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Lolita - 2 Volumes by Vladimir Nabokov. Paris. 1959. Olympia Press. keywords: Literature America Russia. 411 pages. September 1959.

LOLITA is a book that you will never forget. 

DESCRIPTION - LOLITA is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published in 1955 in Paris. The novel is both famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the book's narrator and main character Humbert Humbert becomes sexually obsessed with a pubescent girl, who is aged 12 years when most of the novel takes place. The novel was adapted to film twice, once in 1962 by Stanley Kubrick and again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne. A divorced scholar in his late thirties, Humbert leaves Europe for the United States and moves into a rented room in the home of Charlotte Haze, after seeing her twelve-year-old daughter Dolores sunbathing in the garden. Humbert, who has had a lifelong passion for 'nymphets' - as a pre-adolescent, he experienced the loss of his childhood sweetheart to typhus - is instantly smitten, and will do anything to be near her. The novel is a tragicomedy narrated by Humbert, who riddles the narrative with wordplay and his wry observations of American culture. His humor provides an effective counterpoint to the pathos of the tragic plot. The novel's flamboyant style is characterized by word play, double entendres, multilingual puns, anagrams, and coinages such as nymphet, a word which has since had a life of its own and can be found in most dictionaries, and the lesser used 'faunlet'. Nabokov's LOLITA is far from an endorsement of pedophilia, since it dramatizes the tragic consequences of Humbert's obsession with the young heroine. Nabokov himself described Humbert as 'a vain and cruel wretch' and 'a hateful person' Humbert is a well-educated, multilingual, literary-minded European emigre. He fancies himself a great artist, but lacks the curiosity that Nabokov considers essential. Humbert tells the story of a Lolita that he creates in his mind because he is unable and unwilling to actually listen to the girl and accept her on her own terms. In the words of Richard Rorty, from his famous interpretation of LOLITA in CONTINGENCY, IRONY, AND SOLIDARITY, Humbert is a 'monster of incuriosity'. Some critics have accepted Humbert's version of events at face value. In 1959, novelist Robertson Davies excused the narrator entirely, writing that the theme of LOLITA is 'not the corruption of an innocent child by a cunning adult, but the exploitation of a weak adult by a corrupt child'. Most writers, however, have given less credit to Humbert and more to Nabokov's powers as an ironist. Martin Amis, in his essay on Stalinism, KOBA THE DREAD, proposes that LOLITA is an elaborate metaphor for the totalitarianism which destroyed the Russia of Nabokov's childhood Amis interprets it as a story of tyranny told from the point of view of the tyrant. 'All of Nabokov's books are about tyranny,' he says, 'even LOLITA. Perhaps LOLITA most of all'. In 2003, Iranian expatriate Azar Nafisi published the memoir READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN about an illicit women's reading group. In this book the psychological and political interpretations of Lolita are united, since as female intellectuals in Iran, Nafisi and her students were denied both public liberty and private sexual selfhood. Although rejecting a too-easy identification of Lolita's captivity with that of her students Nafisi writes of her students' strong emotional connection with the book: 'what linked us so closely was this perverse intimacy of victim and jailer' and 'like Lolita we tried to escape and create our own little pockets of freedom'. For Nafisi the essence of the novel is Humbert's solipsism and his erasure of Lolita's independent identity. She writes: 'Lolita was given to us as Humbert's creature [. ] To reinvent her, Humbert must take from Lolita her own real history and replace it with his own [. ] Yet she does have a past. Despite Humbert's attempts to orphan Lolita by robbing her of her history, that past is still given to us in glimpses'. One of the novel's early champions, Lionel Trilling, warned in 1958 of the moral difficulty in interpreting a book with so eloquent and so self-deceived a narrator: 'we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents [. ] we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting'. Because of the subject matter, Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher, eventually resorting to Olympia Press, a publisher of 'erotica' in Paris, which published LOLITA in September 15, 1955. A favorable notice by English author Graham Greene led to widespread critical admiration for the book, and its eventual U. S. publication on August 18, 1958, by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Today, it is considered by many one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it was named the fourth greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV (1899-1977) was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers in Russian and English. Poet, novelist, dramatist, memoirist, critic, translator, essayist, and scientist, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature in 1973. He taught creative writing and Russian literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. Among his most celebrated works are LOLITA; PALE FIRE; ADA; SPEAK, MEMORY; and his translation of Pushkin's EUGENE ONEGIN.

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Smilla's Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg. New York. 1993. Farrar Straus Giroux. Translated From The Danish By Tiina Nunnally. 453 pages. Jacket design by Honi Werner. 0374266441.

An inventive thriller with an unlikely but refreshingly believable heroine.

DESCRIPTION - SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Inuit, but she lives in Copenhagen. She is thirty-seven, single, childless, moody, and she refuses to fit in. Smilla's six-year-old Inuit neighbor, Isaiah, manages only with a stubbornness that matches her own to befriend her. When Isaiah falls off a roof and is killed, Smilla doesn't believe it's an accident. She has seen his tracks in the snow, and she knows about snow. She decides to investigate and discovers that even the police don't want her to get involved. But opposition appeals to Smilla. As all of Copenhagen settles down for a quiet Christmas, Smilla's investigation takes her from a fervently religious accountant to a tough-talking pathologist and an alcoholic shipping magnate and into the secret files of the Danish company responsible for extracting most of Greenland's mineral wealth - and finally onto a ship with an international cast of villains bound for a mysterious mission on an uninhabitable island off Greenland. To read SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is to be taken on a magical, nerve-shattering journey - from the snow-covered streets of Copenhagen to the awesome beauty of the Arctic ice caps. A mystery, a love story, and an elegy for a vanishing way of life, SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW is a breathtaking achievement, an exceptional feat of storytelling.

 Peter Høeg was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. Before becoming a writer, he worked variously as a sailor, ballet dancer, and actor. He published his first novel, A HISTORY OF DANISH DREAMS (1988), to positive reviews. However, it was SMILLA’S SENSE OF SNOW (1992), a million-copy bestseller, that earned Høeg immediate and international literary celebrity. His books have been published in more than thirty countries.

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The Itching Parrot by Jose Joaquin Fernandez De Lizardi. Garden City. 1942. Doubleday. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Anne Porter. 290 pages.

An early Latin American picaresque novel.

DESCRIPTION - The Mangy Parrot: The Life and Times of Periquillo Sarniento Written by himself for his Children (Spanish: El Periquillo Sarniento) by Mexican author Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi, is generally considered the first novel written and published in Latin America. El Periquillo was written in 1816, though due to government censorship the last of four volumes were not published until 1831. The novel has been continuously in print in more than twenty editions since then. El Periquillo Sarniento can be read as a nation-building novel, written at a critical moment in the transition of Mexico (and Latin America) from colony to independence. Jean Franco has characterized the novel as 'a ferocious indictment of Spanish administration in Mexico: ignorance, superstition and corruption are seen to be its most notable characteristics' [Jean Franco, An Introduction to Spanish-American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 34; cited in Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991), p. 29]. Given Lizardi's career as a pioneering Mexican journalist, his novel can also be read as a journal of opinion in the guise of a picaresque novel. It follows the adventures of Pedro Sarmiento (nicknamed 'Periquillo Sarniento' or 'Mangy Parrot' by his disreputable friends), who, like Lizardi himself, is the son of a Criollo family from Mexico City with more pretensions to 'good birth' than means of support. The story begins with Periquillo's birth and miseducation and continues through his endless attempts to make an unearned living, as a student, a friar, a gambler, a notary, a barber, a pharmacist, a doctor, a beggar, a soldier, a count, and a thief, until late in life he sees the light and begins to lead an honest life. At every point along the way, Lizardi uses the deathbed voice of the elderly and repentant Periquillo to lambast the social conditions that led to his wasted life. In this, the novelist mimics the role of the early nineteenth-century journalist more interested in arguing opinions than relating mundane incidents. The marriage of slapstick humor with moralizing social commentary, established in El Periquillo, remained a constant in the Mexican novels that followed on its heels throughout the nineteenth century (Antonio Benitez-Rojo, 'Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish American Novel as National Project,' Modern Language Quarterly 57 (2): pp. 334-35). Agustin Yanez justifies this often criticized 'moralizing' tendency in Lizardi as 'a constant in the artistic production of Mexico... and moreover, it is a constant in Mexican life' ('El Pensador Mexicano,' in Cedomil Goic, ed., Historia y critica de la literatura hispanoamericana, t. I, Epoca colonial, Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1988, pp. 428-29). At the same time, as critics have noted, Lizardi's interest in depicting the realities and reproducing the speech of Mexicans from all social classes make his novel a bridge between the inherited picaresque mold that forms its overt structure and the costumbrista novels of the nineteenth century. Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi is emblematic of the generation of intellectuals, artists, and writers who led Mexico into the modern era. His own life history resonates with the ambivalences and outright contradictions of a world between colonial rule and independence. His writings -- four novels, several fables, two plays, dozens of poems, over 250 articles and pamphlets -- are important in three ways: as artistic expressions in themselves; as texts that contributed in vital ways to the intellectual life of Mexico early in its independence; and as windows into the daily life of that period. Of Lizardi's many published works, El Periquillo Sarniento remains the most important. It typifies the dual impulse of his writing: to entertain and to edify. It is also a lively, comic novel that captures much of the reality of Mexico in 1816. In his subsequent novels Noches tristes (1818) and La Quijotita y su prima (1818-19), Lizardi's didactic side won out over his will to entertain. La Quijotita in particular is an exercise in moralizing, populated with flat characters whose function is to model particular foibles or virtues. Lizardi's last novel, Don Catrin de la Fachenda (1820), has on the contrary been held up by some critics as superior to El Periquillo. In Don Catrin, Lizardi took pains to respond to critics of the overt moralizing in his first novel. The result is a slimmed-down, artistically unified, more ironic, and darker picaresque (Nancy Vogeley, 'A Latin American Enlightenment Version of the Picaresque: Lizardi's Don Catrin de la Fachenda,' in Carmen Benito-Vessels and Michael Zappala, eds., The Picaresque, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994, pp. 123-46). Yet El Periquillo retains its importance. As Antonio Benitez-Rojo writes, citing Benedict Anderson's use of El Periquillo as an exemplar of the anti-colonial novel, 'the illusion of accompanying Periquillo along the roads and through the villages and towns of the viceroyalty helped awaken in the novel's readers the desire for nationness.' Don Catrin 'is artistically superior to El Periquillo Sarniento,' Benitez-Rojo continues, 'yet for all its defects the latter, because of its great vitality, is a major work of Mexican literature.' ('Jose Joaquin Fernandez de Lizardi and the Emergence of the Spanish American Novel as National Project,' p. 335; p. 336.) Finally, El Periquillo has the virtue of being the first, as Lizardi himself noted: 'I am far from believing that I have written a masterpiece that is free from defects: it has many that I recognize, and must have others still that I have not noticed; but it also has one undeniable distinction, which is that of being the first novel that has been written in this country by an American in three hundred years.' (Cited in Jefferson Rea Spell, Bridging the Gap, Mexico City: Editorial Libros de Mexico, 1971, p. 267.) Because of its status as the first novel written by a Latin American and one emulated by generations of Mexican novelists, El Periquillo Sarniento appears on many 'must-read' lists for graduate programs in Latin American literature, and it is of equal interest to students of Latin American history.Print Editions of El Periquillo in Spanish and English - The most widely available edition in Spanish of El Periquillo Sarniento, edited and annotated by Jefferson Rea Spell, is published in Mexico by Editorial Porrua (many editions since 1949).; An excellent new edition, edited and annotated by Carmen Ruiz Barrionuevo, was published in Madrid by Ediciones Catedra in 1997, but has since gone out of print; A partial translation of El Periquillo Sarniento into English was published in 1942 by Doubleday under the title The Itching Parrot; A new and unabridged English translation, The Mangy Parrot (2004), is published by Hackett Publishing Company. ISBN 0-87720-735-8; An abridgment of the Hackett translation is published under the title The Mangy Parrot, Abridged (2005). ISBN 0-87220-670-X.

José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (November 15, 1776 – June 21, 1827), Mexican writer and political journalist, best known as the author of El Periquillo Sarniento (1816), translated as The Mangy Parrot in English, reputed to be the first novel written in Latin America. Lizardi, as he is generally known, was born in Mexico City when it was still the capital of the colonial Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain. His father was a physician employed in and around Mexico City, who for a time supplemented the family income by writing. Likewise, his mother came from a family of modest but "decent" means; her own father had been a bookseller in the nearby city of Puebla. The death of Lizardi’s father after a short illness in 1798 forced the young man to leave his studies in the Colegio de San Ildefonso and enter the civil service as a minor magistrate in the Taxco-Acapulco region. He married in Taxco in 1805. The necessity of providing for a growing family led Lizardi to supplement his meager income as his father had, by writing. He began his literary career in 1808 by publishing a poem in honor of Ferdinand VII of Spain. Though Ferdinand VII later became a target of nationalist rage among pro-independence Mexicans because of his tendency toward despotism, his politics were still unknown in 1808, the year of the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. With Napoleon’s brother-in-law usurping the Spanish throne and the legitimate king in exile, raising a public voice in his favor was a patriotic stance for a Mexican intellectual, and in line with Lizardi’s later proto-nationalist views. At the beginning of the Mexican War of Independence in November 1810, Morelos’s insurgent forces fought their way into Taxco where Lizardi was heading the local government as acting Subdelegado (the highest provincial government position in the colonial system). After an initial insurgent victory, Lizardi tried to play both sides: he turned over the city’s armory to the insurgents, but he also informed the vice-royalty of rebel movements. Judged in the context of his later writings, these actions do not appear hypocritical. Lizardi was always supportive of the intellectual aims and reformist politics of the insurgents, but was equally opposed to war and bloodshed. By peacefully capitulating Taxco to the insurgents, he aimed to avoid loss of life in the city then under his command. Following the royalist recapture of Taxco in January 1811, Lizardi was taken prisoner as a rebel sympathizer and sent with the other prisoners of war to Mexico City. There he appealed successfully to the viceroy, arguing that he had acted only to protect Taxco and its citizens from harm. Lizardi was now free and living in Mexico City, but he had lost his job and his possessions. He turned now to full-time writing and publishing to support his family, publishing more than twenty lightly satirical poems in broadsheets and pamphlets in the course of the year. After a limited freedom of the press was declared in Mexico on October 5, 1812 (see Spanish Constitution of 1812), Lizardi quickly organized one of the first non-governmental newspapers in the country. The first issue of his El Pensador Mexicano ("The Mexican Thinker," a title he adopted as his own pseudonym) came out on October 9, just four days after press freedom was allowed. In his journalism, Lizardi turned from the light social criticism of his earlier broadsheets to direct commentary on the political problems of the day, attacking the autocratic tendencies of the viceregal government and supporting the liberal aspirations represented by the Cortes in Spain. His articles show the influence of Enlightenment ideas derived from clandestine readings of forbidden books by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, a hazardous route to take in those hopeful but uncertain times. In the ninth issue of El Pensador Mexicano (December 1812), Lizardi attacked viceroy Francisco Javier Venegas directly, resulting in his arrest. He continued to issue the paper from his jail cell, but he dismayed pro-independence readers by suppressing his sympathies for the insurgents and muting critiques of the system that had imprisoned him. When a new viceroy, Félix María Calleja, was named in March 1813, Lizardi lavished praise on him; the viceroy responded by freeing Lizardi after seven months of jail. Lizardi continued to write and publish his periodicals after his release, but increased attention from royalist censors and the Inquisition muted his critical tone. When victory over Napoleon in Europe led to the reestablishment of an authoritarian monarchy, the overthrow of the Spanish Cádiz Cortes, and the abrogation of freedom of the press in 1814, Lizardi turned from journalism to literature as a means of expressing his social criticism. This social and political conjuncture led to Lizardi's writing and publication of El Periquillo Sarniento, which is commonly recognized as the first novel by a Mexican and the first Latin American novel. Though it is a novel in form and scope, El Periquillo Sarniento resembled Lizardi’s periodicals in several ways: he printed and sold it in weekly chapter installments throughout 1816; he wove extensive commentary on the political and moral climate of Mexico into the narration; and, like his periodicals, the novel was eventually halted by censorship. The first three volumes slipped past the censor, as Lizardi had hoped they would in their fictionalized guise, but Lizardi’s direct attack on the institution of slavery (in the form called Asiento) in the fourth volume was enough to have the publication stopped. The final sixteen chapters of El Periquillo were only published in 1830 - 1831, after Lizardi’s death and a decade following Mexican independence. Lizardi’s other works of fiction also appeared by installments during the years of renewed royalist repression that lasted until 1820: Fábulas (collection of fables, 1817), Noches tristes (novel, 1818), La Quijotita y su prima (novel, 1818–1819) and Don Catrín de la Fachenda (completed 1820, published 1832). With the re-establishment of the liberal Spanish constitution in 1820, Lizardi returned to journalism, only to be attacked, imprisoned, and censored again by a changing roster of political enemies. Royalists repressed him until the independence of Mexico in 1821; centralists opposed to his federalist leanings attacked him after independence; throughout, he suffered attacks by the Catholic hierarchy, opposed to his Masonic leanings. Lizardi died of tuberculosis in 1827 at the age of 50. Because of his family’s extreme poverty he was buried in an anonymous grave, without the epitaph he had hoped would be engraved on his tombstone: "Here lie the ashes of the Mexican Thinker, who did the best he could for his country." It is unfortunate that today Lizardi is remembered primarily by educators, teachers, university students, and government officials in Latin America, reflecting a possible deterioration of quality education in the region.

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Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1979. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Translated From the Polish By Louis Iribarne. 206 pages. Jacket design by Jean-Marie Troillard. 0151879788.

Pirx, simpleton or genius? Pirx the Pilot is the Good Soldier Schweik sent into space.

DESCRIPTION - In Pilot Pirx, Stanislaw Lem has created an irresistibly likable character - an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants. He is a bumbler, but an inspired one. We are at a moment in time when the Transgalactic tine flies regularly to the Moon, which by now provides excellent tourist accommodations; space travel has become routine, Yet things go wrong, mysteriously and suspiciously, and Pirx is the one to investigate strange accidents, either because his superiors consider him expendable, or because they trust his flair. Whimsical, spellbinding, infused with Lem's uncannily vivid 'familiarity' with the day-to-day realities and regions of space travel, the tales of Pilot Pirx build up to a towering climax. We meet Pirx in school, embarking on a training mission that is to drive home to him, with devastating impact, the inadequacy of textbook knowledge in an astronaut's arsenal. In 'Terminus,' the last and longest adventure, Pirx deciphers a spaceship's sinister past with the help of a robot's retentive memory; the writing develops a new dimension, revealing Lem's imaginative affinity with robots, whom he endows with something akin to feelings by investing his central character, Pirx, with the full range of human foibles, Lem offers here a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that may give man the courage to confront the vastness of outer space.

Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

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 The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar. Princeton. 1987. Princeton University Press. 278 pages. Cover illustration - Snow White. From 'Sneewittchen. Ein Kinder-Marchen mit 17 Bildern, illustrated by Theodore Hosemann (Berlin - Winckelmann, 1847). 0691067228. hardcover.

 A look at the classic Grimm Brothers fairy tales in their uncensored form, tracing their transformation from adult reading material to the watered-down tales that many of us first encountered as children.

DESCRIPTION - A look at the classic Grimm Brothers fairy tales in their uncensored form tracing their transformation from adult reading material to the watered-down tales that many of us first heard as children. Even those who remember that Snow White's stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella's stepsisters, that Briar Rose's suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castle, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will be surprised by Maria Tatar's revelations about the tales of the brothers Grimm in their unexpurgated form. Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales figures as the subject matter for this intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. Although children never have much trouble accepting the hard facts of the bedtime stories in this collection, adults have often found it difficult to come to terms with their sensationalistic content. Bruno Bettelheim has taught us to look for deeper symbolic meanings in the violence of fairy tales. Now Professor Tatar skillfully employs the tools not only of the psychoanalyst but also of the folklorist, literary critic, and historian to examine the harsher aspects of the stories gathered by the Grimms. Few books have been written in English on the tales collected by the Grimms, and none has probed their allegedly happy endings so thoroughly. From a first chapter on 'Sex and Violence' to an epilogue entitled 'Getting Even,' the author presents an entirely new interpretation of this best-selling of all German books. She focuses above all on the wishes for revenge that drive the heroes and heroines of the Grimms' tales. In transforming folk materials that once served as adult entertainment into children's reading matter, the Grimms may have suppressed episodes touching on sexual matters, but they often embellished descriptions of cruelty, especially when it took the form of revenge. For Professor Tatar violent family conflicts, the pitting of the weak against the strong, and universal fantasies of retaliation are keys to the enduring popularity of the Grimms' stories. 'Tatar seeks to reexamine the Grimms' tales by combining methods from psychology, structuralism, folklore, and social history. She has a fine ability to bring together research in the field and to conceive new interpretations. The book is eminently readable and will certainly help the general reader to reassess the Grimms' tales. ' - JACK ZIPES, University of Florida.

The Brothers Grimm (or Die Brüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as 'Cinderella' ('Aschenputtel'), 'The Frog Prince' ('Der Froschkönig'), 'Hansel and Gretel' ('Hänsel und Gretel'), 'Rapunzel', 'Rumpelstiltskin' ('Rumpelstilzchen'), and 'Snow White' ('Schneewittchen'). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812. The brothers spent their formative years in the German town of Hanau. Their father's death in 1796 caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years after. They both attended the University of Marburg where they developed a curiosity about German folklore, which grew into a lifelong dedication to collecting German folk tales. The rise of romanticism during the 19th century revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the brothers represented a pure form of national literature and culture. With the goal of researching a scholarly treatise on folk tales, they established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between 1812 and 1857, their first collection was revised and republished many times, growing from 86 stories to more than 200. In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetime. The popularity of the Grimms' collected folk tales has endured well. The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. In the mid-20th century, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized.

 MARIA TATAR is Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She is the author of SPELLBOUND: STUDIES ON MESMERISM AND LITERATURE (Princeton).

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 Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. New York. 1973. Viking Press. 760 pages. Jacket design by Marc Getter. 0670348325.

DESCRIPTION - GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is an epic postmodern novel written by Thomas Pynchon and first published on February 28, 1973. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers around the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military, and, in particular, the quest undertaken by several of the characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device named the 'Schwarzgerat,' or '00000. ' Frequently digressive and often playfully self-conscious, the novel subverts many of the traditional elements of plot and character development, traverses detailed, specialist knowledge drawn from a wide range of disciplines, and has earned a reputation as a 'difficult' book. In 1974, the three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction supported GRAVITY'S RAINBOW for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the board overturned this decision, branding the book 'unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene. ' The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel, and won the National Book Award in 1974. Since its publication, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW has spawned an enormous amount of literary criticism and commentary, including two reader's guides and several online concordances, and is widely regarded as Pynchon's magnum opus. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW is composed of four parts, each of these comprising a number of episodes whose divisions are marked by a graphical depiction of a series of squares. It has been suggested that these represent sprocket holes as in a reel of film, although they may also bear some relation to the engineer's graph paper on which the first draft of the novel was written. One of the book's editors has been quoted as saying that the aforementioned squares relate to censored correspondence sent between soldiers and their loved ones during the war. When family and friends received edited letters, the removed sections would be cut out in squared or rectangular sections. The squares that start each of the four parts would therefore be indicative of what is not written, or what is removed by an external editor or censor. The number of episodes in each part carries with it a numerological significance which is in keeping with the use of numerology and Tarot symbolism throughout the novel. Many facts in the novel are based on technical documents relating to the V-2 rockets. Equations featured in the text are correct. References to the works of Pavlov, Ouspensky, and Jung are based on Pynchon's actual research. The firing command sequence in German that is recited at the end of the novel is also correct and is probably copied in verbatim from the technical report produced by Operation Backfire. The novel is regarded by some as the greatest postmodern work of 20th century literature, while others have declared it unreadable. The three-member Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction unanimously supported GRAVITY'S RAINBOW for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. However, the other eleven members of the fourteen-member Pulitzer board overturned this decision, calling the book 'unreadable', 'turgid', 'overwritten', and 'obscene', with at least one member confessing to having gotten only a third of the way through the book. The novel inspired the 1984 song 'Gravity's Angel' by Laurie Anderson. In her 2004 autobiographical performance 'The End of the Moon', Anderson said she once contacted Pynchon asking permission to adapt GRAVITY'S RAINBOW as an opera. Pynchon replied that he would allow her to do so with one condition: the opera had to be written for a single instrument: the banjo. Anderson said she took that as a polite 'no.'

 Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short stories, VINELAND and, MASON & DIXON. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

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The Pledge by Friedrich Duerrenmatt. New York. 1959. Knopf. Translated From The German By Richard and Clara Winston. 185 pages. Jacket design by George Salter.

A police detective's relentless search to find a child-murderer in an unconventional story of guilt, responsibility, justice, and fate.

DESCRIPTION - A child has been murdered. . . The official solution of the crime does not satisfy the inspector. He sets out on his own to find the bestial killer. Suspense mounts as the story turns into a bizarre tale of guilt and justice. The story of the sex maniac’s crime makes for harrowing reading, but the account of the detective’s decay as a citizen and a man constitutes an arresting and deeply moving human drama. He is driven by his pledge toward a stratagem as questionable as the crime itself.

 Friedrich Durrenmatt (Duerrenmatt) was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theater whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author gained fame largely due to his avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire. One of his leading sentences was: 'A story is not finished, until it has taken the worst turn'. Durrenmatt was a member of the Gruppe Olten. Durrenmatt was born in Konolfingen, in the Emmental, the son of a Protestant pastor. His grandfather Ulrich Durrenmatt was a conservative politician. The family moved to Bern in 1935. Durrenmatt began to study of philosophy and German language and literature at the University of Zurich in 1941, but moved to the University of Bern after one semester. In 1943 he decided to become an author and dramatist and dropped his academic career. In 1945-46, he wrote his first play 'It is written'. On October 11 1946 he married the actress Lotti Geissler. She died on January 16 1983 and Durrenmatt married again in 1984 to another actress, Charlotte Kerr. Durrenmatt also some of his own works and his drawings were exhibited in Neuchatel in 1976 and 1985, as well as in Zurich in 1978. Like Brecht, Durrenmatt explored the dramatic possibilities of epic theater. His plays are meant to involve the audience in a theoretical debate, rather than as purely passive entertainment. When he was 26, his first play, It Is Written, premiered to great controversy. The story of the play revolves around a battle between a sensation-craving cynic and a religious fanatic who takes scripture literally, all of this taking place while the city they live in is under siege. The play's opening night in April, 1947 caused fights and protests in the audience. His first major success was the play Romulus the Great. Set in the year 476 A. D. , the play explores the last days of the Roman Empire, presided over, and brought about by its last emperor. The Visit which tells of a rich benefactor visiting her beneficiaries, is the work best known in the United States. The satirical drama The Physicists which deals with issues concerning science and its responsibility for dramatic and even dangerous changes to our world has also been presented in translation. Radio plays published in English include Hercules in the Augean Stables, Incident at Twilight and The Mission of the Vega The two late works 'Labyrinth' and 'Turmbau zu Babel' are a collection of unfinished ideas, stories, and philosophical thoughts. In 1990, he gave two famous speeches, one in honour of Vaclav Havel, and the other in honour of Mikhail Gorbachev Durrenmatt often compared the three Abrahamic religions and Marxism, which he also saw as a religion. Even if there are several parallels between Durrenmatt and Brecht, Durrenmatt never took a political position, but represented a pragmatic philosophy of life. In 1969, he traveled in the USA, in 1974 to Israel, and in 1990 to Auschwitz in Poland. Durrenmatt died on December 14, 1990 in Neuchatel.

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If  on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino. New York. 1981. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Translated From The Italian By William Weaver. 260 pages. Jacket design by Rubin Pfeffer Jacket photograph by Benn Mitchell. 0151436894.

 DESCRIPTION - Beguiling and frustrating, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER draws the reader in with each chapter, and at just the right moment Italo Calvino has a surprise for you. 'The catalogue of forms is endless. ' This quotation from Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES applies equally to his imaginative flights in the present novel, his first In many years. Far from being a dead form, the novel here is shown as capable of endless mutations. IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, author, ambiance, style; each breaks off with the first chapter, at a moment of suspense. A labyrinth, no less, in which two readers, male and female, pursue the story lines that Intrigue them. Thus, 'If on a winter's night a traveler' by Italo Calvlno gets Inextricably mixed up with 'Outside the town of Malbork,' a work of unquestionably Polish origin, redolent of somewhat carbonized onions. As the book branches out into known and unknown literatures, including a translation from an extinct language, the author, not without malice, rings the changes of contemporary literature with virtuoso versatility. The two be- wildered readers tie their own knots and end up in a king-size bed for parallel readings. They are the true heroes of the tale: for what would writing be without responsive readers? Would it be at all?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 - September 19, 1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). 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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Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen. New York. 1995. New Press. 372 pages. Cover illustration by Jeff Danziger. 156584100x.

Not only a revealing look some forgotten American history, but at how American history has traditionally been taught in our schools.

DESCRIPTION - High School students hate history. When they list their favorite subjects, history always comes in last. They consider it 'the most irrelevant' of twenty-one school subjects; 'bo-o-o-oring' is the adjective most often applied. James Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institution surveying twelve leading high school textbooks of American history. What he found was an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple, weighing in at an average of four-and-a-half pounds and 888 pages. In response he has written LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, in part a telling critique of existing textbooks but, more importantly, a wonderful retelling of American history as it should - and could -be taught to American students. Beginning with pre-Columbian American history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, and the My Lai massacre, Loewen supplies the conflict, the suspense, unresolved drama, and connection with current-day issues so appallingly missing from textbook accounts. A treat to read and a serious critique of American education, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME is for anyone who has ever fallen asleep in history class.

James William Loewen (February 6, 1942 – August 19, 2021) was an American sociologist, historian, and author. He was best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.

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The Sunday Woman by Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini. New York. 1973. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Translated From The Italian By William Weaver. 408 pages. 0151867208.

Both an elegant mystery, a love story, and a novel of manners and class, THE SUNDAY WOMAN is a neglected classic.

DESCRIPTION - A thoroughly unpalatable character is found murdered with a weapon so unspeakable that the police will not reveal what it is to the press, By an extraordinary web of circumstance suspicion falls on a scion of Turin's high society and his woman friend, much to the embarrassment of the local police. The investigator, a suave Sicilian, matches the subtlety of the charmingly snobbish suspects, for whom a man of his type is a beguiling novelty, as they are for him. It would be a mistake to label this book a murder mystery. It is a marvelously rich novel with fully rounded, indeed, unforgettable characters, structured around a murder case. The visceral curiosity about 'who done it' furnishes the suspense on the surface level, At the same time, however, the reader is constantly delighted by the wit and charm with which the two authors handle the inquiry. Two love stories, one escalating, the other disintegrating, are brought to beginning and end in the wake of the murder, generating their own suspense. This may well be the most delightful and sophisticated entertainment of this and many seasons. A pair of remarkably acute Italian writers have written a joyful book around a grim happening, and in the process given us the portrait of an Italian city--Turin--and its society, high, low, and dubious. Here, at long last, is a true novel whose scenes and people have real, continuing life, a novel that one reads with avidity and hates to put down.

Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini, who lived in Turin, were literary collaborators for fifteen years, editing, among other works, anthologies of American literature and science fiction. For their first supersleuth novel, THE SUNDAY WOMAN, they were awarded Italy's 'Book-of-the-Year' prize.

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The Day Is Born Of Darkness by Mikhail Dyomin. New York. 1976. Knopf. Translated From the Russian By Tony Kahn. 371 pages. Jacket design by Lidia Ferrara. 0394491661. April 1976.

DESCRIPTION - Mikhail Dyomin was only 16 when he went to jail for the first time, for evading a compulsory wartime work order. But it was the beginning for him of a 15-year career as a professional criminal, as an inhabitant of one of the strangest and least-known societies on the face of the earth - the Soviet underworld. This extraordinary first-person account of his life there - as a thief, as a convict, as a writer of prison ballads sung in camps from Magadan to the Aral Sea - is an authentic voice out of Russia's lower depths, brilliantly evocative of the color and violence that still lurk behind Communism's stolid gray facade, an engrossing tale of adventure, and probably the fullest picture yet given of life on the wrong side of the law in the Soviet Union. Here in riveting detail are the realities of outlaw existence: the battles in prison ; the tricks of housebreaking, con games, train robbery; the arcana of convict life, from instructions for making a deck of cards out of blood and bread, to tips on eating nettles. Here are the gypsy camps, the brothels and thieves' dens, the black markets and village fairs and long, lonely trains howling into the Asian night, the whole exotic rogue's-world of crime. And here are the characters Dyomin encountered, fought with, loved: Queen Margo, the sophisticated and monumentally connected Grande Dame of Crime; Saloma the Onanist, ultimate prison camp escapist; Khasan, the homicidal cardshark, with his court of cutthroat lovers; the author's deadly enemy Snuffles, whom he finally kills, and dozens more. Dyomin's first robbery, his attendance at the all-European Thieves' Conference in Lvov, his chilling run-in with political terrorists, his narrow escapes, murders, love affairs, imprisonments - adventure piled on adventure, and all recounted with the energy, style, and rolling pace of a born storyteller. THE DAY IS BORN OF DARKNESS ends with the author's discharge from a Siberian labor camp, his dream of becoming a published poet about to come true. Once on the outside, he went on to write five more books under the name Dyomin, becoming a popular and successful writer. In 1971, he quietly defected during a visit to Paris, where he now lives and writes.

 AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Mikhail Dyomin has taken his writing name from the forged identity papers he was forced to use while in hiding within the Soviet criminal underground. He was born Georgy Trifonov in 1926. His mother belonged to the pre-revolutionary nobility; his father, a top Red Army commissar in the Civil War, fell into disfavor and was persecuted during the Stalinist era. Dyomin was first arrested in 1942, at the age of sixteen, for disobeying a compulsory work order. Sentenced to two years of hard labor in a Moscow foundry, he was finally given a medical discharge. He worked for a while as an advertising artist, until an office-wide investigation by the secret police sent him fleeing, without identity papers, into the underground. There he lived for several years, working with a pickpocket gang and 'riding the rails. ' After his arrest, he spent six years in some of the most notorious Arctic camps--as a member of the criminal elite--and during this time earned a name for himself as a 'scribbler' of prison songs and poems. Dyomin's first literary scholarship was earned upon his release from the Siberian camp, when his fellow inmates took up a collection to see him through his first book. In the fifteen years following his release, he published six books; he became a member of the Writers' Union and was by all measures a successful, popular author. Yet, he was dissatisfied with the restrictions imposed by state censorship, and during a visit to France some years ago, he quietly defected. He now lives in a small apartment in Paris, where he continues to write.

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 The Egyptologists by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. New York. 1966. Random House. 247 pages.

A very funny story about male subterfuge and the war between the sexes, precisely the kind of story that Kingsley Amis, this time with the help of Robert Conquest, tells so well. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   Every Thursday night in certain parts of London, husbands kiss their wives and then hurry off to attend the weekly meeting of a certain exclusive learned society. Jekyll-like, these men shed their air of scholarly absorption as they near headquarters-a building situated at a specially selected hard-to-find address, where a plaque, inscribed in specially designed hard-to-decipher lettering, reads: METROPOLITAN EGYPTOLOGICAL SOCIETY. Should the reader be at first in some doubt as to the real nature of the activities of the Egyptologists, it is only to be expected. The members' expertise in camouflage and deception has baffled the most perceptive people, and at various times the Society has been suspected of engaging in espionage, in drug-smuggling, in the activity implied by its all-male membership-and even in Egyptology. Why does the Society protect itself so vigilantly against inquiring outsiders? What is the significance of the safeguards listed in Article 22 of its Constitution? And what goes on behind the locked doors of its Isis Room? Hint: if even a fraction of the lecherous males of the world adopted the brilliant masquerade conceived by the authors in this engaging farce, learned societies would proliferate by the thousands.

 Kingsley Amis, born in London in 1922, was educated at the City of London School and St. John's College, Oxford. During World II he was a lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals. From 1949 to 1961 he was Lecturer in English at various universities in Great Britain, and also fulfilled an appointment as Visiting Lecturer at Princeton in 1958-59. Mr. Amis won immediate attention with his first novel, Lucky Jim, and has since written four others, as well as a collection of short stories, two books of poetry and a critical survey of science fiction.

 Born in 1917, Robert Conquest was educated at Winchester and Oxford, served in a line regiment in World War II and afterward in the British Diplomatic Service, Since 1956 he has interspersed free-lance writing with academic appointments at the London School of Economics and the Columbia University Russian Institute, among others, He has also been the Literary Editor of the Spectator. Mr. Conquest is the author of two books of poems, a science-fiction novel, five works of Soviet political and literary themes, and, with Kingsley Amis, has edited the science-fiction 'Spectrum' anthologies.

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 The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. New York. 1972. Harper & Row. 464 pages. Jacket design by Apteryx Studio. 0060129018.

DESCRIPTION - An exhaustive history that traces the growing, processing, transporting, and distribution of narcotics since the end of World War II. A landmark book of investigative reporting and history. The fabled Golden Triangle, where Laos, Thailand, and Burma meet, long a traditional opium-growing area, now provides 70 percent of the world's illicit supply of heroin. And many elements in the governments of these countries, and in the government of South Vietnam - most of which are supported by U. S. military and financial aid - are deeply (and lucratively) involved in the growing, processing, transport, and distribution of narcotics. How has this situation come about? Basing their narrative on firsthand research in Asia and Europe, the authors trace the whole story since the end of World War II. They demonstrate that during the First Indochina War (1946-1954) the security of Saigon and its environs and the loyalty of the hill tribes depended on profits from and some protection for the opium traffic. Similarly, it became necessary for the United States, when it took over the French commitment in 1954, to look the other way in the matter of the involvement in the drug traffic of succeeding Vietnamese regimes. After Diem's downfall in 1963 it became apparent that money from the rackets--especially narcotics--was vital to any regime's survival.    The authors found that in Laos, opium crops found their way from the hill villages into a secret base at Long Tieng; in Burma, the CIA financed remnants of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Army, which later became self-supporting by taking over 90 pecent of the opium shipments from the rebel Shan States of Burma; that in Thailand, shaky regimes relied on American support and opium money to help bolster their stability. They also found that the Mafia, working through Corsican criminal syndicates from Marseille, had established outposts in Southeast Asia for its international narcotics smuggling operations during the French occupation. In spite of recent well-publicized seizures of massive shipments of heroin from Southeast Asia, heroin continues to flood the country, spreading into every level of this society and shredding the fabric of everyday life. U. S. government estimates of the number of addicts has leaped from 315,000 in 1969 to over 560,000 in 1972. This book puts all the pieces of this ghastly puzzle together, and then maps the possible avenues out of the horror, suggesting that America may have to choose between our commitments in Southeast Asia and getting heroin out of our high schools. In 1971, at the age of twenty-five, Alfred W. McCoy set out on an eighteen-month trip to Europe and Asia to investigate the global heroin trade. The resultant book, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA, brought him international recognition as a groundbreaking theorist of the politics and economics of drug trafficking. Its publication also embroiled him in a controversy with the Central Intelligence Agency Incensed by McCoy's charges that the agency had covered up the involvement of our Indochinese allies in heroin trafficking and had itself participated in aspects of the drug trade, the CIA tried to suppress the book before its release. Twenty years of research have led to this revised and updated edition of McCoy's classic. In it, he concludes that, with global production and consumption of narcotics at record levels and heroin use in America on the rise, it is time to confront the failure of the U. S. government's drug policy. 'Driven by a myopic moralism' since the legal sale of narcotics was banned in the early 1920s, U. S. policymakers, McCoy observes, have refused to recognize that their repression of the drug trade has only served to make it grow. Now dispersed across continents as a result of prohibition, the illicit drug trade is more resistant to suppression than ever before. The heroin problem will worsen, according to McCoy, until the U. S. government also puts an end to the CIA's involvement in the narcotics trade, which since World War II has been an integral part of the agency's efforts to maintain U. S. power abroad. If Congress had imposed restraints on CIA covert operations two decades ago, McCoy argues, it 'might have prevented the agency's complicity in the disastrous cocaine and heroin epidemics of the 1980s. This remarkable expose of official U. S. hypocrisy in its approaches to one of the world's greatest social problems offers an analysis that is destined to influence the public debate on drugs for years to come.

 Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.

Cathleen B. Read is studying for a Ph. D. in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University.

Leonard P. Adams II has published several scholarly articles and is a Ph. D. candidate in Chinese history at Yale University. A landmark book of investigative reporting and history.

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 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. Garden City. 1954. Doubleday. 256 pages. Jacket art by Edward Gorey.

Jim is barely hanging on to his job at a small English university, and if he can't successfully suck up to the head of his department, he has no chance at all of staying employed. It doesn't help that he gets drunk, speaks his mind, and antagonizes all of the wrong people. One of the funniest books I have ever read!

DESCRIPTION - Jim Dixon was one of those hapless individuals who bumble through life tripping over their own good intentions, As he caromed from fiasco to triumph to cataclysm, he was sustamed only by his rare talent for creating a Face to suit every occasion. grimaces like his Mad- Peasant face or the Shot-in-the-Back face, smirks like the Evelyn Waugh or Sex-Life-in-Ancient-Rome. Jim held tenuously to a probationary instructorship at a small English university and his hopes for reappointment lay solely in his ability to butter up Professor Welch, the odious and vapid head of his department. Lurking like a neurotic thundercloud on Jim's already hazy horizon was Margaret Peel, a young woman of scant charm and suicidal tendencies, who was being harbored at the home of Professor Welch while convalescing from a surfeit of sleeping tablets taken in pique. As part of his hysterical campaign of apple polishing Jim accepted an invitation to one of Professor Welch's artistic week ends, After a French-play-reading, recorder-playing, madrigal-singing evening with a group of local intellectuals that included the professor's painter son, Bertrand, poor Jim sought sanctuary at a nearby pub. Closing time found him launched on a monumental binge, the results of which were an inconclusive but spirited attack on Margaret's virtue, an incendiary episode with his bedclothes, the formation of a new and delightfully surprising alliance with Christine Callaghan, the bearded Bertrand's current inamorata. From this point on the plot begins to congeal, with Jim caught like a shrimp in the aspic. Kingsley Amis, who wrote LUCKY JIM, has a rare wit that teeters between the hilariously nonsensical and the deeply serious, This delightful-if often quite mad-novel is his first.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kingsley Amis was born in South London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and at St John’s College, Oxford, of which he is an Honorary Fellow. Between 1949 and 1963 he taught at the University College of Swansea, Princeton University and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He started his career as a poet and has continued to write in that medium ever since. His novels include LUCKY JIM (1954). TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE (1966), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978) and STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984). His novel, THE OLD DEVILS, won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1986. Among his other publications are NEW MAPS OF HELL, a survey of science fiction (1960), RUDYARD KIPLING AND HIS WORLD (1975) and THE GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION (1981). He published his COLLECTED POEMS in 1979, and has also edited THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE and THE FABER POPULAR RECITER. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981.

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Animal Farm by George Orwell. New York. 1946. Harcourt Brace & Company. 118 pages.

DESCRIPTION - The animals on Mr. Jones's farm stage a successful revolution, and take the place over. Their hopes, their plans, and their achievements, form the subject of ANIMAL FARM. In the first flush of enthusiasm there is set up a great commandment, 'All animals are equal', but unfortunately leadership devolves almost automatically on the pigs, who are on a higher intellectual level than the rest. The revolution begins to go wrong - yet at every step excellent excuses are always forthcoming for each perversion of the original doctrine. Mr. Orwell has a wonderful sympathy for most of his animal characters, and they are all very much alive. It is not only the fight between the two pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, as to who shall run things - what equally stirs the reader and brings tears is what happens to the devoted work-horse, Boxer, and even to that less admirable but very deftly pictured character, the mare Mollie, who loved ribbons. About this little book there is the same kind of reality one concedes to ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It lives in the heart as a direct story, as a story for its own sake, and yet, although the author never intrudes or points a moral, it also takes on meanings from what we have all noticed in the affairs of the world. To read it is an experience out of the ordinary, for it goes at a bounce into that region where the heart and the head join together in enjoyment.

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by the pen name George Orwell, was an English author and journalist. Noted as a novelist and critic as well as a political and cultural commentator, Orwell is among the most widely admired English-language essayists of the 20th century. He is best known for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general, and Stalinism in particular: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both were written and published towards the end of his life. Eric Arthur Blair was born on 25 June 1903 to British parents in Motihari, Bengal Presidency, British India. There, Blair's father, Richard Walmesley Blair, worked for the Opium Department of the Civil Service. His mother, Ida Mabel Blair, brought him to England at the age of one. He did not see his father again until 1907, when Richard visited England for three months before leaving again. Eric had an older sister named Marjorie, and a younger sister named Avril. He would later describe his family's background as 'lower-upper-middle class'. At the age of six, Blair was sent to a small Anglican parish school in Henley-on-Thames, which his sister had attended before him. He never wrote of his recollections of it, but he must have impressed the teachers very favourably, for two years later, he was recommended to the headmaster of one of the most successful preparatory schools in England at the time: St Cyprian's School, in Eastbourne, Sussex. Blair attended St Cyprian's by a private financial arrangement that allowed his parents to pay only half of the usual fees. At the school, he formed a lifelong friendship with Cyril Connolly, future editor of the magazine Horizon, in which many of his most famous essays were originally published. Many years later, Blair would recall his time at St Cyprian's with biting resentment in the essay 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. However, in his time at St. Cyprian's, the young Blair successfully earned scholarships to both Wellington and Eton. After one term at Wellington, Blair moved to Eton, where he was a King's Scholar from 1917 to 1921. Aldous Huxley was his French teacher for one term early in his time at Eton. Later in life he wrote that he had been 'relatively happy' at Eton, which allowed its students considerable independence, but also that he ceased doing serious work after arriving there. Reports of his academic performance at Eton vary; some assert that he was a poor student, while others claim the contrary. He was clearly disliked by some of his teachers, who resented what they perceived as disrespect for their authority. After Blair finished his studies at Eton, his family could not pay for university and his father felt that he had no prospect of winning a scholarship, so in 1922 he joined the Indian Imperial Police, serving at Katha and Moulmein in Burma. He came to hate imperialism, and when he returned to England on leave in 1927 he decided to resign and become a writer. He later used his Burmese experiences for the novel Burmese Days and in such essays as 'A Hanging' and 'Shooting an Elephant' Back in England he wrote to Ruth Pitter, a family acquaintance, and she and a friend found him a room in London, on the Portobello Road, where he started to write. It was from here that he sallied out one evening to Limehouse Causeway - following in the footsteps of Jack London - and spent his first night in a common lodging house, probably George Levy's 'kip'. For a while he 'went native' in his own country, dressing like other tramps and making no concessions, and recording his experiences of low life in his first published essay, 'The Spike', and the latter half of Down and Out in Paris and London In the spring of 1928, he moved to Paris, where his Aunt Nellie lived and died, hoping to make a living as a freelance writer. In the autumn of 1929, his lack of success reduced Blair to taking menial jobs as a dishwasher for a few weeks, principally in a fashionable hotel on the rue de Rivoli, which he later described in his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, although there is no indication that he had the book in mind at the time. Ill and penniless, he moved back to England in 1929, using his parents' house in Southwold, Suffolk, as a base. Writing what became Burmese Days, he made frequent forays into tramping as part of what had by now become a book project on the life of the poorest people in society. Meanwhile, he became a regular contributor to John Middleton Murry's New Adelphi magazine. Blair completed Down and Out in 1932, and it was published early the next year while he was working briefly as a schoolteacher at a private school called Frays College near Hayes, Middlesex. He took the job as an escape from dire poverty and it was during this period that he managed to obtain a literary agent called Leonard Moore. Blair also adopted the pen name George Orwell just before Down and Out was published. In a November 15 letter to Leonard Moore, his agent, he left the choice of a pseudonym to Moore and to Victor Gollancz, the publisher. Four days later, Blair wrote Moore and suggested P. S. Burton, a name he used 'when tramping,' adding three other possibilities: Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, and H. Lewis Allways. Orwell drew on his work as a teacher and on his life in Southwold for the novel A Clergyman's Daughter, which he wrote at his parents' house in 1934 after ill-health - and the urgings of his parents - forced him to give up teaching. From late 1934 to early 1936 he worked part-time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, Booklover's Corner, in Hampstead. Having led a lonely and very solitary existence, he wanted to enjoy the company of other young writers, and Hampstead was a place for intellectuals, as well as having many houses with cheap bedsitters. He worked his experiences into the novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying In early 1936, Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz of the Left Book Club to write an account of poverty among the working class in the depressed areas of northern England, which appeared in 1937 as The Road to Wigan Pier. He was taken into many houses, simply saying that he wanted to see how people lived. He made systematic notes on housing conditions and wages and spent several days in the local public library consulting reports on public health and conditions in the mines. He did his homework as a social investigator. The first half of the book is a social documentary of his investigative touring in Lancashire and Yorkshire, beginning with an evocative description of work in the coal mines. The second half of the book, a long essay in which Orwell recounts his personal upbringing and development of political conscience, includes a very strong denunciation of what he saw as irresponsible elements of the left. Gollancz feared that the second half would offend Left Book Club readers, and inserted a mollifying preface to the book while Orwell was in Spain. Soon after completing his research for the book, Orwell married Eileen O'Shaughnessy. In December 1936, Orwell travelled to Spain primarily to fight, not to write, for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco's Fascist uprising. In a conversation with Philip Mairet, the editor of the New English Weekly, Orwell said: 'This fascism. somebody's got to stop it. ' To Orwell, liberty and democracy went together and, among other things, guaranteed the freedom of the artist; the present capitalist civilization was corrupt, but fascism would be morally calamitous. John McNair is also quoted as saying in a conversation with Orwell: 'He then said that this was quite secondary and his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism. ' He went alone, and his wife joined him later. He joined the Independent Labour Party contingent, a group of some twenty-five Britons who joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, a revolutionary Spanish communist political party with which the ILP was allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, believed that Franco could be defeated only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism - a position fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies, which argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties to defeat the Nationalists. In the months after July 1936 there was a profound social revolution in Catalonia, Aragon and other areas where the CNT was particularly strong. Orwell sympathetically describes the egalitarian spirit of revolutionary Barcelona when he arrived in Homage to Catalonia. According to his own account, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the Communist-run International Brigades by chance - but his experiences, in particular his and his wife's narrow escape from the Communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for POUM and made him a life-long anti-Stalinist and a firm believer in what he termed Democratic Socialism, that is to say, in socialism combined with free debate and free elections. During his military service, Orwell was shot through the neck and nearly killed. At first it was feared that his voice would be permanently reduced to nothing more than a painful whisper. This wasn't so, although the injury did affect his voice, giving it what was described as, 'a strange, compelling quietness. ' He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him he was lucky to survive, but that he personally thought 'it would be even luckier not to be hit at all. ' The Orwells then spent six months in Morocco in order to recover from his wound, and during this period, he wrote his last pre-World War II novel, Coming Up For Air. As the most English of all his novels, the alarms of war mingle with idyllic images of a Thames-side Edwardian childhood enjoyed by its protagonist, George Bowling. Much of the novel is pessimistic; industrialism and capitalism have killed the best of old England. There were also massive new external threats and George Bowling puts the totalitarian hypothesis of Borkenau, Orwell, Silone and Koestler in homely terms: 'Old Hitler's something different. So's Joe Stalin. They aren't like these chaps in the old days who crucified people and chopped their heads off and so forth, just for the fun of it. They're something quite new - something that's never been heard of before. ' After the ordeals of Spain and writing the book about it, most of Orwell's formative experiences were over. His finest writing, his best essays and his great fame lay ahead. In 1940, Orwell closed up his house in Wallington and he and Eileen moved into 18 Dorset Chambers, Chagford Street, in the genteel neighbourhood of Marylebone, very close to Regent's Park in central London. He supported himself by writing freelance reviews, mainly for the New English Weekly but also for Time and Tide and the New Statesman. He joined the Home Guard soon after the war began In 1941 Orwell took a job at the BBC Eastern Service, supervising broadcasts to India aimed at stimulating Indian interest in the war effort, at a time when the Japanese army was at India's doorstep. He was well aware that he was engaged in propaganda, and wrote that he felt like 'an orange that's been trodden on by a very dirty boot'. The wartime Ministry of Information, which was based at Senate House, University of London, was the inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nonetheless, Orwell devoted a good deal of effort to his BBC work, which gave him an opportunity to work closely with people like T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand and William Empson. Orwell's decision to resign from the BBC followed a report confirming his fears about the broadcasts: very few Indians were listening. He wanted to become a war correspondent and also seems to have been impatient to begin work on Animal Farm. Despite the good salary, he resigned in September 1943 and in November became the literary editor of Tribune, the left-wing weekly then edited by Aneurin Bevan and Jon Kimche Orwell was on the staff until early 1945, contributing a regular column titled 'As I Please. ' Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge had returned from overseas to finish the war in London. All three took to lunching regularly, usually at the Bodega just off the Strand or the Bourgogne in Soho, sometimes joined by Julian Symons, and David Astor, editor/owner of The Observer. In 1944, Orwell finished his anti-Stalinist allegory Animal Farm, which was first published in Britain on 17 August 1945 and in the U. S. A on the 26 August 1946 with great critical and popular success. Frank Morley, an editor Harcourt Brace, had come to Britain as soon as he could at the end of the War to see what readers were currently interested in. He asked to serve a week or so in Bowes and Bowes, a Cambridge bookshop. On his first day there customers kept asking for a book that had sold out - the second impression of Animal Farm. He left the counter, read the single copy left in the postal order department, went to London and bought the American rights. The royalties from Animal Farm were to provide Orwell with a comfortable income for the first time in his adult life. While Animal Farm was at the printer, and with the end of the War in sight, Orwell felt his old desire growing to be somehow in the thick of the action. David Astor asked him to act as a war correspondent for the Observer to cover the liberation of France and the early occupation of Germany, so Orwell left Tribune to do so. He was a close friend of Astor, and his ideas had a strong influence on Astor's editorial policies. Astor, who died in 2001, is buried in the grave next to Orwell. Orwell and his wife adopted a baby boy, Richard Horatio Blair, born in May 1944. Orwell was taken ill again in Cologne in spring 1945. While he was sick there, his wife died during an operation in Newcastle to remove a tumour. She had not told him about this operation due to concerns about the cost and the fact that she thought she would make a speedy recovery. For the next four years Orwell mixed journalistic work - mainly for Tribune, the Observer and the Manchester Evening News, though he also contributed to many small-circulation political and literary magazines - with writing his best-known work, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 1949. Originally, Orwell was undecided between titling the book The Last Man in Europe and Nineteen Eighty-Four but his publisher, Fredric Warburg, helped him choose. The title was not the year Orwell had initially intended. He first set his story in 1980, but, as the time taken to write the book dragged on, that was changed to 1982 and, later, to 1984. He wrote much of the novel while living at Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the island of Jura, which lies in the Gulf stream off the west coast of Scotland. It was an abandoned farmhouse with outbuildings near to the northern end of the island, lying at the end of a five-mile heavily rutted track from Ardlussa, where the laird or landowner, Margaret Fletcher, lived and where the paved road, the only road on the island, came to an end. In 1948, he co-edited a collection entitled British Pamphleteers with Reginald Reynolds. In 1949, Orwell was approached by a friend, Celia Kirwan, who had just started working for a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department, which the Labour government had set up to publish anti-communist propaganda. He gave her a list of 37 writers and artists he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings. The list, not published until 2003, consists mainly of journalists but also includes the actors Michael Redgrave and Charlie Chaplin. Orwell's motives for handing over the list are unclear, but the most likely explanation is the simplest: that he was helping a friend in a cause - anti-Stalinism - that they both supported. There is no indication that Orwell abandoned the democratic socialism that he consistently promoted in his later writings - or that he believed the writers he named should be suppressed. Orwell's list was also accurate: the people on it had all made pro-Soviet or pro-communist public pronouncements. In fact, one of the people on the list, Peter Smollett, the head of the Soviet section in the Ministry of Information, was later proven to be a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, and 'almost certainly the person on whose advice the publisher Jonathan Cape turned down Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text', although Orwell was unaware of this. In October 1949, shortly before his death, he married Sonia Brownell. Orwell died in London at the age of 46 from tuberculosis. He was in and out of hospitals for the last three years of his life. Having requested burial in accordance with the Anglican rite, he was interred in All Saints' Churchyard, Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire with the simple epitaph: 'Here lies Eric Arthur Blair, born June 25, 1903, died January 21, 1950'; no mention is made on the gravestone of his more famous pen-name. He had wanted to be buried in the graveyard of the closest church to wherever he happened to die, but the graveyards in central London had no space. Fearing that he might have to be cremated, against his wishes, his widow appealed to his friends to see if any of them knew of a church with space in its graveyard. Orwell's friend David Astor lived in Sutton Courtenay and negotiated with the vicar for Orwell to be buried there, although he had no connection with the village. Orwell's son, Richard Blair, was raised by an aunt after his father's death. He maintains a low public profile, though he has occasionally given interviews about the few memories he has of his father. Blair worked for many years as an agricultural agent for the British government. 

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A Tiger For Malgudi by R. K. Narayan. New York. 1983. Viking Press. 176 pages. Jacket design by Carol Lowenstein. Jacket illustration courtesy of The Granger Collection. 0670712604. August 1983.

 . DESCRIPTION - Raja, the hero and narrator of this wise and humorous novel, is a magnificent specimen - eleven feet from tip to tail, and the terror of Malgudi. He leads a carefree, if predatory, jungle life until he is lured into captivity by his own greed. His subsequent career as a circus performer and film star, which ends when he inadvertently gains the reputation of a man-eater, provides ample opportunity to observe the strange behavior of the bipeds around him. But nothing in his experience of humans has prepared him for his meeting with a holy man known only as the Master, a man whose authority is based on a profound understanding of the natural and spiritual world rather than on brute force. Raja becomes his unlikely disciple, and what seemed to be a simple tale becomes a novel of surprising depth and humanity. R. K. Narayan's skillful blend of observation, philosophy, and humor will come as no surprise to readers already familiar with the works of this master storyteller, whom John Updike has called 'the foremost Indian writer of fiction in English.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001), full name Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami, was an Indian writer, best known for his works set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. He is one of three leading figures of early Indian literature in English (alongside Mulk Raj Anand and Raja Rao), and is credited with bringing the genre to the rest of the world. Narayan broke through with the help of his mentor and friend, Graham Greene, who was instrumental in getting publishers for Narayan’s first four books, including the semi-autobiographical trilogy of Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts and The English Teacher. Narayan’s works also include The Financial Expert, hailed as one of the most original works of 1951, and Sahitya Akademi Award winner The Guide, which was adapted for film and for Broadway. The setting for most of Narayan's stories is the fictional town of Malgudi, first introduced in Swami and Friends. His narratives highlight social context and provide a feel for his characters through everyday life. He has been compared to William Faulkner, who also created a fictional town that stood for reality, brought out the humour and energy of ordinary life, and displayed compassionate humanism in his writing. Narayan's short story writing style has been compared to that of Guy de Maupassant, as they both have an ability to compress the narrative without losing out on elements of the story. Narayan has also come in for criticism for being too simple in his prose and diction. In a writing career that spanned over sixty years, Narayan received many awards and honours. These include the AC Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second-highest civilian award. He was also nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's parliament. Novelist Graham Greene said of Narayan, ‘Since the death of Evelyn Waugh, Narayan is the novelist I most admire in the English language.’

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We'll To The Woods No More by Edouard Dujardin. New York. 1938. New Directions. Translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert. Illustrated by Alice Laughlin. 157 pages.

DESCRIPTION - The importance of this book is that with it was invented a new fiction method, the monologue intérieur, which has revolutionized the modern novel and which, one could even say, has given new depth to our understanding of experience. Forgotten soon after its publication in 1887, Dujardin’s novel, called in French Les lauriers son coupés, was read first by James Joyce in 1902; it was republished in 1924 after Joyce had freely acknowledged that it was the inspiration for his stream-of-consciousness method. It has since had direct and indirect influence on many writers of the first order, and without it one can scarcely understand twentieth century literature. The story of a young man-about-town in love with a Parisian actress, We’ll to the Woods No More recounts what goes on in his mind during an April evening when he hopes she will finally be ‘his. Told with insight and irony, it is a charming tale, and a few perceptive readers saw something more in it from the beginning. George Moore, a friend of Dujardin’s wrote of the poetry of the book’s treatment, while Mallarmé described it as ‘the instant seized by the throat.’ In a new introduction for this edition, Professor Leon Edel, critic and editor, discusses the book itself, earlier experiments which led to Dujardin’s method and our indebtedness to it today. The translation is by Stuart Gilbert, author of books on Joyce and the editor of his letters. (original title: Les lauriers son coupes, 1887).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Édouard Dujardin (10 November 1861 – 31 October 1949) was a French writer, one of the early users of the stream of consciousness literary technique, exemplified by his 1888 novel Les Lauriers sont coupés. Édouard Émile Louis Dujardin was born in Saint-Gervais-la-Forêt, Loir-et-Cher, and was the only child of Alphonse Dujardin, a sea captain. He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. Dujardin became editor of the journal Revue Indépendente in 1886, and it was in this journal that his first works were published. His association with this journal resulted in it being termed an ‘important voice for the symbolists’ (Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center 2004). When his parents died, Dujardin was the sole heir to their fortune, and he used some of this money to finance the plays Antonia in 1891 and Le Chevalier Du Passé in 1882. His literary works are extensive and include numerous plays, poems and novels. Dujardin also produced works of literary and social criticism and reminiscence. James Joyce claimed his style of interior monologue owed its influence to works by Dujardin. He continued his involvement with journalism throughout his life and this resulted in numerous disputes with authorities, including charges of treason, though he was never convicted. Dujardin had expensive and lavish tastes for clothing which was deemed ‘dandyish’ for his time, and was known to frequent Parisian night life. His many dalliances with women were noted and he had had numerous relationships with actresses, models and other glamorous women. Dujardin was also known to have many female friends involved in the arts and he supported some of them financially. His frivolous lifestyle eventually reduced his finances so he began numerous financial ventures, including gambling and real estate. He also offered his services to periodicals for marketing and advertising campaigns. It was here that the police noticed an article compiled by Dujardin which resulted in a jail sentence, though it was later remitted. In 1885 Dujardin and Téodor de Wyzewa initiated the Revue Wagnérienne, imitating Félix Fénéon and his Revue Indépendante which had first been published the year before. In 1886 Dujardin and Fénéon joined forces under the banner of a new improved Revue Indépendante. One of the innovations at this time was that the Revue started having small exhibitions in its rooms. Dujardin married a woman named Germaine in 1893 and they later separated in 1901. They did not divorce until 1924 when he married Marie Chenou, a woman thirty years his junior. He fathered two children, lived a peaceful life during his old age and died aged 88 years old on 31 October 1949.

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Resurrection by William Gerhardi. New York. 1934. Harcourt Brace & Company. 372 pages. hardcover.

'One grows older furtively, under the watchful eyes of friends. But gradually one sees they are accomplices who condone the crime; which turns into a weakness, an indulgence, finally a boast.' - The opening lines from William Gerhardi's novel RESURRECTION.

DESCRIPTION - A thirty-seven year-old man attends a ball during the course of which he has an out-of-body experience and revisits his entire past. 'Resurrection' is fiction and autobiography merged into one. For though, in its passionate argument for the resurrection of the body, it presents the entire truth of the author's experience, it remains fiction in its technique and in its surface of names and pattern. A brilliant London ball furnishes the setting. Here are encountered the singular and bright individuals whose lives and thoughts have contributed to the reality of the author's existence. Throughout this affair, dancing, falling in love, conversing, eating, he is driven by the powerful conviction that has lately come to him - the conviction that we do not die. This belief so colors and compels each moment, that he has the force to relive his entire life in the course of the evening. More than half of the book is given to an extraordinary recital, during which the author summons up the experiences he had in one year that was unusually crowded with adventure of every sort, a year of travel when he visited America, Greece, Egypt, India. Returning to the ball at last, he returns to his present and to the bewildering contrast that his new belief in an after-life provides. The whole last section is a record of the personal conflict, subtly played out in the setting with which the novel begins. New in treatment as in story, this represents William Gerhardi's most mature contribution to fiction. The style and signature are unmistakable; and they are the same that distinguished such novels as FUTILITY and THE POLYGLOTS.

William Alexander Gerhardi(e) was a British novelist and playwright. Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s H. G Wells was a ferocious champion of his work. His first novel Futility, was written while he was at Cambridge and drew on his experiences in Russia fighting the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of 'waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in WAITING FOR GODOT, but it is probably more apt to recognize a common comic nihilism between those two figures. His next novel, THE POLYGLOTS is probably his masterpiece Again it deals with Russia He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography 'The Casanova Fable', his friendship with Hugh being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus. After World War II Gerhardie's star waned, and he became unfashionable, and although he continued to write, he had nothing published after 1939. After a period of poverty-stricken oblivion, he lived to see two 'definitive collected works' published by Macdonald More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works. Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest 'Pronounced jer hardy, with the accent on the a: jer-har'dy. This is the way I and my relatives pronounce it, tho I am told it is incorrect. Philologists are of the opinion that it should be pronounced with the g as in Gertrude. I believe they are right. I, however, cling to the family habit of mispronouncing it. But I do so without obstinacy. If the world made it worth my while I would side with the multitude.'

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The Royal Game and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. New York. 1981. Harmony Books. Translated From The German By Jill Sutcliffe. Introduction By John Fowles. 250 pages. Jacket design by Shirley Tuckley. 0517545535.

The stories of Stefan Zweig are exquisite gems. In his day he was one of most popular writers of his time, but now many of his books are out-of-print. Thankfully, a few presses like Pushkin Press are making some of Zweig's work available once again. THE ROYAL GAME & OTHER STORIES contains some of Zweig's classics.

 DESCRIPTION - It is difficult to imagine, while reading the five newly translated stories here, how a writer of Stefan Zweig's awesome gifts came to suffer literary obscurity. Such formidable figures as Thomas Mann, Richard Strauss, and Sigmund Freud all praised Zweig; his books were international best-sellers. As John Fowles writes in his introduction to The Royal Game and Other Stories, Zweig is a 'remarkably fertile and gifted writer. Stefan Zweig's stories have a dark magnetism; they explore the limitless scope of every kind of single-mindedness-obsessional love, pathological revenge, and even madness in chess. Zweig wrote: 'A psychological problem is as attractive for me in a living person as in an historical person. my novels and biographies come out of the same source. , an insatiable curiosity. ' Zweig pushes his fictional characters through traps and pitfalls that divert them from their characteristic behavior and then follows them to the extremes to which their minds will eventually lead. The reader is inexorably drawn into a web of hidden secrets and unforgettable characters. THE ROYAL GAME AND OTHER STORIES brings to the modern reader a compelling kind of narrative wizardry little found today. As John Fowles, author of The French Lieutenant's Woman, concludes in his introduction, 'Now I must let Zweig's troubled, but always humane, spirit speak for itself. It has wandered much too far out of the English-speaking world's memory. It is time, on this centenary of his birth, that we read him again. ' Five stories you will always remember by a writer you will never forget. In LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, a celebrated novelist returns home early one morning. His servant hands him tea and a letter; the letter is written in an unfamiliar, shaky, feminine hand. It begins, 'To you who never knew me,' and gradually reveals a woman's obsession and impossible love. THE BURNING SECRET is a story from the land of childhood. During the days of Imperial Austria, a young baron arrives in Semmering for a mountain holiday. At an elegant dinner, he finds an object for his lust: a sensual Jewess, who is accompanied by her small boy. The baron befriends the boy, gains his confidence, and closes in on the married mother. AMOK is a tale of dark passion. As John Fowles says, 'Conrad's literal typhoons are carried over into the domain of the sexual. ' A European doctor commits a crime. Guilt-ridden and alcoholic, he is banished to the remote tropics. At first, he successfully fights death and disease - later, they seep into his very being. A wealthy married woman mysteriously appears at his isolated outpost, pregnant with her lover's child. Trapped by her own passion, she requests the doctor's services. He agrees but only if she will first surrender herself to him. Frau Wagner, in 'FEAR,' is respectable-she has a husband, children, and servants. Yet something has gone wrong; she lives and dreams the horror that her secret love will be discovered. THE ROYAL GAME is the story of a man who enters into a fateful chess match. Imprisoned years before by the Gestapo, a single chess book saves Dr. B. from the madness of solitary confinement. Now while he is aboard a ship to Buenos Aires, his fellow passengers urge him to challenge Czenotivic, the world champion, to a match. Dr. B. hesitates, then agrees. The madness of his imprisonment returns. 'Stefan Zweig has suffered, since his death in 1942, a darker eclipse than any other famous writer of this century. Even 'famous writer' understates the prodigious reputation he enjoyed in the last decade or so of his life, when he was arguably the most widely read and translated serious author in the world. ' - From the Introduction by John Fowles.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - STEFAN ZWEIG was born in 1881 in Vienna to a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He was first known as a poet and translator and then as a biographer, producing studies of an assortment of people-notably, Erasmus, Joseph Fouch?, and Marie Antoinette. His well-known collection of stories, Kaleidoscope, appeared in 1934 and his one-truly remarkable-novel, Beware of Pity, appeared in 1939. Zweig traveled widely, and living in Salzburg between the wars, he made friends with the greats-Romain Rolland, Freud, Toscanini. Recognition as a writer came early, and by the time he was forty, he had already achieved literary fame. In 1934, with Nazism entrenched across the border, Zweig left Austria to settle in England-his publishing life was destroyed by the Nazis and he saw his dream of a united Europe shattered. Shortly after completing the title story in this collection in 1942, Zweig took his own life in Petropolis, Brazil.

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Joseph Fouche: The Portrait Of A Politician by Stefan Zweig. London. 1930. Cassell & Company. Translated From The German By Eden & Cedar Paul. 327 pages.

This biography of Joseph Fouche, a major behind-the-scenes figure in the French Revolution, is a fascinating study of one man's rise from relatively humble beginnings to the absolute pinnacle of power, back down again, then up, and then again down. Fouche's roll-coaster ride of fortune is a remarkable story.

DESCRIPTION - 'Gambler-in-chief at the great roulette board of human destiny,' Joseph Fouche is one of the most amazing figures in history. He is 'the most remarkable politician the world has ever known,' says Stefan Zweig, and, by way of proof, offers a brilliant and fascinating biography. Against the flaming background of the French Revolution we see Fouche, hitherto unknown, a 'semi-priest,' take his seat as member of the dreaded National Convention of France. When the people cry for the blood of the aristocrats he proceeds to Lyons, which has risen against the revolutionists, and plunges into an orgy of murder and blasphemy; when the people turn to moderation he repudiates his former companions, helps to speed Robespierre to the guillotine, and becomes the most moderate of moderates. His rise is meteoric, his fall equally so. Suddenly Citizen Fouche sinks into obscure poverty, earning his crust of bread by petty spying, even, at one tune, by becoming a swineherd. Then in the next era Fouche rises again to new and greater heights as Minister of Police to Napoleon. Not only does he spy out Napoleon's enemies, he even uses Josephine to spy on the Emperor himself. Joseph Fouche, the man who killed aristocrats and tended swine, finally becomes Duke of Otranto, millionaire, aristocrat, master-spy, and super-blackguard. From the pages of this volume emerge not only Fouche, but some of the great figures of history: Napoleon, Robespierre, Louis XVIII, Talleyrand, Lafayette. To read it is to gain knowledge of sixty of the most volcanic years the world has known.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Stefan Zweig (November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world. Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), from a Jewish banking family. Joseph Brettauer did business for twenty years in Ancona, Italy, where his second daughter Ida was born and grew up, too. Zweig studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on ‘The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine‘. Religion did not play a central role in his education. ‘My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth‘, Zweig said later in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jews and Jewish themes, as in his story Buchmendel. Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna's main newspaper; Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig's early essays. Zweig believed in internationalism and in europeanism; Herzl's Jewish nationalism could not therefore have much attraction, as The World of Yesterday, his autobigraphy, makes clear. The Neue Freie Presse did not review Herzl's Der Judenstaat. Zweig himself called Herzl's book an ‘obtuse text, [a] piece of nonsense’. Stefan Zweig was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský. Hostovský described Zweig as ‘a very distant relative’; some sources describe them as cousins. At the beginning of World War I, patriotic sentiment was widespread, and extended to many German and Austrian Jews: Zweig, as well as Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen, all showed support. Zweig, although patriotic, refused to pick up a rifle; instead, he served in the Archives of the Ministry of War, and soon acquired a pacifist stand like his friend Romain Rolland, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature 1915. He then moved to Switzerland until the end of the war. Zweig remained a pacifist all his life and advocated the unification of Europe. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies. His Erasmus of Rotterdam he called a ‘concealed self-portrayal’ in The World of Yesterday. Zweig married Friderike Maria von Winternitz (born Burger) in 1920; they divorced in 1938. As Friderike Zweig she published a book on her former husband after his death. She later also published a picture book on Zweig. In 1939 Zweig married his secretary Lotte Altmann. Zweig left Austria in 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in London first, then from 1939 in Bath). Because of the swift advance of Hitler's troops into France and all of Western Europe, Zweig and his second wife crossed the Atlantic Ocean and traveled to the United States, where they settled in 1940 in New York City, and traveled. On August 22, 1940, they moved again to Petrópolis, a town in the conurbation of Rio de Janeiro. Feeling more and more depressed by the growth of intolerance, authoritarianism, and nazism, and feeling hopeless for the future for humanity, Zweig wrote a note about his feelings of desperation. Then, in February 23, 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the city of Petrópolis, holding hands. He had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. ‘I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth’, he wrote. The Zweigs' house in Brazil was later turned into a museum and is now known as Casa Stefan Zweig. Zweig was a very prominent writer in the 1920s and 1930s, and befriended Arthur Schnitzler and Sigmund Freud. He was extremely popular in the USA, South America and Europe, and remains so in continental Europe; however, he was largely ignored by the British public, and his fame in America has since dwindled. Since the 1990s there has been an effort on the part of several publishers (notably Pushkin Press and the New York Review of Books) to get Zweig back into print in English. Plunkett Lake Press Ebooks has begun to publish electronic versions of his non-fiction as well. Criticism over his oeuvre is severely divided between some English-speaking critics, who despise his literary style as poor, lightweight and superficial, and some of those more attached to the European tradition, who praise his humanism, simplicity and effective style. Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Royal Game, Amok, Letter from an Unknown Woman – filmed in 1948 by Max Ophüls), novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion of Feelings, and the posthumously published The Post Office Girl) and biographies (notably Erasmus of Rotterdam, Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles and also posthumously published, Balzac). At one time his works were published in English under the pseudonym 'Stephen Branch' (a translation of his real name) when anti-German sentiment was running high. His biography of Queen Marie-Antoinette was later adapted for a Hollywood movie, starring the actress Norma Shearer in the title role. Zweig enjoyed a close association with Richard Strauss, and provided the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman). Strauss famously defied the Nazi regime by refusing to sanction the removal of Zweig's name from the program for the work's première on June 24, 1935 in Dresden. As a result, Goebbels refused to attend as planned, and the opera was banned after three performances. Zweig later collaborated with Joseph Gregor, to provide Strauss with the libretto for one other opera, Daphne, in 1937. At least one other work by Zweig received a musical setting: the pianist and composer Henry Jolles, who like Zweig had fled to Brazil to escape the Nazis, composed a song, ‘Último poema de Stefan Zweig’, based on ‘Letztes Gedicht’, which Zweig wrote on the occasion of his 60th birthday in November 1941. During his stay in Brazil, Zweig wrote Brasilien, Ein Land der Zukunft (Brazil, Land of the Future) which was an accurate analysis of his newly adopted country and in his book he managed to demonstrate a fair understanding of the Brazilian culture that surrounded him. Zweig was a passionate collector of manuscripts. There are important Zweig collections at the British Library and at the State University of New York at Fredonia. The British Library's Stefan Zweig Collection was donated to the library by his heirs in May 1986. It specialises in autograph music manuscripts, including works by Bach, Haydn, Wagner, and Mahler. It has been described as ‘one of the world's greatest collections of autograph manuscripts’. One particularly precious item is Mozart's ‘Verzeichnüß aller meiner Werke’ – that is, the composer's own handwritten thematic catalogue of his works. The 1993–1994 academic year at the College of Europe was named in his honour.

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Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays by Chinua Achebe. New York. 1989. Doubleday. 188 pages. Jacket illustration by Sally Sturman. 0385247303. October 1989.

A thought-provoking collection of essays from the Nigerian author of THINGS FALL APART. His essay on Joseph Conrad is especially brilliant.

DESCRIPTION - One of the most provocative and original voices in contemporary literature, Chinua Achebe commands widespread critical acclaim. His novels, including the recently published ANTHILLS OF THE SAVANAH, are considered modern classics. HOPES AND IMPEDIMENTS draws on the best critical writings of this powerful writer over the past twenty-five years, offering a new perspective on the human condition. These essays range from an analysis of Joseph Conrad that has infuriated many an English professor, to a moving tribute to James Baldwin. There are reflections on broad topics such as 'The Truth of Fiction,' 'Thoughts on the African Novel,' 'Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South,' and on the present needs of his own society. Throughout these provocative works run the central themes of literature and art against the background of Europe and Africa and the black-white divide. Mr. Achebe brings to bear his unique creative energies in exposing the monster of racist habit. 'Gloriously gifted with the magic of an ebullient, generous, great talent.' - Nadine Gordimer.

 Chinua Achebe (born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe, 16 November 1930 – 21 March 2013) was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature. Chinua Achebe published THINGS FALL APART in 1958. It was followed by NO LONGER AT EASE (AWS 3) and ARROW OF GOD (AWS 16). A MAN OF THE PEOPLE (AWS 31) aroused widespread interest on publication at the time of the January 1966 coup because of its prophetic ending. The effects of his novels, and of his editorship of the African Writers Series has had a dramatic impact on the development of the literature of Africa. Some of the stories in GIRLS AT WAR (AWS 100) and some of the poems in BEWARE SOUL BROTHER (AWS 120) are set in the war. His essays were published in 1975 under the title MORNING YET ON CREATION DAY (Heinemann). He was educated at Government College, Umuahia and University College, Ibadan. By the time he left the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation in 1966 he had become Director of External Broadcasting. Since the war he has been at the Universities of Nigeria, Massachusetts and Connecticut. He has now returned to Nsukka. Among many recent honours has been the award of a Fellowship of the Modern Languages Association of America and of Doctorates at the Universities of Stirling and Southampton. He has recently followed Heinrich Boll, the Nobel prizewinner, as the recipient of the Scottish Arts Council's Neil Gunn Fellowship. Chinua Achebe is best known as a novelist. But the years of the Nigerian crisis and the civil war were not, for both practical and psychological reasons, a time for work on full-length novels. He found poetry a means of expressing his distress, even though few of the poems speak directly of the war. He has added some new poems to this collection which has already been published in Nigeria. 

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The Art of the Novel by Milan Kundera. New York. 1988. Grove Press. Translated From The French By Linda Asher. 165 pages. Jacket design by the author. 0802100112.

Milan Kundera reinvigorates our desire to tackle the classics in literature.

DESCRIPTION - In these seven related essays he reacquaints us with some of the giants of the novel and inspires us to rethink our relationships to their narratives. 'Need I stress that intend no theoretical statement at all, and that the entire book is simply a practitioner's confession? Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is; I have tried to express here the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels. ' In seven relatively independent but closely linked parts, Milan Kundera sets forth his personal conception of the European novel Is its history coming to an end? Today in the period of 'terminal paradoxes,' the novel 'cannot live in peace with the spirit of our time:. if it is to go on 'progressing' as novel, it can do so only against the progress of the world. ' One of the parts is devoted to Hermann Broch, another to Kafka, and throughout the book Kundera constantly reflects on the writers who are the mainstays of his 'personal history of the novel': Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Tolstoy Musil, Gombrowicz. In two dialogues, the author speaks directly about his own art almost in the craftsman's sense of the word: about his means of creating 'experimental selves' and novelistic 'polyphony' about his methods of composition. And in a characteristically playful and original 'dictionary' he defines and considers the 'key words' that appear throughout his novels as well as those that underlie his aesthetic of the novel.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MILAN KUNDERA was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Since 1975, he has lived in France. He is the author of THE JOKE, LAUGHABLE LOVES, LIFE IS ELSEWHERE, THE FAREWELL PARTY THE BOOK OF LAUGHTER AND FORGETTING, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING and the play JACQUES AND HIS MASTER. The fiction was originally written in Czech, THE ART OF THE NOVEL in French.

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Therese Raquin by Emile Zola. New York. 1962. Penguin Books. Translated From The French & With An Introduction By Leonard Tancock. 256 pages. The cover shows a detail from Under the Lamplight by Edouard Vuillard in the Musee Annonciade, St Tropez. 0140441204.

THERESE RAQUIN has all of the steaminess of a James M. Cain novel. Absolutely hypnotic in stretches - It is short, but not too sweet.

DESCRIPTION - 'Putrid Literature', 'a quagmire of slime and blood', 'a sewer' - these were some of the critics' reactions to this novel. The immediate success which THERESE RAQUIN enjoyed on publication in 1868 was partly due to scandal, following the accusation of pornography; in reply Zola defined the new creed of Naturalism in the famous preface which is printed in this volume. The novel is a grim tale of adultery, murder and revenge in a nightmarish setting. A thriller and, as Leonard Tancock says in his introduction, a cautionary tale on the sixth and seventh commandments, this early work of Zola's is full of black macabre poetry which has kept its tragic power for over a century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Émile François Zola (2 April 1840 – 29 September 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in the renowned newspaper headline J'Accuse.

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The Cowards by Josef Skvorecky. New York. 1970. Grove Press. Translated From The Czech By Jeanne Nemcova. 416 pages.

Josef Skvorecky's groundbreaking novel of the last days of the Nazi Protectorate of Czechoslovakia.

DESCRIPTION - Danny Smiricky is as concerned with woman and jazz as he is with the departure of the defeated Nazis and the advancing Soviet army. Still, there is no way to avoid the political absurdities that are just around the corner. 'I wrote a novel about which there are two divergent opinions: it was considered either epoch-making or scandalous. But I never set out to create art at all, I simply tried to write a book. THE COWARDS came out quite smoothly, without any problems. I expected to be attacked for excessive naturalism, slang, some of the erotic scenes, and I was ready to defend myself on the grounds of literary theory. But I would have never dreamed that I might become the target of attacks for having sullied things which are holy and glorious. ' Thus spoke the author in 1962. Josef Skvorecky's crime was that he wrote about the Red Army as a collection of men, not as gods of the proletariat. Czech writers, poets, composers, directors, editors, and readers thought The Cowards was indeed one of the major works of fiction to emerge from the post-war period. Politicians and establishment critics with Stalinist leanings found the book scandalous. As a result, all who appreciated THE COWARDS--the editors who published the novel and the critics who praised it--were fired outright and the accustomed avenues of expression denied them. This was Prague in 1958. Under Dubcek, the book was reissued and quickly became a manifesto for the young generation of Czechoslovak liberals. Since then, it has been translated into German, French, Polish, English, and other editions are soon to appear. 'What is THE COWARDS anyway? The story of a small town, its jazz, its student life, the end of the war. ' It is also the intense, personal story of Danny Smiricky and the boys in his band who somehow float above the turmoil, somehow remain the only sane human beings in a chaotic time. The cowards scoff at the self-appointed civil government, they find the regimentation of the military authorities absurd, and their only immediate thoughts--with humor, irony, and fantasy--are of the girls they have had or the girls they want. THE COWARDS relates the events of the last week of the Nazi Protectorate of Czechoslovakia, of the advancing Soviets, of Danny's feelings for women, politics, sharp clothes, his saxophone, and his 'image. ' It is a remembrance of a lost time, of a lost feeling, of a boredom with the exterior world, and a fascination with jazz and Danny's own sprawling imagination. Josef Skvorecky's book is an important statement by a major international writer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Josef Škvorecký (September 27, 1924 – January 3, 2012) was a Czech-Canadian writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. SKVORECKY was born in Bohemia, emigrated to Canada in 1968, and was for many years a professor of English at Erindale College, University of Toronto. He and his wife, the novelist Zdena Salivarova, ran a Czech-language publishing house, Sixty-Eight Publishers, in Toronto, and were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. Skvorecky’s novels include THE COWARDS, MISS SILVER’S PAST, THE BASS SAXOPHONE, THE ENGINEER OF HUMAN SOULS, and DVORAK IN LOVE. He was the winner of the 1980 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1984 Governor General’s Award for fiction in Canada. Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

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Florida Frenzy by Harry Crews. Gainesville. 1982. University Press Of Florida. Paperback Original. 138 pages. Cover design by Larry Leshaw. 0813007267. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Florida is where Harry Crews likes to do his writing. When he writes about Florida, he demonstrates a perfect grasp of both the tacky and the sublime attractions of this peculiar subtropical paradise. Since he moved to the Sunshine State in 1968, Mr. Crews has been watching and writing. In this collection of fiction and essays produced since 1969, the people and places of Florida are filtered through his Southern Gothic consciousness and rowdy sense of humor. Mr. Crews has published novels and many magazine essays. He is a member of the English department at the University of Florida. ‘Teaching and Writing in the University’ was written especially for this volume.

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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