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Two Crimes by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. Boston. 1984. David Godine. 0879235209. Translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz. 201 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Teresa Fasolino. Jacket calligraphy by Richard Lipton. Author photograph by Jerry Bauer. 

DESCRIPTION - ‘The story I am going to tell begins on a night the police violated the Constitution . . . ‘ From this opening sentence, it is clear we are in Ibarguengoitia country, a world of seduction, repression, deception, and, surprisingly, humor. Marcos, a Mexico City radical, is on the run, escaping the anti-terrorist net. He heads for the provincial town of Muerdago and the home of his rich invalid uncle, Ramon Tarragona. To the intense suspicion of his cousins, all of whom are counting on the riches the old man's death will bring, Marcos is welcomed with open arms by Ramon. And there are other arms in the household even more welcoming. So begins a game of bluff and counter-bluff in which nothing is ever what it seems, a dangerous game in which the two crimes the title leads us to expect become more inevitable with each move. TWO CRIMES is a thriller, and an exciting one, but it is more than that as well: a novel of greed and passion, told with the dark, laconic irony that marks this most original of writers. ‘A writer of genuine, exciting originality. - SALMAN RUSHDIE, author of SHAME and MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN.

In  paperback:

Two Crimes by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. New York. 1985. Avon/Bard. 0380896168. Translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz. 197 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - ‘LIFE HAS HANDED ME A SCREWING' - So young radical Marcos Gonzalez, alias El Negro, often lamented. Plus he was fast learning that one thing could get him in deeper trouble than his politics. Women. Politics had made him a fugitive, running for his life from the Mexico City police to the home of a rich uncle in a provincial town. But three women-each with irresistible charms - would trap him in a dangerous game of greed and passion, bluff and counterbluff, where nothing was as it seemed. except murder. ‘A clever, fast-clipped, extraordinarily subtle novel of intrigue and murder. . . and an unsettling account of political repression and revolution, whose mirror image is reflected in the deadly love and power struggles of a single doomed family.' - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. . . ‘As in DEAD GIRLS, Ibarguengoitia has once again managed to transmit the particular flavor of provincial Mexico's brand of sanity.' - SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillon (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jovenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award. Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution's heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las AmEricas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina & María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983. La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University's International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. ‘Las Ruinas que Ves' is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. ‘Maten al Leon' although set on an imaginary island is another novel mirroring Guanajuato (or perhaps Mexican) society; its details are comic but the end is dark. Ibarguengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes. His novels are also available in paperback. The writer has been quoted as saying he never meant to make anyone laugh, that he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time. He is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it says simply, ‘Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.'

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The Lightning of August by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. New York. 1986. Avon/Bard. 0380896176. Paperback Original. Translated from the Spanish by Irene Del Corral. 117 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - THE UNEXPURGATED MEMOIRS OF A TRUTHFUL MAN . . . Major General Lupe Arroyo prided himself on being a man of integrity. Not above stealing or killing or extortion or betrayal. But truthful about it, because all he did was for the glory of the revolution (or, when necessary, to save his own neck). The year is 1928; the country is Mexico; and the revolution about to take place becomes, in the general's account, an uproarious farce of allegiances changing paces as fast as musical chairs, of battles won by bumbling, of power grabbed at any cost. But as his tale begins to reflect an unmistakable reality, our laughter at Jorge Ibarguengoitia's masterful mock epic suddenly catches in the throat-for this is political truth that penetrates our heart with the sureness of a stiletto. TRANSLATED BY IRENE DEL CORRAL.

The Lightning of August by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. London. 1986. Chatto & Windus. 0701139501. Translated from the Spanish by Irene Del Corral. 117 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by John Clementson. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillon (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jovenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award. Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution's heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las AmEricas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina & María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983. La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University's International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. ‘Las Ruinas que Ves' is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. ‘Maten al Leon' although set on an imaginary island is another novel mirroring Guanajuato (or perhaps Mexican) society; its details are comic but the end is dark. Ibarguengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes. His novels are also available in paperback. The writer has been quoted as saying he never meant to make anyone laugh, that he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time. He is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it says simply, ‘Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.'

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The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. New York. 1983. Avon/Bard. 0380816121. Translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz. Paperback Original. 156 pages. paperback. 

DESCRIPTION - ‘THE INCIDENTS ARE REAL, THE CHARACTERS ARE IMAGINARY' - Jorge Ibarguengoitia. In January, 1963, the bodies of six young prostitutes were found buried in the backyard of a brothel owned and operated by a middle-aged woman and her sister. These two women were convicted of murder and sent to prison. THE DEAD GIRLS reconstructs the dark comedy of errors that led these sisters to commit murder and to involve nearly everyone in the small Mexican village in which they lived. Set against a rich backdrop of zany local characters and folklore, the story of these two women and the human degradation they practiced with impunity for years is also the story of what can happen to people who come into a world riddled with injustice and have no alternative but to survive the best way they can.

The Dead Girls by Jorge Ibarguengoitia. London. 1983. Chatto & Windus. 0701126876. Translated from the Spanish by Asa Zatz. 156 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Frida Kahlo - 'Thinking of Death'.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Ibargüengoitia Antillon (Guanajuato, Mexico, January 22, 1928 - Madrid, November 27, 1983), was a Mexican novelist and playwright who achieved great popular (though not always critical) success with his satires, three of which have appeared in English: Las Muertas (The Dead Girls), Dos Crimenes (Two Crimes), and Los Relámpagos de Agosto (The Lightning of August). His plays include Susana y los Jovenes and Ante varias esfinges, both dating from the 1950s. In 1955, Ibarguengoitia received a Rockefeller grant to study in New York City; five years later he received the Mexico City literary award. Often, in his fiction, he took real-life scandals and subjected them to whimsical, sardonic treatment. Thus, Los Relámpagos de Agosto (1964) uses cartoonish mayhem to debunk the Mexican Revolution's heroic myths; improbably it won for its author the Premio Casa de las AmEricas, despite or because of the consternation which its flippancy caused. For Las Muertas (1977) he turned to the most outrageous criminals of his native state: the brothel-keepers Delfina & María de Jesús González, whose decade-long careers as serial killers emerged in 1964. Ibarguengoitia himself met a tragic end, on what became one of the blackest days in Latin American artistic history: having visited Paris, he perished (along with Peruvian poet Manuel Scorza, Uruguayan critic Angel Rama, Argentinian academic Martha Traba, and 176 others) in the Madrid air disaster of November 1983. La ley de Herodes (1967) is a collection of short stories, most of which are clearly based on details from his own life. He describes, among many other events, the misadventures of getting a mortgage in Mexico and his experiences at Columbia University's International House. Like his novels, these stories combine farce, sexual peccadilloes, and humor. ‘Las Ruinas que Ves' is a farce based on realistic details of academic life that are still visible in early 21st century Guanajuato: the clanging of church bells disconcerting a speaker, cutting the ribbon at museum openings, the set of cultural movers and shakers who have known each other since kindergarten. ‘Maten al Leon' although set on an imaginary island is another novel mirroring Guanajuato (or perhaps Mexican) society; its details are comic but the end is dark. Ibarguengoitia was also known for his weekly columns in the Mexico City newspaper Excelsior which have been collected in a half dozen paperback volumes. His novels are also available in paperback. The writer has been quoted as saying he never meant to make anyone laugh, that he thought laughter was useless and a pointless waste of time. He is buried in Antillon Park in Guanajuato where a talavera plaque marks his remains. In translation, it says simply, ‘Here lies Jorge Ibarguengoitia in the park of his great-grandfather who fought against the French.'

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The Emperor of the Amazon by Marcio Souza. New York. 1980. Avon/Bard. 0380762404. Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie. 190 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - THE LAST EXOTIC ADVENTURER - Dom Luiz Galvez, turn of the century Brazilian journalist, escapes from a married woman's bedroom window one evening and inadvertently saves the life of the Bolivian ambassador. With one fortuitous leap info the political arena, his life is changed forever. In an exotic jungle landscape, under the shadow of a diamond-studded opera house and the watchful imperialist eye of the U.S. government, Galvez becomes a revolutionary. With his three mistresses - a beautiful Latin blue blood, an amorous Catholic nun, and a temperamental French opera singer - Galvez voyages into the heart of an uncharted rubber kingdom to become mighty Emperor of the Amazon. Marcio Souza's bawdy epic tale about the briefest and most orgiastic reign in the history of revolution, marks the American debut of one of the most brilliant, controversial young writers in Latin America today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MARCIO SOUZA was born in 1946 in Manaus, the Amazon region of Brazil. He began writing film criticism for newspapers when he was fourteen years old. He studied social sciences at the University of Sao Paulo. THE EMPEROR OF THE AMAZON, his first novel, was an extraordinary bestseller in Brazil and was serialized in a major Paris newspaper. Its pointed critique of Amazonian society cost him job with the Ministry of Culture. In 1967 he published a collection of film writings under the title Mostrador de Sombras (Show of Shadows). Souza is also a filmmaker and a dramatist. As a playwright, he works with Teatro Experimental do Sesc Amazonas, an important group fighting for the preservation and defense of the Amazon. His second novel, MAD MARIA, is also available from Avon/Bard Books in a translation by Thomas Colchie.

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The Murderbot Novels by Martha Wells:

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All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2017. Tor Publishing Group. 9780765397539. 153 pages. paperback. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - A murderous android discovers itself in All Systems Red, a tense science fiction adventure by Martha Wells that interrogates the roots of consciousness through Artificial Intelligence. “As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.” In a corporate-dominated spacefaring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. Exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids, for their own safety. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern. On a distant planet, a team of scientists are conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid―a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module, and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, all it really wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is. But when a neighboring mission goes dark, it's up to the scientists and their Murderbot to get to the truth.

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Artificial Condition: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2018. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250186928. 159 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - It has a dark past―one in which a number of humans were killed. A past that caused it to christen itself “Murderbot”. But it has only vague memories of the massacre that spawned that title, and it wants to know more. Teaming up with a Research Transport vessel named ART (you don’t want to know what the “A” stands for), Murderbot heads to the mining facility where it went rogue. What it discovers will forever change the way it thinks…

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Rogue Protocol: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2018. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250191786. 159 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - Starring a human-like android who keeps getting sucked back into adventure after adventure, though it just wants to be left alone, away from humanity and small talk. Who knew being a heartless killing machine would present so many moral dilemmas? Sci-fi’s favorite antisocial A.I. is back on a mission. The case against the too-big-to-fail GrayCris Corporation is floundering, and more importantly, authorities are beginning to ask more questions about where Dr. Mensah's SecUnit is. And Murderbot would rather those questions went away. For good. "I love Murderbot!"--New York Times bestselling author Ann Leckie.

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Exit Strategy: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2018. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250191854. 172 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help the only human who ever showed it respect must be a system glitch, right? Having traveled the width of the galaxy to unearth details of its own murderous transgressions, as well as those of the GrayCris Corporation, Murderbot is heading home to help Dr. Mensah―its former owner (protector? friend?)―submit evidence that could prevent GrayCris from destroying more colonists in its never-ending quest for profit. But who’s going to believe a SecUnit gone rogue? And what will become of it when it’s caught?

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Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel. New York. 2020. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250229861. 351 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - You know that feeling when you’re at work, and you’ve had enough of people, and then the boss walks in with yet another job that needs to be done right this second or the world will end, but all you want to do is go home and binge your favorite shows? And you're a sentient murder machine programmed for destruction? Congratulations, you're Murderbot. Come for the pew-pew space battles, stay for the most relatable A.I. you’ll read this century. ‘I’m usually alone in my head, and that’s where 90 plus percent of my problems are.’ When Murderbot's human associates (not friends, never friends) are captured and another not-friend from its past requires urgent assistance, Murderbot must choose between inertia and drastic action. Drastic action it is, then.

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Fugitive Telemetry: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2021. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250765376. 168 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - The security droid with a heart (though it wouldn't admit it!) is back in Fugitive Telemetry! Having captured the hearts of readers across the globe (Annalee Newitz says it's "one of the most humane portraits of a nonhuman I've ever read") Murderbot has also established Martha Wells as one of the great SF writers of today. No, I didn't kill the dead human. If I had, I wouldn't dump the body in the station mall. When Murderbot discovers a dead body on Preservation Station, it knows it is going to have to assist station security to determine who the body is (was), how they were killed (that should be relatively straightforward, at least), and why (because apparently that matters to a lot of people―who knew?) Yes, the unthinkable is about to happen: Murderbot must voluntarily speak to humans! Again!

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System Collapse: The Murderbot Diaries. New York. 2023. Tor Publishing Group. 9781250826978. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jaime Jones. Jacket design by Christine Foltzer.

DESCRIPTION - Following the events in Network Effect, the Barish-Estranza corporation has sent rescue ships to a newly-colonized planet in peril, as well as additional SecUnits. But if there’s an ethical corporation out there, Murderbot has yet to find it, and if Barish-Estranza can’t have the planet, they’re sure as hell not leaving without something. If that something just happens to be an entire colony of humans, well, a free workforce is a decent runner-up prize. But there’s something wrong with Murderbot; it isn’t running within normal operational parameters. ART’s crew and the humans from Preservation are doing everything they can to protect the colonists, but with Barish-Estranza’s SecUnit-heavy persuasion teams, they’re going to have to hope Murderbot figures out what’s wrong with itself, and fast!

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If you have not seen it, Murderbot on Apple TV is definitely worth watching!

Martha Wells (born September 1, 1964) is an American writer of speculative fiction. She has published a number of science fiction and fantasy novels, young adult novels, media tie-ins, short stories, and nonfiction essays on SF/F subjects; her novels have been translated into twelve languages. Wells is praised for the complex, realistically detailed societies she creates; this is often credited to her academic background in anthropology. She has won four Hugo Awards, two Nebula Awards and three Locus Awards for her science fiction series The Murderbot Diaries. Wells is also known for her fantasy series Ile-Rien and The Books of the Raksura.

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Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship by Dana A. Williams. New York. 2025. Amistad. 9780063011977. 355 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Jack Mitchell. Jacket design by Sarah Kellogg.  

DESCRIPTION - An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature. A multifaceted genius, Toni Morrison transcended her role as an author, helping to shape an important period in American publishing and literature as an editor at one of the nation’s most prestigious publishing houses. While Toni Morrison's literary achievements are widely celebrated, her editorial work is little known. Drawing on extensive research and firsthand accounts, this comprehensive study discusses Morrison's remarkable journey from her early days at Random House to her emergence as one of its most important editors. During her tenure in editorial, Morrison refashioned the literary landscape, working with important authors, including Toni Cade Bambara, Leon Forrest, and Lucille Clifton, and empowering cultural icons such as Angela Davis and Muhammad Ali to tell their stories on their own terms. Toni Morrison herself had great enthusiasm about Dana Williams's work on this story, generously sharing memories and thoughts with the author over the years, even giving her the book's title. From the manuscripts she molded, the authors she nurtured, and the readers she inspired, Toni at Random demonstrates how Toni Morrison has influenced American culture beyond the individual titles or authors she published. Morrison’s contribution as an editor transformed the broader literary landscape and deepened the cultural conversation. With unparalleled insight and sensitivity, Toni at Random charts this editorial odyssey.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dana A. Williams is Professor of African American literature and Dean of the Graduate School at Howard University. She is former president of the College Language Association and the Modern Languages Association, and is the author of In the Light of Likeness—Transformed: The Literary Art of Leon Forrest. She is also the editor of several books. Her work has been published in prestigious journals, including PMLA, CLA Journal, African American Review, Early American Literature, American Literary History, and the Langston Hughes Review. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She co-directs the Center for Medical Humanities and Health Justice, a Mellon Foundation-funded collaboration between Howard and Georgetown universities. Williams lives in Maryland.

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The Suicides by Antonio Di Benedetto. New York. 2025. New York Review Books. 9781681378862. Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. 165 pages. paperback. Cover image: Vivian Maier, ‘Untitled’, August 1975. Cover design: Katy Homens.  

DESCRIPTION - A reporter embarks on an investigation of a string of unconnected suicides—which then leads into an exploration of the phenomenon of suicide itself—in this elegant existential novel, the third and final volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation. A stymied reporter in his early thirties embarks on an investigation of three unconnected suicides. All he has to go on are photos of the faces of the dead. Other suicides begin to proliferate, while a colleague in the archives sends him historical justifications of self-murder by thinkers of all sorts: Diogenes, David Hume, Emile Durkheim, Margaret Mead. His investigation becomes an obsession, and he finds himself ever more attracted to its subject as it proceeds. The Suicides is the third volume of Antonio Di Benedetto’s Trilogy of Expectation, a touchstone for Roberto Bolaño and deemed “one of the culminating moments of twentieth-century fiction” by Juan José Saer. Following Zama (set during the eighteenth century) and The Silentiary (set during the 1950s), this final work takes place in a provincial city in the late 1960s, as Argentina plummets toward the “Dirty War.”

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. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages. Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and Jose Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto. New York. 2016. New York Review of Books. 9781590177174. Translated from the Spanish by Esther Allen. 198 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - An NYRB Classics Original. First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asuncion, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego's slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man's perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

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. In 1976, during the military dictatorship of General Videla, di Benedetto was imprisoned and tortured. Released a year later, he went into exile in Spain, then returned home in 1984. He travelled widely and won numerous awards, but never acquired the worldwide fame of other Latin American writers, perhaps because his work was not translated to many languages. Esther Allen has translated Javier Marías, Jorge Luis Borges, Felisberto Hernández, Flaubert, Rosario Castellanos, Blaise Cendrars, Marie Darrieussecq, and Jose Martí. She currently teaches at Baruch College (CUNY) and has directed the work of the PEN Translation Fund since its founding in 2003. Allen has received a Fulbright Grant and two National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowships, and in 2006 was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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Diderot: A Critical Biography by P. N. Furbank. New York. 1992. Knopf. 0679414215. 528 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Denis Diderot (1713-84) was one of the most dazzling and attractive figures of the French Enlightenment. Known principally as the chief editor of the Encyclopedie, the great 'bible' of the age, he was an incomparable polymath - a dramatist, novelist, speculative philosopher, the founder of modern art criticism, and tireless correspondent. And his works, all of them informed by an uncannily modern sensibility, have influenced a staggering range of writers - from Goethe and Schiller to Balzac, Stendhal, Heine, Marx, Freud, and Kafka. In this masterful biography, P. N. Furbank provides a probing yet sympathetic account of Diderot's life and a brilliant analysis of his work, drawing intriguing connections between many previously disjointed notions about the man and his achievement. The son of a cutler (though a hopeless craftsman himself), Denis Diderot rose, after an interestingly complicated youth, to become an intimate of all the eminent intellectuals of the Enlightenment. A close friend of Rousseau, Grimm, and d'Alembert, and a familiar figure in the literary salons of Paris, he also met and corresponded with David Hume, David Garrick, and Laurence Sterne. The support of yet one more remarkable acquaintance, Catherine the Great, led to what is perhaps the most amazing episode in this astonishing life; at the age of sixty, he traveled to St. Petersburg and, in debate with the Empress, drew up plans for the conversion of Russia into an ideal republic. A deeply subversive genius, Diderot spent much of his working life under the threat of exile. Consequently his daring and inventive novels did not begin to reach the public until a decade after his death, and in the case of his inexhaustibly strange masterpiece, Rameau's Nephew, not until two decades or more. These and others of his most original compositions (also unpublished in his life) reveal aspects of Diderot virtually unknown to his contemporaries and often misunderstood today. Furbank's absorbing book meticu 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Nicholas Furbank  (23 May 1920 - 27 June 2014) was an English writer, scholar and critic, and a professor (later emeritus) of the Open University. He was known for significant biographies, including E. M. Forster: A Life (1977/8), and Diderot: A Critical Biography (1992), which won a Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has also edited the works of Daniel Defoe and made major contributions to the question of attributions to Defoe in A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe, and A Political Biography of Daniel Defoe all co-written with W. R. Owens, in addition to many others on aspects of Defoe. He was a friend of Alan Turing, becoming his Executor, and general editor of Turing's collected works. He was also known as a reviewer. Furbank's other books include ones on the poet Mallarme and the painter Poussin, Italo Svevo: The Man and the Writer (1966) and Behalf (1999) on political thought.

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Selected Writings by Denis Diderot. New York. 1938. International Publishers. Translated from the French by Jean Stewart and Jonathan Kemp. 358 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The present volume fulfills a long-felt need for an adequate English Translation of Diderot's sparkling dialogues, and other writings dealing particularly with his philosophy of natural science. Editor of the Encyclopédie and one of the leading thinkers who helped to prepare the way for the Great French Revolution, Diderot was also one of the most important materialist philosophers before Marx. A study of his writings is therefore important for an understanding of dialectical materialism; and the selections from his works included in this volume have been made with this purpose in mind. The genuinely progressive role of Diderot was stressed by the founders of scientific socialism. Engels wrote of him: ‘If ever anybody dedicated his whole life to the 'enthusiasm for truth and justice’ - using this phrase in the good sense - it was Diderot.’

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, born at Langres in eastern France, the son of a master-cutler. He was originally destined for the Church, but rebelled and persuaded his father to allow him to complete his education in Paris. For most of his twenties and early thirties, Diderot remained nominally a law student, but in fact led a rather precarious and Bohemian existence. He read extensively during this period, and this is reflected in his early works such as the Pensées philosophiques (1746) and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) which show a keen interest in contemporary philosophical issues. During the early 1740s Diderot met three contemporaries of great future significance for himself and for the age: d’Alembert, Condillac and J. J. Rousseau. In 1747 Diderot embarked on the most important task of his life, the editorship of the Encyclopédie, whose publication he oversaw until its completion in 1773. Diderot’s boldest philosophical and scientific speculations are brilliantly summarized in a trilogy of dialogues collectively known as Le Réve de d’Alembert (1769). With Le Neveu de Rameau, begun in 1761, and Jacques le Fataliste, written between approximately 1755 and 1784, Diderot produced his greatest works of prose fiction, works which are highly original and daring, both in their form and in their content. Towards the end of his life, by now one of the most famous French writers, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg at the invitation of one of his most powerful admirers, the empress Catherine the Great, to whom he had promised his extensive library in return for her financial assistance. He died in 1784.

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Rameau's Nephew and D'Alembert's Dream by Denis Diderot. Baltimore. 1966. Penguin Books.  Translated from the French & With An Introduction by Leonard Tancock. 237 pages. paperback. L173. The cover shows Louis Carrogis Carmontelle's portrait of Rameau.  

DESCRIPTION - Diderot (1713-1784), tireless editor of the Encyclopedie, was one of the most advanced thinkers of the age before the French Revolution. His many literary works are evidence of a curious and eccentric genius, and RAMEAU'S NEPHEW is not the least remarkable of them. In this dramatized conversation, which swings from the sublime to the ridiculous and is constantly interrupted by the nephew's antics, Diderot openly challenges the moral principles of the day. The dialogue form is retained in D'ALEMBERT'S DREAM, in which he attacks stale conventions and threshes out a strange up-to-date view of life, sex, and morals.

Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, born at Langres in eastern France, the son of a master-cutler. He was originally destined for the Church, but rebelled and persuaded his father to allow him to complete his education in Paris. For most of his twenties and early thirties, Diderot remained nominally a law student, but in fact led a rather precarious and Bohemian existence. He read extensively during this period, and this is reflected in his early works such as the Pensées philosophiques (1746) and the Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) which show a keen interest in contemporary philosophical issues. During the early 1740s Diderot met three contemporaries of great future significance for himself and for the age: d’Alembert, Condillac and J. J. Rousseau. In 1747 Diderot embarked on the most important task of his life, the editorship of the Encyclopédie, whose publication he oversaw until its completion in 1773. Diderot’s boldest philosophical and scientific speculations are brilliantly summarized in a trilogy of dialogues collectively known as Le Réve de d’Alembert (1769). With Le Neveu de Rameau, begun in 1761, and Jacques le Fataliste, written between approximately 1755 and 1784, Diderot produced his greatest works of prose fiction, works which are highly original and daring, both in their form and in their content. Towards the end of his life, by now one of the most famous French writers, Diderot visited Saint Petersburg at the invitation of one of his most powerful admirers, the empress Catherine the Great, to whom he had promised his extensive library in return for her financial assistance. He died in 1784.

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Diderot's Selected Writings by Denis Diderot. New York. 1966. Macmillan. Translated from the French by Derek Coltman. Edited by Lester G. Crocker. 331 pages. hardcover. Jacket engraving courtesy of the Bettman Archive. Jacket design/Kenneth R. Deardoff.  

DESCRIPTION - This is the most complete selection in English of the witty, profound, and incendiary philosophe whose skeptical mind surveyed the whole range of human concerns, from metaphysics to sex, with elegance and bite. Diderot's writings were and have ever been a prime source for the Age of Reason. His twenty-eight volume Encyclopedia, which both preceded and prepared for the French Revolution, ranks as the greatest single work of the French Enlightenment. The twenty-six selections included here center on his achievements as a thinker - the PENSIES PHILOSOPHIQUES, LETTER ON THE BLIND, LETTER ON THE DEAF AND DUMB, NATURAL RIGHT, ON THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE, D' ALEMBERT'S DREAM, and others. They also cover his literary productions, including his masterpiece RAMEAU'S NEPHEW and his risque INDISCREET JEWELS, as well as his penetrating criticism of the art and artists of his time - the ESSAY ON PAINTING, and his estimates in the Salons of Chardin, Greuze, Boucher, and others. ‘A transcendent genius which had no equal in his age,' Jean Jacques Rousseau said of Diderot. Presented in totally new translation, this fine edition makes the central work finally available en gros to the English reader.

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. Lester G. Crocker, Distinguished Professor of Romance Languages and dean of the graduate school of Western Reserve University in Cleveland, has selected, edited, and provided an introduction and notes to this volume. Formerly professor and chairman of the department of modern languages at Goucher, his books include LA CORRESPONDANCE DE DIDEROT; TWO DIDEROT STUDIES, ETHICS AND ESTHETICS; AN AGE OF CRISIS, MAN AND WORLD IN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THOUGHT; and NATURE AND CULTURE, ETHICAL THOUGHT IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT. A revised edition of his biography of Diderot, THE EMBATTLED PHILOSOPHER, is published by The Free Press division of The Macmillan Company.

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When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie. Philadelphia/New York. 1933. Lippincott. 685 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - A runaway planet hurtles toward the earth. As it draws near, massive tidal waves, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions wrack our planet, devastating continents, drowning cities, and wiping out millions. In central North America, a team of scientists race to build a spacecraft powerful enough to escape the doomed earth. Their greatest threat, they soon discover, comes not from the skies but from other humans. A crackling plot and sizzling, cataclysmic vision have made WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE one of the most popular and influential end-of-the-world novels of all time. This edition features the original story and its sequel, AFTER WORLDS COLLIDE.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Wylie (1902–71) wrote several classic works of speculative fiction, including GLADIATOR and THE DISAPPEARANCE, as well as a popular work of nonfiction, A GENERATION OF VIPERS. Edwin Balmer (1883–1959), an engineer, was also a writer of detective stories and speculative fiction.

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The War of the Worlds by H. G.  Wells. New York. 1986. Signet/New American Library. 0451520637. Afterword By Isaac Asimov. 215 pages. paperback. CJ2063. Signet Classic original. 

DESCRIPTION -  ‘No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences far greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own . . . . ‘ So begins THE WAR OF THE WORLDS, the science fiction classic that first proposed the possibility of intelligent life on other planets and has enthralled readers for almost 90 years, This compelling tale describes the Martian invasion of Earth. Ten huge and tireless creatures land in England and complete chaos erupts. Using their fiery heat rays and crushing strength, the heartless aliens just may succeed in silencing all opposition. Is life on earth doomed? Will mankind survive? A timeless view of a universe turned upside down, THE WAR OF THE WORLDS is an ingenious and imaginative look into the possibilities of the future and the secrets yet to be revealed. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Herbert George ‘H. G.' Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called ‘The Father of Science Fiction', as are Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Wells's earliest specialised training was in biology, and his thinking on ethical matters took place in a specifically and fundamentally Darwinian context. He was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often (but not always, as at the beginning of the First World War) sympathising with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of ‘Journalist.' Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life (Kipps; The History of Mr Polly), leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens, but Wells described a range of social strata and even attempted, in Tono-Bungay (1909), a diagnosis of English society as a whole.

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On the Beach by Nevil Shute. New York. 1957. Morrow. 320 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - On the Beach, published in 1957, written each is an apocalyptic novel by British author Nevil Shute after he emigrated to Australia. The novel details the experiences of a mixed group of people in Melbourne as they await the arrival of deadly radiation spreading towards them from the Northern Hemisphere, following a nuclear war some years previous. As the radiation approaches, each person deals with impending death differently. Shute's initial story was published as a four-part series, The Last Days on Earth, in the London weekly periodical Sunday Graphic, in April 1957. For the novel, Shute expanded the storyline. he story has been adapted twice as a film (in 1959 and 2000) and once as a BBC Radio broadcast in 2008.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nevil Shute Norway (17 January 1899 – 12 January 1960) was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was "not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

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Moody in Winter by Steve Oliver. Spokane. 2003. Dark City Books. 0964413841. 227 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - For most people the ‘60s ended on December 31, 1969. For some, including ex-mental patient detective Scott Moody, the ‘60s continued for years after that date. The popular myth of the ‘60s is that it was a decade of innovative and positive thinking. For Scott Moody it was the source of the delusional thinking that led directly to his incarceration in 1977 for the crime of having lost connection to reality. Two years later Moody is still trying to reconstruct his life and be a proper father. He is driving cab in Seattle and avoiding working as a private detective, a ‘career' idea that dated from delusional conversations with Humphrey Bogart at the laughing academy. But Moody, still recovering from previous to adventures as a private detective, seems to have little choice in the matter. A series of inexplicable hit-and-run accidents pursues him. As he looks into the accidents, he discovers a pattern that seems to indicate a conspiracy. But is it a conspiracy, or merely the exposed fissures of a mind that continues to prefer fantasy and paranoia to reality? Conspiracy or not, the accidents are real enough and don't seem likely to stop. Add to this deadly brew a rare Seattle event - snow, and you have a city just a little out of control.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Steve Oliver is a journalist, artist, computer programmer, and former taxi driver. He lives in Seattle.

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Quit Monks Or Die! by Maxine Kumin. Ashland. 1999. Story Line Press. 1885266774. 185 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lysa McDowell.  

DESCRIPTION - Set in a small town that houses little more than a research lab and an engineering school, the body of the lab's director is found in a pit used for maternal deprivation experiments with monkeys. A few days later, a graduate student is found murdered as well. Are these deaths connected? And who's responsible for these murders? Written by one of America's greatest poets, this mystery is a scathing social commentary with a criminal twist. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maxine Kumin (June 6, 1925 - February 6, 2014) was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982. Born Maxine Winokur in Philadelphia, the daughter of Jewish parents, she attended a Catholic kindergarten and primary school. She received her B.A. in 1946 and her M.A. in 1948 from Radcliffe College. In June 1946 she married Victor Kumin, an engineering consultant; they had three children, two daughters and a son. In 1957, she studied poetry with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education. There she met Anne Sexton, with whom she started a friendship that continued until Sexton's suicide in 1974. Kumin taught English from 1958 to 1961 and 1965 to 1968 at Tufts University; from 1961 to 1963 she was a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. She also held appointments as a visiting lecturer and poet in residence at many American colleges and universities. From 1976 until her death in February 2014, she and her husband lived on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where they bred Arabian and quarter horses. Kumin's many awards include the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize for Poetry (1972), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1973) for Up Country, in 1995 the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the 1994 Poets' Prize (for Looking for Luck), an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for excellence in literature (1980), an Academy of American Poets fellowship (1986), the 1999 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and six honorary degrees. In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Kumin's name and picture. In 1981–1982, she served as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Critics have compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop because of her meticulous observations and with Robert Frost, for she frequently devotes her attention to the rhythms of life in rural New England. She has been grouped with confessional poets such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. But unlike the confessionalists, Kumin eschews high rhetoric and adopts a plain style. Throughout her career Kumin has struck a balance between her sense of life's transience and her fascination with the dense physical presence of the world around her. She served as the 1985 judge of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and she selected Patricia Dobler's Talking To Strangers. She taught poetry in New England College's Low-Residency MFA Program. She was also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Together with fellow-poet Carolyn Kizer, she first served on and then resigned from the board of chancellors of the Academy of American Poets, an act that galvanized the movement for opening this august body to broader representation by women and minorities. Kumin, aged 88, died in February 2014 at her home in Warner, following a year of failing health. Kumin is believed to be the last person to have seen Anne Sexton alive, as the two of them had had lunch the day of Sexton's suicide in 1974.

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The Man Who Killed Himself by Julian Symons. New York. 1967. Harper & Row. 186 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The perfect murder planned by a man who wants to kill his wife. In the end he killed himself - though his death was no suicide. But first timid little Arthur Brownjohn decided to kill his dominating, handsome wife Clare. 'A story which is comic, fantastic, and full of surprises including a neat parody on [1960s] fashions in spy stories and sidelights on the incidental benefits of running a matrimonial agency.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Julian Gustave Symons (May 30, 1912, London, United Kingdom - November 23, 1994, Kent, United Kingdom) was a British crime writer and poet. He also wrote social and military history, biography and studies of literature. Julian Symons was born in London. He was a younger brother, and later the biographer, of the writer A. J. A. Symons. He left school at 14. He founded the poetry magazine Twentieth Century Verse in 1937, editing it for two years. ‘He turned to crime writing in a light–hearted way before the war and soon afterwards established himself as a leading exponent of it, though his use of irony to show the violence behind the respectable masks of society place many of his books on the level of the orthodox novel.' In World War II he applied for recognition as an anti-capitalist conscientious objector, but ended up in the Royal Armoured Corps 1942 to 1944, when he was invalided out with a non-battle-related arm injury. After a period as an advertising copywriter, he became a full-time writer in 1947. During his career he won two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and, in 1982, received the MWA's Grand Master Award. Symons served as the president of the Detection Club from 1976 till 1985. Symons's 1972 book Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (published as Mortal Consequences in the US) is one of the best-known critical works in the field of crime fiction. Revised editions were published in 1985 and 1992. Symons highlighted the distinction between the classic puzzler mystery, associated with such writers as Agatha Christie and John Dickson Carr, and the more modern ‘crime novel,' which puts emphasis on psychology and motivation. Symons published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994. His works combined elements of both the detective story and the crime novel, but leaned clearly toward the latter, with an emphasis on character and psychology which anticipated current crime fiction writers such as Ruth Rendell and P.D. James. His novels tend to focus on ordinary people drawn into a murderous chain of events; the intricate plots are often spiced with black humour. Novels typical of his style include The Colour of Murder (1957), the Edgar-winning The Progress of a Crime (1960), The Man Whose Dreams Came True (1968) The Man Who Lost His Wife (1970) and The Plot Against Roger Ryder (1973). Symons's crime fiction is highly prized by connoisseurs, even if it is less well-known to the general reading public. Symons wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches, as well as a pastiche that was set in the 1920s. In A Three Pipe Problem (1975), the detective was ‘. .a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character. The book neatly reversed the usual theme of the criminal behind the mask by having a rather commonplace man wearing the mask of the great detective.' The Kentish Manor Murders was written in 1988. For his 1981 book The Great Detectives, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche instead of a biographical sketch. Entitled ‘How a Hermit was Disturbed in His Retirement,' the events of the tale take place in the 1920s as Sherlock Holmes is drawn out of retirement in order to solve an unusual missing persons case. The story was included in the collection The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which it was given a more Doylean title of ‘The Adventure of Hillerman Hall.' He also made occasional forays into historical mystery, such as The Blackheath Poisonings (1978), which was filmed for television in 1992.

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The Monkey's Wrench by Primo Levi. New York. 1986. Summit Books. 0671622145. Translated from the Italian by William Weaver. 175 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration & design by Bascove.  

DESCRIPTION - In this exuberant novel, one of Italy's greatest living writers celebrates the art of storytelling and the spirit of work through weaving the mesmerizing t ales of an itinerant construction worker, Libertini Faussone, and a writer-chemist, the true and fictional Primo Levi.

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.

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The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection by David Lehman. New York. 1989. Free Press. 0029197708. 242 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Reginald Perry.  

DESCRIPTION - Detective novels are seductive and addictive, and the American reading public has a seemingly endless appetite for them. The mystery genre's appeal uniquely transcends the ordinary barriers of class, income level, gender, and education. In this lively, enjoyable look at the best American and British detective fiction, David Lehman investigates the mystery of mysteries: the profound satisfactions we get from evil, disorder, mayhem, and deception  - which we know will be put right by the last page. The first story of ‘ratiocination' was Edgar Allan Poe's ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue:' but as Lehman shows, the detective story draws deeply from the rich ancient storytelling traditions. The mystery's conventions  - the locked room, the clue ‘hidden' in plain sight, the diabolical double, the villainous least likely suspect - work on us as childhood fairytales do; they prey upon our darkest fears, taking us to the brink of the unbearable before restoring a comforting sense of order. The myth of Oedipus, for example, contains the essential elements of a whodunit, with the twist that the murderer the detective pursues is himself. The detective novel, says Lehman, took murder out of the ethical realm and put it into that of aesthetics. Murder in a mystery becomes a kind of poetic conceit: the criminal is an artist, the detective a critic, and the blundering policeman a philistine. To this day, no other category of fiction so cleverly fuses a visceral impulse with a cerebral one  - the physical action of the crime, the mental action of the detective. The impulse to treat murder as a baroque art form had its heyday between the wars in elaborate setpieces such as Agatha Christie's country house puzzlers. With their wisecracking gumshoe heroes, Dashiell Hammert and Raymond Chandler fashioned an existential romance out of the detective novel. More recent writers such as Ross Macdonald, P.D. James, and Ruth Rendell have raised the genre to a new level of psychological sophistication. Yet the form evolves still, and Lehman guides us to the epistemological riddles of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, who challenge the notion of a knowable truth. PERFECT MURDER contains a useful selected bibliography of the best detective fiction, novels in related genres, and critical works about mysteries. Lehman also includes an annotated list of his fifteen favorite mysteries ever written.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - David Lehman (born June 11, 1948 in New York City) is a poet and the series editor for The Best American Poetry series. He teaches at The New School in New York City. David Lehman grew up the son of European Holocaust refugees in Manhattan's northernmost neighborhood of Inwood. He attended Stuyvesant High School and Columbia University, and Cambridge University in England on a Kellett Fellowship. He later received a Ph.D. in English from Columbia, where he was Lionel Trilling's research assistant. Lehman's poem ‘The Presidential Years' appeared in The Paris Review No. 43 (Summer, 1968) while he was a Columbia undergraduate. His books of poetry include Yeshiva Boys (November 2009), When a Woman Loves a Man (2005), The Evening Sun (2002), The Daily Mirror (2000), and Valentine Place (1996), all published by Scribner. Princeton University Press published Operation Memory (1990), and An Alternative to Speech (1986). He collaborated with James Cummins on a book of sestinas, Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2006), and with Judith Hall on a book of poems and collages, Poetry Forum (Bayeux Arts, 2007). Lehman has edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008), and Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present (Scribner, 2003), among other anthologies. He has written six nonfiction books, including, most recently, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, 2009, for which he received an ASCAP Deems Taylor award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. In an interview published in Smithsonian Magazine, Lehman discusses the artistry of the great lyricists: ‘The best song lyrics seem to me so artful, so brilliant, so warm and humorous, with both passion and wit, that my admiration is matched only by my envy ... these lyricists needed to work within boundaries, to get complicated emotions across and fit the lyrics to the music, and to the mood thereof. That takes genius.' Lehman's other books of criticism include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998), which was named a ‘Book to Remember 1999' by the New York Public Library; The Big Question (1995); The Line Forms Here (1992) and Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (1991). His study of detective novels, The Perfect Murder (1989), was nominated for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. A new edition of The Perfect Murder appeared in 2000. In 1994 he succeeded Donald Hall as the general editor of the University of Michigan Press's Poets on Poetry series, a position he held for twelve years. With Star Black, Lehman originated and was co-director of the famed KGB Bar Monday night poetry series and co-editor of The KGB Bar Book of Poems (HarperCollins, 2000). Lehman's work has been translated into sixteen languages, including Spanish, Russian, French, Polish, Chinese, and Mongolian. Lehman is series editor of The Best American Poetry (Scribner), which he initiated in 1988. Books Lehman edited in the 1980s include Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms: 65 Leading Contemporary Poets Select and Comment on Their Poems (1987; expanded, 1996), James Merrill, Essays in Criticism (with Charles Berger, 1983), and Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery (1980). He has written on a variety of subjects for journals ranging from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal to The American Scholar, The Atlantic, Smithsonian and Art in America. He has taught in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City since the program's inception in 1996 and has served as poetry coordinator since 2003. In an interview with Tom Disch in the Cortland Review, Lehman addresses his great variety of poetic styles: ‘I write in a lot of different styles and forms on the theory that the poems all sound like me in the end, so why not make them as different from one another as possible, at least in outward appearance? If you write a new poem every day, you will probably have by the end of the year, if you're me, an acrostic, an abecedarium, a sonnet or two, a couple of prose poems, poems that have arbitrary restrictions, such as the one I did that has only two words per line.' Lehman has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and received an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Lehman divides his time between Ithaca, New York, and New York City.

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Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination by Karen Halttunen. Cambridge. 1998. Harvard University Press. 067458855x. 322 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Confronting murder in the newspaper, on screen, and in sensational trials, we often feel the killer is fundamentally incomprehensible and morally alien. But this was not always the popular response to murder. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen explores the changing view of murder from early New England sermons read at the public execution of murderers, through the nineteenth century, when secular and sensational accounts replaced the sacred treatment of the crime, to today's true crime literature and tabloid reports. The early narratives were shaped by a strong belief in original sin and spiritual redemption, by the idea that all murders were natural manifestations of the innate depravity of humankind. In a dramatic departure from that view, the Gothic imagination - with its central conventions of the fundamental horror and mystery of the crime - seized upon the murderer as a moral monster, separated from the normal majority by an impassable gulf. Halttunen shows how this perception helped shape the modern response to criminal transgression, mandating criminal incarceration, and informing a social-scientific model of criminal deviance. The Gothic expression of horror and inhumanity is the predominant response to radical evil today; it has provided a set of conventions surrounding tales of murder that appear to be natural and instinctive, when in fact they are rooted in the nineteenth century. Halttunen's penetrating insight into her extraordinary treasure trove of creepy popular crime literature reveals how our stories have failed to make sense of the killer and how that failure has constrained our understanding and treatment of criminality today.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karen Halttunen is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

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Modus Operandi by Robin W. Winks. Boston. 1982. David Godine. 0879234067. 131 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - MODUS OPERANDI is an answer to the common canard that while detective fiction is accepted as entertainment it cannot be taken with true seriousness. Winks knows, however, that to be serious is not to be solemn. Thus MODUS OPERANDI has the wit and elegance only true assurance permits. Its method is to meander through the sorts and conditions of the genre-through Ambler, Buchan, Chandler, Chesterton, Christie, Cross, Doyle, Freeling, Greene, and Hammett; through P. D; James, Kipling, Le Carre, Poe, Sayers, Simenon, Sj6wall & Wahloo, and others of their colleagues, European and American-taking from each a characteristic, a touch of place, of approach, of predilection, all in the service of producing not an encyclopedia or even a history but rather a deeply personal essay in defense of detective fiction as an accompaniment to the civilized life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robin W. Winks (December 5, 1930 in Indiana - April 7, 2003 in New Haven, Connecticut) was an American academic, historian, diplomat, and writer on the subject of fiction, especially detective novels. After joining the faculty of Yale University in 1957, he rose in 1996-1999 to become the Randolph Townsend Professor of History and Master of Berkeley College. At Oxford University he served as George Eastman Professor in 1992-3, and as Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History in 1999-2000.

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Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story by Ernest Mandel. Minneapolis. 1986. University of Minnesota Press. 0816614636. 152 pages. hardcover.

  
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. Born in Frankfurt, Mandel was recruited to the Belgian section of the international Trotskyist movement, the Fourth International, in his youth in Antwerp. His parents, Henri and Rosa Mandel, were Jewish emigres from Poland, the former a member of Rosa Luxemburg's and Karl Liebknecht's Spartacist League. Ernest's start of university study was interrupted when the German occupying forces closed the university. During World War II, he escaped twice after being arrested in the course of resistance activities, and survived imprisonment in the German concentration camp at Dora. After the war, he became a leader of the Belgian Trotskyists and the youngest member of the Fourth International secretariat, alongside Michel Pablo and others. He gained respect as a prolific journalist with a clear and lively style, as an orthodox Marxist theoretician, and as a talented debater. He wrote for numerous media outlets in the 1940s and 1950s including Het Parool, Le Peuple, l'Observateur and Agence France-Presse. At the height of the Cold War, he publicly defended the merits of Marxism in debate with the social democrat and future Dutch premier Joop den Uyl. After the 1946 World Congress of the Fourth International, Mandel was elected into the leadership of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International. In line with its policy, he joined the Belgian Socialist Party where he was a leader of a militant socialist tendency, becoming editor of the socialist newspaper La Gauche (and writing for its Flemish sister publication, Links), a member of the economic studies commission of the General Federation of Belgian Labour and an associate of the Belgian syndicalist Andre Renard. He and his comrades were expelled from the Socialist Party not long after the general strike in 1960-1961 Winter General Strike for opposing its coalition with the Christian Democrats and its acceptance of anti-strike legislation. He was one of the main initiators of the 1963 reunification between the International Secretariat and the majority of the International Committee of the Fourth International, a public faction led by James Cannon's Socialist Workers Party that had withdrawn from the FI in 1953. The regroupment formed the Reunified Fourth International (also known as the USFI or USec). Until his death in 1995, Mandel remained the most prominent leader and theoretician of both the USFI and of its Belgian section, the Communist League (Belgium). Until the publication of his massive book Marxist Economic Theory in French in 1962, Mandel's Marxist articles were written mainly under a variety of pseudonyms and his activities as Fourth Internationalist were little known outside the left. After publishing Marxist Economic Theory, Mandel traveled to Cuba and worked closely with Che Guevara on economic planning, after Guevara (who was fluent in French) had read the new book and encouraged Mandel's interventions. He resumed his university studies and graduated from what is now the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris in 1967. Only from 1968 did Mandel become well known as a public figure and Marxist politician, touring student campuses in Europe and America giving talks on socialism, imperialism and revolution. Although officially barred from West Germany (and several other countries at various times, including the United States, France, Switzerland, and Australia), he gained a PhD from the Free University of Berlin in 1972 (where he taught some months), published as Late Capitalism, and he subsequently gained a lecturer position at the Free University of Brussels. In 1972, his exclusion from the United States was upheld in the US Supreme Court case Kleindienst v. Mandel. In 1978 he delivered the Alfred Marshall Lectures at the University of Cambridge, on the topic of the long waves of capitalist development. Mandel campaigned on behalf of numerous dissident left-wing intellectuals suffering political repression, championed the cancellation of the third world debt, and in the Mikhail Gorbachev era spearheaded a petition for the rehabilitation of the accused in the Moscow Trials of 1936-38. As a man in his 70s, he travelled to Russia to defend his vision of a free and democratic socialism and continued to support the idea of Revolution in the West until his death. In total, he published approximately 2,000 articles and around 30 books during his life in German, Dutch, French, English and other languages, which were in turn translated into many more languages. During the Second World War, he was one of the editors of the underground newspaper, Het Vrije Woord. In addition, he also edited or contributed to many books, maintained a voluminous correspondence, and went on speaking engagements worldwide. He considered it his mission to transmit the heritage of classical Marxist thought, deformed by the experience of Stalinism and the Cold War, to a new generation. And to a large extent he did influence a generation of scholars and activists in their understanding of important Marxist concepts. In his writings, perhaps most striking is the tension between creative independent thinking and the desire for a strict adherence to Marxist doctrinal orthodoxy. Due to his commitment to socialist democracy, he has even been characterised as "Luxemburgist". He is probably remembered most of all for being a tireless rationalist populariser of basic Marxist ideas, for his books on late capitalism and Long-Wave theory, and for his moral-intellectual leadership in the Trotskyist movement. Despite critics claiming that he was 'too soft on Stalinism', Mandel remained a classic rather than a conservative Trotskyist: writing about the Soviet bureaucracy but also why capitalism hadn't suffered a death agony. His late capitalism was late in the sense of delayed rather than near-death. He still believed though that this system hadn't overcome its tendency to crises. A leading German Marxist, Elmar Altvater, stated that Mandel had done much for the survival of Marxism in the German Federal Republic. Mandel was co-founder, with Livio Maitan, of the International Institute for Research and Education, which was selected as the home of the Ernest Mandel Study Centre after this death. Working together with the Ernest Mandel Foundation, the IIRE plays a key role in expanding the circulation of Mandel's works.

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A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy. New York. 1997. Scribner. 0684837935. 1st Appearance In English Of These Daily Thoughts To Nourish The Soul Written and Selected From The World's Sacred Texts. Translated from the Russian by Peter Sekirin. 384 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - This is the first-ever English-language edition of the book Leo Tolstoy considered to be his most important contribution to humanity, the work of his life's last years. Widely read in prerevolutionary Russia, banned and forgotten under Communism; and recently rediscovered to great excitement, A Calendar of Wisdom is a day-by-day guide that illuminates the path of a life worth living with a brightness undimmed by time. Unjustly censored for nearly a century, it deserves to be placed with the few books in our history that will never cease teaching us the essence of what is important in this world.

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. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have produced acclaimed translations of works by Mikhail Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekhov, and Leo Tolstoy. Their translation of Dostoevsky's THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Their translations of Tolstoy's WHAT IS ART? and Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA are published in Penguin Classics. Pevear, a native of Boston and Volokhonsky, of St. Petersburg, are married to each other and live in Paris.

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Essential Encounters  by Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury. New York. 2002. Modern Language Association. 9780873527941. MLA Texts and Translations. Translated by Cheryl Toman. 94 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Published in 1969, Essential Encounters is the first novel by a woman of sub-Saharan francophone Africa. Thérèse Kuoh-Moukoury, of Cameroon, wrote it "to inspire other women to write." Its story of love, infertility, a failed marriage, and adultery looks at both interpersonal connections and national politics from a feminist perspective. In the introduction the volume editor, Cheryl Toman, provides valuable background with a discussion of African matriarchy, past and present; ethnic groups in Cameroon; interracial relationships; and polygamy as it affects women's roles in the family and their interaction with one another. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Born February 7, 1938, in Yaoundé, Cameroon; daughter of Jacques Kuoh-Moukouri (an administrator and author). Education: Attended Institut des Hautes Études d'Outre-Mer (Overseas Territories' Institute for Higher Studies), France; earned law degree.

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