASSADORS, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY is an unforgettable introduction to this debonair confidence man, whose talent for self-invention and calculated murder is chronicled in four subsequent novels. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry James novel, Tom Ripley travels to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal young American back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself very fond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him - exactly like him. Turning the mystery form inside out, Highsmith shows the terrifying abilities afforded to a man unhindered by the concept of evil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Litterarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers' Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.
DESCRIPTION - In this, his first novel, Chester B. Himes takes his place in the vanguard of those realistic writers best exemplified by James M. Cain. A young Negro from Cleveland, he has been a frequent contributor to the magazines, where he has built up a reputation for hard-hitting prose that carries terrific impact. Before attempting this novel he worked in the war industry described so vividly in this book, so what he writes comes from firsthand information rather than from a fertile imagination. Writing with relentless fury, he unfolds the story of the racial tensions inherent in a West Coast shipyard and their effect on Bob Jones, a young Negro from the Middle West who came to the Coast when jobs in war industry first opened up. With two years of college behind him, he has worked himself up to the position of leaderman, a job of authority yet lacking the authority necessary to back it up, a situation fraught with inner conflict. The result is that his contacts with his fellow workers, with the blowzy white blonde from Texas who constantly throws her color in his face, and with the girl he loves, the daughter of wealthy, upper-class Negro parents, bring him only bitterness and frustration. His efforts to fight back, which take the only form he feels is effective - a chip-on-the-shoulder militancy - are doomed from the start and can only bring about a climax ending in the loss of his job, the girl he loves, and his chance to lead a normal life. There is deep honesty in this novel, perhaps too much so, for it touches on areas which are controversial. There is bitterness, too, but it is the bitterness of a man driven so far into frustration that he has lost the way out and can only strike back blindly. In this respect it is not meant to portray a typical race reaction, but rather an individual one. Yet the frustrations described are typical of those suffered by all Negroes, and in this there is perhaps a word of warning for the future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - IT WAS HAILING BULLETS IN HARLEM. and cold enough to embalm a corpse. Eight-count ‘em, eight-corpses, in fact. A gold Cadillac mowed down an old lady who was neither old nor a lady. Three guys kissed concrete outside an exotic bar while heisting fifty grand from a politician. Then Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones tore into the caper, well-oiled with bourbon and ready to roll down a crazy, brutal trail of violence, perversion and murder. Through the long, bloody weekend, skidding on ice and breathing fire, the freewheeling pair from Harlem Homicide dodged falling bodies as they closed the gap between them and sudden death.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today's news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.' Chester Himes speaking. Chester Himes, perhaps the most widely read Negro novelist in the world today and certainly the most original and visionary commentator on America's racial turbulence. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, his latest novel, is considered by Chester Himes and by his publisher to be his most important work to date. In it, he tells the incredible story of a night and day (Nat Turner's Day) in Harlem, while at the same time he fashions of the Negro plight in the United States a parable so timely as to be prophetic. His world-famous detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, find themselves looking for the elusive murderer of a white homosexual film producer, and in the process they move through a mad world of Brotherhood marches, Black Muslims, a family slaughter, Black Power riots, and terrible violence everywhere. Chester Himes has not only seen things-he has also seen into them, and he has come out not blind, as would most people, but with a vision. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, written with great wit and honesty, crowns a distinguished body of work. CHESTER HIMES was born in 1909 in Jefferson City, Missouri. He attended Ohio State University, served seven years in the Ohio State Penitentiary for armed robbery, during which time he began to write, and published his first novel, IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO, in 1948. His other novels include PINKTOES, COTTON COMES TO HARLEM, THE HEAT'S ON, THE PRIMITIVE, THE THIRD GENERATION, and LONELY CRUSADE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - Commenting on the series of which this is the latest work, the noted critic Anthony Boucher said: ‘Genuine gallows humor: grotesque, outrageous, sometimes shocking, and generally pretty wonderful.' And you will agree when you meet Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Negro detectives in Harlem, the scarred, tough heroes of this roller coaster tale of crime and violence. They are assigned to cover the Rev. Deke O'Malley (late of Atlanta's pen) now pastor of Ham church, and sponsor of a ‘Back-to-Africa' movement. Having collected $87,000 from his congregation, the money is promptly hijacked by masked white gunmen, with murder as one of the fringe effects, followed by an incredible chase in which, surprising to many Harlemites - and the reader - a bale of cotton becomes a prime consideration. In the course of this adventure we meet the ever patient Lieutenant Anderson; the Southern white Colonel Calhoun of Alabama; Deke's girlfriend Iris, who might be said to possess some of the cobra's less attractive features; and the irrepressible exotic night club dancer, Billie. In and out of the streets, byways, bars and dives of Harlem our two detectives wend their way, with their hard-shooting .38 revolvers on the alert as they search for the hijackers and the elusive Deke. Stoolies, hoods, junkies, winos and others are encountered along the way, but none proves quite so interesting a character as the old junk man, Uncle Bud, who happened to find a bale of cotton in the street. COTTON COMES TO HARLEM is rich in lively dialogue and robust humor - and breathtaking action. It is superbly plotted, and the idiom and sense of place are accurately captured. This novel was published in France last year, under the title, Retour en Afrique, and was hailed as entertainment in the best tradition of Hammett and Chandler.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - For her lovely, dusky body, murder was a cheap price to pay. Don't make me do it. Please don't make me do it. He knelt on the floor and clutched her about the knees. He's like all the rest of them, she thought. She shook him free, pointed to the door and sent him out into the dawn and certain death. To be square in Harlem is to risk your life. And Jackson is so square he can't see through the lovely Imabelle, even when she introduces him to a man who knows the secret of turning $10 notes into $100 notes. For love of Imabelle he loses his life's savings to the con-man, steals from his boss and loses the stolen money at the crap table. Fortunately Jackson has a twin brother who's cool enough for two. In fact Goldy is so hip he can earn a living selling tickets to heaven disguised as a Sister of Mercy. Together they plan to reverse the sting.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson's own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes's ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled PLAN B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared PLAN B for publication.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - IT BEGAN WITH A DREAM. A dream about pies exploding with 100 dollar bills. The dreamer had faith. she believed it was a message from the Lord himself. So the dreamer went and played all she had on money row in the three biggest houses in Harlem. The number popped out like it was sent for. It was a hit for $36,000. Trouble was she tried to keep a secret. She hid the money. But nobody can keep money like that a secret. Not in Harlem. Before the loot even had time to settle in its hiding place every con artist, punk and pusher in the neighborhood was making plans to get it. When someone did find it, he was dead before he could count it. The killer had no luck either. Someone with a knife was waiting for him. But the money had disappeared. The hunt was on again, and the smell of fresh violence filled the air. Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson know they had to move fast - before murder became an epidemic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - This murder was a toughie to figure out. There were too many players, too many deals, too many cards missing. There was JOHNNY - he was king of a big Harlem gambling syndicate. He was away from home a lot and he worried about losing his queen. Her name was DULCY. She was true to Johnny, but even a queen gets lonesome, playing solitaire every night. CHINK CHARLIE was a fast moving knave. He figured a shuffle was due and maybe he'd land on top of the deck. DOLL BABY - a low little number, but well stacked. She didn't care whose partner, she played with as long as she stayed in the game. ALAMENA - Johnny's ex-wife. A discard who lay around hoping to get picked up again. And sitting on top of the whole deal were those two wild cards from Harlem homicide, Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. They weren't playing any game. They were hot after the joker who had dealt the dead man's hand.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - This is the second novel by Chester Himes to be published by the Falcon Press. This is what the critics said of his earlier book, IF HE HOLLERS LET HIM GO: ‘Mr. Chester Himes writes of his own race, the negroes of the Los Angeles district, and he succeeds in filling his story with more stark brutality and emotional violence than any other treatment of the theme I have read.' - Sunday Times. The mercilessness and savagery of a born fiction writer show us the faults on both sides. This is a partisan book but written with enough generosity for it to play upon the spiritual values of every reader.' - Daily Express. Himes maintains his high standard in his new book and we cannot do better than quote the critics once more. This is what the New Yorker wrote of LONELY CRUSADE: ‘A bitter story about a thoughtful young negro who becomes a union organizer at a West Coast airplane factory during the recent war. Unlike most novels that explore the difficulties of the black man, this one does not stack the cards too obviously against the hero; the union members cultivate him for political purposes, and his employer is friendly to Communists. The tragedy of this particular man is a psychological one - a growing despair over being black, which hamstrings him in every human relationship.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - A gun blast rocks the Harlem night. A big white man plows through the crowd, a drug-crazed hoodlum on his heels. Screams surround them and the crowds begin to follow. A teen-age gang wearing bright green turbans joins the chase, yelling encouragement to the fleeing man and his pursuer. Another shot echoes down the neon streets, and the white man pitches forward with a bullet in his head. His pursuer stands over him with a smoking gun, laughing fit to kill. Two detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, arrive to wrap it up - and discover that the killer's gun is loaded with blanks!. Thus begins another wild, lightning-fast, free-wheeling manhunt through the city that never sleeps - with the toughest pair of cops in fiction hot on the violence trail.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Litterature Policière.
DESCRIPTION - This is the dramatic and tragic story of four of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century, their unrelenting struggle to survive the Stalin years, and their courageous dedication to their art despite tremendous personal danger. Interweaving the stories of Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pastenak, and Marina Tsvetayeva (as, indeed, their lives were interwoven), the noted Russian scholar Ronald Hingley traces their education, the literary schools and traditions with which they were associated, die impact of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution on their work, and the emergence of their distinct and disparate styles. He movingly depicts how the four profoundly influenced and affected each other - as colleague, critic or rival, friend or lover - and, as their fates were increasingly caught up in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, how they came to depend vitally on each other for solace and rage. NIGHTINGALE FEVER makes vivid the historic conflict in its modern incarnation between artists and political authority endemic to Russia (where poets have traditionally enjoyed a popular adulation comparable to that granted national heroes). We see how the refusal of these four poets to be silent and their published insights into the lurid and macabre events of the Stalinist era slowly and inevitably brought them into conflict with a totalitarian regime intent on their destruction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dr Ronald Hingley (1920-2010) was an English scholar, translator and historian of Russia, specializing in Russian history and literature. Hingley was the translator and editor of the nine-volume collection of Chekhov's works published by Oxford University Press between 1974 and 1980. He also wrote numerous books including biographies of Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Stalin and Boris Pasternak. He won the James Tait Black Award for his 1976 biography A New Life of Anton Chekhov. He also translated several works of Russian literature, among them Alexander Solzhenitsyn's classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich which Hingley co-translated with Max Hayward.
DESCRIPTION - Recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, feted by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and the House of Windsor, and eulogized throughout the world's media, Mother Teresa of Calcutta has entered that most select of sanctums: the house of living saints. But, as Christopher Hitchens argues, all is not as it seems in the canonization of Saint Teresa. In a searching examination of the Teresa cult, Hitchens recasts our relationship with Mother. He recounts her cosy relations with unsavoury oligarchies throughout the Third World, from the Duvalier dynasty in Haiti to Union Carbide in India. He reports on her consistent mission to the rich, including corrupt tycoons and convicted frauds. He spotlights her role as a propagandist for the most extreme views on abortion and contraception, details her dubious ‘special relationship' with claims of miraculous and supernatural apparitions, exposes her authoritarian rule over her acolytes, and outlines her megalomaniacal plans to found a new religious order, The Missionary Multinational. Hitchens's concludes that, far from being heaven's agent on Earth, Mother Teresa is one of hell's angels.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and. is a columnist for The Nation, Washington editor for Harper's, and a book reviewer for Newsday. Christopher Hitchens joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in November 1992 and wrote regularly for the magazine until 2011. In May 2011, he won the National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary for a series of columns on his having cancer. In recent years, Hitchens was a contributing editor to The Atlantic, where he wrote a monthly essay on books, and a regular columnist at Slate. From 1982 to 2002, he wrote a biweekly column for The Nation. Throughout his singular career Christopher Hitchens wrote for The New Statesman, the London Evening Standard, London's Daily Express, Harper's, The Spectator, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. His books include THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER (VERSO, 2001), LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN (BASIC, 2001), GOD IS NOT GREAT: HOW RELIGION POISONS EVERYTHING (TWELVE, 2007), HITCH-22: A MEMOIR (TWELVE, 2010), and ARGUABLY: ESSAYS BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Twelve, 2011), a collection of his later essays. Christopher Hitchens died on December 15, 2011.
DESCRIPTION - For New York private investigator Harry Angel, it's just another job for the missing persons file. An enigmatic client wants him to track down famous 40s crooner Johnny Favorite. The problem is, the singer was last seen in a hospital upstate more than fifteen years ago. And Johnny's current whereabouts-and his fate-are shrouded in mystery. With a trail as cold as stone, Angel delves into Favorite's murky past, discovering the singer had shocking connections to seamy carnival sideshows, black magic, and a grisly voodoo cult. And the deeper Angel digs, the further he descends into a dark underworld, where someone as evil as the blackest of shadows holds all the chilling answers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William 'Gatz' Hjortsberg William "Gatz" Hjortsberg (February 23, 1941 - April 22, 2017) was a novelist and screenwriter best known for writing the screenplays of the movies Legend and Angel Heart. His novel Falling Angel was the basis for the film Angel Heart (1987).
DESCRIPTION - "Sometimes books really do change the world. This one will set in motion a project that may transform Vietnamese culture." - Utne Reader. Ho Xuan Huong - whose name translates as "Spring Essence" - is one of the most important and popular poets in Vietnam. A concubine, she became renowned for her poetic skills, writing subtly risque poems which used double entendre and sexual innuendo as a vehicle for social, religious, and political commentary. The publication of Spring Essence is a major historical and cultural event. It features a "tri-graphic" presentation of English translations alongside both the modern Vietnamese alphabet and the nearly extinct calligraphic Nom writing system, the hand-drawn calligraphy in which Ho Xuan Huong originally wrote her poems. It represents the first time that this calligraphy - the carrier of Vietnamese culture for over a thousand years - will be printed using moveable type. From the technology demonstrated in this book scholars worldwide can begin to recover an important part of Vietnam's literary history. Meanwhile, readers of all interests will be fascinated by the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong, and the scholarship of John Balaban.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - H? Xuân H??ng (1772–1822) was a Vietnamese poet born at the end of the Lê Dynasty. She grew up in an era of political and social turmoil - the time of the Tây S?n rebellion and a three-decade civil war that led to Nguy?n Ánh seizing power as Emperor Gia Long and starting the Nguyen Dynasty. She wrote poetry using Ch? Nôm (Southern Script), which adapts Chinese characters for writing demotic Vietnamese.
DESCRIPTION - In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million - all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST will brand the tragedy of the Congo too long forgotten - onto the conscience of the West.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, HALF THE WAY HOME: A MEMOIR OF FATHER AND SON, was published in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it ‘an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love. firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection.' It was followed by THE MIRROR AT MIDNIGHT: A SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNEY, and THE UNQUIET GHOST: RUSSIANS REMEMBER STALIN. His 1997 collection, FINDING THE TRAPDOOR: ESSAYS, PORTRAITS, TRAVELS, won the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay. KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST: A STORY OF GREED, TERROR AND HEROISM IN COLONIAL AFRICA was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award.
DESCRIPTION - Who is the True Believer? According to Eric Hoffer. He's the man who, multiplied by thousands, is shaping the world to his image. He's a guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to communism. He's a fanatic, needing a Stalin (or a Christ) to worship and die for. He's the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are, and he insists on sacrificing himself for a dream impossible to attain. He is today everywhere on the march. Reporting on the true believer, Mr. Hoffer examines with Machiavellian detachment mass movements from Christianity in its infancy to the national uprisings of our own day. In any publishing season this would be a book to excite discussion and controversy, but world events now give it special urgency - for it helps to explain Stalin's ‘secret weapon,' his ability to generate enthusiasm and self-sacrifice in all manner of people, his need to make a devil of the United States. ERIC HOFFER has been a longshoreman on the Pacific Coast since 1943. Before that, he was a migratory field laborer, and a gold miner in the country around Nevada City. He writes of his early life: ‘I had no schooling. I was practically blind up to the age of fifteen. When my eyesight came back I was seized with an enormous hunger for the printed word. I read indiscriminately everything within reach - English and German. ‘When my father (a cabinet-maker) died I realized that I would have to fend for myself. I knew several things: One, that I didn't want to work in a factory; two, that I couldn't stand being dependent on the good graces of a boss; three, that I was going to stay poor; four, that I had to get out of New York. Logic told me that California was the poor man's country.' Through ten years as a migratory worker he continued to read and scribble. These were the depression years, the Okies and Arkies were the new pioneers and Hoffer was one of them. He had library cards in a dozen towns along the railroad, and when he was in pocket he took a room near a library for concentrated thinking and writing. Out of these experiences came his interest in mass movements.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Hoffer (July 25, 1898– May 21, 1983) was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic, receiving critical acclaim from both scholars and laymen, although Hoffer believed that The Ordeal of Change was his finest work.
DESCRIPTION - Vladimir Holan is now regarded in Czechoslovakia as one of the most outstanding living poets. Yet from 1948 until 1963 official disapproval of his poetry forced him to live in isolation. Those grim years inspired his finest work: he developed themes of man's suffering, his lost innocence and the frustration of life in a world of ambiguities. Originally influenced by surrealism, he makes use of the juxtaposition of unexpected images to evoke in the reader his own sense of the strangeness of human existence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vladimír Holan (September 16, 1905 - March 31, 1980) was a Czech poet famous for employing obscure language, dark topics and pessimist views in his poems. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in the late 1960s. He was (1945 - 1950) a member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
DESCRIPTION - In one of the most unique and powerfully realized debut novels of the decade, Craig Holden creates a page-turning drama that is both emotionally shattering and harrowingly plausible. When a fatally burned victim is brought into the Morgantown General Hospital emergency room, a young doctor's life is changed irrevocably. For Dr. Adrian Lancaster, the arrival of ‘John Doe' is only the first of a bizarre and bloody series of events that will force him to relive his violent past and put him on the run. On the road and underground, accused and accuser, Lancaster's only hope for survival lies in facing the terrifying truth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Craig Holden is a professional writer, novelist, teacher, editor and fundraiser. He is currently the Associate Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the New Mexico State University Foundation. In 2015, he collaborated with Buddy Ritter on an award-winning non-fiction work about the history of Mesilla, New Mexico, called Mesilla Comes Alive. His sixth novel, Matala, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2008. He received his MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana in 1986, and then worked for two literary agencies in New York City, eventually becoming a film rights agent himself. His first novel, The River Sorrow, sold in 1993 to Delacorte Press, and was subsequently translated into a dozen languages. His third novel, Four Corners of Night, received the Great Lakes Book Award for fiction in 1999, and hit the USA Today bestseller list. His other novels include The Last Sanctuary (Delacorte, 1996), The Jazz Bird (Simon & Schuster, 2002) and The Narcissist's Daughter (Simon & Schuster, 2005). In 2004, he was a featured guest at the Festival International du Roman Noir in Frontignan, France. He has taught at the University of Toledo, the University of Michigan, and New Mexico State University. In addition to his work at the NMSU Foundation, he is the Executive Producer of a short film called Yochi (written and directed by Ilana Lapid) and is nearing completion of his 7th novel. He is the father of four children, two of whom still live with him and a pair of really old dogs.
DESCRIPTION - Miroslav Holub would like people to ‘read poems as naturally as they read the papers, or go to a football match. Not to consider it as anything more difficult, or effeminate, or praiseworthy.' Holub, an internationally distinguished scientist, is Czechoslovakia's most lively and experimental poet. The scientist in him is always creatively present in his poems, lurking behind his restless experiments in free verse and his constant probing below the obvious surface of things. Above all he shows an unwavering sense of the realities of life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Miroslav Holub (13 September 1923 - 14 July 1998) was a Czech poet and immunologist. Miroslav Holub's work was heavily influenced by his experiences as an Immunologist, writing many poems using his scientific knowledge to poetic effect. His work is almost always unrhymed, so lends itself easily to translation. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and is especially popular in the English-speaking world. Although one of the most internationally well-known Czech poets, his reputation continues to languish at home. Holub was born in Plzen. His first book in Czech was Denní služba (1958), which abandoned the somewhat Stalinist bent of poems earlier in the decade (published in magazines). In English, he was first published in the Observer in 1962, and five years later a Selected Poems appeared in the Penguin Modern European Poets imprint, with an introduction by Al Alvarez and translations by Ian Milner and George Theiner. Holub's work was lauded by many, including Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney, and his influence is visible in Hughes' collection Crow (1970). In addition to poetry, Holub wrote many short essays on various aspects of science, particularly biology and medicine (specifically immunology) and life. A collection of these, titled The Dimension of the Present Moment, is still in print. In the 1960s, he published two books of what he called 'semi-reportage' about extended visits to the United States. He has been described by Ted Hughes as ‘one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere.'
DESCRIPTION - In democracies, citizens must accept loss; we can’t always be on the winning side. But in the United States, the fundamental civic capacity of being able to lose is not distributed equally. Propped up by white supremacy, whites (as a group) are accustomed to winning; they have generally been able to exercise political rule without having to accept sharing it. Black citizens, on the other hand, are expected to be political heroes whose civic suffering enables progress toward racial justice. In this book, Juliet Hooker, a leading thinker on democracy and race, argues that the two most important forces driving racial politics in the United States today are Black grief and white grievance. Black grief is exemplified by current protests against police violence—the latest in a tradition of violent death and subsequent public mourning spurring Black political mobilization. The potent politics of white grievance, meanwhile, which is also not new, imagines the United States as a white country under siege. Drawing on African American political thought, Hooker examines key moments in US racial politics that illuminate the problem of loss in democracy. She connects today’s Black Lives Matter protests to the use of lynching photographs to arouse public outrage over post–Reconstruction era racial terror, and she discusses Emmett Till’s funeral as a catalyst for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. She also traces the political weaponization of white victimhood during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Calling for an expansion of Black and white political imaginations, Hooker argues that both must learn to sit with loss, for different reasons and to different ends.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juliet Hooker is the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science at Brown University. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos, which was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2018 Ralph Bunche Book Award for the best work in ethnic and cultural pluralism and the 2018 Best Book Award of the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
DESCRIPTION - This landmark work of history and theory challenges every accepted notion about the nature of black women's lives. AIN'T I A WOMAN examines the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the historic devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent women's movement, and black women's involvement with feminism. Hooks refutes the antifeminist claim that black women are not victims of sexist oppression nor in need of an autonomous women's movement. She pushes feminist dialogue to new limits by claiming that all progressive struggles are significant only when they take place within a broadly defined feminist movement which takes as its starting point that race, class, and sex are immutable facts of human existence. Bell Hooks' insight as a black woman and a feminist extends the scope of feminist theory and practice for us all, and marks the emergence of a revitalized feminism in the 1980s.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks' writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Also an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before in 2004 joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where a decade later she founded the bell hooks Institute.
DESCRIPTION - In these twelve new essays, feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of black women and men within our white supremacist culture. Taking on popular music, advertising, literature, television, historical narrative, and, most importantly, film, hooks consistently demonstrates the incisive intelligence and passion for justice that prompted Publishers Weekly to dub her ‘one of the foremost black intellectuals in America today.'. bell hooks is a writer and professor who speaks widely on issues of race, class, and gender. Her previous books include AIN'T I A WOMAN, FEMINIST THEORY, TALKING BACK, YEARNING, and most recently, with Cornel West, BREAKING BREAD: INSURGENT BLACK INTELLECTUAL LIFE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks' writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Also an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before in 2004 joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where a decade later she founded the bell hooks Institute.
DESCRIPTION - One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the author of such powerful and influential books as AIN'T I A WOMAN and BLACK LOOKS, bell hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public discourse on race. KILLING RAGE speaks to this imbalance. These twenty-three essays, most of them new works, are written from a black and feminist perspective, and they tackle the bitter difficulties of racism by envisioning a world without it. hooks defiantly creates positive plans for the future rather than dwell in theories of a crisis beyond repair. The essays here address a spectrum of topics to do with race and racism in the United States: psychological trauma among African Americans; friendship between black women and white women; anti-Semitism and racism; internalized racism in the movies and media. hooks presents a challenge to the patriarchal family model, explaining how it perpetuates sexism and oppression in black life. She calls out the tendency of much of mainstream America to conflate ‘black rage' with murderous, pathological impulses, rather than seeing it as a positive state of being. And in the title essay she writes about the ‘killing rage' - the fierce anger of black people stung by repeated instances of everyday racism - finding in that rage a healing source of love and strength, and a catalyst for productive change. Her analysis is rigorous and her language unsparingly critical, but Hooks writes with a common touch that has made her a favorite of readers far from universities. bell hooks's work contains multitudes; she is a feminist who includes and celebrates men, a critic of racism who is not separatist or Afrocentric, an academic who cares about popular culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks' writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Also an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before in 2004 joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where a decade later she founded the bell hooks Institute.
DESCRIPTION - Writing is a healing act of power for this woman who grew up in an ‘old school' Southern black world where children were meant to be seen and not heard. ‘Talking back' was punished with silence. But in the world of woman-talk, where the everyday rules of how to live and how to act were established, hooks made language her birthright. When it comes to bigotry, there is no mincing words: bell hooks talks back. In TALKING BACK, this voice is as strong and uncompromising as ever but it is also much more personal. She writes about the meaning of feminist consciousness in daily life and about self-recovery, about overcoming white - and male-supremacy, and about intimate relationships, exploring the point where the public and private meet. ‘Domination is not just a subject for discourse and books,' she concludes. ‘It is about pain. Even before the words, we remember the pain.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. The focus of hooks' writing was the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. Also an academic, she taught at institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before in 2004 joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where a decade later she founded the bell hooks Institute.
DESCRIPTION - No other land has captured our imagination quite like Tibet. Hidden away behind the protecting Himalayas in the heart of Central Asia, ruled over by a God-king, and kited by a people whose only wheel was the prayer-wheel, it has long been the stuff of travellers dreams. In this startling and informative book, Peter Hopkirk, the London Times specialist in Middle Eastern and Asian affairs, tells of an extraordinary contest that spanned a century, as travelers from nine different countries attempted to enter a Tibet closed to the outside world and be the first to penetrate Lhasa, its sacred capital. His tale draws on a cast of remarkable men and women - secret agents and soldiers, adventurers and fortune hunters, missionaries and mystics - whose motives were as varied as their characters. Armed with sextants and flower-presses, rifles, and, in one case, a gift of lavender water for the Dalai Lama, these trespassers sought out, for personal glory and political advantage, the secrets of Tibet. They traversed hidden passes, played hide-and-seek with wary border guards - and some never returned. First published in England in 1982, this poignant story ends with the Chinese Communist invasion of 1950, when the world's last stronghold of mystery and romance was forced to give up its freedom. For those seeking to understand the history of the area and the culture of its people, TRESPASSERS ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD offers an exciting path to the heart of the hidden kingdom. Peter Hopkirk has worked for the London Times for sixteen years, five of them as its Chief Reporter. He wrote the narrative material for both the Tutankhamun and Chinese Treasures exhibitions in London. During twenty-nine years as a reporter and foreign correspondent he has travelled widely in China, the surrounding regions of Russian Central Asia, Mongolia, Afghanistan, and Himalayan India. He collects rare books on Central Asia.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Hopkirk (December 15, 1930-August 22, 2014) was a British journalist and author who has written six books about the British Empire, Russia and Central Asia.
DESCRIPTION - Although war was never formally declared, the Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It caused six French governments to fall, led to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, brought De Gaulle back to power, and came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and as many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by an unholy marriage of revolutionary terror and state torture. The war made headlines around the world, and at the time it seemed like a French affair: Now, this brutal and intractable conflict looks less like the last colonial war than the first postmodern one-a full-dress rehearsal for the sort of amorphous struggle that convulsed the Balkans in the 1990s and that is now ravaging Iraq, and in which religion, nationalism, imperialism, and terrorism assume previously unimagined degrees of intensity. Originally published in 1977, A Savage War of Peace was immediately proclaimed by experts of varied political sympathies to be the history of the Algerian War, a book that not only does justice to its Byzantine intricacies, but that does so with intelligence, assurance, and unflagging momentum. It is these qualities that make A Savage War of Peace not only essential reading for anyone who wishes to investigate this dark stretch of history but a lasting monument of the historian's art.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Alistair Allan Horne (November 9, 1925, London, United Kingdom - May 25, 2017, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom) was a British journalist, biographer and historian of Europe, especially of 19th and 20th century France.
DESCRIPTION - Many historians have seen a radical shift in W.E.B. Du Bois' political activities in his later years. Following World War II, the evolution of his political perspective led to his ouster from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he had worked for years, and the Justice Department's indictment of him for failure to register as a foreign agent. In this extensively researched study, Gerald Horne shows that Du Bois' later activities were the culmination of his lifelong concerns, which Du Bois resolutely followed despite the threats of Cold War McCarthyism. In investigating Du Bois' last 20 years, Horne shows how the confluence of Cold War anticommunism and attempts to discredit the civil rights and anticolonial movements influenced the evaluation of Du Bois' activity. The recently opened papers of W.E.B. Du Bois and previously unexamined papers of the NAACP are among the new sources Horne examined for his study.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston, is author of Black and Brown: African-Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists, and Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois.
DESCRIPTION - The Mexican Revolution was a defining moment in the history of race relations, impacting both Mexican and African Americans. For black Westerners, 1910-1920 did not represent the clear-cut promise of populist power, but a reordering of the complex social hierarchy which had, since the nineteenth century, granted them greater freedom in the borderlands than in the rest of the United States. Despite its lasting significance, the story of black Americans along the Mexican border has been sorely underreported in the annals of U.S. history. Gerald Horne brings the tale to life in BLACK AND BROWN. Drawing on archives on both sides of the border, a host of cutting-edge studies and oral histories, Horne chronicles the political currents which created and then undermined the Mexican border as a relative safe haven for African Americans. His account addresses blacks' role as ‘Indian fighters,' the relationship between African Americans and immigrants, and the U.S. government's growing fear of black disloyalty, among other essential concerns of the period: the heavy reliance of the U.S. on black soldiers along the border placed white supremacy and national security on a collision course that was ultimately resolved in favor of the latter. Mining a forgotten chapter in American history, BLACK AND BROWN offers tremendous insight into the past and future of race relations along the Mexican border. Gerald Horne is professor of African & Afro-American studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His numerous books include RACE WOMAN: THE LIVES OF SHIRLEY GRAHAM DU BOIS and RACE WAR! WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE JAPANESE ATTACK ON THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston, is author of Black and Brown: African-Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists, and Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois.
DESCRIPTION - Horne's engaging study brings to light William Patterson's leadership in the struggle against Jim Crow, underscoring the radical roots of the civil rights movement and the repression of the left in the Cold War era. A significant contribution to the history of the black freedom struggle. - Robbie Lieberman, coeditor of Anticommunism and the African American Freedom Movement: Another Side of the Story. A leading African American Communist, lawyer William L. Patterson (1891–1980) was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the defeat of Jim Crow by virtue of his leadership of the Scottsboro campaign in the 1930s. In this watershed biography, historian Gerald Horne shows how Patterson helped to advance African American equality by fostering and leveraging international support for the movement. Horne highlights key moments in Patterson's global activism: his early education in the Soviet Union, his involvement with the Scottsboro trials and other high-profile civil rights cases of the 1930s to 1950s, his 1951 We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations, and his later work with prisons and the Black Panther Party. Drawing from government and FBI documents, newspaperbacks, periodicals, archival and manuscript collections, and personal paperbacks, Horne documents Patterson's effectiveness at carrying the freedom struggle into the global arena and provides a fresh perspective on twentieth-century struggles for racial justice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gerald Horne is the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston. His many books include Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the u.S. Before Emancipation.
DESCRIPTION - On August 1965 the predominantly black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles erupted in flames and violence following an incident of police brutality. This is the first comprehensive treatment of that uprising. Property losses reached hundreds of millions of dollars and the official death toll was thirty-four, but the political results were even more profound. The civil rights movement was placed on the defensive as the image of meek and angelic protestors in the South was replaced by the image of ‘rioting' blacks in the West. A ‘white backlash' ensued that led directly to Ronald Reagan's election as governor of California in 1966. Gerald Horne weaves a compelling account which suggests that crucial developments in the 1960s - including the rise of black nationalism and a white backlash - are grounded in the preceding decades' repression of the interracial left. The decline of the left and of working-class organizations resulting from the Red Scare in turn facilitated the rise of black nationalism. The Black Panther party, the most politically oriented group to develop in the wake of Watts, was bludgeoned out of existence, its place taken by masculinist gangs and gangsters. In FIRE THIS TIME Horne delineates the central roles played by Ronald Reagan, Tom Bradley, Martin Luther King, Jr., Edmund G. Brown, and organizations such as the NAACP, Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, and gangs. He documents the role of the Cold War in the dismantling of legalized segregation, and he looks at the impact of race, region, class, gender, and age on postwar Los Angeles. All this he considers in light of world developments, particularly in Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and Africa.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gerald Horne, Moores Professor of History at the University of Houston, is author of Black and Brown: African-Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, and Trade Unionists, and Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois.
DESCRIPTION - Ida B. Wells and Cheikh Anta Diop Award Recipient for Outstanding Scholarship and Leadership in Africana Studies. The successful 1776 revolt against British rule in North America has been hailed almost universally as a great step forward for humanity. But the Africans then living in the colonies overwhelmingly sided with the British. In this trailblazing book, Gerald Horne shows that in the prelude to 1776, the abolition of slavery seemed all but inevitable in London, delighting Africans as much as it outraged slaveholders, and sparking the colonial revolt. Prior to 1776, anti-slavery sentiments were deepening throughout Britain and in the Caribbean, rebellious Africans were in revolt. For European colonists in America, the major threat to their security was a foreign invasion combined with an insurrection of the enslaved. It was a real and threatening possibility that London would impose abolition throughout the colonies - a possibility the founding fathers feared would bring slave rebellions to their shores. To forestall it, they went to war. The so-called Revolutionary War, Horne writes, was in part a counter-revolution, a conservative movement that the founding fathers fought in order to preserve their right to enslave others. The Counter-Revolution of 1776 brings us to a radical new understanding of the traditional heroic creation myth of the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gerald Horne is John J. and Rebecca Moores Professor of African American History at the University of Houston. He is the author of more than two dozen books, including Race to Revolution, The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and Negro Comrades of the Crown.
DESCRIPTION - As an unabashed dog lover, Alexandra Horowitz is naturally curious about what her dog thinks and what she knows. As a cognitive scientist she is intent on understanding the minds of animals who cannot say what they know or feel. This is a fresh look at the world of dogs - - from the dog's point of view. The book introduces the reader to the science of the dog - - their perceptual and cognitive Abilities - - and uses that introduction to draw a picture of what it might be like to be a dog. It answers questions no other dog book can - - such as: What is a dog's sense of time? Does she miss me? Want friends? Know when she's been bad? Horowitz's journey, and the insights she uncovered from studying her own dog, Pumpernickel, allowed her to understand her dog better, and appreciate her more through that understanding. The reader will be able to do the same with their own dog. This is not another dog training book. Instead, Inside of a Dog will allow dog owners to look at their pets' behaviour in a different, and revealing light, enabling them to understand their dogs and enjoy their relationship even more.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alexandra Horowitz teaches psychology, canine cognition, and creative nonfiction writing at Barnard College, Columbia University. She earned her PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of California at San Diego, and has studied the cognition of humans, rhinoceros, bonobos, and dogs. For seventeen years she shared her home with an unwitting research subject, Pumpernickel, a wonderful mixed breed. Now her Dog Cognition Lab studies the behavior of owned dogs to keep discovering what they see, smell, and know. Before her scientific career, Horowitz worked as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster and served on the staff of The New Yorker. Her latest book, On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes, was published in 2013. She lives in New York City with her husband, young son, and two large, non-heeling dogs.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1953. 12 short stories present a moving and vivid picture of life in India. This book is a collection of short stories set in India just before the Partition of the country into India and Pakistan. The author is Muslim so the stories often have that cultural slant, as opposed to a Hindu or Sikh point of view. These stories are domestic tales about the very poor in the households of the middle class. They are tiny pictures which portray life, not on the grand scale of a world stage, but in a village or behind the door of a house in a modern city. Ancient customs exist with 20th century reality, sometimes peacefully, but more often uncomfortably.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Attia Hosain (October 20, 1913 - January 25, 1998) was a writer and broadcaster who hailed from Undivided India and worked for many years in the UK. She wrote two acclaimed books, being the semi-autobiographical Sunlight on a broken column and a collection of short stories named Phoenix fled.
DESCRIPTION - SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her. When Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. She has seen his tracks in the snow, and she knows about snow. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her to get involved. But opposition appeals to Smilla. As all of Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation takes her from a fervently religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and an alcoholic shipping magnate and into the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth - and finally onto a ship with an international cast of villains bound for a mysterious mission on an uninhabitable island off Greenland. To read SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is to be taken on a magical, nerve-shattering journey - from the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen to the awesome beauty of the Arctic ice caps. A mystery, a love story, and an elegy for a vanishing way of life, SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is a breathtaking achievement, an exceptional feat of storytelling.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Høeg, born in 1957 in Denmark, followed various callings-dancer, actor, sailor, fencer, and mountaineer-before turning seriously to writing. His work has been published in thirty-three countries.
DESCRIPTION - The first English translation of the entire corpus of the Sagas of Icelanders together with forty-nine Tales. Fifty translators and scholars from seven countries participated in this project. The Sagas of Icelanders are set in the Viking Age but written in Icelandic by anonymous authors during the 13th and 14th centuries. Their action spans the whole world known to the Vikings, but the stories centre on the unique settler society they founded in Iceland. Deeply rooted in the real world of their day, concise and straightforward in style, the Sagas explore perennial human problems: love and hate, fate and freedom. While steeped in Viking Age oral tradition, the Sagas depict the descendants of the settlers in Iceland, immediately before and after the year 1000, when they abandoned the ancient gods such as Odin and Thor and adopted Christianity. In this period, too, Icelanders ventured farther westwards; the culmination of this venture was Leif Eiriksson's voyage to North America. The horizons of the Saga writers extended to the limits of the Viking world: westward to Greenland and Vinland, east to Russia and north to Lapland, south and east to Constantinople and Jerusalem. For sheer narrative artistry and skill of characterisation, the finest Sagas rank with the world's greatest literary treasures - as epic as Homer, as deep in tragedy as Sophocles, as engagingly human as Shakespeare. The Sagas of Icelanders have served as a source of inspiration for many writers of later times - such diverse authors as Walter Scott, Jorge Luis Borges and W. H. Auden. Careful editorial planning and coordination ensured that the translators followed the same translation policy and produced the same high level of accuracy and readability. Coordination work included use of consistent English terms for key words and concepts, recurrent proverbs and phrases, and other cultural realia. The publishers are confident that these extensive editorial efforts have produced sound, quality translations. While they reflect the expertise of scholars in this specialist field, a prime concern was to produce a text in smooth and readable modern English. There are probably few examples of comparable coordinated translations of an entire literary corpus into another language. The Complete Sagas of Icelanders include extensive reference material: A comprehensive Introduction by Professor Robert Kellogg, Maps, Glossary, A Note on Poetic Imagery, Cross-Reference Index of Characters, Illustrations and Diagrams, and Tables.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Viðar Hreinsson grew up on a farm in Northern Iceland but studied Icelandic and literary theory in Iceland and Copenhagen. He is an independent literary scholar at the Reykjavik Academy and has taught and lectured on various aspects of Icelandic literary and cultural history at universities in both in Iceland and abroad, in Canada, USA and Scandinavia. He is the General Editor of the acclaimed The Complete Sagas of Icelanders I-V (1997), and he is the author of a two-volume biography of Icelandic Canadian poet Stephan G. Stephansson published in Iceland 2002 and 2003.
DESCRIPTION - Perhaps more than any other writer, Langston Hughes made the white America of the 1920s and ‘30s aware of the black culture thriving in its midst. Like his most famous poems, Hughes's stories are messages from that other America, sharply etched vignettes of its daily life, cruelly accurate portrayals of black people colliding - sometimes humorously, more often tragically - with whites. Here is the ailing black musician who comes home from Europe to die in his small town - only to die more quickly and brutally than he had imagined. Here are the wealthy bohemians who collect Negroes like so many objets d'art. the moonlighting student who becomes the reluctant confidante of a boozy white Don Juan. the elegant charlatan who peddles ‘real, primitive jazz out of Africa' as a nostrum to the spiritually starved elite. Filled with mordant wit and human detail, The Ways of White Folks is unmistakably the work of a great poet who was also a shrewd and compelling storyteller.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.'
DESCRIPTION - In this major new rendition by the acclaimed translator Julie Rose, Victor Hugo's tour de force, LES MISERABLES, is revealed in its full unabridged glory. A favorite of readers for nearly 150 years, and the basis for one of the most beloved stage musicals ever, this stirring tale of crime, punishment, justice, and redemption pulses with life and energy. Hugo sweeps readers from the French provinces to the back alleys of Paris, and from the battlefield of Waterloo to the bloody ramparts of Paris during the uprising of 1832. First published in 1862, this sprawling novel is an extravagant historical epic that is teeming with harrowing adventures and unforgettable characters. In the protagonist, Jean Valjean, a quintessential prisoner of conscience who languished for years in prison for stealing bread to feed his starving family, LES MISERABLES depicts one of the grand themes in literature–that of the hunted man. Woven into the narrative are the prevalent social issues of Hugo's day: injustice, authoritarian rule, social inequality, civic unrest. And this new translation brings astonishing vivacity and depth to Hugo's immortal dramatis personae–the relentless police detective Javert, the saintly bishop Myriel, the tragic prostitute Fantine and her innocent daughter, Cosette, the dashing lover Marius, and many others whom Jean Valjean encounters on his path to sublime sacrifice. Featuring an Introduction by the award-winning journalist and author Adam Gopnik, this Modern Library edition is an outstanding, authoritative translation of a masterpiece, a literary high-wire act that continues to astonish, stimulate, enlighten, and entertain readers around the world. Victor Hugo (1802-85), novelist, poet, playwright, and French national icon, is best known for two of today's most popular world classics: LES MISERABLES and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE-DAME, as well as other works, including THE TOILERS OF THE SEA and THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. Hugo was elected to the AcadEmie Française in 1841. As a statesman, he was named a Peer of France in 1845. He served in France's National Assemblies in the Second Republic formed after the 1848 revolution, and in 1851 went into self-imposed exile upon the ascendance of Napoleon III, who restored France's government to authoritarian rule. Hugo returned to France in 1870 after the proclamation of the Third Republic. Julie Rose's acclaimed translations include Alexandre Dumas's THE KNIGHT OF MAISON-ROUGE and Racine's PHÈDRE, as well as works by Paul Virilio, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Thomas, and many others. She is a recipient of the PEN medallion for translation and the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize. Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris TO THE MOON and THROUGH THE CHILDREN'S GATE, and editor of the Library of America anthology Americans in Paris. He writes on various subjects for The New Yorker and has recently written introductions to works by Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, and Alain-Fournier.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry but also rests upon his novels and his dramatic achievements.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1942 at the height of her popularity, DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD is Zora Neale Hurston's candid, funny, bold, and poignant autobiography, an imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. As compelling as her acclaimed fiction, Hurston's very personal literary self-portrait offers a revealing, often audacious glimpse into the life - public and private - of an extraordinary artist, anthropologist, chronicler, and champion of the Black experience in America. Full of the wit and wisdom of a proud, spirited woman who started off low and climbed high, DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD is a rare treasure from one of literature's most cherished voices.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS.
DESCRIPTION - MULES AND MEN is the first great collection of black America's folk world. In the 1930's, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her ‘native village' of Eatonville, Florida to record the oral histories, sermons and songs, dating back to the time of slavery, which she remembered hearing as a child. In her quest, she found herself and her history throughout these highly metaphorical folk-tales, ‘big old lies,' and the lyrical language of song. With this collection, Zora Neale Hurston has come to reveal and preserve a beautiful and important part of American culture. From the Foreword by FRANZ BOAS - Ever since the time of Uncle Remus, Negro folk-lore has exerted a strong attraction upon the imagination of the American public. Negro tales, songs and sayings without end, as well as descriptions of Negro magic and voodoo, have appeared; but in all of them the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro has been given very inadequately. It is the great merit of Miss Hurston's work that she entered into the homely life of the southern Negro as one of them and was fully accepted as such by the companions of her childhood. Thus she has been able to penetrate through that affected demeanor by which the Negro excludes the White observer effectively from participating in his true inner life. Miss Hurston has been equally successful in gaining the confidence of the voodoo doctors and she gives us much that throws a new light upon the much discussed voodoo beliefs and practices. Added to all this is the charm of a loveable personality and of a revealing style which makes Miss Hurston's work an unusual contribution to our knowledge of the true inner life of the Negro. To the student of cultural history the material presented is valuable not only by giving the Negro's reaction to every day events, to his emotional life, his humor and passions, but it throws into relief also the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life, with its strong African background in the West Indies, the importance of which diminishes with increasing distance from the south.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS.
DESCRIPTION - Based on acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston's personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica - where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer during her visits in the 1930s - Tell My Horse is a fascinating firsthand account of the mysteries of Voodoo. An invaluable resource and remarkable guide to Voodoo practices, rituals, and beliefs, it is a travelogue into a dark, mystical world that offers a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies, customs, and superstitions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was a novelist, folklorist, and anthropologist whose fictional and factual accounts of black heritage remain unparalleled. Her many books include DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD; THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD; JONAH'S GOURD VINE; MOSES, MAN OF THE MOUNTAIN; MULES AND MEN; and EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS.
DESCRIPTION - ‘There is no book more important to me than this one.' - Alice Walker. When first published in 1937, this novel about a proud, independent black woman was generally dismissed by male reviewers. It was out of print for almost thirty years hut since its reissue in a paperback edition by the University of Illinois Press in 1978 has become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature. Now, with the publication of this richly illustrated deluxe edition, a novel by a black woman is accorded the kind of treatment usually reserved for white male writers. Mesmerizing in its immediacy and haunting in its subtlety, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD tells the story of Janie Crawford - fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy woman - who comes of age expecting better treatment than what she gets from her three husbands and community. Then she meets Tea Cake, a younger man who captivates Janie's heart and spirit, and offers her the chance to relish life without being one man's mule or another man's adornment. ‘I urge you to read THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD. This extraordinary fictional achievement is now considered the finest black novel of its time (and surely it is one of the finest of all time). THEIR EYES belongs in the category with [the novels] of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway - of enduring American literature.' - Doris Grumbach, Saturday Review.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1901-60) was a novelist, folklorist, anthropologist, and author of five novels, a folktale collection, numerous short stories, and an autobiography. THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD is considered her most outstanding achievement. JERRY PINKNEY has won numerous awards for his illustrations, particularly of children's books, and has illustrated limited-edition books by writers including William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, James Michener, and Vladimir Nabokov. RUBY DEE wrote and starred in the 1990 PBS television program ‘Zora Is Mv Name!' SHERLEY ANNE WILLIAMS, a leading poet, is professor of English at the University of California at San Diego. For this edition she has greatly expanded upon a prefatory piece initially written for the 1978 paperback edition.
DESCRIPTION - In his new novel Mr. Huxley does for the world of tomorrow what he has already done so successfully in POINT COUNTER POINT for the world of today. Abandoning his mordant criticism of modern men and morals he takes a leap into the future and shows us life as he conceives it may be some thousands of years hence. It is usual for human beings to suppose that, whatever the immediate outlook may be, ultimately all will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. The philosophers and scientists have encouraged this belief. Mr. Huxley, however, with irrepressible wit and raillery, shows us that there is another side to the coin and warns us against being too optimistic. In a world of auto-gyros, synthetic babies and ‘Feelie' Palaces there is much to disquiet and amuse a citizen of our primitive twentieth century. There is also unique opportunity for a fresh display of Mr. Huxley's gaiety and commonsense.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an empire, exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories?the islands, atolls, and archipelagos?this country has governed and inhabited? In How to Hide an Empire, Daniel Immerwahr tells the fascinating story of the United States outside the United States. In crackling, fast-paced prose, he reveals forgotten episodes that cast American history in a new light. We travel to the Guano Islands, where prospectors collected one of the nineteenth century's most valuable commodities, and the Philippines, site of the most destructive event on U.S. soil. In Puerto Rico, Immerwahr shows how U.S. doctors conducted grisly experiments they would never have conducted on the mainland and charts the emergence of independence fighters who would shoot up the U.S. Congress. In the years after World War II, Immerwahr notes, the United States moved away from colonialism. Instead, it put innovations in electronics, transportation, and culture to use, devising a new sort of influence that did not require the control of colonies. Rich with absorbing vignettes, full of surprises, and driven by an original conception of what empire and globalization mean today, How to Hide an Empire is a major and compulsively readable work of history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Immerwahr is associate professor of history at Northwestern University and author of Thinking Small: The United State and the Lure of Community Development, which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Prize. He has written for N+1, Slate, Dissent, and other publications.
DESCRIPTION - On an icy January day, the Reykjavik police are called to a block of flats where a body of the young boy has been found in the garden, frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. Erlendur and his team embark on an investigation but have little to go on. In this new extraordinary thriller from Gold Dagger Award winner Arnaldur Indridason, the Reykjavik police are called on an icy January day to a garden where a body has been found: a young, dark-skinned boy is frozen to the ground in a pool of his own blood. Erlendur and his team embark on their investigation and soon unearth tensions simmering beneath the surface of Iceland's outwardly liberal, multicultural society. Meanwhile, the boy's murder forces Erlendur to confront the tragedy in his own past. Soon, facts are emerging from the snow-filled darkness that are more chilling even than the Arctic night.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the Golden Dagger Award. Indriaason lives in Reykjavik, Iceland; he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list.
DESCRIPTION - Jar City introduces American readers to a new crime writer from Iceland whose work has created an international sensation. Arnaldur Indridason has been compared to such luminaries in the field as Henning Mankell, Georges Simenon, Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall; everyone agrees that here is a world-class writer. When a lonely old man is found murdered in his Reykjavík flat, the only clues are a cryptic note left by the killer and a photograph of a young girl's grave. Inspector Erlendur, who heads the investigation team, discovers that many years ago the victim was accused, though not convicted, of an unsolved crime. Did the old man's past come back to haunt him? As the team of detectives reopen this very cold case, Inspector Erlendur uncovers secrets that are much larger than the murder of one old man - secrets that have been carefully guarded by many people for many years. As he follows a fascinating trail of unusual forensic evidence, Erlendur also confronts stubborn personal conflicts that reveal his own depth and complexity of character. Like all great crime fiction, Jar City is about much more than murder, and avid suspense fans are about to discover a first-rate writer who has already received rave reviews around the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the Golden Dagger Award. Indriaason lives in Reykjavik, Iceland; he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list.
DESCRIPTION - Arnaldur Indridason has proven himself to be a master of the mystery genre with his critically acclaimed Inspector Erlendur series, which has sold more than 7 million copies worldwide. Now, in Outrage, this superlative crime writer author has written his best book to date, with exceptional prose, heart pounding suspense, and a mystery that is not solved until the last page. Haunted by personal demons, Detective Erlendur decides to take a short leave of absence, putting a female detective, Elínborg, in charge while he is gone. When a troubling case lands on Elínborg's desk, she's quickly thrust into a violent and volatile situation with extremely high stakes. Soon, her investigation uncovers a twisted tale of double lives that may be connected to the unsolved disappearance of a young girl. The clock is ticking to solve the case before a serial rapist strikes again. Reviewers everywhere rave about Indridason's smart and fast-paced Reykjavík thrillers, which exemplify the very best in international crime fiction. Perfect for the many devoted fans of this series as well as for the reader who's never visited Iceland through Indridason's books, OUTRAGE will lead you down a trail of hidden violence, psychological brutality, and wrongs that may never fully be righted.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year. (The film of Jar City, now available on DVD, was Iceland's entry for the 2008 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.) Indridason lives in Iceland.
DESCRIPTION - Downtrodden Detective Erlendur and his team must once again investigate Reykjavik's hidden past to unravel a case of human nastiness. Construction work in an expanding Reykjavik uncovers a shallow grave. Years before, this part of the city was all open hills, and Erlendur and his team hope this is a typical Icelandic missing person scenario; perhaps someone once lost in the snow, who has lain peacefully buried for decades. But things are never that simple. While Erlendur struggles to hold together the crumbling fragments of his own family, his case unearths many other tales of family pain. The hills have more than one tragic story to tell: tales of failed relationships and heartbreak; of anger, domestic violence and fear; of family loyalty and family shame. Few people are still alive who can tell the story, but even secrets taken to the grave cannot remain hidden forever. Alive with tension and atmosphere, and disturbingly real, this is an outstanding continuation of the Reykjavik Murder Mysteries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the Golden Dagger Award. Indriaason lives in Reykjavik, Iceland; he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list.
DESCRIPTION - In the wake of an earthquake, the water level of an Icelandic lake drops suddenly, revealing the skeleton of a man half-buried in its sandy bed. It is clear immediately that it has been there for many years. There is a large hole in the skull. Yet more mysteriously, a heavy communication device is attached to it, possibly some sort of radio transmitter, bearing inscriptions in Russian. The police are called in and Erlendur, Elinborg and Sigurdur Oli begin their investigation, which gradually leads them back to the time of the Cold War when bright, left-wing students would be sent from Iceland to study in the ' heavenly State ' of Communist East Germany. The Draining Lake is another masterfully written Indridason mystery about passions and shattered dreams, the fate of the missing and the grief of those left behind.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the Golden Dagger Award. Indriaason lives in Reykjavik, Iceland; he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A commanding new voice. puts Iceland on the map as a major destination for enthusiasts of Nordic crime fiction.' - Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review on Silence of the Grave. ARNALDUR INDRIDASON took the international crime fiction scene by storm after winning England's CWA Gold Dagger Award for Silence of the Grave. Now, with the highly anticipated Voices, this world-clan sensation treats American readers to another extraordinary Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson thriller. The Christmas rush is at its peak in a grand Reykjavik hotel when Inspector Erlendur Sveinsson is called in to investigate a murder. The hotel Santa has been stabbed, and Erlendur and his detective colleagues have no shortage of suspects between hotel staff and the international travelers staying for the holidays. But then a shocking secret surfaces. As Christmas Day approaches, Erlendur must deal with his difficult daughter, pursue a possible romantic interest, and untangle, a long-buried web of malice and greed to find the murderer. One of Indridason's most accomplished works to date, Voices is sure to win him a multitude of new American suspense fans.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arnaldur Indridason was born in 1961. He worked at an Icelandic newspaper, first as a journalist and then for many years as a film reviewer. He won the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel for both Jar City and Silence of the Grave, and in 2005 Silence of the Grave also won the Golden Dagger Award. Indriaason lives in Reykjavik, Iceland; he and J.K. Rowling are the only authors to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Icelandic bestseller list.
DESCRIPTION - The book of The Arabian Nights has become a synonym for the fabulous and the exotic. Every child is familiar with the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba. Yet very few people, even specialists in oriental literature, have a clear idea of when the book was written or what exactly it is. Far from being a batch of stories for children, The Arabian Nights contains hundreds of narratives of all kinds - fables, epics, erotica, debates, fairy tales, political allegories, mystical anecdotes and comedies. It is a labyrinth of stories and of stories within stories and of stories within stories within stories. Widely held in contempt in the Middle East for its frivolity and occasional obscenity, the Nights has nevertheless had a major influence on European and American culture, to the extent that the story collection must be considered as a key work in Western literature. A full understanding of the writings of Voltaire, Dickens, Melville, Proust and Borges, or indeed of the origins of science fiction, is impossible without some familiarity with the stories of the Nights. The Arabian Nights: A Companion guides the reader into this labyrinth of storytelling. It traces the development of the stories from prehistoric India and Pharaonic Egypt to modern times. It explores the history of the translation, and explains the ways in which its contents have been added to, plagiarized and imitated. Above all, the Companion uses the stories as a guide to the social history and the counter-culture of the medieval Near East and the world of the storyteller, the snake-charmer, the burglar, the sorcerer, the drug-addict, the treasure hunter and the adulterer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Graham Irwin (born 23 August 1946) is a British historian, novelist, and writer on Arabic literature.
DESCRIPTION - Exposes the new generation of whiteness thriving at the expense and borrowed ingenuity of black people - and explores how this intensifies racial inequality. American culture loves blackness. From music and fashion to activism and language, black culture constantly achieves worldwide influence. Yet, when it comes to who is allowed to thrive from black hipness, the pioneers are usually left behind as black aesthetics are converted into mainstream success - and white profit. Weaving together narrative, scholarship, and critique, Lauren Michele Jackson reveals why cultural appropriation - something that's become embedded in our daily lives - deserves serious attention. It is a blueprint for taking wealth and power, and ultimately exacerbates the economic, political, and social inequity that persists in America. She unravels the racial contradictions lurking behind American culture as we know it - from shapeshifting celebrities and memes gone viral to brazen poets, loveable potheads, and faulty political leaders. An audacious debut, White Negroes brilliantly summons a re-interrogation of Norman Mailer's infamous 1957 essay of a similar name. It also introduces a bold new voice in Jackson. Piercing, curious, and bursting with pop cultural touchstones, White Negroes is a dispatch in awe of black creativity everywhere and an urgent call for our thoughtful consumption.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lauren Michele Jackson teaches in the Departments of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. Her writing about race and culture has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Essence, the New Republic, Teen Vogue, Rolling Stone, and New York magazine, among many other places. She lives in Chicago.
DESCRIPTION - A COMPREHENSIVE HISTORY OF AN IMPORTANT - YET NEGLECTED - ERA IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE ‘This is a landmark work in the history of African American Studies and American intellectual history. Writing with verve, Jackson brings to life a large cast of characters and traces an ongoing conversation among the writers and critics of this period. This book is likely to become a model for a new generation of scholars, both for the breadth of its engagement and the depth of its archival research.' - Werner Sollors, Harvard University. The Indignant Generation is the first narrative history of the neglected but essential period of African American literature between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Era. The years between these two indispensable epochs saw the communal rise of Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, and many other influential black writers. While these individuals have been duly celebrated, little attention has been paid to the political and artistic milieu in which they produced their greatest works. With this commanding study, Lawrence Jackson recalls the lost history of a crucial era. Looking at the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II, Jackson restores the ‘indignant' quality to a generation of African American writers shaped by Jim Crow segregation, the Great Depression, the growth of American Communism, and an international wave of decolonization. He also reveals how artistic collectives in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, fostered a sense of destiny and belonging among diverse and disenchanted peoples. As Jackson shows through contemporary documents, the years that brought us Their Eyes Were Watching God, Native Son, and Invisible Man also saw the rise of African American literary criticism - by both black and white critics. Fully exploring the cadre of key African American writers who triumphed in spite of segregation, The Indignant Generation paints a vivid portrait of American intellectual and artistic life in the mid-twentieth century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lawrence P. Jackson teaches English and African American studies at Emory University. He is the author of Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius and a forthcoming biography of Chester Himes.
DESCRIPTION - 'The degradations, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe.' Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in the American South and went on to write one of the most extraordinary slave narratives. First published pseudonymously in 1861, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl describes Jacobs's treatment at the hands of her owners, her eventual escape to the North, and her perilous existence evading recapture as a fugitive slave. To save herself from sexual assault and protect her children she is forced to hide for seven years in a tiny attic space, suffering terrible psychological and physical pain. Written to expose the appalling treatment of slaves in the South and the racism of the free North, and to advance the abolitionist cause, Incidents is notable for its careful construction and literary effects. Jacobs's story of self-emancipation and a growing feminist consciousness is the tale of an individual and a searing indictment of slavery's inhumanity. This edition includes the short memoir by Jacobs's brother, John S. Jacobs, 'A True Tale of Slavery'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harriet Ann Jacobs (February 11, 1813 - March 7, 1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed. She became an abolitionist speaker and reformer. Jacobs wrote an autobiographical novel, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first serialized in a newspaper and published as a book in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. It was a reworking of the genres of slave narrative and sentimental novel, and was one of the first books to address the struggle for freedom by female slaves, explore their struggles with sexual harassment abuse, and their effort to protect their roles as women and mothers. After being overshadowed by the Civil War, the novel was rediscovered in the late 20th century, when there was new interest in minority and women writers. One scholar researched the novel, identifying Harriet Jacobs as the author and documenting many events and people in her life that corresponded to this fictionalized, autobiographical account. R. J. Ellis's publications include Harriet Wilson's 'Our Nig': A Cultural Biography (2003), a co-edited collection of essays, Becoming Visible: Women's Presence in Ninetenth-Century America (2010) and editions of Our Nig (2011, with Henry Louis Gates), and Charles Chesnutt's The Colonel's Dream (2015). He was President of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers from 2012 to 2015.
DESCRIPTION - In ‘the most important sports book of our time' (Warren Susman), the sport is cricket; the scene, the colonial West Indies; and the commentator, the eloquent and always provocative C.L.R. James, who shows us how, in the rituals of performance and conflict on the field, we are watching not just prowess but politics and psychology at play Part memoir of a boyhood in a black colony (by one of the founding fathers of African nationalism), part passionate celebration of an unexpected and unusual game, BEYOND A BOUNDARY raises, in a warm and witty voice, serious questions about sports and society With his acute political vision always informed by his abiding player's enthusiasm, James probes the manners, morals, and heroes of cricket-taking in along the way the history of organized athletics, Greek drama, the aesthetics of batting, Karl Marx, and the behavior of American baseball fans. The scenes could be yesterday's Negro Baseball League, the boxing ring in Capetown, or tomorrow's Olympics, for this twenty-year-old classic-now in its first American edition-remains a startling and prophetic statement on the issues of race and sport today. C. L. R. JAMES, historian, novelist, cultural and political critic and activist, was born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1901. The son of a schoolteacher, he attended the island's major government secondary school where, in the twenties, he became a teacher himself. During those years he also played club cricket and began writing fiction. James went to England in 1932 to help his friend and cricketing opponent, Learie Constantine, with his autobiography, and published in that year his first political book, THE LIFE OF CAPTAIN CIPRIANI, a pioneering argument on behalf of West Indian self-government. He also became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and, later, the Glasgow Herald. Now one of the last surviving founders of the African nationalist movement, James edited, during the thirties in London, the journal of the International African Service Bureau, the Pan-African organization whose leaders included Jomo Kenyatta. James came to America on a lecture tour in 1938 and stayed fifteen years. He was the first man to argue for an autonomous, Socialist black movement, independent of white-majority parties; while in the States, he took part in wartime sharecroppers' strikes and was active in the Socialist Workers' Party. He was interned on Ellis Island in 1952 (where he wrote MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, a study of Melville) and was expelled the following year, returning to England. In 1958, James returned for four years to Trinidad to take part in the preparations for colonial emancipation he'd advocated for a quarter century. Since 1962 he has lived in England, with a brief return to the West Indies to cover a cricketing test series in 1965. C. L. R. James's many works include his famous study of the Haitian revolution, The BLACK JACOBINS (1938); MINTY ALLEY (1936), a novel; the play TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE, in which he and Paul Robeson performed in London in 1936; MODERN POLITICS (1960) and Party POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES (1961); BEYOND A BOUNDARY (1963); NKRUMAH AND THE GHANA REVOLUTION (1977); and three volumes of selected writings, THE FUTURE IN THE PRESENT, SPHERES OF EXISTENCE, and AT THE RENDEZVOUS OF VICTORY. He continues to write prolifically, contributing to such journals as Radical America, Freedomways, New Society, and New Left Review. C.L.R. James died in London in 1989. ROBERT LIPSYTE was born in New York City. He was a sports reporter and columnist for the New York Times for fifteen years and is currently sports columnist for Charles Kuralt's ‘Sunday Morning' on CBS television. His books include NIGGER (the autobiography of Dick Gregory), SPORTSWORLD: AN AMERICAN DREAMLAND, and numerous highly acclaimed works for young adults.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
DESCRIPTION - Political theorist and cultural critic, novelist and cricket enthusiast, C. L. R. James (1901 - 1989) was a brilliant polymath who has been described by Edward Said as ‘a centrally important 20th-century figure.' Through such landmark works as THE BLACK JACOBINS, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, and AMERICAN CIVILIZATION, James's thought continues to influence and inspire scholars in a wide variety of fields. ‘There is little doubt,' wrote novelist Caryl Phillips in The New Republic, ‘that James will come to be regarded as the outstanding Caribbean mind of the twentieth century.' In his seminal work of literary and cultural criticism, MARINERS, RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, James anticipated many of the concerns and ideas that have shaped the contemporary fields of American and Postcolonial Studies, yet this widely influential book has been unavailable in its complete form since its original publication in 1953. A provocative study of Moby Dick in which James challenged the prevailing Americanist interpretation that opposed a ‘totalitarian' Ahab and a ‘democratic, American' Ishmael, he offered instead a vision of a factory-like Pequod whose ‘captain of industry' leads the ‘mariners, renegades and castaways' of its crew to their doom. In addition to demonstrating how such an interpretation supported the emerging US national security state, James also related the narrative of Moby Dick, and its resonance in American literary and political culture, to his own persecuted position at the height (or the depth) of the Truman/McCarthy era.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
DESCRIPTION - MINTY ALLEY is an early classic of modern Caribbean writing in English. It is the only novel written by C. L. R. James and belongs to the ‘Beacon period' of Caribbean literature in the late 20s and 30s of this century. C. L. R. James promised another novel after MINTY ALLEY, first published in 1936, but that novel never emerged. MINTY ALLEY and James's short stories establish the compassionate creative imagination that was to illuminate a brilliant social, political and historical analysis of the Caribbean and the world at large. They also underline a special dimension of the spirit behind his creative critical writing. C. L. R. JAMES's works include THE BLACK JACOBINS, HISTORY OF PAN AFRICAN REVOLT, BEYOND A BOUNDARY, FACING REALITY; PARTY POLITICS IN THE WEST INDIES, MARINERS RENEGADES AND CASTAWAYS, WORLD REVOLUTION, and others.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
DESCRIPTION - In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied two thirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave trade. Its whole structure rested on the labor of half a million Negro slaves controlled by a handful of whites. To cow the Negroes into docility necessitated a regime of calculated brutality and terrorism, and it was not unusual for a white master to fill a disobedient slave with gunpowder and blow him up with a match. Rebellious slaves were buried up to the neck in sand and their faces smeared with sugar so that the flies might devour the. Others were flogged with the long cowhide rigoise, often receiving as many as one hundred blows. All that was needed to start an organized rebellion in an atmosphere so full of smouldering hatred was a dynamic leader, and he emerged in the person of Toussaint l'Ouverture. His post as a plantation steward had given him experience in administration and authority, and he had further, by diligent study, taught himself to read and write. Not only was he a commanding personality but he was so strong physically that when he was nearly sixty years old he could still jump on a horse running at full speed and do what he liked with it. With Toussaint at the helm, the revolution quickly took shape, and over a period of time succeeded in completely liberating the enslaved Negroes and driving the whites from their colonial possession. The revolt, the only successful slave uprising in history, saw one man completely transform thousands of trembling slaves into a people able to organize themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day. It is one of the great epics of revolutionary struggle and achievement, and in this book C. L. R. James, one of the foremost of contemporary historians, vividly traces the story of the San Domingo revolution as reflected in the achievements of Toussaint l'Ouverture. A classic and impassioned account of the first revolution in the Third World. This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803, a revolution that began in the wake of the Bastille but became the model for the Third World liberation movements from Africa to Cuba.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
DESCRIPTION - A popular history of the rise and fall of the Communist International. First published in 1937, this was one of the few contemporary attempts to synthesize the experience of the revolutionary movement after World War I. ‘This book is an introduction to and survey of the revolutionary Socialist movement since the War-the antecedents, foundation and development of the Third International-its collapse as a revolutionary force. The Bolshevik Party, and the Soviet Union which it controls, being the dominating factors in the Third International, are given extensive treatment. The ideas on which the book are based are the fundamental ideas of Marxism. Since 1923 they have been expounded chiefly by Trotsky and a small band of collaborators. Many who sneered or ignored for years are now uncomfortably aware that inside Russia there is something vaguely called ‘Trotskyism,' which the Soviet authorities, despite the economic successes, discover in the very highest offices in the State and in increasingly wide circles of the population. At the same time in Western Europe, statesmen and publicists, frightened at the steady rise of the revolutionary wave, join with the Stalinist regime in Russia to condemn ‘Trotskyism.' Mr. Winston Churchill, in the Evening Standard of October 16th, 1936, unleashes a fierce diatribe against the ‘Trotskyists,' coupled with scarcely veiled approval of the Stalinists, i.e. of the Third International. Governments and national statesmen do pot concern themselves with jesuitical differences between interpretations of Marx and Lenin. The whole future of civilization is involved. The present crisis in world affairs, the growth of Fascism, the Spanish revolution, the inevitable revolution in France, the role of Russia yesterday, to-day, and to-morrow, the constant ebb and flow of political parties and movements all over the world, these things must be seen, can only be understood at all, as part of the international revolutionary movement against Capitalism which entered a decisive stage in 1917 with the foundation of the first Workers' State and, two years later, the organisation of a revolutionary International. Ruhr invasion; the illness and death of Lenin and the quick victory of Stalin over Trotsky in 1923; Chang-Kai-Shek's northern expedition in 1926, the failure of the Shanghai Commune and the disastrous adventure of the Canton insurrection; the breakdown of the New Economic policy in 1928, the ‘liquidation of the kulak,' and the capitulation without a blow of the powerful working-class movement of Germany before Hitler; the restoration of private property on the Russian countryside, the Popular Front in France, the murder of Zinoviev and Kamenev, the turning of guns by the Third International on the P.O.U.M. in Spain because it agitates for the Socialist revolution-all these major events of post-war history are one closely-connected whole. Seen in isolation they are a jumble. This book shows their inter-connection. How much the book owes to the writings of Trotsky, the text can only partially show. But even with that great debt, it could never have been written at all but for the material patiently collected and annotated in France, China, America, Germany and Russia. My task has been chiefly one of selection and co-ordination. Yet in so wide and complicated a survey, differences of opinion and emphasis are bound to arise. Therefore while the book owes so much to others as to justify the use of the term ‘we,' the ultimate responsibility must remain my own.' - from the author's preface to the book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901–19 May 1989) was an Afro-Trinidadian journalist, socialist theorist and writer. Born in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony, James attended Queen's Royal College in Port of Spain before becoming a cricket journalist, and also an author of fiction. He would later work as a school teacher, teaching among others the young Eric Williams. Together with Ralph de Boissière, Albert Gomes and Alfred Mendes, James was a member of the anti-colonialist Beacon Group, a circle of writers associated with The Beacon magazine.
DESCRIPTION - Poems that imagine the life and times of Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry that challenged Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Based on fifteen years of archival research, The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer HonorEe Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley's "age"?the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade. For the first time in verse, Wheatley's relationship to black people and their individual "mercies" is foregrounded, and here we see her as not simply a racial or literary symbol, but a human being who lived and loved while making her indelible mark on history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS lives in Talladega, Alabama. Her poetry has been published in the anthologies AT OUR CORE: WOMEN WRITING ABOUT POWER; DARK EROS; and IDENTITY LESSONS. She has also published poems in Crab Orchard Review; African American Review; Callaloo; Poet Lore; Brilliant Corners; and The Massachusetts Review.
DESCRIPTION - As the seas rise, the fight intensifies to save the Pacific Ocean's Marshall Islands from being devoured by the waters around them. At the same time, activists are raising their poetic voices against decades of colonialism, environmental destruction, and social injustice. Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetn¯il-Kijiner's writing highlights the traumas of colonialism, racism, forced migration, the legacy of American nuclear testing, and the impending threats of climate change. Bearing witness at the front lines of various activist movements inspires her work and has propelled her poetry onto international stages, where she has performed in front of audiences ranging from elementary school students to more than a hundred world leaders at the United Nations Climate Summit. The poet connects us to Marshallese daily life and tradition, likening her poetry to a basket and its essential materials. Her cultural roots and her family provides the thick fiber, the structure of the basket. Her diasporic upbringing is the material which wraps around the fiber, an essential layer to the structure of her experiences. And her passion for justice and change, the passion which brings her to the front lines of activist movements - is the stitching that binds these two experiences together. Iep Jaltok will make history as the first published book of poetry written by a Marshallese author, and it ushers in an important new voice for justice.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KATHY JETNIL-KIJINER is a Marshallese writer. She is co-founder of the nonprofit organization Jo-Jikum, which empowers youth to work toward solutions on environmental issues threatening their home islands.
DESCRIPTION - Andrew Hawkins' birth is the result of a huge misunderstanding. His story begins on an evening in 1837. Jonathan Polkinghorne, master of the Cripplegate plantation, and his dutiful butler, George Hawkins, drink a bit too much and decide they can't go home to their own wives - so they go home to each others'. Disaster ensues. Their wives never quite recover, George is banished to the fields, and nine months later Anna Polkinghorne gives birth to the fated narrator of OXHERDING TALE. As a youth, Andrew is caught in the perpetual battle of the sexes; as he matures, he becomes a social chameleon, who tastes life fully in both the white and the black worlds, never truly belonging to either. Charles Johnson's comic philosophical novel takes the form of a picaresque, first-person narrative. It is the story of Andrew's desperate flight from slavery, but in OXHERDING TALE bondage is spiritual as well as physical, sexual as well as racial. Andrew's adventures cover not only the landscape of the antebellum South - the horrors of the ‘peculiar institution,' black suicide, and death in the mines - but also timeless questions of identity and the nature of the self. The novel's title refers to the ‘Ten Oxherding Pictures' of the twelfth-century Zen artist Kuo-an Shih-yuan, which depict the progress of a young herdsman searching for his wayward ox (Self). Accordingly, the narrative skillfully interfaces Eastern (and Western) philosophical traditions with the drama of black American slavery. On his way to a liberation that should surprise the reader, Andrew encounters a vivid cast of characters. There is Flo Hat-field, an aging sensualist and ‘genius of love,' who satisfies her gargantuan appetites on a diet of sweets and young male slaves; Reb, the Coffinmaker, a direct pipeline to African mysteries, who reluctantly flees north with Andrew; and Horace Bannon, the ominous Soulcatcher, a bounty-hunter who does not so much catch runaways as absorb them into himself, taking on their individual quirks and idiosyncrasies. A young Karl Marx also appears, paying a funny, yet zanily plausible visit to America to meet Ezekiel Sykes-Withers, Andrew's tragic and ascetic tutor. There is Minty, a slave girl of remarkable strength, as well as the misanthropic Dr. Undercliff and his sharp-tongued daughter, Peggy, with whom Andrew achieves a rare and unexpected serenity. Brilliantly realized minor characters complete the portrait of a world that, as the narrator says, ‘is ruin now, mere parable.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CHARLES JOHNSON received the National Book Award for MIDDLE PASSAGE in 1990. Currently the Pollock Professor of English at the University of Washington, he lives in Seattle with his wife, Joan, and their two children.
DESCRIPTION - After a successful career with the NAACP, Johnson returned to teaching, joining the faculty of Fisk University in Nashville as professor of creative literature. While at Fisk, he produced his autobiography, ALONG THIS WAY, in which he concluded that the Negro race must continue to advance because ‘if the Negro is made to fail, America fails with him.' Johnson also denied that African Americans would embrace communism to solve the problems of prejudice and discrimination, as many whites feared. In his mind, blacks were too sensible to adopt a creed that would separate them even more from mainstream America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Weldon Johnson was a writer, poet and distinguished statesman, born in Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, grew up. Their father was head waiter at a resort hotel there and their mother, who had been born in the Bahamas and educated in New York City, was the first black woman to teach in a public school in Florida. Their parents were both talented musically and the family often made music together. James attended Atlanta University and, on graduation, became principal of Stanton Grammar School in Jacksonville. Over the years, he became a figure in the struggle of African Americans for equal rights. He was the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1920 through 1931. In 1900 he and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson wrote a song in celebration to be sung by school children. That song, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,' much to their surprise, became the ‘Negro National Anthem' and is still being sung throughout the country. Johnson contributed articles regularly to ‘The Crisis'. In 1927, he published the Book of American Negro Poetry. Dr. James Weldon Johnson was appointed consul to Venezuela. His autobiography is called ALONG THIS WAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, published in 1933. BLACK MANHATTAN, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN, and GOD'S TROMBONES are three of his most famous works.
DESCRIPTION - First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standard - and double consciousness - that ruled the lives of black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN became a groundbreaking document of Afro-American culture; the first first-person novel ever written by a black, it became an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to ‘pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of ragtime. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN is a complex and moving examination of the question of race and an unsparing look at what it meant to forge an identity as a man in a culture that recognized nothing but color.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was a writer, poet and distinguished statesman, born in Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, grew up. His autobiography is called ALONG THIS WAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, published in 1933. BLACK MANHATTAN, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN, and GOD'S TROMBONES are three of his most famous works. Even while traveling, lecturing, and lobbying, Johnson made time to pursue his literary interests. In 1922 he produced the first edition of THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, an anthology of contemporary African-American verse that included such writers as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. Dubois. (The second edition of the collection, published in 1931, added nine more poets, including Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.) In the preface, Johnson stated one of his best-known beliefs: ‘the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.' By presenting the literary achievements of African Americans, Johnson hoped to change the perceptions of white America about the inferiority of his race.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1916, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN is one of the masterpieces of modern fiction. James Joyce's semi-autobiographical first novel, this is the story of Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and creative youth who rebels against his family his education, and his country by committing himself to the artistic life. Joyce's brilliant rendering of the impressions and experiences of childhood broke new ground in the use of language and in the structure of the novel. As the coming-of-age story of an extraordinary young man, James Joyce's modern classic has become one of the twentieth century's most popular works of fiction. As a bold literary experiment, it has had an important and lasting influence on the contemporary novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 - 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
DESCRIPTION - Perhaps the greatest short story collection in the English language, James Joyce's DUBLINERS is both a vivid and unflinching portrait of ‘dear, dirty Dublin' at the turn of the century, and a moral history of a nation and a people whose ‘golden age' has passed. From the opening story, ‘The Sisters', in which a boy first encounters death, to the powerful and evocative ‘The Dead', which brings the collection to its haunting climax, DUBLINERS startles the reader into realizing universal human truths in moments Joyce called epiphanies. And his richly drawn characters - at once intensely Irish and utterly universal - haunt us log after the first reading. In writing that never fails to provoke and mesmerize, Joyce takes us deep into the heart of the city of his birth, capturing the cadences of Dubliners' speech in remarkably realistic portrayals of their inner lives. This magnificent collection of fifteen stories reveals Joyce at his most accessible and perhaps most profound.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 - 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
DESCRIPTION - ULYSSES is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. It is considered one of the most important works of Modernist literature. ULYSSES chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main character, Leopold Bloom, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title alludes to the hero of Homer's Odyssey (Latinised into Ulysses), and there are many parallels, both implicit and explicit, between the two works (e.g., the correspondences between Leopold Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus). June 16 is now celebrated by Joyce's fans worldwide as Bloomsday. ULYSSES totals 250,000 words from a vocabulary of 30,000 words, with most editions containing between 644 and 1000 pages. Divided into 18 ‘episodes', as they are referred to in most scholarly circles, the book has been the subject of much controversy and scrutiny since its publication, ranging from early obscenity trials to protracted textual ‘Joyce Wars'. ULYSSES's groundbreaking stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring and highly experimental prose - full of puns, parodies, allusions - as well as for its rich characterizations and broad humour, has made the book perhaps the most highly regarded work in Modernist writing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 - 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
DESCRIPTION - THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF POSTWAR EUROPE FOR OUR TIME. Tony Judt's POSTWAR is cause for celebration. The product of a decade's labor, it is sweeping narrative history in the grand tradition, a deeply learned and absorbing chronicle of Europe since the fall of Berlin, weaving East and West, North and South, into a majestic sixty-year tapestry studded with brilliant new insight. Tony Judt has drawn on forty years of reading and writing about modern Europe to craft this account of the continent's remarkable journey - tumultuous and uneven - out of the devastation of history's most savage war. While his range is vast, and seemingly no country, no vital theme, no crucial individual, no watershed event fails to get its moment in the narrative sun, Postwar is the very opposite of the dutiful plod. Animated and propelled by the celebrated force of its author's point of view, it is never less than brilliant. Witty, opinionated and full of fresh and surprising stories and asides, visually rich and rewarding, with useful and provocative maps, photos and cartoons, Postwar is a rare joy for lovers of history and lovers of Europe alike, a show from which one exits, dazzled, into the present moment, with much mental furniture rearranged, if not smashed into kindling, and all of Europe indelibly in mind.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - TONY JUDT (2 January 1948 - 6 August 2010) was born in London in 1948. He was educated at King's College, Cambridge, and the Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, and has taught at Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley and New York University, where he is currently the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of European Studies and Director of the Remarque Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Europe and that he founded in 1995. The author or editor of eleven books, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The New Republic, The New York Times and many other journals in Europe and the United States.
DESCRIPTION - METAMORPHOSIS is one of the most terrifying stories ever written. A man wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Kafka describes his reactions and the reactions of his family - at first horrified, then kind, wrathful, despising, and finally negligent. This haunting parable on human reaction to suffering and disease has already become a classic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924) was a German-language writer of novels and short stories, regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. Kafka strongly influenced genres such as existentialism. His works, such as ‘Die Verwandlung‘ (‘The Metamorphosis'), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle), are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation, physical and psychological brutality, parent–child conflict, characters on a terrifying quest, and mystical transformations. Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and trained as a lawyer. After completing his legal education, Kafka obtained employment with an insurance company. He began to write short stories in his spare time, and for the rest of his life complained about the little time he had to devote to what he came to regard as his calling. He also regretted having to devote so much attention to his Brotberuf (‘day job', literally ‘bread job'). Kafka preferred to communicate by letter; he wrote hundreds of letters to close female friends and family, including his father, his fiancEe Felice Bauer, and his youngest sister Ottla. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major impact on his writing, and he was conflicted over his Jewishness and felt it had little to do with him, although it debatably influenced his writing.
DESCRIPTION - Written in 1914, THE TRIAL is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The son of a well-to-do merchant, FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanitorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked most of his adult life at the Workers Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Only a small portion of his writings were published during his lifetime; most of them, including the three unfinished novels, AMERIKA, THE TRIAL, and THE CASTLE, were published posthumously.
DESCRIPTION - Whether she is infiltrating 12-step meetings and codependency workshops or evaluating the claims of gurus from Shirley MacLaine to M. Scott Peck, Kaminer deftly diagnoses a national movement with a strong tendency toward authoritarianism, a cult of victimhood, and a nasty streak of cover religiosity. Whether she is infiltrating 12-step meetings and codependency workshops or evaluating the claims of gurus from Shirley MacLaine to M. Scott Peck, Kaminer deftly diagnoses a national movement with a strong tendency toward authoritarianism, a cult of victimhood, and a nasty streak of cover religiosity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wendy Kaminer (born 1949) is an American lawyer and writer. She has written several books on contemporary social issues, including A Fearful Freedom: Women's Flight From Equality, about the conflict between egalitarian and protectionist feminism; I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, about the self-help movement; and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety.
DESCRIPTION - The distinguished Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy was sitting in a Budapest cafE, wondering whether to write a long-planned monograph on modern man or a new play, when he was disturbed by the roaring - so loud as to drown out all other noises - of a passing train. Soon it was gone, only to be succeeded by another. And another. Strange, Karinthy thought, it had been years since Budapest had streetcars. Only then did he realize he was suffering from an auditory hallucination of extraordinary intensity. What in fact Karinthy was suffering from was a brain tumor, not cancerous but hardly benign, though it was only much later - after spells of giddiness, fainting fits, friends remarking that his handwriting had altered, and books going blank before his eyes - that he consulted a doctor and embarked on a series of examinations that would lead to brain surgery. Karinthy's description of his descent into illness and his observations of his symptoms, thoughts, and feelings, as well as of his friends' and doctors' varied responses to his predicament, are exact and engrossing and entirely free of self-pity. A JOURNEY ROUND MY SKULL is not only an extraordinary piece of medical testimony, but a powerful work of literature - one that dances brilliantly on the edge of extinction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karinthy was born into a bourgeois family in Budapest. His family was originally jewish, but they had changed religions shortly before he was born. He started his writing career as a journalist and remained a writer of short, humorous blurbs until his death.
DESCRIPTION - ‘This book' writes Miss her Foreword ‘must hive a disturbing effect upon those readers who believe its story. Those, especially in Kenya, who regard it as untrue or greatly exaggerated may deplore its publication. Yet I believe that it is right that it should be published. It records the experiences of a young Kikuyu who was detained from 1953 to 1960 as an activist in the Mau Mau movement in Kenya and who describes his periodical ill treatment in detention. But it also reveals what passed in his mind during this experience and there can be little doubt that, in greater or less degree, his attitude of mind is shared with thousands of other Kikuyu who, as the so-called ‘hard-core' of Mau Mau, are likely to play an authoritative part in the future of Kenya. It is also probable that his story will arouse sympathy and understanding among Africans in general and in much of the non-African world. For us British, whether in Britain or in Kenya, who were shocked by the character of the Mau Mau outbreak, to know all may not be to forgive all but it is still important to know, and few of us who read this book are likely to close it with quite the same views of Mau Mau, of Kenya or, perhaps, of Africa in general, as those with which we opened it.' The book is illustrated with a section of half-tones and there is a map showing the sites of the camps.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josiah Mwangi Kariuki (21 March 1929 - 2 March 1975) was a Kenyan socialist politician during the administration of the Jomo Kenyatta government. He held different government positions from 1963, when Kenya became an independent country, to 1975, when he was assassinated. He left behind three wives and many children. He was popularly known as "JM".
DESCRIPTION - This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy. Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas. Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the ‘will to power' was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation. He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity. Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Arnold Kaufmann (July 1, 1921 - September 4, 1980) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University. He is renowned as a scholar and translator of Friedrich Nietzsche. He also wrote a 1965 book on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and published a translation of Goethe's Faust.
DESCRIPTION - The first six of her novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. ASYLUM PIECE, a collection of short stories which explored the inner mindscape of the psychological explorer, heralded the new style and content of Kavan's writing. They were published after she was institutionalized for a heroin-related breakdown and suicide attempt. After her release, Kavan changed her name legally and set about a new career as an avant-garde writer in the mode of Franz Kafka. Her development of ‘nocturnal language' involved the lexicon of dreams and addiction, mental instability and alienation. She has been compared to Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin, as well as Kafka. (Nin was an admirer and unsuccessfully pursued a correspondence with Kavan.) On one occasion Kavan collaborated with her analyst and close friend, Karl Theodor Bluth, in writing ‘The Horse's Tale' (1949).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Kavan (10 April 1901-5 December 1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Kavan was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life, a dependency which was generally undetected by her associates, and for which she made no apologies. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life. An inveterate traveler, Kavan spent twenty-two months of World War II in New Zealand, and it was that country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica that inspired the writing of ICE. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death. She died at her home in Kensington on 5 December 1968.
DESCRIPTION - Short stories addressing the surreal realities of mental illness, from an incredible cult writer often compared to Kafka and Woolf. The tortured life of Anna Kavan brought her some reward in terms of great pieces of art. Her drug addiction bore fruit in the Julia and the Bazooka collection of stories; while this companion volume recalls her experience of the asylum - powerful, haunting works which can be harrowing but are full of sympathy too.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Kavan (1901–1968) was a novelist, short story writer, and painter. Her works include Asylum Piece, Ice, and Sleep Has His House. She has been often compared to Djuna Barnes, Franz Kafka, Anaïs Nin, and Virginia Woolf. She was a long-term heroin addict and suffered periodic bouts of mental illness, and these facets of her life feature prominently in her novels and short stories.
DESCRIPTION - Earth was doomed. Slowly and inexorably the world was entering a new and cataclysmic ice age. Like a plodding giant, walls of ice were covering the earth leaving in its wake total annihilation of life. And this great natural horror had been caused by the world's most brilliant scientists - one too many nuclear bombs had been released and the balance of nature had been irreparably altered. And where ice and snow hadn't knifed their way into the land, ravaging and brutal wars were taking their toll. Through this surrealistic nightmare of ice and ultimate death, two men search for a strangely elusive girl. One, referred to only as the Warden, becomes a military power in his own right when the wars begin. A cruel, sadistic, merciless man he seems the total personification of Man's negative qualities. The narrator is the other man, and while he searches and nearly dies in pursuit of his quarry, he is never quite sure what it is that drives him to her. For those few times when he does locate her, she escapes his grasp explaining that she would rather die than be with either him or the Warden. A deceptively simple plot becomes a chilling tour de force in the capable hands of Miss Kavan as she comments on the human condition both today and tomorrow. And her thoughts are all the more harrowing because of the basic truths they reveal.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Kavan (10 April 1901-5 December 1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Kavan was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life, a dependency which was generally undetected by her associates, and for which she made no apologies. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life. An inveterate traveler, Kavan spent twenty-two months of World War II in New Zealand, and it was that country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica that inspired the writing of ICE. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death. She died at her home in Kensington on 5 December 1968.
DESCRIPTION - Anna Kavan now stands alongside Virginia Woolf as one of Britain's great twentieth-century modernists. This posthumous collection of Kavan's short stories contains some of her most compelling writing which owes much to her personal experiences - especially her nearly lifelong addiction to heroine. An important literary work, these stories highlight the shadowed world of the incurable drug addict and probe the psychological aspects of addiction. '. in 1938 she emerged from the clinic, she wasn't cured but she was transformed. Throughout this terrible period she'd managed to publish six romantic novels as Helen Ferguson. Anna Kavan was the heroine of the autobiographical LET ME ALONE (1930), and this was the name she then adopted, dyeing her hair blonde, projecting a persona of chic control. She also, remarkably, embarked on a series of fictions which place her firmly in the avant-garde. here was a poetic minimalism, polished and eerie, that was more technically daring than anything written before by an Englishwoman, with the exception of Virginia Woolf. Reviewers were foxed but impressed and cast about for words like 'symbolism', 'surrealism' and 'Kafka'. Her dominant themes are isolation and the pain involved in the search for love. Kavan's is a dangerous frightening world - you don't go there for laughs - but it is also tender and intellectual and immersed in a shimmering hush. She is one of England's few modern masters.' - Duncan Fallowell, Daily Telegraph. 'One of the most mysterious of modern writers, Anna Kavan created a uniquely fascinating fictional world. Few contemporary novelists could match the intensity of her vision.' - J.G. Ballard.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ANNA KAVAN (1901–1968) is one of the greatest unsung enigmas in twentieth-century British literature. Born Helen Woods, a fraught childhood and two failed marriages led her to change her name to that of one of her characters. Despite struggling with mental illness and heroin addiction for most of her life she was still able to write fiction that was as powerful and memorable as any female English female writer of the last 150 years.
DESCRIPTION - This is writing which probes far into the mysterious world of dreams and night shadows. It is the story of a girl who has rejected normal relationships for what seemed to her the greater realities - a borderline world she inhabits at night. Exploring this new world of symbols she relives parts of her past life: Her childhood and the mother who died when she was young: Herr relations with her father who was always too busy to answer the questions she was afraid to ask; Her days at school when she found herself unable to accept authority; The stupidity of the family doctor who was not equipped to understand or prescribe a cure for her problems; Her days at the university where people were kinder to her, but where she was unable to accept friends because she had grown to mistrust all kindness. Anna Kavan is acknowledged in England as one of the most significant writers of her generation. As a lay worker in the field of mental illness, she speaks from something very akin to personal experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anna Kavan (10 April 1901-5 December 1968; born Helen Emily Woods) was a British novelist, short story writer and painter. Kavan was addicted to heroin for most of her adult life, a dependency which was generally undetected by her associates, and for which she made no apologies. She is popularly supposed to have died of a heroin overdose. In fact she died of heart failure, though she had attempted suicide several times during her life. An inveterate traveler, Kavan spent twenty-two months of World War II in New Zealand, and it was that country's proximity to the inhospitable frozen landscape of Antarctica that inspired the writing of ICE. This post-apocalyptic novel brought critical acclaim, earning Kavan the Brian Aldiss Science Fiction Book of the Year award in 1967, the year before Kavan's death. She died at her home in Kensington on 5 December 1968.
DESCRIPTION - The Sound of the Mountain centers upon the Ogata family of Kamakura, and its events are witnessed from the perspective of its aging patriarch, Shingo, a businessman close to retirement who works in Tokyo. Shingo is experiencing temporary lapses of memory, recalling strange and disturbing dreams upon waking, and hearing sounds, including the titular noise which awakens him from his sleep, "like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth." Shingo takes the sound to be an omen of his impending death. Shingo observes and questions his relations with his family members, his wife Yasuko, his philandering son Shuichi, his daughter-in-law Kikuko, and his married daughter Fusako, who has left her husband and returned to her family home with her two young daughters. Shingo realizes that he has not truly been an involved and loving husband and father, and perceives the marital difficulties of his adult children to be the fruit of his poor parenting. To this end, he begins to question his secretary, Tanizaki Eiko, about his son's affair, as she knows Shuichi socially and is friends with his mistress, and he quietly puts pressure upon Shuichi to quit his infidelity. At the same time, he becomes aware that he has begun to experience a fatherly yet erotic attachment to Kikuko, whose physical attractiveness, filial devotion, and quiet suffering in the face of her husband's unfaithfulness contrast strongly with the bitter resentment and homeliness of Shingo's own daughter, Fusako. Complicating matters in his own marriage is the infatuation he once possessed for Yasuko's older sister, more beautiful than Yasuko, who died as a young woman but now appears in his dreams along with other dead friends and associates. The novel can be interpreted as a meditation of aging and its attendant decline, and coming to terms with one's mortality. Even as Shingo regrets not being present for his family and blames himself for his children's failing marriages, the natural world comes alive for him in a whole new way, provoking meditations on life, love, and companionship.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yasunari Kawabata (11 June 1899 - 16 April 1972) was a Japanese novelist and short story writer whose sparse, lyrical, subtly-shaded prose works won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, the first Japanese author to receive the award. His works have enjoyed broad international appeal and are still widely read.
DESCRIPTION - In "Why Do Ruling Classes Fear History?" and Other Questions, Harvey Kaye shows how our present-day political and economic elites stand in a long line of governing classes that have been eager to declare an end to the making of history. Invoking the hard-fought-for accomplishments of America's past and the persistent possibilities of its future, he calls upon his fellow citizens, especially intellectuals of the Left, to redeem the "prophetic memory" of American experience and renew the struggle for liberty, equality, and democracy. Through essays that range in tone and content from the rhetorical power of a public address to the intimacy of a personal memoir, Harvey Kaye looks at the value of knowledge and the power of history to liberate. Not content to accept the notion that history is at an end and that individuals are powerless to effect change, Kaye makes an impassioned plea to understand the ongoing, circuitous route of history and its ability to engender social action at a time when society seems to have lost tract of the true lessons that history can teach.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harvey J Kaye is an American historian and sociologist. He is currently the Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.
DESCRIPTION - ZORBA THE GREEK is a novel written by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba. The unnamed narrator is a scholarly, introspective writer who opens a coal mine on the fertile island of Crete. He is gradually drawn out of his ascetic shell by Zorba, an ebullient man who revels in the social pleasures of eating, drinking, and dancing. The narrator's reentry into a life of experience is completed when his newfound lover, the village widow, is ritually murdered by a jealous mob.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nikos Kazantzakis (18 February 1883 - 26 October 1957) was a Greek writer and philosopher, celebrated for his novel Zorba the Greek, considered his magnum opus. He became known globally after the 1964 release of the Michael Cacoyannis film Zorba the Greek, based on the novel. He gained renewed fame with the 1988 Martin Scorsese adaptation of his book The Last Temptation of Christ.
DESCRIPTION - Between 1929 and 1941, the Communist Party organized and led a radical, militantly antiracist movement in Alabama - the center of Party activity in the Depression South. HAMMER AND HOE documents the efforts of the Alabama Communist Party and its allies to secure racial, economic, and political reforms. Sensitive to the complexities of gender, race, culture, and class without compromising the political narrative, Robin Kelley here illuminates one of the most unique and least understood radical movements in American history. The Alabama Communist Party was built from scratch by working people who had no Euro-American radical political tradition. It was composed largely of poor blacks, most of whom were semiliterate and devoutly religious, but it also attracted a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, iconoclastic youth, and renegade liberals. Kelley shows that the cultural identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the development of the Party. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals. In the South race pervaded virtually every aspect of Communist activity. And because the Party's call for voting rights, racial equality, equal wages for women, and land for landless farmers represented a fundamental challenge to the society and economy of the South, it is not surprising that Party organizers faced a constant wave of violence. Kelley's analysis ranges broadly, examining such topics as the Party's challenge to black middle-class leadership; the social, ideological, and cultural roots of black working-class radicalism; Communist efforts to build alliances with Southern liberals; and the emergence of a left-wing interracial youth movement. He closes with a discussion of the Alabama Communist Party's demise and its legacy for future civil rights activism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ROBIN D. C. KELLEY, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of the award-winning HAMMER AND HOE, RACE REBELS, and YO' MAMA'S DISFUNKTIONAL!
DESCRIPTION - The annals of both African American and labor history are filled with heroic figures and dramatic protest movements. The strikes, marches, and civil rights struggles that make up the main historical events were by nature extraordinary episodes led by extraordinary personalities. But what of ordinary events and ordinary people? What of the more personal and everyday forms of protest and resistance? What of the radical and underground movements that rarely find a place in African American history? In an unprecedented tour through a previously hidden layer of history, RACE REBELS demonstrates exactly how the cultural world can be a political one. Robin D. G. Kelley makes visible hidden streams of black working-class resistance in the United States, and sheds new light on aspects of black politics and culture that most scholars have dismissed as marginal to the ‘main events.' Examining the words and deeds of African Americans who often found themselves at odds with the black middle class as well as with racist whites, Kelley argues that these men and women created strategies of resistance, and even entire subcultures, that have remained outside mainstream African American politics. They rebelled against both racist oppression and middle-class ‘race politics', and - in the South, in particular - did so in a way that made them appear less threatening than they really were. Whether they were masking acts of industrial sabotage with Sambo imitations, or loud-talking a white conductor from the back of a segregated trolley, they encoded their strategies of resistance in order to cover their tracks. Here, for the first time, black America's ‘race rebels' are given the historiographical attention they deserve, from the Jim Crow era to the present. From movements like communism and civil rights: to places such as work, home, and the public sphere; to cultural arenas such as fashion in Malcolm X's time and gangsta rap in our own, Kelley finds black working-class people fighting battles many of us never imagined, using weapons many of us never knew existed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ROBIN D. C. KELLEY, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is professor of history and Africana studies at New York University and author of the award-winning HAMMER AND HOE, RACE REBELS, and YO' MAMA'S DISFUNKTIONAL!
DESCRIPTION - This stirring epic of modem Turkey-a tempestuous, romantic tale of rebellion against a still-existing feudal world-is told with the simplicity and awesome sweep of the great folk legends. The hero of the tale is Ince Memed, rebel, brigand, and adventurer. Born in a small village in the Taurus Mountains, where the peasants struggle in servitude to a rich Agha or lord, Memed as a boy tries to escape the hard life in the thistle-choked fields but is brought back to an existence even crueller in hardship than before. Years later he tries to escape again, this time with his lovely childhood sweetheart, Hatche, whom he wants to marry but who has been promised to the nephew of the Agha. The lovers are pursued, Memed kills the nephew and escapes, but Hatche is caught and thrown into prison. Memed now takes to the mountains and soon becomes the most famous bandit throughout the Taurus, helper of the poor and scourge of their oppressors. His chief goals, however, remain: to free Hatche from prison and to settle accounts with the Agha. The story of these exploits in the wild mountains and the wretched villages of the Taurus, peopled by poor farmers, strange and courageous outlaws, intriguing nomads-all under the shadow of the cruel and grasping Agha-rises to true epic proportions as Memed, the protector, the hawk, becomes the renowned avenger of his people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ya?ar Kemal (born Kemal Sad?k Gökçeli; 6 October 1923 - 28 February 2015) was a Turkish writer and human rights activist. He was one of Turkey's leading writers. He received 38 awards during his lifetime and had been a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature on the strength of Memed, My Hawk. An outspoken intellectual, he often did not hesitate to speak about sensitive issues, especially those concerning the problems of the Kurdish people. He was tried in 1995 under anti-terror laws for an article he wrote for German magazine Der Spiegel accusing the Turkish army of destroying Kurdish villages. He was released but later received a suspended 20-month jail sentence for an article he wrote criticising racism against minorities in Turkey, especially the Kurds.
DESCRIPTION - Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. In this deeply researched and fast-moving narrative, Kendi chronicles the entire story of antiBlack racist ideas and their staggering power over the course of American history. Stamped from the Beginning uses the lives of five major American intellectuals to offer a window into the contentious debates between assimilationists and segregationists and between racists and antiracists. From Puritan minister Cotton Mather to Thomas Jefferson, from fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison to brilliant scholar W. E. B. Du Bois to legendary antiprison activist Angela Davis, Kendi shows how and why some of our leading proslavery and procivil rights thinkers have challenged or helped cement racist ideas in America. As Kendi provocatively illustrates, racist thinking did not arise from ignorance or hatred. Racist ideas were created and popularized in an effort to defend deeply entrenched discriminatory policies and to rationalize the nation's racial inequities in everything from wealth to health. While racist ideas are easily produced and easily consumed, they can also be discredited. In shedding much needed light on the murky history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning offers us the tools we need to expose them and in the process, gives us reason to hope.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ibram X. Kendi is an award-winning scholar and a New York Times bestselling author. He is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
DESCRIPTION - This tale, set during the Depression, tells about Francis Phelan and other inhabitants of skid row in Albany, New York. Ironweed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the best-known of William Kennedy's three Albany-based novels. Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom. Years ago he left Albany in a hurry after killing a scab during a trolley workers' strike; he ran away again after accidentally - and fatally - dropping his infant son. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and the present. Chronicles the final wanderings of a one-time ballplayer turned down-and-out murderer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York, to William J. Kennedy and to Mary E. McDonald. Kennedy was raised a Catholic. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents of Albany's history and the supernatural. Kennedy's works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; film, 1987), and Roscoe (2002).
DESCRIPTION - An international bestseller, Ken Kesey's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST defined the 1960s era of ever-widening perspectives and ominous repressive forces. Full of mischief, insight, and pathos, Kesey's powerful story of a mental ward and its inhabitants probes the meaning of madness, often turning conventional notions of sanity and insanity on their heads. The tale is chronicled by the seemingly mute Indian patient, Chief Bromden; its hero is Randle Patrick McMurphy, the boisterous, brawling, fun-loving rebel who encourages gambling, drinking, and sex in the ward, and rallies the other patients around him by challenging the dictatorial rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy's defiance -- which begins as a sport -- develops into a grim struggle with the awesome power of the ‘Combine', concluding with shattering, tragic results. In its unforgettable portrait of a man teaching the value of self-reliance and laughter destroyed by forces of hatred and fear, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST is a classic parable that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kenneth Elton ‘Ken' Kesey (September 17, 1935 - November 10, 2001) was an American author, best known for his novel ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. ‘I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie,' Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.
DESCRIPTION - No writer in the western philosophical tradition has made more persistent use of parables, stories, and narrative metaphors than has Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), whose gift of storytelling has imprinted unforgettable images on our minds. The aim of this volume is to bring together a careful selection of these stories for edification, enjoyment, and critical examination. The essential conviction underlying this effort is that Kierkegaard ranks among the best of the great parabolists of the western tradition. The mind of Kierkegaard has been kept alive in the common memory more by his parables than any other part of his authorship. Like all good parables, they have developed an oral tradition. Do not be surprised if you find here parables that you have heard imperfectly retold or partially revised. Now the reader can track down the original. Kierkegaard's parables aim not merely at a change of mind but a change of will. Kierkegaard does not tell his parables with the expectation that his hearers will experience a casual illumination or fascination, but rather that they might say to themselves, ‘Aha! I know how that is and it makes a difference in the way I understand myself and make fundamental choices!' Kierkegaard's parables intend to communicate an enriched capacity for self-examination leading to increased moral sensitivity and intensified spirituality. They offer his readers a potential gift, the acceptance of which requires their participation. A parable is not like an easily recognized object that is handed to someone to use, but like a gift that one first needs to open and then has to figure out what to do with it. The parables seek to facilitate a capability that can only be set in motion by the act of self-discovery, but that capability may remain dormant unless the self is jolted out of fixed behavioral routines, which the parables powerfully challenge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 - 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a 'single individual', giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
DESCRIPTION - THE MOST COMPREHENSIVE AND AUTHORITATIVE COLLECTION OF KIERKEGAARD QUOTATIONS EVER PUBLISHED. ‘The Quotable Kierkegaard serves equally well as an introduction or a reference book. There is no better way to sample the unique flavor of Kierkegaard's thought. And if you ever need a quotation for a speech or a sermon, for an epigraph or an epitaph, for a dedication or a denunciation, you're sure to find a striking one here.' - David Lodge, author of Small World, Therapy, and other novels. ‘Why I so much prefer autumn to spring is that in the autumn one looks at heaven - in the spring at the earth.' - Søren Kierkegaard. The father of existentialism, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) was a philosopher who could write like an angel. With only a sentence or two, he could plumb the depths of the human spirit. In this collection of some 800 quotations, the reader will find dazzling bon mots next to words of life-changing power. Drawing from the authoritative Princeton editions of Kierkegaard's writings, this book presents a broad selection of his wit and wisdom, as well as a stimulating introduction to his life and work. Organized by topic, this volume covers notable Kierkegaardian concerns such as anxiety, despair, existence, irony, and the absurd, but also erotic love, the press, busyness, and the comic. Here readers will encounter both well-known quotations (‘Life must be understood backward. But then one forgets the other principle, that it must be lived forward') and obscure ones (‘Beware false prophets who come to you in wolves' clothing but inwardly are sheep - i.e., the phrasemongers'). Those who spend time in these pages will discover the writer who said ‘my grief is my castle,' but who also taught that ‘the best defense against hypocrisy is love.' Illuminating and delightful, this engaging book also provides a substantial portrait of one of the most influential of modern thinkers; Gathers some 800 quotations; Drawn from the authoritative Princeton editions of Kierkegaard's writings; Includes an introduction, a brief account and timeline of Kierkegaard's life, a guide to further reading, and an index.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813 - 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christendom, morality, ethics, psychology and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a 'single individual', giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
DESCRIPTION - Best known for THE LORDS OF HUMAN KIND (1969), V. G. Kiernan created a work ‘concerned with the impressions and opinions of Europeans and non-Europeans about one another, their attitudes and behaviour towards one another, in the century or century and a half before the First World War, the epoch when Europe's importance in the world was greatest.' The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said regarded it as a central influence in developing his modern-day classic Orientalism (1978). Kiernan's work has many haunting themes, including the contrast between liberty at home and tyrannical oppression abroad: ‘It did not escape comment that the Dutch were no sooner gaining their freedom at home than they were depriving other people of theirs, an inconsistency repeated by several European nations later on.' The techniques of oppression abroad brought a pack of plagues back to Europe, observed Kiernan, whether in Lord Salisbury's crass judgment that the Irish were no more fit for home rule than Hottentots or in the imperial manner of warfare that relied on hard-charging offensive techniques designed ‘to hypnotize and paralyze the enemy by asserting the firmer will and higher morale of the attacker.' As millions of Europeans were later slaughtered in World War I, the military officers failed to see ‘that machine guns and barbed wire were not so easily hypnotized as half-armed' Asians and Africans. The generals doggedly stuck to the bayonet-charging techniques that once worked for them in their youth on the campaign grounds in the overseas colonies. Kiernan's work also examined a variety of racial hierarchies on display in European literature, perhaps most graphically in Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913). In this work, there is ‘a table of ranks among the races, an order of fitness to survive. implied in the sequence in which they succumb to the mysterious etheric poison that the planet has swum into. Africa and the Australian aborigines are speedily extinguished, followed by India and Persia, while in Europe the Slavs collapse sooner than the Teutons, and southern France sooner than the north, after 'delirious excitement' and a 'Socialist upheaval' at Toulon.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Victor Gordon Kiernan (4 September 1913 - 17 February 2009) was professor emeritus of modern history at Edinburgh University and recognized as one of the most wide-ranging of global historians. He was a man of letters close to the Edwardian era but infused with a radical consciousness from the Great Depression and from a decade of witnessing anticolonial struggles in the Indian subcontinent.
DESCRIPTION - This big, robust novel tells the story of an American negro company in the Second World War, from its basic training in Georgia to the hellish war in the Pacific and to a mutiny in which coloured soldiers shoot it out with white soldiers in an Australian city. AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER is an angry novel, although much of the anger smoulders beneath the humorous surface of the lives of this company, whose loves and laughter contrast horrifyingly with the undertones of race hatred. The reader cannot fail to be struck by the irony of asking negroes to fight - in segregated units - and to die to preserve the very freedoms they are unable to enjoy at home. Mr Killens succeeds magnificently in describing the negro experience in the last war, particularly through his exploration of the character of Sergeant Solly Saunders, a graduate whose personal dilemma was whether to sell out to the whites and aim for a corn mission, or stick by his coloured comrades in the ranks. AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER has pace, excitement and real depth. The battle scenes have a hallucinatory power that calls to mind FROM HERE TO ETERNITY. ‘Mr Killens tells the truth, tells it with love and precision and I am convinced that those who are unable to respond to it today will find themselves helplessly proving its truth tomorrow.' - JAMES BALDWIN.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Oliver Kittens was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1916. He attended Edward Waters College, Morris Brown College, and Howard University, as well as the Terrell Law School and Columbia and New York Universities. In 1936 he joined the staff of the National Labour Relations Board in Washington, where he served until 1942 and again in 1946 after his return from the war. For 26 months he was with the Amphibian Forces in the South Pacific. Mr Killens has won the Afro-Arts Theatre Cultural Award for 1955, the Brooklyn N.A.A.C.P. Literary Arts Award for 1957, and the Climbers Business Club Humanitarian Award for 1959. He is chairman of the Harlem Writers' Guild Workshop and of the Writers' Committee of the American Society of African Culture. He writes for television and films, his latest film being Odds Against Tomorrow, starring Harry Belafonte. Mr Kittens, who lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children, recently travelled by Land-Rover 12,000 miles through West Africa doing research for a proposed television series. AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER is Mr Killens's second novel; his first, YOUNGBLOOD, was published in 1954.
DESCRIPTION - ‘If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by airplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V.C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an air- port named after him - why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen. ' So begins Jamaica Kincaid's new book, which shows us what we have not yet seen of the place where she grew up - a ten-by-twelve-mile island in the British West Indies. First, there is the perhaps familiar aerial view of this longed-for place, the disproportionately large airport, the careening drive over bad roads in a Japanese taxi, the dilapidated school and hospital, the mockery of a library. Then there is the sea: ‘That water - have you ever seen anything like it? Far out, to the horizon, the color of the water is navy blue; nearer, the water is the color of the North American sky. Oh, what beauty!' What follows is less familiar, a new point of view, for it is unlikely that, on vacation, you have had the time to think clearly about the people you are visiting - their colonial history, their government, their manners, their sense of time - or about their opinion of you. You are English or European or American, escaping the banality and corruption of your large place; they are Antiguan, formerly British, and unable to escape the same drawbacks of their own little realm. This expansive essay - lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode - cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jamaica Kincaid (born May 25, 1949) is an Antiguan-American novelist, essayist, gardener, and gardening writer. She was born in St. John's, Antigua, which is part of the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda. She lives in North Bennington, Vermont, during the summers and teaches at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, during the academic year. Kincaid is an award-winning writer whose work has been both commended and criticized for its subject matter and tone because her writing draws upon her life and is perceived as angry. In response, Kincaid counters that writers draw upon their lives all the time and that to describe her writing as autobiographical and angry is not a valid criticism.
DESCRIPTION - RAY DAVIES: NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE is a critical biography of Ray Davies, with a focus on his music and his times. The book studies Davies' work from the Kinks' first singles through his 2006 solo album, from his rock musicals in the early 1970s to his one-man stage show in the 1990s, and from his films to his autobiography. Based on interviews with his closest associates, as well as studies of the recordings themselves, this book creates the most thorough picture of Davies' work to date. ‘Kitts' obvious background in literary and social history offers an entirely new and much needed elevation of the caliber of writing on composers from the rock field whose work is deserving of such a broadening of scope.' - Doug Hinman, Author of THE KINKS: ALL DAY AND ALL OF THE NIGHT: DAY BY DAY CONCERTS, RECORDINGS, AND BROADCASTS, 1964-1997. ‘A remarkable history of a genius, deftly told through the art of music. Kitts has taken a difficult man and demonstrated his most effective way of life. RAY DAVIES: NOT LIKE EVERYBODY ELSE is a truly impassioned work.' - Eric James Abbey, Author of GARAGE ROCK AND ITS ROOTS: MUSICAL REBELS AND THE DRIVE FOR INDIVIDUALITY. ‘Kitts guides us down memory lane with the fascinating history of the great Ray Davies (with and without the Kinks). Kitts has impeccable musical ears, incredible knowledge, and a keen perception about Mr. Davies, which make this book a must for any Kinks/Ray Davies fan, and a great place to start for those who are less familiar with Davies and the Kinks.' - Bob Putignano, www.SoundsofBlue.com
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas M. Kitts, Professor of English and Chair of the Division of English/Speech at St. John's University, New York, is the co-editor of LIVING ON A THIN LINE: CROSSING AESTHETIC BORDERS WITH THE KINKS, the author of THE THEATRICAL LIFE OF GEORGE HENRY BOKER, articles on American literature and popular culture, reviews of books, CDs, and performances, and a play, GYPSIES. He is the book review editor of Popular Music and Society and the editor of The Mid-Atlantic Almanack.
DESCRIPTION - In THE POLITICS OF WAR, Gabriel Kolko has written anew kind of history of the epic events of World War II, a chronicle that merges the diplomatic, economic, and military aspects of the war to paint the contours of the global crises that have lasted from 1945 down to the present It is the first history of 1943-1945 period to assess critically American diplomacy in the context of the political and economic outcome of a world torn asunder: a world emerging from the war, confronting revolutions and revolutionaries everywhere, racked by hunger and the collapse of nations, and opening the first chapter of the cold war between the former Allies. Kolko presents the basic forces in the confrontation: the Communists and revolutionaries seeking to alter existing societies; the Soviet Union, a critical source of stability as well as change; and Great Britain, fatally weakened and heir to an empire in collapse. He shows how the United States responded to each of these factors, seeking to define and advance its own conception of a reformed world economic and political order, and America's future role in it. The Politics of War is the first volume to treat extensively United States peace aims for the postwar world and relate them to the conduct of American diplomacy in Poland and Eastern Europe, the first consideration of the United States' reaction to the Resistance and leftist mass movements from France to the Far East At the same time Kolko assesses the character of the radical movements in Europe and China in a manner that reveals the potential and nature of the vast forces of social revolution in modern times, movements s frequently in conflict with the Soviet Union as with the United States. THE POLITICS OF WAR is an account of the causes of modern political and social changes as well as the diplomacy of the Allies. Kolko has presented the first global history of the political basis and consequence of military strategy in a manner that throws entirely new light on reasons behind major military events: the dropping of the atomic bombs, the war in China, the Paris uprising of August 1944, or the last months of the military campaign against Germany. He makes the military and political realities one unified problem confronting the heads of state, portraying World War II as the leaders themselves regarded it. Based on a vast store of new and unexploited sources, unpublished as well as published, in THE POLITICS OF WAR the reader sees how and on what premises American leaders guided the nation through wartime diplomatic crises concerning the entire world and the future of American power. The volume is the most complete and original critical account of the period yet published, drawing on a larger quantity and variety of information than any single history of the war. THE POLITICS OF WAR is a broad and moving panorama of a world at war and in total upheaval, and the American role and response to the monumental military, political, and economic events. It is the first balanced history of the most important sustained crisis of our time, a microcosm that reveals the roots of the problems of the world today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 - May 19, 2014) was an American-born Canadian historian and author. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and US foreign policy in the 20th century.
DESCRIPTION - Mr. Kolko develops the startling thesis that: the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of the 20th century was toward growing competition and economic decentralization, rather than increasing monopolization of industry and finance. Indeed, giant businesses were not only unable to prevent new com~1etitors from entering their industries, but they were less profitable than many much smaller firms. Having failed to establish control over the economy by their own means, many leaders of big business became the chief initiators of progressive legislation on a national level. ‘Progressivism' was, in this sense, profoundly conservative in its efforts to maintain existing social and power relations in a new economic context. The author has used numerous manuscript collections including new and previously untapped sources of vital information to arrive at this challenging theory which offers these fresh, unexpected, and controversial ideas about the Progressive Era in American history. His analyses of the movements for banking regulation, a Federal Trade Commission, meat inspection, and other vital aspects of progressivism will come as a surprise to many. The continuity between the New Nationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and the new freedom of Woodrow Wilson is vividly illustrated as Mr. Kolko relates the political history of the period to its economic context. As he dissects the actions and personnel of the time, he reveals a general power structure with an intimate detail unknown in other writings on recent American history. Unexploited letters and diaries are used to unravel hitherto unsolved riddles that have perplexed historians. He concludes this study with an outline of a theory of political capitalism relevant to the dominant tendencies of the period. THE TRIUMPH OF CONSERVATISM will not only be of great interest to historians, political scientists, and economists, but to anyone interested in understanding the basic forces in the development of American society in the 20th century. Gabriel Kolko received his Ph.D. in American history from Harvard. He is the author of Wealth and Power in America, and has contributed to numerous academic and popular journals. Mr. Kolko is presently working on a history of recent American foreign policy. He is the first recipient of the Transportation History prize of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, awarded for his writings on U.S. railroads and federal regulation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gabriel Morris Kolko (August 17, 1932 - May 19, 2014) was an American-born Canadian historian and author. His research interests included American capitalism and political history, the Progressive Era, and US foreign policy in the 20th century.
DESCRIPTION - The poetry of Yusef Komunyakaa arises from the juxtaposition of psychological and physical landscapes. In his work, memory is more than the repository of subjective experience, it is the means for understanding the historical and social contexts that shape experience. NEON VERNACULAR charts the development of his characteristic themes and concerns by gathering work from seven of his previous collections, along with a dozen new poems that continue the autobiographical trajectory of his recent MAGIC CITY. Komunyakaa's latest writing has engaged the tensions and ironies of his childhood in Bogalusa, Louisiana, once a center of Klan activity and later a locus of Civil Rights efforts. The new poems continue this exploration from the perspective of an adult: ‘I am back here, interfaced / With a dead phosphorescence; / The whole town smells / Like the world's oldest anger.' Whether recalling his stormy relationship with his father, his days of high school football, or his return from Vietnam, he evokes the psychological, historical, and personal details that create an impressive range of characters and places. The remaining poems represent work from all of Komunyakaa's previous collections, with the exception of MAGIC CITY. Many of these poems originally appeared in limited editions and arc now otherwise unavailable. These pieces, organized chronologically, trace his evolving engagement with memory and history, reveal the profound influence of jazz music on his poetry, and document his struggles to redefine his status as a black man and a Vietnam veteran in a society that does nor value either one. ‘Komunyakaa's best poems are jazzy and improvisational, razor-sharp pieces that tell us more about our culture than any news broadcast.' - Bloomsbury Review.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yusef Komunyakaa was born in 1947 in the quiet mill town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. Son of a carpenter he was raised in a house of few books at the beginning of the civil rights movement. His grandparents were church people and he has said in interview ‘the Old Testament informed the cadences of their speech. It was my first introduction to poetry.' During his youth, he read the bible all the way through, twice, and also borrowed James Baldwin's Nobody Knows My Name, from Bogalusa's black library a total of 25 times.
DESCRIPTION - ‘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 - and perhaps the foremost aphorist of modern times - unrelentingly assailed those powers whom he regarded as the mainspring of a Europe in an advanced state of putrefaction. Journalists, nationalists, warmongers, ‘psychoanais' - all who corrupted the quality of life through their defilement of language found themselves on the receiving end of satiric barbs launched by the outraged humanitarian, who (true satirist that he was) measured everything he witnessed against unbending standards. ‘Hate must make a person productive; otherwise one might as well love.' Karl Kraus was a passionate lover as well as a productive hater; HALF-TRUTHS & ONE-AND-A-HALF TRUTHS strikes a balance between aphoristic sayings born of contempt or indignation and those having their source in more positive - though no less intense - feelings and concerns. The process of artistic creation, the role of the satirist, the significance of language (‘the divining rod which finds sources of thought') and the mysteries inherent in the relationship between the sexes are some of the themes on which Kraus expressed himself aphoristically; Professor Zohn's selection and translation have resulted in one of the more quotable books to have appeared in the English language in recent years.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KARL KRAUS (1874-1936) was a major influence on the intellectual life of Vienna, whose seminal thinkers and artists have profoundly changed twentieth-century thought. On some of them Kraus's influence was fundamental. Indeed, as the critic George Steiner recently noted, ‘without Kraus, Wittgenstein's philosophy might well have been nonexistent.' Kraus is difficult to classify in any category; he stands unique in world literature. Many critics believe him to be the greatest satirist since Swift; he was also one of the most brilliant aphorists. As a critic of society, in violent opposition to the all-pervading corruption of the spirit in public life, he was without equal. Harry Zohn is a native of Vienna and currently chairman of the department of Germanic and Slavic languages at Brandeis University, where he has taught since 1951. The many books which he has written or edited include a study of Karl Kraus (1971), and the Austrian reader Der farbenvolle Untergang. Among the works which Professor Zohn has translated may be mentioned The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Sigmund Freud's Delusion and Dream, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Marianne Weber's Max Weber: A Biography, and selections from the German satirist Kurt Tucholsky. Professor Zohn holds the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit awarded by the Federal Republic of Germany, and is a member of the Austrian P.E.N. Club.
DESCRIPTION - One hundred years after Austrian satirist Karl Kraus began writing his dramatic masterpiece, The Last Days of Mankind remains as powerfully relevant as the day it was first published. Kraus's play enacts the tragic trajectory of the First World War, when mankind raced toward self-destruction by methods of modern warfare while extolling the glory and ignoring the horror of an allegedly ‘defensive' war. This volume is the first to present a complete English translation of Kraus's towering work, filling a major gap in the availability of Viennese literature from the era of the War to End All Wars. Bertolt Brecht hailed The Last Days as the masterpiece of Viennese modernism. In the apocalyptic drama Kraus constructs a textual collage, blending actual quotations from the Austrian army's call to arms, people's responses, political speeches, newspaper editorials, and a range of other sources. Seasoning the drama with comic invention and satirical verse, Kraus reveals how bungled diplomacy, greedy profiteers, Big Business complicity, gullible newsreaders, and, above all, the sloganizing of the press brought down the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the dramatization of sensationalized news reports, inurement to atrocities, and openness to war as remedy, today's readers will hear the echo of the fateful voices Kraus recorded as his homeland descended into self-destruction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The Austrian Jewish author Karl Kraus (1874-1936) was the foremost German-language satirist of the twentieth century. As editor of the journal Die Fackel (The Torch) he conducted a sustained critique of propaganda and the press, expressed through polemical essays, witty aphorisms, and resonant poems. Edward Timms, founding director of the University of Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies, is best known for his two-volume study Karl Kraus - Apocalyptic Satirist. The title of his memoirs, Taking Up the Torch, reflects his long-standing interest in Kraus's journal. Fred Bridgham is the author of wide-ranging studies in German literature, history, and the history of ideas. His translations of lieder and opera include Hans Werner Henze's The Prince of Homburg for performance by English National Opera.
DESCRIPTION - From Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakia's foremost writer - seven stories displaying the conjurer's gifts of surprise and magic illumination that have won him the praise of such diverse literary figures as Sartre, Aragon, and Philip Roth. These are stories of the ways in which people respond - stunned or energized, frightened or amused - when their own buried erotic impulses are suddenly released; stories told with subtle grace and an astonishing psychological precision - A young man and his girl pretend she is a pickup - in an aphrodisiac game that becomes an emotional nightmare. A man and an older woman, meeting after fifteen years, in the city where they had once made love without seeing one another's bodies, learn what the experience has been to each of them ever since. A boy pretends to atheism to seduce a devout girl - only to find himself seized with a revulsion for her and a yearning for God. An aging doctor, famous as a Grand Collector of Women, and finding his advances rejected, tricks his glamorous wife into serving as his advertisement. In bars, on beaches, on station platforms, girls wait for the same lover who never comes - a comfortably married man whose compulsion is the Don Juan opening gambit. An art historian pursued by a self-declared ‘expert' in his field, obsessively avoids him - with bizarre and comic consequences to his own beautifully concealed love affair. And, in the brief space of ‘Symposium' (which takes place in a hospital, ‘any hospital in any town you like'), the density of an entire novel is compressed: a lonely nurse, getting drunk, and full of hysterical abandon, mimics a striptease in the staff room - and a philandering young doctor and his three colleagues, casually teasing her, begin to act out the confusion, vanity, and cynicism of their separate attitudes toward sex, friendship, love, and each other. Games, fantasies, schemes that turn on their makers to mock them - in dazzling story after story, images of self suddenly take new shapes or, destroyed altogether, are replaced by piercing sensations of panic, exhilaration, or vertiginous uncertainty. In the words of Claude Roy in Le Monde, ‘Kundera's stories are dances. experienced by Chekhov. X-rayed by Freud.' And what they reveal to us about ourselves both fascinates and hovers in the mind. Milan Kundera lives in Brno, Czechoslovakia, where he was born. His first novel, THE JOKE, has been translated into a dozen languages and made into a film which he himself wrote and directed. His play, THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS, produced in Czechoslovakia in 1962, has been performed in fourteen countries. This collection is being published simultaneously with his latest novel, LIFE IS ELSEWHERE, winner of the 1973 Medicis award for the best foreign novel to appear that year in France. His books are no longer allowed to be published in his native country.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The son of a well-known pianist, Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He was enrolled in the Czech Communist Party right after the Second World War, then debarred from it after the incidents of February, 1948 (the takeover of Prague), at which time he was a student. He worked as a laborer, then as a jazz musician, and finally ended up devoting himself to literature and film. He was a professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students were the creators of the Czech New Wave in film. After the Russian invasion in 1968, he lost his post and saw all his books removed from the public libraries in his country. In 1975, he settled in France, and in 1979, the Czech government, responding to the publication of THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, revoked his Czech citizenship.
DESCRIPTION - A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover - these are the two couples whose story is told in Milan Kundera's masterful new novel, his first since THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING. Controlled by day, Terezas jealousy awakens by night, transformed into ineffably sad death-dreams, while Tomas, a successful surgeon, alternates loving devotion to the dependent Tereza with the ardent pursuit of other women. Sabina, an independent, free-spirited artist, lives her life as a series of betrayals (of parents, husband, country, love itself), whereas her lover, the intellectual Franz, loses all because of his earnest goodness and fidelity. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence we feel, says the novelist, ‘the unbearable lightness of being' - not only as the consequence of our private arts but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, and embraces, it seems, all aspects of human existence. It juxtaposes geographically distant places (Prague, Geneva, Paris, Thailand, the United States, a forlorn Bohemian village); brilliant and playful reflections (on ‘eternal return,' on kitsch, on man and animals - Tomas and Tereza have a beloved dog named Karenin); and a variety of styles (from the farcical to the elegiac), to take its place as perhaps the major achievement thus far of one of the worlds truly great writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The son of a well-known pianist, Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He was enrolled in the Czech Communist Party right after the Second World War, then debarred from it after the incidents of February, 1948 (the takeover of Prague), at which time he was a student. He worked as a laborer, then as a jazz musician, and finally ended up devoting himself to literature and film. He was a professor at the Prague Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies, where his students were the creators of the Czech New Wave in film. After the Russian invasion in 1968, he lost his post and saw all his books removed from the public libraries in his country. In 1975, he settled in France, and in 1979, the Czech government, responding to the publication of THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, revoked his Czech citizenship.
DESCRIPTION - CARMEN LAFORET'S NADA is one of the most important literary works of post-Civil War Spain. Loosely based on the author's own life, it is the story of an orphaned young woman who leaves her small town to attend university in war-ravaged Barcelona. Residing amid genteel poverty in a mysterious house on Calle de Aribau, young Andrea falls in with a wealthy band of schoolmates who provide a rich counterpoint to the squalor of her home life. As experience overtakes innocence, Andrea gradually learns the disquieting truth about the people she shares her life with: her overbearing and superstitious aunt Angustias; her nihilistic yet artistically gifted uncle Roman and his violent brother Juan; and Juan's disturbingly beautiful wife, Gloria, who secretly supports the clan with her gambling. From existential crisis to a growing maturity and resolve, Andrea's passionate inner journey leaves her wiser, stronger, and filled with hope for the future. Edith Grossman's vital new translation captures the feverish energy of Laforet's magnificent story, showcasing its sharply drawn characters, its dark, powerful imagery, and its subtle humor. And Mario Vargas Llosa's Introduction illuminates Laforet's brilliant depiction of life during the early days of the Franco regime. With crystalline insight into the human condition, Carmen Laforet's classic novel stands poised to reclaim its place as one of the great novels of twentieth-century Europe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARMEN LAFORET (September 6, 1921, Barcelona, Spain - February 28, 2004, Madrid, Spain) had a profound impact on Spanish literature. Her debut novel, Nada, was awarded the first Premio Nadal in 1944-She also wrote a collection of short stories and five other novels, including Al doblar la esquina (Around the Block) and La mujer nueva (The New Woman), which won Spain's National Prize for Literature in 1955. EDITH GROSSMAN is the distinguished translator of works by many Spanish and Latin American writers, including Miguel de Cervantes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Alvaro Mutis. She is the recipient of two Translation of the Year awards from the American Literary Translators Association and the 2OO6 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. She lives in New York City. MARIO VARGAS LLOSA is one of Latin America's preeminent fiction writers and essayists. His novels include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE NOTEBOOKS OF DON RIGOBERTO, And AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER.
DESCRIPTION - ‘We are in the heart of a coloured or half-coloured community, sharing its sudden, unreasonable passions, its naive illusions about the world outside. The people speak an English vernacular in which the book is written. The result is something strange, emotional and compassionate, something between garrulous realism and popular poetry, and it is quite delightful. One is back again in the pages of Huckleberry Finn - the fundamental book of a civilization - and Mr. Lamming's book reminds one delightfully, indeed poignantly of it in many episodes. As in Huckleberry Finn there is the feeling for landscape, for times of day and night and there is nothing rhetorical, studied or conventional about his descriptions. Mr. Lamming catches the myth-making and myth-dissolving mind of boyhood, the sudden stupors and astonishments. He has caught the endless jawing of boys as they grow up into a life which is very different from the one they imagine. This ability to get the groping mind is Mr. Lamming's gift and it is very valuable and very civilised. His book makes our kind of documentary writing look conventional and silly.' - V. S. PRITCHETT (New Statesman and Nation).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Lamming (born 1927), is a novelist and poet. He was born in Barbados and teaches at Brown University. George Lamming was born on June 8, 1927 in Carrington Village, Barbados, of mixed African and English parentage. After his mother married his stepfather, Lamming split his time between this birthplace and his stepfather's home in St David's Village. Lamming attended Roebuck Boys' School and Combermere School on a scholarship. Encouraged by his teacher, Frank Collymore, Lamming found the world of books and started to write. Before moving to England, he worked from 1946 to 1950 as a teacher at El Colegio de Venezuela, a boarding school for boys in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He then emigrated to England where, for a short time, he worked in a factory. In 1951 he became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service.
DESCRIPTION - The title story in this collection is claimed by its narrator to be a chapter in his biography of the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. He begins by saying he knows some intimate details of Gogol's life and that as his biographer he feels obligated to reveal them, though as his friend he might have kept all this to himself. After setting the reader up for some perhaps prurient ‘facts,' the narrator tells us that Gogol's wife was a life-sized balloon, anatomically correct and quite voluptuous. Claiming to be the only person besides Gogol who has ever seen this creation, the narrator goes on to tell us an occasion where he heard her speak. He describes how she developed her own personality, in spite of the fact that she was a balloon, and that she even contracted syphilis, which subsequently infected Gogol. The narrator and Gogol are celebrating the silver anniversary of Gogol and his wife when the novelist gets insanely irritated with her, inserts a bicycle pump into her, and inflates her until she explodes. Gogol then throws the rubber pieces into the fire (much as he had burned his manuscripts earlier). He also throws into the fire a balloon baby boy. The story closes with the narrator again defending his position of biographer, providing the truth about Gogol to the reader.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tommaso Landolfi (August 9, 1908–1979) was an Italian author and translator. Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is AN AUTUMN STORY. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II. Landolfi is also the author of a collection of stories, WORDS IN MOTION, and GOGOL'S WIFE. Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.
DESCRIPTION - Little known in this country when he died in 1979, Landolfi is scarcely better recognized today, a situation this collection of 24 stories, with an introduction by Italo Calvino, is intended to remedy. Landolfi did not aspire to amuse or entertain in the usual sense; he preferred to confound and mystify. Even in his relatively conventional stories he scarcely bothered to inquire into motive or seek resolution. In ‘Uxoricide,' for example, a wife-murderer sets out to kill the shrew for reasons that do not seem quite sufficient, so that the act itself appears brutal and sadistic. In ‘A Woman's Breast,' a man lusts after that part of a stranger until he attains it, is thereupon sickened by the sight and discovers odd morbidities within himself. Landolfi's overriding interests in language and its literary possibilities, metaphysics, literary criticism necessarily limit his audience. He saw the writer as one who spits words (see the title story), and he set himself against the critics who accused him of being ‘utterly indecipherable and mysterious.' That is, however, a challenge hurled at the reader. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tommaso Landolfi (August 9, 1908–1979) was an Italian author and translator. Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is AN AUTUMN STORY. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II. Landolfi is also the author of a collection of stories, WORDS IN MOTION, and GOGOL'S WIFE. Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.
DESCRIPTION - A landmark novel about the cultural meanings of race by the Harlem Renaissance's premier woman writer. The beautiful, elegant, and ambitious Clare Kendry leads a dangerous life. A light-skinned African American married to a white man unaware of her racial heritage, Clare has severed all ties to her past to become part of white, middle-class society. Clare's childhood friend, Irene Redfield, as light-skinned as Clare, has chosen to remain within the African-American community. Married to a successful doctor and the mother of two boys, Irene refuses to acknowledge the racism she grew up with and that continues to set limits on her family's happiness. A chance encounter forces both women to confront the lies they have told others and the secret fears they have buried within themselves. First published in 1929, Passing is a remarkably candid exploration of the destabilization of racial and sexual boundaries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen, born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 - March 30, 1964), was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels - Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) - and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late twentieth century, when issues of racial and sexual identity and identification have been studied.
DESCRIPTION - Born to a white mother and an absent black father, and despised for her dark skin, Helga Crane has long had to fend for herself. As a young woman, Helga teaches at an all-black school in the South, but even here she feels different. Moving to Harlem and eventually to Denmark, she attempts to carve out a comfortable life and place for herself, but ends up back where she started, choosing emotional freedom that quickly translates into a narrow existence. QUICKSAND, Nella Larsen's powerful first novel, has intriguing autobiographical parallels and at the same time invokes the international dimension of African American culture of the 1920s. It also evocatively portrays the racial and gender restrictions that can mark a life.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nellallitea 'Nella' Larsen, born Nellie Walker (April 13, 1891 - March 30, 1964), was an American novelist of the Harlem Renaissance. First working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels - Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) - and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries. A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late twentieth century, when issues of racial and sexual identity and identification have been studied.
DESCRIPTION - Plain Style is an amusing and instructive guide to written English by the late Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism, The True and Only Heaven, and many other memorable works of American history and social criticism. Written for the benefit of the students at the University of Rochester, where Lasch taught from 1970 until his death in 1994, it quickly established itself in typescript as a local classic--a lively, witty, and historically minded alternative to the famous volume by William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style. Now available for the first time in published form, Plain Style is fundamentally a clear, readable, practical guide to the timeless principles of effective composition. At the same time, however, in ways that Stewart Weaver explains in his critical introduction, it is a distinctive and revealing addition to the published work of an eminent American thinker. No mere primer, Plain Style is an essay in cultural criticism, a political treatise even, by one for whom directness, clarity, and honesty of expression were essential to the living spirit of democracy. As the teachers and students who have for years benefited from its succinct wisdom will testify, Plain Style is an indispensable guide to writing and, indeed, Christopher Lasch's least-expected but perhaps most serviceable work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) was Professor of History at the University of Rochester. Among his many books are The Culture of Narcissism, The Minimal Self, The True and Only Heaven, and Haven in a Heartless World. Stewart Weaver is Professor of History at the University of Rochester.
DESCRIPTION - With an unsentimental eye, Christopher Lasch examines the new narcissism, product of the dotage of bourgeois society. he narcissistic personality of our time, liberated from the superstitions of the past, embraces new cults, only to discover that emancipation from ancient taboos brings neither sexual nor spiritual peace. In their emotional shallowness, their fear of intimacy, their hypochondria, their pseudo-self-insight, their promiscuous pansexuality, their dread of old age and death, the new narcissists bear the stamp of a culture that has lost interest in the future. Their outlook on life - as revealed in the new consciousness movements and therapeutic culture; in pseudo-confessional autobiography and fiction; in the replacement of Horatio Alger by the happy hooker as the symbol of success; in the theater of the absurd and the absurdist theater of everyday life; in the degradation of sport; in the collapse of authority; in the escalating war between men and women - is the world view of the resigned. American society in the seventies retreats from politics, but its only hope, Lasch argues, lies in reform of public life. He calls for new politics, new discipline, new love to replace narcissistic self-absorption. Lasch's reputation as a controversial social critic of courage and insight will be enhanced by this provocative, troubling, fascinating book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Christopher (Kit) Lasch (June 1, 1932 - February 14, 1994) was an American historian, moralist, and social critic. Mentored by William Leuchtenburg at Columbia University, Lasch was a professor at the University of Rochester. Lasch sought to use history as a tool to awaken American society to the pervasiveness with which major institutions, public and private, were eroding the competence and independence of families and communities. He strove to create a historically informed social criticism that could teach Americans how to deal with rampant consumerism, proletarianization, and what he famously labeled the 'culture of narcissism.' His books, including The New Radicalism in America (1965), Haven in a Heartless World (1977), The Culture of Narcissism (1979), and The True and Only Heaven (1991), were widely discussed and reviewed. The Culture of Narcissism became a surprise best-seller and won the National Book Award in the category Current Interest (paperback). Lasch was always a critic of liberalism, and a historian of liberalism's discontents, but over time his political perspective evolved dramatically. In the 1960s, he was a neo-Marxist and acerbic critic of Cold War liberalism. During the 1970s, he began to become a far more iconoclastic figure, fusing cultural conservatism with a Marxian critique of capitalism, and drawing on Freud-influenced critical theory to diagnose the ongoing deterioration that he perceived in American culture and politics. His writings during this period led him to be denounced by feminists and hailed by conservatives for his apparent defense of the traditional family. He eventually concluded that an often unspoken but pervasive faith in "Progress" tended to make Americans resistant to many of his arguments. In his last major works he explored this theme in depth, suggesting that Americans had much to learn from the suppressed and misunderstood Populist and artisan movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
DESCRIPTION - ‘STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE alone is a foundation for a new American critical literature. Lawrence fertilizes with fire. No living American writing in a critical sense from now on will be able to ignore him' - Herbert J. Seligmann. Lawrence asserted that ‘the proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it'. In these highly individual, penetrating essays he has exposed ‘the American whole soul' within some of that continent's major works of literature. In seeking to establish the status of writings by such authors as Poe, Melville, Fenimore Cooper and Whitman, Lawrence himself has created a classic work. Studies in Classic American Literature is valuable not only for the light it sheds on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American consciousness, telling ‘the truth of the day', but also as a prime example of Lawrence's learning, passion and integrity of judgement.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 - 2 March 1930) was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works, among other things, represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialization. In them, some of the issues Lawrence explores are emotional health, vitality, spontaneity and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile which he called his ‘savage pilgrimage.' At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as, ‘The greatest imaginative novelist of our generation.' Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical ‘great tradition' of the English novel.
DESCRIPTION - A youthful emissary of the Bishop of Iceland goes to the beautiful and mysterious district under Glacier to investigate the local state of Christianity and the puzzling affairs of the pastor. The story is the young man's report to the bishop about some extraordinary happenings at Glacier and the remarkable characters whom he encounters during his investigations. - In this strange region all accepted distinctions between past and present, the natural and the supernatural seem at times to disappear. Pastor Jon Primus, the delinquent minister, turns out to be, among other things, a kind of holy man, with a mind that is highly elusive to the young academician. Completely neglectful of the formalities of his office, he is the parish jack-of-all-trades who repairs primitive utensils and shoes horses for all corners. Pastor Jon has a profound respect for life on earth and none at all for theory and philosophy which he describes as so many fables. As to theology, he will typically ask you to consider the lilies of the field. His capacity for destroying a logical argument is unsurpassed. Yet he has a worthy antagonist in the friend of his youth. Gudmundur Sigmundsson, now Dr. Godman Syngmann, the great guru, cosmopolitan engineer, super-businessman, angler and cosmobiologist extraordinary whose appearance at Glacier adds greatly to the confusion of the young man's mission. And finally There is Ua, the lady whose mysterious presence pervades the story: Who is she? The pastor's bride who ran away a long time ago with Dr. Synqmann? A former nun? The erstwhile madam of a sporting house in Buenos Aires? An ‘old-fashioned witch'?. A ghost? The mythical Bitch Goddess herself? Dr. Syndmann's scientifically produced re-incarnation? For some time shells very much a real woman. And then, at the end, she vanishes, mockingly, with the elusiveness of life itself. CHRISTIANITY AT GLACIER is a highly complex work, and Mr. Laxness has rarely been more entertaining and brilliantly inventive. From one point of view, it is a strangely timeless fable of modern times. It is also a novel of great philosophical and theological wit, set against a magically invoked background of nature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Halldor Laxness was born near Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1902. His first novel was published when he wsa seventeen. The undisputed master of contemporary Icelandic fiction, and one of the outstanding novelists of the century, he has written more than sixty books, including novels, short stories, essays, poems, plays, and memoirs. In 1955 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1998.
DESCRIPTION - SALKA VALKA was Laxness's breakthrough novel and reflected his Socialistic views which marked his novels in the 1930s and 1940s. The story depicted a young woman, Salka, and a small fishing community. Evil enters into the community in the form of merchants and fishing entrepreneurs and is pitted against labor movement. The book gained a huge success in England. The Evening Standard wrote that Greta Garbo would be the perfect Salka in its film adaptation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - HALLDOR LAXNESS winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. Born in Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, his college education was begun in his homeland and continued abroad with the French Benedictines in Luxembourg and the Jesuits in London. Mr. Laxness is the author of twelve full-scale novels. Many of these have been published in twenty-five to thirty languages and have been best sellers in many different countries. INDEPENDENT PEOPLE, one of his five novels published in English, was a best seller in this country in 1946. He is also the author of five dramas, a book of poetry, and several volumes of essays. Halldor Laxness was also vice president, together with Jean-Paul Sartre, of the Italian-sponsored Community of European Writers.
DESCRIPTION - In his new novel, John le Carre gives us the final, convulsive confrontation between George Smiley and Karla, his mortal enemy (and opposite) inside the Soviet Union. Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland are the background for this extraordinary book, whose excitement, suspense, and deep understanding of the men and women who populate its world - the men and women who are ‘Smiley's People' - make it a profoundly satisfying successor to le Carre's two great best sellers, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le CarrE, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le CarrE has established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le CarrE 22nd on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'. In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.
DESCRIPTION - This brilliant novel adds John le Carre's name to the microscopically small list of really great writers of espionage fiction. In truth, it does a great deal more. It is the spy novel to end all spy novels. It dis- patches the spun-sugar secret agents of recent fame back to their comic-opera Graustarks forever. Its central figure, Leamas, whose mission is to trap the top spy of East Berlin, is a creation of astonishing reality and authenticity. The plot he sets in motion, and later becomes the principal victim of, is a thing of magnificent complexity. Also of far-reaching implications. For the tension within Leamas is strikingly contemporary. It is the tension of a committed man unable to come to terms with the utterly ruthless machine he serves. Only in Arthur Koestler's DARKNESS AT NOON and Graham Greene's ‘burnt-out cases' can any comparison be found. THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD IS a novel of the first order - terrifying in its significance, impressive in its actuality, awesome in its high political import. It happens also to be immensely thrilling.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le CarrE, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le CarrE has established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le CarrE 22nd on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'. In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.
DESCRIPTION - You could meet him any day on the Underground. Hundreds of him. Mr. George Smiley, small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, is one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. But, George Smiley is also a senior British intelligence officer, as devastating as he is self-effacing. In TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY we meet him in short-lived retirement, deserted by his beautiful wife, wrestling with idleness and disillusionment. And haunted by the secret fear which follows every professional to his grave: namely that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand a reckoning. Casually, le Carre tosses us a total vision of a secret world. A world of hoods and lamplighters, scalphunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock; a world of moles, legmen, listeners and watchers. And in Smiley himself we meet that rarest breed of literary hero: one for whom, from the start, the reader feels personally responsible. Reluctantly in harness, by turn compassionate and ruthless, a vague patriot, scornful of isms and estranged from institutional thought, a master of the black arts of deceit, yet, as a lover, the incurable victim of self-deception, George Smiley is a loner with a sense of human responsibility.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David John Moore Cornwell (born 19 October 1931), pen name John le CarrE, is a British author of espionage novels. During the 1950s and the 1960s, Cornwell worked for the British intelligence services MI5 and MI6, and began writing novels under a pen name. His third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) became an international best-seller, and it remains one of his best-known works. Following the success of this novel, he left MI6 to become a full-time author. Le CarrE has established himself as a writer of espionage fiction. In 2008, The Times ranked le CarrE 22nd on its list of ‘The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'. In 2011, he won the Goethe Medal, a yearly prize given by the Goethe Institute.
DESCRIPTION - This collection of 14 stories - each a harrowing sketch of the Vietnam War and its aftermath - offers American readers a glimpse offamiliar territory, but from an unfamiliar perspective. Often writing from a young woman's point of view, Le Minh Khue, a war veteran who served in the Youth Volunteers Brigade, uses simple, understated prose to describe numbing horrors: 'There were three of us. Three girls. We lived in a cavern at the foot of a strategic hill. Our job was to sit there. Whenever a bomb exploded, we had to run up, figure out how much earth was needed to fill the hold, count the unexploded bombs, and, if necessary, detonate them. They called us the Ground Reconnaissance Team. That title inspired in us a passion to do heroic deeds and therefore our work was not that simple.' So begins the first story, 'Distant Stars.' Born in 1949, Le Minh Khue was no stranger to the vagaries of Land Reform politics and war. Colored by her stint as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Khue's level gaze lingers over the shambles of a war-torn country and its reconstruction to examine the soul of a people whose culture has all but been destroyed. The Stars, the Earth, the River contains an excellent introduction by the translators, grounding the stories in Le Minh Khue's personal history; the narrator of 'A Day on the Road' speaks from having witnessedthe carnage of war. You simultaneously feel the rage of the author and the narrator when Khue disparagingly notes that the conversations around her center on luxuries, motor scooters, and business deals. Of what use, these stories ask, is such suffering? How can a culture honor the losses of war?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Lê Minh Khuê (born 6 December 1949, in T?nh Gia) is a Vietnamese writer. Her works have been translated into English and several other languages. She was interviewed in Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War.
DESCRIPTION - FROM THE TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE - ‘The present book was written long enough ago to have become a classic. It concerns only the beginning of the French Revolution. Its author, Georges Lefebvre. published it early in 1939 in honor of the sesquicentennial of the Revolution of 1789. A few months later the Second World War began. The French Republic collapsed before the assault of Hitlerite Germany, and was succeeded by the Vichy regime that governed France until the liberation in 1945. No sympathetic understanding of the French Revolution was desired by the authorities of Vichy France, which drew their strongest support from anti-republican elements that were then significant in French political life. The Vichy government therefore suppressed the book and ordered some 8,000 copies burned, so that it remained virtually unknown in its own country until reprinted there in 1970, after its author's death. The present English translation appeared in 1947, as soon as possible after the Second World War. It has been widely read in English-speaking countries, where it is better known than in France itself. This new edition presents the translation of 1947 unchanged, but with a revised translator's preface and a few small changes in the translator's notes. What Lefebvre intended to mark the sesquicentennial of 1781 may now signalize its bicentennial fifty years later.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Georges Lefebvre (6 August 1874 - 28 - August 1959) was a French historian, best known for his work on the French Revolution and peasant life. He coined the term 'history from below', which was later popularised by the British Marxist Historians, and the phrase the 'death certificate of the old order' to describe the Great Fear of 1789. Among his most significant works was the 1924 book Les Paysans du Nord pendant la REvolution française ('The Peasants of the North During the French Revolution'), which was the result of 20 years of research into the role of the peasantry during the revolutionary period. R. R. Palmer is Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He now lives in Princeton. New Jersey, where he taught at Princeton University from 1936 to 1963. His own books include TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION and the two-volume THE AGE OF DEMOCRACTIC REVOLUTION, the first volume of which won the Bancroft Prize in 1960. He also edited and translated THE TWO TOCQUEVILLES, FATHER AND SON: HERVE AND ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE ON THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOUTION.
DESCRIPTION - Pirx, the bumbling astronaut who won widespread critical acclaim in Tales of Pirx the Pilot, here faces a new series of intriguing adventures - in which robots demonstrate some alarmingly human characteristics. These five stories, all deftly blending playfulness and suspense, reflect Lem's preoccupation with the technology of the future and his fascination with the artificial brain. The skeptical, commonsensical Pirx, one of the most endearing characters in Lem's universe, wrestles every step of the way with his mixed feelings about robots, beings that fill him with mounting suspicion and apprehension. One robot Pirx encounters in his interplanetary travels comes to grief by developing a human trait: gratitude. Another is so affected by the example of his human companions that he totally succumbs to the lure of mountain climbing and pays for it dearly. Pirx finds that it is indeed a fine line that separates a robot robot from a human robot. Or is there one? In Lem the cold and aloof technology of the future is studded with deep humanity and high lyricism. Each story, you might say, is a perfect constellation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - For Stanislaw Lem, the renowned author of classics in meta-fiction, the creation of machines that think raises troubling moral questions. At the same time, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence presents a delightful opportunity for the mordant satire and verbal slapstick which readers world-wide have come to expect from him. The stories comprising MORTAL ENGINES range stylistically from pathos to fantasy to realism. Here are fables for robots glistening with humor and yet having ominous overtones. ‘The Mask,' on the other hand, with its deeply tragic poetry and its building tension, represents a strange twist of the Frankenstein theme and is reminiscent of the macabre as portrayed by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe. Michael Kandel, whose brilliant translations of Lem's THE CYBERIAD and THE FUTUROLOGICAL CONGRESS were both nominated for the National Book Award in 1975, discusses in his introduction Lem the man and the writer, and provides some scientific background in cybernetics, information theory and advances in artificial intelligence. Stanislaw Lem of Poland, one of Europe's most prolific and articulate writers, has written more than thirty books which have sold millions of copies worldwide. Ranging from novels and film scenarios through philosophy, literary and cultural criticism, to parody and satire, they have been honored with awards and prizes in many countries.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - When Kris Kelvin left Earth for Station Solaris, he was prepared for the hazards of space travel - solitude, hardship, exhaustion, perhaps death - but not for the cruel miracle of landing at his destination to find himself as he really is: to confront a presence and emotions long forgotten and suppressed, and no longer feared. An invisible, elusive spirit had taken possession of those stationed at Solaris - one that knew them better than they did themselves and held them prisoners of their own nightmares. One traveler takes his own life, another goes mad, a third disappears before the phenomenon of the ‘Psi-creature' is explained. The ‘ocean covering Solaris seems to be a gigantic fluid brain, prodigiously powerful and several million years beyond our own civilization, To the explorers on Solaris, it becomes a mysterious, alien force, threatening to their emotional endurance and challenging to their intellectual capacities. From the perspective of Solaris, emerges a new view of the nature of man: a creature who soars off into the cosmos in quest of other worlds and greedy for scientific knowledge, without having explored his own labyrinth of dark passages and secret chambers, without discovering what lies behind doorways that he himself has sealed.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.In Summa Technologiae—his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time—Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity. Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - In Pilot Pirx, Stanislaw Lem has created an irresistibly likable character - an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants. He is a bumbler, but an inspired one. We are at a moment in time when the Transgalactic tine flies regularly to the Moon, which by now provides excellent tourist accommodations; space travel has become routine, Yet things go wrong, mysteriously and suspiciously, and Pirx is the one to investigate strange accidents, either because his superiors consider him expendable, or because they trust his flair. Whimsical, spellbinding, infused with Lem's uncannily vivid ‘familiarity' with the day-to-day realities and regions of space travel, the tales of Pilot Pirx build up to a towering climax. We meet Pirx in school, embarking on a training mission that is to drive home to him, with devastating impact, the inadequacy of textbook knowledge in an astronaut's arsenal. In ‘Terminus,' the last and longest adventure, Pirx deciphers a spaceship's sinister past with the help of a robot's retentive memory; the writing develops a new dimension, revealing Lem's imaginative affinity with robots, whom he endows with something akin to feelings. By investing his central character, Pirx, with the full range of human foibles, Lem offers here a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that may give man the courage to confront the vastness of outer space.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - A dozen of Stanislaw Lem's unforgettable stories are collected here in a cosmic carnival of the real, the fantastic and the bizarre. Immensely rewarding and entertaining to read, these stories are prime specimens of the unsurpassed genius of Lem and his acclaimed portrayal of the delicate balance between humanity and technology, with a constant undertone of morose conviviality. In this volume Michael Kandel, whose translations of Lem's The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress were nominated for a National Book Award, illuminates each group of stories with a brief essay and has also provided a general introduction to the volume that captures the spirit of Lem and justifies his place in the front ranks of science-fiction writers. Stanislaw Lem's many bestselling science fiction books include The Cyberiad, Mortal Engines, The Invincible, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. "A virtuoso storyteller and stylist. Put them together and they add up to genius. Lem is a master of science fiction - and more." - - THEODORE SOLOTAROFF, The New York Times Book Review. "Imaginative and sophisticated. Laffs aplenty." - KURT VONNEGUT, The Nation. "Science fiction at its most majestic." - The Boston Globe.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - An extraordinary contemporary classic by the world-renowned Polish author who has been compared to Voltaire and Rabelais. The Cyberiad is a cycle of tales recounting the escapades of the robot "cosmic constructors" Trurl and Klapaucius as they out-invent each other at home or take up the Gargantuan tasks thrust upon them in other galaxies, creating laser-eyed beasts and dragons of improbability, electronic bards and machines that can make anything beginning with n. Lem draws upon the vocabularies of fairy tale, folk tale, and mythology - and those of twentieth-century scientific, philosophical, and mathematical thought as well. The result is intellectual slapstick of the highest order: a brilliantly funny display of heroes and antiheroes, matters and antimatters, to enchant readers of every order, from Thurber and Tolkien fans to information theorists.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - Ijon Tichy is an amiable, innocent cosmic traveler with a magnetic attraction for mishaps of the most unusual kinds; his absurd adventures and misfortunes make pointed and occasionally not-so-gentle mockery of various twentieth-century beliefs and institutions. Called into question as Tichy is beset by mind-boggling time warps and ‘civilizations’ that are curious, to say the least, are: science and the rational mind, human progress, the ‘rightness’ of the universe, theology and Christianity, the sanctity of life, motherhood—and a host of other things that we tend to take for granted, and even pride ourselves on. In compensation for this intellectual rock-throwing, the reader will be entertained by Lem's masterful creations, including the sadomasochistic robots of Cercia (who talk like Chaucer), the squamp hunt wherein squamp (huge beasts with impervious armor) are literally invaded and conquered from within, accounts of Tichy's unwitting cannibalism, and his personal quarrel with Plato. The reader may find, however - and this is characteristic of Lem's deft satire - that the laughter is often at his own expense.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 - 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.
DESCRIPTION - Ride down Woodward Avenue into the Motor City, toward a deadly show-down between dedicated homicide detective Raymond Cruz and a psychopathic murderer, 'Oklahoma Wildman' Clement Mansell, who picked the wrong town to kill someone, even if it was only a crooked judge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elmore John Leonard Jr. (born October 11, 1925), better known as Elmore Leonard, is an American novelist and screenwriter. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures. Among his best-known works are GET SHORTY, OUT OF SIGHT, HOMBRE, MR. MAJESTYK and RUM PUNCH, which was filmed as Jackie Brown. Leonard's short stories include ones that became the films 3: 10 to Yuma and The Tall T, as well as the current TV series on FX, Justified.
DESCRIPTION - Primo Levi, an Italian partisan, was captured by the Fascists on 14 December, 1943. Early in 1944, together with the Italian Jews interned at Fossoli, he was deported to Auschwitz. On 27 January, 1945, the first Russian patrol came in sight of the camp, signalling a liberation which for Primo Levi would take eight arduous months to realize. IF THIS IS A MAN is the account of Primo Levi's experiences at Auschwitz.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
DESCRIPTION - Primo Levi is justly regarded in his native Italy as one of its leading men of letters. A chemist by profession, in this book he writes about incidents of his life in which one or another of the elements of the periodic table figured in such a way as to become a personal preoccupation. For example, vanadium: Levi was a chemist for an Italian company that imported vanadium from Germany to use in its varnish. On one occasion the shipment from the German supplier was of such a character that the batch of varnish with which it was mixed never dried. Levi wrote to his opposite number, the chemist in the German firm. After much correspondence, that person admitted that the vanadium supplied had not been up to sample, paid Levi's claim, and shipped the proper chemical. But the suspicion had been growing in Levi's mind that the man with whom he was corresponding had been the chief of a laboratory m Auschwitz in which he himself had worked as a starved and abused prisoner. What that recognition meant-for both men-and what happened thereafter was an ironic working out of an infamy decades old but not ended. PRIMO LEVI is the author of two classic memoirs of the experience of the concentration camps, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ and THE RE-AWAKENING.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
DESCRIPTION - Liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians in 1945, a handful of survivors begin their journey home through Eastern Europe. Their route is determined by the bridges and railroad tracks that have outlived battles and bombings. No rules or laws govern these people; no red tape can contain them; no obstacle can stop them. Each one, ‘wandering on the margins of civilization,' lives his own Odyssey. Primo Levi was among these men and women, He is their chronicler. Without bitterness or moralizing, he relates their experiences as well as his own, His perspective is as unique as the situation, and from every detail emanates his keen perception: ‘. then two of them, nominated by the majority, got up, with the severe and resolute faces of men about to sacrifice them. selves conscientiously for the common good. They advanced on the women soldiers face to face and spoke to them in a low voice. The negotiations were surprisingly short; the women put down their helmets and arms, then the four, serious and composed, left the station, took a narrow path and disappeared from our view, They returned a quarter of an hour later, the women in front, a little less gnarled and with slightly congested faces, the men behind, dignified and calm.'. Born in 1919, Primo Levi is a resident Turin, a chemist by profession and a Jew. He is well known in Italy for his essays in criticism and sociology, and for his poetry. His first book, translated IF THIS IS A MAN, received the highest recognition throughout Europe and in the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
DESCRIPTION - The Truce covers Primo Levi's long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.
DESCRIPTION - 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Suzanne Jill Levine (born October 21, 1946 in New York, New York) is an American poet, translator, translation scholar and critic. She earned a BA at Vassar College in 1967, an MA at Columbia University in 1969, and a PhD at New York University in 1976. She specializes in Latin American literature. Some of her most best known translations include works by Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. She wrote the biography Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions (2001), published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Levine is an honorary member of IAPTI.
DESCRIPTION - The bizarre killing of Miss Pak should have belonged to the Korean police. But her amorous associations with American servicemen in Seoul also made her death the business of the U.S. Army's criminal investigation arm, of which Sgt. Ernie Bascom and Sgt. George Sueno were prized digits. George is from East L.A., Ernie is from another planet. In the army, going after the truth is usually seen as a criminal waste of time, so they are well suited to the case. The Eighth Army command is anxious only to squelch the bad press, and the boys are really only interested in enjoying their tour of duty. The two of them know Korea, they like Korea (George even speaks the language), and they are all too happy to check the tawdry dives the woman had trawled for customers. Even if they don't find the perpetrator, the consequences are minimal. There is something odd about the Korean cops' nervousness. Also, the actual killing is pretty heinous; the oddly trussed-up victim is little more than a youngster. Nobody can't die but there are ways no one should. The case gets to George and Ernie. They even work on it after hours. In their line, though, getting involved with a victim isn't smart because you increase tremendously the odds of becoming one.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Limon retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of six previous books in the Sergeant George Sueño series: JADE LADY BURNING, SLICKY BOYS, BUDDHA'S MONEY, THE DOOR TO BITTERNESS, THE WANDERING GHOST, and GI BONES. He lives in Seattle.
DESCRIPTION - George Sueno rose out of the barrios of East L.A. His partner, Ernie Bascom, escaped the mean streets of Detroit. And both have found a home in the U.S. Army - the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) in Korea. Their beat is Itaewon, the red-light district of Seoul. Together they've looked into every bar and brothel, making sure the bourbon is chilled. and the women hot. When a working girl offers them a hundred bucks to deliver a note to Cecil Whitcomb, a British member of the U.N. Honor Guard, Sueno and Bascom are happy to oblige. They figure not only is it a good deed, it's also easy money. But reality hits the next morning - in the form of Whitcomb's brutally mutilated corpse. Sueno and Bascom thought they were playing Cupid, but they were played for suckers. It cost one soldier his life, and it could land them in Leavenworth if they fail to find the killer. Suddenly the neon streets they once loved are a lurid and deadly labyrinth. For Whitcomb wasn't the first victim. nor will he be the last. Defying their superiors, the two CID agents plunge into a world of deception, betrayal, and paranoia. Their sole source of information is a thriving black market run by a ruthlessly efficient criminal network: the slicky boys.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Limon retired from military service after twenty years in the US Army, including ten years in Korea. He is the author of six previous books in the Sergeant George Sueño series: JADE LADY BURNING, SLICKY BOYS, BUDDHA'S MONEY, THE DOOR TO BITTERNESS, THE WANDERING GHOST, and GI BONES. He lives in Seattle.
DESCRIPTION - ‘For most readers the tale told here will be completely new. For those already well acquainted with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the image of that age which they have been so carefully taught and cultivated will be profoundly challenged.' - David Montgomery, author of Citizen Worker. Long before the American Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a motley crew of sailors, slaves, pirates, laborers, market women, and indentured servants had ideas about freedom and equality that would forever change history. THE MANY HEADED-HYDRA recounts their stories in a sweeping history of the role of the dispossessed in the making of the modern world. When an unprecedented expansion of trade and colonization in the early seventeenth century launched the first global economy, a vast, diverse, and landless workforce was born. These workers crossed national, ethnic, and racial boundaries, as they circulated around the Atlantic world on trade ships and slave ships, from England to Virginia, from Africa to Barbados, and from the Americas back to Europe. Marshaling an impressive range of original research from archives in the Americas and Europe, the authors show how ordinary working people led dozens of rebellions on both sides of the North Atlantic. The rulers of the day called the multiethnic rebels a ‘hydra' and brutally suppressed their risings, yet some of their ideas fueled the age of revolution. Others, hidden from history and recovered here, have much to teach us about our common humanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Linebaugh, professor of history at the University of Toledo, is a contributing editor of ALBION'S FATAL TREE and author of THE LONDON HANGED. A member of the Midnight Notes Collective, he lives in Toledo, Ohio. Marcus Rediker, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, is author of Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, winner of the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Prize and the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Social History Award. He is a contributing author of WHO BUILT AMERICA? and lives in Pittsburgh.
DESCRIPTION - Since the publication of her first novel in 1944, Clarice Lispector has been recognized as a Brazilian writer of great talent and originality. It is generally agreed among her critics, however that her best writing is in shorter fiction, where her personal style, with its brilliant flashes of insight, works more coherently. The stories in FAMILY TIES, originally published in 1960, are among her most important contribution to Brazilian fiction, They show her preoccupation with human suffering and failure, and critics have detected in them, as in all of her work, echoes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the French existentialist writers Camus and Sartre. But if her stories are concerned with the metaphysical anguish that results from the sudden recognition of the human condition, which Camus called Absurdity, the reader will find that anguish treated in an original way that reveals the complexity of the experience. The characters created by Clarice Lispector cannot be described as ‘types', even in a psychological context. They are more appropriately seen as images of different states of mind, and this applies also to her settings, the gardens and parks in ‘Love' and ‘The Buffalo', the urban scenes in ‘Preciousness' and ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman', and the jungle setting of ‘The smallest Woman in the World'; all exist outside of time and space. Lispector is a writer who is not interested primarily in the individuals and their individual contexts but in the passions that dominate and usually defeat them. Like Sartre and Camus, she subscribes to the acts that acts alone are important - and isolation and violence become the two salient features of human experience. CONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Introduction; Daydreams of a Drunken Woman; Love; The Chicken; The Imitation of the Rose; Happy Birthday; The Smallest Woman in the World; The Dinner; Preciousness; Family Ties; The Beginnings of a Fortune; Mystery in Sao Cristovao; The Crime of the Mathematics Professor; The Buffalo.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in the Ukraine in 1925, CLARICE LISPECTOR was brought up in Recife, Brazil, and then in Rio de Janeiro. After graduating from the Faculty of Law she married, and published NEAR TO THE WILD HEART. Lispector's gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.
DESCRIPTION - The Passion According to G.H. (A paixão segundo G.H.) is a mystical novel by Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, published in 1964. The work takes the form of a monologue by a woman, identified only as G.H., telling of the crisis that ensued the previous day after she crushed a cockroach in the door of a wardrobe. Its canonical status was recognized in 1988 by its inclusion in the Arquivos Collection, the UNESCO series of critical editions of the greatest works of Latin American literature. It has been translated into English twice, the first time in 1988 by Ronald W. Sousa, and then by Idra Novey in 2012. The novel was written in a quick burst at the end of 1963, following a period of difficulty in Lispector's life. "It's strange," she remembered, "because I was in the worst of situations, sentimentally as well as in my family, everything complicated, and I wrote The Passion, which has nothing to do with that." The novel was published in the following year by Editora do Author, which was run by Lispector's friends Rubem Braga and Fernando Sabino.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in the Ukraine in 1925, CLARICE LISPECTOR was brought up in Recife, Brazil, and then in Rio de Janeiro. After graduating from the Faculty of Law she married, and published NEAR TO THE WILD HEART. Lispector's gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.
DESCRIPTION - CIA legends Francis and Caroll have been dubbed "The Sisters Death and Night" by their cohorts. But few know what these operatives do. They plot - and they have come up with the perfect crime. They've located the ideal pawn - known as the Potter, he is the exiled ex-head of the KGB sleeper school - and with artful deception the Sisters coerce him into betraying his last and best sleeper, the man he considers his son. Once awakened, this sleeper, an assassin living secretly in the United States, will launch a mission of death - unless the Potter, in a desperate race against time, can stop his protege' from committing the Sisters' exquisitely planned, world-shattering crime.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Littell (born January 8, 1935) is an American novelist and journalist who resides in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. Littell was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, of Russian Jewish origin. He is a 1956 graduate of Alfred University in western New York. He spent four years in the U.S. Navy and served at times as his ship's navigator, antisubmarine warfare officer, communications officer, and deck watch officer. Later Littell became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He was a foreign correspondent for the magazine from 1965 to 1970. Littell is an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell.
DESCRIPTION - Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi was born in Mexico City in 1771 of poor middle class parents and educated at the college of San Ildefonso and the University of Mexico, where he studied philosophy and theology. Never distinguished as a scholar, he became one of the most important men of his age, albeit he spent a thoroughly misguided and miserable life, in perpetual rebellion against the society of his own time and the social evils of all time. Imbued with the spirit of the French Encyclopedists, he was a constantly thwarted but undefeated fighter for Mexican Independence, social reform, and the freedom of all mankind. His life and character are marked by the most human frailty, and by a moral courage unsurpassed by any man who ever lived. His writings were systematically suppressed by church and state; the politicians he supported betrayed him; he had to publish his greatest work, El Periquillo Sarniento, surreptitiously, in pamphlet form under the pseudonym of The Mexican Thinker. After a life of persecution, of struggle against censorship, excommunication, imprisonment, of futile battles against poverty and disease; of the worse strategic b1unders, the most ill-advised attacks and retreats, he lived to be cheered by own people and damned by their rulers, and to die in neglect. His memory passed for a time from men's minds; there is no trace of his grave, no monument to mark his greatness; but his book has become the most beloved classic of Latin America, and he is remembered as a great hero in the American struggle for freedom and - in the words of his translator - ‘the singular glory of Mexican literature.' Katherine Anne Porter's introduction to THE ITCHING PARROT gives a magnificent account of his unique and admirable life, and a superb estimate of his greatest work. KATHERINE ANNE PORTER, author of THE FLOWERING JUDAS and PALE HORSE, PALE RIDER, ranks as a great modern stylist and a master of the short story. A great-great-great granddaughter of Daniel Boone, she was born at Indian Creek. Texas, on May 15, 1894, and educated in Texas and Louisiana. As soon as she had learned to write, at the age of three, she began to put down stories on paper and has been doing so ever since. She has spent a great part of her life travelling and has lived in New Orleans, Chicago, Denver, Mexico City, New York, Bermuda, Berlin, Basel and Paris. This translation of THE ITCHING PARROT was begun in Mexico and finished in Basel. During the time she lived in Mexico, Miss Porter acquired a profound knowledge of the colonial history of Mexico and of the life of Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi, and her translation of his greatest work is not only a literary achievement of the highest merit but a work of impeccable scholarship. In addition to having written some of the finest short stories in the English language, she is a student of the life of Joan of Arc and medieval France, of the theocratic state in Massachusetts, and the life of Erasmus of Rotterdam. Her stories have been translated into several languages and her reputation as a writer is international. Miss Porter at present makes her home near Saratoga Springs. New York, where she devotes her time to writing and to her farm, situated near the historic battlefield of Saratoga where one of her ancestors helped to defeat ‘Gentleman Johnny' Burgoyne during the American Revolution.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jose Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (November 15, 1776 - June 21, 1827), Mexican writer and political journalist, best known as the author of El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), translated as The Mangy Parrot in English, reputed to be the first novel written in Latin America.
DESCRIPTION - James Loewen's book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, a debunking of the twelve leading high-school American history textbooks, won the American Book Award, the aesa Critics' Choice Award, and the Oliver Cromwell Cox Award for Anti-Racist Scholarship. It has sold more than a quarter-million copies in its various editions. Now, using the same irrepressibly honest approach and the same subversive take on all things bogus and misinformative, Loewen has identified a whole new arena for his one-of-a-kind inquiries into the way we tell our country's story. Lies Across America looks at more than one hundred sites where history is told on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, outdoor museums, historic houses, forts, and ships. Loewen uses his investigation of these public versions of history, often literally written in stone, to correct historical interpretations that are profoundly wrong, to tell neglected but important stories about the American past, and, most importantly, to raise questions about what we as a nation choose to commemorate and how. Lies Across America offers startling revelations about sites we think we know: Valley Forge, Abraham Lincoln's log cabin, the Intrepid. It also tells of new sites, events, and individuals that should be commemorated on the landscape but aren't: a tombstone with a story to tell in Mississippi, a spy in the Confederate White House, the unforeseen fallout from the Þrst nuclear missile test, the reverse underground railway, a modern ‘sundown' town (blacks can work there, but they'd better leave before the sun sets). It asks why, across our landscape, Indians are consistently ‘savage,' tribal names are wrong and derogatory, whites ‘discover' everything, and the term ‘massacre' is a one-way street; why war museums have selective memories, guides at FDR's family mansion in Hyde Park are ‘specifically forbidden' to talk about Roosevelt's mistress, and James Buchanan's house makes no mention of the fact that he was gay. It muses about the Civil War mare in Kentucky who got an extra body part, the Polynesian King made to look like a Roman emperor on monuments in Hawaii, and the statue of a conquistador in New Mexico who lost his foot. This book is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through our public sites and markers. It is destined to change the way we see our country.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James William Loewen (February 6, 1942 - August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
DESCRIPTION - High School students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it ‘the most irrelevant' of twenty-one school subjects; ‘bo-o-o-oring' is the adjective most often applied. James Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history. What he found was an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple, weighing in at an average of four-and-a-half pounds and 888 pages. In response he has written LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, in part a telling critique of existing textbooks but, more importantly, a wonderful retelling of American history as it should - and could –be taught to American students. Beginning with pre-Columbian American history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the My Lai massacre, Loewen supplies the conflict, the suspense, unresolved drama, and connection with current-day issues so appallingly missing from textbook accounts. A treat to read and a serious critique of American education, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME is for anyone who has ever fallen asleep in history class.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James William Loewen (February 6, 1942 - August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
DESCRIPTION - Every poem ever published by the late poet, who is noted for the passion and vision of her poems about being African-American, a lesbian, a mother, and a daughter, is collected in a definitive anthology of her work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Audre Geraldine Lorde (February 18, 1934 - November 17, 1992) was an American writer, poet and activist. Lorde was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrants who settled in Harlem. Frederick Byron Lorde and Linda Gertrude Belmar Lorde. Lorde was nearsighted and legally blind. The youngest of three daughters, she grew up in Harlem, hearing her mother's stories about the West Indies.
DESCRIPTION - It is the fiesta Day of Death in Mexico and Geoffrey Firmin - ex-consul, ex-husband, an alcoholic and a ruined man - is living out the last day of his life. Drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him, the consul has become an enduring tragic figure. His story, the image of one man's agonised journey towards Calvary, became a prophetic book for a whole generation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Lowry was born in 1909 in New Brighton. He was educated at the Leys School, Cambridge, and St Catharine's College. Between school and university he went to sea, working as a deckhand and trimmer for about six months. His first novel, ULTRAMARINE, was published in 1933. He went to Paris and married his first wife in 1934, and wrote several short stories in Paris and Chartres before going to New York. He then left for Mexico. His first marriage broke up in 1938, and by 1940 he had remarried and settled in British Columbia. During 1941-4, when he was living at Dollarton, he worked on the final version of UNDER THE VOLCANO. In 1954 he finally returned to England. During half his writing life he lived in a squatter's shack, built largely by himself, near Vancouver. His SELECTED LETTERS, edited by H. Breit and Margerie Lowry, appeared in 1967 and Lunar Caustic, part of a large, uncompleted work, appeared in 1963. He died in England in 1957.
DESCRIPTION - When the beautiful Shahrazad gives herself to the bloody-handed King Shahriyar, she is not expected to survive beyond dawn. But using all her wit and guile, she begins a sequence of stories that will last 1001 nights: stories of 'ifrits and money-changers, princes and slave girls, fishermen and queens, and magical gardens of paradise. This volume also includes the well-known tale of 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves'. Along with this landmark new translation, Robert Irwin's introduction discusses the many cultures The Arabian Nights has drawn on and the elaborate structure of the story-within-a-story that defines the collection, as well as the importance to the Nights of locked doors, sex and the recurring themes of money, merchants and debts. This edition also contains suggestions for further reading, a glossary, maps and a chronology.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Lyons (co-translator) is a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and a widely published scholar of classical Arabic literature. Ursula Lyons (co-translator) is an emeritus fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature. Robert Irwin (editor, introducer) is the author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion as well as numerous other studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism.
DESCRIPTION - When the beautiful Shahrazad gives herself to the bloody-handed King Shahriyar, she is not expected to survive,- beyond, dawn. But using all her wit and guile, she begins a sequence of stories that will last 1001 nights: stories of jinns and blind men, warriors and princesses, viziers and magical palaces, and wonderful talking birds. This volume also includes the well-known tales of Sindbad the Sailor. Along with this landmark new translation, Robert Irwin's introduction examines the history and provenance of the Nights, the different uses of the works - from ethnographic source to storytelling celebration - and the varied translations through the years. This edition also contains a glossary and maps.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Lyons (co-translator) is a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and a widely published scholar of classical Arabic literature. Ursula Lyons (co-translator) is an emeritus fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature. Robert Irwin (editor, introducer) is the author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion as well as numerous other studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism.
DESCRIPTION - When the beautiful Shahrazad gives herself to the bloody-handed King Shahriyar, she is not expected to survive beyond dawn. But using all her wit and guile, she begins a sequence of stories that will last 1001 nights: stories of caliphs and merchants, sultans and dancing girls, robbers and enchanted rings, and fantastical fountains of Youth. This volume also includes the well-known tale of 'Aladdin and the Magic Lamp'. Along with this landmark new translation, Robert Irwin's introduction examines the influence of the Nights on writers through the centuries, in works as diverse as The Canterbury Tales and Jane Eyre, and reflects upon the 'improvements' many of these writers made to the stories. This edition also contains a glossary and maps.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Malcolm Lyons (co-translator) is a professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge and a widely published scholar of classical Arabic literature. Ursula Lyons (co-translator) is an emeritus fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, specializes in modern Arabic literature. Robert Irwin (editor, introducer) is the author of The Arabian Nights: A Companion as well as numerous other studies of Middle Eastern politics, art and mysticism.
DESCRIPTION - Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after private investigator Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big-time bank heist by a small-time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ross Macdonald's real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Canada, Millar returned to the U.S. as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain's Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer returns in this gripping mystery, widely recognized as one of acclaimed mystery writer Ross Macdonald's very best, about the search for the long lost heir of the wealthy Galton family. Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family's fortune. Now Anthony's mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton's son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The Galton Case displays MacDonald at the pinnacle of his form.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Brought up in Ontario, he eventually settled in California, where he died in 1983.
DESCRIPTION - Lew Archer is hired by Keith Sebastian, a Los Angeles business executive, to find his daughter Sandy, a high-school senior who has run off with a homeless boy. Sebastian and his wife, living on the edge of affluent bankruptcy, seem unable to communicate with their daughter. Archer finds the runaways easily enough, but before he can return Sandy to her parents, she has participated in a violent crime. Archer's efforts to save the girl from the consequences of her actions, and to understand those actions, involve him in a savage plot twisting deep into the past. At least one old murder and some new ones confound him and the police. Archer himself is very nearly killed by an ex-cop who wants to keep the case closed, but he finally manages to open it and let some daylight in. The Instant Enemy is Lew Archer at his toughest, and Ross Macdonald at his most trenchant in his observations of California society.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ross Macdonald is the pseudonym of the American-Canadian writer of crime fiction Kenneth Millar (December 13, 1915 - July 11, 1983). He is best known for his series of hardboiled novels set in southern California and featuring private detective Lew Archer. Brought up in Ontario, he eventually settled in California, where he died in 1983.
DESCRIPTION - The Cairo Trilogy is recognized internationally as Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz's most important work. With the long-anticipated translation of PALACE WALK - the first volume of The Cairo Trilogy, originally published in Arabic in 1956 - English-language audiences may discover Mahfouz's unforgettable epic for the first time. Palace Walk transports us into the lives of a Muslim family in Cairo during Egypt's occupation by British forces in the early 1900s. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is a man whose character subsumes extraordinary contradictions. He is somber and tyrannical with his wife and children; they cannot guess at his nighttime pleasure in the sensual, his deep satisfaction with the aesthetic and erotic. His wife, Amina, reconciles herself to a type of security based on surrender, a willing prisoner in a society where it is forbidden for a virtuous woman ever to show her face to any man outside of her immediate family. Aisha, their beautiful and spirited younger daughter, dares to peer too closely through the intricate latticed balcony from which the women view the world. And Fahmy, their first son, is caught up in student demonstrations and the violence that threatens them all as Egypt struggles to become free. These are a few of the people we meet on Palace Walk, the street in Cairo that courses between two long-disappeared palaces. It is a powerful metaphor for this vivid novel that shows us the duality of its characters' lives in a tantalizing world of harsh realities and gossamer spirits, at once severe and alluring, and in a society moving from tradition toward modernity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NAGUIB MAHFOUZ (1911-2006) was born in the crowded Cairo district of Gamaliya. He graduated in philosophy from King Fuad University in 1934, and went on to write nearly forty novel-length works, plus hundreds of short stories and numerous screenplays. He was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988. WILLIAM M. HUTCHINS is the principal translator of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, and has most recently translated Mohammed Khudayyir's Basrayatha (AUC Press, 2007), Fadhil al-Azzawi's THE LAST OF THE ANGELS (AUC Press, 2007), and CELL BLOCK FIVE (AUG Press, 2008).
DESCRIPTION - In PALACE WALK, the first volume of the English-language debut of The Cairo Trilogy, Nobel Prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz spun a mesmerizing tale of the lives of a Muslim family in Cairo during the British occupation of Egypt in the early years of this century. PALACE OF DESIRE, the provocative second volume, followed the family into the awakening world of the 1920s. The master storyteller crowns these two bestselling achievements with SUGAR STREET, the trilogy's climactic conclusion, in which the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad moves into the middle of the twentieth century, and the seeds of contemporary Egypt are sown. Aging and ill, the family patriarch now surveys the world from his house's latticed balcony, as his long-suffering wife Amina once did. His children face middle age: daughter Khadija is comfortably married, living on Sugar Street; the once-radiant Aisha, husband and sons lost to typhoid, lives an ashen wraith in her parents' house, her only hope embodied in her lovely, fragile daughter; elder son Yasin has curbed his profligate ways somewhat and settled into complacent domesticity with Zanuba, his father's former mistress; and introspective Kamal, whose unrequited love for a privileged girl was the bittersweet centerpiece of Palace of Desire, devotes himself to an academic career, and seeks love in the arms of a buxom prostitute who once consorted with his father. But it is in the grandsons of al-Sayyid Ahmad that we see a modern Egypt emerging. Khadija's son Ahmad becomes a communist activist, while his brother Abd al-Muni'm becomes a Muslim fundamentalist - both working for what they believe will be a better world. And Ridwan, inheritor of his father Yasin's suave charm and sensual nature, launches a promising political career abetted by a homosexual relationship with a prominent politician - a liaison with profound implications for the young man, and for his family's fortunes. In this enthralling conclusion to Naguib Mahfouz's masterpiece trilogy - richly detailed and affectionately told - SUGAR STREET is not only a thoroughfare in old Cairo: it is a state of being, a window into Egypt's exotic past that casts a revealing light on its present.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NAGUIB MAHFOUZ was born in Cairo in 1911 and began writing when he was seventeen. A student of philosophy and an avid reader, he has been influenced by many Western writers, including Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, Camus, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and above all, Proust. He has more than thirty novels to his credit, ranging from his earliest historical romances to his most recent experimental novels.
DESCRIPTION - The author is a Jamaican and his novel is set in Jamaica. Its characters, who belong to the submerged nine-tenths of the population, are strangers to writers of books for tourists and to the tourists themselves, but not to the police nor to politicians at election times. Roger Mais, having lived and worked among them for most of his 47 years, knows them intimately; and his story, concerned with a small community of the industrious, the shiftless, the pious and the lawless, is as close to reality as art can depict it. Naive and savage, generous and cunning, sensitive and gross, their violence repels while their simple tenderness attracts. Their high spirits, their humour, their love of singing and dancing, are here contrasted with their primitive barbarity in scenes which evoke terror and pity, tears and laughter. In a style that soars into lyrical beauty and plumbs the depths of squalid tragedy, this is a novel of great power by a writer whose sincerity is not to be denied. ROGER MAIS was born at Kingston, Jamaica, in 1905. One of his great-grandfathers was sentenced to the stocks for harbouring runaway slaves. His education was sketchy and unorthodox, but liberal. He is unmarried, and is a painter, as well as a writer, and THE HILLS WERE JOYFUL TOGETHER is his first novel. His recreations are reading, the theatre and music. He says that his most interesting experience was going to jail for six months under Defence Regulations, for writing an article which was considered adverse to the War Effort, but was really only asking for a more liberal constitution (and got it). He wrote this first novel, he says, very quickly, and because he had to; ‘it had been gestating for years'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roger Mais (11 August 1905 - 21 June 1955) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright.
DESCRIPTION - THE SKIN is the savage account of the American occupation of Naples, first European city to be liberated in World War II. Malaparte's bestseller is the famous tale of the orgiastic riot of licentiousness, debauchery, and sensuality which took place when the conquered Italians, men, women and children, long under the Fascist and Nazi boot, hastened to prostitute themselves to their American conquerors, the U.S. Army. Here is a side of the American invasion of Italy and a side of the people invaded never before told. Curzio Malaparte is a spellbinding storyteller. A hundred stories, some funny, some brutal, some tragic, some scandalous, highlight Malaparte's account of the slow, hard fight up the boot-shaped peninsula, in which he served as Italian liaison officer to the American Army. They are not all flattering stories, but the sum total is a dramatic tribute to the kind of American who through his respect for others and his appreciation of their very difference can win reciprocal respect and appreciation for himself and his countrymen. Colonel Jack Hamilton and Malaparte were together from the earliest days in Naples through the long slow fight to Rome. They pursued the Germans through the woods and mountains of Tuscany; through Florence; through the winter rains of the Apennines to spring and the approaching. It was just before Milan that Jack died smiling. Then, says Malaparte, ‘I felt for the first time in my life that a human being had died for me.' This is the profoundly moving climax of a very dramatic and compelling book, a book at once ironic and sentimental, shocking and wise - one that is filled with the grimness and fire of a Goya painting. This personal chronicle of the sidelights of war, of the traffic in souls and bodies, is not for children. For all adult and thinking readers, it bears witness to the wisdom of Aeschylus: ‘If conquerors respect the temples and the gods of the conquered they shall be saved.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Curzio Malaparte (9 June 1898 - 19 July 1957), born Kurt Erich Suckert, was an Italian journalist, dramatist, short-story writer, novelist and diplomat. His chosen surname, which he used from 1925, means ‘evil/wrong side' and is a play on Napoleon's family name ‘Bonaparte‘ which means, in Italian, ‘good side'.
DESCRIPTION - This joyful little masterpiece, written by one of Italy's most renowned modern authors, is perhaps unique in world literature. Essentially the biography of a people, it deals with the Florentines in particular and the Italians in general. In examining his Tuscans, Malaparte ranges wide. Art, literature, architecture, even the color of the Tuscan sky and the tone of the rivers are brought into play. Malaparte exhibits his genius on almost every page. This is all the more striking when one considers his previous work, where a certain self-defeating capriciousness prevented him from achieving artistic perfection. In this book, for the first line to the last, one breathes the fine free air of true literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Curzio Malaparte, whose real name was Kurt Suckert, had a turbulent and controversial career. He was born in Prato, a suburb of Florence, of an Italian mother and a German father. One of the early members of the Fascist Party, he was for a time highly regarded by Mussolini and became the editor of La Stampa, Turin's most influential newspaper. After 1931 Malaparte fell out with the Fascists. He claimed that his disagreements were ideological, but others have maintained that they were personal. At any rate, whatever the reasons, he was jailed on several occasions. Since the last war, however, he gained a considerable popular following in Europe and until his death in 1957 live comfortably in a villa on the island of Capri. A number of his books have been translated into English, of which the most important are COUP d'ETAT: THE TECHNIQUE OF REVOLUTION (1932), KAPUTT (1946), and THE SKIN (1952). THOSE CURSED TUSCANS has been very successful in Italy, having gone through forty printings. Rex Benedict has been orchestra leader, naval aviator, film dubber, move-script translator, novelist, ghost-writer, and translator of books.
DESCRIPTION - Delightful Murder interweaves the history of the "crime story", the novel in which death is reified and a mystery is unraveled, with the history of crime itself. Evolving conceptions of the law and transgression are not only reflected in changes in the crime story, but the story supports and reinforces ideas that maintain the stability of the state. Ernest Mandel begins with the classic detective novel, which he calls "the of bourgeois rationality in literature". In stories by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, the hero is a brilliant sleuth of upper-class origins who solves a formalized puzzle in opposition to a criminal who embodies a single crime or passion that accounts for crime. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler signify a change in classical crime story, a change catalyzed by World War I and the emergence of organized crime. Social corruption and brutality enter the plot and detective-heroes do their work not as a hobby, but to earn a living, often with the help of a nascent organization in the form of a partner or a secretary. As the public becomes aware of crimes against the state and the workings of intelligence agencies, the spy story develops as an offshoot of the detective story, with writers like Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler. With states, rather than individuals, pitted against one another, the difference between right and wrong is no longer clearly defined, and novels like Gorky Park demonstrate that moral ambiguity. "The history of the crime story is a social history," declares Ernest Mandel, "for it appears intertwined with the history of bourgeois society itself. If the question is asked why it should be reflected in the history of a specific literary genre, the answer is: because the history of bourgeois society is also that of property and of the negation of property, in other words, crime." Ernest Mandel has written extensively on political economy. His books include Marxist Economic Theory, Late Capitalism, and The Long Waves of Capitalist Development.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernest Ezra Mandel (also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter; 5 April 1923 - 20 July 1995), was a Marxist economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist.
DESCRIPTION - Osip Mandelstam, born in 1891, was one of the great Russian poets who, like his friends Pasternak and Akhmatova, bore witness to the plight of Russia under Stalin. For this he paid with his life, dying in the winter of 1938 on his way to a Siberian labour camp. Apart from his genius, the first miracle of Mandelstam's poetry - suppressed in Russia for some forty years - is that it has survived. Though the poems reflect his life and its horror, they are by no means all of them grim. In his introduction Clarence Brown describes the 'incorrigible delight' which Mandelstam took in his art. His commitment to poetry was total, and he felt acutely that his gift imposed upon him an obligation: the people, he believed, need poetry no less than bread.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam (15 January 1891 - 27 December 1938) was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets. He was arrested by Joseph Stalin's government during the repression of the 1930s and sent into internal exile with his wife Nadezhda. Given a reprieve of sorts, they moved to Voronezh in southwestern Russia. In 1938 Mandelstam was arrested again and sentenced to a camp in Siberia. He died that year at a transit camp.
DESCRIPTION - Linda Wallander is bored. Just graduated from the police academy, she is waiting to start work at the Ystad police station and move into her own apartment. She's living with her father in the meantime and, like fathers and daughters everywhere, they are driving each other crazy. She will have to work with him, too: her father is Inspector Kurt Wallander, a veteran of the Ystad police. But soon Linda Wallander is no longer bored. She is deeply embroiled in the disappearance of her childhood friend, Anna, and, understandably, she makes a few rookie mistakes - which may just prove life-threatening. Kurt Wallander has other troubles besides a stubborn daughter insisting her friend is in danger, as his case and Linda's investigation into Anna's life dovetail into something far more calculated and dangerous than either had imagined. Already an international bestseller, Before the Frost inaugurates Henning Mankell's new mystery series about Linda Wallander, and also features Stefan Lindman of The Return of the Dancing Master.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Internationally acclaimed author Henning Mankell has written thirty-three novels, including nine Kurt Wallander mysteries. His books have been published in thirty-four countries and consistently top the bestseller lists in Europe, receiving major literary prizes (including the Crime Writers' Association's Macallan Gold Dagger) and generating numerous international film and television adaptations.
DESCRIPTION - First in the Kurt Wallander series. It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn't present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman's last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden's already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - YSTAD, SWEDEN. A man stops at an ATM during his evening walk and inexplicably falls dead to the ground. Two teenage girls brutally murder a taxi driver They are quickly apprehended, shocking local policemen with their compete lack of remorse. One girl escapes police custody and disappears without a trace. A few days later a blackout cuts power to a large swath of the country When a serviceman arrives at the malfunctioning power substation, he maces a grisly discovery. Inspector Kurt Wallander knows these events must be linked, but he has to figure out how and why His endeavors are made all the more difficult when he discovers personal and professional betrayals within his own team. Lonely and frustrated, he begins to doubt the worth of continuing his work as a detective. The search for answers eventually leads Wallander dangerously close to a shadowy group of anarchic terrorists, hidden by the anonymity of cyberspace. Somehow, these criminals a ways seem to know the police's next move. How can a small group of detectives unravel a plot designed to wreak havoc on a worldwide scale? And will they solve the riddle in time? FIREWALL, the latest book in Henning Mankell's critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling series, is a thrilling police procedural about our increasing vulnerability in the modern digitized world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Ebba Segerberg also translated Henning Mankell's One Step Behind (The New Press). She teaches Swedish at Washington University in St. Louis.
DESCRIPTION - On Midsummer's Eve, three friends gather in a secluded meadow in Sweden. in the beautifully clear twilight, they don costumes and begin a secret role-play. But an uninvited guest soon brings their performance to a gruesome conclusion. His approach is careful; his aim is perfect. Three bullets, three corpses. And his plans have only just begun to take shape. Meanwhile, Inspector Kurt Wallander's summer vacation has ended and he's back at the Ystad police station. Constantly fatigued, he soon learns his health is at risk-but all his energies must go into his work when a fellow officer is murdered. in the course of their investigation, the police slowly realize how little they know about what is going on in their seemingly serene town. An unknown killer is on the loose, and their only lead is a photograph of a strange woman no one in Sweden seems to know. Forced to dig deeply into the personal life of one of his colleagues, Wallander uncovers something he could never have imagined. ONE STEP BEHIND is the latest book in what the Los Angeles Times Book Review calls the ‘exquisite' Kurt Wallander mystery series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - In the award-winning SIDETRACKED, Kurt Wallander is called to a nearby rapeseed field where a teenage girl has been loitering all day long. He arrives just in time to watch her douse herself in gasoline and set herself aflame. The next day he is called to a beach where Sweden's former Minister of Justice has been axed to death and scalped. The murder has the obvious markings of a demented serial killer, and Wallander is frantic to find him before he strikes again. But his investigation is beset with a handful of obstacles-a department distracted by the threat of impending cutbacks and the frivolity of World Cup soccer, a tenuous long-distance relationship with a murdered policeman's widow, and the unshakably haunting preoccupation with the young girl who set herself on fire. Fascinating and astute, SIDETRACKED is a compelling mystery enhanced by keen social awareness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - A life raft washes ashore in Skane, Sweden, carrying two dean men in expensive suits, shot gangland-style. Inspector Kurt Wallander and his team determine that the men were Eastern European criminals. But what appears to be an open-and-shut case soon plunges Wallander into an alien world of police surveillance, thinly veiled threats, and life-endangering lies. When another murder is committed, Wallander must travel to Riga, Latvia, at the peak of the massive social and political upheaval preceding the nation's independence from the Soviet Union. A country in transition, Latvia a place where deception and corruption are everyday practice. Wallander struggles to catch up with the culprits in this shadowy society and must make a dangerous choice about who is lying and who is telling the truth. Aligned with political dissidents, he has to work outside the law for the first time and figure out who in this police state he can possibly trust when his and others' lives are at risk. It is the greatest test of his bravery he has yet had to face. THE DOGS OF RIGA is the second book in the critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. LAURIE THOMPSON lives in Wales and has edited Swedish Book Review since its launch in 1983. He has translated fifteen books from the Swedish, including three Kurt Wallander mysteries.
DESCRIPTION - In an African convent, four nuns and a unidentified fifth woman are brutally murdered--the death of the unknown woman covered up by the local police. A year later in Sweden, Inspector Kurt Wallander is baffled and appalled by two murders. Holger Eriksson, a retired car dealer and bird watcher, is impaled on sharpened bamboo poles in a ditch behind his secluded home, and the body of a missing florist is discovered--strangled and tied to a tree. The only clues Wallander has to go on are a skull, a diary, and a photo of three men. What ensues is a case that will test Wallander's strength and patience, because in order to discover the reason behind these murders, he will also need to uncover the elusive connection between these deaths and the earlier unsolved murder in Africa of the fifth woman.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - A disillusioned Inspector Kurt Wallander is thrown back into the fray when he becomes both hunter and hunted in this adventure from the pen of Sweden's master of crime and mystery. Crestfallen, dejected and spiraling into an alcohol-fuelled depression after killing a man in the line of duty, Inspector Kurt Wallander has made up his mind to quit the force for good. When an old acquaintance, a solicitor, seeks Wallander's help to investigate the suspicious circumstances in which his father has dies, Kurt doesn't want to know. But when the solicitor also turns up dead, shot three times, Wallander realizes that he was wrong not to listen. Against his better judgment, he returns to work to head what may now have become a double murder case. A rookie female detective has joined the force in his absence and he adopts the role of mentor to her as they fight to unravel the mystery. An enigmatic business tycoon, who hides behind an entourage of brusque secretaries and tight security, seems to be the common denominator in the two deaths. But while Wallander is on the trail of the killer, somebody is on the trail of Wallander, and closing in fast.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - THE PYRAMID is the long-awaited addition to Henning Mankell's critically celebrated and internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander mystery series: the book of five short mysteries that takes us back to the beginning. Here are the stories that trace, chronologically, Wallander's growth from a rookie cop into a young father and then a middle-aged divorce, illuminating how Wallander became a first-rate detective and highlighting new facets of a now-canonical character. ‘Wallander's First Case' introduces us to the twenty-one-year-old patrolman on his first homicide case: his next-door neighbor, seemingly dead by his own hand. Wallander is a young father confronting an unexpected threat on Christmas Eve in -The Man with the Mask.' In ‘The Man on the Beach.' he is on the brink of middle age and troubled by a distant wife as he unravels why a lonely man on vacation was poisoned. Newly separated in ‘The Death of the Photographer,' Wallander investigates the brutal murder - and the well-concealed secrets - of the local studio photographer. In the title story, he is a veteran detective uncovering unexpected connections between a downed mystery plane and the assassination of a pair of elderly sisters. Over the course of these five stories, he comes into his own as a murder detective, defined by his simultaneously methodical and instinctive work even as he finds himself increasingly haunted from witnessing the worst aspects of an atomized society. Written from the unique perspective of an author looking back upon his own creation to discover his origins, these mysteries are vintage Mankell and essential reading for all Wallander fans. THE PYRAMID is a wonderful display of Mankell's virtuosic powers as an acknowledged master of the police procedural.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - The much-anticipated return of Henning Mankell's brilliant, brooding detective, Kurt Wallander. On a winter day in 2008, Håkan von Enke, a retired high-ranking naval officer, vanishes during his daily walk in a forest near Stockholm. The investigation into his disappearance falls under the jurisdiction of the Stockholm police. It has nothing to do with Wallander-officially. But von Enke is his daughter's future father-in-law. And so, with his inimitable disregard for normal procedure, Wallander is soon interfering in matters that are not his responsibility, making promises he won't keep, telling lies when it suits him-and getting results. But the results hint at elaborate Cold War espionage activities that seem inextricably confounding, even to Wallander, who, in any case, is troubled in more personal ways as well. Negligent of his health, he's become convinced that, having turned sixty, he is on the threshold of senility. Desperate to live up to the hope that a new granddaughter represents, he is continually haunted by his past. And looking toward the future with profound uncertainty, he will have no choice but to come face-to-face with his most intractable adversary: himself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - Third in the Kurt Wallander series. The execution-style murder of a Swedish housewife looks like a simple case even though there is no obvious suspect. But then Wallander learns of a determined stalker, and soon enough, the cops catch up with him. But when his alibi turns out to be airtight, they realize that what seemed a simple crime of passion is actually far more complex - and dangerous. The search for the truth behind the killing eventually uncovers an assassination plot, and Wallander soon finds himself in a tangle with both the secret police and a ruthless foreign agent. Combining compelling insights into the sinister side of modern life with a riveting tale of international intrigue, The White Lioness keeps you on the knife-edge of suspense.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henning Mankell (3 February 1948 - 5 October 2015) is author of the internationally bestselling Kurt Wallander series and the critically acclaimed Chronicler of the Winds. Henning Mankell's books have been published in thirty-six countries with over 25 million copies in print worldwide. Laurie Thompson, the former editor of the Swedish Book Review, has translated more than forty books from the Swedish, including seven by Henning Mankell. He lives in rural Wales.
DESCRIPTION - A MAJOR LITERARY EVENT: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. BUDDENBROOKS, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modern literature - the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle- class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity - seductions that are at variance with its own traditions - its downfall becomes certain. In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, BUDDENBROOKS surpasses all other modern family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - THOMAS MANN was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. JOHN F. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books-most notably Arno Schmidt's EVENING EDGED IN GOLD, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize; Patrick Süskind's PERFUME, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Süskind's THE PIGEON and MR. SUMMER'S STORY; Doris Dörrie's LOVE, PAIN, AND THE WHOLE DAMN THING and WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?; and Libuse Moniková's THE FAÇADE. Mr. Woods lives in San Diego and is currently at work on a translation of Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN.
DESCRIPTION - The book that established Thomas Mann's place in the front ranks of the world's great novelists - ultimately leading to his 1929 Nobel Prize for literature - is now presented in a new translation by John E. Woods, whose 1993 rendering of BUDDENBROOKS was widely acclaimed. Hans Castorp - on the verge of an intense flirtation with Clavdia Chauchat, a married woman and feverish fellow patient - is perched high above the world, dozing in his splendid lounge chair at the International Sanatorium Berghof, swaddled in blankets against the Alpine chill. To his surprise and secret delight, he will remain on this ‘magic mountain' for seven years - removed from the ‘real' world, but irresistibly drawn into the sanatorium's own complex, vertiginous society, which in Mann's hands becomes a microcosm for Western civilization and its interior life on the eve of the First World War. Generally regarded as Mann's magnum opus, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN enthralls by its portrayal of men and women in crisis, confronting illness and death, striving to find a sense of self and purpose - and by its brilliance as a manifold metaphor for our century's wider struggle with the burden of freedom, the ennui of civilization, and the seduction of totalitarianism. And in Wood's invigoratingly fresh translation we also see something less apparent to a previous generation of readers: how deeply Eros - obsessive desire, forbidden love - courses through every vein of Mann's story. Flooded with feeling, with powerful evocations of disease, with the glories of the natural world and inklings of the supernatural, THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN is equally remarkable for Mann's treatment of time - the ‘flatland time' of healthy, active people, and the ‘inelastic present' of the ‘people up here', for whom illness is a lifelong career. Mann is a master at drawing dazzling characters with the finest irony: Settembrini, the impassioned Italian liberal, and Naphta, the caustic Jewish Jesuit, whose opposing worldviews trap them in a grotesque duel; Mynheer Peeperkorn, the enormously wealthy Dutch planter whose garrulous ‘ personality' all but overwhelms his fellow patients; the blustery Director Behrens and the subtle Dr. Krokowski, whose combined energies rule the day and the night of the Berghof; Clavdia Chauchat, the elusive Russian beauty whose slinking charms can awaken forgotten love; and, of course, Hans Castorp himself - the ordinary made extraordinary - whose interior journey leads him out into a blinding snowstorm and a stunning, fleeting moment of revelation; Hans, who is last seen on a battlefield of the Great War - the very conflict toward which every word of the novel has been magnetized. In Woods's new translation, the protean work - a vast, intricate tapestry of dramatic, emotional, and intellectual forces - reemerges, nearly seventy years after its original publication in English, as one of the magnificent literary creations of our time. THOMAS MANN was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. JOHN E. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books - mostly notably Arno Schmidt's EVENING EDGED IN GOLD, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize In 1981; Patrick Suskind's PERFUME, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize in 1987; Mr. Suskind's THE PIGEON and MR. SUMMER'S STORY; Dorris Dorrie's LOVE, PAIN, AND THW WHOLE DAMN THING and WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?; Libuse Monikova's THE FAÇADE; and most recently, Thomas Mann's BUDDENBROOKS. Mr. Woods lives in San Diego. Back-of-jacket photograph of Thomas Mann taken by Alfred A. Knopf on Mann's eightieth birthday, June 6, 1955; Photography Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Jacket design by Martin Ogolter.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 - 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I probably never would have become America's leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn't happened to explode that night. ' So begins this true story of life with a traveling carnival, peopled by amazing characters (the Human Ostrich, the Human Salamander, Jolly Daisy) who commit outrageous feats of wizardry. This is one of the only authentic narratives revealing the ‘tricks' (or more often the lack thereof) and skills involved in a sideshow, and is invaluable to those aspiring to this profession. Having cultivated the desire to create real magic since early childhood, Mannix rose to become a top act within a season; here is his inspiring tale.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Daniel Pratt Mannix IV (October 27, 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - January 29, 1997, Malvern, Pennsylvania) was an American author, journalist, photographer, sideshow performer, stage magician, animal trainer, and filmmaker. His best-known works are the 1958 book Those About to Die, which remained in continuous print for three decades, and the 1967 novel The Fox and the Hound which in 1981 was adapted into an animated film by Walt Disney Productions.
DESCRIPTION - This is Manning Marable's most important work. Written in the tradition of Walter Rodney's HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, and drawing on a wealth of recent economic data, this book systematically examines how all segments of the Black community have been exploited by the dual structures of racism and capitalism. Marable also explores the role of patriarchy in affecting Black women and the Black community as a whole. In successive chapters, Marable charts the development of the Black working class, the Black poor, Black women and Black prisoners. Turning to the Black elite, Marable explains the contradictory role of Black petty entrepreneurs, politicians, ministers and educators within the racist/capitalist state. The author concludes with an eloquent analysis of the violence and racist reaction currently unleashed against Blacks, and articulates a socialist vision and strategy essential to overcome the patterns of underdevelopment. HOW CAPITALISM UNDERDEVELOPED BLACK AMERICA is one of the most crucial studies of race and class written in the last decade.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manning Marable was M. Moran Weston and Black Alumni Council Professor of African American Studies and professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University. He was founding director of African American Studies at Columbia from 1993 to 2003. Since 2002, he has directed Columbia's Center for Contemporary Black History. The author of fifteen books, Marable was also the editor of the quarterly journal Souls. Manning Marable died in April 2011.
DESCRIPTION - The rediscovery of a masterpiece of Central European literature originally published in Budapest in 1942 and known to modern readers until last year. An extraordinary novel about a triangular relationship, about love, friendship, and fidelity; about betrayal, pride, and true nobility. In a castle at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, an old aristocrat waits to greet the friend he has not seen for forty-one years. In the course of this one night, from dinner until dawn, the two men will fight a duel of words and silences, of stories, of accusations and evasions, that will encompass their entire lives and that of a third person, missing from the candlelit dining hall-the now dead chatelaine of the castle. The last time the three of them sat together was in this room, after a stag hunt in the forest, The year was 1900. No game was shot that day but the reverberations were cataclysmic. And the time of reckoning has finally arrived. Already a great international best-seller, EMBERS is a magnificent addition to world literature in the English language. Sandor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948, first to Italy and then to the United States. Mârai committed suicide in San Diego in 1989. He is the author of a significant body of work, which Knopf is translating into English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sándor Márai was born in Kassa, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1900, and died in San Diego, California, in 1989. He rose to fame as one of the leading literary novelists in Hungary in the 1930s. Profoundly antifascist, he survived World War II, but persecution by the Communists drove him from the country in 1948. He went into exile, first in Italy, then in the United States.
DESCRIPTION - In addition to his own busy career as ‘one of Europe's most intriguing contemporary writers' (TLS), Javier Marías is also the translator into Spanish of works by Hardy, Stevenson, Conrad, Faulkner, Nabokov, and Laurence Sterne. His love for these authors is the touchstone of WRITTEN LIVES. Collected here are twenty pieces recounting great writers' lives, ‘or, more precisely, snippets of writers' lives.' Thomas Mann, Rilke, Arthur Conan Doyle, Turgenev, Djuna Barnes, Emily Brontë, Malcolm Lowry, and Kipling appear (‘all fairly disastrous individuals'), and ‘almost nothing' in his stories is invented. Like Isak Dinesen (who ‘claimed to have poor sight, yet could spot a four-leaf clover in a field from a remarkable distance away'), Marías has a sharp eye. Nabokov is here, making ‘the highly improbable assertion that he is ‘as American as April in Arizona,'‘ as is Oscar Wilde, who, in debt on his deathbed, ordered up champagne, ‘remarking cheerfully, ‘I am dying beyond my means.'‘ Faulkner, we find, when fired from his post office job, explained that he was not prepared ‘to be beholden to any son-of-a-bitch who had two cents to buy a stamp.' Affection glows in the pages of WRITTEN LIVES, evidence, as Marías remarks, that ‘although I have enjoyed writing all my books, this was the one with which I had the most fun.'. Javier Marías was born in Madrid, Spain, in 1951, into a very literary family. He earned his first paycheck at age twenty translating Dracula scripts into Spanish for his uncle, the movie director Jesús Franco. Today his own work is translated into thirty-four languages, and four and a half million copies of his books have sold worldwide. His many prizes include the prestigious IMPAC Dublin International Literary award for A Heart So White. He currently lives in Madrid.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Javier Marías was born in Madrid in 1951. The recipient of numerous prizes, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Prix Femina Etranger, he has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. His books have been translated into forty-three languages, in fifty-two countries, and have sold more than seven million copies throughout the world.
DESCRIPTION - THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO is the most influential political call-to-arms ever written. In the century and a half since its publication the world has been shaken repeatedly by those who sought to make its declamations a reality. But the focus of this modern edition is not primarily the vivid history of Marx and Engels' most important work. Rather, with a characteristically elegant and acute introduction by the distinguished historian Eric Hobsbawm, it asserts the pertinence of the MANIFESTO today. Hobsbawm writes that ‘the world described by Marx and Engels in 1848 in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognizably the world we live in 150 years later. He identifies the insights which underpin the MANIFESTO's startling contemporary relevance: the recognition of capitalism as a world system capable of marshalling production on a global scale: its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence, work, the family and the distribution of wealth; and the understanding that, far from being a stable, immutable system, it is, on the contrary, susceptible to enormous convulsions and crisis, and contains the seeds of its own destruction. For anyone skeptical of the triumphalism of the financial markets in recent years, who chooses to focus instead on the growing global divergence of rich and poor, the ravaging of the environment and the atomization of society, the MANIFESTO will appear as a work of extraordinary prescience and power.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - KARL MARX was born in 1818, in the Rhenish city of Trier, the son of a successful lawyer. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin, completing his doctorate in 1841. In Paris three years later, Marx was introduced to the study of political economy by a former fellow student, Frederick Engels. In 1848 they collaborated in writing THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. Expelled from Prussia in the same year, Marx took up residence first in Paris and then in London where, in 1867, he published his magnum opus CAPITAL. A co-founder of the International Workingmen's Association in 1864, Marx died in London in 1883. FREDERICK ENGELS was born in 1820, in the German city of Barmen. Brought up as a devout Calvinist he moved to England in 1842 to work in his father's Manchester textile firm. After joining the fight against the counter revolution in Germany in 1848 he returned to Manchester and the family business, finally settling there in 1850. In subsequent years he provided financial support for Marx and edited the second and third volumes of CAPITAL. He died whilst working on the fourth volume in 1895. ERIC HOBSBAWN is Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. His Many books include THE AGE OF REVOLUTION, THE AGE OF CAPITAL, THE AGE OF EMPIRE, and THE AGE OF EXTREMES.
DESCRIPTION - Marx for the twenty-first century. The first new English translation in fifty years—and the only one based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself. Featuring extensive original commentary, including a foreword by acclaimed political theorist Wendy Brown. An astounding achievement.—China Miéville, author of October: The Story of the Russian Revolution. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy. At once precise and boldly readable, this translation captures the momentous scale and sweep of Marx’s thought while recovering the elegance and humor of the original source. For Marx, our global economic system is relentlessly driven by value—to produce it, capture it, trade it, and, most of all, to increase it. Lifespans are shortened under the demand for ever-greater value. Days are lengthened, work is intensified, and the division of labor deepens until it leaves two classes, owners and workers, in constant struggle for life and livelihood. In Capital, Marx reveals how value came to tyrannize our world, and how the history of capital is a chronicle of bloodshed, colonization, and enslavement. With a foreword by Wendy Brown and an afterword by William Clare Roberts, this is a critical edition of Capital for our time, one that faithfully preserves the vitality and directness of Marx’s German prose and renders his ideas newly relevant to modern readers. DAS KAPITAL, originally intended as an unbelievably ambitious (and never completed) six-volume work, represents one of the key landmarks in the scientific understanding of capitalist development, bourgeois society and the economics of class conflict. ‘What I have to examine in this work,' wrote Marx in the Preface, ‘is the capitalist mode of production,' its natural laws and tendencies ‘winning their way through and working themselves out with iron necessity'. In Volume 1 (1867) years of research resulted in a marvellously lucid exposition that builds up from the basic unit of the commodity to a detailed consideration of the labour theory of value, the role of money, the modern factory system and the ways in which capital extorts surplus-value from wage-labour. Throughout, Marx draws on a profound knowledge of nineteenth-century England to support his analysis and generate countless fresh insights. Yet despite the failure of some of his prophecies, there is nothing dated about Marx's main contentions and conclusions. In the words of Ernest Mandel in his introduction to the Penguin Classic edition of the book, ‘Today's Western world is much nearer to the ‘pure' model of CAPITAL than was the world in which it was composed.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karl Marx (5 May 1818 - 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, and revolutionary socialist. Marx's work in economics laid the basis for much of the current understanding of labour and its relation to capital, and subsequent economic thought. He is one of the founders of sociology and social science. He published numerous books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867–1894).
DESCRIPTION - CON MEN DON'T STEAL - they literally have wads of cash thrust into their hands by trusting victims. Find out how they accomplish these dizzying feats in David Maurer's The Big Con, one of the finest and most entertaining portraits of confidence men and their games ever written. First published in 1940, it later inspired the Oscar-winning movie The Sting, and is to this day considered a classic of criminology. In addition to being a treasure trove of underworld lingo and unforgettable characters, The Big Con vividly illustrates the fundamental stages of every con, including Putting up the mark - finding a well-to-do victim Playing the con for him - gaining his or her confidence Giving him the convincer - allowing the victim to make a small profit Putting him on the send - sending him home to get more money Taking off the touch - fleecing the victim Forewarned is forearmed. In today's world of ever bigger Ponzi schemes, the price of this book might be the best money you ever spent.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Warren Maurer (April 12, 1906 - ca. June 11, 1981) was a professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville from 1937 to 1972, and an author of numerous studies of the language of the American underworld. Maurer received a doctorate from the Ohio State University in Comparative Literature in 1935. He spent much of his academic career studying the language of criminals, drug addicts, and other marginal subcultures. He died on his farm outside Louisville from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The Big Con is Maurer's most popular and perhaps most important book. It was originally published in 1940 by Bobbs-Merrill Company. The source material for it came from Maurer's correspondence, interviews, and informal chats with hundreds of underworld denizens during the 1930s. Among the interviewed criminals were such figures as Joseph "The Yellow Kid" Weil, Charles Gondorff and Limehouse Chappie. Maurer won the trust of hundreds of grifters, who let him in on their language and their methods. The book served as a source for the film The Sting. Maurer wrote three other books, Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction, Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern, and Kentucky Moonshine. In all these books, Maurer described the language - mostly the lexicon - of the people living in these "subcultures." For example, in the last book he focused on the craft of the moonshiners, discussed their infiltration of "dry" counties and reported their terminology. Language of the Underworld is a collection of several of his previous published articles collected by two of his students. It includes an introduction that describes the methods he used to collect criminal argot. Maurer died at home at age 75, the apparent victim of a self-inflected gunshot wound.
DESCRIPTION - The first intersectional history of the Black and Native American struggle for freedom in our country that also reframes our understanding of who was Indigenous in early America. Beginning with pre-Revolutionary America and moving into the movement for Black lives and contemporary Indigenous activism, Afro-Indigenous historian Kyle T. Mays argues that the foundations of the US are rooted in antiblackness and settler colonialism, and that these parallel oppressions continue into the present. He explores how Black and Indigenous peoples have always resisted and struggled for freedom, sometimes together, and sometimes apart. Whether to end African enslavement and Indigenous removal or eradicate capitalism and colonialism, Mays show how the fervor of Black and Indigenous peoples calls for justice have consistently sought to uproot white supremacy. Mays uses a wide-array of historical activists and pop culture icons, sacred texts, and foundational texts like the Declaration of Independence and Democracy in America. He covers the civil rights movement and freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, and explores current debates around the use of Native American imagery and the cultural appropriation of Black culture. Mays compels us to rethink both our history as well as contemporary debates and to imagine the powerful possibilities of Afro-Indigenous solidarity. Includes an 8-page photo insert featuring Kwame Ture with Dennis Banks and Russell Means at the Wounded Knee Trials; Angela Davis walking with Oren Lyons after he leaves Wounded Knee, SD; former South African president Nelson Mandela with Clyde Bellecourt; and more.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kyle T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) writer and scholar of US history, urban studies, race relations, and contemporary popular culture. He is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America.
DESCRIPTION - DARK CONTINENT is a searching history of Europe's most brutal century. Stripping away the comforting myths and illusions that we have grown up with since the Second World War, Mark Mazower presents an unflinching account of a continent locked in a finely balanced struggle between tolerance and racial extermination, imperial ambition and national self-determination, liberty and the tyrannies of Right and Left. It is an attempt to trace the origins of ‘Western values' - the ideological terms we now live by - and to ask what remains of the struggles of previous generations. Instead of seeing Europe as the natural home of freedom and democracy, Mazower argues that it was a frequently nightmarish laboratory for social and political engineering, inventing and reinventing itself through war, revolution and ideological competition. Fascism and communism should be regarded not as exceptions to the general rule of democracy, but as alternative forms of government that attracted many Europeans by offering different solutions to the challenges of the modern world. By 1940 the prospects for democratic government looked bleak, and Europe's future seemed to lie in Hitler's hands. Yet freedom was given another chance with the defeat of the Nazi New Order, and it prevailed decades later across the continent with the collapse of the Iron Curtain. Mazower's extraordinarily skilled and insightful analysis provides us with a new perspective on events of the century now drawing to a close. From the beginnings of the First World War to the establishment of the European Union, he depicts a battle for hearts and minds that reached more deeply than ever before into the daily lives of ordinary people. Vividly written and vigorously argued, DARK CONTINENT presents both a comprehensive history of twentieth-century Europe and a provocative vision of its future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mark Mazower is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. He is the author of the prizewinning INSIDE HITLER'S GREECE: THE EXPERIENCE OF OCCUPATION, 1941-44. He writes and broadcasts regularly on current developments in the Balkans.
DESCRIPTION - The fabled Golden Triangle, where Laos, Thailand, and Burma meet, long a traditional opium-growing area, now provides 70 percent of the world's illicit supply of heroin. And many elements in the governments of these countries, and in the government of South Vietnam - most of which are supported by U.S. military and financial aid - are deeply (and lucratively) involved in the growing, processing, transport, and distribution of narcotics. How has this situation come about? Basing their narrative on firsthand research in Asia and Europe, the authors trace the whole story since the end of World War II. They demonstrate that during the First Indochina War (1946-1954) the security of Saigon and its environs and the loyalty of the hill tribes depended on profits from and some protection for the opium traffic. Similarly, it became necessary for the United States, when it took over the French commitment in 1954, to look the other way in the matter of the involvement in the drug traffic of succeeding Vietnamese regimes. After Diem's downfall in 1963 it became apparent that money from the rackets - especially narcotics - was vital to any regime's survival. The authors found that in Laos, opium crops found their way from the hill villages into a secret base at Long Tieng; in Burma, the CIA financed remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army, which later became self-supporting by taking over 90 pecent of the opium shipments from the rebel Shan States of Burma; that in Thailand, shaky regimes relied on American support and opium money to help bolster their stability. They also found that the Mafia, working through Corsican criminal syndicates from Marseille, had established outposts in Southeast Asia for its international narcotics smuggling operations during the French occupation. In spite of recent well-publicized seizures of massive shipments of heroin from Southeast Asia, heroin continues to flood the country, spreading into every level of this society and shredding the fabric of everyday life. U.S. government estimates of the number of addicts has leaped from 315,000 in 1969 to over 560,000 in 1972. This book puts all the pieces of this ghastly puzzle together, and then maps the possible avenues out of the horror, suggesting that America may have to choose between our commitments in Southeast Asia and getting heroin out of our high schools.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.
DESCRIPTION - Ian McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden, written in 1978, explores coming-of-age, burgeoning sexuality and the distortions of a fourteen-year-old mind. In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix FEmina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - In Laidlaw, the series' progatonist Jack Laidlaw - a hard-drinking philosopher-detective whose tough exterior cloaks a rich humanity and keen intelligence - investigates the murder of a young woman, coming into conflict with Glasgow's hard men, its gangland villains, and the moneyed thugs who control the city. As the gangsters running Glasgow race Laidlaw for the discovery of the young woman's killer, a sense of dangerous betrayal infests the city that only Laidlaw can erase.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William McIlvanney (born 25 November 1936) was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. McIlvanney is a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as ‘the father of 'Tartan Noir'' and Scotland's Albert Camus.
DESCRIPTION - Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw is back, making his third appearance in STRANGE LOYALTIES. As in the earlier books, he is obsessed by an obscure death and is seen by his colleagues as a man near breaking point, driven by a private morality to work at the profession's outer edges. This time, however, the line between investigator and victim is blurred. The dead man is Laidlaw's younger brother, and the investigation takes him back to his roots in Ayrshire from which the not-so-grieving widow has departed and where Laidlaw learns from others of the breakdown of the marriage and his brother's increasing unpredictability in the months before his death under the wheels of a car. With a week's leave and a bottle of Antiquary, Laidlaw sets himself the task of finding out more. To this main plot is added a murder investigation being conducted back in Glasgow into the killing of drug pusher Meece Rooney. The linking of plot and subplot is achieved with the craft of an experienced novelist. The criminal Eddie Foley, for example, is seen in a similar light to the businessman Dave Lyons, who regards the law as ‘a set of rules for those who get caught.' Laidlaw himself is never more persuasively a policeman than when he is passing judgment: a drug dealer gets the thumbs down; an adulterous wife is convicted of lacking the courage of her sins; he scrutinizes himself constantly for lapses from his own standard of conduct. To live behind hedges, draw the curtains, shut out others, begins to seem like the humanist equivalent of sinning against the Holy Ghost.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William McIlvanney (born 25 November 1936) was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. McIlvanney is a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as ‘the father of 'Tartan Noir'' and Scotland's Albert Camus.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It was Glasgow on a Friday night, the city of the stare.' So begins William Mcilvanney's new novel, and at once we are plunged back into the world of that incomparable detective Jack Laidlaw - a world of hard men and harder truths. No truth comes harder to Eck Adamson, vagrant and alcoholic, than that he is dying. To his bed in the Royal Infirmary he summons Laidlaw, perhaps his only friend in the entire city, who reaches him just in time to hear his last desperate words and to receive a cryptic note with three names: Paddy Collins, Lynsey Farren, and the Crib, a local workingman's pub. Few men would have bothered with Eck, an old tramp, whose time had run out - that's the official verdict, anyway. But Jack Laidlaw is a man violently opposed to all ‘official' assumptions and rationalizations, both of police work and of the modern state. Convinced that Eck was murdered, Laidlaw follows the only clues he has. For a start, Paddy Collins is part of Glasgow's underworld - or at least was until a few days before, when he was found brutally, and fatally, stabbed. Lynsey Farren? She's Lady Lynsey Farren, beautiful, rich, a rather unlikely patron of the Crib, and one-time girlfriend of a young Glasgow student, Tony Veitch. But Veitch has not been seen for several days, and Miss Farren is unwilling to say anything that might help matters. As Laidlaw relentlessly pursues the investigation, tracing even the wildest and most incongruous leads. Two clear facts emerge: Tont Veitch is the only man who can answer the questions surrounding Eck's death, and Jack Laidlaw is not the only person tracking him down. When LAIDLAW was published by Pantheon in 1977, Ross MacDonald wrote: ‘McIlvanney is to be congratulated on his talent and his daring.' Both readers and critics were overwhelming in their praise of the book, not just as a crime story but as a fine novel in its own right. THE PAPERS OF TONY VEITCH is its direct sequel, an outstanding story of the people who inhabit Glasgow's hard world and the policeman who attempts to live with and understand them.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William McIlvanney (born 25 November 1936) was a Scottish writer of novels, short stories, and poetry. McIlvanney is a champion of gritty yet poetic literature; his works Laidlaw, The Papers of Tony Veitch, and Walking Wounded are all known for their portrayal of Glasgow in the 1970s. He is regarded as ‘the father of 'Tartan Noir'' and Scotland's Albert Camus.
DESCRIPTION - Jake is on the run. After serving overseas with the U.S. Army, he goes AWOL and makes his own way back home to Harlem. Back to the life he had before. Back to the basement joints, pool rooms and rent parties. Back to brown breasts throbbing with love and brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. No hero's welcome awaits him. Only the same hard-drinking, hard-living scrabble for love and a home that he left behind. In this world of gamblers, loan sharks, lonely women and rivals in love, Jake seems to have it all. But the women of Harlem aren't the only ones keen to make this fine-looking soldier their man. Uncle Sam wants him too!
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Claude McKay, one of the pioneers of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote several critically acclaimed works of poetry, fiction, and autobiography. Although he lived in New York City for much of his life, McKay produced many of his major books in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North Africa during the 1920s and early 1930s. He died penniless in a Chicago hospital in 1948.
DESCRIPTION - The first trade edition of Moby Dick Illustrated by Rockwell Kent, issued after the Lakeside Press 1930 Limited Subscriber's Edition, which consisted of 1,000 three-volume quarto sets that were housed in aluminum slipcases. This edition is set in Monotype Fournier and contains reproductions of all of Kent's original illustrations for the Lakeside Press Limited Edition. No American masterpiece casts quite as awesome a shadow as Melville's monumental Moby Dick. Mad Captain Ahab's quest for the White Whale is a timeless epic-a stirring tragedy of vengeance and obsession, a searing parable about humanity lost in a universe of moral ambiguity. It is the greatest sea story ever told. Far ahead of its own time, Moby Dick was largely misunderstood and unappreciated by Melville's contemporaries. Today, however, it is indisputably a classic. As D.H. Lawrence wrote, Moby Dick ‘commands a stillness in the soul, an awe. [It is] one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, poet, and writer of short stories. His contributions to the Western canon are the whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851); the short work Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) about a clerk in a Wall Street office; the slave ship narrative Benito Cereno (1855); and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). When asked which of the great American writers he most admired, Vladimir Nabokov replied: ‘When I was young I liked Poe, and I still love Melville, whom I did not read as a boy.' Around his twentieth year he was a schoolteacher for a short time, then became a seaman when his father met business reversals. On his first voyage he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for a time. His first book, an account of that time, Typee, became a bestseller and Melville became known as the ‘man who lived among the cannibals'. After Omoo, the sequel to his first book, Melville began to work philosophical issues in his third book, the elaborate Mardi (1849). The public indifference to Moby-Dick (1851), and Pierre (1852), put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, Melville published The Confidence-Man, the last work of fiction published during his lifetime. During his later decades, Melville worked at the New York Customs House and privately published some volumes of poetry in editions of only 25 copies. When he died in 1891, Melville was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the ‘Melville Revival' at the occasion of the centennial of his birth that his work won recognition. In 1924, the story Billy Budd, Sailor was published, which Melville worked on during his final years, and left in manuscript at his death. The single most Melvillean characteristic of his prose is its allusivity. Stanley T. Williams said ‘In Melville's manipulation of his reading was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare's.'
DESCRIPTION - This book has had a unique history. Written before the Algerian war, it predicted the outcome and aftermath of that war; today it stands as an unusually powerful and psychologically penetrating study of oppression in the colonial situation, a book whose theme will remain valid for many years. The President of the Republic of Senegal, Leopold Sedar Senghor, has said: "This book of Albert Memmi's will remain a document to which the historian of colonialism will have to refer in the twenty-first century.' In dedicating this edition of his book to the American Negro, though it was not written with him in mind, Memmi has made no simple gesture of courtesy. For it is obvious that in revealing the mechanisms at the base of colonial oppression, he has also revealed the mechanisms of all oppressions of one group by another, in all parts of the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Albert Memmi (born December 15, 1920) is a French writer and essayist of Tunisian-Jewish origin. Born in Tunisia under French protectorate, from a Tunisian Jewish mother, Marguerite Sarfati, and a Tunisian-Italian Jewish father, Francois Memmi, he speaks French and Tunisian-Judeo-Arabic. He claims to be of Berber ancestry. He was educated in French primary schools, and continued on to the Carnot high school in Tunis, the University of Algiers where he studied philosophy, and finally the Sorbonne in Paris. Albert Memmi found himself at the crossroads of three cultures, and based his work on the difficulty of finding a balance between the East and the West.
DESCRIPTION - Alfred H. Mendes was a member of the Beacon group of writers in Trinidad in the 1930s and friend and colleague of C.L.R. James and Ralph de Boissiere. He was a prolific writer, with a distinctive and engaging voice, and he wrote a significant number of short stories, many of which have never been published and most of which were written between 1920 and `940. THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY is a collection of twelve stories with an introduction and short glossary of Trinidadian Creole words and phrases. The book is useful as a text for university literature courses, with an introduction designed or students unfamiliar with Mendes's work, but not so dauntingly academic as to discourage a general readership.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group' of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.'
DESCRIPTION - In this extraordinary and powerful book Fatima Mernissi, one of the most original and distinctive voices in the Islamic world, uncovers a hidden history of women leaders of Islamic states stretching back over fifteen centuries. When Benazir Bhutto became prime minister of Pakistan in 1988, many claimed that it was a blasphemous assault on Islamic tradition since no Muslim state, critics alleged, had ever been governed by a woman. But Fatima Mernissi examined fifteen centuries of Islamic history and discovered that the critics were wrong. Recovering the stories of fifteen Islamic queens, this remarkable exploration tells how they ascended the throne, how they governed and exercised their power, and how their forgotten reigns influence the ways in which politics is practiced in Islam today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fatema Mernissi (27 September 1940 - 30 November 2015) was a Moroccan feminist writer and sociologist. Fatema Mernissi was born in Fez, Morocco. She grew up in the harem of her affluent paternal grandmother along with various female kin and servants. She received her primary education in a school established by the nationalist movement, and secondary level education in an all-girls school funded by the French protectorate.
DESCRIPTION - In 1912, a revolutionary chick cries, ‘Strike down the wall!' and liberates itself from the ‘egg state.' In 1940, ostriches pull their heads out of the sand and unite to fight fascism. In 1972, Baby X grows up without a gender and is happy about it. Rather than teaching children to obey authority, to conform, or to seek redemption through prayer, twentieth-century leftists encouraged children to question the authority of those in power. TALES FOR LITTLE REBELS collects forty-three mostly out-of-print stories, poems, comic strips, primers, and other texts for children that embody this radical tradition. These pieces reflect the concerns of twentieth-century leftist movements, like peace, civil rights, gender equality, environmental responsibility, and the dignity of labor. They also address the means of achieving these ideals, including taking collective action, developing critical thinking skills, and harnessing the liberating power of the imagination. Some of the authors and illustrators are familiar, including Lucille Clifton, Syd Hoff, Langston Hughes, Walt Kelly, Norma Klein, Munro Leaf, Julius Lester, Eve Merriam, Charlotte Pomerantz, Carl Sandburg, and Dr. Seuss. Others are relatively unknown today, but their work deserves to be remembered. (Each of the pieces includes an introduction and a biographical sketch of the author.) From the anti-advertising message of JOHNNY GET YOUR MONEY'S WORTH (AND JANE TOO)! (1938) to the entertaining lessons in ecology provided by THE DAY THEY PARACHUTED CATS ON BORNEO (1971), and Sandburg's mockery of war in ROOTABAGA PIGEONS (1923), these pieces will thrill readers intrigued by politics and history - and anyone with a love of children's literature, no matter what age.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julia L. Mickenberg is associate professor of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of LEARNING FROM THE LEFT: CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, THE COLD WAR, AND RADICAL POLITICS IN THE UNITED STATES. Philip Nel is professor of English and Director of the Program in Children's Literature, Kansas State University. He is the author of THE ANNOTATED CAT: UNDER THE HATS OF SEUSS AND HIS CATS, DR. SEUSS: AMERICAN ICON, and J. K. ROWLING'S HARRY POTTER NOVELS: A READER'S GUIDE.
DESCRIPTION - Nietzsche wrote the philosophical work for which he is most famous while he was coming apart at the seams. The circumstances of Nietzsche's dramatic psychological disintegration make his writing, while popular, often hard for readers to understand. Elijah Millgram here argues for a new framework for making sense of Nietzsche-one that transforms the way we read him. Why Didn't Nietzsche Get His Act Together? argues that Nietzsche's late works (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra onwards) should not be read as straightforwardly endorsing a consistent or systematic set of philosophical claims. Rather, these late works display Nietzsche living through a series of different personalities or philosophical perspectives. Each perspective embodies a different way of seeing the world, deploys different values, highlights certain features while occluding others, and is motivated by a different dominant drive. What one perspective emphasizes can be left out by another; what one perspective presents as valuable can be seen as neutral or even as damaging from another; what engenders the appearance of coherence or order in one perspective can do the opposite in another. Millgram claims that insofar as each human life embodies a perspective, and insofar as each of Nietzsche's late texts exhibits a distinct perspective, we can think of each of the late works as written by a different author.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elijah "Lije" Millgram (born 1958) is an American philosopher. He is E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research specialties include practical reason and moral philosophy. Elijah Millgram received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1991. He taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University before moving to Utah. He is a former fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow.
DESCRIPTION - Steven Millhauser's funny, beautiful, and magically illuminative novel of childhood is cast in the form of a dead-serious, indeed major, biography. It is the Definitive Life of a Great American Writer (Edwin) who died when he was eleven, told by his contemporary and lifelong friend (Jeffrey). It is organized, thanks to Jeffrey's impeccably neat mind, in three sections: The Early Years, The Middle Years, The Late Years. Thus we closely follow Edwin's development from his pre-verbal noises (age three months), scrupulously noted by his admiring biographer, through the long devotion to comic books and animated film that so profoundly influenced Edwin's life and works, to the climactic flowering of his literary genius in his remarkable (and until now misunderstood) novel, Cartoons. We are made privy to the influence of home and school, to his friendship with the great muralist Edward Penn who disappeared at age seven, to his obsessive love (second grade) for Rose Dorn - blonde, imperious, impervious to the Valentines, verses, and 43 gifts (including not only prizes from boxes of cereal, but wax lips, a compass ring, a red rubber frankfurter, two Japanese fans, and a black plastic inkstain) with which he pursues her. His pained biographer provides, as well, a full account of Edwin's sudden attachment (third grade) to his violent, almost wordless classmate, Arnold Hasselstrom; And as we enter Edwin's brilliantly productive Late Years, we are shown the sinister series of events leading inescapably to his foreseen death. A satire on biography, a portrait of the artist set entirely in childhood, a vision of childhood as a state of genius - all the elements of Steven Millhauser's wonderful novel work together to charm, to astonish, and to compel a rich rediscovery of the lost moment-to-moment content of childhood. Steven Millhauser was born in 1943 in New York City and grew up in Connecticut. He received a B.A. from Columbia in 1965. In 1968 he entered the graduate school of Brown University.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steven Millhauser (born August 3, 1943) is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel Martin Dressler. Millhauser's collections of stories continued with The Barnum Museum (1990), Little Kingdoms (1993), and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (1998). The unexpected success of Martin Dressler in 1997 brought Millhauser increased attention. Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories made the New York Times Book Review list of ‘10 Best Books of 2008'. Millhauser lives in Saratoga Springs, New York and teaches at Skidmore College.
DESCRIPTION - 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 nationalism across the world to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the eighteenth century before leading us to the present. He shows that as the world became modern, those who were unable to enjoy its promises?of freedom, stability, and prosperity?were increasingly susceptible to demagogues. The many who came late to this new world?or were left, or pushed, behind?reacted in horrifyingly similar ways: with intense hatred of invented enemies, attempts to re-create an imaginary golden age, and self-empowerment through spectacular violence. It was from among the ranks of the disaffected that the militants of the nineteenth century arose?angry young men who became cultural nationalists in Germany, messianic revolutionaries in Russia, bellicose chauvinists in Italy, and anarchist terrorists internationally. Today, just as then, the wide embrace of mass politics and technology and the pursuit of wealth and individualism have cast many more billions adrift in a demoralized world, uprooted from tradition but still far from modernity?with the same terrible results. Making startling connections and comparisons, Age of Anger is a book of immense urgency and profound argument. It is a history of our present predicament unlike any other.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. In 2008 he was one of the first authors to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
DESCRIPTION - A wide-ranging, controversial collection of critical essays on the political mania plaguing the West by one of the most important public intellectuals of our time. In America and in England, faltering economies at home and failed wars abroad have generated a political and intellectual hysteria. It is a derangement manifested in a number of ways: nostalgia for imperialism, xenophobic paranoia, and denunciations of an allegedly intolerant left. These symptoms can be found even among the most informed of Anglo-America. In Bland Fanatics, Pankaj Mishra examines the politics and culture of this hysteria, challenging the dominant establishment discourses of our times. In essays that grapple with the meaning and content of Anglo-American liberalism and its relations with colonialism, the global South, Islam, and humanitarian war, Mishra confronts writers such as Jordan Peterson, Niall Ferguson, and Salman Rushdie. He describes the doubling down of an intelligentsia against a background of weakening Anglo-American hegemony, and he explores the commitments of Ta-Nehisi Coates and the ideological determinations of The Economist. These essays provide a vantage point from which to understand the current crisis and its deep origins.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. In 2008 he was one of the first authors to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
DESCRIPTION - A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world. A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers?Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire?are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From the Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely?a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. In 2008 he was one of the first authors to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
DESCRIPTION - The Fourth Pig, originally published in 1936, is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of fairy tales, poems, and ballads. Droll and sad, spirited and apprehensive, The Fourth Pig reflects the hopes and forebodings of its era but also resonates with those of today. It is a testament to the talents of Naomi Mitchison (1897–1999), who was an irrepressible phenomenon - a significant Scottish political activist as well as a prolific author. Mitchison's work, exemplified by the tales in this superb new edition, is stamped with her characteristic sharp wit, magical invention, and vivid political and social consciousness. Mitchison rewrites well-known stories such as ‘Hansel and Gretel' and ‘The Little Mermaid,' and she picks up the tune of a ballad with admiring fidelity to form, as in ‘Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man.' Her experimental approach is encapsulated in the title story, which is a dark departure from ‘The Three Little Pigs.' And in the play Kate Crackernuts, the author dramatizes in charms and songs a struggle against the subterranean powers of fairies who abduct humans for their pleasure. Marina Warner, the celebrated scholar of fairy tales and fiction author, provides an insightful introduction that reveals why Mitchison's writing remains significant. The Fourth Pig is a literary rediscovery, a pleasure that will reawaken interest in a remarkable writer and personality. ENDORSEMENTS: ‘At her best, Naomi Mitchison is forthright and witty, writes with brio and passion and lucidity, and conveys a huge appetite for life, for people, for new adventures, and for breaking through barriers.'--From the introduction by Marina Warner. ‘These stories are important - both within the literary tradition of the fairy tale, and more broadly, as fantasy stories exemplary in their imagining of real-world matters. Warner's introduction to the collection strikes just the right note. A splendid reissue.'--Stephen Benson, University of East Anglia. ‘The Fourth Pig makes a relevant and interesting addition to the Oddly Modern Fairy Tales series. The collection embraces more than fairy tales in the strictest sense and includes playful references to Greek and Teutonic mythology as well as to Gaelic traditions. The introduction is informative and engaging.'--William Gray, director of the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales and Fantasy, University of Chichester. CONTENTS: Introduction by Marina Warner; The Fourth Pig; Omen of the Enemy; Frogs and Panthers; The Furies Dance in New York; Grand-daughter; The Fancy Pig; The Snow Maiden; Hansel and Gretel; Birmingham and the Allies; Soria Moria Castle; Kate Crackernuts; Adventure in the Debateable Land; Mairi MacLean and the Fairy Man; The Little Mermaiden; Pause in the Corrida; Brünnhilde's Journey down the Rhine; The Border Loving; Mirk, Mirk Night; Further Reading.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Naomi Mary Margaret Mitchison, (nEe Haldane; 1 November 1897 - 11 January 1999) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Often referred to as the doyenne of Scottish literature, she wrote over 90 books covering a wide range of genre including historical, science fiction, travelogue and autobiography.
DESCRIPTION - Since the publication of Ossi di Seppia, his first volume of poems, in 1925, Eugenio Montale has come to be seen in Italy as ‘the poet' of this century. His reputation is now international. Truth is the only star Montale has followed. Leaning neither to the right nor the left, favouring neither the Catholic church nor the Communist party, he has stood on his own and kept his perception completely clear. His poetry can be difficult, even obscure; but frequently it reflects life in a strong, musical diction which has been compared to that of T.S. Eliot.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896 - September 12, 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. He is widely considered the greatest Italian lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi.
DESCRIPTION - A MAJESTIC TRANSLATION OF ONE OF THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING MASTERS OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY POETRY. ‘Dry and luminous, sharp-edged and visionary, the inexhaustible poetry of Eugenio Montale is here collected in William Arrowsmith's translations, which are as tough, delicate, and unsentimental as the originals.' - RACHEL HADAS. THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EUGENIO MONTALE brings together for the first time William Arrowsmith's translucent translations in a single volume. Collected here are POETIC DIARY 1971, 1972 and the POETIC NOTEBOOK, as well as his previously published translations of four other volumes: CUTTLEFISH BONES, THE OCCASIONS, THE STORM AND OTHER THINGS, and SATURA. Eugenio Montale changed Italian poetry forever and helped to create international Modernism. Steeped in the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, yet fiercely innovative, in each new book Montale challenged the styles he had previously established. His poems chart an adventure of consciousness and conscience in response to the shocks of modernity, fascism, and two world wars, and they also present several of the greatest erotic sequences in modern poetry. With the wide range of Montale's poetry at last available to the English reader, this collection reveals Montale to be the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century. ‘One of America's most versatile and resourceful translators brings a lifetime of skill and erudition to bear on the life's work of one of Italy's great poets. This volume is a monument to both men.' - GEOFFREY BROCK. ‘The difficulty is not that Montale is great but that he is great obscurely, uniquely. In most of these poems (as in most of Miss Bishop's) Montale's achievement is a tone of voice. Frequently bereft of titles, unsusceptible to ‘form,' merely a manner of speaking. Yet Arrowsmith, who spent years translating most of these unquestionable yet often iracund engenderings, seems born to that manner. We are served an evasive feast!' - RICHARD HOWARD. ‘What a gift it is to have all of Montale's poems and William Arrowsmith's intensely responsive translations now ‘bound with love in one volume.' Arrowsmith beautifully captures the density and drama of the poems, and his notes are a fund of attentive insights. Montale is one of the great erotic poets of our time, truly, as the notes brilliantly show, the heir of Dante.' - RACHEL JACOFF. ‘This superb and long-awaited edition, with the original Italian facing the unrivaled translations of William Arrowsmith and the helpful scholarly apparatus by Rosanna Warren, including Italian literary criticism and the continued efforts of devotees, presents the breadth of Montale's concerns and his use of the Italian, English, American, and classical (including Dante, Shakespeare, and T. S. Eliot) traditions that he absorbed and masterully recast.' - CLAIRE HUFFMAN. ‘Thirty years after Montale's death, his poetry is still vividly alive, as it finds ever new readers within and beyond Italy. To have all of William Arrowsmith's English translations of the verse together in one volume is cause for rejoicing. Warren has done the world of poetry readers a great service. As we read through this incredibly rich poetic itinerary that traverses the heart of the twentieth century's devastations and yearnings, we understand once more why Montale is known as one of modernity's greatest poets. This volume is, quite simply, a gift to be cherished, and a source of endless delights.'- REBECCA WEST.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - EUGENIO MONTALE (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Born in Genoa, he served in World War I and trained to be an opera singer before beginning his prolific writing career. In addition to his poetry, he is the author of many works of nonfiction and a translator of authors including Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and T. S. Eliot.
DESCRIPTION - Augusto Monterroso is widely known for short stories characterized by brilliant satire and wit. Yet behind scathing allusions to the weaknesses and defects of the artistic and intellectual worlds, they show his generous and expansive sense of compassion. This book brings together for the first time in English the volumes Complete Works (and Other Stories) (Obras completas [y otros cuentos] 1959) and Perpetual Motion (Movimiento perpetuo 1972). Together, they reveal Monterroso as a foundational author of the new Latin American narrative. ‘Monterroso is certainly the leading living Guatemalan writer. His microcuentos are finely honed, highly ironic, sophisticated pieces which are both very good literature and excellent pedagogical devices. I would liken his short stories to some of Borges' more accessible ones, with the added dimension of political commitment.’ ~Cynthia Steele, author of Politics, Gender, and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988: Beyond the Pyramid. ‘Sophisticated wit and playful surrealist fantasy dominate these ingenious and gently mocking tales, by a Guatemalan-born soul mate to the late Jorge Luis Borges. This first English translation of Monterroso’s work offers the contents of his two published collections, Complete Works and Other Stories (1959) and Perpetual Motion (1972). They’re a monument, if that isn’t the wrong word, to this entertaining author’s trademark ‘concision and wit.’ ~Kirkus Reviews
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Augusto Monterroso Bonilla (December 21, 1921 - February 7, 2003) was a Honduran writer, known for the ironical and humorous style of his short stories. He is considered an important figure in the Latin American 'Boom' generation, and received several awards, including the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature (2000), Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature (1997), and Juan Rulfo Award (1996). Edith Grossman is an award-winning translator of contemporary Latin American literature. Her recent publications include Strange Pilgrims and Of Love and Other Demons, by Gabriel García Márquez, and Maqroll and The Adventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis.
DESCRIPTION - Imagine Borges' fantastic bestiary having tea with Alice. Imagine Dean Swift and James Thurber trading notes. Imagine a frog from Calaveras County who had actually read Mark Twain. Meet Augusto Monterroso. The foregoing invitation by novelist Carlos Fuentes is both gracious and apt, for in this delightful volume Augusto Monterroso resumes in modem form a tradition older than Aesop-the fable. Here are presented wondrous creatures like the Monkey who wanted to be a satirical writer, the Fly who dreamed he was an Eagle, the Giraffe who learned the hard way about relativity; intriguing revelations like the true point of Penelope's weaving, the dilemma of the Lightning Bolt that did strike twice in the same place, or the case of Ulysses and the non-conformist Siren-and many other delectable and edifying tales. As Monterroso's admirers point out the antics of his fabulous Beasts and Beings are minors to the foibles of mankind (not me and thee, of course-others). On the other hand, it could be limply that your occasional Monkey does want to be a satirical writer, In any case, the author disclaims a strictly moral intention, Asked in an interview if he was against moralists, he responded that he was only against overly-explicit moralists. ‘To say that a grasshopper should work like an ant,' he continued, ‘is a piece of foolishness perpetuated through centuries. The grasshopper won't change. In any case it is the ant who should change.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Augusto Monterroso Bonilla (December 21, 1921 - February 7, 2003) was a Honduran writer, known for the ironical and humorous style of his short stories. He is considered an important figure in the Latin American 'Boom' generation, and received several awards, including the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature (2000), Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature (1997), and Juan Rulfo Award (1996).
DESCRIPTION - Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to ‘put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature. draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World - without the mandate for conquest.' Author of BELOVED, THE BLUEST EYE, SONG OF SOLOMON, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature - individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell - are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn. A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, PLAYING IN THE DARK will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
DESCRIPTION - Three years after her brilliantly acclaimed SULA, Toni Morrison gives us a novel of large beauty and power, creating a magical world out of four generations of black life in America. It is a world we enter in the present, through Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman), son of the richest black family in a Midwestern town. We enter it on the day of his birth (the first black baby allowed to be born at Mercy - popularly called ‘No Mercy' - Hospital), the day on which the lonely insurance man Robert Smith, poised in blue silk wings, attempts to fly from the steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward. We see Milkman growing up in his father's money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely passive mother, and we watch him beginning to move outward - through his profound love and combat with his friend (his Biblical brother) Guitar. through Guitar's mad and loving commitment to the band of seven, the secret avengers called the Seven Days. through Milkman's exotic and then imprisoning affair with his love-blind cousin, Hagar. and through his unconscious apprenticeship to the one person in his family who is open, unfettered, whole: the exiled one, his unkempt, mystical, bootlegging Aunt Pilate, with a brass box for an earring, with no navel (‘a stomach blind as a knee. something God never made'), Pilate who looks like a tall black tree and who saved his life before he was born. And we follow him as he strikes out alone, drawn away from home (south, to the place his father came from) by the promise of buried gold; moving first toward adventure and then - as the unspoken truth about his family and his own buried heritage announces itself - toward an adventurous and crucial embrace of life. This is a novel in which mystery unfolds on mystery, revelation on revelation - in which our vision of what we have seen turns, changes, and takes shape again, transformed. It is a novel expressing with passion, tenderness, and a magnificence of language the mysterious primal essence of family bond and conflict, the feelings and experience of all people wanting, and striving, to be alive.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
DESCRIPTION - Toni Morrison's first novel, THE BLUEST EYE (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent, written - as John Leonard said in The New York Times - in a prose ‘so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.' Her new novel has the same power, the same beauty. At its center - a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures. Sula and Nel - both black, both smart, both poor, raised in a small Ohio town - meet when they are twelve, wishbone thin and dreaming of princes. Through their girlhood years they share everything - perceptions, judgments, yearnings, secrets, even crime - until Sula gets out, out of the Bottom, the hilltop neighborhood where beneath the sporting life of the men hanging around the place in headrags and soft felt hats there hides a fierce resentment at failed crops, lost jobs, thieving insurance men, bug-ridden flour. at the invisible line that cannot be overstepped. Sula leaps it and roams the cities of America for ten years. Then she returns to the town, to her friend. But Nel is a wife now, settled with her man and her three children. She belongs. She accommodates to the Bottom, where you avoid the hand of God by getting in it, by staying upright, helping out at church suppers, asking after folks - where you deal with evil by surviving it. Not Sula. As willing to feel pain as to give pain, she can never accommodate. Nel can't understand her any more, and the others never did. Sula scares them. Mention her now, and they recall that she put her grandma in an old folks' home (the old lady who let a train take her leg for the insurance). that a child drowned in the river years ago. that there was a plague of robins when she first returned. In clear, dark, resonant language, Toni Morrison brilliantly evokes not only a bond between two lives, but the harsh, loveless, ultimately mad world in which that bond is destroyed, the world of the Bottom and its people, through forty years, up to the time of their bewildered realization that even more than they feared Sula, their pariah, they needed her.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
DESCRIPTION - The author of SONG OF SOLOMON now sets her extraordinary powers on a striking new course. TAR BABY, audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones - of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythical force in which the landscape itself becomes animate, alive with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of people whose drama unfolds. It is a novel suffused with a tense and passionate inquiry, revealing a whole spectrum of emotions underlying the relationships between black men and women, white men and women, and black and white people. The place is a Caribbean island. In their mansion overlooking the sea, the cultivated millionaire Valerian Street, now retired, and his pretty, younger wife, Margaret, go through the rituals of living, as if in a trance. It is the black servant couple, who have been with the Streets for years - the fastidious butler, Sydney, and his strong yet remote wife - who have arranged every detail of existence to create a surface calm broken only by bursts of verbal sparring between Valerian and his wife, sudden exchanges that seem to be skirting some dangerous quicksands. And there is a visitor among them - a beautiful young black woman, Jadine, who is not only the servants' dazzling niece, but the protegee and friend of the Streets themselves; Jadine, who has been educated at the Sorbonne at Valerian's expense and is home now for a respite from her Paris world of fashion, film, and art. Through a season of untroubled ease, the lives of these five move with a ritualized grace until, one night, a ragged, starving, black American street man breaks into the house. And, in a single moment, with Valerian's perverse decision not to call for help but instead to invite the man to sit with them and eat, everything changes. Valerian moves toward a larger abdication. Margaret's delicate and enduring deception is shattered. The butler and his wife are forced into acknowledging their illusions. And Jadine, who is at first repelled by the intruder, finds herself moving inexorably toward him - he calls himself Son; he is a kind of black man she has dreaded since childhood: uneducated, violent, contemptuous of her privilege. As Jadine and Son come together in the loving collision they have both welcomed and feared, the novel moves outward - to the Florida backwater town Son was raised in, fled from, yet cherishes; to her sleek New York; then back to the island people and their protective and entangling legends. As the lovers strive to hold and understand each other, as they experience the awful weight of the separate worlds that have formed them - she perceiving his vision of reality and of love as inimical to her freedom, he perceiving her as the classic lure, the tar baby set out to entrap him - all the mysterious elements, all the highly charged threads of the story converge. Everything that is at risk is made clear: how the conflicts and dramas wrought by social and cultural circumstances must ultimately be played out in the realm of the heart. Once again, Toni Morrison has given us a novel of daring, fascination, and power.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
DESCRIPTION - Thirty years of the Nobel Laureate's reflections on life, writing, and other writers - What Moves at the Margin collects three decades of Toni Morrison's writings about her work, her life, literature, and American society. The works included in this volume range from 1971, when Morrison (b. 1931) was a new editor at Random House and a beginning novelist, to 2002 when she was a professor at Princeton University and Nobel Laureate. Even in the early days of her career, in between editing other writers, writing her own novels, and raising two children, she found time to speak out on subjects that mattered to her. From the reviews and essays written for major publications to her moving tributes to other writers to the commanding acceptance speeches for major literary awards, Morrison has consistently engaged as a writer outside the margins of her fiction. These works provide a unique glimpse into Morrison's viewpoint as an observer of the world, the arts, and the changing landscape of American culture. The first section of the book, ‘Family and History,' includes Morrison's writings about her family, Black women, Black history, and her own works. The second section, ‘Writers and Writing,' offers her assessments of writers she admires and books she reviewed, edited at Random House, or gave a special affirmation to with a foreword or an introduction. The final section, ‘Politics and Society,' includes essays and speeches where Morrison addresses issues in American society and the role of language and literature in the national culture. Among other pieces, this collection includes a reflection on 9/11, reviews of such seminal books by Black writers as Albert Murray's South to a Very Old Place and Gayl Jones's Corregidora, an essay on teaching moral values in the university, a eulogy for James Baldwin, and Morrison's Nobel lecture. Taken together, What Moves at the Margin documents the response to our time by one of American literature's most thoughtful and eloquent writers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford; February 18, 1931 - August 5, 2019), known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist, essayist, book editor, and college professor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she gained worldwide recognition when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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).
DESCRIPTION - With each succeeding mystery featuring his reluctant detective (and natural-born existentialist) Easy Rawlins, Walter Mosley gains new fans and builds on what is now recognized as a permanent addition to American crime writing. His current book is A Little Yellow Dog-another instant classic of suspense, style, and shrewd social observation. It's 1964. Easy Rawlins has given up the street life that has brought him so much trouble and grief. He's taken on a job as supervising custodian of Sojourner Truth Junior High School in Watts. For two years he's been getting up early and going off to work. He wears nice clothes and puts all his energy-and love-into his job and his adopted children. Easy likes his new life, even though he feels empty and a little bored sometimes. But all that is about to change. Easy comes in early one morning to find one of the teachers already in her classroom. She has a dog with her and a story about a husband gone mad. Before Easy knows what's happening, the teacher is in his arms. Before the day is over the teacher is gone, leaving Easy with her dog, and the handsomest corpse Easy has ever seen is found in the school garden. That night a second corpse turns up. Easy may have left the streets but he hasn't been forgotten. The world is changing faster than he can keep up. The police believe that Easy is involved in the murders. Old enemies are waiting to get even. The principal of the school wants to fire him. His old friends aren't the same and his new friends might be his death. Easy wants back into his careful little life, but that door is closed. A murderer is running loose somewhere. And a little yellow dog plots revenge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
DESCRIPTION - Walter Mosley's universally praised debut novel, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, introduced readers to the most original new voice in American crime writing in years. Of that novel and its winning detective hero, the Chicago Tribune raved, ‘I, for one, can't wait to find out where Easy Rawlins' hard life is going to take him next.' Eager readers will find out in A RED DEATH, which plunges Easy deep into the political, legal, and moral tar pits of Los Angeles in the early fifties, when Red-baiting and blacklisting were official policy and racial tensions boiled. Easy is now out of ‘the hurting business,' and into the housing (and the favor) business, on the strength of funds dating from his earlier advent ures. He's a little older, a little wiser - and in a lot more trouble. He suddenly finds a corrupt, racist IRS agent breathing down his neck (and reaching for his wallet) about some unpaid taxes. His only out: cut a deal with the FBI to infiltrate the First African Baptist Church and spy on a former Polish resistance fighter suspected of stealing defense plans. Meanwhile, Easy's romantic life becomes equally complicated and dangerous when he takes in his old flame Etta Mae Harris. Hard on her heels is Raymond ‘Mouse' Alexander, her ex-husband, Easy's best friend, a dark, gleefully homicidal angel. Then the murders begin and the LAPD decides that Easy is a convenient suspect. His search for the actual murderer must be conducted in an ethical mine field, where the stark choice is between betrayal and survival. A RED DEATH again displays Walter Mosley's wonderful strengths: a hypnotic narrative voice, crackling dialogue, wonderful subsidiary chara cters, the vivid sense of an almost mythical Los Angeles - and a hero with a winning combination of hard-boiled attitude and hard-earned compassion. It is clearly the work of an emerging master of American crime writing.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - WALTER MOSLEY'S first novel, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, has been or will be published in seven foreign countries. He lives in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - 1961: For most black Americans, these were times of hope. For former P.I. Easy Rawlins, Los Angeles's mean streets were never meaner. or more deadly. Ordinarily, Easy would have thrown the two bills in the sleazy shamus' face - the white man who wanted him to find the notorious Black Betty, an ebony siren whose talent for all things rich and male took her from Houston's Fifth Ward to Beverly Hills. There was too much Easy wasn't being told, but he couldn't resist the prospect of seeing Betty again, even if it killed him.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
DESCRIPTION - The human race has just begun. In a brilliant departure for Walter Mosley, author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins mystery series, BLUE LIGHT imagines a world in which human potential is suddenly, amazingly fulfilled - a change that calls into question the meaning of human differences and the ultimate purpose and fate of the human race. From an unknown point in the universe an inscrutable blue light approaches our solar system. When it reaches Earth, it transforms those it strikes, causing them instantaneously to evolve beyond the present state of humanity. Each person imbued with the light becomes the full realization of his or her nature and potential, with strengths, understanding and communication abilities far beyond our imagining. BLUE LIGHT is the story of these people and their transformation narrated by Chance, a biracial man whose entire life has been a struggle for self-definition, the novel traces the desperate conflict of the ‘Blues' with one of their own, a man who - struck by the light at the moment he expired - has become the living embodiment of death. Written as a kind of gospel in which Chance describes the wanderings of this tribe and their ultimate, apocalyptic battle, the account is also full of his uncertainties - about his own place in this strange new world and about whether he may be recording the beginning of the end of the human race. BLUE LIGHT explores questions about identity, race, and humanity - the hallmarks of Walter Mosley's fiction - but within a mind-stretching new framework. Written as the prelude to a projected trilogy, BLUE LIGHT is imaginative fiction of the highest caliber from one at the most adventurous thinkers and accomplished novelists at work today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - WALTER MOSLEY is the author of the bestselling Easy Rawlins series of mysteries, the novel RL'S DREAM, and the story collection ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED, for which he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He was born in Los Angeles and has been at various times in his life a potter, a computer programmer, and a poet. His books have been translated into twenty languages. He lives in New York.
DESCRIPTION - The time is 1948; the town is Los Angeles; the hero is Easy Rawlins, a tough black war veteran just out of a job at a defense plant. The mortgage payment's coming due, so Easy takes on some detective work from a silkily menacing white gangster, Dewitt Albright. The assignment: find the whereabouts of blonde femme fatale Daphne Monet, a singer known to frequent black jazz joints not usually hospitable to white patrons. Easy's quest for the bewitching Daphne takes him (and the reader) on a vivid tour of forties L.A., from the barber shops and raucous clubs of Watts, to the elegant boardrooms and residences of a white political establishment with a great deal to hide. Once found, Daphne Monet proves an easier woman to locate than to fathom. She incarnates the promise of love and the threat of violent death. With his sardonic, gleefully murderous sidekick Mouse to guide him, Easy enters the dangerously complex moral territory of race relations and necessary violence, where questions of right and wrong depend for their answers on just whose side the law is on. DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS mixes the hard-boiled poetry of Raymond Chandler with the social realism of Richard Wright. Its narrative swings with the complex rhythms of modern urban life. It's a smashing entertainment - and more. ‘ DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS is a dark, delicious tale of post-World War Two L.A., city of sadness and disillusion. Walter Mosley weaves his own kind of magic: he's the chanter of our mean modern times.' - Jerome Charyn.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
DESCRIPTION - In this stunning new work, Walter Mosley, the bestselling author of the Easy Rawlins mysteries, returns to science fiction for the first time since his acclaimed visionary work BLUE LIGHT, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. While BLUE LIGHT was a novel of transcendence in 1960s San Francisco, these interlocking tales of survival unfold in the world of an imminent tomorrow. Life in America a generation from now isn't much different from today: The drugs are better, the daily grind is worse. The gap between the rich and the poor has widened to a chasm. You can store the world's legal knowledge on a chip in your little finger, while the Supreme Court has decreed that constitutional rights don't apply to any individual who challenges the system. Justice is swiftly delivered by automated courts, so the prison industry is booming. And while the media declare racism is dead, word on the street is that even in a colorless society, it's a crime to be black. But the world still turns and folks still have to get by with the hands they're dealt, folks such as: Ptolemy ‘Popo' Bent - This gentle backwoods child has a genius I.Q. - and a soul so pure that officials want him locked up forever; Folio Johnson - A hardboiled, cyber-augmented private eye who can see beneath the dark poetry of the metropolis, he will need an even greater edge than that to find out who's systematically murdering rich, young Nazis; Fera Jones - She's the boxing Queen of the Ring who must still fight all comers to save her dad, preserve her identity, and protect the fans who believe in her; Dr. Ivan Kismet: The world's richest man, MacroCode's CEO is a tycoon, tyrant, and messiah who is evidently more powerful than God. So it's too bad for everyone that Dr. Kismet is utterly insane. Mixing cyberpunk with biting social commentary, and Matrix-style wonders with masterful literary skill, Walter Mosley brings to life the celebs, working stiffs, leaders, victims, technocrats, crooks, oppressors, and revolutionaries who inhabit a glorious all-American nightmare that's just around the corner. Welcome to FUTURELAND.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - WALTER MOSLEY is the New York limes bestselling author of BLUE LIGHT and the Easy Rawlins novels, including A LITTLE YELLOW DOG and DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS. His books have been translated into twenty languages and his short-story collection, ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED, ALWAYS OUTGUNNED, received the Anisfield-Woif Book Award. Born in Los Angeles, he has been a potter, a computer programmer, and a poet. Walter Mosley lives in New York.
DESCRIPTION - The setting: Houston, 1939. Easy and Mouse are young men just setting out in life. Easy has yet to develop his skill for unraveling the secrets of others, and Mouse has yet to kill his first man. All will soon change. Although he's frightened that Mouse may know of his earlier liaison with EttaMae, nineteen-year-old Easy Rawlins agrees to drive his friend to Pariah, Texas. Traveling in a 1936 Ford Mouse has borrowed, the two begin a journey to retrieve money from Mouse's stepfather, daddyReese - money the volatile Mouse wants to use to begin his marriage to EttaMae. They are soon engulfed in a shrouded bayou world of voodoo, sex, revenge, and death that changes their lives and entwines their destinies. Easy and Mouse come of age in GONE FISHIN' as they are compelled to examine their friendship and other relationships that have shaped their lives. Both young men take a closer look at their love and memories of their mothers and are forced to deal with the fathers in their lives - Easy yearning for the one he hardly knew, Mouse vengeful over the one he was left. Out of these memories and interactions, each must somehow forge his own sense of manhood. As Mosley takes Easy and Mouse - and the reader - on this journey to manhood, he weaves together a remarkable cast of friends and foes, who are introduced here for the first time and will later appear in the Easy Rawlins mysteries. For die-hard Mosley fans, here's a chance to unravel some of the mystery surrounding these characters; and for new readers, this is the moment to get caught up in the magic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - WALTER MOSLEY is the author of six books: DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (1990), A RED DEATH (1991), WHITE BUTTERFLY (1991), BLACK BETTY (1994), and A LITTLE YELLOW DOG (1996) in the Easy Rawlins mystery series; and RL'S DREAM (1995), a blues novel. A new character, Socrates Fortlow, was introduced in a collection of stories entitled ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED ALWAYS OUTGUNNED. A native of Los Angeles, Walter Mosley now lives in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - Andrew Vachss called DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, Walter Mosley's debut mystery featuring Easy Rawlins, a tough black private detective in L.A.'s Watts section, ‘the most self-assured, uniquely-voiced first novel I've ever read.' The Wall Street Journal said of its sequel, A RED DEATH: ‘Remarkable. proves Mr. Mosley's debut was no fluke.' Readers and critics agree that Walter Mosley is writing novels fit to stand alongside the giants of the L. A. hardboiled tradition. In Mosley's eagerly awaited new mystery, WHITE BUTTERFLY, the time is 1956 and, things being what they are, no one in official Los Angeles is much bothered as a serial killer proceeds to murder three black bar girls, leaving a distinctive mark each time. But when a white stripper, Cyndi Starr, aka ‘The White Butterfly' on stage, is similarly murdered - and she turns out to be a UCLA coed and the daughter of a politically powerful prosecutor - all hell breaks loose. The heat is finally on to find the killer. Which is why Quinten Naylor, a black LAPD detective, arrives on Easy Rawlins's doorstep one morning - for Easy can go places and do things the police simply cannot. Easy, married now and a father, initially says no - until the police finger his cheerfully murderous sidekick Raymond ‘Mouse' Alexander as a suspect. So Easy begins an odyssey along the seedy jazz joints of Bone Street and the furnished rooms of Hollywood Row in search of the killer, in a case that will put his marriage, his business, and his cunningly constructed secret life in the most dire jeopardy. WHITE BUTTERFLY crackles with tension arid offers, as the best American crime fiction always does, a vivid moral landscape of a particular time and place. The language swings with the jazz rhythms of the streets, while sounding sweet and mournful blues notes underneath. It is the best Easy Rawlins novel yet - a triumph for Walter Mosley, his creator.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Mosley is the author of more than forty books, including eleven previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, the first of which, DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, was made into an acclaimed film starring Denzel Washington. ALWAYS OUTNUMBERED was an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, adapted from Mosley's first Socrates Fortlow novel. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Goddard College, he holds an MFA from CCNY and lives in Brooklyn. New York. He is the winner of numerous awards, including an O. Henry Award, a Grammy, and PEN America's Lifetime Achievement Award.
DESCRIPTION - During his childhood Mrabet listened to traditional story tellers in Tangier´s cafEs - 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 by Peter Owen, followed two years later with The Lemon. Since then, seventeen books written by Mohammed Mrabet have been published and his works have been translated into twelve languages. Henry Miller wrote: ‘Mrabet sees what it means to work simply and tellingly. His writing is quite unique and an inspiration not only to young writers but to veterans too. He has found the secret of communicating on all levels.' The language of Mrabet is a maze like the thousand alleys of the Medina - seductive, but dangerous - without a guide one is lost in suggestions and allusions. His culture does not lend itself to our limited rational thought - the only way is by feeling into it, not thinking.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mohammed Mrabet (real name Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajjem), born on March 8, 1936, is a Moroccan author artist and storyteller of Berber heritage from the Beni Ouraaghil tribe in the Rifian Mountains. Mrabet is mostly known in the West through his association with Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams. Mrabet is an artist of intricate, yet colorful, felt tip and ink drawings in the style of Paul Masson or a more depressive, horror-show Jean Miro, which have been shown at various galleries in Europe and America. Mrabet's art work is his own: very loud and intricate, yet comparable with that of his contemporary, Jillali Gharbaoui (1930-1971). Mrabet is increasingly being recognized as an important member of a small group of Moroccan Master Painters who emerged in the immediate post Colonial period and his works have become highly sought after, mostly by European collectors.
DESCRIPTION - Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Following the 1890 census, the first to measure the generation of African Americans born after slavery, crime statistics, new migration and immigration trends, and symbolic references to America as the promised land of opportunity were woven into a cautionary tale about the exceptional threat black people posed to modern urban society. Excessive arrest rates and overrepresentation in northern prisons were seen by many whites - liberals and conservatives, northerners and southerners - as indisputable proof of blacks' inferiority. In the heyday of separate but equal, what else but pathology could explain black failure in the land of opportunity? The idea of black criminality was crucial to the making of modern urban America, as were African Americans' own ideas about race and crime. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Khalil Gibran Muhammad is Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library and Associate Professor of History, Indiana University.
DESCRIPTION - Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel, Jasmine, and her breakthrough collection, The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing is distinguished as much by its narrative style and shifting points of view as it is by Mukherjee's piercing emotional observations on the immigrant experience and her depiction of racism, nostalgia, and displacement. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee is the first volume to feature the author's complete short fiction--all 35 stories. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey edits the collection, unearthing seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee's unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer's Workshop M.F.A. thesis, The Shattered Mirror, and two tales from 2008. Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee's stories back into print, from the semi-autobiographical story, "Hindus," in her 1985 debut collection, Darkness, to her late stories, published from 1997-2012, as well as her classic, "The Management of Grief." Maxey contextualizes Mukherjee's short fiction and the provocative, often prescient political questions it raises about migration, nationhood, class, and history. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee features a Forward by prominent literary studies scholar Nalini Iyer and Afterword by critically acclaimed writer Lysley Tenorio, one of Mukherjee's former students. It is an essential volume for readers both familiar with Mukherjee's work and new to her groundbreaking fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction. Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham and the author of South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010 and Understanding Bharati Mukherjee.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1930 Musil's ‘Der Mann Ohne Eienschaften' is considered one of the greatest, and longest, German novels of the first half of the century. It is the work for which Musil is best known and for which he dedicated a large portion of his life. The work remains unfinished. It has been described as expressionistic, satirical, and as the last work of the classical tradition. Set in Vienna on the eve of World War I, this great novel of ideas tells the story of Ulrich, ex-soldier and scientist, seducer and skeptic, who finds himself drafted into the grandiose plans for the 70th jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. This new translation-published in two elegant volumes-is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime. Begun in 1924, ‘The Man Without Qualities' depicted a witty and urbane view of life in the glittering world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, told from the viewpoint of the main character, Ulrich, who was a fictionalized version of Musil himself. A first major section of the novel was published as the First Book in 1930, followed in 1933 by a large part of the Second Book, with a remaining, but still incomplete portion published posthumously in 1943. Musil also wrote a successful short novel, ‘Young Törless' (1906), as well as a series of short stories written from the years 1911 to 1924, and translated as ‘Five Women' in 1966. Musil first gained some attention as a writer in the 1920s not only for his short fiction, but also for two plays, ‘The Enthusiasts' and ‘Vincent and the Lady,' both of which were performed in Berlin and Vienna. Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, and received his early education at several prestigious military academies (an experience he later used in telling the story of Törless, the hero of his first novel). He studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he earned a doctorate in the psychology of mathematics. He held jobs as a librarian and an editor before serving in the Austrian army in World War I. From 1918 to 1922 he was a civil servant in Vienna and then worked on and off as a writer and journalist. He lived in Berlin during 1932 and 1933, thereafter returning to Vienna until the Nazi Anschluss of 1938, when he fled with his Jewish wife to Switzerland. He then lived in Zurich and in Geneva, spending the last four years of his life in relative poverty. Inflation in the 1930s had ruined him financially. During his lifetime, Musil never attracted more than a small circle of readers. It was not until the early 1950s, years after his death, that his work attracted serious critical interest and won him an important place in modern fiction. Today he is often compared favorably with Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Musil died suddenly and unexpectedly from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1942 while putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece, ‘The Man without Qualities.'. Robert Musil was born in Klagenfurt, Austria, on November 6,1880, the son of a successful engineer. He was educated at military academies and received a diploma in engineering from the Technical University in Brünn. Engineering, however, failed to satisfy his increasing interest in literature and the humanities. He then studied philosophy and experimental psychology at the University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1908. The publication of his first novel, YOUNG TORLESS, in 1906 and its immediate recognition led him to abandon a career as an academic philosopher and devote himself to writing. After his marriage in 1911 he worked as a librarian at the Technical University in Vienna and then moved in 1913 to Berlin to become an editor of Neue Rundschau. During these years his writing suffered. Musil-served as an officer in the Austrian Army from 1914-1918 and after the war held various government posts in Vienna until 1922, when he decided to live as a free-lance writer. He wrote plays and stories, dramatic criticism for various newspapers, and contributed essays and criticism to a number of literary journals. In the early Twenties he conceived his major work, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, which continued to occupy him for the rest of his life. Volume I appeared in 1930, Volume II in 1933, but the work was never completed. After Hitler's coming to power and the Nazi Anschluss, Musil left Vienna permanently and emigrated to Switzerland, where he led a quiet existence, working continuously at THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, until his death on April 15, 1942, in Geneva. It was only after World War II that Robert Musil's importance as one of the major figures of contemporary literature began to be recognized. More than a thousand reviews, articles and critical essays on his work have been published since 1948, and editions of his work are now available in many languages throughout the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Musil (6 November 1880 - 15 April 1942) was an Austrian writer. His unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities (German: Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften) is generally considered to be one of the most important modernist novels. However, the novel has not been widely read both because of its delayed publication and intricate, lengthy plot.
DESCRIPTION - LOLITA is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955 in Paris. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book's narrator and main character Humbert Humbert becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl, who is aged 12 years when most of the novel takes place. The novel was adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. A divorced scholar in his late thirties, Humbert leaves Europe for the United States and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter Dolores sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, who has had a lifelong passion for 'nymphets' - as a pre-adolescent, he experienced the loss of his childhood sweetheart to typhus - is instantly smitten, and will do anything to be near her. The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used 'faunlet'. Nabokov's LOLITA is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as 'a vain and cruel wretch' and 'a hateful person' Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European emigre. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of LOLITA in CONTINGENCY, IRONY, AND SOLIDARITY, Humbert is a 'monster of incuriosity'. Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of LOLITA is 'not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child'. Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an ironist. Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, KOBA THE DREAD, proposes that LOLITA is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. 'All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny,' he says, 'even LOLITA. Perhaps LOLITA most of all'. In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN about an illicit women's reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Although rejecting a too-easy identification of Lolita's captivity with that of her students Nafisi writes of her students' strong emotional connection with the book: 'what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer' and 'like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom'. For Nafisi the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: 'Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature [. ] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [. ] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses'. One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: 'we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [. ] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting'. Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of 'erotica' in Paris, which published LOLITA in September 15, 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U. S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.
DESCRIPTION - 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 one in such a disastrous way. After Knight's death, his half brother sets out to penetrate the enigma of his life, starting with a few scanty clues in the novelist's private papers. His search proves to be a story as intriguing as any of his subject's own novels, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.
DESCRIPTION - Mr Biswas is a gentle man, thoughtful and fastidious, with a taste for privacy - a pleasant thing if one happens to have money, which he does not. He is a Hindu of high caste but very low fortune, living in the West Indies, and A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS is the story of his longing for independence and a house of his own, which becomes for him a symbol of everything that life has denied him. V. S. Naipaul tells how, in the end, Mr Biswas gets his house. Mr Biswas has been brought up on the haphazard charity of relatives. He is lucky to have his talent for sign writing, as the shopkeepers in Trinidad like to make a show and Mr Biswas earns a kind of living. Literally forced by reason of his high caste to marry into the Tulsi family, he becomes almost part of their furniture in a teeming establishment ruled by old Mrs Tulsi. Mr Biswas might as well have been embraced by an octopus, for to be private, thoughtful, or fastidious is to be a traitor among Tulsis. Following him from birth to death, the author writes with the delicate, dry humour that has attracted great critical acclaim wherever his books have appeared. He gives not only a wonderfully detailed and colourful picture of Hindu life in the West Indies, but also a picture of humanity anywhere as it contends with hardship and loneliness, pushing out its frail but stub- born shoots of hope and dignity. It was clear from his earlier novels that V. S. Naipaul was one of the most distinguished writers to emerge from the West Indies. Now with A HOUSE FOR MR BISWAS, he has written unquestionably the best regional novel about them that has yet appeared - a book which triumphantly transcends geographical considerations, and a tale so true, so exact, and so deeply compassionate, that it put him among the most highly regarded authors in the world on the day it was published.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 – 11 August 2018) was a Trinidadian-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul's breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1990, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
DESCRIPTION - Raja, the hero and narrator of this wise and humorous novel, is a magnificent specimen - eleven feet from tip to tail, and the terror of Malgudi. He leads a carefree, if predatory, jungle life until he is lured into captivity by his own greed. His subsequent career as a circus performer and film star, which ends when he inadvertently gains the reputation of a man-eater, provides ample opportunity to observe the strange behavior of the bipeds around him. But nothing in his experience of humans (on whom he casts rather a cool eye) has prepared him for his meeting with a holy man known only as the Master, a man whose authority is based on a profound understanding of the natural and spiritual world rather than on brute force. Raja becomes his unlikely disciple, and what seemed to be a simple tale becomes a novel of surprising depth and humanity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 - 13 May 2001), full name Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, was an Indian writer, best known for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English (alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao), and is credited with bringing the genre to the rest of the world. Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend, Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan's first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan's works also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which was adapted for film and for Broadway. The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight social context and provide a feel for his characters through everyday life. He has been compared to William Faulkner, who also created a fictional town that stood for reality, brought out the humour and energy of ordinary life, and displayed compassionate humanism in his writing. Narayan's short story writing style has been compared to that of Guy de Maupassant, as they both have an ability to compress the narrative without losing out on elements of the story. Narayan has also come in for criticism for being too simple in his prose and diction. In a writing career that spanned over sixty years, Narayan received many awards and honours. These include the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament. Novelist Graham Greene said of Narayan, ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.'
DESCRIPTION - When Blanche White, black domestic worker extraordinaire, moved north to Boston, she thought it would be a better place to raise her kids, especially when she managed to get them both into a private school. But they appear to be getting as much attitude as education, as they start correcting Blanche's English and acting snotty about homeless people. When Blanche and the kids are invited to Amber Cove, an exclusive, all-black resort in Maine, she sees it as the perfect opportunity to observe her children with their wealthy friends and try to figure out how to stop them from becoming people she doesn't want to know. Along the way, Blanche gets an insider's view of the color and class divisions within the black community. Blanche stands out against the light-skinned, college-educated residents at Amber Cove, and some of the guests make sure she knows it - including her own daughter. But when one of the guests has a fatal accident and the godson of a famous septuagenarian feminist commits suicide, Blanche is enlisted to find out if these events are connected. What she discovers is a web of secrets that somebody may be willing to kill for, even as she meets a man determined to sweep her off her feet, no matter how much she weighs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - BarbaraNeely is also the author of BLANCHE ON THE LAM and BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH, for which she won awards that include the Agatha, the Anthony, and the Macavity. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
DESCRIPTION - Blanche is back! Blanche White - first featured in BLANCHE ON THE LAM and BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH - is a very black, middle-aged woman who cleans white people's houses for a living. Tart-tongued and shrewd, with a keen nose for trouble, she's also a queen-size snoop - who sees at a glance what people are really up to - especially if it's criminal. And heaven help you if Blanche has taken against you! Most of the people Blanche doesn't like are the ‘haves' of this world - and in BLANCHE CLEANS UP, this domestic worker by choice will encounter some ‘haves' with a vengeance. The funny thing is, Blanche had just been thinking that her life had finally settled down. It's been three years since she had to grab the kids and scurry out of Farleigh, North Carolina. Now they've all settled into life in the Roxbury section of Boston, and Blanche herself is feeling like she may finally be free to enjoy life - at least a little. But before Blanche can say, ‘Breakfast is ready,' she gets suckered into standing in as cook-housekeeper to one Allister Brindle, a Boston Brahmin politician, and his do-gooder wife. Blanche is quickly enmeshed in a festering canker of a scandal that moves from the Brindles' house (a.k.a. Prozac House) to her own black community as she tries to figure out the truth behind the swimming pool death of a young black man who knew a little too much. With life suddenly getting just a bit too interesting on both the home and work fronts, Blanche finds herself dealing with a love triangle with bent angles, teen pregnancy, phony spirituality, environmental skullduggery, homophobia, a letter she wishes she hadn't read, a friend whose life she might have saved, and at least one person who doesn't mean her any good. To protect herself and safeguard her family, Blanche will have to rely on her own hard-to-beat intuition - and call on her community network for information, her ancestors for guidance, and above all, her own well-established ability to listen at doors for the poop on who has what on whom. This time, Blanche sees more than she ever wanted to, but she also cleans up - in more ways than one - and does so with humor, good sense, and her own sharp social commentary. As BarbaraNeely herself has said of Blanche, ‘She will always be a woman who has fought for her life and won. She's capable of negotiating enemy territory - even without a reference from her most recent employer.' In Blanche, BarbaraNeely has created a heroine to cheer for - and in BLANCHE CLEANS UP, she gives us a novel that will thrill not only her own ardent fans but other readers eager to explore a new neighborhood with a feisty, funny black woman as their guide.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - BarbaraNeely is also the author of BLANCHE ON THE LAM and BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH, for which she won awards that include the Agatha, the Anthony, and the Macavity. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
DESCRIPTION - Blanche White, a forty-year-old black domestic with big thighs, a wry sense of humor, and a jaundiced view of the rich, is a most unlikely and reluctant sleuth. When someone is killed in the wealthy household where she is working - and hiding out from the Sheriff - Blanche would just as soon mind her own business, given that she's already got her own troubles with the law. But since she is the most likely suspect unless she uncovers the real killer, Blanche puts her considerable wit and intelligence to work. With the help of the remarkably efficient old-girl network among domestic workers, Blanche attacks the tangled web surrounding the murder to try and nail the true killer in time. In the process, Blanche provides a running commentary from a black, working-class, feminist perspective that is new to the mystery genre and rare in any fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - BarbaraNeely is also the author of BLANCHE ON THE LAM and BLANCHE AMONG THE TALENTED TENTH, for which she won awards that include the Agatha, the Anthony, and the Macavity. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
DESCRIPTION - One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. Night Journey is the English-language debut of the work that won María Negroni an Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams - dreams she renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and Calvino. In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality. Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between life and death. Night Journey reflects a mastery of a traditional form while brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural, multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a ‘medieval tabard' where a pelvis should be, a ‘lipless grin,' a ‘beach severed from the ocean.' In one poem ‘nomadic cities' whisk past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's eyes. Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's ‘indomitable literary intelligence' subdues an unspoken terror - helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what it is can one discover its ‘hidden splendor,' the ‘invisible center of the poem.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - María Negroni was born in Rosario, Argentina. She has published eleven books of poetry, three collections of essays, and two novels, as well as works in translation from French and English. Her work has appeared internationally in literary journals, including Diario de Poesía, Página 12, The Paris Review, Circumference, and Bomb, among others. She has been awarded two Argentine National Book Awards, for her collection of essays Ciudad Gotica (1996) and her poetry collection Viaje de la noche (1997). Her book of poems Islandia, in Anne Twitty's translation, received a PEN Translation Award in 2001. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Fundacion Octavio Paz, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. Winner of the following awards - International Prize for Essay Writing from Siglo XXI, 2002 PEN Award for best book of poetry in translation, for Islandia, 2000-2001 Octavio Paz Fellowship for Poetry, 1997 Argentine National Book Award, for El viaje de la noche, 1994 Guggenheim Fellowships.
DESCRIPTION - Racism is resilient, duplicitous, and endlessly adaptable, so it is no surprise that America is again in a period of civil rights activism. A significant reason racism endures is because it is structural: it's embedded in culture and in institutions. One of the places that racism hides-and thus perhaps the best place to oppose it-is books for young people. Was the Cat in the Hat Black? presents five serious critiques of the history and current state of children's literature tempestuous relationship with both implicit and explicit forms of racism. The book fearlessly examines topics both vivid-such as The Cat in the Hat's roots in blackface minstrelsy-and more opaque, like how the children's book industry can perpetuate structural racism via whitewashed covers even while making efforts to increase diversity. Rooted in research yet written with a lively, crackling touch, Nel delves into years of literary criticism and recent sociological data in order to show a better way forward. Though much of what is proposed here could be endlessly argued, the knowledge that what we learn in childhood imparts both subtle and explicit lessons about whose lives matter is not debatable. The text concludes with a short and stark proposal of actions everyone-reader, author, publisher, scholar, citizen- can take to fight the biases and prejudices that infect children's literature. While Was the Cat in the Hat Black? does not assume it has all the answers to such a deeply systemic problem, its audacity should stimulate discussion and activism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Nel is professor of English and Director of the Program in Children's Literature, Kansas State University. He is the author of THE ANNOTATED CAT: UNDER THE HATS OF SEUSS AND HIS CATS, DR. SEUSS: AMERICAN ICON, and J. K. ROWLING'S HARRY POTTER NOVELS: A READER'S GUIDE.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Neruda was a kind of King Midas. Everything he touched turned to poetry'. Says Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who also considers the Chilean Novel laureate ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century, in any language.' [THE FRAGRANGE OF GUAVA, 1983]. The CANTO GENERAL, thought by many of Neruda's most prominent critics to be the poet's masterpiece, is the stunning epic of an entire continent and its people. Although some parts of the poem, including THE HEIGHTS OF MACCHU PICCHU, have been translated,, this is the first time the CANTO has appeared in its entirety in English. The three hundred or so poems of the fifteen-part CANTO, written between 1938 and 1950, constitute a visionary interpretation of Latin America, encompassing its geography, its flora and fauna, its violent history of conquest and repression, its heroes and villains, its conflicts at the time of the poems' composition, the destiny of its peoples, and the life of the ooet himself. Without question this is one of the most important and powerful long poems written in the modern period. ‘Its fame rests not only on the excellence of many individual poems contained in it, but above all on the vastness of its vision, unique in modern poetry.' - Manuel Duran and Margery Safir, EARTH TONES.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was born and died in Chile, but as a member of the diplomatic corps he lived in and visited many parts of the world.
DESCRIPTION - Perhaps no other poet received in his lifetime the international recognition and honors that Pablo Neruda received, was so widely translated, or exerted such far-reaching influence. His name has long been a byword in the Spanish-speaking world (in his own country, he tells us, even the stones know his voice), and over the past decade he has been increasingly read and admired in the United States and England. Neruda's long-awaited memoirs begin with a lyrical evocation of his childhood in the south of Chile - then a frontier wilderness - where he was born, the son of a railway-man, in 1904. He retraces, with numerous anecdotes and loving recollections of people and places, his Bohemian student years in Santiago; his sojourns as Chilean consul in Burma, Ceylon, and Java, in Spain during the civil war, and finally in Mexico; and his service as a senator of the people of Chile. Neruda, a Communist, was driven from his senate seat in 1948, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. After a year in hiding, he escaped on horseback over the Andes and then to Europe; his travels took him to Russia, Eastern Europe, and China before he was finally able to return home in 1952. The following year he was awarded the Stalin (now Lenin) Prize, the highest literary honor of the U.S.S.R. In 1969, Chile's Communist Party chose Neruda as its candidate in the presidential election, but he soon withdrew in favor of Salvador Allende. In 1971, while ambassador to France, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Failing health led to his return to Chile in November 1972, where he died less than a year later, twelve days after the coup that overthrew Allende. The final section of these memoirs was written after the coup, and Spanish editions were published in Argentina and Spain several months after Neruda's death. In these pages we meet many of the century's most important literary and artistic figures, who were Neruda's friends - Garcia Lorca, Vallejo, Alberti, Eluard, Aragon, Ehrenburg, Picasso, Siqueiros, and Rivera, among them - and also such political leaders as Gandhi, Nehru, Mao Tse-tung, Castro, Che Guevara, and of course Neruda's good friend Allende. Neruda not only explains his views on poetry and describes the circumstances that inspired many of his poems, but he speaks out in defense of the causes he considered just and vigorously supported. This intimate and revealing record of the poet's life, written in his unmistakable style, is a significant part of the history of our time. The final editing of Pablo Neruda's memoirs was interrupted by his death, Matilde Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva prepared the manuscript for publication.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PABLO NERUDA (1904-1973) is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century, as well as a controversial political figure. Neruda's breadth and vision and wide range of themes are extraordinary, and his work continues to inspire new generations of writers. From his youth in the coastal town of Temuco in southern Chile, Neruda was known as a naturalist. In dozens of his odes, carefully selected and translated for this edition, Pablo Neruda expressed his joy in the beauty of simple things.
DESCRIPTION - The name of Pablo Neruda has for some time now been firmly in the consciousness of poetry readers in this country. Neruda's Obras Completas are so vast that readers and translators are often led to concentrate on specific parts of it. For the reader's, convenience, the editors have followed the general plan of the Obras Completas as well as its versions where they differ from other books. The greatest exception to this is in the case of the Veinte Poemas, where Neruda seemed to prefer the version in the small separate Losada volume. Beyond the 0bras Completas, this Selection draws on the more recent separate volumes: Plenos Poderes, the Memorial de Isla Negra, Una Casa en la Arena and La Barcarola. This is in no sense a critical edition and no attempt has been made to add notes or comments. The Obras are so vast that the establishment of a definitive text will be a task for the future, and for the Latin American future at that. The only desire has been to present the English language reader with as adequate a selection as possible. covering the whole field of Neruda's achievement. The Spanish text is presented opposite the English.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PABLO NERUDA (1904-1973) is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century, as well as a controversial political figure. Neruda's breadth and vision and wide range of themes are extraordinary, and his work continues to inspire new generations of writers. From his youth in the coastal town of Temuco in southern Chile, Neruda was known as a naturalist. In dozens of his odes, carefully selected and translated for this edition, Pablo Neruda expressed his joy in the beauty of simple things.
DESCRIPTION - ‘In his work a continent awakens to consciousness. So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five hooks of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as ‘the people's poet.' Born Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, Neruda adopted his pen name (in homage to the Czech poet Jan Neruda) to shield himself from family disapproval; by the age of twenty-five he was famous for the romantic verses-Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair-that remain his most beloved. Neruda was appointed an honorary consul abroad, serving in Burma, Spain, and France, where his moral and political convictions began to shape his art. Residence on Earth, written in the early nineteen-thirties, represented a stylistic breakthrough, which in turn gave way to an ideological one. In the forties, the sprawling historical chronicle Canto General cemented Neruda's role as a dissident man of letters. He was persecuted for his Communist beliefs when he returned to Chile in 1943, serving some of the years of a single senatorial term in hiding, then in exile, and he carried on his fight for the dignity of ordinary men and women into his last days, finally against the dictator Augusto Pinochet. This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English- language one, and a group of new translations by leading contemporary poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PABLO NERUDA (1904-1973) is regarded as the greatest Latin American poet of the 20th century, as well as a controversial political figure. Neruda's breadth and vision and wide range of themes are extraordinary, and his work continues to inspire new generations of writers. From his youth in the coastal town of Temuco in southern Chile, Neruda was known as a naturalist. In dozens of his odes, carefully selected and translated for this edition, Pablo Neruda expressed his joy in the beauty of simple things.
DESCRIPTION - GRIPPING AND SURPRISING. NEMESIS is a nail-biting thriller from one of the biggest stars in crime fiction. Grainy closed-circuit television footage shows a man walking into an Oslo bank and putting a gun to a cashier's head. He tells the young woman to count to twenty-five. When the robber doesn't get his money in time, the cashier is executed, and two million Norwegian kroner disappear without a trace. Police Detective Harry Hole is assigned to the case, While Hole's girlfriend is away in Russia, an old flame decides to get in touch. Former girlfriend and struggling artist Anna Bethsen invites Hale to dinner, and he can't resist a visit. But the evening ends in an all too familiar way as Hale awakens with a thundering headache, a missing cell phone, and no memory of the past twelve hours. That same morning, Anna is found shot dead in her bed. Hole begins to receive threatening e-mails. Is someone trying to frame him for this unexplained death? Meanwhile, the bank robberies continue with unparalleled savagery. As the death tall continues to mount, Hole becomes a prime suspect in a criminal investigation led by his longtime adversary Tom Wader and Waaler's vigilante police force. Racing from the cool, autumnal streets of Oslo to the steaming villages of Brazil, Hole is determined to absolve himself of suspicion by uncovering all the information needed to crack both cases. But the ever-threatening Waaler is not finished with his old archenemy quite yet.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and one of Europe's most critically acclaimed and successful crime writers. His first novel featuring Police Detective Harry Hole was an instant hit in Norway, winning the Glass Key 1998 for Best Nordic Crime Novel of the Year - the most prestigious crime-writing award in Northern Europe. Nesbø lives in Oslo.
DESCRIPTION - Police Detective Harry Hole has made a terrible mistake. An embarrassment in the line of duty has pulled him off his usual beat. Reassigned to mundane surveillance tasks, he reluctantly agrees to monitor neo-Nazi activities in Oslo. But as Hole is drawn into an underground world of illegal gun trafficking, brutal beatings, and sexual extortions, he soon learns that he must act fast to prevent an international conspiracy from unfolding. Trapped in the crosshairs of the man with all the answers, Harry Hole plunges headlong into a mystery with roots deep in the past. His investigation takes him back to Norway's darkest hour - when members of the young nation's government collaborated with leaders of Nazi Germany. Dredging up a painful history of denial, Hole turns his attention to the Norwegian troops who fought for Adolf Hitler on the Eastern front. Branded by their countrymen as traitors, the soldiers who survived the brutal Russian winter - the hunger, fear, cold, grenades, and snipers - returned home as scapegoats of a nation's atonement. Sixty years later, old grudges and betrayals appear to have been laid to vest, until Hole realizes that someone has begun to pick off the surviving soldiers one by one. With only his troubled, guilt-ridden conscience as a guide, Hole must move quickly through the traps and mirrors of a twisted criminal mind. But as his sanity slips in a slow burn of anger and alcohol, his mistakes continue to pile up. And if he fails to quicken the pace, Norway's darkest hour since World War II just might lie in the future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist, and one of Europe's most critically acclaimed and successful crime writers today. His first novel featuring Police Detective Harry Hole was an instant hit in Norway, winning the Glass Key Award for Best Nordic Crime Novel - the most prestigious crime-writing award in Northern Europe. In 2004, THE REDBREAST was voted the ‘Best Norwegian Crime Novel Ever Written' by members of Norwegian book clubs. Nesbø lives in Oslo.
DESCRIPTION - This volume represents three generations of Czech poetry. Vitezslav Nezval (born in 1900) adopted surrealism to express the paradoxes of experience, above all in his briefer impressions of Prague. Antonin Bartusek (1921), like Eliot (whose influence he admits), is a master of suggestion: there are hints of greatness in his language and rhythms, in his concern with life and death. With Josef Hanzlik (1938) we enter the contemporary world: here is a poet who, freshly and fluently, records his response to a world of political violence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VITEZSLAV NEZVAL (1900-1958) was the most colourful and versatile of Czech poets between the two wars. He was associated in his early work with the French Dadaists, and was an exponent of 'poetism', but the poetry of his later years gravitated increasingly towards traditional forms. ANTONIN BARTUSEK was born in 1925 in Zeltava, Western Moravia, and studied at Charles University, Prague. He now works at the State Office for Historical Monuments. JOSEF HANZLIK, lyrical poet and translator, was born in 1938 at Neratovice near Prague and studied psychology at Charles University. He was poetry editor of Plamen, the literary monthly of the Writer's Union, until its suspension in 1969. One of the most striking personalities among the younger generation of poets, he has had a great influence on young people.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The present collection of essays is an integral part of the fictional world of THE RIVER BETWEEN, WEEP NOT CHILD, and A GRAIN OF WHEAT. Most of them were written at about the same time as the novels; they have been products of the same moods and touch on similar questions and problems. There are differences. In a novel the writer is totally immersed in a world of imaginations which is other than his conscious self. At his most intense and creative the writer is transfigured, he is possessed, he becomes a medium. In the essay the writer can be more direct, didactic, polemical, or he can merely state his beliefs and faith: his conscious self is here more at work. Nevertheless the boundaries of his imagination are limited by the writer's beliefs, experiences in life, by where in fact he stands in the world of social relations. This must be part of the reason that readers are curious about a writer's opinion on almost everything under the sun - from politics and religion to conservation of wild life! The writer is thus forced either by the public or by the needs of his craft to define his beliefs, attitudes and outlook in the more argumentative form of the essay. Two things I might here explain: the emphasis, in this collection, is on politics and on West Indian fiction. Literature does not grow or develop in a vacuum; it is given impetus, shape, direction and even area of concern by social, political and economic forces in a particular society. The relationship between creative literature and these other forces cannot be ignored, especially in Africa, where modern literature has grown against the gory background of European imperialism and its changing manifestations: slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Our culture over the last hundred years has developed against the same stunting, dwarfing background.' - from the Author's note.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system', by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances.
DESCRIPTION - From the exiled Kenyan novelist, playwright, poet, and literary critic-a magisterial comic novel that is certain to take its place as a landmark of postcolonial African literature. In exile now for more than twenty years, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has become one of the most widely read African writers of our time, the power and scope of his work garnering him international attention and praise. His aim in WIZARD OF THE CROW is, in his own words, nothing less than ‘to sum up Africa of the twentieth century in the context of two thousand years of world history.' Commencing in ‘our times' and set in the ‘Free Republic of Aburlria,' the novel dramatizes with corrosive humor and keenness of observation a battle for control of the souls of the Aburlrian people. Among the contenders: His High Mighty Excellency; the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank. Fashioning the stories of the powerful and the ordinary into a dazzling mosaic, WIZARD OF THE CROW reveals humanity in all its endlessly surprising complexity. Informed by richly enigmatic traditional African storytelling, WIZARD OF THE CROW is a masterpiece, the crowning achievement in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's career thus far.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system', by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances.
DESCRIPTION - Njoroge's only true brother was Mwangi who had died in the white man's big war in Burma, Boro, Kori, and Kamau were all sons of his father's eldest wife, but they all behaved as if they were of one mother and home was a particularly happy place. Above everything else, Njoroge, the youngest, wanted to get education and become like the eldest son of the rich farmer, Jacobo, who had finished all the learning in Kenya and would now go to England. His father, Ngotho, was employed by Mr. Howlands who had come from England to farm the land. Together the two men would go from place to place, examining a new shoot or pulling out a weed, Ngotho felt responsible for the land because he owed it to the dead, the living and the unborn of his line to guard over it until the prophecy came true; Mr. Howlands walked through the shamba with a sense of victory because he had tamed this unoccupied wilderness. At school, Njoroge was good at reading. Education was the key to the future: when Jomo was arrested and a state of emergency declared, it made very little difference at first - everyone knew that Jomo would win, But, one day, Ngotho was arrested and tortured, Boro left to join the freedom fighters in the forest, Jacobo was killed and Mwihaki, his daughter, would not see Njoroge, Gradually all the family was drawn into the struggle and the war became a day-to-day tragedy. This first novel by a young Kikuyu is a moving study of the fight for freedom and the rich red earth of Kenya. James Ngugi was born at Limuru, Kenya, in 1938 and has just finished his last term at University College, Makerere, where he has been reading English. During his time at Makerere he has written two novels, The first of these was given the highest award in the East African Literature Bureau's competition in creative writing and is planned for publication in 1965, His play, THE BLACK HERMIT, was produced at the Uganda National Theatre as part of the Independence celebrations. He has also been editor of Penpoint, the journal of the Makerere Department of English, in which several of his own short stories have appeared. He is widely known also in Kenya as a literary and political journalist through his contributions to the Sunday Nation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ngugi wa Thiong'o (born January 5, 1938) is a Kenyan author, formerly working in English and now working in Gikuyu. His work includes novels, plays, short stories, and essays, ranging from literary and social criticism to children's literature. He is the founder and editor of the Gikuyu-language journal, Mutiiri. In 1977, Ngugi embarked upon a novel form of theater in his native Kenya which sought to liberate the theatrical process from what he held to be ‘the general bourgeois education system', by encouraging spontaneity and audience participation in the performances.
DESCRIPTION - TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS, which was written by Nietzsche (1844-1900) in 1888, the year before he went mad, briefly summarizes his views on almost the whole range of his philosophical interests. It remarkably fulfils his ambition to ‘say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book'. THE ANTI-CHRIST, written immediately afterwards, is his longest and least restrained polemic against Christianity and Christian morals, and is expressed in his most vivid and forceful style. The two books in this volume are linked by a special commentary with Nietzsche's other works.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 - 25 August 1900) was a German philologist, philosopher, cultural critic, poet and composer. He wrote several critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's key ideas include perspectivism, the Will to Power, the 'death of God', the Übermensch and eternal recurrence. One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of 'life-affirmation,' which embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. It further champions the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts. Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked with atheism, psychologism and historism; he considered them to be human creations loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect.
DESCRIPTION - A North Vietnamese man, Kien, narrates his memories of his youth, the pains of adolescence, his experience of the war, and his attempts, as a struggling writer in postwar Hanoi, to cope with the horrors of war and his own survival.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Hoàng ?u Ph??ng, pen name B?o Ninh (born 18 October 1952 in Ngh? An) is a Vietnamese novelist, essayist and writer of short stories, best known for his first novel, published in English as The Sorrow of War. During the Vietnam War, he served in the Glorious 27th Youth Brigade. Of the five hundred who went to war with the brigade in 1969, he is one of ten who survived. In 1987, B?o Ninh published Tr?i b?y chú lùn (Camp of Seven Dwarves), a collection of short stories. He has also written a second novel, Steppe, but is said to be reluctant to publish it. A short story by B?o Ninh, "A Marker on the Side of the Boat" (Kh?c d?u m?n thuy?n), translated by Linh Dinh, is included in the anthology Night, Again. B?o Ninh is also a successful essayist. He is interviewed in Ken Burns's series The Vietnam War.
DESCRIPTION - RIPPLES IN THE POOL is the first novel of an exceptionally gifted and articulate writer. Selina, the heroine, whose early upbringing is ominously clouded in mystery, becomes disillusioned with the artificial glitter and superficiality of the sick urban society in which she has-spent the prime of her life. She plans to resolve her alienation by reassimilating into the rural background of her childhood. But her attempt to find peace of mind in a new identity is foredoomed. She is fatally flawed and her machinations end in tragedy for herself and many of those with whom her life has become inextricably involved. But the unusual, exciting and readable plot is only part of the literary contribution of this book. The characters, who span the whole tapestry of rural life in Africa. are portrayed with a depth and spicy richness that illuminates with shocking clarity aspects of rural society heretofore largely unexplored by African writers. Brooding over the whole story is the pervasive symbolism of the pool and the strange old man who guards not only, one feels, its sombre secrets but also the integrity of the land and its people. Defiled by Selina and the amoral modernity that she had embraced, ultimately the pool apparently triumphs in her personal annihilation and the total rejection of all she stands for. Or does it?
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rebeka Njau (born 1932) is a Kenyan educator, writer and textile artist. She also writes under the name Marina Gashe. She addresses issues that affect women directly and then demonstrates how women's issues are symptomatic of a malaise in the larger Kenyan society.
DESCRIPTION - Christopher Okigbo, once described as 'Africa's most lyrical poet of the twentieth century' was killed in September 1967, fighting for the independence of Biafra. The Sunday Times described his death as 'the single most important tragedy of the Nigerian civil war'. The manner in which Okigbo died typified the passionate, tortured and dramatic quality of his life. Widely considered along with Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe as part of modern Nigeria's greatest literary triumvirate, Okigbo's death promoted him to cult status among subsequent generations of African writers. This is the first full biography of the Nigerian poet. It places Okigbo within the turmoil of his generation and illustrates the aspects of his life that gave rise to such an intense poetry. How did his experience in the prestigious, English-type boarding school, Umuahia, where he was known more as a sportsman than a scholar, influence his life and later choices? Why was he sacked from the colonial service, and how did that lead him towards a search for private recovery, and ultimately towards poetry? What led him to take up arms? In other words, how did his eclectic pursuits as high school teacher, university librarian, publisher, gun-runner and guerrilla fuel his poetic drive? OBI NWAKANMA, journalist and poet, is Assistant Professor in the Department of English atTruman State University, Kirksville, Missouri. Nigeria: HEBN (PB)
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - OBI NWAKANMA, journalist and poet, is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
DESCRIPTION - We had hoped that we lived in a world that would rally in the face of a common threat. Instead, we found that the collective good is abandoned for the economic and political benefit of a handful of people, and nationalist myths of exceptionalism rob billions of their right to survive. Strange and Difficult Times is a new essay collection looking at the biases, assumptions and moral failures in Western responses (both individual and collective, psychological and practical) to the 'crises' of the early twenty-first century. Nanjala Nyabola focusses on the big crisis of the current moment, Covid-19, and the world that it may leave in its wake. Condemning the ways in which the pandemic has exacerbated global inequalities, she argues against the lazy lens that attributes agency to the West and subjecthood to Africans and others in the Global South-drawing all of the aspects of the pandemic together into one structurally racist and ethically indifferent political and economic order. This is the Global South writing back against a system that wasn't designed to include or benefit it, in the voice of a representative with a keen understanding and first-hand experience of living and thinking within that system. Nyabola offers reflections on the future of the state, the purpose of government and the dangers of post-truth democracy. She presents the deepening of inequality via the 'new normal' of the 'post-Covid world', but which is in fact divided into societies that are post-Covid and those that have not been permitted to protect themselves and recover. And she takes a historical look at how African countries, governments, peoples and individuals have been treated and written about during past pandemics, including HIV/AIDS in the 80s and 90s, Ebola in the 2010s, and Spanish flu a century ago.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology and politics, as well as migration and human mobility. A constant traveler, at the time of writing she has visited over seventy countries across four continents.
DESCRIPTION - What does it feel like to move through a world designed to limit and exclude you? What are the joys and pains of holidays for people of colour, when guidebooks are never written with them in mind? How are black lives today impacted by the othering legacy of colonial cultures and policies? What can travel tell us about our sense of self, of home, of belonging and identity? Why has the world order become hostile to human mobility, as old as humanity itself, when more people are on the move than ever? Nanjala Nyabola is constantly exploring the world, working with migrants and confronting complex realities challenging common assumptions - both hers and others'. From Nepal to Botswana, Sicily to Haiti, New York to Nairobi, her sharp, humane essays ask tough questions and offer surprising, deeply shocking and sometimes funny answers. It is time we saw the world through her eyes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and political analyst based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology and politics, as well as migration and human mobility. A constant traveller, at the time of writing she has visited over seventy countries across four continents.
DESCRIPTION - First published in 1939 - which was hardly the time for exuberant literary experiments - AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS was re-issued in 1960. And was then recognized as a classic of its time - and of ours. The story introduces us to Finn MacCool, legendary giant; Sweeny, accursed bird-king of Dal Araidhe; the Pooka MacPhellimey, member of the devil class; and a fast-drinking cast of students, fairies, cowpunchers and clerics. Dylan Thomas called it ‘Just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.' This is a book so unusual that it will not fit info any category. What the publishers can safety say about it, however, is that it is one of the most amusing, wildly funny works of genius in contemporary Irish literature. AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS is perhaps best described in the words of Graham Greene: ‘It is in the line of TRISTRAM SHANDY and ULYSSES; its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland - the Celtic legend (in the stories of Finn), the popular adventure novels (of a Mr. Tracy), the nightmare element as you get it in Joyce, the ancient poetry of Bardic Ireland and the working-class poetry of the absurd Jim Casey. On all these the author imposes the unity of his own humorous vigor, and the technique he employs is as efficient as it is original. We have had books inside books before now, and characters who are given life outside their fiction, but O'Brien takes Pirandello and Gide a long way further: the screw is turned until you have, (a) the narrator writing a book about a man called Trellis who is, (b) writing a book about certain characters who, (c) are turning the tables on Trellis by writing about him. It is a wild fantastic magnificently comic notion, but looking back afterwards one realizes that by no other method could the realistic, the legendary, the novelette have been worked in together.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Brian O'Nolan, who wrote under the names of Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen, was born in Tyrone in 1911, and died in Dublin in 1966. After a brilliant career as a student at University College, Dublin (where he edited a magazine called Blather), he became a civil servant, though he eventually resigned. For many years he wrote the famous Myles na Gopaleen column in the Irish Times.
DESCRIPTION - THE THIRD POLICEMAN is Flann O'Brien's (Brian O'Nolan) brilliantly dark comic novel about the nature of time, death, and existence. Told by a narrator who has committed a botched robbery and brutal murder, the novel follows him and his adventures in a two-dimensional police station where, through the theories of the scientist/philosopher de Selby, he is introduced to ‘Atomic Theory' and its relation to bicycles, the existence of eternity (which turns out to be just down the road), and de Selby's view that the earth is not round but ‘sausage-shaped.' With the help of his newly found soul named ‘Joe,' he grapples with the riddles and contradictions that three eccentric policeman present to him. The last of O'Brien's novels to be published, THE THIRD POLICEMAN joins O'Brien's other fiction (AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS, THE POOR MOUTH, THE HARD LIFE, THE BEST OF MYLES, and THE DALKEY ARCHIVE) to ensure his place, along with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, as one of Ireland's great comic geniuses. THE THIRD POLICEMAN was written between 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished until his death in 1966. In 1967 it was printed by MacGibbon & Kee in the United Kingdom and Walker & Company in the U.S.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Brian O'Nolan, who wrote under the names of Flann O'Brien and Myles na Gopaleen, was born in Tyrone in 1911, and died in Dublin in 1966. After a brilliant career as a student at University College, Dublin (where he edited a magazine called Blather), he became a civil servant, though he eventually resigned. For many years he wrote the famous Myles na Gopaleen column in the Irish Times.
DESCRIPTION - A major literary achievement by the author of a contemporary American classic, GOING AFTER CACCIATO. When Tim O'Brien's novel GOING AFTER CACCIATO won the National Book Award in 1979, it was the unanimous choice of the judges: ‘His landscapes have the breadth and scope of Tolstoy's, and the essential American wonder and innocence of his vision deserves to stand beside that of Stephen Crane.' Tim O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again clearly demonstrated in The Things They Carried, a bold new literary form that explores the power of stories to save our lives. THE THINGS THEY CARRIED works its magic at many levels. On the surface it is a sequence of award-winning stories about a platoon of young foot soldiers caught up in the madness of the Vietnam War. At the same time, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED has the cumulative power and unity of a novel, with recurring characters and interwoven strands of plot and theme. Each chapter flows into the next. Each story echoes off other stories. And on a third level, this amazing book is bound together by Tim O'Brien's own voice and character - as a twenty-three-year-old foot soldier and as a forty-three-year-old writer recreating that experience. Though Vietnam is central to THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, this is not simply a book about war. It is a book about the human heart, about the terrible weight of those things all of us carry through our lives. Five chapters originally appeared in Esquire, including the title chapter, ‘The Things They Carried,' which won the National Magazine Award in fiction. Others have appeared in Gentlemen's Quarterly, Granta, Playboy, and The Quarterly. Several were included in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Best American Short Stories. Prior to publication, foreign rights were sold to six countries. Tim O'Brien grew up in Minnesota and now lives north of Boston. A Seymour Lawrence book.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Timothy 'Tim' O'Brien (born October 1, 1946) is an American novelist best known for his work of fiction, The Things They Carried, a critically acclaimed collection of semi-autobiographical, inter-related short-stories inspired by O'Brien's experiences in the Vietnam War. In addition, he is known for his work, Going After Cacciato, also written about wartime Vietnam.
DESCRIPTION - Acclaimed novelist Heather O'Neill structures her book around ten key lessons she learned in childhood from her father. Wryly humorous and generous, she shares memories and stories that illustrate why it is good to steal things, why one should learn to play the tuba, and why one should never keep a journal. Her unusual mentors went well beyond her janitor father to include ex-bank robbers and homeless men. These eccentric teachers taught her about the circuitous alleyways of semantics and the depth of moral philosophy. O'Neill's intimate recollections make Wisdom in Nonsense the perfect companion to her widely praised debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals (HarperCollins). Co-published with Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littErature canadienne.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Heather O'Neill is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, screenwriter, and essayist. Her work has been shortlisted for many prestigious awards. She lives in Montreal, Quebec.
DESCRIPTION - Silvina Ocampo is one of the most disturbing and fascinating writers a reader can hope to encounter. Many of her stories are about the uneasy conjunction of opposites: evil and saintliness, love and hate, the difficult world of childhood and the dangerously simple world of adults. Borges has written that the cruelty of Ocampo's stories is no doubt the result of the nobility of her soul, a judgement no less paradoxical than much of her own writing. Powerful and haunting, these stories about emotions carried to their limits are among the world's finest. Preface by Jorge Luis Borges. ‘Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.' - Jorge Luis Borges. ‘I don't know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don't show us.' - Italo Calvino. ‘Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and Garcia Marquez, the leading writer in Spanish.' - Jorge Amado. Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvellous. Other than Silvina Ocampo. I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humour.' - Alberto Manguel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Silvina Ocampo Aguirre (July 28, 1903 - December 14, 1993) was an Argentine poet and short-fiction writer. Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of the six children of Manuel Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre. She was educated at home by tutors. One of her sisters was Victoria Ocampo, the publisher of the literarily important Argentine magazine Sur. She studied drawing in Paris under Giorgio de Chirico. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose lover she became (1933) when Bioy was 19. They were married in 1940. In 1954 she adopted Bioy's daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954–94), who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo's death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was recently (as of 2006) awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy. Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006. With Fabián Bioy's death, it is likely the many documents and manuscripts of both writers will soon become available to scholars. Ocampo began as a writer with the book of short stories Viaje olvidado in 1937, and followed up with three books of poetry, Enumeracion de la patria, Espacios mEtricos and Los sonetos del jardín. With Espacios mEtricos, which had been published in 1942 by the publishing house Sur, she won the Premio Municipal in 1954. She won the second prize in the National Poetry Comptetition for Los nombres in 1953 and came back to win the first place prize in 1962 with Lo amargo por dulce. Co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ocampo published Los que aman, odian, in 1946, and with Juan Rodolfo Wilcock she published the theatrical work Los Traidores in 1956. With Borges and Bioy Casares, Ocampo co-authored the celebrated Antología de la literatura fantástica in 1940, and also the Antología poEtica Argentina in 1941.
DESCRIPTION - A woman traveling on a transatlantic ship has fallen overboard. Adrift at sea, she makes a promise to Saint Rita, "arbiter of the impossible," that if she survives, she will write her life story. As she drifts, she wonders what she might include in the story of her life - a repertoire of miracles, threats, and people parade through her mind. Little by little, her imagination begins to commandeer her memories, escaping the strictures of realism. Translated into English for the very first time, The Promise showcases Silvina Ocampo at her most feminist, idiosyncratic and subversive. Ocampo worked quietly to perfect this novella over the course of twenty-five years, nearly up until the time of her death in 1993. The narrator's conflicted memory, as well as the intrusion of memories that are not her own, illustrate Ocampo's struggle with dementia in the last years of her life, and much like the author herself, here we find a narrator writing "against a world of conventional ideas."
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Silvina Ocampo (1903–1993) was born to an old and prosperous family in Buenos Aires, the youngest of six sisters. After studying painting with Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand LEger in Paris, she returned to her native city - she would live there for the rest of her life - and devoted herself to writing. Her eldest sister, Victoria, was the founder of the seminal modernist journal and publishing house Sur, which championed the work of Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, and in 1940 Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo were married. The first of Ocampo's seven collections of stories, Viaje olvidado (Forgotten Journey), appeared in 1937; the first of her seven volumes of poems, Enumeracion de la patria (Enumeration of My Country) in 1942. She was also a prolific translator - of Dickinson, Poe, Melville, and Swedenborg - and wrote plays and tales for children. The writer and filmmaker Edgardo Cozarinsky once wrote, For decades, Silvina Ocampo was the best kept secret of Argentine letters. Silvina Ocampo: Selected Poems is published by NYRB/Poets.
DESCRIPTION - When she hears about the suicide of a Buenos Aires train driver who has left a note confessing to four mortal ‘accidents' on the train tracks, journalist Veronica Rosenthal decides to investigate. For the police the case is closed (suicide is suicide), for Veronica it is the beginning of a journey that takes her into an unfamiliar world of grinding poverty, crime-infested neighborhoods, and train drivers on commuter lines haunted by the memory of bodies hit at speed by their locomotives in the middle of the night. Aided by a train driver with whom she has a tumultuous and reckless affair, a junkie in rehab and two street kids willing to risk everything for a can of Coke, she uncovers a group of men involved in betting on working-class youngsters convinced to play Russian roulette by standing in front of fast-coming trains to see who endures the longest.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sergio Olguín was born in Buenos Aires in 1967 and was a journalist before turning to fiction. Olguín has won a number of awards, among others the Premio Tusquets 2009 for his novel Oscura monotona sangre (Dark Monotonous Blood) His books have been translated into German, French and Italian. The Fragility of Bodies is his first novel to be translated into English. Miranda France is the author of two acclaimed volumes of travel writing: Don Quixote's Delusions and Bad Times in Buenos Aires. She has also written the novels Hill Farm and The Day Before the Fire and translated much Latin American fiction, including Claudia Piñeiro's novels for Bitter Lemon Press.
DESCRIPTION - Scott Moody has a few problems. He's fresh out of a mental hospital. His wife has left him. He drives a taxi and occupies a dumpy apartment. He lives in the obscure inland city of Spokane, Washington and takes frequent doses of Thorazine. He became a private investigator after hallucinations about Humphrey Bogart. Now he's involved with the police who don't think it was a good idea. When this slightly off-center detective tries to find his ex-girlfriend's husband, it becomes clear that the real question is whether he can solve the mystery of his own life - the mystery of happiness and sanity. MOODY GETS THE BLUES is a compelling, humorous mystery and also a portrait of the pathology of madness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.
DESCRIPTION - From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, a subversive history of white male American identity. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? Through the last 150 years of American history -- from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics -- Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ijeoma Oluo is a Seattle-based writer, speaker, and Internet Yeller. She's the author of the New York Times Best-Seller So You Want to Talk about Race, published by Seal Press. Named one of the The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans in 2017, one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine, one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle by Seattle Met, and winner of the of the 2018 Feminist Humanist Award by the American Humanist Society, Oluo's work focuses primarily on issues of race and identity, feminism, social and mental health, social justice, the arts, and personal essay. Her writing has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, Elle Magazine, TIME, The Stranger, and the Guardian, among other outlets.
DESCRIPTION - Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ONDAATJE was born in Sri Lanka. He left there at the age of eleven to go to school in England. He went to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto, where he teaches at Glendon College, York University. His books include a fictional memoir about his family in Sri Lanka, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY; COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, a novel based on the life and music of Buddy Bolden; and THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID. His books of poetry include THERE'S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I'M LEARNING TO DO and SECULAR LOVE.
DESCRIPTION - This book is an absorbing autobiographical journey of discovery to a far place in another time. Through memory, through imagination, the author reveals a world of fabulous characters and landscapes as he finds his own beginnings in the strange context of his family history. Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to a privileged, highly eccentric family of mixed Dutch, Sinhalese, and Tamil ancestry. His parents separated, and he left Ceylon when he was eleven, eventually settling in Canada. Almost twenty-five years later, he returned to sort out the recollected fragments of experience, legend, and family scandal, and to reconstruct the fascinating relationship of his parents set against the exotic background of a colonial empire in decline. Cobras in the garden; grandmother Gratiaen swept away in a flood; the humid silence of the tropical afternoons; his father burying gin bottles in the flower beds; mad, drunken expeditions through the jungle - these are a few of the pieces that the author tries to fit together in order to understand who his parents were and who he is.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MICHAEL ONDAATJE was born in Sri Lanka. He left there at the age of eleven to go to school in England. He went to Canada in 1962 and now lives in Toronto, where he teaches at Glendon College, York University. His books include a fictional memoir about his family in Sri Lanka, RUNNING IN THE FAMILY; COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, a novel based on the life and music of Buddy Bolden; and THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID. His books of poetry include THERE'S A TRICK WITH A KNIFE I'M LEARNING TO DO and SECULAR LOVE.
DESCRIPTION - Juan Carlos Onetti, the man perhaps most responsible for resetting the course of Latin American literature, a leading member of the so-called Generation of 1945, whose work prepared the ground for such writers as Cortázar, Garcia Mârquez, and Vargas Llosa: here is his masterpiece, his most dazzling work of fiction, A BRIEF LIFE, originally published in Spanish twenty-five years ago, now in English for the first time. A work of awesome complexity and eroticism, A BRIEF LIFE concerns an advertising copywriter in his forties who seeks release from himself and from the physical empirical world he knows, in order to experience a moment of psychic weightlessness-a ‘brief life.' As he stalks this moment, stripping himself of his own history, even his own imagination, he resolves to channel his consciousness through persons both real and imagined, through improbable objects, through a ‘desperate attention to all nuances.' The story unfolds as a series of imaginings, in scenes that repeat themselves in new contexts where characters recur, transformed into others who die and are born again. The protagonist's fantasies spin off in many directions and his mental processes move fluidly on the wave of Onetti's extraordinary prose, prismatically revealing each new dimension of being and each new aspect of sexuality. It is a brilliant novel. It is a literary event. JUAN CARLOS ONETTI was born in Montevideo in 1909, and won Uruguay's national prize for literature in 1961. In 1974 he was jailed by that country's police for participating in a literary panel that awarded first prize to a short story declared obscene and subversive by the government.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.
DESCRIPTION - A Dream Come True collects the complete stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America's greatest authors, and regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing. Juan Carlos Onetti's A Dream Come True depicts a sharp, coherent, literary voice, encompassing Onetti's early stages of writing and his later texts. They span from a few pages in Avenida de Mayo - Diagonal - Avenida de Mayo to short novellas, like the celebrated detective story The Face of Disgrace and Death and the Girl, an existential masterpiece that explores the complexity of violence and murder in the mythical town of Santa María. His stories create a world of writing which is both universal and highly local, mediating between philosophical characters and the quotidian melodrama of Uruguayan villages.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.
DESCRIPTION - BODY SNATCHER Is a major literary event: the masterpiece of Uruguayan Juan Carlos Onetti, who has for decades been acknowledged throughout South America and Europe as a world-class writer of fiction. Relatively unknown in America, Onetti, with the English language publication of Body Snatcher, confirms his competitive preeminence among the great novelists of the Boom of Latin American fiction - including Garcia Marquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, and others. Set in Santa Maria, an imaginary provincial town on the banks of the River Plate (reminiscent of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County), BODY SNATCHER, a tragicomic novel of grotesque ideals and lost illusions, recounts two attempts at self-fulfillment, two Promethean stories by turns. Larsen, a boldly original pimp of weary whores, tries to establish the perfect brothel; passionate Julita, a mad widow, refuses to accept the death of her husband by taking his younger brother as her lover. In their sordid, self- righteous society, which pits stupidity and lust against honor and love, both characters are doomed to failure. Informed by the gothic sobriety of Faulkner, the desperate cynicism of CEline, hysterically funny avant-garde nihilism, and the stark precision of Dostoevsky, Body Snatcher is a formidable work of fiction. Juan Carlos Onetti was born in Montevideo in 1909. He currently lives in Spain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.
DESCRIPTION - As the first of his novels to appear in the United States, The Shipyard introduces to readers in this country a Uruguayan with a literary reputation well established in Latin America and increasingly known abroad. Chief character in this strongly atmospheric story is one Larsen, an enigmatic figure who returns to the town of Santa Maria, from which he had been expelled five years earlier. Larsen takes over the managership of Santa Maria's once-prosperous shipyard but soon discovers he has entered a world compounded of the quicksands of illusion and delusion. Onetti chronicles Larsen's inexorable yet witting descent into the quagmire of meaningless forms and motions with a stylistic detail that lends the force of an imperative to the course of his actions. The world of the shipyard - a claustrophobic phantasy which Onetti has made an actuality - not only submerges its participants - but immerses the reader as well.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.
DESCRIPTION - 2018 Winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights. Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the Global South was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar and activist Paul Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress as exalted by widely taught formulations like manifest destiny and Jacksonian democracy, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms US history into one of the working class organizing against imperialism. Drawing on rich narratives and primary source documents, Ortiz links racial segregation in the Southwest and the rise and violent fall of a powerful tradition of Mexican labor organizing in the twentieth century, to May 1, 2006, known as International Workers' Day, when migrant laborers - Chicana/os, Afrocubanos, and immigrants from every continent on earth - united in resistance on the first Day Without Immigrants. As African American civil rights activists fought Jim Crow laws and Mexican labor organizers warred against the suffocating grip of capitalism, Black and Spanish-language newspapers, abolitionists, and Latin American revolutionaries coalesced around movements built between people from the United States and people from Central America and the Caribbean. In stark contrast to the resurgence of America First rhetoric, Black and Latinx intellectuals and organizers today have historically urged the United States to build bridges of solidarity with the nations of the Americas. Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Paul Ortiz (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology.
DESCRIPTION - In this penetrating examination of African American politics and culture, Paul Ortiz throws a powerful light on the struggle of black Floridians to create the first statewide civil rights movement against Jim Crow. Concentrating on the period between the end of slavery and the election of 1920, Emancipation Betrayed vividly demonstrates that the decades leading up to the historic voter registration drive of 1919-20 were marked by intense battles during which African Americans struck for higher wages, took up arms to prevent lynching, forged independent political alliances, boycotted segregated streetcars, and created a democratic historical memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Contrary to previous claims that African Americans made few strides toward building an effective civil rights movement during this period, Ortiz documents how black Floridians formed mutual aid organizations-secret societies, women's clubs, labor unions, and churches-to bolster dignity and survival in the harsh climate of Florida, which had the highest lynching rate of any state in the union. African Americans called on these institutions to build a statewide movement to regain the right to vote after World War I. African American women played a decisive role in the campaign as they mobilized in the months leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The 1920 contest culminated in the bloodiest Election Day in modern American history, when white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan violently, and with state sanction, prevented African Americans from voting. Ortiz's eloquent interpretation of the many ways that black Floridians fought to expand the meaning of freedom beyond formal equality and his broader consideration of how people resist oppression and create new social movements illuminate a strategic era of United States history and reveal how the legacy of legal segregation continues to play itself out to this day.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Professor Paul Ortiz (Ph.D. Duke University, 2000) is the author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States, which received the 2018 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence. His book Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 was awarded the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Book Prize from the Florida Historical Society and the Florida Institute of Technology.
DESCRIPTION - The animals on Mr. Jones's farm stage a successful revolution, and take the place over. Their hopes, their plans, and their achievements, form the subject of ANIMAL FARM. In the first flush of enthusiasm there is set up a great commandment, ‘All animals are equal', but unfortunately leadership devolves almost automatically on the pigs, who are on a higher intellectual level than the rest. The revolution begins to go wrong - yet at every step excellent excuses are always forthcoming for each perversion of the original doctrine. Mr. Orwell has a wonderful sympathy for most of his animal characters, and they are all very much alive. It is not only the fight between the two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, as to who shall run things - what equally stirs the reader and brings tears is what happens to the devoted work-horse, Boxer, and even to that less admirable but very deftly pictured character, the mare Mollie, who loved ribbons. About this little book there is the same kind of reality one concedes to ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It lives in the heart as a direct story, as a story for its own sake, and yet, although the author never intrudes or points a moral, it also takes on meanings from what we have all noticed in the affairs of the world. To read it is an experience out of the ordinary, for it goes at a bounce into that region where the heart and the head join together in enjoyment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
DESCRIPTION - DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON is the first full-length work by the English author George Orwell (Eric Blair), published in 1933. It is a memoir in two parts on the theme of poverty in the two cities. The first part is a picaresque account of living on the breadline in Paris and the experience of casual labour in restaurant kitchens. The second part is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's perspective, with descriptions of the types of hostel accommodation available and some of the characters to be found living on the margins. Orwell's first version of DOWN AND OUT was called ‘A Scullion's Diary'. Completed in October 1930, it used only his Paris material. He offered it to Jonathan Cape in the summer of 1931. Cape rejected it in the autumn. A year later he offered ‘a fatter typescript (the London chapters had been added)' to Faber & Faber, where T. S. Eliot, then an editorial director, also rejected it. It was in the home of Mabel Fierz, who had, with her husband, a London businessman named Francis, been for a number of years a visitor to Southwold in the summer, and who was on friendly terms with the Blairs, that Orwell discarded the typescript. Fierz at this point took it to a literary agent, Leonard Moore, who ‘recognised it as a 'natural' for the new house of Gollancz.' Victor Gollancz was prepared to publish the work, subject to the removal of bad language and some identifiable names, and offered an advance of £40. The title improvised by Gollancz, CONFESSIONS OF A DOWN AND OUTER bothered Orwell. ‘Would The Confessions of a Dishwasher do as well?' he asked Moore. ‘I would rather answer to dishwasher than down & out.'At the last minute, Gollancz shortened the title to DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The author, after possibilities including ‘X,' ‘P.S. Burton' (an alias Orwell had used on tramping expeditions), ‘Kenneth Miles' and ‘H. Lewis Allways' had been considered, was renamed ‘George Orwell.' Orwell did not wish to publish under his own name Eric Blair, and Orwell was the name he used from then on for his main works - although many periodical articles were still published under the name Eric Blair. DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON was published on 9 January 1933 and received favourable reviews from, among others, C. Day Lewis, WH Davies, Compton Mackenzie and JB Priestley. It was subsequently published by Harper & Brothers in New York with a first printing of 1750 copies. Sales were low, however, until December 1940, when Penguin Books printed 55,000 copies for sale at sixpence. A French translation, which Orwell admired, by RN Raimbault and Gwen Gilbert, entitled La Vache EnragEe, was published by Editions Gallimard, on 2 May 1935, with a preface by Panait Istrati and an introduction by Orwell.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
DESCRIPTION - This is the story of one man's experiences, one man who went to Spain with an intellectual sympathy for socialist doctrine and came back after eight months with a fervent, almost religious, belief in its necessity. Because this writer is English, because he is typical of many, and because he happens to be a great writer and reporter, this book is the most exciting for English readers of any book on Spain that has yet appeared. In December, 1936, Orwell enlisted in the P.O.U.M. militia and fought on the Aragon front till April, first in a Spanish company, then with the I.L.P. contingent. On leave in Barcelona during the May fighting, he gives an eye-witness account of what really happened. Then he went back to the front, was wounded, declared medically unfit, and returning through Barcelona to England narrowly escaped arrest as a counter-revolutionary! Orwell tells his story with a wealth of detail, the fighting and trench-warfare, the May confusion, the revolutionary fervour and its suppression, the political conflict, the nature of Communist policy, the role of the Anarchists, and many other things. His book is thrilling, authoritative, persuasive, not only for its first-hand material but for its elucidation and interpretation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
DESCRIPTION - 1984 is the year in which it happens. The world is divided into three great powers, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, each perpetually at war with one another. Throughout Oceania ‘The Party' rules through the agency of all-powerful ministries. The authorities use every device to keep a check on the people's thoughts, words, and deeds. Against this nightmare background is played out the drama of Winston Smith, who rebelled against the Party's rule. The new novel by George Orwell is the major work towards which all his previous writing has pointed. Critics have hailed it as his ‘most solid, most brilliant' book. Though the story of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR takes place thirty-five years hence, it is in every sense timely. The scene is London, where there has been no new housing since 1950 and where the city-wide slums are called Victory Mansions. Science has abandoned Man for the State. As every citizen knows only too well, war is peace. To Winston Smith, a young man who works in the Ministry of Truth (Minitru, for short), come two people who transform his life completely. One is Julia, whom he meets after she hands him a slip reading, ‘I love you.' The other is O'Brien who tells him, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.' The way in which Winston is betrayed by the one and, against his own desires and instincts, ultimately betrays the other, makes a story of mounting drama and suspense. Aside from its high literary qualities, NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR has profound implications for our times. It points the path towards which society may now be heading, and leaves the reader with the shocked feeling that there is no single horrible feature in the world of 1984 - only two generations away - which is not present, in embryo, today. In the final section of the novel George Orwell spells out, for the first time in literature, how the spirit of every man living may be broken in Room 101, and how he can be made to avow - and believe - that black is white two plus two equals five, and evil is good. When George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM was published three years ago, critics compared him to Jonathan Swift. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR fully justifies their verdict. This distinguished novel will be remembered as one of the most important and moving works of fiction to be published in this generation. ‘The most powerful and terrifying novel I have read in years. Orwell's brilliant and despairing glimpse into the totalitarian future plumbs the depths of human pride and degradation more vividly than anything since Dostoievsky's Grand inquisitor.' - ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR. ‘Its terrors are psychological rather than mechanical: it shows us what may happen to the human mind if there is another big war - the destruction of culture, the obliteration of the past, and the decay of science, except so far as it enables men to get other men into their power and to torture them.' - E. M. FORSTER. ‘As timely as the label on a poison bottle.' - JAMES HILTON. ‘A book to haunt your sleep. As a prophecy and a warning it is superb.' - ORVILLE PRESCOTT.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
DESCRIPTION - None of the essays in this posthumous volume has previously appeared in book form and, although each has been printed in some periodical or ‘Little' review, the majority of them will be new to most readers. They range in time of composition from ‘A Hanging' which appeared in THE ADELPHI in 1931 to ‘Reflections on Gandhi' written for PARTISAN REVIEW in 1949, and fall into three main groups. First there are three pieces descriptive of experience: ‘Shooting an Elephant,' ‘A Hanging' and ‘How the Poor Die.' The second and largest group, which includes ‘Politics and The English Language,' and a long essay on ‘Gulliver's Travels,' can be roughly described as being about literature and politics and the relations between the two. Lastly, there is a selection from the weekly column which George Orwell contributed to Tribune under the title ‘I Write As I Please.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was a British novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell, a name inspired by his favourite place, the River Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (i.e. to both left-wing authoritarian communism and to right-wing fascism), and support of democratic socialism. Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican faction of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), are as critically respected as his essays on politics, literature, language and culture. Orwell's work remains influential in popular culture and in political culture, and the adjective "Orwellian"—describing totalitarian and authoritarian social practices—is part of the English language, like many of his neologisms, such as "Big Brother", "Thought Police", "Room 101", "Newspeak", "memory hole", "doublethink", and "thoughtcrime". In 2008, The Times named Orwell the second-greatest British writer since 1945.
DESCRIPTION - AN ANCIENT SENECALESE TRADITION decrees that if the members of any group must be counted, they may only be numbered as so many of ‘God's Bits of Wood.' To give them names might attract the attention of an evil spirit and fatefully alter their lives. Strike! The word itself was foreign to the men and women who lived along the thousand miles of steel that run from the city of Dakar into the ancient heartland of the Sudan. Strike! The word had come to them with the building of the railroad, and with the red-eared men from a country named France. Once before, they had taken it up as a weapon and had been bloodily repulsed; and now, in 1947, they were taking it up again. A few thousands of men and their women were plunging themselves, their people -and, eventually, their continent-headlong into the future. And this time they knew they could not, must not, fail. Written by a man who is himself one of ‘God's Bits of Wood,' and based on actual events, this novel is dramatic evidence of the rebirth of a great people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sembene Ousmane, who was born into a Senegalese fishing family in 1923, worked at a diversity of jobs before writing his first book, THE BLACK DOCKER, in 1956. Since then he has written several novels and short story collections, through which he tells the saga of his land and its people. He has also gained a reputation for his films, particularly BLACK GIRL and THE MONEY ORDER, which were well received both in the U.S. and abroad.
DESCRIPTION - 'In 1879, fourteen years after the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of blacks fled the South. They were headed for the homesteading lands of Kansas, the 'Garden Spot of the Earth' and the 'quintessential Free State, the land of John Brown'. Painter examines their exodus in fascinating detail. In the process, she offers a compelling portrait of the post-Reconstruction South and the desperate efforts by blacks and whites in that chaotic period to 'solve the race problem' once and for all.' - Newsweek.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nell Irvin Painter (born Nell Irvin, 1942) is an American historian notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians. She also served as president of the Southern Historical Association. She was born Nell Irvin to Dona and Frank E. Irvin, Sr. She had an older brother Frank who died young. Her family moved from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California when she was ten weeks old. This was part of the second wave of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to urban centers. Some of their relatives had been in California since the 1920s. The Irvins went to California in the 1940s with the pull of increasing jobs in the defense industry. Nell attended the Oakland Public Schools. Her mother Dona Irvin held a degree from Houston College for Negroes (1937), and later taught in the public schools of Oakland. Her father had to drop out of college in 1937 during the Great Depression; he eventually trained for work as a laboratory technician. He worked for years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he trained many students in lab techniques. Painter earned her B.A. - Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. During her undergraduate years, she studied French medieval history at the University of Bordeaux, France, 1962–63. She also studied abroad at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, 1965–66. In 1967, she completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1974, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She returned to study and earned a B.F.A. at Rutgers University in 2009. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.
DESCRIPTION - This provocative interpretive history focuses on the disputes that consumed Americans as they traded the anxieties and challenges of a mostly rural, agrarian society for those of an industrial culture. These years of dynamic growth and technological progress were punctuated by crises that genera ted unemployment, strikes, and violence, bankrupted businesses, swallowed up profits, and injected class conflict into politics and reform. Primarily a work of narrative political history, this book also devotes a great deal of attention to labor history in the belief that the demand for reform that dominated political debate sprang from the organized ranks of working people whose frustrations and anger inspired fear in the middle and upper classes. At the turn of the twentieth century, this apprehension produced both the reforms that softened the injuries of class and the rationalization of production that increased employers' control over workers. While the most sensational clashes occurred between economic classes, conflicts Concerning the appropriate rights of minorities, women, and neighboring countries also figure in STANDING AT ARMAGEDDON.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nell Irvin Painter (born Nell Irvin, 1942) is an American historian notable for her works on southern history of the nineteenth century. She is retired from Princeton University, and served as president of the Organization of American Historians. She also served as president of the Southern Historical Association. She was born Nell Irvin to Dona and Frank E. Irvin, Sr. She had an older brother Frank who died young. Her family moved from Houston, Texas, to Oakland, California when she was ten weeks old. This was part of the second wave of the Great Migration of millions of African Americans from the Deep South to urban centers. Some of their relatives had been in California since the 1920s. The Irvins went to California in the 1940s with the pull of increasing jobs in the defense industry. Nell attended the Oakland Public Schools. Her mother Dona Irvin held a degree from Houston College for Negroes (1937), and later taught in the public schools of Oakland. Her father had to drop out of college in 1937 during the Great Depression; he eventually trained for work as a laboratory technician. He worked for years at the University of California at Berkeley, where he trained many students in lab techniques. Painter earned her B.A. - Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. During her undergraduate years, she studied French medieval history at the University of Bordeaux, France, 1962–63. She also studied abroad at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, 1965–66. In 1967, she completed an M.A. at the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1974, she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University. She returned to study and earned a B.F.A. at Rutgers University in 2009. Painter has received honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, Wesleyan University, and Yale University, among other institutions.
DESCRIPTION - A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race - not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively. Our story begins in Greek and Roman antiquity, where the concept of race did not exist, only geography and the opportunity to conquer and enslave others. Not until the eighteenth century did an obsession with whiteness flourish, with the German invention of the notion of Caucasian beauty. This theory made northern Europeans into ‘Saxons,' ‘Anglo-Saxons,' and ‘Teutons,' envisioned as uniquely handsome natural rulers. Here was a worldview congenial to northern Europeans bent on empire. There followed an explosion of theories of race, now focusing on racial temperament as well as skin color. Spread by such intellectuals as Madame de Stael and Thomas Carlyle, white race theory soon reached North America with a vengeance. Its chief spokesman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, did the most to label Anglo-Saxons - icons of beauty and virtue - as the only true Americans. It was an ideal that excluded not only blacks but also all ethnic groups not of Protestant, northern European background. The Irish and Native Americans were out and, later, so were the Chinese, Jews, Italians, Slavs, and Greeks - all deemed racially alien. Did immigrations threaten the very existence of America? Americans were assumed to be white, but who among poor immigrants could become truly American? A tortured and convoluted series of scientific explorations developed - theories intended to keep Anglo-Saxons at the top: the ever-popular measurement of skulls, the powerful eugenics movement, and highly biased intelligence tests - all designed to keep working people out and down. As Nell Irvin Painter reveals, power - supported by economics, science, and politics - continued to drive exclusionary notions of whiteness until, deep into the twentieth century, political realities enlarged the category of truly American. A story filled with towering historical figures, THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE forcefully reminds us that the concept of one white race is a recent invention. The meaning, importance, and reality of this all-too-human thesis of race have buckled under the weight of a long and rich unfolding of events.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - NELL IRVIN PAINTER, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, at Princeton University, is the author of seven books, including SOJOURNER TRUTH and STANDING AT ARMAGEDDON. She has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Newark, New Jersey, and the Adirondacks.
DESCRIPTION - In its fifth year (1793-1794), the French Revolution faced a multifaceted crisis that threatened to overwhelm the Republic. In response the government instituted a revolutionary dictatorship and a ‘reign of terror,' with a Committee of Public Safety at its head. R. R. Palmer's fascinating narrative follows the Committee's deputies individually and collectively, recounting and assessing their tumultuous struggles in Paris and their repressive missions in the provinces.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - R. R. Palmer was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. For many years he taught at Princeton University, and several of his books have been published by Princeton University Press. These include CATHOLICS AND UNBELIEVERS IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRANCE (1939), TWELVE WHO RULED: THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC SAFETY IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1941 and 1958), and a translation of Georges Lefebvre's THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION (1947).
DESCRIPTION - Most people are familiar with the stories of SNOW WHITE and SLEEPING BEAUTY, but very few know that behind the Brothers Grimm and their famous fairy tales stood a network of sisters-and mothers, neighbors, and female friends. In this intimate history, writer and German scholar Valerie Paradiz tells the real story of one of the greatest literary collaborations of the nineteenth century; and gives the long-lost women narrators of our most beloved tales their due. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collectors and editors of more than two hundred folk stories, were major German intellects of the nineteenth century, and contemporaries of Goethe and Schiller, But as Paradiz reveals here, the romantic image of the two brothers traveling the countryside, transcribing tales told to them by ordinary peasants, is far from the truth. In fact, more than half the fairy tales the Grimm brothers collected were actually contributed by their educated female friends from the bourgeois and aristocratic classes. Set against the backdrop of the chaotic Napoleonic wars and the high years of German romanticism, CLEVER MAIDS chronicles one of the most fascinating literary enterprises in European history and brilliantly captures the intellectual spirit of the men and women of the age. Even more, it illuminates the ways in which the Grimm tales, with their mythic portrayals of courage, sacrifice, and betrayal, still speak so powerfully to us today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - VALERIE PARADIZ holds a Ph.D. in German studies from the City University of New York, and has taught at Bard College. She is the author of ELIJAH'S CUP, as well as numerous translations of works in German. She lives in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York.
DESCRIPTION - Cesare Pavese committed suicide in 1950, at the height of his literary career. Famous as a novelist, he will also be remembered for his sympathetic poetry, which evokes traditional, timeless Italian life and expresses profound disquiet at the encroachment of soulless urbanization. This collection illustrates his deepening preoccupation with man's isolation and includes two of his most important essays on poetry. This series now includes selected work by the following poets, inverse translations by, among others, W. H. Auden, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael Hamburger, Ted Hughes, J. B. Leishman, Christopher Middleton and David Wevill: Akhmatova, Amichai, Apollinaire, Bobrowski/Bienek, Ekelof, Enzensberger, Four Greek Poets: Cavafy/Elytis/Gatsos/Seferis, Grass, Herbert, Holan, Holub, Kovner/Sachs, Montale, Pavese, Popa, Prevert, Quasimodo, Rilke, Three Czech Poets: Nezval/Bartusek/Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Weores/Juhasz, and Yevtushenko.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - 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.
DESCRIPTION - One of the major poets of our time here probes and defines Mexican character and culture in a series of perceptive essays. But this is far more than a book on Mexico, for Octavio Paz is a writer of vision and compassion, and he constantly compares and relates his observations on Mexico to other cultures. Thus when he speaks of the Mexican's profound sense of solitude, which he sees as his primary trait, that solitude ‘which alternately affirms and denies itself in melancholy and rejoicing, silence and sheer noise, gratuitous cries and religious fervor,' he demonstrates how different it is from that of the North American, ‘who wanders in an abstract world of machines, fellow citizens, and moral precepts.' When he discusses the Conquest and the resulting dichotomy and loss of identity of the Mexican people, or when he details the causes and results of the Mexican Revolution, he situates each in the context of colonialism and revolution in their various forms throughout the world. And in his final chapter, ‘The Dialectic of Solitude' Paz synthesizes his thoughts in a profound, universally applicable evaluation of the situation of contemporary man. OCTAVIO PAZ was born in Mexico City in 1914 and studied at The National University of Mexico. During the Spanish Civil War he fought on the side of the Republicans, and since the end of World War II has lived and worked several years in France, for the past two years as a member of the Mexican diplomatic corps in Paris. He has published ten books of poetry, most of which have recently been gathered into a single volume, Libertad bajo Palabra.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Octavio Paz Lozano (March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998) was a Mexican poet-diplomat and writer. For his body of work, he was awarded the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, the 1982 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature.
DESCRIPTION - A rock gets pushed at the top of a hill, and it begins to roll, and then it doesn't matter who did the pushing. What matters is the damage done. So how it started, I suppose, is insignificant. Because what sticks now is how it ended: with the sudden blast of smoke of automatic weapons, and the low moan of those who are about to die. As the advertising director of Nutty Nathan's - ‘The Miser Who Saves You Money!' - Nick Stefanos knew all the tricks of the electronics business. Blow-out sales and shady deals were his life. When one of the stockboys disappears, it's not news: just another young metalhead who went off chasing some dream of big money and easy living. But the kid reminded Nick of himself twelve years ago: an angry punk hooked on speed, metal and the fast life. So when the boy's grandfather begs Nick to try to find the kid, Nick says he'll try. And once it begins to roll, it doesn't matter who did the pushing. What matters is the damage done. A FIRING OFFENSE is a debut novel packed with exceptional veracity and tenacious emotion, a tough and tender view of both the Washington, D.C., that lies behind the politician's lies and of the truths that lie within our hearts.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - Likened to such great novelists as James M. Cain, David Goodis, and Jim Thompson, George P. Pelecanos proves himself to be a major talent in his own right with this knockout new Nick Stefanos novel. After a night of heavy drinking, Nick Stefanos passes out in a public park. Some time before dawn, the slam of a car door and a steady, frantic moan wake him. He hears a man say, ‘You already been a punk, and shit. Least you can do is go out a man.' And then a muffled scream. And that's how Nick Stefanos comes to investigate the murder of Calvin Jeter, an investigation that will take him through the heart of Washington D.C., and into the unlit alleys of the human soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - KING SUCKERMAN is a thriller that weaves the blaxploitation films, the drug deals, the soul music, and the racial tensions that defined the seventies into a story of natural-born killers and two men who risk everything to bring them down. Dimitri Karras and Marcus Clay are old friends whose affection transcends the barriers of race. Clay is a Vietnam vet trying to make a go of his own small business, while Karras is drifting, playing pickup basketball and supporting himself with small-time drug dealing. When Karras takes Clay with him to make a buy from a new supplier, they cross paths with Wilton Cooper - and enter a world where merciless, unpredictable violence is the only certainty. Cooper cuts a swath of bloody mayhem that leads straight to Karras's door, and Karras has the battle of a lifetime to keep his walk on the wild side from destroying his entire world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - After his ‘promising' (Kirkus Reviews} debut novel. A FIRING OFFENSE. George Pelecanos has come into his own with this complex and powerful new novel of virtue and betrayal. Nick Stefanos, having earned his P.I. license, quickly discovers that snapping photos of unfaithful husbands isn't his thing. Tending bar at the Spot, Nick is closing one night when his high school friend Billy Goodrich shows up. Billy's wife is gone. Nick says he'll find her. And with that first step. Nick sets out on a one-way path that'll take him through a sewer of theft and intrigue and love. Exceptionally moving and true-to-life, NICK s TRIP is a virtuoso work from one of today's hottest voices in hard-boiled fiction. ‘NICK'S TRIP is the kind of book you're always hoping to find and so rarely do. What an authentic, human voice.' - James Sallis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - The Farrow Brothers have come to the city with mayhem on their minds. Setting out to rob a restaurant, they see the job go spectacularly wrong: While Frank kills several of the restaurant's workers, a cop spots Richard in the getaway car and kills him in a gunfight. Speeding away, Frank hits and kills a young boy out for a walk with his mother. It's a disturbingly bloody and ruthless encounter, even for D.C. DIMITRI KARRAS, the father of the boy, joins a grief-counseling group for survivors of the murders. But Frank Farrow hears of the group and joins it in his own way: He vows to take vengeance for his brother by killing everyone who had a hand in his death. Karras realizes it's up to him to stop Farrow - if he can come up with a plan that will work, and if he can overcome his own fears and scruples. SHAME THE DEVIL is the profoundest kind of crime fiction, a story with a heart-stopping pace and the most evil killers this side of Elmore Leonard - but with an eye on the hereafter and the real cost of violence. As it builds to a showdown worthy of Sam Peckinpah, SHAME THE DEVIL explores the very essence of human nature, the beliefs that give lives meaning, and what people do when they see those beliefs broken.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - Constantine is a drifter, a man with a lot of miles behind him and a lot more ahead and a number of jobs in between that never showed up on anyone's books.'He hitches a ride on a bright spring morning with a little man named Polk. Heading down a country road in Folk's hopped-up muscle-car, the two men share a few cigarettes. This is how it starts.'Later, when Constantine walks toward the big brick house, the Beat in his head, the grip of the .45 warm in his hand, the siren wailing in the night at his back, he thinks that the whole thing started on that road, with the car stopping for his upturned thumb. He thinks that the things that happen to a man are put in motion by something just that small, that random. He thinks about that, and he laughs. But he keeps walking. SHOEDOG is noir writing at its finest, a modern crime novel with the lingering resonance of good whiskey and the brutal recoil of a shotgun blast.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - For Joey Recevo and Pete Karras, two kids from one of Washington's rougher neighborhoods, the easiest work to find after the War is all criminal - providing a little muscle for a local boss. But Karras is soft on his fellow immigrants, and the boss can't let his mob get soft, so one of his boys gives Karras a painful lesson. Three years later, it's this same mob that figures big Nick Stefanos's grill needs protection - and this decision will, once again, bring Joey and Pete face-to-face. In this final confrontation, the two of them will find the meaning of friendship and honor, and its cost. Powerfully told, elegantly wrought, THE BIG BLOWDOWN delivers on all of George Pelecanos's early promise and establishes him at the forefront of today's crime writers. ‘Bold and broad-shouldered, a crime epic filled with passionate characters and the gritty life of the street. Strongly felt and sharply written. Pelecanos lifted me from my chair and hurled me right into the mean D.C. streets of the 1950s. Bravo!' - T. Jefferson Parker, author of SUMMER OF FEAR. ‘Pelecanos's books get into your blood like a shot and a beer after a third shift. Definitely my favorite writer working today. You can stay in on Saturday night now - Pelecanos will fill you in on what happened.' - Peter Farrelly, author of OUTSIDE PROVIDENCE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - Before you can thrive you have to survive. When cocaine hit Washington, D.C., in the mid-1980s, the city became nearly unlivable. Gun-carrying kids turned entire neighborhoods into war zones. Zombies walked the sidewalks on weeklong binges. Many police officers and public officials, flush with drug money, looked away. Set amid this chaos and danger, THE SWEET FOREVER captures an unforgettable fight for survival as two men confront the most soul-chilling violence ever to visit the city. Marcus Clay is proud of his small chain of record stores, and proudest of his new store, right in the old neighborhood-now the epicenter of the drug trade. But a black man can't get a break, even on his home turf, when the whole town is going crazy. Even his best friend, Dimitri Karras, who manages the store, is coming to work with his jaw wired tight from his newly acquired cocaine habit. A bad situation turns lethal when a car crashes in front of the store and Marcus sees someone grab a bag out of the backseat and run. The local drug lord wants what's in that bag-and will do whatever it takes to prove that he is the law in this neighborhood. Nobody, certainly not a small-time businessman, is going to stand in his way. In searing confrontations, Marcus and Dimitri must defy the darkness close to home - fighting for their lives, their livelihoods, for the very soul of the city. Opening up the shadowy territory where private sin connects with larger, deadlier evils, George Pelecanos weaves familiar details from the recent past into a thriller of compelling menace and power. With characters as real as your own flesh and a relentless, dazzlingly original story, THE SWEET FOREVER is a classic thriller from one of the most inspired writers at work today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George P. Pelecanos (born 18 Feb 1957) is an American author. Many of his works are in the genre of detective fiction and set primarily in his hometown of Washington, D.C. He is also a film and television producer and a television writer. He worked extensively on the HBO series The Wire. Pelecanos, a Greek American, was born in Washington, D.C. in 1957. Pelecanos's early novels were written in the first person voice of Nick Stefanos, a Greek D.C. resident and sometime private investigator. After the success of his first four novels, the Stefanos-narrated A Firing Offense, Nick's Trip, and Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, and the non-series (though some characters do cross over) Shoedog, Pelecanos switched his narrative style considerably and expanded the scope of his fiction with his D.C. Quartet.
DESCRIPTION - LIFE is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's COMMEDIA and Chaucer's CANTERBURY TALES and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's ULYSSES. Structured around a single moment in time - towards 8:00 p.m. on June 23, 1975 - Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinarily rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlike1y, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, LIFE is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages and fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world. But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel. In what is a spellbinding exploration of the relationship between imagination and reality, possibility and actuality, Perec revealed not only his acute grasp of the human condition but a1so formidable powers of observation and a rare comic talent. This utterly original work, as compulsively readable as it is complex, will be recognized as a milestone of the postwar European experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Georges Perec (7 March 1936 - 3 March 1982) was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group.
DESCRIPTION - This volumes in a sense the work of four poets, for Fernando Pessoa adopted in his writing four separate personas. Though he led an uneventful life, his poetry reveals a mind shaken by intensive inner suffering. Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis helped to set him free by hiving off three great swarms of thought and feeling': each a separate poet, they convey a sense of ambivalence and consolidate a striving for completeness. Dramatic, lyrical, Christian, pagan, old and modern, Pessoa's poets and poetry all contribute to the ‘mysterious importance of existence'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessôa (June 13, 1888 - November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French. Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he dreamed up approximately seventy-five others. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views.
DESCRIPTION - 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 bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.In 2019, the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction.
DESCRIPTION - In this exceptional book-an attempt at what Jorge Luis Borges has called ‘the pure detective story' - one of the greatest writers of Latin American letters is introduced to American readers for the first time. The book's opening gambit is a stunning one: a dictator is assassinated in public, but it is soon revealed that the murdered man was a double. The real leader had been killed the night before. On the surface the question is: did the assassin know that he was after the wrong man? But later events seem to distort all sense of logic and reality, until in the final moment the circuitous routes of the labyrinth seem to straighten into a short and too inevitable line. Jorge Luis Borges has remarked in his introduction to this book that there abound, ‘as in the work of the renowned Dostoevsky, shrewd interrogations and treacherous dialogues; the spheres of the search and of what is sought are interwoven and become confused. We experience the melancholy that is the attribute of any dictatorship, the systematic oppression of stupidity, but also mockery and courage. I do not hesitate to declare that Manuel Peyrou is one of the first storytellers of Hispanic letters.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manuel Peyrou (May 23, 1902 - January 1, 1974) was an Argentine writer and journalist. Peyrou was born in San Nicolás de los Arroyos in 1902. He enrolled at the University of Buenos Aires and obtained a Law Degree in 1925, but never practiced law, instead working for a time for an English Argentine railway company, and ultimately joining the editorial staff of La Prensa, then the country's second-most circulated daily. His short story, La noche incompleta (The Unfinished Night) was published by La Prensa in 1935, and Peyrou became an editor of the daily's respected literary supplement, eventually becoming the section's chief editor. He contributed to literary critic Victoria Ocampo's Sur, and a close friend from his days at the university, Jorge Luis Borges, later brought him on as chief film critic for Los Anales de Buenos Aires, Borges' literary review. La espada dormida (The Sleeping Sword), Peyrou's 1944 pulp fiction work, was followed by a satire, El estruendo de las rosas, in 1948, which earned him a Municipal Literary Prize; Peyrou's later works departed from the detective genre and were mainly realist narratives. A number, including Las leyes del juego (The Rules of the Game, 1959), El árbol de Judas (The Judas Tree, 1963), Marea de fervor (Tide of Fervor, 1967), and El hijo rechazado (The Rejected Son, 1969), were also acclaimed by critics. His short stories were published by Selecciones (the Spanish-language edition of Reader's Digest) and by Greek publisher George Humuziadis, among others. His 1949 work, El estruendo de las rosas, was translated into English by Donald A. Yates and published by Herder Publishers in 1972 as Thunder of Roses: A Detective Novel. Peyrou died in Buenos Aires in 1974.
DESCRIPTION - Ricardo Piglia's ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION was published in Argentina in 1981 and immediately became a strange sort of best seller: despite the considerable difficulty of the text, it became an essential reference point for readers hungry after years of violence and lies and repression. Piglia impressed readers with his surpassing intelligence and immense personal valor, and despite a much different situation now, more than a decade later, his novel still speaks with authority and depth. The figure of Arocena in the first half of the novel is an ironic double to the ideal reader of this text. Inquisitive, endlessly inventive, Arocena hopes to find secret meanings in the letters from the future, Yet he is denied any knowledge of the context of those letters, so his hunches are always off, no matter how ingenious. The problem facing the reader of this novel is that it circles around horrors that are quite literally unspeakable. The tide of the novel suggests, by a sort of anagram, that the theme is the Argentine Republic itself in its tragic history. The two men to whom the novel is dedicated are among the thousands of the ‘disappeared,' and the action begins in April 1976, just days after the military coup of March 24, 1976. Piglia was known above all for a superb collection of short stories, Nombrefalso (Assumed Name), published in 1975, which includes the highly ingenious novella ‘Homage to Roberto Arlt.' He had published an earlier collection of stories, called La invasion in its Argentine edition and Jaulario in the Cuban edition, which won a coveted prize from the Casa de las Americas in Havana. ‘Homage to Roberto Arlt' revealed a complex literary genealogy, with its homages not only to Arlt but also to Onetti and Borges; it also showed Piglia's talent for writing fiction that doubles as literary criticism, updating a genre perhaps best exemplified in the Borges stories of the 1940s.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ricardo Piglia (November 24, 1941, Adrogue, Argentina - January 6, 2017, Buenos Aires) was one of the foremost contemporary Argentine writers. Piglia was born in Adrogue and raised in Mar del Plata, where he went to live in 1955 after the fall of Juan Peron, whom his father supported. He studied history in the National University of La Plata. He then went to work in various publishing houses in Buenos Aires and was in charge of the Serie Negra which published well known authors of crime fiction including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy. A fan of American literature he was also influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as well as by European authors Franz Kafka and Robert Musil. He is known for his fiction, including several collections of short stories; the novels Artificial Respiration (1980), The Absent City (1992), Burnt Money (1997); and criticism including Criticism and Fiction (1986), Brief Forms (1999) and The Last Reader (2005). Piglia has received a number of awards, including the Premio internacional de novela Romulo Gallegos (2011), Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras (2005), Premio Planeta (1997), Premio Casa de las Americas (1967). He was a longtime resident of the United States, where he taught Latin American literature at Princeton University.
DESCRIPTION - THE ABSENT CITY is Ricardo Piglia's third book to be translated into English, and the second published by Duke University Press, Since its original publication in Argentina in 1992, it has been widely read and hailed in the Spanish-speaking world for its combination of literary innovation and poignant sociopolitical reflection, With this translation, Duke makes available to an English-speaking audience one of the most fascinating novels to come out of Latin America in recent times. THE ABSENT CITY is a captivating novel that makes use of several literary genres. On the one hand, THE ABSENT CITY resembles a detective novel: Junior, the son of English immigrants in Argentina, is a newspaper reporter trying to solve the mystery of what is happening in the city of Buenos Aires. But it is much more than a detective novel, as, in a sense, the city becomes a metaphor for the novel, and vice versa. The world in which Junior operates is a futuristic Buenos Aires, in which the map of the city is constructed by a series of fictional narratives. The intrigue of each of these stories (written in different tones, or registers) multiplies as they intersect each other (like streets and avenues of a city) and unfold to make up the enigma of the text (the written, as well as the geographic and political text) that Junior is trying to solve.At the heart of the novel and the city is the unusual heroine, Elena, who used to be a woman but is now a machine (she is the center of the novel and the city, since she composes the stories that make up both). Elena was Argentine writer-philosopher Macedonio Fernández's wife. In the novel, he tries to save her, when she becomes terminally ill, by placing her memories in a machine. Thus under the surface there is also a story of love and loss. A man loses the woman he loves; he cannot bear that loss; therefore he builds a machine to try to preserve her memories; the machine then outlives the man. All this occurs in a city under intense police surveillance. The repressive setting reminds the reader of Argentina's deeply troubled military past, especially the period of dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. But it also has a broader resonance with the dangers of all totalitarian regimes, and some of the twentieth-century atrocities associated with them. Thus another theme that arises is the power of language to create and define reality-the State's official version of history; a machine that creates stories that become real; the attempts of the police to control the flow of information; a world in which people tell stories in an attempt to rewrite history or to prevent others from writing it for them. The proliferation of stories in The Absent City becomes important as a way to challenge official versions of reality. Through a series of reproductions, translations, simulacra, and simulations, narrative becomes a site of political and aesthetic resistance.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ricardo Piglia (November 24, 1941, Adrogue, Argentina - January 6, 2017, Buenos Aires) was one of the foremost contemporary Argentine writers. Piglia was born in Adrogue and raised in Mar del Plata, where he went to live in 1955 after the fall of Juan Peron, whom his father supported. He studied history in the National University of La Plata. He then went to work in various publishing houses in Buenos Aires and was in charge of the Serie Negra which published well known authors of crime fiction including Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and Horace McCoy. A fan of American literature he was also influenced by F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, as well as by European authors Franz Kafka and Robert Musil. He is known for his fiction, including several collections of short stories; the novels Artificial Respiration (1980), The Absent City (1992), Burnt Money (1997); and criticism including Criticism and Fiction (1986), Brief Forms (1999) and The Last Reader (2005). Piglia has received a number of awards, including the Premio internacional de novela Romulo Gallegos (2011), Premio Iberoamericano de las Letras (2005), Premio Planeta (1997), Premio Casa de las Americas (1967). He was a longtime resident of the United States, where he taught Latin American literature at Princeton University.
DESCRIPTION - What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality. Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality--the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth--today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again. A work of extraordinary ambition, originality, and rigor, Capital in the Twenty-First Century reorients our understanding of economic history and confronts us with sobering lessons for today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Piketty is Professor at the Paris School of Economics.
DESCRIPTION - Pirandello (1867-1936) is the founding architect of twentieth-century drama, brilliantly innovatory in his forms and themes, and in the combined energy, imagination and visual colours of his theatre. This volume of plays, translated from the Italian by Mark Musa, opens with SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, Pirandello's most popular and controversial work in which six characters invade the stage and demand to be included in the play. The tragedy HENRY IV dramatizes the lucid madness of a man who may be King. In SO IT IS (IF YOU THINK SO) the townspeople exercise a morbid curiously attempting to discover ‘the truth' about the Ponza family. Each of these plays can lay claim to being Pirandello's masterpiece, and in exploring the nature of human personality each one stretches the resources of drama to its limits. Includes the plays - SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, HENRY IV, SO IT IS (IF YOU THINK SO).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LUIGI PIRANDELLO was born on June 28, 1867, in Agrigento, Sicily. After attending secondary school in Palermo, he went, at the age of eighteen, to the University of Rome. The following year he transferred to the University of Bonn. In Germany he studied romance philology and philosophy, started to write poetry, and completed a translation of Goethe's ROMAN ELEGIES. On his return to Rome, Pirandello was urged by his fellow Sicilian, the novelist Capuana, to try his hand at prose writing. In the short-story form, Pirandello's genius began to emerge. In the twenty years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I he published innumerable short stories and four novels. In an experimental mood, Pirandello then turned to the stage, attempting at first to convey as vividly as possible the attitudes and speech of his native island. A couple of regional plays preceded his first stage success, RIGHT YOU ARE IF YOU THINK YOU ARE, which had its premiere in 1917. From then on Pirandello wrote forty-odd plays in relatively quick succession. He was fifty-four when his drama SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR brought him international acclaim. In 1934 Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died a year and a half later.
DESCRIPTION - Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: - The mobilization of the unemployed during the Great Depression that gave rise to the Workers' Alliance of America - The industrial strikes that resulted in the formation of the CIO - The Southern Civil Rights Movement - The movement of welfare recipients led by the National Welfare Rights Organization.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - France Fox Piven is Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. Richard A. Cloward was a social worker and sociologist, and was a faculty member at the Columbia University School of Social Work from 1954 until his death in 2001. They co-authored: The Politics of Turmoil, Poor People's Movements, The New Class War, and Why Americans Don't Vote. They won the C. Wright Mills Award and various international and national awards.
DESCRIPTION - What is at stake is far from insignificant: it is how one should live one's life.' The central work of the Western world's most famous philosopher, Republic is essentially an enquiry into morality, but it contains crucial arguments and insights into many other areas of philosophy. Socrates and others meet to discuss the ideal community, where morality can be achieved in the balance of wisdom, courage, and restraint. The dialogue is, however, as much about our internal life as about social morality, for these vital elements must likewise work together to create harmonious human beings. Plato achieves more than a philosophical dialogue of lasting fame and importance: Republic is a literary masterpiece too, for he presents the philosophy for the ordinary reader, who is carried along by the wit and intensity of the dialogue and by Plato's unforgettable images of the human condition. This new, lucid translation by Robin Waterfield is complemented by full explanatory notes and an up-to-date critical introduction. 'Waterfield's is certainly the best translation of the Republic available. It is accurate and informed by deep philosophical understanding of the text unlike other translations it combines these virtues with an impressive ability to render Plato into English that is as varied and as expressive as is Plato's Greek.' - Professor Julia Annas, University of Arizona. Jacket illustration: detail from The Acropolis, by Carl Haag. PLATO (c, 427-347 BC), Athenian philosopher-dramatist, has had a profound and lasting influence upon Western intellectual tradition. Born into a wealthy and prominent family, he grew up during the conflict between Athens and the Peloponnesian states. Following its turbulent aftermath, he was deeply affected by the condemnation and execution of his revered master, Socrates (469-399), on charges of irreligion and corrupting the young. Reacting against political activity, Plato now devoted his life to philosophy and to composing memoirs of Socratic enquiry cast in dialogue form. He was strongly influenced by the Pythagorean thinkers of southern Italy and Sicily, whom he reputedly visited when he was about 40. Sometime after his return to Athens he founded the Academy, an early ancestor of the modern university Plato is the earliest Western philosopher from whose output complete works have been preserved. For their combination, dramatic realism, poetic beauty, intellectual vitality, and emotional power his dialogues are unique in Western literature. ROBIN WATERFIELD was born in 1952. After graduating from Manchester University, he went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a university lecturer (at Newcastle upon Tyne and St. Andrews), and an editor and publisher. Currently, however, he is a self-employed consultant editor and writer, whose books range from philosophy to children's fiction. He has translated, in particular, a number of Plutarch's essays, Xenophon's Socratic works, and several other dialogues by Plato.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Plato (c.427-347 BC) stands with Socrates and Aristotle as one of the shapers of the whole intellectual tradition of the West. He founded the Athenian Academy, the first permanent institution devoted to philosophical research and teaching, and the prototype of all Western universities. ROBIN WATERFIELD was born in 1952. After graduating from Manchester University, he went on to research ancient Greek philosophy at King's College, Cambridge. He has been a university lecturer (at Newcastle upon Tyne and St. Andrews), and an editor and publisher. Currently, however, he is a self-employed consultant editor and writer, whose books range from philosophy to children's fiction. He has translated, in particular, a number of Plutarch's essays, Xenophon's Socratic works, and several other dialogues by Plato.
DESCRIPTION - The Great Transformation is a book by Karl Polanyi, an Austro-Hungarian political economist. First published in 1944, it deals with the social and political upheavals that took place in England during the rise of the market economy. Polanyi contends that the modern market economy and the modern nation-state should be understood not as discrete elements, but as the single human invention he calls the Market Society. Polanyi argued that the development of the modern state went hand in hand with the development of modern market economies and that these two changes were inexorably linked in history. His reasoning for this was that the powerful modern state was needed to push changes in social structure that allowed for a competitive capitalist economy, and that a capitalist economy required a strong state to mitigate its harsher effects. For Polanyi, these changes implied the destruction of the basic social order that had existed throughout all earlier history, which is why he emphasized the greatness of the transformation. His empirical case in large part relied upon analysis of the Speenhamland laws, which he saw not only as the last attempt of the squirearchy to preserve the traditional system of production and social order, but also a self-defensive measure on the part of society that mitigated the disruption of the most violent period of economic change. The book also presented his belief that market society is unsustainable because it is fatally destructive to the human and natural contexts it inhabits. Polanyi turns the tables on the orthodox liberal account of the rise of capitalism by arguing that ‘laissez-faire was planned', whereas social protectionism was a spontaneous reaction to the social dislocation imposed by an unrestrained free market. He argues that the construction of a ‘self-regulating' market necessitates the separation of society into economic and political realms. Polanyi does not deny that the self-regulating market has brought ‘unheard of material wealth' , however he suggests that this is too narrow a focus. The market, once it considers land, labor and money as ‘fictitious commodities' (fictitious because each possesses qualities that are not expressed in the formal rationality of the market) ‘subordinate[s] the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.' This, he argues, results in massive social dislocation, and spontaneous moves by society to protect itself. In effect, Polanyi argues that once the free market attempts to separate itself from the fabric of society, social protectionism is society's natural response; this he calls the ‘double movement'. Polanyi did not see economics as a subject closed off from other fields of enquiry, indeed he saw economic and social problems as inherently linked. He ended his work with a prediction of a socialist society, noting, ‘after a century of blind 'improvement', man is restoring his 'habitation.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karl Paul Polanyi (born October 25, 1886, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire - April 23, 1964, Pickering, Ontario) was a Hungarian-American economic historian, economic anthropologist, political economist, historical sociologist and social philosopher. He is known for his opposition to traditional economic thought and for his book, The Great Transformation. Polanyi is remembered today as the originator of substantivism, a cultural approach to economics, which emphasized the way economies are embedded in society and culture.
DESCRIPTION - When the British journalist Rachel Polonsky moves to Moscow, she discovers an apartment on Romanov Street that was once home to the Soviet elite. One of the most infamous neighbors was the ruthless apparatchik, Stalin's henchman, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was a participant in the collectivizations and the Great Purge-and also an ardent bibliophile. In what was formerly his apartment, Polonsky uncovers an extensive library and an old magic lantern-two things that lead her on an extraordinary journey throughout Russia and ultimately renew her vision of the country and its people. In Molotov's Magic Lantern, Polonsky visits the haunted cities and vivid landscapes of the books from Molotov's library: works by Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Akhmatova, and others, some of whom were sent to the Gulag by the very man who collected their books. With exceptional insight and beautiful prose, Polonsky writes about the longings and aspirations of these Russian writers and others in the course of her travels from the Arctic to Siberia and from the forests around Moscow to the vast steppes. A singular homage to Russian history and culture, Molotov's Magic Lantern evokes the spirit of the great artists and the haunted past of a country ravaged by war, famine, and totalitarianism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rachel Polonsky has written for Prospect, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator, among other publications. She is the author of ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THE RUSSIAN AESTHETIC RENAISSANCE and lives in Cambridge, England with her family.
DESCRIPTION - 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. Today heuristic is undergoing a revival whose impetus *' is provided largely by Professor G. Polya's unique HOW TO SOLVE IT, the outstanding modern contribution to the study of problem solving. Though Professor Polya, an eminent mathematician, uses specific examples taken largely from geometry, his principal aim is to teach a method which can be applied to the solution of other problems, more or less technical. The particular solution of a particular problem is, for his purposes, of minor importance. The approach used in heuristic reasoning is constant regardless of its subject, and can be expressed in simple but incisive questions: ‘What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition? Do you know a related problem?' Deftly, Polya the teacher shows us how to strip away the irrelevancies which clutter our thinking and guides us toward a clear and productive habit of mind. The ‘Short Dictionary of Heuristic' included in How TO SOLVE IT supplies the history, techniques, and terminology of heuristic with brilliant precision, and there is a concluding section of nineteen Problems, Hints, and Solutions.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - George Polya (December 13, 1887 - September 7, 1985) was a Hungarian mathematician. He was a professor of mathematics from 1914 to 1940 at ETH Zürich and from 1940 to 1953 at Stanford University. He made fundamental contributions to combinatorics, number theory, numerical analysis and probability theory. He is also noted for his work in heuristics and mathematics education.
DESCRIPTION - On October 2, 1968, approximately ten thousand persons gathered on the square of Tlatelolco in Mexico City to listen to unarmed student leaders protest against one-party political rule in the country, the continued detention of hundreds of political prisoners without trial, and the police repression of which university students at many educational institutions in Mexico City had been the victims in recent months. Five thousand police and soldiers (many out of uniform) were standing guard and tanks were drawn up around the square, despite the fact that the student leaders had announced that their demonstration would be strictly nonviolent because of the truce they had arrived at with the government during the upcoming Olympic Games. Suddenly three flares were seen in the sky; a helicopter appeared and began to shoot on the crowd; the police and troops opened fire and pinned down the crowd, helplessly trapped in the square, with a thirty-minute fusillade. To this day no one knows the exact death toll: the government will admit that some twenty persons were killed, but estimates go as high as three hundred and twenty-five dead (The Manchester Guardian). Literally thousands were wounded, two thousand participants were summarily taken prisoner, and five years later some seventy leaders were still being held in prison without trial. Elena Poniatowska, a journalist and novelist, spent three years tape-recording interviews with participants of this noche triste de Tlatelolcoj' as it has come to be known in Mexico, and this book is her extremely moving re-creation of the massacre through the voices of hundreds of people who were present-a kind of tragic Greek chorus that is infinitely more effective than any third-person account by a single author could ever hope to be. Although it is obvious where her sympathies lie, Señora Poniatowska is a writer, not a propagandist, and hers is an account which includes the voices of many who totally disapproved of the student movement: housewives scandalized at student long hair and mini-skirts; manual workers jealous of middle-class student privileges; government officials who saw in the student agitation merely an attempt to embarrass the government during the Olympics; citizens disturbed by the students noisy disregard for law and order. If Part I of her book is a veritable litany of grievances on the part of students, teachers, and workers, and in essence a searing indictment of the entire status quo of contemporary Mexican society, Part II-again a masterful collage of eyewitness testimony-presents an impressive and often heartbreaking picture of the massacre itself. The events of Tlatelolco Square are now part of our collective contemporary history. Yet, thanks to Ms. Poniatowskas dedicated three-year effort to record the impressions of literally hundreds of participants, her book reads with an immediacy and a poignancy that keep one riveted to the page.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Elena Poniatowski (born May 19, 1932) is a French-born Mexican journalist and author, specializing in works on social and political issues focused on those considered to be disenfranchised especially women and the poor. She was born in Paris to upper class parents, including her mother whose family fled Mexico during the Mexican Revolution. She left France for Mexico when she was ten to escape the Second World War. When she was eighteen and without a university education, she began writing for the newspaper ExcElsior, doing interviews and society columns. Despite the lack of opportunity for women from the 1950s to the 1970s, she evolved to writing about social and political issues in newspapers, books in both fiction and nonfiction form. Her best known work is La noche de Tlatelolco (The night of Tlatelolco, the English translation was titled 'Massacre in Mexico') about the repression of the 1968 student protests in Mexico City. She is considered to be Mexico's grande dame of letters and is still an active writer.
DESCRIPTION - This is the first collection of poems by Vasko Popa, a leading Yugoslav poet, to appear in English translation. His arrangement of poems in cycles, together with his rich poetic imagination and an extreme concentration of language give a special character to Popa's work. His international standing was recently confirmed by the award of the Austrian Lenau prize for literature. Penguin Modern European Poets is designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of this century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series already includes Yevtushenko, Rilke, Apollinaire, Prevert, Quasimodo, a volume of Greek poets, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Gunter Grass.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vasko Popa (June 29, 1922 - January 5, 1991) was a Serbian poet of Romanian descent. He is one of the most translated Serbian poets and at the time he had become one of the most influential World poets.
DESCRIPTION - A landmark study that offers an alternative history of the Cold War from the point of view of the world's poor. ‘Europe' is morally, spiritually indefensible. And today the indictment is brought against it.by tens and tens of thousands of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.' - AimE CEsaire, Discourse on Colonialism. Here, from a brilliant young writer, is a paradigm-shifting history of both a utopian concept and global movement - the idea of the Third World. The Darker Nations traces the intellectual origins and the political history of the twentieth century attempt to knit together the world's impoverished countries in opposition to the United States and Soviet spheres of influence in the decades following World War II. Spanning every continent of the global South, Vijay Prashad's fascinating narrative takes us from the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II to the downfall and corruption of nationalist regimes. A breakthrough book of cutting-edge scholarship, it includes vivid portraits of Third World giants like India's Nehru, Egypt's Nasser, and Indonesia's Sukarno - as well as scores of extraordinary but now-forgotten intellectuals, artists, and freedom fighters. The Darker Nations restores to memory the vibrant though flawed idea of the Third World, whose demise, Prashad ultimately argues, has produced a much impoverished international political arena.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, journalist, commentator and a Marxist intellectual. He is the George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. In 2013–2014, he was the Edward Said Chair at the American University of Beirut. Prashad is the author of seventeen books. In 2012, he published five books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press) and Uncle Swami: South Asians in America Today (The New Press).
DESCRIPTION - Jacques Prevert is a contemporary master of the plain but telling word. PAROLES is his central work. This selection with translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti shows both Prevert's violently anarchic moods and the lyricism that makes him a poet of the people.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Prevert (4 February 1900 - 11 April 1977) was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement,.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed as one of the most important young writers in Latin America today, Manuel Puig, in his widely praised first novel, re-creates with wry compassion the provincial world of a middle-class Argentine family. Through a series of dialogues and soliloquies, as real and sometimes mysterious as conversations overheard, the boy Toto, his relatives and neighbors, servants and schoolmates, spring unforgettably to life. For all of them the only escape from the dreariness of small-town living is the movies. They are all that give shape and color to their existence. Telling of their dreams and fears in language that may parody the clichEs of soap opera or the pseudo-literary style of a term paper, they speak of their marital troubles, of making ends meet, or getting girls, or finding a husband. Toto's cousin dreams of being a sports star, while a scholarship student hopes one day to eat North American pan queques (pancakes) - the status symbol of the day. Most of all, they dream of going to Buenos Aires, where the movies are even better. BETRAYED BY RITA HAYWORTH was originally published in Argentina, and has since been translated into French, German, Portuguese, and Italian. When published in France, Le Monde listed it as one of the best foreign novels of the year. In both Latin America and Europe, the critical praise has been extraordinary.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manuel Puig (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traicion de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Hector Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
DESCRIPTION - From the celebrated author of BETRAYED BY RITA HAYWORTH (‘A triumph. A dazzling and wholly original debut,' said Alexander Coleman in The New York Times Book Review) -an intensely moving novel about love and victimization. Two men are cellmates in an Argentine prison. Molina is a window dresser, homosexual, sentenced to eight years for ‘corruption of minors'; Valentin is a Marxist student, held without trial for three years for inciting ‘disturbances' at an auto factory. Molina is self-obsessed, self-denigrating, but charming, too-he entertains himself by telling Valentin, in elegant detail, the plots of his favorite romantic Hollywood movies. Trapped in naïve enslavement to an idea of men as powerful and responsible and strong, he sees himself as dependent, fragile, vulnerable; he identifies with the heroines of his films. Molina is haunted by the fear that his mother (‘the only good thing that's happened to me in my life') will die of heart disease before he is released, but he is still full of siy humor, brio, delight in life. Valentin is articulate, dogmatic, filled with revolutionary fervor, suppressing in shame his occasional spasms of longing for the ordinary comforts he has renounced and for the memory of a girl he left because she loved him more than politics, a girl ‘with class.' Their guarded but growing friendship - which is all they have and which slowly transfigures them - is threatened as prison officials try to enlist one of them to betray the other. As they live through crisis, caught in the tyranny of politics over feelings, caught in a profound test of human loyalty and in the corruption of their world (our own) - what happens to them is conveyed with extraordinary grace and power.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manuel Puig (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traicion de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Hector Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
DESCRIPTION - Like the heroine in Looking for Mr. Goodbar, Leo Druscovich compulsively seeks to punish himself. He and his unwitting avenger, Gladys, are crippled sexually-by fear, by guilt, by the world they live in, the urban world of constant stress, competition, and ambition. When they fall in love, their love too is crippled. Gladys has never married. Upon graduation from art school, she leaves Buenos Aires and goes to New York City where she holds a series of office jobs, has several love affairs, is mugged and loses an eye, has a nervous breakdown, and returns to Argentina. Leo's life, too, has involved violence. He is, in fact, an undetected murderer. But until his success in the world of the arts, and his sponsorship of Gladys's career as an artist, he has been able to repress memory of that act. Now, with love and fame tantalizingly within reach, he fears that somehow he will be linked to the crime he committed twenty years earlier. Wry and profound, this impressive novel, about two tormented and unforgettable people, demands serious attention. Manuel Puig's two previous novels, BETRAYED BY RITA HAYWORTH and HEARTBREAK TANGO, received extensive critical acclaim and each was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. The Buenos Aires Affair was an immediate bestseller in Argentina until banned by the police.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Manuel Puig (General Villegas, Argentina, December 28, 1932 - Cuernavaca, Mexico, July 22, 1990) was an Argentinian author. Among his best known novels are La traicion de Rita Hayworth (1968) (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas pintadas (1969) (Heartbreak Tango), and El beso de la mujer araña (1976) (Kiss of the Spider Woman), which was made into a film by the Argentine-Brazilian Director, Hector Babenco and in 1993 into a Broadway musical.
DESCRIPTION - GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is an epic postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers around the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertaken by several of the characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the ‘Schwarzgerät,' or ‘00000.' Frequently digressive and often playfully self-conscious, the novel subverts many of the traditional elements of plot and character development, traverses detailed, specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines, and has earned a reputation as a ‘difficult' book. In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported GRAVITY'S RAINBOW for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book ‘unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene.' The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and won the National Book Award in 1974. Since its publication, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW has spawned an enormous amount of literary criticism and commentary, including two reader's guides and several online concordances, and is widely regarded as Pynchon's magnum opus. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is composed of four parts, each of these comprising a number of episodes whose divisions are marked by a graphical depiction of a series of squares. It has been suggested that these represent sprocket holes as in a reel of film, although they may also bear some relation to the engineer's graph paper on which the first draft of the novel was written. One of the book's editors has been quoted as saying that the aforementioned squares relate to censored correspondence sent between soldiers and their loved ones during the war. When family and friends received edited letters, the removed sections would be cut out in squared or rectangular sections. The squares that start each of the four parts would therefore be indicative of what is not written, or what is removed by an external editor or censor. The number of episodes in each part carries with it a numerological significance which is in keeping with the use of numerology and Tarot symbolism throughout the novel. Many facts in the novel are based on technical documents relating to the V-2 rockets. Equations featured in the text are correct. References to the works of Pavlov, Ouspensky, and Jung are based on Pynchon's actual research. The firing command sequence in German that is recited at the end of the novel is also correct and is probably copied in verbatim from the technical report produced by Operation Backfire. The novel is regarded by some as the greatest postmodern work of 20th century literature, while others have declared it unreadable. The three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction unanimously supported GRAVITY'S RAINBOW for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the fourteen-member Pulitzer board overturned this decision, calling the book ‘unreadable', ‘turgid', ‘overwritten', and ‘obscene', with at least one member confessing to having gotten only a third of the way through the book. The novel inspired the 1984 song ‘Gravity's Angel' by Laurie Anderson. In her 2004 autobiographical performance ‘The End of the Moon', Anderson said she once contacted Pynchon asking permission to adapt GRAVITY'S RAINBOW as an opera. Pynchon replied that he would allow her to do so with one condition: the opera had to be written for a single instrument: the banjo. Anderson said she took that as a polite ‘no.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
DESCRIPTION - Is there a secret, privately owned post office operating in competition with the state monopolies? A slightly sinister method of communication for those who have opted out of our society? This is the question that increasingly bugs Oedipa Maas, heroine of Thomas Pynchon's second work of fiction, THE CRYING OF LOT 49. Pynchon, whose first novel, V., was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, was described by George Plimpton (in The New York Times Book Review) as ‘a young writer of staggering promise.' In his new book there is the same combination of wild hilarity and grim reality that made V. so notable. Pynchon's work has been called avant-garde, as indeed it is, but its basic concern with breaking the walls of human isolation is as old as literature. THE CRYING OF LOT 49 takes place in California. It is the story of Oedipa Maas, a young woman who finds herself appointed executrix of a former lover's estate. This is annoying enough, but when it leads to the gradual revelation of the secret postal system of the outcasts - discovered of course through a bizarre philately - Oedipa begins to want out. Unhappily by this time she is in too deeply with, among others, a fake-British musical group called the Paranoids, a child-actor-turned-lawyer called Metzger and a whole gang of dangerous zanies trying to kick the love habit. Thomas Pynchon is a young writer; he is splendidly talented; and THE CRYING OF LOT 49 is a book that will sell to the ever-growing market of Pynchon fans. Thomas Pynchon's V., published in 1963, won the Faulkner First Novel Award in that year.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
DESCRIPTION - It is 1984 in Northern California, where a group of Americans are struggling with the consequences of their lives in the sixties, still run by the passions of those times, sexual and political, which have refused to die. Zoyd Wheeler is preparing for his annual act of televised insanity (for which he receives a government stipend as an official mental degenerate) when an unwelcome face appears from out of his past with news that an old nemesis, Federal Prosecutor Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily armed strike force. Zoyd immediately goes into hiding and sends his daughter, Prairie, off with her violence-loving drummer boyfriend on a Mob wedding gig out of town. And there's cause for worry - Brock Vond has a pathological interest in Zoyd's ex-wife, Frenesi Gates, and intends to use Prairie as a pawn against the mother she can't even remember. Frenesi is now an easy target because her job as an FBI sting specialist has just been cut from the Reagan budget, and she's out in the cold. Meanwhile, at the wedding festivities, Prairie will meet someone in a position to help uncover her mother's dark history as the object of Brock's malevolence and desire. Combining elements of daytime drama and the political thriller, Vineland becomes a strange evocation of twentieth-century America - of the times we live in and the forces we live by and with - as it follows the orbits of old acquaintances headed for a less than harmonic convergence.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.
DESCRIPTION - In 1959 Salvatore Quasimodo, the Sicilian poet, was awarded the Nobel Prize for ‘his lyrical poetry which with classical fire expresses the tragic experiences of life in our time.' No previous edition of his work has been published in England. These new verse translations by Jack Bevan prove him to be, in the best sense, a contemporary poet, a major European voice, and a social and individual conscience - a poet who must he heard and heeded.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Salvatore Quasimodo (August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968), pen name of Salvatore Ragusa, was an Italian author and poet. In 1959 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times'. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.
DESCRIPTION - Translated for the first time into English, THE MANDARIN is perhaps the finest novella of the well-known nineteenth-century Portuguese writer Eça de Queiroz, whose novels include THE RELIC, COUSIN BAZILIO, and THE CRIME OF FATHER AMARO. THE MANDARIN is the story of Teodoro, a poor clerk who, with the help of the Devil, acquires a vast fortune, His debaucheries in Lisbon and Paris, his eventual remorse, and his fantastic adventures in China form the substance of the novella. Such exotic characters as Camiloff, the terrifying but simple-minded Russian ambassador to Peking, and his wife, a blonde ‘Romantic' beauty with whom Teodoro has an affair, and the descriptions of strange places and unheard-of deeds, are brilliantly drawn, The satiric humor which pervades the book is also one of its striking features. Though an exotic work, THE MANDARIN is finally a satire on the Romantic temperament; it is, as de Queiroz himself would say, a ‘serious study of man and his eternal misery.' Also included in the present volume a several of Eça de Queiroz's short stories, mostly about love, they concern, often with hilarious results, romantic characters caught in real-life situations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in 1843, Eça de Queiroz was trained to be a lawyer in accordance with the wishes of his father, whose family was distinguished in this profession. But he entered the consular service instead, and underwent tours of duty in Cuba, the United States, and finally England, In 1888 he became the Portuguese Consul General in Paris, where he died in 1900.
DESCRIPTION - JUNGLE TALES (Cuentos de la Selva) is a collection of eight short stories in which Quiroga captures the magic of the jungle, which is the scene of exciting adventures illuminated by nature in all its splendor. A place where snakes throw glamorous parties with flamingos, stingrays join forces to fight off man-eating jaguars, and a giant tortoise carries a wounded man on its shell for hundreds of kilometers to bring him to safety.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 - 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar.
DESCRIPTION - Tales of horror, madness, and death, tales of fantasy and morality: these are the works of South American storyteller Horacio Quiroga. Author of some 200 pieces of fiction that have been compared to the works of Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, and Edgar Allan Poe, Quiroga experienced a life that surpassed in morbidity and horror many of the inventions of his fevered mind. THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN AND OTHER STORIES is the first representative collection in English of his tales, and it reflects the broad variety of forms that his stories assumed. Quiroga was obsessed with death, a legacy of the violence of his own life. His stories are infused with death, too, but they span a wide range of short fiction genres: jungle tale, Gothic horror story, morality tale, and psychological study. And, in spite of his preoccupation, Quiroga was an astute observer of the diversity of life and the problems of living. Many of his stories are set in the Misiones district of northern Argentina, the jungle where he spent much of his life; but his tales possess a universality that elevates them above the work of a regional writer. The stories in this volume have been selected to provide an overview of the scope of Horacio Quiroga's fiction and to show the versatility and skill that have made him a classic Spanish American writer. The Quiroga stories in this book are available in several Spanish editions. They were taken from the Biblioteca Rodo Series (Horacio Quiroga, Cuentos, Biblioteca Rodo Series, Montevideo, 1937-1945), in which the stories are located as follows: SUNSTROKE - La insolacion, vol. 2; THE PURSUED - Los perseguidos, vol. 7; THE DECAPITATED CHICKEN - La gallina degollada, vol. 1; DRIFTING - A la deriva, vol. 1; A SLAP IN THE FACE - Una bofetada, vol. 1; IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT - En la noche, vol. 3; JUAN DARIEN - Juan Darien, vol. 4; THE DEAD MAN - El hombre muerto, vol. 2; ANACONDA - Anaconda, vol. 3; THE INCENSE TREE ROOF - El techo de incienso, vol. 5; THE SON - El hijo, vol.1. THE FEATHER PILLOW (El almohadon de pluma) was taken from Quiroga's Sus mejores cuentos, with introduction and notes by John A. Crow (Mexico City: Editorial Cultura, 1943).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Horacio Silvestre Quiroga Forteza (31 December 1878 - 19 February 1937) was an Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer. He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, use the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states. His influence can be seen in the Latin American magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez and the postmodern surrealism of Julio Cortázar.
DESCRIPTION - "Claudia Rankine's Citizen comes at you like doom. It's the best note in the wrong song that is America. Its various realities 'mistaken' identity, social racism, the whole fabric of urban and suburban life - are almost too much to bear, but you bear them, because it's the truth. Citizen is Rankine's Spoon River Anthology, an epic as large and frightening and beautiful as the country and various emotional states that produced it. " - Hilton Als. "Claudia Rankine's Citizen combines intellectual generosity, fearlessness, beauty, and a salutary note of strangeness: she allows her ethical formulations to remain askew, tilted, ajar, so that ambiguity, hope, and sorrow can move in animating currents through her utterance's chambers. Rankine's work always repays close and admiring attention, and Citizen shows this brilliant poet and thinker advancing into urgent new zones of revelatory (and musically alert) investigation. " - Wayne Koestenbaum. "What does it mean to be a black citizen in the US of the early twenty-first century? Claudia Rankine's brilliant, terse, and parabolic prose poems have a shock value rarely found in poetry. These tales of everyday life - whether the narrator's or the lives of young black men like Trayvon Martin and James Craig Anderson - dwell on the most normal exteriors and the most ordinary of daily situations so as to expose what is really there: a racism so guarded and carefully masked as to make it all the more insidious. Rankine is never didactic: she merely presents, her eye for the telling detail and the documentary image allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Citizen is an unforgettable book. " - Marjorie Perloff. "Claudia Rankine's Citizen is a courageous, tough, bighearted giant of a little book. In our current climate of Post-black and go-along to get-along, Rankine suffers no fools and takes no prisoners but lovingly embraces and articulates the trauma and contradictions of what happens when one person is spat upon and another person spits." - William Pope.L. This book is made possible through a partnership with the College of St. Benedict, and honors the legacy of S. Mariella Gable, a distinguished teacher at the College.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Claudia Rankine is a Jamaican poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G. Lee Professor of Poetry at Pomona College.
DESCRIPTION - Still convalescent from mental illness induced by his last assignment, Jan Argand, the ‘Honest Commissioner' from Brabt, is sent to the Virtue Islands to advise on security for IBOBRAS, a Spanish-based construction firm contracted by the Americans to build a nuclear base there. A device explodes uncomfortably near him at Madrid airport, and on reaching Santa Caridad, Argand discovers that his document case has been switched for one containing six kilos of heroin. Convinced that he is to be killed, or at least framed, he sets out to track down his enemies and unwittingly stumbles into a web of intrigue and corruption, involving local government officials, wealthy industrialists, a highly successful gem dealer and even a couple of participants in a literary congress, whose events curiously overlap with Argand's activities. In this sequel to THE EURO-KILLERS, which was acclaimed by Professor Winks of Yale as one of the most historically important thrillers ever written, Julian Rathbone excels again at combining a taut, exciting plot with serious topical issues, not the least of which are those that arise when a community is asked to support the nuclear weapons of a superpower. In the age of the cruise missile, BASE CASE may prove closer to home than the exotic Virtue Islands where it is set.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 - 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative.
DESCRIPTION - Julian Rathbone, whose many detective stories have been highly praised, and whose historical novel, JOSEPH, has just been nominated for Britain's prestigious Booker prize, turns in this book to a totally new genre. He has written a genuinely intriguing political thriller that deserves the comparisons to Sjowall and Wahloo that are bound to be made. Wolfgang Herm, wealthy and brilliant creator of multinational EUREAC, disappears on the eve of the fulfillment of a project that threatens one of the last patches of wilderness in the coastal fens of northern Europe. Argand, the honest police commissioner, investigates. Not one but two ransom demands are delivered; sudden death and assassination follow; and through the widening confusion that includes demonstrations, urban terrorism, and even a football riot, we glimpse, in the final denouement, an abyss of greed and corruption. With deadly conviction Julian Rathbone exposes some of the forces and contradictions which threaten Western society, and the puny resistance of the unorganized few who care - eco-freaks, drop-outs, and ordinary men and women of good will. The result is a taut, suspense-filled novel which will add to Rathbone's reputation as a writer who produces splendid entertainment, yet who demands to be taken seriously.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 - 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative.
DESCRIPTION - Commissioner Jan Argond of Brabt, whose integrity has so often embarrassed his superiors, now heads the Bureau of Advice and Investigation, set up to handle complaints against the police themselves. His initial inquiries uncover a series of disturbing cases of police brutality, racism, and harassment of homosexuals. Mysteriously though, many of the complaints are withdrawn, and Argand gradually realizes that suspicions he had originally dismissed as products of his own paranoia point to a depth of governmental deception almost too bitter for him to accept. The plot widens to include an extreme left-wing group that may harbor terrorists; a vast antinuclear demonstration that turns into a near massacre when State Troopers move in; the murder of one of Argand's own team; and an attempt on the life of Argand himself. WATCHING THE DETECTIVES is a highly topical and possibly prophetic novel. Interweaving the most urgent political concerns of Europe and the United States with his usual skill and convincing subtlety, Rathbone has written a gripping story of a nation's, and an individual's, response to a potently unexpected threat. This is a distinguished successor to Rathbone's two previous Argand novels, the EURO-KILLERS and BASE CASE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Christopher Rathbone (10 February 1935 - 28 February 2008) was an English novelist. His politics were those of tolerance and libertarianism, with an innate distrust of self-serving hierarchies and a cynicism towards power-structures and their manipulation of the world, in particular the world of the helpless. In his fiction, much influenced by Greene, he always made social and historical context part of the weave of the narrative.
DESCRIPTION - The English translation of these essays by Roberto Fernandez Retamar ought to be the occasion for rethinking the relations between poetry and politics - or even between literary criticism and politics in a situation in which increasingly no one wants to think about that relationship any longer. His classic CALIBAN is after all, if anything is, the Latin American equivalent of Edward Said's ORIENTALISM (which it preceded by some six or seven years) and generated a similar ferment and restlessness in the Latin American field. Roberto Fernández Retamar is a Cuban poet and essayist whose work has been translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and other languages. He has been a professor at the University of Havana since 1955 and is currently president of the cultural institution, Casa de las Americas, whose journal he edited between 1965 and 1988. Retamar has also been a visiting professor at Yale University. In the early 1960's he was cultural counselor of the Cuban Embassy in Paris and coordinating secretary of the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, and from 1977 through 1986, director of the Marti Studies Center. Retamar's books of essays include Idea de la estilistica (1958), Para una teoria de la literatura hispanoamericana (1975), Introduccion a Jose Marti (1978) and Algunos usos de civilizacion y barbarie (1988), and he contributes to the journals Cuba Socialista, Cuadernos Americanos and Revista de Critica Literaria Lantinoamericana, among others. Edward Baker is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish from Harvard University. Baker has also taught at the University of California at San Diego, the University of Washington, and the University of Minnesota. He is co-editor of a collection of Nicaraguan verse, Nicaragua in Revolution (1980), and author of La lira mecánica (1986). Baker has contributed to Revista de Occidente, Sin Nombre, VRBI, and Maatstaaf.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Roberto Fernández Retamar (born June 9, 1930, Havana) is a Cuban poet, essayist, literary critic and President of the Casa de las AmEricas. In his role as President of the organization, Fernández also serves on the Council of State of Cuba. An early close confidant of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he has remained a central figure in Cuba since the 1959 Revolution. Retamar has also written over a dozen major collections of verse and founded the Casa de las Americas cultural magazine. Professor De Castro Rocha, at the University of Manchester has described Retamar as ‘one of the most distinguished Latin American intellectuals of the twentieth century.' In 1989, he was award the National Prize for Literature, Cuba's national literary award and most important award of its type.
DESCRIPTION - A major work by an essential American poet, published in full for the first time. Available again for the first time since 1978 - and complete in one volume for the first time ever - Charles Reznikoff 's Testimony is a lost masterpiece, a legendary book that stands alongside Louis Zukofsky's ‘A' and William Carlos Williams's Paterson as a milestone of modern American poetry. Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Reznikoff 's book sets forth a stark panorama of late19th- and early 20th-century America - the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease - in a radically stripped-down language of almost unbearable intensity. This edition also includes Reznikoff 's prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by essayist Eliot Weinberger. ‘[Testimony] is perhaps Reznikoff's most important achievement as a poet. A quietly astonishing work. at once a kaleidoscope vision of American life and the ultimate test of Reznikoff 's poetic principles. ' - Paul Auster. ‘Reznikoff 's astonishingly engaging and quietly powerful work has been steadily gaining a passionate following. Testimony is a chronicle of industrial accidents, domestic violence, racism. It tells the story of America's forgotten, those who suffer without redress, without name, without hope; yet the soul of these States is found in books like this; the acknowledgment of these peripheral stories turns a waste land into holy ground.' - Charles Bernstein.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Reznikoff was born in Brooklyn in 1894. He graduated from law school and was admitted to the bar, but never practiced, instead pursuing his writing. Between 1918 and 1961 he published twenty-three books of poetry and prose, gaining a wider readership in 1962, when New Directions published By the Waters of Manhattan: Selected Verse; a second selection, By the Well of Living and Seeing, was published by Black Sparrow in 1974, followed by the Complete Poems and Holocaust. Reznikoff died in 1975, at the age of eighty-one. Eliot Weinberger is an acclaimed essayist, translator, and editor. His essays are collected in Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, Oranges & Peanuts for Sale, Outside Stories, Works On Paper, and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (all available from New Directions). His writing appears frequently in The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books.
DESCRIPTION - This book springs from two premises. The first is that, with a nod toward Marianne Moore, America is - has always been - an imaginary place with real people living in it. The second is that slavery and its legacies explain how and why this is the case. The second premise assumes that slavery - and, after that fell, white supremacy generally - have been necessary adjuncts to American capitalism. Mark Richardson registers these two premises at the level of style and rhetoric - in the texture as much as in the "arguments" of the books he engages. His book is written to appeal to a general reader. It begins with Frederick Douglass, continues with W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, and Richard Wright, and treats works by writers not often discussed in books concerning race in American literature - for example, Stephen Crane and Jack Kerouac. It brings to bear on such books as Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk, and Crane's The Red Badge of Courage a degree and quality of attention one usually associates with the study of lyric poetry. The book offers a general framework within which to read African-American (and American) literature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mark Richardson is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Japan. He is co-editor of The Letters of Robert Frost (Harvard University Press).
DESCRIPTION - MORE daring that Mr. Belloc - who included a tiger among his suggestions for domestic pets - though scarcely more cynical, Clement Richer lauds eloquently the charms of the shark. Whether he tells a sophisticated story simply or a simple story with sophistication, is hard to determine. All that one can say is that he sets violence, horror and tragedy dancing to an odd, enchanting, little jig of his own. Mont Pele thunders and flames, overwhelming the island of Martinique: a boy Trains a shark to bite in two the competitors in diving for American dollars and English guineas: a rich planter is overwhelmed in a lava-flow, his daughter marries the shark-tamer, and looks like living happily ever after. These are the bare bones of this queer, idyllic, heartless, lyrical story, where terror becomes a tamed denizen of fairyland, and the basest of human motives live in a curious shimmer of innocence. In this over-moral world of the New Puritanism, it sounds a clear note of laughter and uninhibited delight. It is scarcely necessary to mention the excellence of Gerard Hopkins's translation, were it not that its very quality may induce the reader to forget that what he is reading is a translation at all.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the FacultE des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the AcadEmie Française.
DESCRIPTION - Few writers of German poetry have exercised so great an influence on modern European literature as Rainer Maria Rilke, who died in 1926. Three years earlier he had published the famous DUINO ELEGIES, in which his personal struggles with the problems of God and of death found their noblest expression.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Rainer Maria Rilke was born on December 4, 1875 in Prague. He published his first book of poetry in 1894. The lover of Lou Andreas-Salome and secretary to Auguste Rodin, Rilke went on to become a famous figure in his own right, publishing his great book, New Poems, in 1907. After WWI, he moved permanently to Switzerland where he wrote the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus in the last years of his life. He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926.
DESCRIPTION - Despite his major international reputation as one of Europe's most important poets today, this is the first English translation which attempts a comprehensive presentation of Yannis Ritsos's voluminous work. Both short poems and one long narrative poem have been selected to illustrate dominant features of his poetry - his arresting use of metaphor; his manner of injecting complexity into simple scenes; his remarkable skill of fusing the legendary past of Greece with Greek life today. Together these deceptively simple and very moving poems convey something of the lyric and epic qualities of a great painter in words.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yiannis Ritsos (1 May 1909 - 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair.
DESCRIPTION - One of Greece's most prolific, distinguished and celebrated poets, Yannis Ritsos is the author of more than 115 volumes of poetry, translations, essays and dramatic works. His many honors include the Lenin Prize (U.S.S.R., 1977), the Alfred de Vigny Award (France, 1975), and the Great International Prize in Poetry of the Bienninal Knokkele-Zoute (Belgium, 1972). YANNIS RITSOS: SELECTED POEMS 1938-1988 is the most comprehensive selection of Ritsos' poetry to appear in English translation to date. The work of 17 translators, this monumental volume generously represents 50 years of a gigantic poet's work. YANNIS RITSOS: SELECTED POEMS 1938 - 1988 features more than 440 poems (including 10 long poems never collected in English) from 43 of Ritsos' books (including 3 not yet published in Greek), 2 comprehensive and insightful essays by the editors on Ritsos' short and long poems, a chronological index of Ritsos' published and selected unpublished work, and more than 25 illustrations based on Yannis Ritsos' celebrated paintings on rocks.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yiannis Ritsos (1 May 1909 - 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair.
DESCRIPTION - Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is boring, said the founding father of the American right. Devoting your life to it, as conservatives do, is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex. With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? In The Reactionary Mind, Robin traces conservatism back to its roots in the reaction against the French Revolution. He argues that the right was inspired, and is still united, by its hostility to emancipating the lower orders. Some conservatives endorse the free market; others oppose it. Some criticize the state; others celebrate it. Underlying these differences is the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality -- while simultaneously making populist appeals to the masses. Despite their opposition to these movements, conservatives favor a dynamic conception of politics and society -- one that involves self-transformation, violence, and war. They are also highly adaptive to new challenges and circumstances. This partiality to violence and capacity for reinvention have been critical to their success. Written by a highly-regarded, keen observer of the contemporary political scene, The Reactionary Mind ranges widely, from Edmund Burke to Antonin Scalia and Donald Trump, and from John C. Calhoun to Ayn Rand. It advances the notion that all right-wing ideologies, from the eighteenth century through today, are improvisations on a theme: the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back. When its first edition appeared in 2011, The Reactionary Mind set off a fierce debate. It has since been acclaimed as the book that predicted Trump (New Yorker) and one of the more influential political works of the last decade (Washington Monthly). Now updated to include Trump's election and his first one hundred days in office, The Reactionary Mind is more relevant than ever.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Corey Robin teaches political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His writings have appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, and the London Review of Books.
DESCRIPTION - Black Marxism is a massively scholarly and politically significant examination of the conjunction, at the level of theory, of two distinct historical traditions of resistance: working-class radicalism in Europe, and Black resistance and rebellion in the African Diaspora. The author, Dr Cedric Robinson, argues that European Marxism articulated an inevitably Western experience of pre- capitalist and capitalist societies, and assumed - incorrectly - the primacy of class consciousness over other forms of mass ideology, notably racism, persisting from the pre-capitalist European past. Robinson goes on to explore in detail the history of Black radicalism, a tradition which he shows spans 400 years and three continents. He recounts critical historical junctures between African and European peoples in order to demonstrate the manner and scale of suppression of Black history in Western thought. Finally, he analyses the relationship between Black and European radicalism as reflected in the works of such 20th Century Black luminaries as W.E.B. DuBois, C.L.R. James, and Richard Wright. Their efforts mark the first systematic realization of the Black radical tradition in historical and theoretical terms. And their achievement is a major part of the intellectual legacy of that tradition. The achievement of Cedric Robinson's book is its exposition of the significance of radical Black thought in the context of constructing a penetrating critique of the Marxist understanding of class consciousness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cedric Robinson (November 5, 1940 - June 5, 2016) was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
DESCRIPTION - In Black Movements in America, Cedric Robinson traces the emergence of Black political cultures in the United States from slave resistances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the civil rights movements of the present. Drawing on historical records, Robinson argues that Blacks have constructed both a culture of resistance and a culture of accommodation based on the radically different experiences of slaves and free Blacks. Robinson concludes that contemporary Black movements are inspired by either a social vision - held by the relatively privileged strata - which holds the American nation to its ideals and public representation, and another - that of the masses - which interprets the Black experience in America as proof of the country's venality and hypocrisy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cedric Robinson (November 5, 1940 - June 5, 2016) was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
DESCRIPTION - Do we live in basically orderly societies that occasionally erupt into violent conflict, or do we fail to perceive the constancy of violence and disorder in our societies? In this classic book, originally published in 1980, Cedric J. Robinson contends that our perception of political order is an illusion, maintained in part by Western political and social theorists who depend on the idea of leadership as a basis for describing and prescribing social order. Using a variety of critical approaches in his analysis, Robinson synthesizes elements of psychoanalysis, structuralism, Marxism, classical and neoclassical political philosophy, and cultural anthropology in order to argue that Western thought on leadership is mythological rather than rational. He then presents examples of historically developed "stateless" societies with social organizations that suggest conceptual alternatives to the ways political order has been conceived in the West. Examining Western thought from the vantage point of a people only marginally integrated into Western institutions and intellectual traditions, Robinson's perspective radically critiques fundamental ideas of leadership and order.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cedric Robinson (November 5, 1940 - June 5, 2016) was a professor in the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He headed the Department of Black Studies and the Department of Political Science and served as the Director of the Center for Black Studies Research. Robinson's areas of interest included classical and modern political philosophy, radical social theory in the African diaspora, comparative politics, and the relationships between and among media and politics.
DESCRIPTION - HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA is a major challenge to all of us. It shows a direct correlation between the development of Europe and the underdevelopment of Africa. This book, which is written with the simplicity and clarity characteristic of Rodney's writings, is compulsory reading. This wide-reaching volume shows how Africa developed before the coming of the Europeans up to the 15th century, and shows Africa's contribution to European capitalist development in the pre-colonial period. Colonialism is then shown as a system for under developing Africa. is among the most insightful analysis of the reasons behind the underdevelopment of the African continent. The book is written in a Marxist context. The author demonstrates exceptional analytical depth and critical research into how European colonialism and capitalism were a double edged sword in creating deep rooted underdevelopment of the continent which has been very difficult to uproot. Other publications of the author include A HISTORY OF THE UPPER GUINEA COAST 1545 TO 1800 (The Clarendon Press, London), THE GROUNDINGS WITH MY BROTHERS (Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London) and a number of papers in international journals and reviews of African history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Walter Rodney (March 23, 1942 - June 13, 1980) was a prominent Guyanese historian and political figure. Rodney's most influential book was HOW EUROPE UNDERDEVELOPED AFRICA, published in 1972. In it he described an Africa which had been consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. The book became enormously influential as well as controversial. In 1974 Rodney returned to Guyana from Tanzania. He was supposed to take a position as a professor at the University of Guyana but the government prevented his appointment. He became increasingly active in politics, forming the Working People's Alliance, against the PNC government. In 1979 he was arrested and charged with arson after two government offices were burned. In 1980, Rodney was killed by a bomb in his car while running for office in Guyanese elections.
DESCRIPTION - Counting the costs of whiteness in the American past and present. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness collects David Roediger's recent essays, many published here for the first time, and counts the costs of whiteness in the past and present of the US. It finds those costs insupportable. At a time when prevailing liberal wisdom argues for the downplaying of race in the hope of building coalitions dedicated to economic reform, Roediger wants to open, not close, debates on the privileges and miseries associated with being white. He closely examines the way in which white identities have historically prepared white Americans to accept the oppression of others, the emptiness of their own lives, and the impossibility of change. Whether discussing popular culture, race and ethnicity, the evolution of such American keywords as gook, boss and redneck, the strikes of 1877 or the election of 1992, Roediger pushes at the boundaries between labor history and politics, as well as those between race and class. Alive to tension within what James Baldwin called 'the lie of whiteness,' Roediger explores the record of dissent from white identity, especially in the cultural realm, and encourages the search for effective political challenges to whiteness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David R. Roediger (born July 13, 1952) is the Foundation Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Kansas University, where he has been since the fall of 2014. Previously, he was an American Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His research interests include the construction of racial identity, class structures, labor studies, and the history of American radicalism. He writes from a Marxist theoretical framework.
DESCRIPTION - For almost two centuries, historians have had difficulty explaining the extraordinary duel that in July 1804 killed Alexander Hamilton, the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury, and ended Vice President Aaron Burr's political career. It was well known that Hamilton disliked Burr - perhaps out of a protective fear for his own power and influence, or perhaps, according to another theory, because of jealousy over the attentions of one or more women. When Burr finally threw down his challenge it followed more than a dozen years of difficult relations and political strife, culminating a few months earlier in Burr's defeat In the race for the governorship of New York, a defeat he attributed to Hamilton's machinations. But why a duel? In A FATAL FRIENDSHIP, the distinguished political scientist and writer Arnold Rogow demonstrates for the first time that the roots of the fatal encounter lay not in Burr's (admittedly flawed) political or private conduct but, rather, in Hamilton's conflicted history and character. With his detailed archival research, his close (and unprecedented) examination of the friendship between the two heroic figures, and his bold, Imaginative writing, Rogow's brilliant new book will change forever our understanding of honor, politics, and friendship In the early American Republic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ARNOLD A. ROGOW (August 10, 1924, Harrisburg, PA - February 14, 2006, Manhattan, New York City, NY) taught at Stanford, the University of Iowa, and the City University of New York. He is the author of many other hooks, including THOMAS HOBBES: RADICAL IN THE SERVICE OF REACTION, JAMES FORRESTAL: A STUDY OF PERSONALITY, POLITICS, AND POLICY, and THE DYING OF THE LIGHT. He lived in New York City.
DESCRIPTION - From Poland's Stanislaw Lem to France's Gerard Klein - Europe's most exciting explorers of Man's outer limits. An amazing collection of cosmic visions from eleven ultra-national explorers on the outer edges of the universe. Boldly terrifying, VIEW FROM ANOTHER SHORE is a unique experience in alien and unfamiliar land! Some of the best science fiction from continental Europe. These stories, varied in subject and treatment and ranging in tone from the gentle humour of Vadim Shefner's 'A Modest Genius' to the sharp satire of Lem's 'In Hot Pursuit of Happiness', provide an important contribution to the body of foreign SF in translation.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - FRANZ ROTTENSTEINER has written and edited many books in the fields of science fiction and fantasy, including The Fantasy Book: An Illustrated History from Dracula to Tolkien (1978), View From Another Shore: European Science Fiction (1999), and The Best of Austrian Science Fiction (2001). He lives in Vienna, Austria.
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 Indigène and published various books including La Montagne EnsorcelEe (1931). 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jacques Roumain (June 4, 1907 - August 18, 1944) was a Haitian writer, politician, and advocate of Marxism. He is considered one of the most prominent figures in Haitian literature. Although poorly known in the English-speaking world, Roumain has significant following in Europe, and is renowned in the Caribbean and Latin America. The great African-American poet, Langston Hughes, translated some of Roumain's greatest works, including Gouverneurs de la Rosee (Masters of the Dew), a masterpiece of world literature.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I have resolved on an enterprise which has no precedent and which, once complete, will have no imitator.'. In his posthumously published CONFESSIONS Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) describes the first fifty-three years of his life. With a frankness at times almost disconcerting, but always refreshing, he set out to reveal the whole truth about himself to the world, and succeeded in producing a masterpiece which has left its indelible imprint on the literature of successive generations, influencing among other Proust, Goethe, and Tolstoy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (28 June 1712 - 2 July 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological, and educational thought. Rousseau's novel Emile, or On Education is a treatise on the education of the whole person for citizenship. His sentimental novel Julie, or the New Heloise was of importance to the development of pre-romanticism and romanticism in fiction. Rousseau's autobiographical writings - his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker - exemplified the late 18th-century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, and featured an increased focus on subjectivity and introspection that later characterized modern writing. His Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought. Rousseau was a successful composer of music, who wrote seven operas as well as music in other forms, and made contributions to music as a theorist. As a composer, his music was a blend of the late Baroque style and the emergent Classical fashion, and he belongs to the same generation of transitional composers as Christoph Willibald Gluck and C.P.E. Bach. One of his more well-known works is the one-act opera Le devin du village, containing the duet 'Non, Colette n'est point trompeuse' which was later rearranged as a standalone song by Beethoven. During the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. Rousseau was interred as a national hero in the PanthEon in Paris, in 1794, 16 years after his death.
DESCRIPTION - From the bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, a concise, elegant exploration of time. Why do we remember the past and not the future? What does it mean for time to flow? Do we exist in time or does time exist in us? In lyric, accessible prose, Carlo Rovelli invites us to consider questions about the nature of time that continue to puzzle physicists and philosophers alike. For most readers this is unfamiliar terrain. We all experience time, but the more scientists learn about it, the more mysterious it remains. We think of it as uniform and universal, moving steadily from past to future, measured by clocks. Rovelli tears down these assumptions one by one, revealing a strange universe where at the most fundamental level time disappears. He explains how the theory of quantum gravity attempts to understand and give meaning to the resulting extreme landscape of this timeless world. Weaving together ideas from philosophy, science and literature, he suggests that our perception of the flow of time depends on our perspective, better understood starting from the structure of our brain and emotions than from the physical universe. Already a bestseller in Italy, and written with the poetic vitality that made Seven Brief Lessons on Physics so appealing, The Order of Time offers a profoundly intelligent, culturally rich, novel appreciation of the mysteries of time.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLO ROVELLI (born May 3, 1956, Verona, Italy) received his PhD in physics at the University of Padua. He has conducted research at Imperial College, Yale University, the University of Rome, and the University of Pittsburgh, and currently directs the quantum gravity group of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Aix-Marseille University. He is author of Quantum Gravity and What Is Time? What Is Space?, as well as many scholarly articles. His most recent book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, translated into thirty-four languages, is an international bestseller.
DESCRIPTION - Rozewicz's belief that ‘art' gives offence to human suffering grew directly from his war experiences and was consolidated during Poland's chaotic and tragic post-war period. He has invented his own type of anti-poem, stripped bare of all poetic device. His work possesses the authority of unflinching honesty; its urgency and barely controlled violence are tempered only by an essential compassion. His popularity within Poland is immense: he has been voted the most important living Polish poet and has received his country's highest literary award. This volume reveals him -as a major European voice and a poet of international stature.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tadeusz Rozewicz (born 9 October 1921) is a Polish poet, dramatist and writer. Rozewicz belongs to the first generation of Polish writers born after Poland regained its independence in 1918 following the century of foreign partitions. He was born in Radomsko near Lodz. His first poems were published in 1938. During the Second World War, like his brother Janusz (also a poet), he was a soldier of the Polish underground Home Army. His brother was executed by Gestapo in 1944. Tadeusz survived the war, finished high-school and enrolled at the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, but in late 1940s moved to Wroclaw where he lived for the next thirty years. By the time of his literary debut as highly innovative playwright in 1960 with The Card Index (Kartoteka), he was already the author of fifteen acclaimed volumes of poetry published since 1944. He had written over a dozen plays and several screenplays. The eruption of dramaturgical energy was also accompanied by major volumes of poetry and prose. Rozewicz is considered one of Poland's best postwar poets and most innovative playwrights. Some of his best known plays other than The Card Index include, The Interrupted Act (Akt przerywany, 1970), Birth Certificate (Swiadectwo urodzenia, screenplay to an award-winning film by the same tite, 1961), Left Home (Wyszedl z domu, 1965), and The White Wedding (Biale malzenstwo, 1975). His New Poems collection was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2008.
DESCRIPTION - This first novel by a new Mexican writer is unlike anything in contemporary fiction. Juan Rulfo, the author of this book that has already been translated and published in several European languages, is considered in Mexico to be the nation's most promising writer. This story is set in the primitive village life of the harsh, Mexican mountain world. Pedro Paramo is a powerful land owner who dominates the world of Media Luna like a feudal lord, Lascivious, cruel, destructive, he is the incarnation of the most essential forces of life: hate, love, and power. lie evokes the holiness and dark side of life that exalts and destroys his tenants. Paramo tyrannizes the local villagers at will, yet he himself is the victim of an overwhelming love that becomes his torment. Rulfo takes the reader through the normal barriers of existence into a world that is deathless because it is already dead, The life of the village is no longer a dull progression of calendar events, It is an amazing montage of the living and dead: people emerge with the intense and unique quality of the figures that accosted Dante in the Inferno. Through his unique suspension of time, Rulfo creates a new vision of human experience. His mystic quality of intense perception illuminates a people and the land that is part of its bloodstream.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JUAN RULFO (1918-1986) was one of Mexico's premier authors of the twentieth century and an important precursor of ‘magical realism' in Latin American writing. His other major work is El llano en llamas (THE BURNING PLAIN).
DESCRIPTION - This huge, ebullient, operatic, comic, serious - and important - novel establishes Salman Rushdie as a major new writer from India. It is a novel whose twin protagonists - Saleem Sinai, the indefatigable narrator, and modern India itself - we follow from the moment of their simultaneous birth (at the stroke of midnight, August 15, 1947, Saleem tumbling forth into the world at the precise instant of this country's arrival at independence) through all the convulsions and comedies of their childhood, adolescence, and somewhat questionable maturity. Baby Saleem - greeted by fireworks displays and cheering crowds, celebrated in the press, welcomed by Prime Minister Nehru himself - grows up to learn quickly the ominous consequences of the coincidence of his birth: his every act is mirrored, magnified, in events that sway the course of national affairs; his life and health are inextricably bound to those of his nation/twin; his biography is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of independent India. And he is blessed (and burdened) with remarkable aptitudes. His uncanny sense of smell (perhaps legitimately inherited, given the bizarre nature of his grandfather's olfactory organ) enables Saleem to sniff out troubles others fail to perceive - but never, of course, to distance himself from them. His extraordinary telepathic powers, first revealed to him accidentally in his mother's laundry hamper in his ninth year, link Saleem with his multitudinous siblings: the 1,000 other ‘midnight's children' of India (the total thus, significantly, 1,001), all born in the initial hour of their country's independence, all fatefully endowed with unusual features and magical gifts. Telling his story, furiously recording it for posterity in a quiet corner of a Bombay pickle factory as he awaits (mysteriously) his own imminent death, Saleem takes us first into the lives of his improbably eccentric forebears. He then plunges headlong into the fantastic events of his own life - sexual escapades, family quarrels, sicknesses-unto-death, miracle cures, incredible perils, miraculous escapes - a whirlwind of disasters and triumphs (both public and private) in which we see reflected modern India at its most impossible arid glorious. Funny, moving, explosively alive, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN is at once a fascinating family saga and a wild, astonishing evocation of a vast and complicated land and its people - a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy, Indian style.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize. After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, Rushdie survived a stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York. In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023. Rushdie's personal life, including his five marriages and four divorces, has attracted notable media attention and controversies, particularly during his marriage to actress Padma Lakshm.
DESCRIPTION - Sprawling, baroque, and brilliant, this majestic, unsettling novel is both fiction and essay, an author's apocalyptic attempt to exorcise the ghosts and the heroes of his characters' and his country's past. Set in the Argentina of Peron's first years, it has been acknowledged worldwide as one of the most ambitious and impressive works of a major Latin American writer - and perhaps of an entire continent. Published in Spanish in 1961, it was promptly translated into French, Italian, and German. Its absence in English until now is astounding; it is here published in a superb translation by Helen Lane. To summarize the plot is to trivialize the text. Suffice it to say that this is a novel of power, sweep, and narrative intricacy. There are at least two time schemes, combining reminiscence and premonition, flashback and prescience; boundaries vanish, time shifts and blurs, dissolves, solidifies, and shifts again. Sábato's famous ‘Report on the Blind,' a terrifying novel-within-a-novel that has been singled out for particular praise, is a metaphor for the entire work - a desperate search for an antidote to a despair born of political repression and historical precedent that holds the individual in such a pitiless grasp that free will seems frozen and fate fixed and inexorable. Its hallucinatory images and complex texture are alive with black humor, existential reflection, and a profound psychological and mythical symbolism which combine to lift this extraordinary novel to the level of masterpiece. Often compared to the works of Hesse, LautrEamont, Dostoevsky, and Borges, ON HEROES AND TOMBS is the last major work of the Latin American ‘boom' of the sixties to be translated into English. Ernesto Sabato was born in Buenos Aires in 1911. After completing his Ph.D. in physics in 1938, he worked at the Curie Laboratory in Paris, where he first came in contact with Andre Breton and other Surrealists. He soon abandoned science and dedicated himself wholly to writing. His first novel, El Tunel (THE OUTSIDER), published in 1948, was enthusiastically praised Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and Graham Greene. Sobre Heroes y Tumbas - ON HEROES AND TOMBS) followed in 1961. A third novel, Abaddon el Exterminador won him the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, awarded to such writers as Solzhenitsyn, Boll, Grass, Musil, Singer, and Márquez. Sábato's works have been translated into twenty-one languages. Involved actively in Communism in his youth, his opposition to Stalin led Sábato to reject the movement. Since then, he has fought all forms of oppression, from the left as well as the right, supporting his principle of ‘social justice and liberty.' During the worst years of Argentine dictatorship, he refused to emigrate, even under the threat of death, and continued to denounce both terrorism and repression. He currently lives in a suburb of Buenos Aires, where, reluctant to participate in societies and congresses of writers, he holds his characteristic position of ‘sniper.'. One of America's foremost translators, Helen R. Lane received the National Book Award in 1974 for her English rendition of Octavio Paz's ALTERNATING CURRENTS. Her sixty published works in translation have won much praise and many prizes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernesto Sabato (June 24, 1911 - April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
DESCRIPTION - ‘I am Juan Pablo Castel, the painter who killed Maria Iribarne. Everybody knows that I killed Maria. But nobody knows how I became acquainted with her, just what the relations between us were, and how I developed the idea of killing her. I shall try to tell everything impartially.' So begins this compact, explosive short novel by a new star in the literary galaxy. The rest of the book is the pell-mell, at times breathless explanation of how Castel first saw Maria, how he searched the streets, buildings, and byways until he found her again, how she became his mistress, how he was involved with her cousin and the blind scholar to whom she was married - and how and why he had, at last, to kill her. Albert Camus recommended to his French publishers that they bring out this extraordinary piece of psychological yarn-spinning by a young Argentine. We are proud to bring it to the attention of American readers. A book of genuine literary distinction, The Outsider is also a real spellbinder.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernesto Sabato (June 24, 1911 - April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
DESCRIPTION - Written over the last half-century, Ernesto Sabato's brilliant essays predict and interpret the catastrophic changes erupting in the world around us during this closing decade of the presesnt millennium. This is Sabato's ‘spiritual autobiography', a passionate plea for magic, myth, and art, and especially for the novel as the one medium in which mankind, sundered and dehumanized by science and secularism, is made whole again. Not since Carl Jung has a major thinker written so intelligently on the importance of myth and art for the survival of mankind. ERNESTO SABATO, of Argentina, is a physicist, civil libertarian and author of fourteen books, including the acclaimed novel. THE TUNNEL.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ernesto Sabato (June 24, 1911 - April 30, 2011) was an Argentine novelist, essayist, painter and physicist. According to the BBC he "won some of the most prestigious prizes in Hispanic literature" and "became very influential in the literary world throughout Latin America". Upon his death El País dubbed him the "last classic writer in Argentine literature".
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 is University Professor at Columbia University. He is the author often previous books, including ORIENTALISM, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 - 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism. Born a Palestinian in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, he was an American citizen through his father. Said spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended elite British and American schools. Subsequently he left for the United States, where he obtained a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. Said then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963, where he became professor of English and comparative literature in 1991. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for the 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyses the cultural representations that are the basis of Orientalism, a term he redefined to refer to the West's patronizing perceptions and depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies - 'the East‘. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect.
DESCRIPTION - Edward W. Said has written a brilliant, highly imaginative history of the ways in which the West has discovered, invented, and sought to control the East. His book is a subtle and far-reaching critique of the attitudes that the West has traditionally assumed toward ‘the Orient', a phrase used to designate not only a vast portion of the earth, but a people, a landscape, even a spirit which we have feared and yet found dangerously attractive. Starting with the eighteenth century, Said described how politicians, archaeologists, writers, and painters all shared in the discovery, and conquest, of the mysterious East. From The French in Egypt to the British in India, to our own ultimate follies in Vietnam, the book traces the story of an obsession. The objects of Said's study range from the most famous authors and politicians, such as Flaubert and Disraeli, to the more obscure and relatively less known linguists and archaeologists. All, however, were caught between colonialism and our own systems of thought. Said argues that Orientalism tells us more about the Occident than it does about the East. At bottom, his book is a fascinating study of how imagination and scholarship interrelated, of how power and politics play crucial roles in the production of culture and knowledge.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edward Wadie Said (1 November 1935 - 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist and public intellectual who helped found the critical-theory field of postcolonialism. Born a Palestinian in Jerusalem in Mandatory Palestine, he was an American citizen through his father. Said spent his childhood in Jerusalem and Cairo, where he attended elite British and American schools. Subsequently he left for the United States, where he obtained a bachelor's degree from Princeton and a doctorate in English literature from Harvard. Said then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1963, where he became professor of English and comparative literature in 1991. As a cultural critic, Said is best known for the 1978 book Orientalism. In it, he analyses the cultural representations that are the basis of Orientalism, a term he redefined to refer to the West's patronizing perceptions and depictions of Middle Eastern, Asian and North African societies - 'the East‘. He contended that Orientalist scholarship was, and remains, inextricably tied to the imperialist societies that produced it, which makes much of the work inherently political, servile to power, and thus intellectually suspect.
DESCRIPTION - Tomaž Šalamun is a Slovenian poet. He was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia, and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He has published 30 collections of poetry in his native Slovenian language. Šalamun spent two years at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in the 1970s and has lived for periods of time in the United States since then. For a time, he served as Cultural AttachE to the Slovenian Embassy in New York. He has had ten collections of poetry published in English, including The Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (Ecco Press, 1998); The Shepherd, the Hunter (Pedernal, 1992); The Four Questions of Melancholy (White Pine, 1997); Feast (Harcourt, 2000), ‘Poker' (Ugly Duckling), ‘Row!' (Arc Publications), ‘The Book for My Brother' (Harcourt), and ‘Woods and Chalices' (Harcourt). He lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is married to the painter Metka Krašovec. SNOW is one of two American chapbooks (Turbinesbeing the other one, in 1973) that were published as a result of Tomas Šalamun's collaborations with a group of poets at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. ‘By the time they were published, he had returned to Ljubljana, where he worked at odd jobs, translated William Carlos Williams and Apollinaire, Balzac and Simone de Beauvoir, divorced, taught primary school in a village, and worked as a salesman while continuing to write his poems. In 1979 he remarried and received a grant that allowed him to travel to Mexico, where he lived during 1979 and 1980. Šalamun returned to Ljubljana in 1981. The pace of the writing in the 1980s has slowed and the vision is noticeably darker' (Robert Hass).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tomaž Šalamun (July 4, 1941 - December 27, 2014) was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He published more than fifty books of poetry in Slovenian during his lifetime, and he is not only recognized as a leading figure of the Slovenian poetic avant-garde but is also considered one of the leading contemporary poets of Central Europe. In 1996 he became the Slovenian Cultural AttachE in New York and lived in the US intermittently until his death in 2014. His honors include the Preseren Fund Prize, the Jenko Prize, Laurel Wreath, Poetry and People Prize, Njegoš Prize, Europäsche Prize, Pushcart Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Besides teaching at several distinguished universities and having his work appear in over seventy journals and magazines internationally, he has had fifteen collections of poems published in English so far. All together, his poetry has been translated into over twenty languages around the world, numbering over eighty volumes. He leaves an expanding legacy with readers and especially with the many young poets who were influenced by his work.
DESCRIPTION - From the Introduction: Salamun belongs to the generation of Eastern European poets - it includes Joseph Brodsky of Russia and Adam Zagajewski of Poland - who came of age in the 1960s. He shares with these contemporaries a sense of history and commitment to the freedom of his art, but he is likely to take some Western readers by surprise because he also belongs to the traditions of European avant-garde and experimental poetry. This crossbreeding has produced a unique and exhilarating body of work. Playful, strange, full of whimsical self-mythologizing, marked by a sense of the absurd, an edge of anger, a sense of compassion for all forms of private and baffled suffering, his work has the genuinely unpredictable quality that always signals the presence of a living imagination. Salamun, like Brodsky and Zagajewski, grew up not with the searing experience of war and its aftermath that has marked the poetry of the older generation (Zbigniew Herbert in Poland, Miroslav Holub in Czechoslovakia, Vasko Popa in Yugoslavia), but in the postwar years, when the pinched material circumstances of economic recovery and the pervasive intellectual dishonesty of Stalinism were a kind of normality, the world as given. [The] political condition which for the older generation marked a change, a narrowing of possibilities, seems to have been for the younger generation part of the atmosphere of childhood, so they experienced it as not so much a matter of culture, but a matter of nature. This is not a poetics of revolution, or even of revolt. The issue isn't justice. It has no millenarian program; it is oppressed by the language of a millenarian program. And so it has the quality of inchoate rebellion, rebellion without a program. It begins in a negation that is also an act of self-liberation, and its future is open-ended. It is this tradition, or this historical moment in European poetry, to which Tomaz Salamun, with his love of the poetics of rebellion, belongs.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tomaz Salamun (July 4, 1941 - December 27, 2014) was a Slovenian poet born in Zagreb in 1941. He published more than thirty books of poetry and frequently taught at universities in Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Texas. Early in his career, he edited the literary magazine Perspektive and was briefly jailed on political charges. He studied art history at the University of Ljubljana and published his first collection, Poker, at the age of twenty-five. He won Slovenia's Preseren and Mladost Prizes, as well as a Pushcart Prize, and was a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University. He was a member of the Slovenian Academy of Science and Art. Robert Hass is the author of Twentieth Century Pleasures, winner of the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. He is currently at work on his third collection of poems, and lives in Berkeley, California.
DESCRIPTION - Salinger's classic coming-of-age story portrays one young man's funny and poignant experiences with life, love, and sex.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jerome David 'J. D.' Salinger (January 1, 1919 - January 27, 2010) was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980. Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. Several were published in Story magazine in the early 1940s before he began serving in World War II. In 1948, his critically acclaimed story 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' appeared in The New Yorker magazine, which became home to much of his later work. In 1951, his novel The Catcher in the Rye was an immediate popular success. His depiction of adolescent alienation and loss of innocence in the protagonist Holden Caulfield was influential, especially among adolescent readers. The novel remains widely read and controversial, selling around 250,000 copies a year. The success of The Catcher in the Rye led to public attention and scrutiny. Salinger became reclusive, publishing new work less frequently. He followed Catcher with a short story collection, Nine Stories (1953); a volume containing a novella and a short story, Franny and Zooey (1961); and a volume containing two novellas, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963). His last published work, a novella entitled 'Hapworth 16, 1924', appeared in The New Yorker on June 19, 1965. Afterward, Salinger struggled with unwanted attention, including a legal battle in the 1980s with biographer Ian Hamilton and the release in the late 1990s of memoirs written by two people close to him: Joyce Maynard, an ex-lover; and Margaret Salinger, his daughter. In 1996, a small publisher announced a deal with Salinger to publish 'Hapworth 16, 1924' in book form, but amid the ensuing publicity the release was indefinitely delayed. He made headlines around the globe in June 2009 when he filed a lawsuit against another writer for copyright infringement resulting from that writer's use of one of the characters from The Catcher in the Rye. Salinger died of natural causes on January 27, 2010, at his home in Cornish, New Hampshire. In November 2013, three unpublished stories by Salinger were briefly posted online. One of the stories, called 'The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,' is said to be a prequel to The Catcher in the Rye.
DESCRIPTION - 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 of individual freedom, yet Saul shows that there has never before been such pressure for conformity. Our business leaders describe themselves as capitalists, yet most are corporate employees and financial speculators. We are obsessed with competition, yet the single largest item of international trade is a subsidized market in armaments. We call our governments democracies, yet few of us participate in politics. We complain about ‘invasive government,' yet our legal, educational, financial, social, cultural and legislative systems are breaking down. While most observers view these problems separately, Saul demonstrates that they are largely manifestations of our blind faith in the value of reason. Over the last 400 years, our ‘rational elites' have gradually instituted reforms in every phase of social life. But Saul show that they have also been responsible for moist of the difficulties and violence of the same period. This paradox arises from a simple truth, which our elites deny: far from being a moral force, reason is no more than an administrative method. Their denial has helped to turn the modern West into a vast, incomprehensible, directionless machine, run by process-minded experts - ‘Voltaire's bastards' - whose cult of scientific management if bereft of both sense and morality. Whether in politics, art, business, the military, entertainment, science, finance, academia or journalism, these experts share the same outlook and methods. The result, Saul maintains, is a civilization of immense technological power whose people increasingly dwell in a world of illusion. Already known to millions of readers as the author of novels which portray the overwhelming effects of this power on the modern individual by weaving together international finance, the oil and arms business, guerilla warfare, drug traffic, and the world of art, here Saul lays aside the mask of fiction to speak in his own voice. Only by withdrawing from our addiction to ‘solutions' , he argues, reclaiming the citizens' right to question and participate in public life, and recovering a common sense capacity for intelligent panic, can we find a way out of our permanent crisis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - JOHN RALSTON SAUL is an internationally renowned novelist and essayist and the author of VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS and THE DOUBTER'S COMPANION, among other works. Named one of Utne Reader's 100 visionaries, he gave the prestigious 1995 Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, on which THE UNCONSCIOUS CIVILIZATION is based. Translated into several languages, the book has been a Canadian bestseller for close to a year.
DESCRIPTION - Postwar American publishing has been ruthlessly transformed since Andre Schiffrin joined its ranks in 1956. Gone is a plethora of small but prestigious houses that often put ideas before profit in their publishing decisions, sometimes even deliberately. Now six behemoths share 80% of the market and profit margin is all. Andre Schiffrin can write about these changes with authority because he witnessed them from inside a conglomerate, as head of Pantheon, co-founded by his father bought (and sold) by Random House. And he can write about them with candor because he is no longer on the inside, having quit corporate publishing in disgust to setup a flourishing independent house, the New Press. Schiffrin's evident affection for his authors sparkles throughout a story woven around publishing the work of those such as Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Gunnar Myrdal, George Kennan, Juliet Mitchell, R.D.Laing, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson. Part-memoir, part-history, here is an account of the collapsing standards of contemporary publishing that is irascible, acute and passionate. An engaging counterpoint to recent, celebratory memoirs of the industry written by those with more stock options and fewer scruples than Schiffrin, The Business of Books warns of the danger to adventurous, intelligent publishing in the bullring of today's marketplace.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andre Schiffrin (June 14, 1935, Paris, France - December 1, 2013, Paris, France) was, for thirty years, Publisher at Pantheon. He was also the Director of the New Press, which he founded in 1993. He contributed a regular column on publishing to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
DESCRIPTION - This selection of thoughts on religion, ethics, politics, women, suicide, books, and much more is taken from Schopenhauer's last work, Parerga and Paralipo-mena, published in 1851. Contents - Introduction; Essays - On the Suffering of the World; On the Vanity of Existence; On the Antithesis of Thing in Itself and Appearance; On Affirmation and Denial of the Will to Live; On the Indestructibility of our Essential Being by Death; On Suicide; On Women; On Thinking for Yourself; On Religion: A Dialogue; Aphorisms - On Philosophy and the Intellect; On Ethics; On Law and Politics; On Aesthetics; On Psychology; On Religion; On Books and Writing; On Various Subjects.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 - 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Representation (German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Influenced by Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the 'truth was recognized by the sages of India'; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers (e.g., asceticism). The influence of 'transcendental ideality' led him to choose atheism. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.
DESCRIPTION - BRUNO SCHULZ was one of the most remarkably gifted writers to have been produced in Eastern Europe in this century. Little known outside his native Poland, his work nevertheless - and despite official disapproval - continues to exercise a profound influence over young Polish writers. STREET OF CROCODILES is typical of Schulz's genius. It is a loosely connected series of reminiscences concerning the narrator s boyhood - a dazzling fabric of realistic impressions interwoven with eerie, often downright zany, hallucinations, But always beneath the glittering surface of Schulz's prose lie implications, half perceived yet powerfully communicated, of deeper meanings. It is usual to compare Schulz with Kafka and there are moments also when his work is reminiscent of the paintings of Chagall, but ultimately comparisons do a disservice to this original and vital author. Schulz, a Jew, was murdered by the Nazis, who anathematized his writing. After the war, the Communists of the Stalin era likewise condemned his work, but following the Polish liberalization of 1956, Schulz's reputation underwent a partial rehabilitation, As one Polish observer put it, ‘he is no longer overtly condemned; but very pointedly, he is never written about in the official journals.' In fact, the philosophical gap between Schulz and the Communists is unbridgeable. Perhaps this helps to explain his continued popularity in Poland.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 - November 19, 1942) was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher born to Jewish parents. He is regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award. Several of Schulz's works have been lost in the Holocaust, including short stories from the early 1940s and his final, unfinished novel The Messiah. Schulz was shot and killed by a German Nazi in 1942 while walking back home toward Drohobycz Ghetto with a loaf of bread.
DESCRIPTION - The Greek gods and heroes live on to this day, and their human significance remains valid for all men. The Greek myths have been the inexhaustible treasure house for the poetry and philosophy of the Greeks themselves and of later centuries. No other popular version of Greek mythology has achieved such enduring fame as Gustav Schwab's legends and tales of antiquity, translated here for the first time into English. They have delighted many generations, and no similar attempt has surpassed them. In an amazing work of reconstruction, Schwab wove together the scattered fragments of the mythological tales into a continuous, coherent narrative. He went back to the most varied antique sources - to Hesiod and Homer, to the great Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, but also to Ovid - and he transcribed them as literally as possible. Through this device his work shares the timeless quality of its prototypes. This book is meant not only for children, but also for the childlike spirit of the young and old alike. It conveys a breath of the imperishable strength of youth in Greek genius. A detailed index representing a condensed mythological dictionary supplements the text.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gustav Benjamin Schwab (19 June 1792 - 4 November 1850) was a German writer, pastor and publisher.
DESCRIPTION - A magnificently illustrated tribute to black women in art and story. IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from the ancient past to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupian novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. Volume 1: Ancient African Queens weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and travelers' tales from Egypt to southern Africa, from prehistory to the nineteenth century. These women rulers, warriors, and heroines include Amanirenas, the queen of Kush who battled Roman armies and defeated them at Aswan; Daurama, mother of the seven Hausa kingdoms; Amina Kulibali, founder of the Gabu dynasty in Senegal; Ana de Sousa Nzinga, who resisted the Portuguese conquest of Angola; Beatrice Kimpa Vita, a Kongo prophet burned at the stake by Christian missionaries; Nanda, mother of the famous warrior-king Shaka Zulu; and many others. These extraordinary women's stories, narrated in the style of African oral tradition, are absorbing, informative, and accessible. The abundant illustrations, many of them rare archival images, depict the diversity among Black women and make this volume a unique treasure for every art lover, every school, and every family. Copublished with Modus Vivendi Publications.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.
DESCRIPTION - VOLUME 2: HEROINES OF THE SLAVERY ERA Translated by Rose-Myriam Rejouts, Val Vinokurov, and Stephanie Daval With a Foreword by Howard Dodson. IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from ancient times to the present. Lavishly illustrated. with text written and selected by the renowned Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. VOLUME 2: HEROINES OF THE SLAVERY ERA weaves together oral tradition, folk legends and stories, songs and poems, historical accounts, and personal writings from North and South America and the Caribbean from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. These women of the slavery era include Aqualtune, a princess from Congo enslaved in Brazil, who led an army of ten thousand warriors in the Battle of Mbwila; Anastasia, an African slave in Brazil, who today is considered the patron saint of Brazil's blacks; Solitude, a slave in the French West Indies, the leader of the survivors of La Goyave and legendary in Guadeloupe to this day; Phillis Wheatley, a slave in Boston, a child prodigy and brilliant woman whose poetry is among the finest of the early American era; Harriet Tubman, heroine of the Underground Railroad, who helped hundreds of other slaves escape to freedom in the United States and Canada; Ellen Craft, a slave who successfully escaped to Philadelphia with her husband; Sojourner Truth, famed orator on behalf of the rights of women and the abolition of slavery; and many others. A magnificent tribute to black women From the ancient past to the present. Hundreds of rare archival images. Fascinating stories of women's legacy to world culture. A treasure For every family and school. SIMONE SCHWARZ-BART is the author of six novels and a play, which have been translated and published in many languages; BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE BRIDGE OF BEYOND have been published in English. Andre Schwarz-Bart is the author of three novels, including Le dernier des Justes (THE LAST OF THE JUST), which was awarded the 1959 Prix Goncourt and has been translated into twenty languages. Rose-Myriam REjouis and Val Vinokurov have previously translated two works by French novelist Patrick Chamoiseau: SOLIBO MAGNQICENT and TEXACO. Stephanie Daval is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton University, specializing in Francophone literature. Howard Dodson is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Jacket design: Ben Neff. Jacket illustration: Portrait of Sojourner Truth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.
DESCRIPTION - Volume 3: Modern African Women offers powerful and unforgettable tales from Senegal to South Africa, from the nineteenth century to the present. These modern African rulers, leaders, and visionaries include Madam Yoko, Queen of the Kpaa and national heroine of Sierra Leone; Princess Kesso, a Fulani Muslim princess from Guinea who became one of the world's first black models; Alice Lenshina, who fought British colonial rule in Zambia and was considered a prophet in the Lumpa Church; Ellen Kuzwayo. member of the African National Congress whose struggle for civil and women's rights landed her in prison; Dulcie September, the ANC representative in France, killed for her ardent support for the cause of freedom; Miriam Makeba, internationally loved South African singer; Winnie Mandela, who carried on the struggle against apartheid during Nelson Mandela's long imprisonment; and many others. A magnificent tribute to black women from the ancient past to the present. Hundreds of rare archival images. Fascinating stories of women's legacy to world culture. A treasure For every family and school. IN PRAISE OF BLACK WOMEN is a magnificent tribute to women in Africa and the African diaspora from ancient times to the present. Lavishly illustrated, with text written and selected by the celebrated Guadeloupean novelist Simone Schwarz-Bart, this four-volume series celebrates remarkable women who distinguished themselves in their time and shaped the course of culture and history. Simone Schwarz-Bart is the author of six novels and a play, which have been translated and published in many languages; BETWEEN TWO WORLDS and THE BRIDGE BEYOND have been published in English. Andre Schwarz-Bart is the author of three novels, including Le dernier des Justes (The Last of the Just), which was awarded the 1959 Prix Goncourt and has been translated into twenty languages. Rose-Myriam REjouis and Val Vinokurov have previously translated two works by Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau: Solibo Magnificent and Texaco. Stephanie Daval is completing a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Princeton University, specializing in Francophone literature. Howard Dodson is director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. Jacket design: Ben Neff. Jacket photo: Myriam Makeba. Olympia 1971.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Simone Schwarz-Bart (born Simone Brumant on 8 January 1938) is a French novelist and playwright of Guadeloupean origin. She is a recipient of the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle. Simone Brumant was born on 8 January 1938 at Saintes in the Charente-Maritime department of France. Her place of birth is not clear, however, as she has also stated that she was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe.
DESCRIPTION - The anonymous letter arrived in the afternoon mail. The message, spelled out in words that had been cut from a newspaper, read: ‘This letter is your death sentence, To avenge what you have done, you will die. The pharmacist Manno, to whom the letter had been addressed, showed the letter to the mailman. ‘It may be a joke, you think?' the pharmacist asked the mailman anxiously. ‘What else can it be? A joke. Don't give it a second thought,' said the postman, and went away. Then, on August 23, 1964, the pharmacist and his friend Dr. Roscio went hunting, as they'd done often. When some of their dogs came running back to the village alone, a search party set out. The hunters were found in the woods, dead: the pharmacist had been shot in the back, the doctor in the chest. The colonel and the chief inspector of the squadra mobile hurriedly took over the investigation. The pharmacist's friends ransacked his past for clues and bestowed all sympathy on Dr. Roscio's lovely young widow. But it was Professor Laurana, quiet, modest, timid, who began to move toward the truth, along a dangerous path - for in the Sicilian world truth is complicated indeed and, for an unworldly man, perhaps too realistic - and too ruthless. This is a brief and brilliant novel which lights up the dark Sicilian landscape with extraordinary clarity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 - November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968).
DESCRIPTION - The first translation into English of the acclaimed mystery-writer's final detective novel serves as the perfect introduction to an important Italian writer. Published just before his death, this novel refines and condenses Sciascia's analysis of the mafia and the crucial part it plays in Sicily's political system. In a small Sicilian village, a young and inexperienced policeman receives a strange phone call from a retired diplomat. On investigating the matter, he finds the diplomat dead. What at first appears to be a simple case of suicide turns into an intricate tale of corruption that involves the Mafia, the head of police, and the entire Sicilian establishment. Sciascia's novella Candido is also included. Candido Munafo, born in 1943 under the bombs of the Allied forces invading his home region, Sicily, is stricken, as it were from birth, with an irresistible propensity for naked truth. It shows in the child, the adolescent, the man. ‘Things are always simple,' he is heard muttering, and that applies to all matters approached and experienced by him - religious, philosophical, political, or simply human. However, in postwar Sicily, as elsewhere, the results of seeing and saying the truth are generally disastrous. In the disarray and hypocrisy around him, Candido is rapidly perceived as a monster who generates suicides, destroys the family, lives happily in sin. The one man who understands and supports him is his tutor, a doubting priest in trouble with both the Church and the Communist Party. The target of the polemics in this brilliant, witty offshoot of Voltaire's CANDIDE is the ambiguities of the modern world. On the ancient earth of Sicily, two ideologies are locked in battle for the souls of men: Church and Party alike demand total loyalty and an abdication of disinterested truth-seeking. With inspired malice, Sciascia reveals the parallel methods used in pursuing divergent ends. Constantly entertaining, written with the lightest of hands, CANDIDO wraps its morality tale into a flow of delightful narrative. The reflection is left to the reader.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 - November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968).
DESCRIPTION - The first man to die was District Attorney Varga, who was conducting the prosecution in the Reis trial. He died with a sprig of jasmine clasped in his hand. The next man to die was a judge named Sanza, shot through the heart, in Ales, a town about sixty miles away from where Varga had been killed. The Minister for National Security had assigned Inspector Rogas to investigate the murders. Rogas was an exceptional investigator - his head worked well, and his head told him there would be a third murder, and that it would be the murder that would provide the clue he'd need to solve them all. He was at least partially right - the highest ranking magistrate in the town of Chiro. Judge Azar, was the next victim. This is a novel that explores many things, including the codes of justice and the power that taints and destroys courts and governments. It is a complex, ironic novel, and a most important one.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 - November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968).
DESCRIPTION - IN THE FORM of a swift-moving detective novel, this book presents a well-informed and revealing ‘documentary' on the secret machinations of that notorious organization called the Mafia. The novel opens with a routine police inquiry into the shooting of an insignificant building contractor. As the investigation progresses, it becomes apparent that mysterious and influential forces are at work to suppress all evidence of the crime and to prevent its just solution. Nonetheless, under the direction of an idealistic young police officer the search for the criminals continues-a search that leads from the scene of the murder, a small Italian village, to the foothills of Sicily, and ultimately to the highest government offices in Rome. On its publication in Italy, MAFIA VENDETTA provoked a public outcry and caused no little embarrassment in government circles, American readers will appreciate the vigorous realism and rapid pace of the novel, and readily understand why this fictional expose ‘hit home.'. Leonardo Sciascia was born at Racalmuto, in the province of Agrigento (Sicily), in 1921. His work as a writer reflects his concern with the problems, social and economic, which face the people of southern Italy. In 1956 the Italian publisher Laterza brought out his PARISHES OF REGALPETRA, an account of the history and life of a rural region of Sicily. His Patriarchs of Sicily, published in 1958, is a collection of tales depicting the social and spiritual plight of the island. In 1961 he wrote a study on Pirandello and Sicily. MAFIA VENDETTA, his best-known work, was awarded the Crotone Prize in 1962.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 - November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968).
DESCRIPTION - 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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leonardo Sciascia (January 8, 1921 - November 20, 1989) was an Italian writer, novelist, essayist, playwright and politician. Some of his works have been made into films, including Open Doors (1990) and Il giorno della civetta (1968).
DESCRIPTION - Vertigo is the third novel New Directions has published by W.G. Sebald, one of themost enormously acclaimed European writers of our time. Vertigo, W.G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald - the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness - takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts - Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that ‘swimming of the head,' as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so ‘stunning and strange,' as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is ‘like a dream you want to last forever.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - W. G. SEBALD was born in Wertach im Allgau, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 he was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previously translated books - THE RINGS OF SATURN, THE EMIGRANTS, VERTIGO, and AUSTERLITZ - have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.
DESCRIPTION - Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the civil rights movement in Boston in the 1970s. The sisters are so close that they have created a private language, yet to the outside world they can't be sisters: while Cole looks like her father's daughter, Birdie appears to be white. For Birdie, Cole is the mirror in which she can see her own blackness. Then their parents' marriage falls apart.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Danzy Senna, (b. 1970) is an American novelist. Danzy Senna was born in Boston, Massachusetts and is the daughter of the author Carl Senna (THE BLACK PRESS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS,) a black poet of Mexican heritage who came from a struggling single-parent household, and Fanny Howe, an Irish-American poet and novelist born into privilege. They met and married while both were activists during the American Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968). Senna received her B.A. from Stanford University and MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine, where she received several creative writing awards. Her first novel, CAUCASIA (1998), received the Book-of-the-Month Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction. It also received the Alex Award , American Library Association. Her second novel SYMPTOMATIC (2003), is a psychological thriller narrated by a biracial young woman who is often mistaken for white. Senna's latest work is a memoir entitled WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT?: A PERSONAL HISTORY (2009).
DESCRIPTION - The Guide to Modern World Literature is an encyclopedic attempt to describe all major 20th-century authors, in all languages. The book is over 1300 pages long. Cyril Connolly said of the first (1973) edition: "I'm very much afraid he will prove indispensable!"
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Roger Seymour-Smith (24 April 1928 - 1 July 1998) was a British poet, literary critic, biographer and astrologer. Seymour-Smith was born in London and educated at Highgate School and St Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he was editor of Isis. He began as one of the most promising of Anglophone post-war poets, but became better known as a critic, writing biographies of Robert Graves (whom he met first at age 14 and maintained close ties with), Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, and producing numerous critical studies. The poet and critic Robert Nye stated that Seymour-Smith was "one of the finest British poets after 1945." Others to praise his poetry included Robert Graves, C. H. Sisson, Geoffrey Grigson and James Reeves. He came to prominence in 1963, as the editor of the first twentieth-century edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets to use the 'original' spelling. Characteristically, his commentary concerned Shakespeare's sexuality, which upset many. Later, his Fallen Women (1969) and Sex and Society (1975) would become 'standard plundering material for more famous works' as the author good-humouredly claimed. He had known Alex Comfort, who was then writing The Joy of Sex (1972), from their schooldays at Highgate School and the two often swapped notes. Seymour-Smith's Poets Through their Letters Vol 1 (Wyatt to Coleridge) was acclaimed for its scholarship, but sold poorly. Hence, Volume 2 was never published. His two volumes of poetry Tea with Miss Stockport (1963) and Reminiscences of Norma (1971), were praised by many, including Peter Porter. But an apparent creative silence till his last collection, Wilderness (1994), led to a decline in his reputation with the reading public during the 1980s. The Guide to Modern World Literature is an encyclopedic attempt to describe all major 20th-century authors, in all languages. The book is over 1300 pages long. Cyril Connolly said of the first (1973) edition: "I'm very much afraid he will prove indispensable!" His criticism of Lawrence Durrell singled out his poetry as his real achievement; John Fowles, Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow, Malcolm Bradbury and Ted Hughes received the first adverse criticism of their reputations in this book. The stature of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–76) as the greatest fictional post-war achievement was asserted: a view endorsed by Kingsley Amis and Hilary Spurling. He also predicted that T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets would not survive as a great poem by 2000. The polyglot Seymour-Smith further used the book to champion writers he regarded as underrated, such as James Hanley, Laura Riding, Wyndham Lewis, Roberto Arlt, Pio Baroja, Rayner Heppenstall and Jose Maria Arguedas, while attacking those he felt were overvalued, such as George Bernard Shaw, W. H. Auden and as mentioned above, T. S. Eliot. Seymour-Smith also disparaged Harold Pinter, Margaret Atwood, and Tom Stoppard, whom he thought overrated. Anthony Burgess likened Seymour-Smith to Samuel Johnson due to his many literary surveys from The Guide to Modern World Literature in 1975 onwards.
DESCRIPTION - Robert Sheckley was an eccentric master of the American short story, and his tales, whether set in dystopic cityscapes, ultramodern advertising agencies, or aboard spaceships lighting out for hostile planets, are among the most startlingly original of the twentieth century. Today, as the new worlds, alternate universes, and synthetic pleasures Sheckley foretold become our reality, his vision begins to look less absurdist and more prophetic. This retrospective selection, chosen by Jonathan Lethem and Alex Abramovich, brings together the best of Sheckley's deadpan farces, proving once again that he belongs beside such mordant critics of contemporary mores as Bruce Jay Friedman, Terry Southern, and Thomas Pynchon. ‘Because Sheckley leavened his darkest visions with wit and aburdist plotting, he is considered one of science fiction's seminal humorists, a precursor to Douglas Adams.' - THE NEW YORK TIMES.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Sheckley (July 16, 1928 - December 9, 2005) was an American writer. First published in the science fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical. Sheckley was nominated for Hugo- and Nebula awards and was named Author Emeritus by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2001.
DESCRIPTION - The story of Victor Frankenstein and of the monstrous creature he created has held the reading public spellbound since its publication almost a century and a half ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A brilliant exercise in the macabre, written with near - hallucinatory intensity, Frankenstein represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination. Of its contemporary significance, Harold Bloom writes: 'The greatest paradox and most astonishing achievement of Mary Shelley's novel is that the monster is more human than his creator. This nameless being, as much a modern Adam as his creator is a modern Prometheus, is more lovable than his creator and more hateful, more to be pitied and more to be feared, and above all able to give the attentive reader that shock of added consciousness in which aesthetic recognition compels a heightened realization of the self.' The California edition of the Pennyroyal Press Frankenstein unites the dark side of Barry Moser's art with the classic 1818 text of Mary Shelley's tale of moral transfiguration. In a vivid sequence of woodcuts, the reader witnesses the birth of the 'monster' as Moser shapes him from darkness and gives him a form simultaneously ghastly in its malice and transfixing in its suffering.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mary Shelley (nee Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
DESCRIPTION - In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors. Author readings. In its extraordinary range of character and culture, Almanac of the Dead is fiction on the grand scale. The acclaimed author of Ceremony has undertaken a weaving of ideas and lives, fate and history, passion and conquest in an attempt to re-create the moral history of the Americas, told from the point of view of the conquered, not the conquerors.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon; born March 5, 1948) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the First Wave of what literary critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. Silko was a debut recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Grant, now known as the 'Genius Grant', in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994. She currently resides in Tucson, Arizona.
DESCRIPTION - This anthology gives the reader an opportunity to sample some of the latest examples of the mystery genre from Latin America. With this volume, readers can enjoy some of the best mystery and crime fiction from Latin America, as Latin Americans have long been devotees of British whodunits as well as North American hard-boiled tales. Here, translated from the Spanish and Portuguese, are eight stories from those countries where the most significant work in mystery and crime fiction in Latin America originates - Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, and Cuba. A boom in the genre can be observed in the 1970s and 1980s, the period to which these stories belong. In an introductory essay, Amelia S. Simpson explains the background to that boom, and the context that makes Latin American mystery and crime fiction an intriguing and exceptional body of writing within what is often thought of as a formulaic genre with little substance and few literary pretensions. The stories in the present volume cover a range of styles and express a variety of views of what mystery and crime fiction can mean. The elegant and supple voice of Argentine author Ricardo Piglia looks at systems of violence in "The Crazy Woman and the Story of the Crime." With a nod to Raymond Chandler and the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, and a bow to Poe's ratiocinations, Piglia creates one of the most imaginative, intricate in its implications, and original crime stories Latin America has produced. The real horror of Piglia's tale of violence is that it never ends. "Hierarchy," by Piglia's fellow Argentine Eduardo Goligorsky, on the other hand, reaches an explosive conclusion that punctuates another vision of systematic violence. In "Doctor and Doctoring," the Mexican author Luis Arturo Ramos draws on history and memory--a story of haves and have-nots--to bring together two men in a murderous embrace. The next four stories are from Brazil. The first two deal specifically, like Ramos's tale, with the fact of social privilege and authority. Ignacio de Loyola Brandao's "Monday's Heads" shows a deeply rooted social psychosis blossom in the narrow confines of an elevator car. The documentary style of Paulo Celso Rangel's "Deposition" underlines the lack of artifice needed to play this predictable and brutal game of cat and mouse. In "Mandrake," Rubem Fonseca's private eye shows us a deeply disturbed and disturbing side of Rio de Janeiro. Glauco Rodrigues Correa's "The South Bay Crime" provides an amusing look at provincial Brazilians and maintains as well a suspenseful narrative concerning a young boy's mysterious disappearance. Finally, Cuban author Arnaldo Correa's "The Man under the Ceiba Tree" subtly undermines the transparent approach of much socialist detective fiction of the postrevolutionary period. Like all good mystery and crime stories, these can be read simply for pleasure, as well as for the insights they offer into Latin American culture and fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Amelia S. Simpson received an M.A. in Latin American studies in 1977 and a Ph.D. in Spanish American literature in 1986, both from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Florida, Gainesville, since 1987.
DESCRIPTION - In a small Swedish town a blond woman in her middle thirties is brutally murdered and left buried in a swamp. Some weeks later her decomposing body is found accidentally by a group of hikers. Prime suspects are the convicted sex murderer who was her only neighbor on a lonely country road, and her former husband - a rough, drunken retired sailor. Meanwhile, on a quiet suburban street in another part of Sweden, a midnight shootout take place between three cops and two teenage boys. Dead: one cop and two teenage boys. Wounded: two cops. Escaped: one kid. Those are the facts. And Martin beck, Chief of Sweden's National Homicide Squad, is called in with his partner, Lennart Kollberg. In this unfamiliar small-town setting they encounter figures from their earlier cases (ROSEANNA, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE). We learn a great deal about crime, contemporary Sweden, and police work as Beck and Kollberg move thoughtfully toward the solution of both crimes. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have been called ‘the reigning king and queen of mystery fiction' by The National Observer. COP KILLER is the ninth in their well-known Martin Beck series, which includes the book from which the recent film THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN was made.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - Accustomed as he was to public speaking, powerful Swedish industrialist Viktor Palmgren had no idea that his after-dinner speech in elegant Hotel Savoy would be so rudely interrupted that warm summer evening. Suddenly, in the midst of Palmgren's entertaining remarks, an uninvited guest strolled in, pulled a blue-steel object from his pocket, shot the speaker in the head, and disappeared through an open window. No one in the restaurant was able to identify the gunman, and local police were sheepishly baffled. Enter: Chief Inspector Martin Beck, of the National Homicide Squad. And so we are off on another precision-timed, beautifully constructed tale of police work and further absorbing adventures of Martin Beck and his dogged fellow detectives of Sweden's National Police. Old friends of Beck and his colleagues will relish the special atmospheric setting and human interest in this latest installment, and may be relieved to note that Beck's appetite (which failed him regularly in the dyspeptic days before the idea of divorce had ever crossed his mind) has actually begun to improve. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife writing team, are the creators of the Martin Beck mystery series, are regarded by mystery lovers today with a very special affection. THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, an earlier volume, won the Edgar Award (from the Mystery Writers of America) as the best mystery novel of 1970, and the entire series, also including ROSEANNA, THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE, and THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED, has won praise from critics everywhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - One July day, a naked woman was dredged up from the bottom of Sweden's beautiful Lake Vattern. Who was she? Where had she come from? How had she got there? And why? Never before in all his experience as a policeman had Martin Beck been given a case to investigate where there was so little information to work on, but through all the empty days that followed, his determination to find the person who had committed this ugly crime never wavered. For weeks nothing happened and the chances of bringing the murderer to book seemed more and more remote. The Stockholm Homicide Squad had not even been able to find out the girl's identity. Then, out of the blue, they received one vital fragment of information and slowly the pieces began to fall into place. The lines of enquiry stretched from Stockholm to Turkey, to South Africa and to the United States, and bit by bit Martin Beck and his colleagues began to build up a picture of the girl and the person they suspected of being her killer. The hazardous but ingenious trap they lay for the suspect brings the story to a dramatic conclusion. ROSEANNA introduces Martin Beck to the American public for the first time. Tough, intelligent, sensitive and dedicated to his job, Martin Beck is a far cry from the slick, smart-alecky private eyes and detectives we have come to know so well. A chain smoker with a graveyard cough and an abused stomach; a ‘weekend' sailor who likes to spend what time he has making model ships, living in a gray suburban apartment with his once pretty wife and two children with whom he has few points of contact and little in common - that is Martin Beck. His adventures and the background of present-day Sweden combine to make an unusually vivid and exciting mystery story. Per Wahlöö was born in the old university town of Lund, Sweden, in 1926. He has been a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio and television plays, film scripts, short stories and novels; two of his novels, THE ASSIGNMENT and THE THIRTY-FIRST FLOOR, have already been published in the U.S.A. Mr. Wahlöö and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjöwall, edit Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry. They have two children.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - The bloody murder of a police captain in his hospital room exposes the particularly unsavory history of a man who spent forty years practicing brutality and force. As this story unfolds, Martin Beck and his colleagues scour Stockholm for the murderer, a demented and deadly rifleman, who finally stages a terrifying scene of chaos and revenge against the police. As the tension builds and a feeling of impending danger and doom settles on Martin Beck, an even stronger sense of responsibility and something like shame urge him into taking drastic steps on his own which lead to shocking disaster. In their newest episode in the lives of Martin Beck and the Stockholm police, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö go to the heart of modern police practices, laying bare the workings of an organization and its various personalities which can so deeply affect society at large. An extremely taut and exciting novel, THE ABOMINABLE MAN once again proves Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö to be ‘the reigning king and queen of mystery fiction.'. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife writing team who created Martin Beck, are regarded by mystery lovers with a very special affection. THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN, an earlier volume, won the Edgar Award (from Mystery Writers of America) as the mystery novel of 1970, and the entire series, also including ROSEANNA, THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, THE MAN WHO WENT IN SMOKE, THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED, and MURDER AT THE SAVOY, has won praise from critics everywhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - The cunning incendiary device that blew the roof off a Stockholm apartment house one cold winter night not only interrupted the small, peaceful orgy underway inside, it nearly took the lives of the building's eleven occupants. And if one of police commissioner Martin Beck's colleagues hadn't been on the scene, the explosion would have led to a major catastrophe since - for reasons nobody could satisfactorily explain - the fire department didn't arrive until too late. How could a regulation-sized ladder truck vanish in the center of Stockholm? What, if anything, did the explosion have to do with the peculiar death earlier that day of a 46-year-old bachelor whose cryptic suicide note consisted of only two words: ‘Martin Beck'? Once again Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö bring to life the familiar team of grudgingly dedicated policemen who assist Martin Beck (now head of Sweden's homicide bureau) in picking a trail through the intricate underground that connects Stockholm criminals to those on the Continent. No heroes. Beck's men work hard just getting from one day to the next in a big-city world of evil on every scale. Beck himself, by this book, is a little more accustomed to the intolerable existence he faces: the ashes in his akvavit have settled a bit as his appreciation for the mysteries in his own life heightens, slightly.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - The night eight people were shot to death in a Stockholm bus, police detective Martin Beck seriously wondered what makes anyone want to be a cop. One of the dead was a colleague of Beck's, an ambitious young detective whose private life was both perverse and mysterious. There were no clues. Working on a hunch, Beck and a team of experts set out on the largest manhunt Sweden has ever seen. Indiscreet revelations of the dead detective's girlfriend help Beck reconstruct the steps that led to his death. Then with painstaking thoroughness, Beck and the Swedish police comb the country for missing clues and find the killer, in the process solving a murder case that has been on the books for years. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö are a husband-and-wife writing team in Sweden. Their earlier works include such highly praised mysteries as ROSEANNA, THE MAN ON THE BALCONY and THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - A decayed corpse with a bullet through its head is found inside a locked room. Suicide? Perhaps - but inside the locked room there is no gun. A young blonde in sunglasses holds up a bank and shoots the hapless citizen who moves to stop her. Martin Beck, slowly recovering from a near-fatal bullet wound (THE ABOMINABLE MAN), is assigned to investigate the mysterious death the in the locked room, and we are off with him, carefully examining the evidence and pursuing the clues - including the young and attractive landlady of the dead man - ruminating on life and crime and the police in contemporary Sweden as Martin Beck works his precise way toward solving both mysteries. This latest episode in the of Martin Beck and the Stockholm police has been greeted with overwhelming praise by the Swedish press and public, and has been called the best book so far by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish husband-and-wife team who created Martin Beck, have been called ‘the reigning king and queen of mystery fiction' by the National Observer. In 1970 they received the Edgar Award for the best mystery novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and a movie of their LAUGHING POLICEMAN, starring Walter Matthau, was released in November 1973. The entire Martin Beck series, including ROSEANNA, THE MAN WHO WENT UP IN SMOKE, THE FIRE ENGINE THAT DISAPPEARED, MURDER AT THE SAVOY and THE ABOMINABLE MAN, has been enthusiastically received by mystery lovers everywhere.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - Martin Beck, a superintendent now, a little grayer, but still the dedicated and ruthless policeman, is a worried man. What gave every indication of being a warm and peaceful summer, suddenly develops into a nightmare for the members of the Stockholm Homicide Squad when the city becomes the scene of a rash of brutal muggings and child sex-murders. The people of Stockholm are tense and fearful; the police are worried and seemingly helpless as their appeals bring forth little useful information and their inquiries lead nowhere; the men are tired and despairing, harried alike by the press and their own superior officers. As so often happens in a case like this, one almost insignificant clue starts to unravel a complex thread. The chance testimony of a jealous girl, striking back at her unfaithful lover, leads to the arrest of the elusive mugger and the dawning realization that he is perhaps the only person in Stockholm to have seen the murderer. He is able to give the police a description - a description that reminds Martin Beck of someone, or maybe something he overheard. As we follow Martin Beck and his colleagues in their relentless and meticulous investigation, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö once again demonstrate their mastery of this fascinating form of reportage, describing the methods, inspirations and problems of the police in a large city, which showed to such stunning effect in ROSEANNA.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - This new adventure of the dedicated Swedish policeman Martin Beck begins as a long, leisurely summer holiday is cut off by the top brass at the Foreign Office who decide to pack him off to Budapest. The mission turns out to be one of the most exasperating assignments of Beck's entire career: the search for Alf Matsson, a well-known journalist who has vanished without a trace. On the trail of this hard-drinking Swedish newsman, Martin Beck investigates some curious East European underworld characters and - at the risk of his life - stumbles upon a flourishing international racket in which Matsson was involved. Yet even after an exhaustive search along the banks of the Danube, Martin Beck still cannot produce the missing man. Gradually some remarkably efficient policemen in Budapest - and his own hard-working colleagues at home in Stockholm - help Martin Beck convert this wild-goose chase into a coolly systematic manhunt. Finally, by relentlessly cross-examining Matsson's bohemian drinking companions, he deduces the unexpected nature of the crimes that have taken place. With steady suspense and a vivid international background, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö have again created a forcefully realistic portrait of modern police - men stuck with the thankless, nearly dehumanizing tasks entailed in achieving even a semblance of justice in our cruel contemporary world. Per Wahlöö is the author of the novels THE THIRTY-FIRST FLOOR and THE ASSIGNMENT, which have been published with great success in America. Together with Maj Sjöwall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahlöö has been a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjöwall, edit Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry. They have two children.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - THE TERRORISTS is the last Martin Beck mystery, tragically finished just a few weeks before Per Wahlöö's death. The book is, in effect, a marvelous summing up. The story centers on the visit of an American senator to Stockholm. Martin Beck tries to protect him from an international gang of terrorists, while they decide that Beck too should be removed from the scene. Interwoven with this basic story are two fascinating subplots. One, a classic mini-mystery, is the story of a millionaire pornographer bludgeoned to death in his own bathtub. The other is the story of a young girl, a Swedish hippie, caught up unexpectedly in the maze of police bureaucracy. As in other Martin Beck books, the plot comes together in a totally unexpected climax. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö met as journalists working on different magazines. Over lunch one day they shared what turned out to be a common interest and the beginning of a literary collaboration and a marriage - the concept of the crime novel as a mirror to society. Together they planned a series, to consist of ten books, which they said would trace ‘a man's [Martin Beck's] personality changing over the years, as the milieu and the atmosphere, the political climate, the economic climate, and the crime rate change. ‘ Begun in 1965 with ROSEANNA and ending in 1975 with Per Wahlöö's death and the completion of the tenth book, THE TERRORISTS, the Martin Beck series has come to represent a unique achievement in the field of mystery fiction. The books, originally written in Swedish, have been published in every major country and have won many awards, including the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar for the best mystery novel of 1970 (THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN). The Wahlöös have been hailed as ‘the reigning king and queen of mystery fiction.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Together with Maj Sjowall, he has written several Martin Beck books, including ROSEANNA and THE MAN ON THE BALCONY, which were each acclaimed the best mystery of the year upon being published in the United States. Born in 1926, Mr. Wahloo was a reporter for several Swedish newspapers and magazines and has written numerous radio, television and film scripts, novels and short stories. He and his wife and co-author, the poet Maj Sjowall, also edited Peripeo, a magazine of literature and poetry.
DESCRIPTION - Witty, hilarious, delightfully readable, Antonio Skarmeta's new novel, BURNING PATIENCE, is a bittersweet tale of adolescent love set against the sadness of Chile's recent history. Its situation is simplicity itself. Teenager Mario Jimenez, wildly in love with Beatriz Gonzalez, the local bar-owner's daughter, is the postman of Isla Negra. In this small Chilean fishing village where almost everyone is illiterate, Mario's only customer is none other than Latin America's greatest poet, Pablo Neruda. What an opportunity, if not to become a poet, at least to enlist this most famous romantic and lover in a campaign to set the woman of his dreams on fire! As the beautiful Beatriz falls under the spell of adolescent fervor and Neruda's words, this very down-to-earth, erotic fairy tale of a young man and his famous guardian angel gains an immense charm, humor - and power, For it is also a tale about the power others have to destroy poets and mailmen alike, but not the words they have let loose in the world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antonio Skármeta (born Esteban Antonio Skármeta Vranicic on November 7, 1940) is a Chilean writer descending from Croatian immigrants from the Adriatic island of Bra?, Dalmatia. He was awarded Chile's National Literature Prize in 2014. His 1985 novel and film Ardiente paciencia ('Ardent Patience') inspired the 1994 Academy Award-winning movie, Il Postino (The Postman). Subsequent editions of the book bore the title El cartero de Neruda (Neruda's Postman). His fiction has since received dozens of awards and has been translated into nearly thirty languages worldwide. Skármeta studied philosophy and literature both in Chile and at Columbia University in New York. From 1967 to 1973, the year he left Chile (first to Buenos Aires and later to West Berlin), he taught literature at the University of Chile. In 1987, he was a member of the jury at the 37th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1989, after the end of Pinochet's military dictatorship, the writer returned to Chile in order 'to create political space for freedom'. He hosted a television program on literature and the arts, which regularly attracted over a million viewers. From 2000 to 2003 he served as the Chilean ambassador in Germany. He teaches classes at Colorado College both in Santiago, and Colorado Springs. In 2011 his novel Los días del arco iris won the prestigious Premio Iberoamericano Planeta-Casa de AmErica de Narrativa, one of the richest literary prizes in the world worth $200,000. His unpublished play El Plebiscito was the basis of Pablo Larraín's successful drama film No.
DESCRIPTION - Readers of THE MOURNFUL DEMEANOUR OF LIEUTENANT BORUVKA will welcome the second book in the Boruvka series, although the lieutenant appears in only two of the ten stories (the first and last). The heroine in this volume is a nightclub singer called Eve Adam, a garrulous meddler in other people's affairs, Under contract from the State Concert Agency, she sings in various cities around the world. As Eve Adam travels and a crime occurs, each story violates one of the rules of the Detective Story Decalogue by Father Ronald A. Knox, probably the best-known set of rules for writing detective fiction. And so the task for the reader is two-fold: to decide which rule has been broken and to identify the murderer - in Prague, in Stockholm, in Rimini, in Berkeley, and in all the other cities. This book, newly translated, has never before appeared in English. Two more Boruvka books, of quite a different nature but equally remarkable, will follow.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - ‘I wrote a novel about which there are two divergent opinions: it was considered either epoch-making or scandalous. But I never set out to create art at all, I simply tried to write a book. THE COWARDS came out quite smoothly, without any problems. I expected to be attacked for excessive naturalism, slang, some of the erotic scenes, and I was ready to defend myself on the grounds of literary theory. But I would have never dreamed that I might become the target of attacks for having sullied things which are holy and glorious. ' Thus spoke the author in 1962. Josef Skvorecky's crime was that he wrote about the Red Army as a collection of men, not as gods of the proletariat. Czech writers, poets, composers, directors, editors, and readers thought The Cowards was indeed one of the major works of fiction to emerge from the post-war period. Politicians and establishment critics with Stalinist leanings found the book scandalous. As a result, all who appreciated THE COWARDS - the editors who published the novel and the critics who praised it - were fired outright and the accustomed avenues of expression denied them. This was Prague in 1958. Under Dubcek, the book was reissued and quickly became a manifesto for the young generation of Czechoslovak liberals. Since then, it has been translated into German, French, Polish, English, and other editions are soon to appear. ‘What is THE COWARDS anyway? The story of a small town, its jazz, its student life, the end of the war. ' It is also the intense, personal story of Danny Smiricky and the boys in his band who somehow float above the turmoil, somehow remain the only sane human beings in a chaotic time. The cowards scoff at the self-appointed civil government, they find the regimentation of the military authorities absurd, and their only immediate thoughts - with humor, irony, and fantasy - are of the girls they have had or the girls they want. THE COWARDS relates the events of the last week of the Nazi Protectorate of Czechoslovakia, of the advancing Soviets, of Danny's feelings for women, politics, sharp clothes, his saxophone, and his ‘image.' It is a remembrance of a lost time, of a lost feeling, of a boredom with the exterior world, and a fascination with jazz and Danny's own sprawling imagination. Josef Skvorecky's book is an important statement by a major international writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - Third in the series of linked detective tales featuring the ‘downbeat Prague cop' of THE MOURNFUL DEMEANOUR OF LIEUTENANT BORUVKA and SINS FOR FATHER KNOX, this collection of six stories takes place around the time of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The stories include a murder in which a famous writer and supporter of Alexander Dubcek is implicated, but evidence uncovered by Boruvka points elsewhere. In a second story the murderer has reached a position of influence by the time our detective comes on the scene. A Soviet army sentry turns out to be responsible for a third murder. In the final story Boruvka must decide whether to jeopardize his career as he pursues an American gangster. In each of these cases, some of which are based on actual events, Boruvka is pitted against his colleagues, the secret police, and even his country. This third volume of tales ‘demonstrates Skvorecky's formidable story-telling gifts, sharp wit, and understanding of the human heart' (Library Journal). ‘Boruvka is, I suppose, in the British or European tradition of developed detective characters-he has problems, he even falls in love. If Woody Allen were stouter, he could play the part.' -Josef Skvorecky, commenting on his sad-eyed detective. JOSEF SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and is now professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, run a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto. Skvorecky's novels include DVORAK IN LOVE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, COWARDS, MISS SILVER'S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE MOURNFUL DEMEANOUR OF LIEUTENANT BORUVKA, and SINS FOR FATHER KNOX. He is the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General's Award for Fiction in Canada.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It is magnificent!. It marks an exceptional moment in history. It is a magnum opus.' - Milan Kundera. From the internationally acclaimed writer Josef Skvorecky: his most stunning and ambitious work. ‘An entertainment,' he calls it, ‘on the old themes of life, women, fate, dreams, the working class, secret agents, love and death.' It is a novel whose protagonist is a novelist, Danny Smiricky, a Czech, who, feeling himself to be ‘too old to write for the desk drawer,' fled his country in 1968 to find asylum in Canada. When we meet him, he has been - for nearly a decade - professor of American literature (his great love) at Edenvale College in Toronto. He still sees his New World with Old World eyes, seduced by its freedom and security, charmed by its earnest decadence, exasperated by its political innocence. Having lived through Czechoslovakia's traumatic half-century, he sees Canada as a country without a past; he is deeply mistrustful of all ideologies. His students bemuse him (the central tragedy of their lives has been the death of Janis Joplin); his prettiest student tempts him, despite the gulf of experience between them. He is followed by Czech secret agents (most of them amateurs); he consorts with a motley assortment of fellow EmigrEs: prosperous Czechs, homesick Czechs, gloomy, paranoid Czechs who hatch wildly hare-brained counter-revolutionary schemes. Let loose in his surrealistic Eden, Danny finds much to divert him, much to satisfy ‘a writer's unscrupulous hunger,' and has absolutely no nostalgia for Stalin's dictum that a writer should be an engineer of the soul of the New Socialist Man. The novel moves between the quirky calm of Danny's American present and the (unresolved) suspense of his past, that tragic, comic melodrama in which he stars as Youth; as feckless hero of the Resistance; as lover of Nadia the factory girl, his co-conspirator in sabotage; as hipster manquE of a small Bohemian town under the pall of the Nazi occupation - with a cast of heroes, traitors, cowards, hotheads and innocents. From this rich interaction of past and present emerges an extraordinary portrait of a writer in exile, moving toward a greatly longed-for identification - which will never be complete - with the country he now calls home. It is at once Danny's story and the whole sorrowful history of East and West since the war - a wise, witty, bawdy, tender novel of dazzling reach and sweep. JOSEF SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and is now Professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. His books include The Cowards, Miss Silver's Past and The Bass Saxophone. In 1980 he was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. (original title: Pribeh inzenyra lidskych dusi, 1977 - Sixty-Eight Publishers, Toronto, Canada).
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - From the internationally acclaimed writer Josef Skvorecky we now have the first in a series of linked detective tales featuring a highly intelligent member of the Czechoslovak police force and his agreeable colleagues. Many of the tales are delightful parodies of ‘standard' mysteries, and most are set in the author's native Czechoslovakia. Lieutenant Boruvka himself is splendidly realized - a pensive, conscience-stricken man driven to melancholy by the fiendish truths of murder, yet always wide awake to the strange methods of murder he encounters. Twelve bizarre plots involve theatrical people or musicians, and one concerns a band of mountaineers. Its solution reveals pent-up emotions of love, jealousy, and envy. Other cases involve blackmail, apparent suicide, and unusual trajectories for weapons - a wealth of gruesome circumstances, The entire book is intended to be read as a continuous account; in the last tale, the reader learns the secret of Boruvka's past. Never before published in the United States, this unusual volume introduces the sad lieutenant and his developing fortunes to all who relish ingenious puzzles. Three other books will follow, all abounding in the wit and irony that characterize the writing of this remarkable author. JOSEF SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and is now professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, run a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto. Skvorecky's novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER'S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He is winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General's Award for fiction in Canada.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - Fourth in the ‘Lieutenant Boruvka' series, this novel finds the pudgy, mournful detective in Toronto. He has escaped from Russian-occupied Czechoslovakia where he was imprisoned for rebelling against ‘justice'. This is a devious murder mystery and a confrontation of the old world and the new.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 - January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. 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.
DESCRIPTION - In Gunfighter nation: the myth of the frontier in twentieth-century America (Atheneum, 1992), the concluding volume of his highly acclaimed trilogy, Slotkin draws on a wide range of sources to examine the pervasive influence of Wild West myths on American culture and politics. In the third of a three-volume study in the development of the myth of the frontier in US literary, popular, and political culture from the colonial period to the present, Slotkin covers the expression of the frontier myth in such popular culture phenomena as dime novels, Buffalo Bill's Wild West, the formula fiction of 1900-40, and the Hollywood film. Covering historiography, Slotkin also discusses the exploration of the significance of the American frontier experience in Theodore Roosevelt's The Winning of the West and Frederick Jackson Turner's The Significance of the Frontier in American History.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin (born 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and in 2010 was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he received the Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.
DESCRIPTION - In the intense psychological and social anxieties of the Puritan settlers in the American wilderness, and in their imaginative exorcism of these anxieties, Richard Slotkin isolates the beginnings of a myth of regeneration through violent confrontation with the dark forces of nature and humanity. His central thesis is that an entire set of national attitudes and traditions informing our literature and defining our social responses has evolved from the myth of the hunter-hero struggling in a savage new world to claim the land, to displace the Indian. Using the popular literature of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries - Thomas Morton's The New English Canaan, various captivity stories, the Boone tales, the historical romances of Cooper, Simms, and R. M. Bird, the writings of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville - Mr. Slotkin carefully, convincingly traces the development of this myth and fully characterizes it. Moreover, the book raises important theoretical questions about the nature of myths, the processes by which they gain social currency, the ways in which they function to shape literary and other cultural phenomena. Mr. Slotkin's study is at once synthetic and seminal. He draws together a large body of materials under new rubrics and uses them as the basis for provocative conclusions about American literature and American history, argued boldly and eloquently, implying the need of a revaluation of the American tradition.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin is Olin Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 and Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, published by the University of Oklahoma Press.
DESCRIPTION - In The Fatal Environment, Richard Slotkin demonstrates how the myth of frontier expansion and subjugation of the Indians helped to justify the course of America's rise to wealth and power. Using Custer's Last Stand as a metaphor for what Americans feared might happen if the frontier should be closed and the 'savage' element be permitted to dominate the 'civilized,' Slotkin shows the emergence by 1890 of a myth redefined to help Americans respond to the confusion and strife of industrialization and imperial expansion.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Slotkin (born 1942) is a cultural critic and historian. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, and in 2010 was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1995 he received the Mary C. Turpie Award of the American Studies Association for his contributions to teaching and program-building. Slotkin writes novels alongside his historical research, and uses the process of writing the novels to clarify and refine his historical work.
DESCRIPTION - On the night of the vernal equinox in 1930, the novel's protagonist, Wilbur Smythe, puts in motion his plan to avenge the deaths of his wife and his employer, a wealthy Kiowa, both murdered by a banker greedy for the Kiowa's oil money. Smythe intends to kidnap the banker's seventeen-year-old daughter, Sissy, and hold her hostage to torment her father before killing him. Hunter's Trap further explores the clash of values and cultures that formed the core of Smith's earlier novel based on historical events, Buffalo Nickel. In this new novel, he has written a blend of early twentieth-century ‘western' with Greek tragedy and has given the tension-filled story a sophisticated gloss of 1930s determinism and pre-Christian paganism, so that the horrific outcome of Smythe's plan to use the daughter of his nemesis has a fateful inevitability and a gruesome but implacable logic. Set largely in El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juarez, the story weaves together the strong political and social undercurrents of the Depression. Beneath its texture of place and time, however, the story reasserts the age-old wisdom of how thin the margin is between good and evil in members of the human ‘family.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - C. W. Smith (born 1940) is a novelist, short-story and essay writer who serves as a Dedman Family Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Southern Methodist University. C. W. Smith (full name Charles William Smith) was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, and grew up in Hobbs, New Mexico. He received a B.A. in English from the University of North Texas in 1964 and an M.A. in English from Northern Illinois University in 1967. After teaching at Southwest Missouri State University, he moved to Mexico for a year to work on his first novel, Thin Men of Haddam. Published by Viking/Grossman in 1973, the book won the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for the Best Novel by a Texan or about Texas and was recognized by the Southwestern Library Association for making a ‘distinguished contribution to an understanding of a vital social issue in the American Southwest.' Smith has said that his goal since beginning his first novel has been ‘to document in a dramatic fashion the cultural conflicts of the American Southwest as well as the universal, existential dilemmas that arise from being human regardless of place and time.' In pursuit of that goal, his second novel, set in West Texas among oil field workers and small-town citizens, sought to portray the lives of young people trapped in circumstances too small for their aspirations.
DESCRIPTION - Brilliant. One of the best books of the season.' ASSOCIATED PRESS A triple murder in a Moscow amusement center: three corpses found frozen in the snow, faces and fingers missing. Chief homicide investigator Arkady Renko is brilliant, sensitive, honest, and cynical about everything except his profession. To identify the victims and uncover the truth, he must battle the KGB, FBI, and New York police as he performs the impossible - and tries to stay alive doing it. THIS TITLE COMES FROM MORTALIS: Mysteries and Thrillers Random House Trade Paperbacks is please to present Mortalis, a line of books featuring mysteries and thrillers that are historical and/or international in scope. The list includes trade paperback originals as well as reprints of classic mysteries, international thrillers, and the occasional tale of true crime. 'Mortalis gives us an ideal way to introduce the best new writers as well as to celebrate the masters in these genres,' said Jane von Mehren, Vice President and Publisher, Trade Paperbacks, Random House Publishing Group. Mortalis republishes some classic authors such as Martin Cruz Smith , P. D. James, Robert Harris, Agatha Christie, and Wilkie Collins as well as original trade paperbacks such as Boris Akunin's SISTER PELAGIA AND THE WHITE BULLDOG (the start of a new series from an internationally bestselling author), New York Times Notable author David Corbett's BLOOD OF PARADISE, and Alex Carr's literary thriller AN ACCIDENTAL AMERICAN. Featuring stunning new packaging, each title contains a 'dossier' in the back-a brand new commentary section that illuminates a specific and intriguing aspect of the work, or the author's career.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Cruz Smith (born November 3, 1942) is an American mystery novelist.
DESCRIPTION - The year is 1876. The United States has just suffered its third successive Indian defeat at the Custer massacre. The Presidency has been stolen in the country's worst political scandal. In the midst of economic depression, violence erupts and mobs control the cities. All this is in your history book. Now, what if the Indians won? THE TIME IS NOW. The United States straddles a vast unconquered Red Nation. For the first time in a hundred years the long unguarded borders are threatened. The Indians have the bomb. Indian sympathizers in the United States are called Pinkos. The President is terrified. The CIA is in stalemate. A fascinating, highly original novel of the unlikely come true. Crammed with battles and tricks, characters and history.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Martin Cruz Smith (born November 3, 1942) is an American mystery novelist. Born Martin William Smith in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing in 1964. He is of partly Pueblo, Spanish, Senecu del Sur and Yaqui ancestry. From 1965 to 1969 Smith worked as a journalist and began writing fiction in the early 1970s. Canto for a Gypsy, his third novel overall and the second to feature Roman Grey, a gypsy art dealer in New York City, was nominated for an Edgar Award. Nightwing (1977), also an Edgar nominee, was his breakthrough novel, and he adapted it for a feature film of the same name (1979). Smith is best known for his novels featuring Russian investigator Arkady Renko whom Smith introduced in Gorky Park (1981). The novel, which was called the ‘first thriller of the '80s' by Time, became a bestseller and won a Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers' Association. Renko has since appeared in seven other novels by Smith. Gorky Park debuted at number one on the ‘New York Times' bestseller list on April 26, 1981 and hung onto the top spot for another week. It stayed in the number two position for over three months, beaten only by James Clavell's Noble House. It stayed in the top 15 through November of that year. Polar Star also claimed the number one spot for two weeks on August 6, 1989. It subsequently held the number two spot for over two months. During the 1990s, Smith twice won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers. The first time was for Rose in 1996; the second time was for Havana Bay in 1999. And on September 5, 2010, he and Arkady Renko returned to the top of the New York Times bestseller list when Three Stations debuted at number seven on the fiction bestsellers list. In the 1970s, Smith wrote two Slocum adult action Western novels under the pen name Jake Logan. Smith has also written a number of other paperback originals, including a series about a character named ‘The Inquisitor', a James Bond-type agent employed by the Vatican. Smith also wrote two novels in the Nick Carter series. He originally wrote under the name ‘Martin Smith', only to discover there were other writers with the same name. His agent asked Smith to add a third name and Smith chose Cruz, his paternal grandmother's surname. Smith lives in San Rafael, California, with his family.
DESCRIPTION - RODERICK RANDOM was published in 1748 to immediate acclaim, and established Smollett among the most popular of eighteenth-century novelists. Narrated by an unheroic, apparently rudderless hero named Random, Smollett's wildly energetic and entertaining novel is held together not least by the narrator's outrage and dismay. Although RODERICK RANDOM was first published anonymously, the secret of Smollett's authorship was soon discovered, with the result that many readers thought they recognized similarities between the life of the hero and that of his creator. Certainly Roderick Random's early years - disinherited and without wealth and influence - and his university career, apprenticeship and service as a naval surgeon, vividly reflect the experiences of the author. How Random learns to survive the fickle hand of fortune, recovers his long-lost father, marries his beloved Narcissa, and dispatches his enemies is the stuff, not of autobiography, but of a novel which profoundly satirizes the moral chaos of its times. Dickens and Thackeray, among other great Victorians, applauded Smollett for his wit and invention, and in RODERICK RANDOM we enjoy the novel of a pioneer opening up the frontiers of fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tobias George Smollett (19 March 1721 - 17 September 1771) was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels, such as The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), which influenced later novelists such as Charles Dickens. George Orwell admired Smollett very much. His novels were amended liberally by printers; a definitive edition of each of his works was edited by Dr. O. M. Brack, Jr. to correct variants.
DESCRIPTION - No collection of Japanese literature is complete without KOKORO, the last novel Natsume Soseki completed before his death in 1916. Published here in the first new English translation in more than fifty years, Kokoro - meaning ‘heart'- is the story of a subtle and poignant friendship between two unnamed characters, a young man and an enigmatic elder whom he calls ‘Sensei.' Haunted by tragic secrets that have cast a long shadow over his life, Sensei slowly opens up to his young disciple, confessing indiscretions from his own student days that have left him reeling with guilt, and revealing, in the seemingly unbridgeable chasm between his moral anguish and his student's struggle to understand it, the profound cultural shift from one generation to the next that characterized Japan in the early twentieth century. ‘Soseki is the representative modern Japanese novelist, a figure of truly national stature.' - Haruki Murakami.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - S?seki Natsume (February 9, 1867 - December 9, 1916), born Kinnosuke Natsume was a Japanese novelist of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He is best known for his novels Kokoro, Botchan, I Am a Cat and his unfinished work Light and Darkness. He was also a scholar of British literature and composer of haiku, kanshi, and fairy tales.
DESCRIPTION - In the Eddas, ragnarok, or the downfall of the gods, is the end of the world, a time of wolves, serpents, fire, earthquake, and colossal war. Villy Sorensen has rewritten the mythology of an ancient Nordic world from the perspective of our century, highlighting the personalities and symbolization of the Norse gods to reflect our own crisis of value and belief. His novel, originally published as RAGNAROK in 1982 in Denmark, will win new acclaim in its English translation by Paula Hostrup-Jessen. THE DOWNFALL OF THE GODS begins with stories of charm and enchantment that introduce the major characters. At first they are ingenuous and amusing; then their relationships heat up. Odin, the chief of the gods, who rules by a system of surveillance and ambiguous decrees, is preoccupied with preparing a massive army to aid the gods in a final battle for the control of the world. Opposing him in the gods' council is Balder, who argues that the very preparation for war - with its bloody exercises, deceits, and betrayals - hastens the catastrophe. There are Loki the shape-changer, half god and half giant, who alone may travel between Asgard, home of the gods, and Utgard, home of the frost giants, Freyja, goddess of love, who criticizes Odin for his war-mongering; and others. On the other side are the giants, ready for revenge but never quite able to figure out why the gods insist on enmity; and caught between are human beings, generally forgotten in the quarrels on high. Far more than a striking literary exercise, this book has the dark wit to make us realize that the apocalyptic vision of ragnarok looms before us.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Villy Sørensen (13 January 1929 - 16 December 2001) was a Danish short-story writer, philosopher and literary critic of the Modernist tradition. His fiction was heavily influenced by his philosophical ideas, and he has been compared to Franz Kafka in this regard. He was the most influential and important Danish philosopher since Søren Kierkegaard.
DESCRIPTION - On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as ‘the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust' (Wall Street Journal) and ‘the first masterpiece in comic book history' (The New Yorker). The Pulitzer Prize-winning MAUS tells the story of Vladek Spiegelman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist coming to terms with his father's story. MAUS approaches the unspeakable through the diminutive. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), shocks us out of any lingering sense of familiarity and succeeds in ‘drawing us closer to the bleak heart of the Holocaust' (The New York Times). MAUS is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits. This astonishing retelling of our century's grisliest news is a story of survival, not only of Vladek but of the children who survive even the survivors. MAUS studies the bloody pawprints of history and tracks its meaning for all of us.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Art Spiegelman is a contributing editor and artist for The New Yorker, and a co-founder / editor of RAW, the acclaimed magazine of avant-garde comics and graphics. His drawings and prints have been exhibited in museums and galleries here and abroad. Honors he has received for MAUS include the Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in New York City with his wife, Francoise Mouly, and their two children, Nadja and Dashiell.
DESCRIPTION - For four hundred years - from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the US. Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as one hundred million people. Indeed, as historian David E. Stannard argues in this stunning new book, the European and white American destruction of the native peoples of the Americas was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. Stannard begins with a portrait of the enormous richness and diversity of life in the Americas prior to Columbus's fateful voyage in 1492. He then follows the path of genocide from the Indies to Mexico and Central and South America, then north to Florida, Virginia, and New England, and finally out across the Great Plains and Southwest to California and the North Pacific. Stannard reveals that wherever Europeans or white Americans went, the native people were caught between imported plagues and barbarous atrocities, typically resulting in the annihilation of 95 percent of their populations. What kind of people, he asks, do such horrendous things to others? His highly provocative answer: Christians. Digging deeply into ancient European and Christian attitudes toward sex, race, and war, he finds the cultural ground well prepared by the end of the Middle Ages for the centuries-long genocide campaign that Europeans and their descendants launched - and in places continue to wage - against the New World's original inhabitants. Advancing a thesis that is sure to create much controversy, Stannard contends that the perpetrators of the AMERICAN HOLOCAUST drew on the same ideological wellspring as did the later architects of the Nazi Holocaust. It is an ideology that remains dangerously alive today, he adds, and one that in recent years has surfaced in American justifications for large-scale military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. At once sweeping in scope and meticulously detailed, American Holocaust is a work of impassioned scholarship that is certain to ignite intense historical and moral debate.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David E. Stannard (born June 11, 1941) is Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii. His previous books include DEATH IN AMERICA, SHRINKING HISTORY: ON FREUD AND THE FAILURE OF PSYCHOHISTORY, THE PURITAN WAY OF DEATH: A STUDY IN RELIGION, CULTURE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE, and BEFORE THE HORROR: THE POPULATION OF HAWAII ON THE EVE OF WESTERN CONTACT.
DESCRIPTION - The Red and the Black, Stendhal's masterpiece, is the story of Julien Sorel, a young dreamer from the provinces, fueled by Napoleonic ideals, whose desire to make his fortune sets in motion events both mesmerizing and tragic. Sorel's quest to find himself, and the doomed love he encounters along the way, are delineated with an unprecedented psychological depth and realism. At the same time, Stendhal weaves together the social life and fraught political intrigues of post–Napoleonic France, bringing that world to unforgettable, full-color life. His portrait of Julien and early-nineteenth-century France remains an unsurpassed creation, one that brilliantly anticipates modern literature. Neglected during its time, The Red and the Black has assumed its rightful place as one of the world's great books, and Burton Raffel's extraordinary new translation, coupled with an enlightening Introduction by Diane Johnson, helps it shine more brightly than ever before.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marie-Henri Beyle (23 January 1783 - 23 March 1842), better known by his pen name Stendhal in English, was a 19th-century French writer. Known for his acute analysis of his characters' psychology, he is considered one of the earliest and foremost practitioners of realism, as is evident in the novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839).
DESCRIPTION - ‘Nothing odd will do long,' said Dr Johnson; ‘Tristram Shandy did not last.'. But Tristram Shandy has lasted, to be cherished in the century of Joyce and Pirandello perhaps even more than in the eighteenth. No one description will fit this strange, eccentric, endlessly complex masterpiece. It is a novel about writing a novel in which the invented world is as much infused with wit and genius as the theme of inventing it. It is a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction, and a wry demonstration of its limitations. It is also, in Christopher Ricks's words, ‘the greatest shaggy dog story in the language'.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 - 18 March 1768) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and an Anglican clergyman. He is best known for his novels The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy; but he also published many sermons, wrote memoirs, and was involved in local politics. Sterne died in London after years of fighting consumption.
DESCRIPTION - 'This Master Hyde, if he were studied,' thought he, 'must have secrets of his own; black secrets, by the look of him; secrets compared to which poor Jekyll's worst would be like sunshine.''? The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde When Edward Hyde traples an innocent girl, two bystanders catch the fellow and force him to pay reparations to the girl's family. A respected lawyer, Utterson, hears this story and begins to unravel the seemingly manic behavior of his best friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and his connection with Hyde. Utterson probes into both Jekyll and his unlikely protege, increasingly unnerved at each new revelation. In a forerunner of psychological dramas to come, Robert Louis Stevenson uses Hyde to show that we are both repulsed and attracted to the darker side of life, particularly when we can experience it in anonymity.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1850 and became one of the world's most popular writers. He was novelist, essayist, and poet - master of a widely acclaimed style. His special literary talent has given his classic stories of adventure (TREASURE ISLAND, KIDNAPPED, and DAVID BALFOUR, among others) a lasting place in the annals of English literature. Equally enduring are his compelling story of THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE and his collection of poems for children, A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES. Robert Louis Stevenson died in 1894.
DESCRIPTION - Beginning with the dim prehistory of the mythical gods and their descendants, Heimskringla recounts the history of the kings of Norway through the reign of Olaf Haraldsson, who became Norway's patron saint. Once found in most homes and schools and still regarded as a national treasure, Heimskringla influenced the thinking and literary style of Scandinavia over several centuries. Snorri Sturluson was, without compare, the greatest historian of the Middle Ages. His translator, the late Lee M. Hollander, was a noted authority in the field of Old Norse literature. ‘[Snorri Sturluson] speaks - as almost no other historian ever has spoken - with the authority of a man whose masterful skills would have made him one of the formidable, foremost in any of the events he records. So he saturates even remotely past happenings with a gripping first-hand quality. Hollander's translation is very good, fresh on every page. Wherever you open the book, the life grips you and you read on. ' - Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books. ‘Among the many contributions to world literature that ancient Iceland has given us, Heimskringla stands out as one of the truly monumental works. Among medieval European histories in the vernacular it has no equal.' - Modern Philology.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Snorri Sturluson (1179 - 23 September 1241) was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was elected twice as a lawspeaker at the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He was the author of the Prose Edda or Younger Edda, which consists of Gylfaginning ('the fooling of Gylfi'), a narrative of Norse mythology, the Skáldskaparmál, a book of poetic language, and the Háttatal, a list of verse forms. He was also the author of the Heimskringla, a history of the Norwegian kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga. As an historian and mythographer, Snorri is remarkable for proposing the hypothesis (in the Prose Edda) that mythological gods begin as human war leaders and kings whose funeral sites develop cults (see euhemerism). As people call upon the dead war leader as they go to battle, or the dead king as they face tribal hardship, they begin to venerate the figure. Eventually, the king or warrior is remembered only as a god. The late Dr. Lee M. Hollander, professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, was an authority in the field of Old Norse literature. He has written many articles on related subjects and has translated much of the best prose and poetry of the old North - The Poetic Edda, The Skalds, and a number of sagas. Of these, The Poetic Edda and The Saga of the Jomsvikings have appeared under the imprint of the University of Texas Press.
DESCRIPTION - The personalities of the 12 Caesars of Ancient Rome (Julius Caesar and the 11 emperors who followed after him) have profoundly impressed themselves upon the world, largely because of Suetonius' biographies of them. Using contemporary documents, this book attempts to penetrate the fog of superstition and rumour that has gathered around these men. The author examines how these potentates wielded their power, how they coped, or failed in their task, and he considers the effects of their intensely demanding public careers on their private lives. He also questions the truth of the many stories which have suggested that the Caesars were consumed by erotic eccentricities.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (c.69-c.140) was a Roman biographer and antiquarian. He served as a member of the Imperial service and as secretary to the Emperor Hadrian. Robert Graves fought in the First World War, after which he published his autobiography, Goodbye To All That. Michael Grant's academic titles include Chancellor's Medallist and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and President of the Classical Association.
DESCRIPTION - This is the great modern Italian novel. It is supremely ironical and deals with a delightfully abnormal character. Zeno, happily unconscious of his absurdity, writes an account of his eccentric and entertaining life for a psychoanalyst. He proposes to three sisters in the same evening and is accepted by the least attractive. He rationalizes his relations with his mistress by saying she would not love him, if she knew how much he loved his wife. Incidentally, he never loves his wife as much as when he is with his mistress. He entirely covers the walls of a room with dates, some scribbled in pencil, some painted in glaring colors, each representing the day of his final renunciation of cigarettes. Zeno, accomplished hypochondriac and master of indecision, suffers increasingly from the narcotic effect of his continual introspection, but is so essentially human that he will capture your sympathy and make you laugh, first at him and then at yourself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ITALO SVEVO was born in Trieste in 1861 and was given a commercial education in Germany. CONFESSIONS OF ZENO was published in 1923 and was immediately hailed by European critics as the finest Italian novel. At the time of his accidental death in 1928 Svevo was one of the best known and most successful businessmen in Triesie, though he was only beginning to enjoy fame as a writer. UNA VITA, his first novel, appeared in 1892 and was followed by SENILITA in 1898. In 1912 Italo Svevo met James Joyce, and it is Joyce that we have to thank, not only for calling attention to him at that time, but for persuading him to continue writing. The war kept Svevo away from business and gave him the opportunity. The fact that writing was never his means of livelihood made it possible for him to disregard tradition and slowly develop his own introspective style. Translator Beryl de Zoete (1884-1962) was a dance critic, dance researcher and translator; born in London where she resided for most of her life; married Basil de SElincourt (b. 1876) in 1902, but the marriage lasted for only a few years; studied dance, at least in part with Emile Jaques-Dalcroze in 1913 and 1915, and subsequently taught dance until sometime in the 1920s; entered into a lifelong relationship with the Orientalist and translator Arthur Waley (1889-1966), whom she met in 1918 but never married; traveled extensively, including in Bali and South Asia; wrote on dance at various times for (at least) The Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman and Nation and Ballet (, wrote books on dance in Bali (1938), India (1953) and Sri Lanka (1957). Full name: Beryl Drusilla de Zoete. According to her biographer Marian Ury, de Zoete was actually born in 1879.
DESCRIPTION - Italo Svevo's early novel Senilità (1898) remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire Senilità as a preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyce helped to launch Svevo's career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, Confessions of Zeno. In Senilità, Svevo tells the story of the amorous entanglement of Emilio, a failed writer already old at thirty-five, and Angiolina, a seductively beautiful but promiscuous young woman. A study in jealousy and self-torment, the novel traces the intoxicating effect of a narcissistic and amoral woman on an indecisive daydreamer who vacillates between guilt and moral smugness. The novel is suffused with a tragic sense of existence, and the unbreachable distance between one consciousness and another. Svevo's unmistakably modern voice subtly captures rapid shifts in mood and intention, exploiting irony, indirection, and multiple points of view to reveal Emilio's increasing anguish as he comes to recognize the dissonance between himself and his world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - ITALO SVEVO was born in Trieste in 1861 and was given a commercial education in Germany. CONFESSIONS OF ZENO was published in 1923 and was immediately hailed by European critics as the finest Italian novel. At the time of his accidental death in 1928 Svevo was one of the best known and most successful businessmen in Triesie, though he was only beginning to enjoy fame as a writer. UNA VITA, his first novel, appeared in 1892 and was followed by SENILITA in 1898. In 1912 Italo Svevo met James Joyce, and it is Joyce that we have to thank, not only for calling attention to him at that time, but for persuading him to continue writing. The war kept Svevo away from business and gave him the opportunity. The fact that writing was never his means of livelihood made it possible for him to disregard tradition and slowly develop his own introspective style. This style combined with his wholly individual humor makes CONFESSIONS OF ZENO most unusual and engaging. Beth Archer Brombert is a professional translator and author. Her most recent book is Edouard Manet, Rebel in A Frock Coat. Victor Brombert is Henry Putnam University Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures, Emeritus, at Princeton University. He has written numerous books, including, most recently, In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature.
DESCRIPTION - Hailed in England as ‘the best novel of the year' (The Guardian) and nominated for the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award, WATERLAND is a novel of resonant depth and encyclopedic richness. It is also a book about beer, eels, the French Revolution, the end of the world, windmills, will-o'-the-wisps, murder, love, incest, education, curiosity, storytelling and - supremely - the malign and merciful element of water. One bright summer morning in 1943 Henry Crick, a lock-keeper, finds young Freddie Parr's body floating in his lock. Although the death is termed an accident, Henry Crick's son Tom knows otherwise, and bears the secret for life, Forty years later, Tom, now a history teacher besieged by a bizarre marital crisis and the ‘phasing out' of history from his school's curriculum, abandons his formal lessons to tell his students stories of his native Fenland, an ambiguous, amphibious domain where past and present intermingle, where the drama of loss and reclamation is written in the landscape. Tom Crick traces for his listening class the tragedies and changing fortunes of his forebears: how his eighteenth-century ancestor Thomas Atkinson dredged a river, built an empire, then broke his young wife Sarah's head in a jealous rage and died of grief; how Sarah survived for fifty years, deprived of her senses, to become a local deity; how his grandfather Ernest fell in love with his own daughter and fathered a child he believed would become Saviour of the World, And he tells them of the fateful repercussions of that summer morning in 1943, which still trap the aging Crick in the consequences of events long ago. WATERLAND is a moving meditation on history, on procreation, on destruction, and on our struggles to shore up our small worlds against the onrushing forces of time and nature. Graham Swift, born in 1949, was nominated as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists, He has published two other novels in Britain, THE SWEET-SHOP OWNER and SHUTTLECOCK, and a collection of short stories, LEARNING TO SWIM, Graham Swift lives and works in London.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Graham Colin Swift FRSL (born 4 May 1949) is a English writer. Born in London, England, he was educated at Dulwich College, London, Queens' College, Cambridge, and later the University of York. Some of Swift's books have been filmed, including Last Orders, starring Michael Caine and Bob Hoskins and Waterland, starring Jeremy Irons. Last Orders was joint-winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and a mildly controversial winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, owing to the superficial similarities in plot to William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Waterland is set in The Fens; a novel of landscape, history and family, it is often cited as one of the outstanding post-war British novels and has been a set text on the English literature syllabus in British schools. Writer Patrick McGrath asked Swift about the ‘feeling for magic' in Waterland during an interview. Swift responds that ‘The phrase everybody comes up with is magic realism, which I think has now become a little tired. But on the other hand there's no doubt that English writers of my generation have been very much influenced by writers from outside who in one way or another have got this magical, surreal quality, such as Borges, Márquez, Grass, and that that has been stimulating. I think in general it's been a good thing. Because we are, as ever, terribly parochial, self-absorbed and isolated, culturally, in this country. It's about time we began to absorb things from outside.' Swift was acquainted with Ted Hughes and has himself published poetry of note, some of which is included in Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (2009).
DESCRIPTION - Lemography is a unique collection of critical essays on Stanislaw Lem, writer and philosopher. Its aim is to introduce aspects of his work hitherto unknown or neglected by scholarship and evaluate his influence on twentieth-century literature and culture - and beyond. The book's uniqueness is enhanced by the global makeup of the contributors who hail from Canada, United States, Great Britain, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Sweden and Finland. In all cases, these are scholars and translators who for many years have pursued, and in some cases defined, Lem scholarship. Rather than study Lem as a science fiction writer, each essay commands a wider sphere of reference in order to appraise Lem's literary and philosophical contributions. Each focuses on a different novel (or set of novels) from the writer's opus, examining them critically. Between them, the essays cover virtually all phases of Lem's multidimensional career, ensuring comprehensive coverage. Contributors: Peter Swirski is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and Honorary Professor in American Studies in China; Waclaw M. Osadnik is Professor of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton; David Seed holds a chair in American Literature at Liverpool University; Nicholas Ruddick is Professor and Head of English at the University of Regina, where he has taught since 1982; Bo Pettersson is Professor of the Literature of the United States and former Head of English at the Department of Modern Languages, University of Helsinki; Iris Vidmar is a philosopher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Rijeka, Croatia, where she teaches Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Art, and Philosophy of Literature; Victor Yaznevich is a PhD in technical sciences (Moscow, 1993) with specialization in computers and information, is one of the prominent Russian-language translators and bibliographers of Lem; Kenneth Krabbenhoft has been Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University until his retirement in 2013.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Swirski is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and co-author of Stanislaw Lem: Life and Selected Letters (LUP, 2014). Waclaw M. Osadnik is Professor of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
DESCRIPTION - Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future brings a welter of unknown elements of Lem's life, career, and literary legacy to light. Part One traces the context of his cultural influence, telling the story of one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the century. It includes a comprehensive critical overview of Lem's literary and philosophical oeuvre which comprises not only the classics like Solaris, but his untranslated first novels, realistic prose, experimental works, volumes of nonfiction, latter-day metafiction, as well as the final twenty years of polemics and essays. The critical and interpretive Part Two examines a range of Lem's novels with a view to examining the intellectual vistas they open up before us. It focuses on several of Lem's major but less studied books. "Game, Set, Lem" uses game theory to shed light on his arguably most surreal novel, the Kafkaesque and claustrophobic Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (1961). "Betrization Is the Worst Solution - Except for All Others" takes a close look at the quasi-utopia of Return From the Stars (1961) and at the concept of ethical cleansing and mandatory de-aggression. "Errare Humanum Est" focuses on the popular science thriller The Invincible (1964) in the context of evolution. "A Beachbook for Intellectuals" is a critical fugue on Lem's medical thriller cum crime mystery, The Chain of Chance (1976). Stanislaw Lem: Philosopher of the Future closes with a two-part coda. "Fiasco" recapitulates and reflects on the literary and cognitive themes of Lem's farewell novel, and "Happy End of the World!" reviews The Blink of an Eye, Lem's farewell book of analyses and prognoses from the cusp of our millennium.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Swirski is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University.
DESCRIPTION - This definitive edition of Szymborska's poetry in English includes the 100 poems in View with a Grain of Sand as well as sixty-four newly translated poems and her 1996 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Wislawa Szymborska-Wlodek (2 July 1923 - 1 February 2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Prowent, which has since become part of Kornik, she later resided in Krakow until the end of her life. She was described as a ‘Mozart of Poetry'. In Poland, Szymborska's books have reached sales rivaling prominent prose authors: although she once remarked in a poem, ‘Some Like Poetry' (‘Niektorzy lubia poezje'), that no more than two out of a thousand people care for the art. Szymborska was awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality'. She became better known internationally as a result of this. Her work has been translated into English and many European languages, as well as into Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese.
DESCRIPTION - AN EASY THING marks the English-language debut of Paco lgnacio Taibo II, Mexico's leading detective novelist and a writer world renowned for his atmospheric and highly innovative crime fiction. Set in the chaotic urban heart of Mexico City, a place where the ghosts of Old Mexico constantly eat away at all pretense of modernity, An Easy Thing is distinguished by the vulnerable human presence of its jaded detective hero, Hector Belascoarán Shayne. Already weary from coping with his mother's death and his lover's flight, Hector finds himself reluctantly involved in three perplexing cases: a murder at a capitalist- and corruption-riddled factory; disturbingly violent threats against the innocent teenage daughter of a former porn star; and finally, an attempt to find a rather extraordinary missing person-namely, Emiliano Zapata, archetypal (and, most think, long deceased) hero of the failed Mexican Revolution. Complicated characters; tight and witty dialogue; undercurrents of violence and sex; lots of action; and dazzling streaks of irony, dark comedy, and Latin fabulism combine to create a compelling, original mystery, a mystery that resonates with the bigger mysteries of Mexico's troubled history and of the dark side of human nature. This is mystery writing with a soul-and a funny, wise, warm, and entertaining soul it is, grounded in Paco Taibo's knowledge of modern Hispanic and world literature and history, and by his political and everyday human passions. Aficionados of world-class crime writing will be glad to welcome Taibo and the vivid fictional universe of An Easy Thing over the border. ‘A revelation! Not only is Paco Taibo's AN EASY THING a brilliant and witty work of crime fiction, it is also one of the finest portraits extant of today's Mexico City-frightening, chaotic, yet oddly vulnerable. This is must reading for the mystery addict as well as any serious student of the international scene.' - Roger L. Simon, author of THE BIG FIX, RAISING THE DEAD, and other Moses Wine mysteries. Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. He is currently professor of history at the UAM-Azcapotzalco (Metropolitan University of Mexico City), and is executive vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, many of which have been published throughout the world, Taibo lives with his wife and daughter in Mexico City. Originally published in Spain as Cosa Facil. (c) Paco lgnacio Taibo II. de esta edicion, Ediciones Jucar.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. He is currently professor of history at the UAM-Azcapotzalco (Metropolitan University of Mexico City), and is executive vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, many of which have been published throughout the world, Taibo lives with his wife and daughter in Mexico City.
DESCRIPTION - For the past decade Paco Ignacio Taibo II has been the most popular and talked about author in Latin and South America, his mysteries have drawn comparisons to the work of such diverse writers as Dashiell Hammett and Gabriel Garcia Márquez, and his books have achieved bestselling status in both Eastern and Western Europe. Now Taibo's most acclaimed and bestselling novel is available in its first English edition. A private eye who shares his office with a plumber, an upholsterer, and a sewer engineer, Hector Belascoarán Shayne is a one-eyed anarchist, a man who knows intimately the teeming landscape of modern.day Mexico City-land of pressing poverty, absurdist street theater, and tragic class warfare. For Shayne, it is a world that can draw tears one moment and blood the next-as it does on the hot afternoon when he finds the dead Roman in his office. A threatening letter and a Polaroid snapshot of another corpse let Hector know that he has been targeted for intimidation, taking the identities of the two dead men, he finds out what they had in common: a connection to a dead daredevil named Zorak, whose sinister sideline was training a now disbanded paramilitary group used to put down political demonstrations.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. He is currently professor of history at the UAM-Azcapotzalco (Metropolitan University of Mexico City), and is executive vice president of the International Association of Crime Writers. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, many of which have been published throughout the world, Taibo lives with his wife and daughter in Mexico City.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Hector Belascoarán Shayne, detective, was a stranger. A stranger in motion. He couldn't quite recognize himself he couldn't quite love himself And since he neither loved himself nor stopped loving himself he couldn't be too careful. He was absolutely sure that in this story, they were going to kill him.' The last Hector Belascoarán Shayne mystery from Paco Ignacio Taibo II ended with the one-eyed detective lying in the oily rain of Mexico City, his body perforated with bullets. Now the author of this hugely popular, highly political, endlessly inventive series of novels proves that no miracle is beyond his reach. Hector Belascoarán Shayne rises from the dead. He's a gun-carrying argonaut of Mexico City, city of strikes and pollution, ‘cemetery of dreams' He doesn't want to be alive, but he is, and when a woman tells him a sob story about her sister's death at the hands of a handsome rumba dancer in white patent leather shoes named Luke Estrella, Hector agrees to do something about him. In a Mexico City hotel the detective meets a battered, alcoholic gringo who's after the same man. On Acapulco Bay, nearly blinded by bikinied beauties, the detective shadows Estrella, who once owned porn shops in Cuba, cut off the hands of Che Guevara, and now is meeting with CIA operatives and a trafficker of stolen archeological treasures. Before Hector can decide whether he is pursuing Estrella or Estrella is pursuing him, he finds himself on a flight to Tijuana, for a confrontation with a killer. From the arms trade to the drug trade, from Nicaragua to the assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, Paco lgnacio Taibo II writes a heartrending, hilarious, and haunting story of corruptions venality, and violence, as told by Mexico's finest one-eyed detective. And when the final gunshots stop ringing in Hector's ears, Taibo's remarkable detective must attempt his most daring feat of all: learning to live with himself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II is one of the most popular authors at work today. Born in Asturias, Spain, he has lived in Mexico since 1958. A historian, journalist, and writer of short stories, novels, and works of history, he is one of the founders of the International Association of Crime Writers. His work has been widely translated and published throughout the world; his most recent novel, LEONARDO'S BICYCLE, won the Latin American Dashiell Hammett Award for the best crime novel of the year. He lives in Mexico City with his wife and daughter.
DESCRIPTION - With the publication of AN EASY THING, American readers were introduced to Latin American answer to the hard-boiled sleuths of Hammett and Chandler: the cynical half-Irish, half-Basque detective hero with the unlikely moniker, Hector Belascoarán Shayne. Now, in SOME CLOUDS, master crime writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II serves up another Belascoarán Shayne caper, set once again in the chaotic heart of Mexico City, involving two inexplicable murders and a mysterious fortune worth millions, Before his case is ended, Belascoarán Shayne must negotiate an intricate labyrinth of corruption and cover-up that bears an unsettling resemblance to Mexico City's real-life scandals. Hector Belascoardn Shayne had two exotic last names, a degree in engineering from the National University, and one eye less than most people. He was thirty-five years old, with an ex-wife, an ex-lover, one brother, one sister, a denim suit that made him look more like a social anthropologist than a detective, a 38 automatic in his office in Mexico City, a slight limp from an old bullet wound in his right leg, and a private investigator's license he'd gotten through a correspondence course. He had a marked predilection for soft drinks, lemon. scented aftershave, crab salad, the Bossa Nova, and certain Hemingway novels. His heroes were Justin Playfair, Michael Strogoff, John Reed, Buenaventura Durutti, Capablanca, and Zorro (though he knew he was never going to get very far with a cemetery-full of heroes like that). ‘His name is Hector Belascoarán Shayne, and he's an independent investigator in Mexico City. he's the damndest, most unique private eye you'll likely encounter in this day and age.' - Joseph Wambaugh.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born in Spain in 1949, PACO IGNACIO TAIBO II has lived in Mexico since 1958, and has been a nationalized Mexican citizen since 1980. The author of numerous novels, works of history, and short-story collections, Taibo is currently president of the International Association of Crime Writers. Taibo, a best-selling author throughout the Spanish-speaking world, has published works around the globe, including editions in France, Germany, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and the Russian republics. His English-language debut, the crime novel AN EASY THING (1990), was followed by THE SHADOW OF THE SHADOW (1991).
DESCRIPTION - An explosive, headline-making portrait of Allen Dulles, the man who transformed the CIA into the most powerful - and secretive - colossus in Washington, from the founder of Salon.com and author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers. America's greatest untold story: the United States' rise to world dominance under the guile of Allen Welsh Dulles, the longest-serving director of the CIA. Drawing on revelatory new materials - including newly discovered U.S. government documents, U.S. and European intelligence sources, the personal correspondence and journals of Allen Dulles's wife and mistress, and exclusive interviews with the children of prominent CIA officials - Talbot reveals the underside of one of America's most powerful and influential figures. Dulles's decade as the director of the CIA - which he used to further his public and private agendas - were dark times in American politics. Calling himself the secretary of state of unfriendly countries, Dulles saw himself as above the elected law, manipulating and subverting American presidents in the pursuit of his personal interests and those of the wealthy elite he counted as his friends and clients - colluding with Nazi-controlled cartels, German war criminals, and Mafiosi in the process. Targeting foreign leaders for assassination and overthrowing nationalist governments not in line with his political aims, Dulles employed those same tactics to further his goals at home, Talbot charges, offering shocking new evidence in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. An exposE of American power that is as disturbing as it is timely, The Devil's Chessboard is a provocative and gripping story of the rise of the national security state - and the battle for America's soul.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Talbot is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years and the acclaimed national bestseller Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror, and Deliverance in the City of Love. He is the founder and former editor in chief of Salon, and was a senior editor at Mother Jones and the features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. He has written for The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Time, The Guardian, and other major publications. Talbot lives in San Francisco, California.
DESCRIPTION - SWEDISH COPS is a history of Swedish culture and ideas in an international context, as expressed in crime fiction from 1965 to 2012. It argues that, from being feared and despised, the police emerged as heroes and part of the social project of the welfare state after World War II. Establishing themselves artistically and commercially at the forefront of the genre, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö constructed a model for using the police novel as an instrument for social and political criticism. With varying political affiliations, their model has been adapted by authors such as Leif G. W. Persson, Jan Guillou, Henning Mankell, Håkan Nesser, Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, and Stieg Larsson, as well as film series such as Beck and Wallander. SWEDISH COPS is the first book of its kind, and it is as thrilling as the novels and films it analyzes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michael Tapper teaches film at Lund University. He has been a contributor to the Swedish National Encyclopaedia since 1989 and has served as film critic at the daily Sydsvenska Dagbladet in Malmö, Sweden, since 1999.
DESCRIPTION - Even those who remember that Snow White's stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella's stepsisters, that Briar Rose's suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castle, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will be surprised by Maria Tatar's revelations about the tales of the brothers Grimm in their unexpurgated form. Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales figures as the subject matter for this intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. Although children never have much trouble accepting the hard facts of the bedtime stories in this collection, adults have often found it difficult to come to terms with their sensationalistic content. Bruno Bettelheim has taught us to look for deeper symbolic meanings in the violence of fairy tales. Now Professor Tatar skillfully employs the tools not only of the psychoanalyst but also of the folklorist, literary critic, and historian to examine the harsher aspects of the stories gathered by the Grimms. Few books have been written in English on the tales collected by the Grimms, and none has probed their allegedly happy endings so thoroughly. From a first chapter on ‘Sex and Violence' to an epilogue entitled ‘Getting Even,' the author presents an entirely new interpretation of this best-selling of all German books. She focuses above all on the wishes for revenge that drive the heroes and heroines of the Grimms' tales. In transforming folk materials that once served as adult entertainment into children's reading matter, the Grimms may have suppressed episodes touching on sexual matters, but they often embellished descriptions of cruelty, especially when it took the form of revenge. For Professor Tatar violent family conflicts, the pitting of the weak against the strong, and universal fantasies of retaliation are keys to the enduring popularity of the Grimms' stories. ‘Tatar seeks to reexamine the Grimms' tales by combining methods from psychology, structuralism, folklore, and social history. She has a fine ability to bring together research in the field and to conceive new interpretations. The book is eminently readable and will certainly help the general reader to reassess the Grimms' tales.' - JACK ZIPES, University of Florida.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MARIA TATAR is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of SPELLBOUND: STUDIES ON MESMERISM AND LITERATURE (Princeton).
DESCRIPTION - A good, sound, vintage set, containing a great treasure on the inside. There are 40 plates and numerous text illustrations, all done by Thackeray himself. VANITY FAIR is the story of Becky Sharp, one of the most beautiful, willful, and resourcefully charming pleasure-seekers in literature. With finishing- school credentials and proper connections, Becky begins as a governess, wins the hearts of the moneyed young and old, and, in the light of presentation at court and calculated scandals, emerges a full-fledged courtesan on the Continent, living surprisingly well beyond her means. Thackeray's greatest novel is a moral tapestry of early nineteenth-century English manners, and his persistent theme is the folly of the good-at-heart, the evil of those endowed with grace and wit. Anthony Trollope called Thackeray ‘. one of the recognized stars of the literary heaven.' V.S. Pritchett finds Thackeray ‘. the first of our novelists to catch life visually and actually as it passes in fragments before us. he is above all a superb impressionist-perhaps our greatest.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 - 24 December 1863) was an English novelist of the 19th century. He was famous for his satirical works, particularly Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of English society.
DESCRIPTION - Widely acclaimed as one of the world's best travel writers, Paul Theroux takes us on the ultimate journey through the world's most complex and mysterious continent. In the travel-writing tradition that made Paul Theroux's reputation, DARK STAR SAFARI is a rich and insightful book whose itinerary is Africa, from Cairo to Cape Town: down the Nile, through Sudan and Ethiopia, to Kenya, Uganda, and ultimately to the tip of South Africa. Going by train, dugout canoe, ‘chicken bus,' and cattle truck, Theroux passes through some of the most beautiful - and often life-threatening - landscapes on earth. This is travel as discovery and also, in part, a sentimental journey. Almost forty years ago, Theroux first went to Africa as a teacher in the Malawi bush. Now he stops at his old school, sees former students, revisits his African friends. He finds astonishing, devastating changes wherever he goes. ‘Africa is materially more decrepit than it was when I first knew it,' he writes, ‘hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can't tell the politicians from the witch doctors. Not that Africa is one place. It is an assortment of motley republics and seedy chiefdoms. I got sick, I got stranded, but I was never bored. In fact, my trip was a delight and a revelation.' Seeing firsthand what is happening across Africa, Theroux is as obsessively curious and wittily observant as always, and his readers will find themselves on an epic and enlightening journey. DARK STAR SAFARI is one of his bravest and best books.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Theroux's first collection of essays and articles devoted entirely to travel writing, FRESH AIR FIEND touches down on five continents and floats through most seas in between to deliver a literary adventure of the first order, with the incomparable Paul Theroux as a guide. From the crisp quiet of a solitary week spent in the snowbound Maine woods to the expectant chaos of Hong Kong on the eve of the Hand-over, Theroux demonstrates how the traveling life and the writing life are intimately connected. His journeys in remote hinterlands and crowded foreign capitals provide the necessary perspective to "become a stranger" in order to discover the self. A companion volume to SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS, FRESH AIR FIEND is the ultimate good read for anyone fascinated by travel in the wider world or curious about the life of one of our most passionate travelers.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - An unmitigated treat for the hundreds of thousands of fans of the first Bazaar. In GHOST TRAIN TO THE EASTERN STAR, Theroux recreates an epic journey he took thirty years ago, a giant loop by train (mostly) through Eastern Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, China, Japan, and Siberia. In short, he traverses all of Asia top to bottom, and end to end. In the three decades since he first travelled this route, Asia has undergone phenomenal change. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has risen, India booms, Burma slowly smothers, and Vietnam prospers despite the havoc unleashed upon it the last time Theroux passed through. He witnesses all this and more in a 25,000 mile journey, travelling as the locals do, by train, car, bus, and foot. His odyssey takes him from Eastern Europe, still hungover from Communism, through tense but thriving Turkey, into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbour Azerbaijan revels in oil-driven capitalism. As he penetrates deeper into Asia's heart, his encounters take on an otherworldly cast. The two chapters that follow show us Turkmenistan, a profoundly isolated society at the mercy of an almost comically egotistical dictator, and Uzbekistan, a ruthless authoritarian state. From there, he retraces his steps through India, Mayanmar, China, and Japan, providing his penetrating observations on the changes these countries have undergone. Brilliant, caustic, and totally addictive, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is Theroux at his very best.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - Paul Theroux's journeys have taken readers to the ends of the earth and back again - across China in RIDING THE IRON ROOSTER, deep into the Americas in THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS, through Europe and Asia in THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR. Now Theroux launches his most exotic and tantalizing adventure yet, as he kayaks the shimmering Pacific from island to island, exploring its surfy coasts and blue lagoons, and taking up residence to discover the secrets of these happy isles. Theroux compares the vast Pacific to the universe: each island like a distant star, each archipelago like a galaxy. His travels begin in what he calls ‘Meganesia': the great islands of New Zealand, where he walks the mountain trails of the Fiordland wilderness; and Australia, where he hikes the red ranges around Alice Springs (‘Oceania after someone has pulled the plug') and camps among crocodiles and wild pigs on an Aboriginal reserve. Then, traveling with his collapsible kayak, Theroux lives among the Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea, and discovers the truth about their fabled sexual lives. From there, via the megapode egg-diggers of the Solomon Islands and the cargo cults of Vanuatu, he proceeds to Melanesian Fiji and Polynesian Tonga, where he is granted an audience with King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV. After living a Robinson Crusoe fantasy on a desert island, Theroux continues under tropical skies to Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the last points on the Polynesian triangle: Easter Island and the paradise of Hawaii. A mesmerizing narrator - brilliant, witty, and keenly perceptive - Paul Theroux enters a Gauguin painting, sails in the wake of Captain Cook, recalls the bewitching tales of Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson, and we follow. Alone in his kayak, paddling to seldom visited shores, he glides through time and space, discovering a world of islands, their remarkable people, and in turn, happiness.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - Welcome to the Hotel Honolulu, a down-at-the-heels tourist place on a back street two blocks from the beach at Waikiki, where middle America stays and dreams. Like the Canterbury pilgrims, every guest in this eighty-room hotel has come in search of something - sun, love, happiness, unnamable longing - and everyone has a story. Honeymooners, vacationers, wanderers, mythomaniacs, soldiers, and families all land at the Hotel Honolulu. But the hotel is as suited to being a crime scene as a love nest. Fortunately, our keen-eyed narrator, a writer down on his luck, is there to relate all the comings and goings. He's lost money, friends, house, and family, and he has no experience running a hotel. But all that doesn't stop Buddy, the boozy owner of the place - the last of a dying breed - from signing him on as manager. It isn't long before the hotel expands to encompass the narrator's whole universe. His original plan of escape from a life of the mind becomes something altogether different: a way to return to the world he left, the world of imagined life. No one but Paul Theroux could write this romp of a book, with its acutely drawn characters and canny insights into a place that is often viewed as a simple island paradise. In this unforgettable novel, Theroux shows us a funny, languid floating world, island style. This is the essence of Hawaii as it has never been depicted, and it is also the heart of America.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - This is an intimate portrait of a friendship, its beginning, middle, and end. And it describes that rarest and most fragile of alliances, a literary friendship. One year before he published his first book, Paul Theroux met V. S. Naipaul - Vidia, as he was known. For thirty years both men remained in close touch, even when continents separated them. SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW is a double portrait of the writing life, but it is much more, for travel and reading and emotional ups and downs are also aspects of this friendship, which is powerful and enriching and often a comedy - and, ultimately, a bridge that is burned. The two writers' paths crossed in 1966 in Uganda, which Naipaul saw as a dangerous jungle and Theroux regarded as a benign home. Theroux became Naipaul's driver, interpreter, and apprentice - he was twenty-three and Naipaul thirty-four. Theroux was guided by the older writer, but as the years passed their positions were frequently reversed, as Naipaul sought Theroux's guidance and advice. They became each other's editors, confidants, and teachers. From Singapore to London, India to South America, the United States and back to Africa, the writers corresponded and crossed paths. Naipaul's brother, Shiva, is part of the story, and so is Margaret, Naipaul's Anglo-Argentine companion. A formidable and intensely private figure, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and is often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize, Naipaul was close to few others except his first and second wives and Theroux himself. Naipaul was the first to read and champion Theroux's earliest efforts. Over time, they witnessed each other's SUCCCMCS and failures. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, mis is a very personal account of how one develops as a writer, how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life, and what constitutes the relationship of mentor and student. Told with Theroux's impeccable eye for place and setting and his novelistic instinct for character and incident, SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW recalls Nicholson Baker's U AND I: A TRUE STORY, Rainer Maria Rilke's classic LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, and Boswell's LIFE OF JOHNSON, but it is nearly without precedent in anatomizing the nature of writing as well as the nature of friendship itself.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - The journeys of Paul Theroux take place not only in exotic, unexpected places of the world but in the thoughts, reading, and emotions of the writer himself. A gathering of people, places, and ideas in fifty glittering pieces of gold.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - Post-colonial Malaysia is Theroux territory, charted fictionally in SAINT JACK and brilliantly revisited in his best-selling travel book, THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR. THE CONSUL'S FILE is a journey with a young American diplomat to a ‘bachelor post' at the uneasy frontier where civilization meets jungle. The Consul records his stint in Ayer Hitam through a sequence of tales in which he is both observer and participant. As his intimacy with the town grows, so does his motley cast of Asians and exiles: the son of a Cantonese cafe owner, dreaming of a Fulbright one day and a movie contract the next; Margaret Harbottle, writer of travelogues and freeloader extraordinary; an American ingenue dubbed ‘The Flower of Malaysia,' who flirts with local mores and gets more than she bargained for. Orphans of empire, the English and Americans find refuge in their down-at-the-heels club - the scene of an epic tennis match between a Malay prodigy and a despised Japanese salesman - and diversion on the sexual battlefield. A dependent wife goes on permanent liberty in Bali. A woman anthropologist woos, and subdues, an aborigine chief. And the Consul, on a Singapore rendezvous with a former lover, finds diplomatic relations fatal to passion. The supernatural flourishes like exotic flora in Ayer Hitam, and its ghostly influence pervades many of the Consul's tales. From the comic to the bizarre, they build into a sensual evocation of place and character. This is a master storyteller writing at the height of his formidable power.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - The Orient Express, The Khyber Pass Local, The Frontier Mail, The Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, The Mandalay Express, The Ozora Limited - a Grand Tour by train, a journey from London to Tokyo and back with as many mishaps as detours. Paul Theroux, novelist and railway lover, set out one day from Victoria Station, bent on boarding every eastbound train that chugged into sight, eventually returning from Japan on the Trans-Siberian Express. The trains he took in his parabola through Asia prove that, in spite of supersonic jets and package tours, travel can still be a serendipitous adventure. He sought trains; he found passengers - any number of travelers eager to unburden themselves to the attentive writer. They ranged from the unfortunate Duffill, destined always to miss his connection, to the admirable Bernard, preserving in the middle of Burma the outmoded ways of British imperialism; and from Mr. Radia, who intoned Hindi songs through his nose, to the mysterious, gun-toting Mr. Pensacola with his stories of opium smuggling. In this unique and vastly entertaining railway odyssey, Paul Theroux's sharp eye catches the telling details of landscape and character that have consistently distinguished his novels. The Great Railway Bazaar is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes shocking report on Asia. It is also the fascinating record of one intrepid traveler's mind as he traversed two continents - through the deserts of Iran, the war zone of Vietnam, the snowfields of Japan and Siberia - on the trains with the wonderful names. ‘In the fine old tradition of travel for fun and adventure compulsive reading.' - Graham Greene.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight. About the Author - Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - A natural successor to THE CONSUL'S FILE, this book takes the American narrator from Ayer Hitam to a new post in the London Embassy. As he once observed with cool, amused eye the British and Malays, he can now observe the British and their endless treasure trove of eccentricities on home ground. And the Americans in the embassy are no less curious. There is a man who is beggared when he inherits a title, the embassy Minister who is obsessed with rage at a male employee who wears an earring, an Arab who has come to London to rob a certain tomb, a woman who cycles all the way to Yorkshire to perform a peculiar revenge, and dozens of others who nurse some secret vagary - and, with each, Theroux produces a surprising illumination.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - Starting with a rush-hour subway ride to South Station in Boston to catch the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, Theroux winds up on the poky, wandering Old Patagonian Express steam engine, which comes to a halt in a desolate land of cracked hills and thorn bushes. But with Theroux the view along the way is what matters: the monologuing Mr. Thornberry in Costa Rica, the bogus priest of Cali, and the blind Jorge Luis Borges, who delights in having Theroux read Robert Louis Stevenson to him.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - The journeys of Paul Theroux are the stuff of dreams and adventure; his wonderfully observant accounts of distant lands and seas have unlocked the mysteries of China, the islands of the South Pacific, the outer reaches of Siberia, and the far corners of Patagonia. Transported by Theroux's marvelous storytelling, readers have been carried to places they may never visit, into exotic corners of the world where travelers are few and discovery is still possible. Now Paul Theroux has ventured to one of the most traveled places on earth, and returned with his most exhilarating, revealing, and eloquent travel book. In this modern version of the Grand Tour, Theroux sets off from Gibraltar, one of the fabled Pillars of Hercules, on a glorious journey around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is a long, lively, occasionally dangerous, and endlessly fascinating trip, up the coast of Spain, along the Riviera, by ferry to the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and beyond-way beyond. By foot, train, bus, and cruise ship, Theroux travels around Italy and the Greek islands, to Albania in a state of near anarchy and to war-torn Croatia. He sails across an old sea of myths into Istanbul, its minarets, mosque domes, and obelisks beckoning him to the Levant. After hearing of Theroux's onward itinerary, a Turkish shipmate murmurs, ‘Gechmis olsen!' - May it be behind you! Ahead are Damascus and the remote villages of Syria, shrouded in the cult of Assad and his martyred son; Israel, besieged by suicide bombers; Egypt, where Theroux visits with Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, recovering from an assassination attempt. And past the hill that marks the southern Pillar of Hercules lie Morocco and Paul Bowles' Tangier. Exploring coastlines as wild as anything he encountered in China or Peru, probing through layers of tradition and culture, ancient and modern tawdry and splendid, Theroux recalls the words of his predecessors - Homer, E Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Carlo Levi, Lawrence Durrell - and weaves the legends and siren calls of civilizations as old as time into a tantalizing story about life on the Mediterranean today His magnificent Grand Tour is an irresistible invitation to discovery enlightenment, and sheer entertainment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Travel writing at its best.' THE HOUSTON POST Author and travel writer Paul Theroux does what no one else can: he travels to the isolated, unusual, and fascinating spots of the world, and creates an elegy to them that makes readers feel they are traveling with him. Evocative, breathtaking, intriguing, here is the armchair traveler's guide to the sites of the world he makes us feel we know.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). He has published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel The Mosquito Coast. He is the father of British authors and documentary makers Louis Theroux and Marcel Theroux, the brother of authors Alexander Theroux and Peter Theroux, and uncle to the American actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux.
DESCRIPTION - In THE BEAST OF THE HAITIAN HILLS Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin have created a tale of violence as well as charm, and the story is always strong and frequently terrifying. Morin Dutrilleul was a city man who went to the country to live. He was not superstitious, he did not believe the old legends and felt calmly superior to the peasants who did. To prove his point he cut down the tree at whose foot the sacrifices to the local gods had always been left. From that point on the story rises in a crescendo of fear; fear by the peasants of the Cigouave, the beast of the hills, fear by Morin of his growing belief in the old legends and the horrible activities of the old gods. The victim of rum and superstition, Morin does not escape the climax of violence and terror with which the book ends.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Emile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel CanapE-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
DESCRIPTION - The pencil of God writes hard and fast when it writes; and the Haitians say the pencil of God has no eraser. This is a novel of the strange half-lit world which exists in Haiti between the church and continued on back nap continued from front flap voodoo, and of a simple devout man, Dioghe Cyprien, a small warehouse owner, whose weakness is an everlasting and virile love of the ladies. In his last fling, the very dissimulation and craftiness which he has used to attain his heart's desire is boomeranged back to him by his love's old female relatives, who place a voodoo curse on him. His life becomes a series of freak disasters - tongues clack in the provincial, small-town atmosphere of Saint-Marc. The gossip that he is a were wolf, a fiend, a consort of evil spirits, at first a whisper, becomes a deafening roar. Like a swimmer pulled by the tide between the sharks and the reefs, Diogbne is pulled between the church and voodoo. The curse is the curse of gossip and suspicion, which can be as effective in Boston or New York or anywhere else as it is in Haiti.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Emile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel CanapE-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
DESCRIPTION - Do you know why the sky is so far from earth that we must use lamps, rather than stars, to read by? why Misery, rejected in both heaven and hell, has come back to earth to stay till Judgment Day? why dogs cannot talk and goats cannot climb? These are among the eighteen delightful Haitian tales retold by the Marcelin brothers in this collection. The authors heard many of them as children; now, with relish and grace, they revive the old tales of devils and magic and charms, of animals who outwit one another, of the dead who return to mingle with the living.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904 - 1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He was the older brother of Pierre Marcelin, who was born in 1908, and the two brothers worked together in the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished in Paris where he studied law. He began his career as general secretary at ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the occupation of his country by the U.S. military since 1915. In 1927, he participated with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Emile Roumer and Normil Sylvain of the creation of La Revue Indigène, in which they published many poems. They began to honor the indigenized and Haitian literary and artistic material, and returned write about the displeasure with the U.S. occupation. His first published novel CanapE-Vert, was awarded the Literary Prize of Latin America. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the People's Socialist Party (PSP) with Anthony Lespes, the same year he published La Bête de Musseau. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin died August 13, 1975 in Syracuse near New York.
DESCRIPTION - ‘We were like two prisoners in the stocks, hating one another yet fettered to one another by the same chain. ' While ‘The Kreutzer Sonata' caused a public sensation, Tolstoy's wife, Sonya, was hurt and furious that he should have enriched his scathing indictment of marriage with private details from their own life together. Tolstoy, during two years of obsessive unhappiness, had become convinced that the idea of a ‘Christian marriage' was an impossibility. Here he lets loose all his frustration and disgust at human sexuality, and the humiliating, ungodly, sensual tie that binds men to women. The curious result, part self-lacerating confession, part Christian polemic, is moving, above all, as the story of a man whose sexual jealousy, inflamed by guilt, drives him to murder his wife.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910.
DESCRIPTION - A wealthy Russian prince, serving as a juror in a murder trial, recognizes in the accused a girl he has seduced in his youth. The novel that grows out of this tragic incident is, like WAR AND PEACE, a vast panorama of Russian life. But here it is the life, not of the aristocracy, but of the teeming underworld that Tolstoy reveals in all its diversity. Prince Nekhlyudov is one of Tolstoy's great self-portraits, and it is his mature vision of a society rotten at the heart that stands out in this, his last great novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Count Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 on the family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. In 1844, he entered the University of Kazan to read Oriental languages and later law, but left before completing a degree. In 1851, he joined an artillery regiment in the Caucasus. He took part in the Crimean War and after the defense of Sevastopol wrote THE SEVASTOPOL SKETCHES (1855), which established his literary reputation. After leaving the army in 1856, Tolstoy spent some time mixing in literary circles in St. Petersburg and abroad, finally settling at Yasnaya Polyana, where he involved himself in the running of peasant schools and the emancipation of the serfs. In 1862, he married Sofya Andreevna Behrs; they had thirteen children. Tolstoy wrote two great novels, WAR AND PEACE (1869) and ANNA KARENINA (1877). His works, which include many short stories and essays, earned him numerous followers in Russia and abroad. He died in 1910.
DESCRIPTION - From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the best-selling, award-winning translators of ANNA KARENINA and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, comes a brilliant, engaging, and eminently readable translation of Leo Tolstoy's master epic. WAR AND PEACE centers broadly on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812, and follows three of the best-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count, who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves behind his family to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman, who intrigues both men. As Napoleon's army invades, Tolstoy vividly follows characters from diverse backgrounds - peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers - as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving - and human - figures in world literature. Pevear and Volokhonsky have brought us this classic novel in a translation remarkable for its fidelity to Tolstoy's style and cadence and for its energetic, accessible prose. With stunning grace and precision, this new version of War and Peace is set to become the definitive English edition
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - COUNT LEO TOLSTOY (1828-1910) was born in central Russia. After serving in the Crimean War, he retired to his estate and devoted himself to writing, fanning, and raising his large family. His novels and outspoken social polemics brought him world fame. Together, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Gogol. They were twice awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for their versions of Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV and Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA), and their translation of Dostoevsky's DEMONS was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.
DESCRIPTION - CANE is an acknowledged classic - a powerful work of innovative fiction evoking Negro life in the South, primarily Georgia. Jean Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C., the son of educated blacks of Creole stock. He studied various subjects at a number of universities, but literature was his first love and he regularly contributed avant-garde poetry and short stories to such magazines as DIAL, BROOM, SECESSION, DOUBLE DEALER, and LITTLE REVIEW. After a brief literary apprenticeship in New York, Toomer taught school in rural Georgia. It was that experience that led to the writing of CANE. ‘By far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance, [CANE] ranks with Richard Wright's NATIVE SON and Ralph Ellison's INVISIBLE MAN as a measure of the Negro novelist's highest achievement. Jean Toomer belongs to that first rank of writers who use words almost as a plastic medium, shaping new meanings from an original and highly personal style. Toomer displays a concern for technique which is fully two decades in advance of the period. While his contemporaries of the Harlem School were still experimenting with a crude literary realism, Toomer had progressed beyond the naturalistic level to ‘the higher realism of the emotions,' to symbol, and to myth.' - Robert A. Bone, THE NEGRO NOVEL IN AMERICA. ‘No earlier volume of poetry or fiction or both had come close to expressing the ethos of the Negro in the Southern setting as Cane did. Even in today's ghettos astute readers are finding that its insights have anticipated and often exceeded their own.' - Arna Bontemps. ‘The colored people did not praise it. The, white people did not buy it. Yet (excepting the work of DuBois) CANE contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America.' - Langston Hughes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 - March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many his most significant.
DESCRIPTION - An international bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, The Ogre is a masterful tale of innocence, perversion, and obsession. It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to 'ogre' of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michel Tournier (born 19 December 1924) is a French writer. His works are highly considered and have won important awards such as the Grand Prix du roman de l'AcadEmie française in 1967 for Friday, or, The Other Island and the Prix Goncourt for The Erl-King in 1970. His works dwell on the fantastic, his inspirations including traditional German culture, Catholicism, and the philosophies of Gaston Bachelard. He currently lives in Choisel and is a member of the AcadEmie Goncourt. His autobiography has been translated and published as The Wind Spirit (Beacon Press, 1988). Born in Paris from parents who met at the Sorbonne while studying German, he spent his youth in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He learned German early, staying each summer in Germany. His education was deeply marked by the German culture, music and Catholicism. Later he discovered the thought of Gaston Bachelard. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the university of Tübingen and attended Maurice de Gandillac's course. He wished to teach philosophy at high-school but, like his father, failed to obtain the French agrEgation. He joined Radio France as a journalist and translator and hosted L'heure de la culture française. In 1954 he worked in advertisement for Europe 1. He also collaborated for Le Monde and Le Figaro. From 1958 to 1968, he was the chief editor of Plon. In 1967 he published his first book, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, retelling Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, adding to the story a philosophical depth. He was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'AcadEmie française for it.
DESCRIPTION - Includes six autobiographical essays covering the author's childhood, education, and the creation of his major works of fiction.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michel Tournier (born 19 December 1924) is a French writer. His works are highly considered and have won important awards such as the Grand Prix du roman de l'AcadEmie française in 1967 for Friday, or, The Other Island and the Prix Goncourt for The Erl-King in 1970. His works dwell on the fantastic, his inspirations including traditional German culture, Catholicism, and the philosophies of Gaston Bachelard. He currently lives in Choisel and is a member of the AcadEmie Goncourt. His autobiography has been translated and published as The Wind Spirit (Beacon Press, 1988). Born in Paris from parents who met at the Sorbonne while studying German, he spent his youth in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He learned German early, staying each summer in Germany. His education was deeply marked by the German culture, music and Catholicism. Later he discovered the thought of Gaston Bachelard. He studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and at the university of Tübingen and attended Maurice de Gandillac's course. He wished to teach philosophy at high-school but, like his father, failed to obtain the French agrEgation. He joined Radio France as a journalist and translator and hosted L'heure de la culture française. In 1954 he worked in advertisement for Europe 1. He also collaborated for Le Monde and Le Figaro. From 1958 to 1968, he was the chief editor of Plon. In 1967 he published his first book, Vendredi ou les Limbes du Pacifique, retelling Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, adding to the story a philosophical depth. He was awarded the Grand Prix du roman de l'AcadEmie française for it.
DESCRIPTION - From A Native Daughter explores issues of native Hawaiian student organizing at the University of Hawaii, the master plan of the native Hawaiian self-governing organization Ka Lahuni Hawaii and its platform on the four political arenas of sovereignty, the 1989 Hawaii declaration of the Hawaii ecumenical coalition on tourism, and a typology on racism and imperialism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Haunani-Kay Trask (born October 3, 1949) is a Hawaiian nationalist, educator, political scientist and writer whose genealogy connects her to the Pi?ilani line on her maternal side and the Kahakumakaliua line on her paternal line. She grew up on O?ahu and continues to reside there. Trask worked as a professor of Hawaiian Studies with the Kamakak?okalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai?i at M?noa until her retirement and has represented Native Hawaiians in the United Nations and various other global forums. She is the author of several books of poetry and nonfiction.
DESCRIPTION - Winner of the 1999 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day - and rendered here in graceful and readable verse - reveal the equally hard emotional work of memory and forgetting, the extraordinary difficulty of trying to live with or without someone.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, author of BELLOCQ'S OPHELIA and DOMESTIC WORK (her first book), has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize. Her work was also included in THE BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2000. Trethewey now lives in Decatur, Georgia, and is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Emory University.
DESCRIPTION - The stunning follow-up volume to her 2007 Pulitzer Prize–winning NATIVE GUARD, by America's new Poet Laureate. Natasha Trethewey's poems are at once deeply personal and historical - exploring her own interracial and complicated roots - and utterly American, connecting them to ours. The daughter of a black mother and white father, a student of history and of the Deep South, she is inspired by everything from colonial paintings of mulattos and mestizos to the stories of people forgotten by history. Meditations on captivity, knowledge, and inheritance permeate THRALL, as she reflects on a series of small estrangements from her poet father and comes to an understanding of how, as father and daughter, they are part of the ongoing history of race in America. THRALL confirms not only that Natasha Trethewey is one of our most gifted and necessary poets but that she is also one of our most brilliant and fearless.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Natasha Trethewey (born April 26, 1966) is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi. She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dalton Jerson Trevisan (born 14 June 1925) is a Brazilian author of short stories. He has been described as an ‘acclaimed short-story chronicler of lower-class mores and popular dramas.' Trevisan won the 2012 Premio Camões, the leading Portuguese-language author prize. His short stories are inspired in the daily life of his home city of Curitiba, though featuring characters and situations of universal meaning. His extremely concise and refined tales have been called ‘Haikus in prose‘.
DESCRIPTION - From his debut collection, THE DAY WE GOT DRUNK ON CAKE, published in 1968, to FAMILY SINS (1990), William Trevor has crafted the short story to perfection, giving us brilliant and subtle stories full of the reversals, surprises, and shadowy truths we discover in life itself. To read this volume is not just to encounter an extraordinary literary stylist, but to understand life as surely as though we were looking through the eyes of his protagonists and - deeper still - into their hearts. WILLIAM TREVOR: THE COLLECTED STORIES includes the tales from his seven previous books, as well as four stories that have never appeared in book form in America. They depict the comforts and frustrations of life in rural Ireland, the complexities of family relationships, and the elusive grace of love. They portray the almost invisible strands that bind people to each other as well as the chains that imprison them in solitary yearning. Startling, funny, compassionate, and profound, William Trevor's stories engage and provoke us as only the best fiction can.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - William Trevor (24 May 1928 - 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. Trevor resided in Devon, South West England, from the 1950s until his death at the age of 88.
DESCRIPTION - ‘We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be; nut if we stop pretending, we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence.' Arguably the greatest tool in the creation of a people's identity, history has been manipulated by oligarchs and rewritten by committees. In this provocative analysis of historical narrative, Michel-Rolph Trouillot demonstrates how power operates, often invisibly, at all stages in the making of history to silence certain voices. From the West's failure to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, to the continued debate over denials of the Holocaust, and the meaning of Columbus's arrival in the Americas, Trouillot shows us that history is not simply the recording of facts and events, but a process of actively enforced silences, some unconscious, others quite deliberate. As such, Trouillot argues that history must never be merely accepted. Instead, he divulges ways to expose the forces of power in historical narrative and helps us to discern how these forces shape our current understanding of our pasts and ourselves.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Michel-Rolph Trouillot (November 26, 1949, Haiti - July 5, 2012, Chicago, IL) was a Haitian academic and anthropologist. He was Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Trouillot's lifetime of work presented a vision for anthropology and the social sciences, informed by historical depth and empirical examination of Caribbean societies. The Haitian historian and novelist Henock Trouillot was his uncle. Trouillot died on July 5, 2012.
DESCRIPTION - When Boris Pasternak came across a volume of Marina Tsvetayeva's poetry in 1922 he 'was immediately overcome by the immense lyrical power of her poetic form'. One of the most original Russian voices to emerge from the turmoil of the early twentieth century, Tsvetayeva, whose tragic life nourished her genius, seemed always to be drawn to doomed causes. Her commitment to White Russia caused interest in her work to decline, but in recent years her poetry has been rescued from obscurity and appreciated anew both in Russia and the West.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (8 October 1892 - 31 August 1941) was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from starvation, she placed her in a state orphanage in 1919, where she died of hunger. Tsvetaeva left Russia in 1922 and lived with her family in increasing poverty in Paris, Berlin and Prague before returning to Moscow in 1939. Her husband Sergei Efron and her daughter Ariadna Efron (Alya) were arrested on espionage charges in 1941; and her husband was executed. Tsvetaeva committed suicide in 1941. As a lyrical poet, her passion and daring linguistic experimentation mark her as a striking chronicler of her times and the depths of the human condition.
DESCRIPTION - FATHERS AND SONS (first published in 1861) is generally agreed to be Turgenev's masterpiece, and its hero, Bazarov, is one of the most remarkable figures in Russian literature. Turgenev's creation of the first literary nihilist and his demonstration of the failure of communication between generations succeeded in enraging both fathers and sons in the Russia of his time they also help to explain the appeal of this work to Europeans today. Yet FATHERS AND SONS also contains some of the most moving scenes in the literature of any language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (November 9, 1818 - September 3, 1883) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches (1852), was a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons (1862) is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century fiction.
DESCRIPTION - Condensed and deceptively simple, the poems of Ungaretti are symbolic images expressed, with supreme mastery, in a language purged of rhetoric and sentimentality. A friend of Apollinaire, Ungaretti was influenced (as appears from his preoccupation with form and language) by Mallarme and Valery. In his view civilization itself is threatened today by 'a mad disintegration of words'. In this first selection to be published in English, Patrick Creagh has succeeded brilliantly in rendering into English poetry the work of a man who has claims to be regarded as the leading Italian poet of this century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Giuseppe Ungaretti was the son of Tuscan peasants, who emigrated to Egypt and ran a small bakery in a suburb of Alexandria. He was born in 1888. It was not until 1912 that Ungaretti left Alexandria. He went to Paris, and on the way caught his first glimpse of Italy. The war broke out, and Ungaretti went to Milan, where he published his first poems in the magazine ‘Lacerba.' When Italy entered the war in 1915 he joined up as a private in the infantry and was sent to the front line on the Carso. There he was in the thick of some of the worst fighting of the war. His first small volume was written in the trenches and published in 1916. These poems are included in Allegria (1919). Back in Paris after the war, he brought out a volume of poems in French (La Guerre), and married in 1920. He went to live in Rome the following year, supporting himself as a journalist. His second major volume, Sentimento del Tempo (The Feeling of Time), came out in 1933. In 1939 his nine-year-old son Antonietto died, and Ungaretti's grief is clear in Il Dolore (1947). The most important of his subsequent publications have been La Terra Promessa (1950), Un Grido e Paeraggi (1952), and Il Taccuino del Vecchio (1960), In addition he has translated works of Shakespeare and Blake, Gongora, Mallarme, Racine and others.
DESCRIPTION - In this powerful and timely personal essay, best-selling author Otegha Uwagba reflects on racism, whiteness, and the mental labour required of Black people to navigate relationships with white people. Presented as a record of Uwagba's observations on this era-defining moment in history - that is, George Floyd's brutal murder and the subsequent protests and scrutiny of institutional racism - Whites explores the colossal burden of whiteness, as told by someone who is in her own words, 'a reluctant expert'. What is it like to endure both racism and white efforts at anti-racism, sometimes from the very same people? How do Black people navigate the gap between what they know to be true, and the version of events that white society can bring itself to tolerate? What does true allyship actually look like - and is it even possible? Addressing complex interracial dynamics and longstanding tensions with characteristically unflinching honesty, Uwagba deftly interrogates the status quo, and in doing so provides an intimate and deeply compelling portrayal of an unavoidable facet of the Black experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Otegha Uwagba is the author of the Little Black Book: A Toolkit For Working Women published in 2017 and her highly anticipated part memoir, part cultural commentary We Need To Talk About Money is scheduled for publication in May 2021. She is also a speaker, brand consultant and founder of Women Who, a London-based multi-media platform aimed at creative women.
DESCRIPTION - This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian CEsar Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939). Vallejo's poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo's is a tragic vision–perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature–in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman's long relationship with Vallejo's poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo's life and work. Contents - Foreword / Mario Vargas Llosa; Introduction / Efraín Kristal; Los heraldos negros · The Black Heralds; Plafones ágiles · Agile Soffits; Buzos · Divers; De la tierra · Of the Earth; Nostalgias imperiales · Imperial Nostalgias; Truenos · Thunderclaps; Canciones de hogar · Songs of Home; Trilce; Poemas humanos · Human Poems; España, aparta de mí este cáliz · Spain, Take This Cup from Me; Afterword: A Translation Memoir; Appendix: A Chronology of Vallejo's Life and Works / Stephen M. Hart; Notes; Bibliography; Index of Spanish Titles and First Lines; Index of English Titles and First Lines.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cesar Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 - April 15, 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him 'the greatest universal poet since Dante'. The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo '. the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language.' He was a member of the intellectual community called North Group formed in Trujillo city. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia's translation of The Complete Posthumous Poetry of Cesar Vallejo won the National Book Award for translation in 1979.
DESCRIPTION - The Peruvian poet CEsar Vallejo in 1922 published his second important hook of poems, Trilce after Los Heraldos Negros (1919). To anyone who had read Latin American poetry written before Truce, it seemed a strange book indeed, and the literary critics recognized in Vallejo a major talent. When Vallejo got into trouble with Peruvian authorities he emigrated to France and never returned. While in Paris he lived often on the verge of starvation, but managed to make contact with artists and writers, such as Juan Gris, Vicente Huidobro, and Juan Larrea. He maintained himself by writing dispatches for the Lima weekly Mundial, and later he was a weekly columnist for Variedades also published in Lima. Between 1923 and 1938, the year of his death, Vallejo produced 110 poems which have come to be recognized as one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century. Only recently has an accurate text of these posthumous published poems been available. Larrea and other Peruvian scholars have been consulted by the translators of this volume regarding Vallejo's intentional misspellings, neologisms and Peruvianisms, and they have taken each into consideration, seeking equivalent words and phrases in English. All typeset editions of Vallejo's posthumously published poetry have, until very recently been riddled with errors. The typescript for this book was based on Vallejo's worksheets reproduced in facsimile in the 1968 Moncloa edition of his Complete Poetic Works. From the worksheets Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia have created not only this translation but a faithful Spanish text. Besides a long introduction containing new information on Vallejos years in Europe when all of these poems were written, Eshleman and Barcia have included a section of notes and comments concerning their choices and interpretation of the many difficult words. Also translated is most of the crossed-out material on Vallejos final typescript and, in many instances, the translators have explained how the poet seems to have arrived at a particular final word or line.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cesar Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 - April 15, 1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him 'the greatest universal poet since Dante'. The late British poet, critic and biographer Martin Seymour-Smith, a leading authority on world literature, called Vallejo '. the greatest twentieth-century poet in any language.' He was a member of the intellectual community called North Group formed in Trujillo city. Clayton Eshleman and Jose Rubia Barcia's translation of The Complete Posthumous Poetry of Cesar Vallejo won the National Book Award for translation in 1979.
DESCRIPTION - Mario Vargas Llosa has long been acknowledged as one of Latin America's most important writers. A novelist of wide-ranging concerns, Vargas Llosa has, with AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, written his comic masterpiece-a ribald, sophisticated tale of life and love in Lima of the 1950s. In AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER he tells, in fact, two stories which unfold contrapuntally. On one level, the book concerns young Mario, who, while working at a second-rate Lima radio station, becomes romantically involved with Julia, his divorced, thirty-two-year-old aunt. The development of their liaison-from fling to romance to marriage-and the scandal it creates is the keenly observed, witty main plot. Interwoven with this love affair is the tale of Pedro Camacho, Mario's friend at the radio station, and the resident scriptwriter of outlandish soap operas which are the hit of Lima. This second story is equally funny, but the humor is darker and the conclusion serious indeed. Camacho's plots become more and more convoluted, and his absorption in them so total that soon he dresses like his characters in order to write, and finally confuses them so completely that he must destroy them all. His Gothic tales of ruin become a parable of his own rum. AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER is a wonderful, deft story which is also an account of storytelling-its pleasures and its dangers. Combining grace, humor, and an understated seriousness, the book is a brilliantly realized tour de force.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - Mario Vargas Llosa, renowned as a novelist, is one of our most brilliant and provocative public intellectuals as well. In Making Waves, the first collection of his essays, he explores, with characteristic brio and elegance, his long-standing preoccupations-literature and politics, Europe and the Americas, and the relations among them all. We follow Vargas Llosa from his native Peru to Madrid and then to Paris, the setting of essays on his great precursors Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus, as well as a comic account of his visit to the tomb of Rin Tin Tin and an affecting memoir of his time in the city as an aspiring writer in the 1960s. In passionately critical essays on the Cuban revolution and its aftermath, Vargas Llosa takes up vital questions of Latin American independence, while in essays on Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, and Julio Cortázar-and in an exchange with Günter Grass-he ponders magic realism. In more recent articles, he considers the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path and the presidency of Alberto Fujimori-and the failures of the English public-school system, which made his son into a Rastafarian. The essays in Making Waves are full of Mario Vargas Llosa's unflagging literary intensity and moral and political integrity. They are an important addition to the body of work of this major international writer.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Vargas Llosa's many books published in English translation by FSG include A Fish in the Water (1994), a memoir of his candidacy for the presidency of Peru, and Death in the Andes (1996), a novel.
DESCRIPTION - THE TIME OF THE HERO immediately established Mario Vargas Llosa as an important contemporary novelist - one of a number who have come out of Latin America since World War II. In THE GREEN HOUSE Vargas Llosa has expanded his vision and his boundaries and has written an epic and powerful novel that gives a deep sense of the gigantic and painful adventure of human existence. The story of The Green ho use moves back and forward in time, weaving its darkly glittering fabric. It merges dream, memory, and present-tense experience to create a total reality. There are the city and the jungle. The city is Piura and across the river from the city, at the edge of the desert, stands ‘The Green House,' the brothel founded by the stranger, Anselmo. On the fringes of the city is the slum, La Man gacheria, where the police dare not go, filled with murderers, ugly smells, and dirty bars-a world apart, a breath of hell. Far up the river, deep in the green heart of the Amazon jungle, is the settlement of Santa Maria de Nieva with its army outpost and its Mission, and farther still into ‘the heart of darkness' is the island in the river where Fushia, the legendary Japanese smuggler, lives. The world that contains these places and these people casts a spell over the reader. Lives touch tangentially or overlap: Bonifacia, the timorous Indian servant at the Mission becomes a prostitute at the Green House. Fushia, endlessly scheming, limitlessly cruel, disappears in a leper colony in the jungle. ‘The Green House'is burned down by a mob whipped to frenzy by Father Garcia and is rebuilt again. Anselmo becomes a harp-player and a saintly figure in La Man gacheria. And the ‘heroes'-Jose, Monk, Josefino, and Lituma - continue their round of magnificent exploits and sordid orgies. The world turns; the river flows through the city and jungle, weaving the web of life over and over. THE GREEN HOUSE is full of the legendary, the exotic, the heroic, encompassing many lives and many levels, from nobility to degradation. It is the profound and moving exercise of a brilliant imagination that searches the very center of man's experience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - The scene: a pitch-black lavatory after eights-out in a military academy. Four cadets are drawing lots for the night's mission. Their objective: the captain's office. Their target: to steal a copy of the next day's chemistry examination. Thus begins THE TIME OF THE HERO, a work which has been hailed by critics around the world as one of the best Spanish-language novels of recent decades. The author has set his novel at the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Lima, Peru. In this microcosm, this city within a city, a group of cadets form still another circle in their attempt to break out of the vicious round of sadistic hazing, military discipline, confinement, and boredom. The cadets' rebellion is led by the Jaguar, an aloof, tough boy who refuses to be initiated and treated as one of the Dogs. Under his leadership seven cadets, later reduced to four, join forces to fight the system by smuggling in pisco and cigarettes, running midnight poker games in the latrine, selling answers to examinations, stealing or mutilating uniforms. The Poet, regarded as the class brain, writes and sells pornographic stories; the Boa, their sex hero, wins the contests they hold in their hide-out; and the Slave is their built-in scapegoat. But what began as pranks in their First Year turns into tragedy by the time the boys reach the Third Year-the point at which the novel opens. The officers' discovery of the theft of a crucial final exam sets off a cycle of betrayal, murder, and revenge which jeopardizes the entire military hierarchy. Moving back and forth from past to present, from inner thought to outer action, from within the Academy to the city outside, Vargas Llosa exposes the sordid world of the military elite, with its hypocrisy, moral decay, and power politics, and the corruption throughout the society beyond the Academy walls.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the world's great storytellers. His novel CONVERSATION IN THE CATHEDRAL is a classic narrative of tyranny and filial love, while his ribald tale AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER is a comic masterpiece. The War of the End of the World, Vargas Llosa's new work, brings together all of its author's superb gifts in an epic historical novel, a realistic panorama of Tolstoyan sweep that is at once a magnificent literary accomplishment and an enthralling story. To compare THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD with the great historical novels of a Tolstoy or a Stendhal is no hyperbole. Vargas Llosa has chosen to retell one of the crucial events of Latin America: the uprising in the Brazilian backlands that almost reversed the history of the continent. It is the story of an apocalyptic prophet and the state he created - Canudos, home to all the damned of the earth, to prostitutes, bandits, beggars, and their like. In Canudos, history and civilization are turned on their ears. There is no money, property, marriage, no income tax, decimal system, or census. Canudos is the revolutionary spirit in its purest and most apocalyptic form-a state which promises to be a libertarian paradise but which the forces of the modern world and of the nation-state cannot tolerate. The International Herald Tribune has described this novel as ‘at one and the same time a major literary work, an adventure story, a historical drama, and an inquiry into ideological fanaticism and ‘utopian' violence in Latin America'.' Vargas Llosa has described it as his most ambitious novel to date; it will unquestionably be called his most successful.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. Peru's foremost writer, he has been awarded the Cervantes Prize, the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished literary honor, and the Jerusalem Prize. His many works include THE FEAST OF THE GOAT, THE BAD GIRL, AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, THE WAR OF THE END OF THE WORLD, and THE STORYTELLER. He lives in London.
DESCRIPTION - In the midst of a violent and fearful climate of racist attitudes and calls for freedom, a diverse group of children meet and become friends in a small upcountry town. Eight-year-old Vic and his younger sister, Deepa, of Indian descent; Njoroge, an African boy; and British siblings Annie and Bill play all sorts of make-believe games reflecting the surrounding reality. When one day their innocent games are brought to a brutal conclusion, their world tumbles around them. Against the backdrop of a chaotic and changing Kenya, we follow Vic into an adulthood still shrouded by the fear in which his childhood ended. He is an ‘in-between man.' An Asian, he stands between the white colonials and the black Africans; his homeland is Kenya, but in the 1960s-in the early, heady years of independence and of Jomo Kenyatta's presidency-he feels unimportant and irrelevant to the new nation. He is a man who learns early not to take too strong a stand but to simply remain in-between and go along. When Vic takes a job in civil service, he becomes an in-between man of another sort: a conduit for influence brokers. And as the hopefulness of the 1960s gives way to the pervasive corruption and repression of the 1970S and 1980s, Vic is drawn deeper and deeper into the official orbit of graft and power-brokering, pocketing ever-larger bribes, buying protection from Kenyatta himself-finally earning ‘the distinction of having been numbered one of Africa's most corrupt men, a cheat of monstrous and reptilian cunning.' At the same time , we see how Njoroge lives through the remnants of his youthful idealism, taking hold of unexpected opportunities-as a Kikuyu, he is a member of Kenyatta's ruling class and reigniting in adulthood the abiding love for Deepa that began when they were children.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before moving to Canada in 1978, he attended M.I.T. and the University of Pennsylvania, and later was writer in residence at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. Vassanji is the author of four acclaimed novels: The Gunny Sack, which won a regional Commonwealth Prize; No New Land; The Book of Secrets, which won the very first Giller Prize; and Amnriika. He lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.
DESCRIPTION - ‘It is the purpose of this inquiry to discuss the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life, but it has been found impracticable to confine the discussion strictly within the limits so marked out. Some attention is perforce given to the origin and the line of derivation of the institution, as well as to features of social life that are not commonly classed as economic. At some points the discussion proceeds on grounds of economic theory or ethnological generalisation that may be in some degree unfamiliar. The introductory chapter indicates the nature of these theoretical premises sufficiently, it is hoped, to avoid obscurity. A more explicit statement of the theoretical position involved is made in a series of papers published in Volume IV of the American Journal of Sociology, on ‘The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labour', ‘The Beginnings of Ownership', and ‘The Barbarian Status of Women.' But the argument does not rest on these - in part novel - generalisations in such a way that it would altogether lose its possible value as a detail of economic theory in case these novel generalisations should, in the reader's apprehension, fall away through being insufficiently backed by authority or data. Partly for reasons of convenience, and partly because there is less chance of misapprehending the sense of phenomena that are familiar to all men, the data employed to illustrate or enforce the argument have by preference been drawn from everyday life, by direct observation or through condition notoriety, rather than from more recondite sources at a farther remove. It is hoped that no one will find his sense of literary or scientific fitness offended by this recourse to homely facts, or by what may at times appear to be a callous freedom in handling vulgar phenomena or phenomena whose intimate place in men's life has sometimes shielded them from the impact of economic discussion. Such premises and corroborative evidence as are drawn from remoter sources, as well as whatever articles of theory or inference are borrowed from ethnological science, are also of the more familiar and accessible kind and should be readily traceable to their source by fairly well-read persons. The usage of citing sources and authorities has therefore not been observed. Likewise the few quotations that have been introduced, chiefly by way of illustration, are also such as will commonly be recognised with sufficient facility without the guidance of citation.' - from the Preface.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called 'institutions' and 'technology'. Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen is famous in the history of economic thought for combining a Darwinian evolutionary perspective with his new institutionalist approach to economic analysis.
DESCRIPTION - ‘A man in advance of his age, repudiated by his generation, may appear in historical perspective to have been the most authentic spokesman for what that generation was adding to culture.' - From Dr. Mitchell's Introduction. Thorstein Veblen represents the point in America's intellectual history at which Darwinism was brought into the backward science of economics. No man was better fitted temperamentally or better equipped in scholarship to perform this function. His economic heresies are notorious, but his reward lies in the speed with which, since his death, his ideas have grown into contemporaneity. An essay such as ‘The Case of America,' written in 1923, is not only a profound explanation of the American small town, but is the equal of Main Street in its satirical trenchancy. This volume is for those who wish to refresh their knowledge of Veblen's teachings, who want to grasp in compact form his major contributions, and for those who do not yet know Veblen and do not choose to read ten or twelve separate volumes. Dr. Mitchell, one of Veblen's best-known pupils, has selected the clearest, most forceful expressions of Veblen's leading ideas: criticisms of orthodox economics in the light of other sciences; satiric studies of the leisure class and other effects of the money psychology; distinctions between pecuniary and industrial employments, between the business man and the engineer; the past of Europe and the future of America; perpetual world peace, and so on. The result might be called the essence of Veblenism.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called 'institutions' and 'technology'. Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen is famous in the history of economic thought for combining a Darwinian evolutionary perspective with his new institutionalist approach to economic analysis.
DESCRIPTION - This anthology gives a fuller picture of Verlaine's poetry than many translations have offered in the past by providing some of his most famous verse but also some political and scatological works for which he is less known. The translations capture and reproduce Verlaine's variety of registers and style in lively renderings that are faithful to the spirit of the buoyant original verse. - Joseph Acquisto, author of The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy Crowned Prince of Poets in his later years, Paul Verlaine stands out among the iconoclastic founders of French modernist verse. This diglot anthology offers the most comprehensive selection of Verlaine's poetry available in English translation. Verlaine's famous works are presented here alongside poems never previously translated into English, including neglected political works and prison pieces only recently brought to light, which reveal social, homoerotic, and even pornographic inspirations. The poems are organized not by collections and date of publication but by themes and time of composition. This innovation, along with Nicolas Valazza's extensive supporting materials, will help the curious student or scholar explore the master poet's work in the context of his troubled life: from the beginning of his literary career among the Parnassians to his affair with Rimbaud and the end of his marriage, his time in prison, and his bohemian lifestyle up to his death in 1896. Verlaine, the poet of ambiguity, has always been a challenge to translate. Samuel Rosenberg expertly crafts language that privileges the musicality of Verlaine's verse while respecting each poem's meaning and pace. Featuring 192 poems in French with English translations, this collection will appeal to scholars and poetry enthusiasts alike.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PAUL VERLAINE was born in Metz, France in 1844, and died in 1896. He began to publish poems and to make a name for himself in Paris in his early twenties. In 1870, he married his child-bride Mathilde, whose very respectable family he time and again outraged with his drunken sprees and outbursts of violence.
DESCRIPTION - Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvet's stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam REjouis and Val Vinokur, Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005. In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually building in emotional intensity, the novellas paint a shocking portrait of families and artists struggling to survive under Haiti's terrifying government restrictions that have turned its society upside down, transforming neighbors into victims, spies, and enemies. In ‘Love,' Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family. Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a criminal act of rebellion. In ‘Anger,' a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her father's land. And in ‘Madness,' Rene, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority. Sympathetic, savage and truly compelling with an insightful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave and graphic evocation of a country in turmoil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a seminal writer of postoccupation Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1916 and died in New York in 1973. She is the author of five novels, including Dance on the Volcano, Fonds des Nègres, Fille d'Haiti, and Les Rapaces. Rose-Myriam REjouis and Val Vinokur have translated two novels by Patrick Chamoiseau, Solibo Magnificent and Texaco, the latter of which won the American Translators Association Galantière Prize for Best Book. Their translation of Love, Anger, Madness was supported by a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
DESCRIPTION - Vizinczey's book confronts disasters as diverse as sexual confusions, wars, and the destruction of our environment (both private neurosis and public horror) and traces them to the dominant presumption that men can determine the results of their actions. From an incisive account of how chance works and why we fail to grant chance its due, the author is able to explain, among other things, how a big country can be defeated by a small country. His profound analysis of the myth and the real nature of power culminates in the discovery of its growth pattern: power weakens as it grows. His premise that 'the decisive cause of every event is pure chance' is the basis of a compelling new argument for individual morality and freedom.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stephen Vizinczey, originally István Vizinczey (born 1933, in Káloz, Hungary), is an author and writer. Vizinczey's first published works were poems which appeared in George Lukacs's Budapest magazine Forum in 1949, when the writer was 16. He studied under Lukacs at the University of Budapest and graduated from the city's Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in 1956. He wrote at that time two plays, The Last Word and Mama, which were banned by the Hungarian Communist regime. He took part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and after a short stay in Italy, ended up in Canada speaking only 50 words of English, and eventually taking Canadian citizenship.
DESCRIPTION - In this new translation of Voltaire's CANDIDE, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novel's irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel casts the novel in an English idiom that had Voltaire been a twenty- first-century American he might himself have employed. The translation is immediate and unencumbered, and for the first time makes Voltaire the satirist a wicked pleasure for English-speaking readers. CANDIDE recounts the fantastically improbable travels, adventures, and misfortunes of the young Candide, his beloved CunEgonde, and his devoutly optimistic tutor, Pangloss. Endowed at the start with good fortune and every prospect for happiness and success, the characters nevertheless encounter every conceivable misfortune, Voltaire's philosophical tale, in part an ironic attack on the optimistic thinking of such figures as G. W. Leibniz and Alexander Pope, has proved enormously influential over the years. In a general introduction to this volume, historian Johnson Kent Wright places CANDIDE in the contexts of Voltaire's life and work and the Age of Enlightenment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day. Burton Raffel is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Humanities Emeritus and professor of English emeritus, University of Louisiana at Lafayette. His other translations from the French include Stendhal's THE RED AND THE BLACK and Rabelais's GARGANTUA AND PANTAGRUEL winner of the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, 1992.
DESCRIPTION - An American traitor's astonishing confession - mournful, macabre, diabolically funny - written with unnatural candor in a foreign death cell. There was a grotesque uniformity in what all Nazis said in their own defense. And then along came one named Howard W. Campbell, Jr., an unlikely name for a Nazi. BORN: February 16, 1912. BIRTHPLACE: Schenectady, New York. OCCUPATIONS: Pornographer, poet, hangman, Nazi propagandist, playwright, Casanova, polygamist, chess player, necrophile, spy. MARTIAL STATUS: Wife missing on Russian Front since 1944. His is the tale of a traitor who regarded high treason as the least of his crimes. And he told it while preening himself in a prison cell awaiting his own execution.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.'
DESCRIPTION - Kurt Vonnegut's long-awaited war novel proves to be a miracle of compression. It is a contemporary PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, with the hero named, curiously enough, Billy Pilgrim. He is the son of an American barber. He serves as a chaplain's assistant in the Second World War, is captured by the Germans, survives the largest massacre in European history, the fire bombing of Dresden. (Vonnegut, too, was a prisoner of war and saw that fire storm.) Billy Pilgrim becomes an optometrist after the war, makes a great deal of money, is kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore on his daughter's wedding night. He is mated in public in a zoo on that planet - to a star of many Earthling blue movies, the gorgeous Montana Wildhack. And so on. Beautiful. Unstuck in time, Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's shattered survivor of the Dresden bombing, relives his life over and over again under the gaze of aliens; he comes at last to some understanding of the human comedy. The basis of George Roy's great 1972 film and perhaps the signature student's novel in the 1960's embracing protest and the absurdity of war.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.'
DESCRIPTION - A remarkable and terrifying novel of how life might be for the space travlers of the future. THE TIME: Somewhere in the near future. THE PLACE: Beyond the limits of space, where here the beauty of woman is without compare. but man is without a memory of woman's delights. where nothing is forbidden but thinking is an unforgivable sin. where life is ‘perfect', but resistance to its ‘perfection' means death.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.'
DESCRIPTION - Man's revolt against a glittering, mechanized tomorrow. Here is the gripping story of one man's rebellion against a terrifying world of tomorrow - a machine-ruled America that threatens to make man obsolete. In the great tradition of 'Brave New World' and '1984' Kurt Vonnegut uses a strange and marvelous world of the future to tell of passions and conflicts that are ageless. Utopia 14 is, perhaps, Vonnegut's most accessible novel.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 - April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association. The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut ‘the counterculture's novelist.'
DESCRIPTION - In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to France adopts a child. Now a young artist, this girl, Malaika, travels to the troubled land of her birth in hope of finding her mother--and perhaps something of her lost self. Her search, at times funny and strange, is also deeply poignant, reminding us at every moment of the turns of fate we call truth.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The French-Djiboutian novelist, poet, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi (born July 20, 1965) is one of the leading francophone writers of his generation. His other books include THE LAND WITHOUT SHADOW, HARVEST OF SKULLS, and RIFTS, ROADS AND RAILS.
DESCRIPTION - Derek Walcott's first collection, 25 POEMS, was released in St. Lucia in 1948. Several poems from that collection were reprinted in IN A GREEN NIGHT (1962), a book that led Robert Graves to write: ‘Derek Walcott handles English with a closer understanding of its inner magic than most (if not any) of his English-born contemporaries.' In the decades since, Walcott has gone from strength to strength, with the publication in America of seven volumes of verse: SELECTED POEMS (1964), THE GULF (1970), ANOTHER LIFE (1973), SEA GRAPES (1976), THE STAR-APPLE KINGDOM (1979), THE FORTUNATE TRAVELLER (1981), AND MIDSUMMER (1984). COLLECTED POEMS includes most of the poems in each of Walcott's collections, as selected by the poet, and the complete text of ANOTHER LIFE - a magnificent narrative poem of over four thousand lines. Both the autobiography of an artist and a paean to the island and people of his youth, this long poem exemplifies the technical virtuosity and thematic variety of Walcott's considerable oeuvre. The accumulated riches in this retrospective collection present the sure development of one of our major poets, as well as a tribute to the possibilities of the language.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (23 January 1930 - 17 March 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015.
DESCRIPTION - Eric Walrond is one of the great underexamined figures of the Harlem Renaissance and the Caribbean diaspora. Very little of his later work has been subsequently published or made readily available to American scholars. His writings, set in the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, discuss imperialism, racism, the role of the black writer, black identity, and immigration--all topics of vital concern today. Born in British Guiana (now Guyana), Walrond moved to New York City in 1918 where he worked briefly for Marcus Garvey and became a protege of Charles S. Johnson. During that time, he wrote short fiction as well as nonfiction and gained a measure of fame for his 1926 collection, Tropic Death. In Search of Asylum compiles Walrond's European journalism and later fiction, as well as the pieces he wrote during the 1950s at Roundway Hospital in Wiltshire, England, where he was a voluntary patient. Louis Parascandola and Carl Wade have assembled a collection that at last fills in the biographical gaps in Walrond's life, providing insights into the contours of his later work and the cultural climates in which he functioned between 1928 and his death in 1966.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Derwent Walrond (18 December 1898 – 8 August 1966) was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, Walrond was well-travelled, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York City, and eventually England. He made a lasting contribution to literature, his most famous book being Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28; it remains in print today as a classic of its era.
DESCRIPTION - TROPIC DEATH, Eric Walrond's most acclaimed work, consists of ten stories of inhumanity in the American tropics, especially white against black - or imperial power against impoverished native. In ‘Subjection,' for example, a white marine shoots a black canal worker. Walrond also explores the effects of modern technology and exploitation on the Caribbean natural environment; ‘The Palm Porch' describes the construction of the Panama Canal in terms of its causing ‘the gradual death and destruction of the frontier post.' Walrond writes in an impressionistic style that quickly shifts from one image to another. He depicts cultural impressions more than characters or plot yet illustrates the disorientation and alienation his characters experience. Considered an example of avant-garde writing, TROPIC DEATH has been praised by critics such as W. E. B. DuBois and Langston Hughes.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Derwent Walrond (18 December 1898 – 8 August 1966) was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, Walrond was well-travelled, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York City, and eventually England. He made a lasting contribution to literature, his most famous book being Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28; it remains in print today as a classic of its era.
DESCRIPTION - Eric Walrond (1898-1966), a significant figure in the Harlem Renaissance and New Negro Movement, is a seminal writer of Black diasporic life, but much of his work is not readily available. This new anthology brings together a broad sampling of Walrond's writings, including not only selections from his celebrated Tropic Death (1926) but also other stories, essays, and reviews. Born in British Guiana in 1898 and raised in Barbados and Panama, Walrond arrived in the U.S. in 1918 when the wave of West Indian immigrants was reaching its peak. He worked as an editor for Marcus Garvey's Negro Worm and Charles S. Johnson's Opportunity but moved on to Europe after ten years. This anthology retraces Walrond's migratory life by focusing on key periods of his work. Examples of his apprentice writing document his early encounters with racial prejudice and his ambivalence toward the Garveyites, while a second section focuses on his involvement with the New Negro Movement and reflects both his emphasis on racial pride and interest in literary aesthetics. A third section contains impressionistic stories from Tropic Death, which vividly depicts the lives and culture of Caribbean Blacks and still holds a unique place in Black literature. A final section samples Walrond's work from England, much of it unknown today, where he continued to write on the themes of migration, discrimination, and racial pride until his death in London in 1966. Louis J. Parascandola's introduction to the collection provides the most complete description to date of Walrond's life and work. It brings together previously undocumented biographical information that situates him in the context of his times, and it offers both an overview and a renewed appreciation of his writings. This book restores Walrond to his proper place in the history of African American and Caribbean literature and is an essential reader for students of Black culture.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric Derwent Walrond (18 December 1898 – 8 August 1966) was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist. Born in Georgetown, British Guiana, the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, Walrond was well-travelled, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York City, and eventually England. He made a lasting contribution to literature, his most famous book being Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28; it remains in print today as a classic of its era.
DESCRIPTION - FROM THE ANCIENT LOWLY - THE GREAT strikes and uprisings of the working people of the ancient world are almost unknown to the living age. It matters little how accounts of five immense strike-wars, involving destruction of property and mutual slaughter of millions of people, have been suppressed, or have otherwise failed to reach us; the fact remains that people are absolutely ignorant of these great events. A meagre sketch of Spartacus may be seen in the encyclopedias, but it is always ruined and its interest pinched and blighted by being classed with crime, its heroes with criminals, its theme with desecration. Yet Spartacus was one of the great generals of history; fully equal to Hannibal and Napoleon, while his cause was much more just and infinitely nobler, his life a model of the beautiful and virtuous, his death an episode of surpassing grandeur. Still more strange is it, that the great ten-years' war of Eunus should be unknown. He marshalled at one time an army of two hundred thousand soldiers. He manœuvered them and fought for ten full years for liberty, defeating army after army of Rome. Why is the world ignorant of this fierce, epochal rebellion? Almost the whole matter is passed over in silence by our histories of Rome. In these pages it will be read as news, yet should a similar war rage in our day, against a similar condition of slavery, its cause would not only be considered just, but the combatants would have the sympathy and support of the civilized world. The great system of labor organization explained in these pages must likewise be regarded as a chapter of news. The portentous fact has lain in abeyance century after century, with the human family in profound ignorance of an organization of trades and other labor unions so powerful that for hundreds of years they undertook and successfully conducted the business of manufacture, of distribution, of purveying provisions to armies, of feeding the inhabitants of the largest cities in the world, of inventing, supplying and working the huge engines of war, and of collecting customs and taxes - tasks confided to their care by the state. Our civilization has a blushingly poor excuse for its profound ignorance of these facts; for the evidences have existed from much before the beginning of our era.… They are growing fewer and dimmer as their value rises higher in the estimation of a thinking, appreciative, gradually awakening world
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Cyrenus Osborne Ward was a historian and author of The Ancient Lowly (1887), the book that looked at ancient history from a working-class perspective. He worked as a librarian and translator for the US Bureau of Labor during the writing of his great work, under the title A History of the Ancient Working People and The Ancient Lowly to the Adoption of Christianity by Constantine.
DESCRIPTION - The new Zapatistas in Chiapas have served as a catalyst for revolutionary indigenous movements across Mexico, pioneering a new model of resistance and posing a powerful threat to the stability of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Homage to Chiapas vividly depicts the grassroots struggles for land and local autonomy now underway in an economically strategic nation of nearly 100 million people. Weinberg analyzes NAFTA s impact on Mexico s campesinos with on-the-spot reportage from Tabasco, where fishermen blockade state owned oil wells to protest local pollution, from Central Mexico where plans for a giant computer complex and golf course spark an Indian uprising, as well as from Chiapas where he interviews Sub-commander Marcos. He also examines Mexico s growing militarization in the name of the war on drugs and reviews the Zapatistas challenge to their supporters to carry the struggle throughout Mexico and beyond its borders.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bill Weinberg is a correspondent, principally on Mexico and Central America, for Native Americas, the quarterly journal of Cornell University's American Indian Studies Program. He is also an editor at High Times, the American counterculture monthly, and a producer at New York's non-commercial WBAI Radio. An award-winning journalist specializing in the environment and native issues, he is the author of War on the Land: Politics & Ecology in Central America. He currently resides in New York.
DESCRIPTION - WEIMAR GERMANY still fascinates us, and now this complex and remarkably creative period and place has the history it deserves. Eric Weitz's new book reveals the Weimar era as a time of strikingly progressive achievements - and even greater promise. With a rich thematic narrative and detailed portraits of some of Weimar's greatest figures, this comprehensive history recaptures the excitement and drama as it unfolded, viewing Weimar in its own right - and not as a mere prelude to the Nazi era. WEIMAR GERMANY tells how Germans rose from the defeat of World War I and the turbulence of revolution to forge democratic institutions and make Berlin a world capital of avant-garde art. Setting the stage for this story, Weitz takes the reader on a walking tour of Berlin to see and feel what life was like there in the 1920s, when modernity and the modern city - with its bright lights, cinemas, ‘new women,' cabarets, and sleek department stores - were new. We learn how Germans enjoyed better working conditions and new social benefits and listened to the utopian prophets of everything from radical socialism to communal housing to nudism. WEIMAR GERMANY also explores the period's revolutionary cultural creativity, from the new architecture of Erich Mendelsohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius to Hannah Höch's photomontages and Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's theater. Other chapters assess the period's turbulent politics and economy, and the recipes for fulfilling sex lives propounded by new ‘sexologists.' Yet WEIMAR GERMANY also shows how entrenched elites continually challenged Weimar's achievements and ultimately joined with a new radical Right led by the Nazis to form a coalition that destroyed the republic. Thoroughly up-to-date, skillfully written, and strikingly illustrated, WEIMAR GERMANY brings to life as never before an era of creativity unmatched in the twentieth century-one whose influence and inspiration we still feel today.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of A CENTURY OF GENOCIDE and CREATING GERMAN COMMUNISM, 1890-1990.
DESCRIPTION - ‘The way to right wrongs is to turn to the light of truth upon them.' Seventy-one years before Rosa Parks was arrested for her courageous act of resistance, police dragged a young black journalist named Ida B. Wells off a train for refusing to give up her seat. That experience shaped Wells's career as a journalist and spurred her to become a fierce civil rights advocate. When hate crimes touched her life personally, she began what was to become her life's work: an anti-lynching crusade that captured attention across the United States and abroad. A pioneer in the civil rights movement, Wells exposed the horrors of lynching and brought to light the myths used to justify it. Covering the scope of Wells's remarkable career, The Light of Truth contains her early writings, her anti-lynching exposEs, articles from her travels abroad, and her later journalism. ‘Brave woman! You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured.' - Frederick Douglass.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931) was an African-American journalist, newspaper editor, suffragist, sociologist, and an early leader in the civil rights movement. She documented lynching in the United States, showing that it was often used as a way to control or punish blacks who competed with whites, rather than being based in criminal acts by blacks, as was usually claimed by white mobs. She was active in women's rights and the women's suffrage movement, establishing several notable women's organizations. Wells was a skilled and persuasive rhetorician, and traveled internationally on lecture tours.
DESCRIPTION - Right and left have done their worst in Hungary, forcing poets back into their private worlds. Writing - and often experimenting - in verse of great technical proficiency and range, Sándor Weöres uses primitive (and even invented) mythology to remind us of the far-off roots of our civilization. Nature and Hungarian folklore are very prominent in the prolific, passionate verses of Ferenc Juhasz, a poet at odds with his time, who has nevertheless contributed to it some of its finest work.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sándor Weöres (22 June 1913 - 22 January 1989) was a Hungarian poet and author. Born in Szombathely, Weöres was brought up in the nearby village of Csönge. His first poems appeared when he was nineteen, being published in the influential journal Nyugat (‘West') through the acceptance of its editor, the poet Mihály Babits.Ferenc Juhász (16 August 1928 - 2 December 2015) was a Hungarian poet and Golden Wreath laureate (1992). He was considered a close contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976. His brother was historian Gyula Juhász. Ferenc Juhász published his first poem in 1946. In 1949, he published his first book of poems, The Winged Foal. His poems, including The boy changed into a stag clamors at the gate of secrets, have been widely translated.
DESCRIPTION - Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. 'My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published.' Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of a society obsessed with mass-produced fantasies foretold much of what was to come in American life. Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as 'a novel in the form of a comic strip,' tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. MISS LONELYHEARTS by Nathanael West - Born New York, New York, October 1 7, 1903; Died El Centro, California, December 22, 1940. ORIGINAL PUBLISHER: Liveright, Inc. PUBLICATION DATE: April 8, 1933. ORIGINAL RETAIL PRICE: $2.00. ORIGINAL PRINTING: 2, 200 copies. In the spring of 1929 the humorist S.J. Perleman took West along to dinner in New York with a newspaper acquaintance responsible for an advice column in the Brooklyn Eagle. Perleman had the idea that the letters sent to the pseudonymous ‘Susan Chester' might provide him with comic material. Instead, the letters riveted West. In the cry and the response between those lonely hearts and what was no more than a promotion to build circulation, West grasped something of the numbness that seemed to accompany the onset of a mass society. That night he came away with the title and the structural frame of the novel that he worked on over the next four years. ISSUE POINTS: Of the 2,200 copies printed for Liveright only several hundred were actually released before the publisher declared a bankruptcy of questionable necessity and its printer impounded the stock of Miss Lonelyhearts. At publication date, with favorable reviews appearing, there were few books for the stores. Eventually West was able to get control of the rights and transferred them to Harcourt Brace & Co. Harcourt used the Liveright plates, substituting its name and logo, and printed its own edition. The publishing scandal prompted the Author's League to change its generic contract so that in cases of publisher bankruptcy the rights to the work would immediately revert to the author. The basis for the text is a privately owned copy. The dust jacket is taken from a copy in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. THE BOOK AND ITS AUDIENCE: Through the years West worked on the novel he supported himself as the night manager of the comfortable Sutton Club Hotel on East 56th Street in Manhattan. Business was slow at the Sutton and West filled its empty rooms with his own circle of literary and needy friends. His ‘guests' included Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, James T. Farrell, Erksine Caldwell as well as Perleman, now married to West's sister, Laura. Outside, on the streets of New York the misery of the Depression was inescapable. To West the suffering he saw and described was not only economic but spiritual - a result of the combination of uprootedness, anonymity, commercialism, loss of ancient faith and rapid change. How to novelize the urban society of the thirties which was organized around the flickering stimuli of the newspapers, radio and the movies was a significant challenge to the writer. The critic Henry Seidel Canby stated that it was folly to suppose that it could be done ‘by the old time story teller who assumed that a character was an independent personality instead of a consciousness floating on a stream of impressions.' This is what West achieved in the character of Miss Lonelyhearts - the consciousness of the age floating on a stream of impressions in a crushing struggle to find ultimate value. It was an achievement that brought West no material gain in his lifetime. However, as it was recognized by a growing number of champions including William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the novel has built a readership and a place among the handful of the finest American novels of the century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathanael West, born Nathan Weinstein (October 17, 1903 - December 22, 1940), was an American author, screenwriter and satirist. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was made into a film which came out in 1975 starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character 'Miss Lonelyhearts' in Hitchcock's film Rear Window has parallels to West's work.
DESCRIPTION - THE DAY OF THE LOCUST is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun - drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West's Hollywood is not the glamorous 'home of the stars' but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their own desires - from the ironically romantic artist narrator to a macho movie cowboy a middle - aged innocent from America's heartland, and the hard - as - nails call girl would - be - star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life. 'This is the sleazy side of Hollywood, The wouldbes, the neverwases, the hopefuls, And the pretenders. the shames, the deceits And the lies by which they live all are here. It packs a knockout punch:' - CHICAGO TRIBUNE. 'The DAY OF THE LOCUST. ranks first among the many novels about Hollywood.' - MALCOLM COWLEY. '. Has scenes of extraordinary power. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd. the aspirant actress. those vividly drawn grotesques.' - F. SCOTT FITZGERALD.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nathanael West, born Nathan Weinstein (October 17, 1903 - December 22, 1940), was an American author, screenwriter and satirist. Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as West's masterpiece. Day of the Locust was made into a film which came out in 1975 starring Donald Sutherland and Karen Black. Likewise Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) saw production in film (1933, 1958, 1983), stage (1957), and operatic (2006) versions; and the character 'Miss Lonelyhearts' in Hitchcock's film Rear Window has parallels to West's work.
DESCRIPTION - The current revival of interest in Heraclitus is not surprising-as a philosopher of bitter paradox and hard metaphor, who found in change itself the one unchanging attribute of reality, Heraclitus speaks to our age. The sayings of the Dark One, as he has been called, survive only as fragments, for the most part disconnected sentences presumably from a single treatise. The first compilation of these was made in Germany well over a century ago, but this is the first book written in English to introduce him to the general reader. The more than one hundred fragments are arranged topically in groups to preface eight chapters, which examine the various aspects of Heraclitus' thought: his speculations on the universe in its composition and functioning, and on man in his relation to his environment, his fellow man, and his own soul. Most arresting among Professor Wheelwright's many accomplishments in this book is his success in helping the reader strip off his twentieth-century preconceptions and take part in the adventure of a brilliant Greek mind exploring reality with the resources of the late sixth century B.C. It is an extraordinary adventure, for which the best possible preparation is Heraclitus' own precept: ‘Unless you expect the unexpected, you will never find truth.' The range of PHILIP WHEELWRIGHT'S interests and accomplishments suggests Heraclitus' Fragment: ‘The things of which there can be sight, hearing, and learning-these are what I especially prize.' Well-known to audiences in university communities across the United States for his lectures on language and symbolism, to the readers of the Sewanee Review and the Kenyon Review for his critical writings, to students in philosophy for his texts in general philosophy, ethics, and Aristotle, he combines the talents of philosopher, teacher, and literary critic-talents particularly pertinent to the discovery of Heraclitus. Both his A.B. and Ph.D. degrees he received from Princeton University, where he has also taught. Since then he has taught at New York University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California at Riverside, where he is now Professor of Philosophy. He has recently been the Neilson Research Professor at Smith College and in the Spring term of 1960 will be Churchill Visiting Professor at the University of Bristol, the first American to be honored with this appointment.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Ellis Wheelwright (July 6, 1901 - January 6, 1970) was an American philosopher, classical scholar and literary theorist.
DESCRIPTION - The first volume of DAS KAPITAL, Karl Marx's unfinished masterpiece, was published in 1867 to muted praise. Born in a two-room flat in London's Soho amid political squabbles and personal tragedy, the fruit of Marx's twenty-year struggle did not at first look like it would have much affect on the world. But after Marx's death, the book went on to influence thinkers, writers, and revolutionaries, from George Bernard Shaw to V. I. Lenin, changing the direction of twentieth century history. In MARX'S DAS KAPITAL, Francis Wheen, the celebrated biographer of Karl Marx, tells the captivating story of the book's creation and explores its meaning and impact. Far from being a dry economic treatise, Wheen shows that DAS KAPITAL is something like a vast Gothic novel, whose heroes are enslaved by the monster they created: capitalism. Furthermore, Wheen argues, there has been nothing remotely like Marx's book before or since, and as long as capitalism endures, DAS KAPITAL demands to be understood. ‘[An] exhilarating read and a healthy corrective to those brought up to think of Marx's work as rigid and doctrinaire.' - THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
DESCRIPTION - Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws?the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. He earned his B.A. and J.D. from Yale University and Law School and also holds an M.A. in European History from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in Intellectual History from the University of Chicago. From 1988-1989,
DESCRIPTION - One of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year. In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities, in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson compares this epic migration to the migrations of other peoples in history. She interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to new data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves. With stunning historical detail, Wilkerson tells this story through the lives of three unique individuals: Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success and, in old age, voted for Barack Obama when he ran for an Illinois Senate seat; sharp and quick-tempered George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where he endangered his job fighting for civil rights, saw his family fall, and finally found peace in God; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 to pursue a medical career, the personal physician to Ray Charles as part of a glitteringly successful medical career, which allowed him to purchase a grand home where he often threw exuberant parties. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous and exhausting cross-country trips by car and train and their new lives in colonies that grew into ghettos, as well as how they changed these cities with southern food, faith, and culture and improved them with discipline, drive, and hard work. Both a riveting microcosm and a major assessment, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an ‘unrecognized immigration' within our own land. Through the breadth of its narrative, the beauty of the writing, the depth of its research, and the fullness of the people and lives portrayed herein, this book is destined to become a classic.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Isabel Wilkerson won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing as Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times. The first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism and the first African American to win for individual reporting, she has also won the George Polk Award and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
DESCRIPTION - Career criminal ‘Junior' Frenger has just flown into Miami Airport on his stolen credit cards and vanished - leaving a corpse in the V.I.P. lounge. All of Miami, from beachfront hotels to ethnic slums, is now a network of hidey-holes for the psychopathic Frenger. Inspired liar, a chameleon who can pass for a policeman and then blend in among the citizens he preys on, Frenger remains unpredictable and elusive - until he comes after homicide detective Hoke Moseley with Hoke's own gun. MIAMI BLUES is a gritty suspense story by a veteran author whom Erskine Caldwell has praised for ‘the powerful sensation of a violent life in the characters he has created.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
DESCRIPTION - Charles Willeford won remarkable acclaim for MIAMI BLUES, his thriller about Sergeant Hoke Moseley's war with a ‘blithe psychopath' who turned Miami upside down. Now Hoke is back, impeded in his pursuit of a new Miami killer by orders to take on the ‘cold case' files - seemingly insoluble crimes that are keeping his boss from a promotion. Then, on Hoke's doorstep: a surprise from his ex-wife to complicate his affairs. From Hoke's Cuban partner, Ellita Sanchez: tearful news that puts his diplomatic skills to the test. From the sensuous young stepmother of the boy whose death Hoke is investigating: a surprising offer that Hoke accepts at his peril, then turns to unexpected advantage. Syncopated by Charles Willeford's unpredictable dark humor, pulsing with street talk and street violence, New Hope for the Dead is a stunner by a unique talent whom The New Yorker calls ‘extraordinarily winning.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
DESCRIPTION - Hoke Moseley, the leisure-suited Miami homicide detective introduced in MIAMI BLUES and NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD, finally shows the world around him what a real ‘burned out' cop does - he stops working, stops talking, stops thinking. and sits unseeing in his chair with a complete crime-induced breakdown of the highest order. In another part of the state: Career criminal Troy Louden - amoral, alias many other names, and reminiscent of certain reptiles - has arrived to upset the balance of nature on the city streets of south Florida. SIDESWIPE, like its predecessors, is distinguished by Hoke Moseley's utterly original way of doing business on his beat, and by a blithe and pitiless killer as fascinating as any antagonist in police fiction. Here two sets of lives that should have absolutely nothing to do with each other collide in a spectacular and violent supermarket robbery that shouldn't have happened, but did. Syncopated by Charles Willeford's unpredictable dark humor, pulsating with street talk and street violence, SIDESWIPE careens through a multiethnic, tropical antiparadise that is, writes the Miami Herald, ‘neither the Oz/ Miami of the travel posters nor the Inferno/ Miami of the media, but a full-color map of a place where some people actually live.' Entertaining, gruesome, surprising, convincing - this impressive novel is everything to be hoped of a new addition to the popular Hoke Moseley crime canon. CHARLES W1LLEFORD is the author of MIAMI BLUES, NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD, and ten other novels, including THE BURNT ORANGE HERESY and COCKFIGHTER.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
DESCRIPTION - Set against the sweeping panorama of Arizona circa 1880, this work has many of the surface trappings of a standard western. However, from the first shocking realisation that the line between good and evil is being overstepped, the author then begins to dismantle the American cowboy myth. THE DIFFERENCE was described by Charles Willeford as a post modern western. Filled with outcasts and misfits, liberally dosed with black humour and jarring violence, and set in the wild west of 1880's Arizona. The protagonist, Johnny Shaw returns to southern Arizona to collect his inheritance, but before long becomes embroiled in a deadly dispute with the Reardon family, which results in the death of one of the sons. Shaw flees and finds an unlikely ally in a blacksmith, Jake Dover, who knew and respected Shaw's father. Dover hides Shaw from the Reardon's, and teaches him how to use a gun with speed and precision. Finally Shaw returns to Arizona fo an almighty showdown. Shaw tells the story from his point of view, believing himself to be right, but Shaw's professed virtue is at sharp odds with his actions. Those actions are made especially jarring by Willeford's terse prose, which adds impact to his character's sudden, simple bursts of violence. THE DIFFERENCE was originally published in 1971 as THE HOMBRE FROM SONORA, under the name Will Charles.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
DESCRIPTION - Hoke Moseley was really getting into the ‘cold cases' he'd been assigned - and then Commander Bill Henderson dropped into Hoke's office and told him to let his beard grow for a couple of days. Henderson couldn't say why, only that Major Willie Brownley, the division chief, had something up his sleeve. Hoke went back to puzzling out what an electronic garage door opener might have to do with a three-year-old murder. But the major's request nagged at him. What was secret? And on top of that, when he got home he discovered that the man who just bought the house across the street was a fellow he had put away for murder - and there he was, out on parole, sitting on his lawn staring at Hoke's house. Hoke soon found out what the beard was for - at least as much as the major wanted to tell him. At a ramshackle crossroads south of Miami, Hoke was stripped of all identification - money, wallet, gun and even his false teeth - and sent south to the migrant farms where rumors of slavery and murder had become impossible to ignore. From this point on, the bizarre and brutal story Charles Willeford unfolds will literally blow away any reader lucky enough to pick up THE WAY WE DIE NOW. As KIRKUS said of an earlier Willeford book, ‘A nasty crime comedy that's full of casual violence, outrageous coincidence and hilariously rude dialog. Willeford has a marvelously deadpan way with losers on both sides of the law.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.
DESCRIPTION - To the Finland Station is one of the greatest works by 20th-century America's heralded man of letters. This magisterial study of the revolutionary dream reaches from the French Revolution through the Paris Commune to Russia in 1917, and features brilliant portraits of such figures as Jules Michelet, the great historian of the French people; the utopians Robert Owen and Charles Fourier; the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin; and of course Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. Combining his polymathic talents as critic, journalist, historian, and novelist, Edmund Wilson offers an incisive and enduring tribute to the resilience, depth, and passion of the modern culture of protest. The appendices which are in this first edition of 1940 were dropped from subsequent editions and not restored until much later.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edmund Wilson (May 8, 1895 - June 12, 1972) was an American writer, literary and social critic, and noted man of letters. Wilson was interested in modern culture as a whole, and many of his writings go beyond the realm of pure literary criticism. His early works are heavily influenced by the ideas of Freud and Marx, reflecting his deep interest in their work.
DESCRIPTION - H. SOTHERN, JOHNSTON FORBES-ROBERTSON, JOHN PHILIP KEMBLE, F. R. BENSON WALTER HAMPDEN LAWRENCE BARRETT, DAVID GARRICK, EDWIN BOOTH, BARRY SULLIVAN, CHARLES DILLON, ROBERT MANTELL, M. MOUNET-SULLY, MR. RAE OSMOND TEARLE, & G. V. BROOKE LOUISE POMEROY. Keywords: Shakespeare Literary Criticism Hamlet. HAMLET is the most famous and the most often performed of Shakespeare's plays. But there are many difficulties and apparent inconsistencies facing those who would produce the play on the stage as well as those who would read Hamlet with an intelligent appreciation of what is going on. One example of these difficulties is in the ‘play scene'; it can be expressed in a nutshell by the question: ‘Did Claudius see the dumb-show - and if not, why not?' This problem engaged the attention of Dr. Dover Wilson on a dreary train ride in 1917 and immediately set him on an excited pursuit of all sorts of clues and questions which opened up fresh difficulties the more he pursued them. Before reaching his quarry, the trail led to a complete recension of the text of HAMLET and the editing of the play in The New Shakespeare Series. Now after eighteen years of keen detective work, Dr. Dover Wilson has completed his quest. The results of his discoveries are presented in WHAT HAPPENS IN HAMLET.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Dover Wilson CH (13 July 1881 - 15 January 1969) was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare.
DESCRIPTION - 'Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century provides a good short course in the major popular revolutions of our century--in Russia, Mexico, China, Algeria, Cuba, and Viet Nam--not from the perspective of governments or parties or leaders, but from the perspective of the peasant peoples whose lives and ways of living were destroyed by the depredations of the imperial powers, including American imperial power. '-New York Times Book Review. 'Eric Wolf's study of the six great peasant-based revolutions of the century demonstrates a mastery of his field and the methods required to negotiate it that evokes respect and admiration. In six crisp essays, and a brilliant conclusion, he extends our understanding of the nature of peasant reactions to social change appreciably by his skill in isolating and analyzing those factors, which, by a magnification of the anthropologist's techniques, can be shown to be crucial in linking local grievances and protest to larger movements of political transformation. '--American Political Science Review 'An intellectual tour de force. '--Comparative Politics
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Eric R. Wolf is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, Herbert H. Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York.
DESCRIPTION - Tobias Wolff has been praised as ‘a captivating, brilliant writer-one of the best we've got' (Annie Dillard) and ‘a master storyteller, a natural raconteur' (The New York Times). The winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, he has now written his first work of nonfiction, a memoir that is sure to become a classic. THIS BOY'S LIFE is Wolff's re-creation of youth, so true in its every particular that whatever our own experience, we cannot help but recognize ourselves in this wily, peculiar, and ultimately winning boy. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby - or ‘Jack,' as he preferred to call himself, after Jack London - and his mother are constantly on the move. Between themselves they develop an almost telepathic trust that sees them through their wanderings from Florida to Utah and finally to a small town in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, where remarriage brings to an end the sequence of new schools and jobs and friends and suitors. Here his fresh start becomes a fight for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a nearly Dickensian stepfather, and the boy begins the difficult, comical, dangerous process of growing up. Tobias Wolff brings to life the stuff of boyhood - paper routes and whiskey, scouting and fist-fights, friendship and betrayal - and captures as well America in the fifties, the time of the Mickey Mouse Club, the ‘Lawrence Welk Show,' and the first Thunderbirds off the assembly lines. But his main achievement is the portrayal of the boy as he was: by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, recognizing no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. His various schemes - running away to Alaska, forging checks and stealing cars - lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him to a new world of possibility. With great humor, force, and feeling, Tobias Wolff has given us an indelible picture of childhood.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff (born June 19, 1945) is an American author. He is known for his memoirs, particularly This Boy's Life (1989), and his short stories. He has also written two novels.
DESCRIPTION - President Clinton's public acknowledgment made prize-winning black mystery writer Walter Mosley a household name, but until recently Charlie Chan's stereotypical Birmingham Brown, popularized by the 1940s movie series, was the only commonly seen image of the black detecive. In fact, much of the mystery, suspense, and crime fiction in Paula L. Woods's groundbreaking collection has been long out-of-print, generally unavailable, or not previously published at all. And yet, the genre has a rich and fascinating history. Pauline E. Hopkins's classic 1ocked-room mystery story 'Talma Gordon,' here anthologized for the first time, was originally published by Colored American Magazine in 1900. By 1932, Rudolph Fisher had already written THE CONJURE-MAN DIES, the first detective novel to feature a black protagonist. Fisher's suave Harlem physician, John Archer; and his detective pal Perry Dart offered a unique twist on the Holmes/Watson team, and foreshadowed Chester Himes's memorable duo, Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, who dominated the literary block mystery scene from the 1950s to the 1980s. Ranging from Fisher and Himes to the influential nongenre writers Richard Wright and Ann Petry; from the political thrillers of John A. Williams and Samuel Greenlee to the international perspective of Mike Phillips and Njami Simon; from the earliest mystery story by an African-American to modern mainstream authors including Walter Mosley, BararaNeely, and Eleanor Taylor Bland, SPOOKS, SPIES, AND PRIVATE EYES is an eclectic, rich, and immensely entertaining compendium holding multiple delights for a wide and varied audience.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PAULA L. WOODS is the co-author of I, TOO, SING AMERICA: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN BOOK OF DAYS and co-editor of I HEAR A SYMPHONY: AFRICAN AMERICANS CELEBRATE LOVE, which won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Multicultural Literature and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's Fiction Honors. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, New York - Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Detroit News, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia inquirer, among other newspapers. Co-founder of a general consulting firm, Woods/Liddell Group, and a book packaging and marketing firm, Livre Noir, she lives in Los Angeles.
DESCRIPTION - The purpose in writing this book was to present to the average reader in succinct form the history of the United States as it has been influenced by the presence of the Negro in this country. The aim here is to supply also the need of schools long since desiring such a work in handy form with adequate references for those stimulated to more advanced study. In this condensed form certain situations and questions could not be adequately discussed, and in endeavoring thus to tell the story the author may have left unsaid what others consider more important. Practically all phases of Negro life and history have been treated in their various ramifications, however, to demonstrate how the Negro has been influenced by contact with the Caucasian and to emphasize what the former has contributed to civilization. The author is indebted to Mr. David A. Lane, Jr., who kindly assisted him in reading the entire proof. - CARTER G. WOODSON, WASHINGTON, D. C. April, 1922.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 - April 3, 1950) was an African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson was one of the first scholars to study African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1915, Woodson has been cited as the "father of black history". In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month. Charles Harris Wesley (December 2, 1891 - August 16, 1987) was an American historian, educator, minister, and author. He published more than 15 books on African-American history, served as president of Wilberforce University, and founding president of Central State University, both in Ohio.
DESCRIPTION - The most influential work by the father of Black history, reflecting the long-standing tradition of antiracist teaching pioneered by Black educators. The Mis-education of the Negro (1933) is Woodson’s most popular classic work of Black social criticism, drawing on history, theory, and memoir. As both student and teacher, Woodson witnessed distortions of Black life in the history and literature taught in schools and universities. He identified a relationship between these distortions in curriculum and the violence circumscribing Black life in the material world, declaring, There would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom. Woodson’s primary focus was the impact dominant modes of schooling had on Black youth. This systematic process of mis-education undermined Black people’s struggles for freedom and justice, and it was an experience that scholars before and after Woodson recognized and worked to challenge. Woodson argued that students, teachers, and leaders needed to be educated in a manner that was accountable to Black experiences and lived realities, both past and present. This edition includes an appendix of selected letters and articles by Woodson, and Suggestions for Further Reading.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carter Godwin Woodson (December 19, 1875 - April 3, 1950) was an African-American historian, author, journalist and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Woodson was one of the first scholars to study African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1915, Woodson has been cited as the "father of black history". In February 1926 he launched the celebration of "Negro History Week", the precursor of Black History Month.
DESCRIPTION - Widely acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written on race and class divisions in America, this powerful novel reflects the forces of poverty, injustice, and hopelessness that continue to shape out society. Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the African American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, an African American youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. While not apologizing for Bigger's crimes, Wright portrays a systemic inevitability behind them. Bigger's lawyer, Boris Max, makes the case that there is no escape from this destiny for his client or any other black American since they are the necessary product of the society that formed them and told them since birth who exactly they were supposed to be. "No American Negro exists", James Baldwin once wrote, "who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull." Frantz Fanon discusses the feeling in his 1952 essay, L'expErience vEcue du noir (The Fact of Blackness). "In the end", writes Fanon, "Bigger Thomas acts. To put an end to his tension, he acts, he responds to the world's anticipation." The book was a successful and groundbreaking best seller, but was also criticized by among other's James Baldwin as ultimately advancing Bigger as a stereotype, not a real character.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28, 1960) was an African-American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Many believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. Wright was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, and lived in the South until 1927, when he moved to Chicago. He later resided in New York City, and died in Paris as an expatriate. Among his many works are NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY, THE OUTSIDER, SAVAGE HOLIDAY, and LAWD TODAY!
DESCRIPTION - Here for the first time in one volume are the very best of the crime and detective stories of Latin America. Donald A. Yates, who was the first to present Jorge Luis Borges to American readers in the early 1960's, has here assembled a highly readable and wide-ranging collection of tales that date from the turn of the century till recently, and represent the cream of Argentinian, Chilean, Mexican, and other Latin writers. Prominent among the contributors are Borges himself, and two of his lifelong associates, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Manuel Peyrou. Each story is prefaced by a brief biblio-biographical note on the author, and the introduction by the editor outlines in full detail the emergence of the Latin detective story from its Anglophile origins to its present high literary distinctiveness and originality.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Donald A. Yates (1930–2017) was professor emeritus of Spanish American literature at Michigan State University (East Lansing). He is the translator of both novels and short stories by many Spanish American authors, including Labyrinths: Selected Writings of Jorge Luis Borges, edited and translated with James Irby (New Directions, 1962), and Adolfo Bioy Casares's celebrated novel Diary of the War of the Pig (McGraw-Hill, 1972). Labyrinths was the first collection of Borges's work to appear in English. Yates published his own fiction, poetry, articles, and book reviews, as well as translations, in many periodicals, including the Atlantic, Holiday, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. He was a Fulbright Scholar and visiting lecturer in Argentina in 1962–63, 1964–65, 1967–68, and 1970, and, with the support of a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship.
DESCRIPTION - A People's History of the United States is a 1980 non-fiction book by American historian and political scientist Howard Zinn. In the book, Zinn presented a different side of history from what he considered to be the more traditional "fundamental nationalist glorification of country." Zinn portrays a side of American history that can largely be seen as the exploitation and manipulation of the majority by rigged systems that hugely favor a small aggregate of elite rulers from across the orthodox political parties. A People's History has been assigned as reading in many high schools and colleges across the United States. It has also resulted in a change in the focus of historical work, which now includes stories that previously were ignored. The book was a runner-up in 1980 for the National Book Award. It frequently has been revised, with the most recent edition covering events through 2005. In 2003, Zinn was awarded the Prix des Amis du Monde Diplomatique for the French version of this book Une histoire populaire des Etats-Unis. More than two million copies have been sold. In a 1998 interview, Zinn said he had set "quiet revolution" as his goal for writing A People's History. "Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives." In 2004, Zinn edited a primary source companion volume with Anthony Arnove, entitled Voices of a People's History of the United States.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Howard Zinn (August 24, 1922 - January 27, 2010) was an American historian, academic, author, playwright, and social activist. Before and during his tenure as a political science professor at Boston University from 1964-88 he wrote more than 20 books, which included his best-selling and influential A People's History of the United States. He wrote extensively about the civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as of the labor history of the United States. His memoir, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, was also the title of a 2004 documentary about Zinn's life and work.
DESCRIPTION - This work of compelling lyrical unity tells the story of growing up black in the colonial world of Martinique. Not only does the young hero, Jose, have to fight the ignorance and poverty of plantation life, but he must also learn to survive the all-pervasive French cultural saturation - to remain true to himself, proud of his race and his family. His ally in this struggle is his grandmother, M'man Tine, who fights her own weariness to release at least one child from the plantation village, a dirt street lined with the shacks of sugarcane workers. First published in 1950. La rue cases-negres was inspired by Richard Wright's BLACK BOY. ‘Everything in it is autobiographical,' wrote Zobel, ‘but the story was patterned after my own aesthetics of composition.' The movie adaptation, honored at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, has been released in the United States as Sugar Cane Alley. Joseph Zobel, born in 1915 in Petit-Bourg, Martinique, has published many collections of stories and a volume of verse, Incantation pour un retour an pays natal. His novel La fete a Paris is the continuation of La rue cases-negres.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique - June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, ‘La Rue Cases-Nègres‘, was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works,
DESCRIPTION - ‘Putrid Literature', ‘a quagmire of slime and blood', ‘a sewer' - these were some of the critics' reactions to this novel. The immediate success which THERESE RAQUIN enjoyed on publication in 1868 was partly due to scandal, following the accusation of pornography; in reply Zola (1840-1902) defined the new creed of Naturalism in the famous preface which is printed in this volume. The novel is a grim tale of adultery, murder and revenge in a nightmarish setting. A thriller and, as Leonard Tancock says in his introduction, a cautionary tale on the sixth and seventh commandments, this early work of Zola's is full of black macabre poetry which has kept its tragic power for over a century.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Emile Francois Zola (2 April 1840 - 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.
DESCRIPTION - The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called surveillance capitalism, and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior. Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization? The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Shoshana Zuboff is an author and scholar. She is the author of the books In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power and The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, co-authored with James Maxmin. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, integrates her lifelong themes: the digital revolution, the evolution of capitalism, the historical emergence of psychological individuality, and the conditions for human development.
DESCRIPTION - INTRODUCTORY NOTE - A Pledge: ‘I won't dwell on the subject, but the fact is, we make Literature, art, music, only because we're not happy. Thus all the books that have been written, the great works of art. We have not been happy. I don't really feel comfortable talking about myself, so I'll pretend that what I'm writing now is just a pledge to myself. This work was written under conditions common to Latin America: a military dictatorship and the tragedies that always follow in (its) wake. At the time I began ANTEPARADISE I no longer believed much in tradition. When we are witness to so much unnecessary pain, all history seems to fail, and with it all the great models for making poetry, art, literature. But I also think that the only meaning of art, its only purpose-quite aside from the issue of specific schools or formalisms-is to make life more humanly livable. In brief, we should keep on proposing Paradise, even if the evidence at hand might indicate that such a pursuit is folly. I am working toward this goal, and not only as poet or artist. ANTEPARADISE is the second part of a unitary work (the first part is the book Purgatory) that I've been writing over the past ten years. In ANTEPARADISE I've employed new poetic forms, from the use of mathematics and logical systems to distortion, breaks from conventional poetic diction, and aerial writing. In my poem ‘The New Life,' for example, the fifteen verses written in Spanish against the blue sky over New York City were composed as a homage to minority groups throughout the world and, more specifically, to the Spanish-speaking people of the United States. This poem is the conclusion of the ANTEPARADISE. When I first designed this project, I thought the sky was precisely the place toward which the eyes of all communities have been directed, because they have hoped to find in it the signs of their destinies; therefore, the greatest ambition one could aspire to would be to have that same sky as a page where anyone could write. ANTEPARADISE was conceived as a total structure, a trajectory beginning with the experience of everything precarious and painful in our lives and concluding with a glimmer of happiness. I'll never write a Paradise, even if such a thing could be written today; but if it could, it would be a collective enterprise in which the life of everyone who walks the face of the earth would become the only work of art, the only epic, the only Pietà worthy of our admiration. I won't write it, but that is the outcome I desire.'
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Raúl Zurita Canessa (born 1950) is a Chilean poet. He won the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2000.
DESCRIPTION - The dramatic tale of a white man who ran amuck in the East Indies, bringing disaster to himself and to the woman he desired. Stefan Zweig, biographer, critic, playwright and novelist, is especially famous throughtout Europe for his mastery of the novelle, the story that compresses a slice of life into a closely knit short narrative. AMOK, his masterpiece in this field, was published with great success abroad, but was never translated into English until 1931 for fear that its subject matter might prove too daring for the Anglo-Saxon taste.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 - February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.
DESCRIPTION - ‘Gambler-in-chief at the great roulette board of human destiny,' Joseph FouchE is one of the most amazing figures in history. He is ‘the most remarkable politician the world has ever known,' says Stefan Zweig, and, by way of proof, offers a brilliant and fascinating biography. Against the flaming background of the French Revolution we see FouchE, hitherto unknown, a ‘semi-priest,' take his seat as member of the dreaded National Convention of France. When the people cry for the blood of the aristocrats he proceeds to Lyons, which has risen against the revolutionists, and plunges into an orgy of murder and blasphemy; when the people turn to moderation he repudiates his former companions, helps to speed Robespierre to the guillotine, and becomes the most moderate of moderates. His rise is meteoric, his fall equally so. Suddenly Citizen FouchE sinks into obscure poverty, earning his crust of bread by petty spying, even, at one tune, by becoming a swineherd. Then in the next era FouchE rises again to new and greater heights as Minister of Police to Napoleon. Not only does he spy out Napoleon's enemies, he even uses Josephine to spy on the Emperor himself. Joseph FouchE, the man who killed aristocrats and tended swine, finally becomes Duke of Otranto, millionaire, aristocrat, master-spy, and super-blackguard. From the pages of this volume emerge not only FouchE, but some of the great figures of history: Napoleon, Robespierre, Louis XVIII, Talleyrand, Lafayette. To read it is to gain knowledge of sixty of the most volcanic years the world has known.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 - February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.
DESCRIPTION - It is difficult to imagine, while reading the five newly translated stories here, how a writer of Stefan Zweig's awesome gifts came to suffer literary obscurity. Such formidable figures as Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, and Sigmund Freud all praised Zweig; his books were international best-sellers. As John Fowles writes in his introduction to The Royal Game and Other Stories, Zweig is a ‘remarkably fertile and gifted writer. Stefan Zweig's stories have a dark magnetism; they explore the limitless scope of every kind of single-mindedness-obsessional love, pathological revenge, and even madness in chess. Zweig wrote: ‘A psychological problem is as attractive for me in a living person as in an historical person. my novels and biographies come out of the same source., an insatiable curiosity.' Zweig pushes his fictional characters through traps and pitfalls that divert them from their characteristic behavior and then follows them to the extremes to which their minds will eventually lead. The reader is inexorably drawn into a web of hidden secrets and unforgettable characters. THE ROYAL GAME AND OTHER STORIES brings to the modern reader a compelling kind of narrative wizardry little found today. As John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, concludes in his introduction, ‘Now I must let Zweig's troubled, but always humane, spirit speak for itself. It has wandered much too far out of the English-speaking world's memory. It is time, on this centenary of his birth, that we read him again.' Five stories you will always remember by a writer you will never forget. In LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, a celebrated novelist returns home early one morning. His servant hands him tea and a letter; the letter is written in an unfamiliar, shaky, feminine hand. It begins, ‘To you who never knew me,' and gradually reveals a woman's obsession and impossible love. THE BURNING SECRET is a story from the land of childhood. During the days of Imperial Austria, a young baron arrives in Semmering for a mountain holiday. At an elegant dinner, he finds an object for his lust: a sensual Jewess, who is accompanied by her small boy. The baron befriends the boy, gains his confidence, and closes in on the married mother. AMOK is a tale of dark passion. As John Fowles says, ‘Conrad's literal typhoons are carried over into the domain of the sexual.' A European doctor commits a crime. Guilt-ridden and alcoholic, he is banished to the remote tropics. At first, he successfully fights death and disease - later, they seep into his very being. A wealthy married woman mysteriously appears at his isolated outpost, pregnant with her lover's child. Trapped by her own passion, she requests the doctor's services. He agrees but only if she will first surrender herself to him. Frau Wagner, in ‘FEAR,' is respectable-she has a husband, children, and servants. Yet something has gone wrong; she lives and dreams the horror that her secret love will be discovered. THE ROYAL GAME is the story of a man who enters into a fateful chess match. Imprisoned years before by the Gestapo, a single chess book saves Dr. B. from the madness of solitary confinement. Now while he is aboard a ship to Buenos Aires, his fellow passengers urge him to challenge Czenotivic, the world champion, to a match. Dr. B. hesitates, then agrees. The madness of his imprisonment returns. ‘Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century. Even ‘famous writer' understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed in the last decade or so of his life, when he was arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world.' - From the Introduction by John Fowles. STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna to a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He was first known as a poet and translator and then as a biographer, producing studies of an assortment of people-notably, Erasmus, Joseph FouchE, and Marie Antoinette. His well-known collection of stories, Kaleidoscope, appeared in 1934 and his one-truly remarkable-novel, Beware of Pity, appeared in 1939. Zweig traveled widely, and living in Salzburg between the wars, he made friends with the greats-Romain Rolland, Freud, Toscanini. Recognition as a writer came early, and by the time he was forty, he had already achieved literary fame. In 1934, with Nazism entrenched across the border, Zweig left Austria to settle in England-his publishing life was destroyed by the Nazis and he saw his dream of a united Europe shattered. Shortly after completing the title story in this collection in 1942, Zweig took his own life in Petropolis, Brazil.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 - February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.