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Gombrowicz, Witold. Diary. New Haven. 2012. Yale University Press. 9780300118063. Translated from the Polish By Lillian Vallee. Preface by Rita Gombrowicz. 783 pages. paperback.  Cover illustration: David Levine, ‘Witold Gombrowicz’ (1988).

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 This edition also includes ten previously unpublished pages from the 1969 portion of the diary.

And the Diary as they first appeared in English in three individual volumes:

Diary, Volume One: 1953-56 by Witold Gombrowicz. Evanston. 1988. Northwestern University Press. Translated From The Polish By Lillian Vallee. 232 pages. Cover art by Andrzej Dudzinski. 0810107147. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This is the first English translation of the DIARY, the most Polish and the most universal of Witold Gombrowicz's work. Gombrowicz, who left Poland at thirty-five and never returned, whose writings have been partly or totally banned in his own country - the DIARY was published in Poland for the first time in 1986 - has had an impact on Polish literature unlike any of his contemporaries. In the editions smuggled into Poland from the West, he was read by his own generation and by the generations that followed. He was read and imitated. But Gombrowicz changed more than the image of Polish literature. If literature cannot influence national character, it can at least influence the national image, its understanding and evaluation of itself. That is what Gombrowicz changed: the image and stereotype of the Pole. The Gombrowicz Me with which the Diary begins is what is most fascinating in this work and makes it great literature; through this Me Gombrowicz presents the universality of the most personal experience in its concreteness and mixture of Gombrowiczian categories: the high and the low, maturity and immaturity, purity and impurity, joy and pain, aggression and transgression in all human relations. This volume addresses the debt of literature to pain, the tyranny of form, the terrible link between beauty and inferiority, the allure of ideology. Here is the moral and visceral core of a great writer's sensibility.

Diary, Volume Two: 1957-61 by Witold Gombrowicz. Evanston. 1989. Northwestern University Press. Translated From the Polish By Lillian Vallee. 239 pages. Cover art by Andrzej Dudzinski. 0810107163. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This is the first English translation of the DIARY, the most Polish and the most universal of Witold Gombrowicz's work. Gombrowicz, who left Poland at thirty-five and never returned, whose writings have been partly or totally banned in his own country - the DIARY was published in Poland for the first time in 1986 - has had an impact on Polish literature unlike any of his contemporaries. In the editions smuggled into Poland from the West, he was read by his own generation and by the generations that followed. He was read and imitated. But Gombrowicz changed more than the image of Polish literature. If literature cannot influence national character, it can at least influence the national image, its understanding and evaluation of itself. That is what Gombrowicz changed: the image and stereotype of the Pole. Volume Two of the DIARY explores a more personal and intimate side of Gombrowicz in his adopted country of Argentina. Here Gombrowicz takes the reader into salons, private homes, encounters in restaurants and theaters, dramatizing and self-dramatizing, turning the Diary into a work blending techniques of fiction and theater. His sustained analysis of the nature of pain and his dramatization of the cruel paradox of freedom rank with the greatest accomplishments of contemporary literature.

Diary, Volume Three: 1961-66 by Witold Gombrowicz. Evanston. 1993. Northwestern University Press. Translated From The Polish By Lillian Vallee. 215 pages. Cover art by Andrzej Dudzinski. 081910718x. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This is the first English translation of the DIARY, the most Polish and the most universal of Witold Gombrowicz’s work. Gombrowicz (1904-1969), who left Poland at thirty-five and never returned, whose writings have been partly or totally banned in his own country - the DIARY was published in Poland for the first time in 1986 - has had an impact on Polish literature unlike any of his contemporaries. In the editions smuggled into Poland from the West, he was read by his own generation and by the generations that followed. He was read and imitated. But Gombrowicz changed more than the image of Polish literature. If literature cannot influence national character, it can at least influence the national image, its understanding and evaluation of itself. That is what Gombrowicz changed: the image and stereotype of the Pole. Volume Three of the DIARY records the years from 1961 through 1966 as Gombrowicz leaves Argentina for Europe, spends a year in Berlin, and finally settles in a small town on the French Riviera. It contains sections on Gombrowicz’s friendship with Bruno Schulz; extends his reflection on die nature of pain in Dante’s Divine Comedy, a work he describes as ‘the most monstrous poem at world literature’; and records his responses to (he work of his literary contemporaries and his meditations on his own place among men. This volume also includes diary entries from 1967 and 1968 not published in the original and provided by Gombrowicz’s widow, Rita Gombrowicz. The DIARY reveals the moral and visceral core of a great writer’s sensibility and demonstrates what is most concrete and universal in his experience.

Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish novelist and dramatist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and an absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life but is now considered one of the foremost figures of Polish literature. Gombrowicz was born in Maloszyce, in Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, he studied law at Warsaw University He spent a year in Paris where, he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales. He was less than diligent in his studies, but his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean. When he returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started writing, but soon rejected the legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to manifest his 'worse' and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kepinski turned out to be a failure. At the turn of the 20's and 30's he started to write short stories, which were later printed under the title Memoirs Of A Time Of Immaturity. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns started appearing in the press, mainly in the 'Kurier Poranny He met with other young writers and intellectuals forming an artistic cafe society in 'Zodiak' and 'Ziemianska', both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the famous Polish cruise liner, Chrobry, to South America. When he found out about the outbreak of war in Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires till the war was over but was actually to stay there until 1963 - often, especially during the war, in great poverty. At the end of the 40s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position among Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures in Fray Mocho cafe, and finally, by publishing in 1947, a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke written with the help of Gombrowicz's friends. Today, this version of the novel is considered to be a significant literary event in the history of Argentine literature; however, when published it did not bring any great renown to the author, nor did the publication of Gombrowicz's drama 'Slub' in Spanish in 1948. From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of PeKaO SA Bank. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc and from 1951 he started having works published in the Parisian journal 'Culture,' where, in 1953, fragments of 'Dziennik' appeared. In the same year he published a volume of work which included the drama 'Slub' and the novel 'Trans-Atlantyk', where the subject of national identity on emigration was controversially raised. After October 1956 four books written by Gombrowicz appeared in Poland and they brought him great renown despite the fact that the authorities did not allow the publication of 'Dziennik', and later organized a slanderous campaign against Gombrowicz in 1963 who was then staying in West Berlin. In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognized globally and many of his works were translated, including 'Pornografia' and 'Kosmos' His dramas were staged in many theatres all around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden. In 1963 he returned to Europe, where he received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation during his stay in Berlin, and in 1964 he spent three months in Royaumont abbey near Paris, where he employed Rita Labrosse, a Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature, as his secretary. In 1964 he moved to Vence near Nice in the south of France, where he spent the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the fame which culminated in May 1967 with the International Publishers Prize and six months before his death, married Rita Labrosse. Gombrowicz wrote in Polish, however, in view of his decision not to allow his works to be published in his native country until the ban on the unabridged version of 'Dziennik', in which he described the Polish authorities slanderous attacks on him, was lifted he remained a largely unknown figure to the general reading public until the first half of the 1970s. Despite this, his works were printed in Polish by the Paris Literary Institute of Jerzy Giedroyc and translated into more than 30 languages. Morover, his dramas were repeatedly staged in the most important theatres in the whole world by the prominent directors such as: Jorge Lavelli, Alf Sjoeberg, Ingmar Bergman along with Jerzy Jarocki and Jerzy Grzegorzewski in Poland.

Lillian Vallee has translated Czeslaw Milosz and Jan Kott as well as Jan Mur's JOURNAL OF A POLISH CAMP INTERNEE In 1978 she won the translation prize of the Poetry Society of America.

Jan Kott is the author of SHAKESPEARE OUR CONTEMPORARY, as well as THE THEATER OF ESSENCE and THE BOTTOM TRANSLATION.

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Selected Stories by Benny Andersen. Willimantic. 1983. Curbstone Press. One Of Denmark's Most Recognized Contemporary Authors. Various Translators. Paperback Original. 97 pages. 0915306255.

DESCRIPTION - 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.

 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.

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A Childhood by Harry Crews. New York. 1978. Harper & Row. 171 pages. Jacket design by Honi Werner. 0060109327. October 1978. hardcover.

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.'

And, in an illustrated edtion by University of Georgia Press:

Crews, Harry. A Childhood. Athens. 1995. University Of Georgia Press. 0820317594. Illustrated by Michael McCurdy. 192 pages. hardcover.

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.

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The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin. London. 1953. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 86 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Isaiah Berlin, Fellow of All Souls and former Fellow of New College, Oxford, has long enjoyed a considerable reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. His brilliant lectures on ‘Freedom and its Betrayal’, recently broadcast, have introduced him to an even wider public. In this essay on the sources of Tolstoy’s historical scepticism he deals vividly and originally with a little-known subject that is today specially relevant. Leo Tolstoy held uncompromising views about the laws and writing of history, and embodied these in the celebrated epilogue to War and Peace, as well as in the philosophical digressions interpolated here and there. These ‘theoretical asides’ have found little favour with the majority of Tolstoy’s critics. The epilogue tends to be spoken of as a prolix and irrelevant general discussion, a tedious sermon which, whatever its contemporary impact, now seems pedestrian and superfluous. Mr. Berlin does not share this view. Tolstoy’s reflections on history seem to him a great deal more original and sharp than the conventional comments of his critics. This essay is an attempt to relate Tolstoy’s analysis of history to his changing view, both conscious and semi-conscious, of life and art. Mr. Berlin provides evidence of a seldom remarked influence upon Tolstoy exercised by a celebrated early enemy of democracy, Joseph de Maistre. Tolstoy is known to have read the Savoyard publicist when he was writing WAR AND PEACE. Both Tolstoy and de Maistre were, to some extent, aristocratic dilettanti in open revolt against the rationalism and optimism of their own times. Their views, which often appeared to their contemporaries as merely perverse and obscurantist efforts to retard the inevitable march of enlightenment, seem, in the middle of the twentieth century, much more realistic and formidable. Both Tolstoy and de Maistre delighted in formulating solutions to problems in terms as unpalatable as possible to the majority of their contemporaries. But, whatever may be thought of the answers, or of their authors’ motives for urging them, the questions seem a good deal more ominous today than a century ago. Tolstoy put these question with characteristic force and directness, and at the same time made it impossible for himself to solve them, for reasons which this essay attempts to make clear.

The New American Library/Mentor edition:

The Hedgehog and The Fox by Isaiah Berlin. New York. 1957. New American Library/Mentor. M198. 128 pages. May 1957.

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Man's Fate. Is man the captain of his destiny or is he the victim of inexorable forces which combine to crush his individuality? Does any man -- or woman -- really mold history? These pertinent questions which plagued the author of WAR AND PEACE are now brilliantly examined by the noted English scholar and philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, the editor of THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: THE 18TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHERS.

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. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. In its obituary of the scholar, The Independent stated that ‘Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time ... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential’. In 1932, at the age of 23, he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he played a crucial role in founding Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was appointed a CBE in 1946, knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. The annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held at the Hampstead Synagogue and both Wolfson College and the British Academy each summer. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism has had a lasting influence. HENRY HARDY, editor of the four-volume series of Sir Isaiah’s collected essays, took his B. Phil, and D. Phil, from Wolfson College, and is now an editor and publisher. His edition of selected writings by Arnold Mallinson, Quinquagesimo Anno, was published under his own imprint in 1974. ROGER HAUSHEER is a member of Wolfson College, Oxford, and is studying the philosophy of J.G. Fichte. At present he is also Lecturer in British Studies at the University of Giessen, West Germany.

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War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. New York. 2007. Knopf. Translated From The Russian By Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky. 1273 pages. Jacket image: Cathedral Square in the Kremlin by Fyodor Alexeyev. October 2007. 0307266931.

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.

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.

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, and their translation of Dostoevsky's DEMONS was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.

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Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux. Boston. 2001. Houghton Mifflin. 424 pages. Jacket design by John Gall. Jacket photograph by Tommy Steele. 0618095012. May 2001.

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. 

PAUL THEROUX (Born: April 10, 1941) is the internationally acclaimed author of such travel books as THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR, THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS, SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS, and THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA. His many novels include HOTEL HONOLULU, KOWLOON TONG, MY OTHER LIFE, and MILLROY THE MAGICIAN. His novels SAINT JACK, THE MOSQUITO COAST, and HALF MOON STREET have been made into successful feature films. Theroux resides in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

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Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje. New York. 1982. Norton. 207 pages. Jacket design by Antonina Krass. 0393016374. September 1982. hardcover.

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 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.

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.

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In The Skin Of A Lion by Michael Ondaatje. New York. 1987. Knopf. 244 pages. Jacket illustration & design by Bascove. 0394563638. September 1987. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Michael Ondaatje's previous books - THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID, COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER, and RUNNING IN THE FAMILY - have earned him the respect and praise of his fellow writers. Now, with his new novel, IN THE SKIN OF A LION, he has written a book that is certain to gain him the wider readership he so richly deserves. We begin with a young girl sitting in a car in the early morning hours. The man beside her is telling her a story, his story - of his boyhood in the Canadian backwoods, of his arrival in the bustling Toronto of the 1920s, of the passionate and fabulous adventures he underwent there. His name is Patrick Lewis, and as his tale unfolds, other people come forward to illuminate his life: the two women - friends, actresses - whom he loved. an elusive millionaire. a charmed thief. a nun blown off a bridge, only to be plucked - in midair - to safety. Each has his or her moment at the center of the story, as it progresses, as it doubles back on itself, as its full meaning and splendor are finally revealed. Combining history and poetry, mythic events and sensual detail, Michael Ondaatje has fashioned a luminous work of the imagination. 'A dazzling novel of power and style, dealing with human situations through verbal cinema. An extraordinary performance on the level - and beyond - of Ondaatje's THE COLLECTED WORKS OF BILLY THE KID and COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER. He has invented a new form. ' - Leon Edel. 'Michael Ondaatje's fiction is as original and evocative as any being written today. A brilliantly imaginative blend of history, lore, passion and poetry, In the Skin of a Lion is his best book. ' - Russell Banks.

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.

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Polish Memories by Witold Gombrowicz. New Haven. 2004. Yale University Press. 0300104103. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. 191 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo coutesy of the beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.  

DESCRIPTION - Although Witold Gombrowicz's unique, idiosyncratic writings include a three-volume Diary, this voluminous document offers few facts about his early life in Poland before his books were banned there and he went into voluntary exile. Polish Memories-a series of autobiographical sketches Gombrowicz composed for Radio Free Europe during his years in Argentina in the late 1950s-fills the gap in our knowledge. Written in a straightforward way without his famous linguistic inventions, the book presents an engaging account of Gombrowicz's childhood, youth, literary beginnings, and fellow writers in interwar Poland and reveals how these experiences and individuals shaped his seemingly outlandish concepts about the self, culture, art, and society. In addition, the book helps readers understand the numerous autobiographical allusions in his fiction and brings a new level of understanding and appreciation to his life and work. Witold Gombrowicz is the author of Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, Pornografia, and Cosmos, the first two available from Yale University Press. These, along with his plays and the three-volume Diary, have been translated into more than thirty languages.

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.

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Emilio's Carnival by Italo Svevo. New Haven. 2001. Yale University Press. Newly Translated from the Italian by Beth Archer Brombert. Introduction By Victor Brombert. 233 pages. Jacket illustration by Umberto Veruda, Terzetto'. 0300090471.

DESCRIPTION - Italo Svevo's early novel SENILITA remained unknown for many years until James Joyce encountered the novelist in Trieste and came to admire SENILITA as a preeminent modern Italian novel. Joyce helped to launch Svevo's career, and years later Svevo achieved great fame with his masterpiece, THE CONFESSIONS OF ZENO. In SENILITA, 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.

Italo Svevo was born in Trieste in 1861, Educated primarily in Bavaria, he wrote in Italian, but had to work as a young man as a French and German correspondence clerk in a Trieste bank. He was not happy in the business world and at the age of thirty-one he wrote and had published at his own expense A LIFE, It was followed four years later by AS A MAN GROWS OLDER. But both books were such failures that Svevo gave up writing for the next twenty years. During this time he became a good friend of James Joyce who was so impressed with Svevo's work that when CONFESSIONS OF ZENO was published several years later, Joyce was able to use his influence to make Svevo known in Europe. Svevo was just beginning to become recognized in Italy when he was killed in 1928 in a car accident.

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.

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The Outsider by Ernesto Sabato. New York. 1950. Knopf. Translated From The Spanish By Harriet De Onis. 177 pages. Jacket design by ALVIN LUSTIG. Originally published in Spanish as El Tunel, 1945. hardcover.

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.

Sabato, Ernesto. The Tunnel. New York. 1988. Available Press. 0345351924. Originally Published As The Outsider by Knopf In 1950. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. 138 pages. paperback. Cover by Alicia Segal/Sevil.  

DESCRIPTION - THE TUNNEL is one of the most highly regarded short novels of the twentieth century. Admired by such writers as Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham Greene on its first publication in 1948, it has been translated into most of the major languages of the world, but has been long out of print in English for several decades. Now is a fresh and compelling translation by Margaret Sayers Peden, it is available for a new readership.

Sabato, Ernesto. The Tunnel. New York. 2011. Penguin Books. 9780143106531. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. 140 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - An unforgettable psychological novel of obsessive love, The Tunnel was championed by Albert Camus, Thomas Mann, and Graham Greene upon its publication in 1948 and went on to become an international bestseller. At its center is an artist named Juan Pablo Castel, who recounts from his prison cell his murder of a woman named María Iribarne. Obsessed from the moment he sees her examining one of his paintings, Castel fantasizes for months about how they might meet again. When he happens upon her one day, a relationship develops that convinces him of their mutual love. But Castel's growing paranoia leads him to destroy the one thing he truly cares about.

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". Sabato was distinguished by his bald pate and brush moustache and wore tinted spectacles and open-necked shirts.  He was born in Rojas, a small town in Buenos Aires Province. Sabato began his studies at the Colegio Nacional de La Plata. He then studied physics at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he earned a PhD. He then attended the Sorbonne in Paris and worked at the Curie Institute. After World War II, he lost interest in science and started writing. Sabato's oeuvre includes three novels: El Túnel (1948), Sobre héroes y tumbas (1961) and Abaddón el exterminador (1974). The first of these received critical acclaim upon its publication from, among others, fellow writers Albert Camus and Thomas Mann. The second is regarded as his masterpiece, though he nearly burnt it like many of his other works. Sabato's essays cover topics as diverse as metaphysics, politics and tango. His writings led him to receive many international prizes, including the Miguel de Cervantes Prize (Spain), the Legion of Honour (France), the Jerusalem Prize (Israel), and the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France). At the request of President Raúl Alfonsín, he presided over the CONADEP Commission that investigated the fate of those who suffered forced disappearance during the Dirty War of the 1970s. The result of these findings was published in 1984, bearing the title Nunca Más (Never Again).

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The Deptford Trilogy is comprised of a series of novels by Canadian writer Robertson Davies that begins when a young boy throws a snowball at another boy, hitting a pregnant woman by mistake. The consequences of that unfold over the course of the three novels in the trilogy. -  Fifth Business (1970), The Manticore (1972), and World of Wonders (1975).

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies. New York. 1970. Viking Press. 308 pages. Jacket design by Mel Williamson. 0670312134. November 1970. hardcover.

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.

The Manticore by Robertson Davies. New York. 1972. Viking Press. 310 pages. Jacket design by Hal Siegel. 0670453137. November 1972. hardcover.

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 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.

World of Wonders by Robertson Davies. New York. 1976. Viking Press. 358 pages. Jacket design by Honi Werner. 0670788120. March 1976.

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 - 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.

William Robertson Davies, 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 sometimes said to have detested. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate college at the University of Toronto. Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and language. His father, Senator William Rupert Davies, was a newspaperman, and both his parents were voracious readers. He, in turn, read everything he could. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama. He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and while there attended services at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene. He would later leave the Presbyterian Church and convert to Anglicanism over objections to Calvinist theology. After Upper Canada College, he studied at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 1932 until 1935. At Queen's he was enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree, and wrote for the student paper, The Queen's Journal. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLitt degree in 1938. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. In 1940 he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. Also that year Davies married Australian Brenda Mathews, whom he had met at Oxford, and who was then working as stage manager for the theatre. Davies' early life provided him with themes and material to which he would often return in his later work, including the theme of Canadians returning to England to finish their education, and the theatre. Davies and his new bride returned to Canada in 1940, where he took the position of literary editor at the magazine Saturday Night. Two years later, he became editor of the Peterborough Examiner in the small city of Peterborough, Ontario, northeast of Toronto. Again he was able to mine his experiences here for many of the characters and situations which later appeared in his novels and plays. Davies, along with family members William Rupert Davies and Arthur Davies, purchased several media outlets. Along with the Examiner newspaper, they owned the Kingston Whig-Standard newspaper, CHEX-AM, CKWS-AM, CHEX-TV, and CKWS-TV. During his tenure as editor of the Examiner, which lasted from 1942 to 1955, and when he was publisher from 1955 to 1965, Davies published a total 18 books, produced several of his own plays and wrote articles for various journals. For example, Davies set out his theory of acting in his Shakespeare for Young Players and then put theory into practice when he wrote Eros at Breakfast, a one-act play which was named best Canadian play of the year by the 1948 Dominion Drama Festival. Eros at Breakfast was followed in close succession by Fortune, My Foe in 1949 and At My Heart's Core, a three-act play, in 1950. Meanwhile, Davies was writing humorous essays in the Examiner under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks. Some of these were collected and published in The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks, and later in Samuel Marchbanks' Almanack Also during the 1950s, Davies played a major role in launching the Stratford Shakespearean Festival of Canada. He served on the Festival's board of governors and collaborated with the Festival's director, Sir Tyrone Guthrie, in publishing three books about the Festival's early years. Although his first love was drama and he had achieved some success with his occasional humorous essays, Davies found greater success in fiction. His first three novels, which later became known as The Salterton Trilogy, were Tempest-Tost, Leaven of Malice, and A Mixture of Frailties These novels explored the difficulty of sustaining a cultural life in Canada, and life on a small-town newspaper, subjects of which Davies had first-hand knowledge. In 1960 Davies joined Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he would teach literature until 1981. The following year he published a collection of essays on literature A Voice From the Attic, and was awarded the Lorne Pierce Medal for his literary achievements. In 1963 he became the Master of Massey College, the University of Toronto's new graduate college. During his stint as Master, he initiated the tradition of writing and telling ghost stories at the yearly Christmas celebrations. His stories were later collected in his book High Spirits Davies drew on his interest in Jungian psychology to create what was perhaps his greatest novel: Fifth Business, a book that draws heavily on Davies' own experiences, his love of myth and magic and his knowledge of small-town mores. The narrator, like Davies, is of immigrant Canadian background, with a father who runs the town paper. The book's characters act in roles that roughly correspond to Jungian archetypes according to Davies' belief in the predominance of the spirit over the things of the world. Davies built on the success of Fifth Business with two more novels: The Manticore, a novel cast largely in the form of a Jungian analysis, and World of Wonders Together these three books came to be known as The Deptford Trilogy. When Davies retired from his position at the University, his seventh novel, a satire of academic life, The Rebel Angels, was published, followed by What's Bred in the Bone These two books, along with The Lyre of Orpheus, became known as The Cornish Trilogy. During his retirement he continued to write novels which further established him as a major figure in the literary world: The Lyre of Orpheus, Murther and Walking Spirits and The Cunning Man A third novel in what would have been a further trilogy was in progress at Davies' death. He also realized a long-held dream when he penned the libretto to an opera: The Golden Ass, based on The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, just like that written by one of the characters in Davies' 1958 A Mixture of Frailties. The opera was performed by the Canadian Opera Company at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto, in April, 1999, several years after Davies' death. Davies was a fine public speaker: deft, often humorous, and unafraid to be unfashionable.

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Demian by Hermann Hesse. London. 1958. Peter Owen/Vision Press. Translated From The German By W. J. Strachan. 184 pages. Jacket design by Eric Patton.

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).

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Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux. Boston. 1998. Houghton Mifflin. 358 pages. Jacket design by Michaela Sullivan. Jacket photograph by David Perry/Photonica. 0395907284. October 1998.

I doubt that Paul Theroux's story of the trajectory of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul would have pleased Sir Vidia, but it is a remarkable tale nonetheless, revealing as much about Paul Theroux as it does about V. S. Naipaul.

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.

PAUL THEROUX (Born: April 10, 1941) is the internationally acclaimed author of such travel books as THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR, THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS, SUNRISE WITH SEAMONSTERS, and THE KINGDOM BY THE SEA. His many novels include HOTEL HONOLULU, KOWLOON TONG, MY OTHER LIFE, and MILLROY THE MAGICIAN. His novels SAINT JACK, THE MOSQUITO COAST, and HALF MOON STREET have been made into successful feature films. Theroux resides in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

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A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul. New York. 1979. Knopf. Jacket design by Herb Lubalin Associates. 278 pages. May 1979. 0394505735. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - The setting is Africa today, in a country somewhere in the interior that has recently suffered revolution and civil war and is now under the authority of a new President-a man whose immense, almost insane energy and untempered crudity have made his power felt even in the remotest villages. Youth squads have sprouted up everywhere. There is a whole new apparatus in the university-scholars devoted to chronicling the wars and coups of 'the new Africa. ' Property changes hands mysteriously, and overnight. People are there one day and gone the next. There are executions. No relationship, however private, passionate or casual, is free of an unhinging insecurity. Naipaul takes us completely into the existence of one isolated man who has come to live in an isolated village at 'a bend in the river. ' He is restless, edgy, reflective-strangely, almost deliberately passive in relation to the world around him; to his work, to his sexuality, to both his past and his future. And it is the remarkable achievement of the novel that through the uneasy submission of this one man to the events and conditions that have come to define his life, we ourselves become submerged in, and held by, his reality, and the reality of his time and place. A Bend in the River is the most convincing vision we have yet been given of what 'ordinary' life is like in Africa today. Its publication is an important literary event.

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul and, familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidad and Tobago-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 won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, 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. In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants. His breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961.

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The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino. New York. 1962. Random House. Translated From The Italian By Archibald Colquhoun. 246 pages. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.

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. Italo Calvino was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the Cosmicomics collection of short stories, and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter's night a traveler.

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). Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba, to botanists Mario Calvino and Evelina Mameli. (His brother was Floriano Calvino, a famous geologist.) The family soon moved to its homeland Italy, where Italo lived most of his life. They moved to Sanremo, on the Italian Riviera, where his father had come from (his mother came from Sardinia). The young Italo became a member of the Avanguardisti (a fascist youth organization in which membership was practically compulsory) with whom he took part in the occupation of the French Riviera. He suffered some religious troubles, as his relatives were openly atheist in a largely Catholic country. He was sent to attend a Waldensian private school. Calvino met Eugenio Scalfari (later a politician and the founder of the major Italian newspaper La Repubblica), with whom he would remain a close friend. In 1941 Calvino moved to Turin, after a long hesitation over living there or in Milan. He often humorously described this choice, and used to describe Turin as ‘a city that is serious but sad.' In 1943 he joined the Partisans in the Italian Resistance, in the Garibaldi brigade, with the battlename of Santiago. With Scalfari he created the MUL (liberal universitarian movement). Calvino then entered the (still clandestine) Italian Communist Party. Calvino graduated from the University of Turin in 1947 with a thesis on Joseph Conrad and started working with the official Communist paper L'Unità. He also had a short relationship with the Einaudi publishing house, which put him in contact with Norberto Bobbio, Natalia Ginzburg, Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini. With Vittorini he wrote for the weekly Il Politecnico (a cultural magazine associated with the university). Calvino then left Einaudi to work mainly with L'Unità and the newborn communist weekly political magazine Rinascita. He worked again for the Einaudi house from 1950, responsible for the literary volumes. The following year, presumably to advance in the communist party, he visited the Soviet Union. The reports and correspondence he produced from this visit were later collected and earned him literary prizes. In 1952 Calvino wrote with Giorgio Bassani for Botteghe Oscure, a magazine named after the popular name of the party's head-offices. He also worked for Il Contemporaneo, a Marxist weekly. From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with the actress Elsa de' Giorgi, an older and married woman. Calvino wrote hundreds of love letters to her. Excerpts were published by Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy. In 1957, disillusioned by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Calvino left the Italian Communist party. His letter of resignation was published in L'Unità and soon became famous. He found new outlets for his periodic writings in the magazines Passato e Presente and Italia Domani. Together with Vittorini he became a co-editor of Il Menabò di letteratura, a position which Calvino held for many years. Despite severe restrictions in the US against foreigners holding communist views, Calvino was allowed to visit the United States, where he stayed six months from 1959 to 1960 (four of which he spent in New York), after an invitation by the Ford Foundation. Calvino was particularly impressed by the ‘New World': ‘Naturally I visited the South and also California, but I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York.' The letters he wrote to Einaudi describing this visit to the United States, were first published as ‘American Diary 1959-1960' in the book Hermit in Paris in 2003. In 1962 Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara. This encounter later led him to contribute an article on the 15th of October 1967, a few days after the death of Guevara, describing the lasting impression Guevara made on him. Back in Italy, and once again working for Einaudi, Calvino started publishing some of his cosmicomics in Il Caffè, a literary magazine. Vittorini's death in 1966 influenced Calvino greatly. He went through what he called an ‘intellectual depression', which the writer himself described as an important passage in his life: ‘ I ceased to be young. Perhaps it's a metabolic process, something that comes with age, I'd been young for a long time, perhaps too long, suddenly I felt that I had to begin my old age, yes, old age, perhaps with the hope of prolonging it by beginning it early'. He then started to frequent Paris, where he was nicknamed L'ironique amuse. Here he soon joined some important circles like the Oulipo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle) and met Roland Barthes and Claude Levi-Strauss, in the fermenting atmosphere that was going to evolve into 1968's cultural revolution (the French May). During his French experience, he also became fond of Raymond Queneau's works, which would influence his later production. Calvino had more intense contacts with the academic world, with notable experiences at the Sorbonne (with Barthes) and at Urbino's university. His interests included classical studies: Honore de Balzac, Ludovico Ariosto, Dante, Ignacio de Loyola, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Giacomo Leopardi. At the same time, not without surprising Italian intellectual circles, Calvino wrote novels for Playboy's Italian edition (1973). He became a regular contributor to the important Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. In 1975 Calvino was made Honorary Member of the American Academy, and the following year he was awarded the Austrian State Literary Prize for European literature. He visited Japan and Mexico and gave lectures in several American towns. In 1981 he was awarded the prestigious French Legion d'Honneur. During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared some notes for a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. However, on 6 September, he was admitted to the ancient hospital of Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, where he died during the night between the 18 and 19 September of a cerebral hemorrhage. His lecture notes were published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium in 1988.

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Home is the Sailor by Jorge Amado. New York. 1964. Knopf. Translated from the Portuguese by Harriet De Onis. 301 pages. Typography, binding, and jacket design by Warren Chappell. March 1964. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - GOOD-NATURED, incompetent, friendly, and lustful-at sixty the crony of college students and high-living officials-Vasco Moscoso de Aragao 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?'-the book asks that eternal question, not ponderously, but as inherent in a triumph of the story-telling art.

Jorge Amado de Faria (August 10, 1912 - August 6, 2001) was a Brazilian writer of the Modernist school. He was the best-known of modern Brazilian writers, his work having been translated into some 30 languages and popularized in film, notably Dona Flor and her Two Husbands (Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) in 1978. His work dealt largely with the poor urban black and mulatto communities of Bahia. Amado was born in a fazenda (‘farm’) in the inland of the city of Itabuna, in the southern part of the Brazilian state of Bahia, son of João Amado de Faria and D. Eulália Leal. The farm Amado was born in was precisely located on the village of Ferradas, which though today is a district of Itabuna, at the time was administered by the town of Ilhéus. That is why he considered himself a citizen of Ilhéus. In the large cocoa plantation, Amado knew the misery and the struggles of the people working the earth, living in almost slave conditions, which were to be a theme always present in his later works (for example, the notable Terras do Sem Fim of 1944). When he was only one year old the family moved to Ilhéus, a coastal city, where he spent his childhood. He attended high school in Salvador, the capital of the state. During that period Amado began to collaborate with several magazines and took part in literary life, as one of the founders of the Modernist ‘Rebels’ Academy’. Amado published his first novel, O País do Carnaval, in 1931, at age 18. Later he married Matilde Garcia Rosa and had a daughter, Lila, in 1933. The same year he published his second novel, Cacau, which increased his popularity. Amado’s leftist activities made his life difficult under the dictatorial regime of Getulio Vargas: in 1935 he was arrested for the first time, and two years later his books were publicly burned. His works were banned from Portugal, but in the rest of Europe he gained great popularity with the publication of Jubiabá in France. The book had enthusiastic reviews, including that of Nobel Prize Award winner Albert Camus. Being a militant, from 1941 to 1942 Amado was compelled to go into exile to Argentina and Uruguay. When he returned to Brazil he separated from Matilde Garcia Rosa. In 1945 he was elected to the National Constituent Assembly, as a representative of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) (he received more votes than any other candidate in the state of São Paulo). He signed a law granting freedom of religious faith. The same year he remarried, this time to the writer Zélia Gattai. In 1947 he had a son, João Jorge. The same year his party was declared illegal, and its members arrested and persecuted. Amado chose exile once again, this time in France, where he remained until he was expelled in 1950. His first daughter, Lila, had died in 1949. From 1950 to 1952 Amado lived in Czechoslovakia, where another daughter, Paloma, was born. He also travelled to the Soviet Union, winning the Stalin Peace Prize in 1951. On his return to Brazil in 1955, Amado abandoned active political life, leaving the Communist Party one year later: from that period on he dedicated himself solely to literature. His second creative phase began in 1958 with Gabriela, Cravo e Canela, which was described by Jean-Paul Sartre as ‘the best example of a folk novel’: Amado abandoned, in part, the realism and the social themes of his early works, producing a series of novels focusing mainly on feminine characters, devoted to a kind of smiling celebration of the traditions and the beauties of Bahia. His depiction of the sexual customs of his land was much to the scandal of the 1950s Brazilian society: for several years Amado could not even enter Ilhéus, where the novel was set, due to threats received for the alleged offense to the morality of the city’s women. On April 6, 1961 he was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Literature. He received the title of Doctor honoris causa from several Universities in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, Israel and France, as well as other honors in almost every South American country, including Obá de Xangô (santoon) of the Candomblé, the traditional Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia. Amado’s popularity as a writer never decreased. His books were translated into 49 languages in 55 countries, were adapted into films, theatrical works, and TV programs. They even inspired some samba schools of the Brazilian Carnival. In 1987, the House of Jorge Amado Foundation was created, in Salvador. It promotes the protection of Amado’s estate and the development of culture in Bahia. Amado died on August 6, 2001. His ashes were spread in the garden of his house four days later.

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Diary of a Mad Old Man by Junichiro Tanizaki. New York. 1965. Knopf. Translated From The Japanese By Howard Hibbett. 182 pages. Jacket design by Ellen Raskin. August 1965. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In this novel Tanizaki returns to the vein of The Key, and to a theme that has dominated much of his work: the relationship of sexual desire to the will to live. It tells the story of a seventy-seven-year-old man of exquisite tastes who suffers a stroke, and then discovers that even while his body is breaking down, his sexual urges are far from diminished. Satsuko, his flashy, modern daughter-in-law, a dancer with a murky past, senses this and follows a psychiatrist's orders to give 'her father-in-law gentle, kindly attention, not exciting him unnecessarily but not ignoring his wishes either. ' As she comes strutting in to her ringside seat at a fight, jingling the keys to her English car, flashing her expensive jewelry, with her American permanent, her French lace gloves, she is the last word in cosmopolitanism. And Utsugi is Everyman close to his end, all pretenses and reticences gone. Pitiful as he is, his diary is without self-pity; ridiculous as he is, he is never without self-mockery. Much of the novel, especially the scene in which Satsuko explains the difference between necking and petting, shines with humor. Here in a short novel is much of the tragicomedy of human existence. 'I am convinced that Tanizaki is one of the few great writers of our time. He is an author of outstanding stature and deserves to be far better known outside Japan than he is.' - IVAN MORRIS.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (24 July 1886 – 30 July 1965) was a Japanese author, one of the major writers of modern Japanese literature, and perhaps the most popular Japanese novelist after Natsume Sōseki. Some of his works present a rather shocking world of sexuality and destructive erotic obsessions; others, less sensational, subtly portray the dynamics of family life in the context of the rapid changes in 20th-century Japanese society. Frequently his stories are narrated in the context of a search for cultural identity in which constructions of 'the West' and 'Japanese tradition' are juxtaposed.

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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. New York. 1977. Knopf. 339 pages. Jacket design by R. D. Scudellari. 0394497848. September 1977.

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. , son of the richest black family in a Midwestern town. We enter it on the day of his birth, 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 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, 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 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.

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. Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 and went to graduate school at Cornell University. She later taught English at Howard University and also married and had two children before divorcing in 1964. In the late 1960s, she became the first black female editor in fiction at Random House in New York City. In the 1970s and 1980s, she developed her own reputation as an author, and her perhaps most celebrated work, Beloved, was made into a 1998 film. In 1996, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Also that year, she was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. On May 29, 2012, President Barack Obama presented Morrison with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

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Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis. London. 1952. John Lehmann. Translated From The Greek By Carl Wildman. 319 pages. hardcover.

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.

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.

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The Master and Margarita by Mikhail. Bulgakov. New York. 1967. Harper & Row. Translated from the Russian by Michael Glenny. 394 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Mercer Mayer. 

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.

And, the first translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece - 

 The Master & Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. Dana Point. 1995. Ardis Publishers. Translated From The Russian By Diana Burgin & Katherine Tiernan O'Connor. 367 pages. 0875010679.

The Devil visits 1920s Moscow and reeks havoc in this black comedy of the effects of evil and the power of truth.

DESCRIPTION - This is the first translation of the most complete text of Bulgakov's exuberant comic masterpiece, and the first annotated edition. A literary sensation from its first publication, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA has become an astonishing publishing phenomenon in Russia and has been translated into more than twenty languages, and made into plays and films. Mikhail Bulgakov's novel is now considered one of the seminal works of twentieth-century Russian literature. In this imaginative extravaganza the devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the capital of world atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. Margarita, the despairing and daring heroine, becomes a witch in an effort to save the Master, and agrees to become the devil's hostess at his annual spring ball by turns acidly satiric, fantastic, and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem. In a brilliant tour de force, Bulgakov provides a startlingly different version of Pontius Pilate's encounter with one Yeshua, a naive believer in the goodness of man. The interplay of these two narratives is part of the ingenious pleasure of this work which defies all genre classifications and expectations. The commentary and afterword provide new insight into the mysterious subtexts of the novel, and here, for the first time, THE MASTER AND MARGARITA is revealed in all its complexity.

 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. In addition to the stories in the present collection (first published in two magazines in the mid-twenties) Bulgakov wrote altogether fourteen plays, three novels and a rich and varied collection of satirical stories. Although many of his works still remain unpublished in the USSR, enough of his best books and plays have appeared posthumously, between 1955 and 1967, to have secured for Mikhail Bulgakov a place as one of the most original and powerful Russian writers of the twentieth century. Diana Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and chairperson of the Modern Language Department. Her book, SOPHIA PARNOK: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RUSSIA’S SAPPHO was published earlier this year. Katherine Tiernan O’Connor is Professor of Russian at Boston University and the author of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister—Life: The Illusion of Narrative. She it currently writing a book on Chekhov’s letters. Ellendea Proffer has translated plays and prose by Bulgakov, and is the author of MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: LIFE AND WORK.

Diana Burgin is Professor of Russian at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and chairperson of the Modern Language Department. Her book, SOPHIA PARNOK: THE LIFE AND WORK OF RUSSIA'S SAPPHO was published earlier this year. Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is Professor of Russian at Boston University and the author of Boris Pasternak's My Sister--Life: The Illusion of Narrative. She it currently writing a book on Chekhov's letters. Ellendea Proffer has translated plays and prose by Bulgakov, and is the author of MIKHAIL BULGAKOV: LIFE AND WORK.

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The Love Department by William Trevor. New York. 1967. Viking Press. 281 pages. Jacket design by Paul Bacon. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Who are the real 'enemies of love' in modern life? William Trevor's third novel is written with the same wry comedy and deadpan irony that distinguished THE OLD BOYS and THE BOARDING HOUSE, but its theme reaches out to embrace a much larger segment of humanity. The 'Love Department' of a big women's magazine, headed by the dwarfish and unloved Lady Dolores, is devoted to counseling unhappy housewives in the suburbs. Lady Dolores is disturbed by the reports of one Septimus Tuam, a young philanderer who has been cutting a wide swath among these disaffected matrons, One day there appears in her fabulous offices a hapless young man from the provinces named Edward. She hires him in his innocence and assigns him to the pursuit of Septimus Tuam, He sets out on his landlady's bicycle through the highways and byways of Wimbledon and into the lives of an assorted group of characters, each involved in his or her own way in the precarious problems of love. Septimus Tuam, it turns out, is a charmer, no mistaking it, Edward, in trying to catch up to him, must first go through many frustrations. Be it said only that 'love falls like snowflakes,' and that Septimus finally gets his dramatic comeuppance - not through any conscious act of Edward's, and not at all according to Lady Dolores's nefarious secret designs. Inventive, sardonic, wildly farcical at times, full of quizzical insights into people, THE LOVE DEPARTMENT will delight any reader with an eye for some of life's oddities.

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.

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The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera. New York. 1976. Knopf. Translated from the Czech by Peter Kussi.  213 pages. Jacket design by Lidia Ferrara. Jacket illustration by Charles Shields. 0394496604. hardcover. September 1976.

An early novel from Milan Kundera.

DESCRIPTION - With the international publication of THE JOKE, LIFE IS ELSEWHERE, and LAUGHABLE LOVES, Czechoslovakia's foremost contemporary writer has won world recognition--admired by Jean Paul Sartre, Philip Roth, and Louis Aragon, among others. His new novel--already a critical triumph in France--comically, chillingly, enters the peaceful, self-contained world of a fertility spa, where a compelling psychological drama unfolds in the span of five days. A telephone call announcing an unwanted pregnancy intrudes with the sound of doom into the life of Klima, famous jazz trumpeter and incurable philanderer whose 'erotic secret' is his hopeless love for his wife Out of the would-be-forgotten past, the call sends him hastily back to the small spa where two months before, entertaining there with his band, he met and spent the night with a pretty young nurse, Ruzena. As he proceeds--according to a plan carefully based on 'the only reasonably certain element in the entire affair: the girl's love'--to 'lovingly' persuade her to abort the child, and as Ruzena vacillates between faith and suspicion, meek compliance and mulish refusal, other lives are drawn into their delicate conflict. Brilliantly, Kundera gives us a constellation of characters whose destinies become fatefully intertwined: Klima's beautiful wife and Ruzena's infatuated boyfriend, who 'sweep into the story like two rockets steered by blind jealousy--if that can be called steering'; the spa's own Dr. Skreta, cheerfully 'curing' his childless patients with injections from his private sperm-bank that populate the region with little Skretas; Bartleff, the mysterious and saintlike American millionaire; Jakub, the persecuted political dissident whose path briefly crosses Ruzena's, who sees in her the image of all that is corrupting his country, and who places her life in peril, giving Fate an ever-present deadly weapon to use--or not. As the story moves toward its denouement, as souls are humorously, ironically, terribly revealed, the unsparing clarity of Kundera's insight and the suspense of his narration powerfully illuminate the fearful ambiguity at the core of human life, and the intricate strategies we live by.

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. His first novel, THE JOKE, and his collection of stories, LAUGHABLE LOVES, appeared in print in Prague before 1968. His other novels have not been allowed publication in his fatherland. LIFE IS ELSEWHERE won the Prix Medicis for the best foreign novel published in France in 1973, and The Farewell Party won a similar prize, the Premio Mondello, for the best foreign novel published in Italy in 1976. Kundera’s works have been translated into twenty languages.

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The World of Witold Gombrowicz 1904-1969 by Vincent Giroud. New Haven. 2004. University Press of New England. 74 pages. Cover photograph by Hanne Garthe. 0845731580. paperback.

A pictorial biography of one of Poland's greatest writers of the 20th century.

DESCRIPTION - The greatest prose writer of twentieth-century Polish letters, Witold Gombrowicz is also recognized as a figure whose literary standing is comparable to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, or Beckett. Yet, his reputation in the United States and the English-speaking world has never been equal to his renown in continental Europe or in Latin America. In a letter to an American publisher preserved in his archive at the Beinecke Library, he writes that he hoped to be read in America some day, at least by the elite. Yet Gombrowicz is no elitist writer. His first novel, FERDYDURKE, its moral and philosophical implications notwithstanding, is as funny as Moliere or Lewis Carroll. His three plays - YVONNE, PRINCESS OF BURGUNDY, THE MARRIAGE, and OPERETTA - have been successfully produced in many countries and have acquired a permanent place in the repertory. His DIARY, in more than 1,200 pages, is an account, in turn moving and humorous, of his experience of exile, a document on the intellectual polemics of the post-World War II period, and a philosophical journal in the manner of Montaigne. Reading Gombrowicz, or attending a performance of one of his plays, is an exhilarating and profoundly liberating experience. This remains the case today as it was for the young Poles who discovered his work at the height of the Communist period. He is, as Jozef Czapski has pointed out, a great debunker of all false reputations and false values. In this and other respects, such as the philosophical underpinnings of much of his writing, it is appropriate, as Wojciech Karpinski has suggested recently, to see in him a modern Nietzsche. Gombrowicz was born a century ago, an anniversary observed in the spring of 2004 in Poland and other countries of Europe. The Yale commemoration is part of the 'Gombrowicz Autumn' on the East Coast and in other parts of the United States, which will feature performances of his plays, screenings of film adaptations of his works, photographic exhibitions, and a variety of other public programs, as well as publications by and about him, including some of his work available in English for the first time. The presence in the Beinecke Library of the Gombrowicz Archive, next to the papers of several fellow Polish emigre writers, was enough to justify that Yale play a major part in this celebration. In conjunction with this exhibition, an international symposium on Gombrowicz, sponsored jointly by the Beinecke Library, the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Yale University Press will gather scholars, writers, and translators from Argentina, France, Poland, and the United States.

Witold Marian Gombrowicz was a Polish novelist and dramatist. His works are characterized by deep psychological analysis, a certain sense of paradox and an absurd, anti-nationalist flavor. In 1937 he published his first novel, Ferdydurke, which presented many of his usual themes: the problems of immaturity and youth, the creation of identity in interactions with others, and an ironic, critical examination of class roles in Polish society and culture. He gained fame only during the last years of his life but is now considered one of the foremost figures of Polish literature. Gombrowicz was born in Maloszyce, in Congress Poland, Russian Empire to a wealthy gentry family. He was the youngest of four children of Jan and Antonina In 1911 his family moved to Warsaw. After completing his education at Saint Stanislaus Kostka's Gymnasium in 1922, he studied law at Warsaw University He spent a year in Paris where, he studied at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Internationales. He was less than diligent in his studies, but his time in France brought him in constant contact with other young intellectuals. He also visited the Mediterranean. When he returned to Poland he began applying for legal positions with little success. In the 1920s he started writing, but soon rejected the legendary novel, whose form and subject matter were supposed to manifest his 'worse' and darker side of nature. Similarly, his attempt to write a popular novel in collaboration with Tadeusz Kepinski turned out to be a failure. At the turn of the 20's and 30's he started to write short stories, which were later printed under the title Memoirs Of A Time Of Immaturity. From the moment of this literary debut, his reviews and columns started appearing in the press, mainly in the 'Kurier Poranny He met with other young writers and intellectuals forming an artistic cafe society in 'Zodiak' and 'Ziemianska', both in Warsaw. The publication of Ferdydurke, his first novel, brought him acclaim in literary circles. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Gombrowicz took part in the maiden voyage of the famous Polish cruise liner, Chrobry, to South America. When he found out about the outbreak of war in Europe, he decided to wait in Buenos Aires till the war was over but was actually to stay there until 1963 - often, especially during the war, in great poverty. At the end of the 40s Gombrowicz was trying to gain a position among Argentine literary circles by publishing articles, giving lectures in Fray Mocho cafe, and finally, by publishing in 1947, a Spanish translation of Ferdydurke written with the help of Gombrowicz's friends. Today, this version of the novel is considered to be a significant literary event in the history of Argentine literature; however, when published it did not bring any great renown to the author, nor did the publication of Gombrowicz's drama 'Slub' in Spanish in 1948. From December 1947 to May 1955 Gombrowicz worked as a bank clerk in Banco Polaco, the Argentine branch of PeKaO SA Bank. In 1950 he started exchanging letters with Jerzy Giedroyc and from 1951 he started having works published in the Parisian journal 'Culture,' where, in 1953, fragments of 'Dziennik' appeared. In the same year he published a volume of work which included the drama 'Slub' and the novel 'Trans-Atlantyk', where the subject of national identity on emigration was controversially raised. After October 1956 four books written by Gombrowicz appeared in Poland and they brought him great renown despite the fact that the authorities did not allow the publication of 'Dziennik', and later organized a slanderous campaign against Gombrowicz in 1963 who was then staying in West Berlin. In the 1960s Gombrowicz became recognized globally and many of his works were translated, including 'Pornografia' and 'Kosmos' His dramas were staged in many theatres all around the world, especially in France, Germany and Sweden. In 1963 he returned to Europe, where he received a scholarship from the Ford Foundation during his stay in Berlin, and in 1964 he spent three months in Royaumont abbey near Paris, where he employed Rita Labrosse, a Canadian from Montreal who studied contemporary literature, as his secretary. In 1964 he moved to Vence near Nice in the south of France, where he spent the rest of his life. There he enjoyed the fame which culminated in May 1967 with the International Publishers Prize and six months before his death, married Rita Labrosse. Gombrowicz wrote in Polish, however, in view of his decision not to allow his works to be published in his native country until the ban on the unabridged version of 'Dziennik', in which he described the Polish authorities slanderous attacks on him, was lifted he remained a largely unknown figure to the general reading public until the first half of the 1970s. Despite this, his works were printed in Polish by the Paris Literary Institute of Jerzy Giedroyc and translated into more than 30 languages. Morover, his dramas were repeatedly staged in the most important theatres in the whole world by the prominent directors such as: Jorge Lavelli, Alf Sjoeberg, Ingmar Bergman along with Jerzy Jarocki and Jerzy Grzegorzewski in Poland.

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Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. New York. 1994. Norton. Newly Translated From The Russian By Michael R. Katz. 157 pages. Jacket photograph of Ivan Sechenov: Ivan Sechenov established the first Russian school of physiology and propagated a scientific view of the nature of human kings. His theories provided the basis for the development of neuro-physiology. 039303559x. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - On the eve of Alexander II's great reforms, in an atmosphere of uncertainty and anticipation, Turgenev began work on his fourth novel, in FATHERS AND SONS the author planned to portray a new type of hero, a 'nihilist,' who would represent the values of the younger generation. Set at a very specific Moment in history, the novel reveals the full breadth of nineteenth-century Russia. Michael Katz presents Turgenev's greatest and ultimately most important novel in a beautifully rendered, finely tuned new translation. it captures a world on the brink of change, subtle psychological confrontations among powerful fictional characters, and the gracefulness of the author's poetic imagination. This new version of FATHERS AND SONS will be welcomed by general readers and scholars alike.

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.

MICHAEL R. KATZ was born in New York City. He was educated at Williams College and Oxford University. He is presently professor of Russian, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages, and director of the Center for Post-Soviet and East European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His other translations include Dostoevsky's NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND and DEVILS, Herzen's WHO IS TO BLAME?, Chernyshevsky's WHAT IS TO BE DONE?, and Druzhinin's POLINKA SAKS. He has also published books on the literary ballad and on dreams in fiction, as well as articles on various topics in Russian literature. He is married and has one daughter.

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