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Contending Forces by Pauline E. Hopkins. Carbondale. 1978. Southern Illinois University Press. 0809308746. Afterword by Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrations by R. Emmet Owen. 432 pages. hardcover.

0809308746 DESCRIPTION - In 1900, a mere 35 years after the Civil War had ended the practice of one human being owning another, Pauline Hopkins, black and female, published Contending Forces, whose rediscovery here shocks us into recognition that our national literature does indeed con; tain examples of black awareness and pride. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Pauline Hopkins writes of the injustices suffered by blacks at the hands of whites. But her novel penetrates deeper than Uncle Tom's Cabin. Nor is the white man the sole devil in Hopkins's fiction; there are the contending forces: 'Conservatism, lack of brotherly affiliation, lack of energy for the right and the power of the almighty dollar which deadens men's hearts to the sufferings of their brothers, and makes them feel that if only they can rise to the top of the ladder may God help the hindermost man, are . . . the contending forces that are dooming this race to despair.'

Hopkins Pauline E

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859 - August 13, 1930) was a prominent African-American novelist, journalist, playwright, historian, and editor. She is considered a pioneer in her use of the romantic novel to explore social and racial themes. Her work reflects the influence of W. E. B. Du Bois.

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The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions by Thorstein Veblen. New York/London. 1917. Macmillan. 404 pages. hardcover.

theory of the leisure class macmillan 1917 no dw DESCRIPTION - ‘It is the purpose of this inquiry to discuss the place and value of the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life, but it has been found impracticable to confine the discussion strictly within the limits so marked out. Some attention is perforce given to the origin and the line of derivation of the institution, as well as to features of social life that are not commonly classed as economic. At some points the discussion proceeds on grounds of economic theory or ethnological generalisation that may be in some degree unfamiliar. The introductory chapter indicates the nature of these theoretical premises sufficiently, it is hoped, to avoid obscurity. A more explicit statement of the theoretical position involved is made in a series of papers published in Volume IV of the American Journal of Sociology, on ‘The Instinct of Workmanship and the Irksomeness of Labour', ‘The Beginnings of Ownership', and ‘The Barbarian Status of Women.' But the argument does not rest on these - in part novel - generalisations in such a way that it would altogether lose its possible value as a detail of economic theory in case these novel generalisations should, in the reader's apprehension, fall away through being insufficiently backed by authority or data. Partly for reasons of convenience, and partly because there is less chance of misapprehending the sense of phenomena that are familiar to all men, the data employed to illustrate or enforce the argument have by preference been drawn from everyday life, by direct observation or through condition notoriety, rather than from more recondite sources at a farther remove. It is hoped that no one will find his sense of literary or scientific fitness offended by this recourse to homely facts, or by what may at times appear to be a callous freedom in handling vulgar phenomena or phenomena whose intimate place in men's life has sometimes shielded them from the impact of economic discussion. Such premises and corroborative evidence as are drawn from remoter sources, as well as whatever articles of theory or inference are borrowed from ethnological science, are also of the more familiar and accessible kind and should be readily traceable to their source by fairly well-read persons. The usage of citing sources and authorities has therefore not been observed. Likewise the few quotations that have been introduced, chiefly by way of illustration, are also such as will commonly be recognised with sufficient facility without the guidance of citation.' - from the Preface. . .

Veblen Thorstein AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Thorstein Bunde Veblen (born Torsten Bunde Veblen; July 30, 1857 - August 3, 1929) was an American economist and sociologist, and leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen is credited for the main technical principle used by institutional economists, known as the Veblenian dichotomy. It is a distinction between what Veblen called 'institutions' and 'technology'. Besides his technical work, Veblen was a popular and witty critic of capitalism, as illustrated by his best-known book The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen is famous in the history of economic thought for combining a Darwinian evolutionary perspective with his new institutionalist approach to economic analysis. He combined sociology with economics in his masterpiece, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), where he argued that there was a fundamental split in society between those who make their way via exploitation and those who make their way via industry. In hunter-gatherer societies, this was the difference between the hunter and the gatherer in the tribe, but in feudalism, it became the difference between the landed gentry and the indentured servant. In society's progressively modernized forms, those with the power to exploit are known as the 'leisure class', defined by a commitment to demonstrations of idleness and a lack of productive economic activity. Veblen maintains that as societies mature, conspicuous leisure gives way to 'conspicuous consumption'. Both are performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. While Veblen was sympathetic to state ownership of industry, he did not support labor movements of the time. Scholars mostly disagree about the extent to which Veblen's views are compatible with Marxism, socialism, or anarchism. Veblen believed that technological developments would eventually lead to a socialist economy, but his views on socialism and the nature of the evolutionary process of economics differed sharply from Karl Marx's. While Marx saw socialism as the immediate precursor to communism and the ultimate goal for civilization to be achieved by the working class, Veblen saw socialism as an intermediate phase in an ongoing evolutionary process in society that would arise due to natural decay of the business enterprise system. As a leading intellectual of the Progressive Era, Veblen made sweeping attacks on production for profit, and the emphasis on the wasteful role of consumption for status found within many of his works greatly influenced socialist thinkers and engineers who sought a non-Marxist critique of capitalism.

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Liquor, Guns and Ammo by Kent Anderson. Tucson. 1998. Dennis McMillan Publications. 0939767295. 296 pages. hardcover.

0939767295 DESCRIPTION - Brings together a diverse group of Anderson's writings: previously unpublished chapters from both "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Night Dogs", non-fiction articles on blood sports and bloodthirsty men as well as an award-winning travel piece on Mexico's Copper Canyon, the screenplay "Shank", and finally, notes toward a novel-in-progress, the third volume of the trilogy that began with "Sympathy for the Devil" and "Night Dogs."

Anderson Kent AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Kent Anderson (born August 20, 1945) is an American author, Vietnam War veteran, former police officer and former university professor born in 1945 in North Carolina. He has written novels, various articles and scenarios. Kent Anderson grew up in North Carolina. At age 19 he joined the Merchant navy as an Ordinary seaman for two years. In 1968 he enlisted in the US army and successfully applied and tested for the Special Forces. He was then assigned to Special Forces camp A-101 Mai Loc from 1969 to 1970. He earned two Bronze Star medals for his service in South Vietnam. After his service in Vietnam, he worked as a police officer in Portland, Oregon from 1972 to 1976. Kent Anderson then joined the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Montana where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts in Fiction in 1978. He worked again as a police officier in Oakland, California in 1983 before resigning to write his first novel, Sympathy for the Devil, about a young Special Forces soldier in the Vietnam War. He then worked as an assistant professor of English at UTEP in El Paso, Texas and at BSU in Boise, Idaho. Kent Anderson also worked as a screenwriter for Newline cinema, for which he wrote the scenario of Motorcycle Gang directed by John Milius. In 1996, Kent Anderson published his second novel, Night Dogs, where the protagonist of his first book joins the Portland Police Bureau as a police officer in the late 70's. This book was selected by the New York Times in the Notable books of the Year in 1998. Nowadays, Kent Anderson lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he keeps on writing novels.

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What We Did While We Made More Guns by Dorothy Barresi. Pittsburgh. 2018. University of Pittsburgh Press. 9780822965237. Pitt Poetry Series. 6 x 9. 104 pages. paperback.

9780822965237 DESCRIPTION - The poems in What We Did While We Made More Guns investigate the place where economic failure meets a widening acculturation of violence - a kind of Great Acceleration of soul extinction set in this spectacularly uneasy moment in American history. Cutting, comic, sorrowful, at times terrified, at times resolute, the poems tilt along the high cliff's edge of identity anxiety and American moral uncertainty, where each of us plays our part in the business of dispossession or resistance. Building themselves out of jazzed-up verbal velocities and wounded (in)sincerity, the poems counsel resilience against all forms of battery, mortal, spiritual, financial. They are pattern-makers in the dark. They talk back to God. They take into themselves what cannot be taken back: the news that forty-six million Americans have “slipped” below the poverty line; that guns discharge monstrously banal virility; that a black woman pulled over for a routine traffic violation dies by strangulation in her jail cell; that we buy and sell the myth of the American Dream as though our lives depended on it.

Barresi Dorothy

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dorothy Barresi is the author of four previous books of poetry: American Fanatics; Rouge Pulp; The Post-Rapture Diner, winner of an American Book Award, and All of the Above, winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is professor of English and creative writing at California State University, Northridge.

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Money: Whence It Came Where It Went by John Kenneth Galbraith. Boston. 1975. Houghton Mifflin. 0395198437. 324 pages. hardcover.

0395198437 DESCRIPTION - "Most things in life -- automobiles, mistresses, cancer -- are important only to those who have them. Money, in contrast, is equally important to those who have it and those who don't. Both, accordingly have a concern for understanding it. Both should proceed in the full confidence that they can." So writes John Kenneth Galbraith in this book. In it he offers a broad, professional view of the working of money as illuminated by its history from the kings of Lydia down to he present turmoil. No one has ventured such a sweeping and comprehensive look at the subject before; certainly no one has brought to it such a combination of literary skill, historical knowledge and professional economic competence. Henceforth all who speak on money -- and all who merely wish to know about money -- will have to read this book. And it will not be a chore. They will find it an interesting, amusing, and rewarding task.

Galbraith John Kenneth AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Kenneth ‘Ken' Galbraith (15 October 1908 - 29 April 2006) was a Canadian and later, U.S., economist, public official and diplomat, and a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s, during which time Galbraith fulfilled the role of public intellectual. In macro-economical terms he was a Keynesian and an institutionalist. Galbraith was a long-time Harvard faculty member and as a professor of economics stayed with Harvard University for half a century. He was a prolific author and wrote four dozen books, including several novels, and published over a thousand articles and essays on various subjects. Among his most famous works was a popular trilogy on economics, American Capitalism (1952), The Affluent Society (1958), and The New Industrial State (1967). Galbraith was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson; he served as United States Ambassador to India under the Kennedy administration. His prodigious literary output and outspokenness made him arguably ‘the best-known economist in the world' during his lifetime. Galbraith was one of few recipients both of the Medal of Freedom (1946) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2000) for his public service and contribution to science. The government of France made him a Commandeur de la Legion d'honneur.

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The Debt by Olle Högstrand. New York. 1974. Pantheon Books. 0394491912. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. 217 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Kenneth Miyamoto.

0394491912 DESCRIPTION - Lovely young Eva Hjort, an employee of the Psychological Defense Department (PDD), is murdered. Suspicion centers on three men. Daniel Strand, Eva's boss at PDD, is a former journalist who lives a quiet conventional life with his wife, two teenage children, and a mortgage. He also sells defense secrets to the Russians. Jacob Meyer is a German Jew who runs a small East German travel agency. Eva Hjort was in love with Meyer and used to work for him. He was Strand's initial contact with the Russians. Rune Sundin, Strand's superior at PDD, happens to sell defense secrets to the Americans. He suspects that Strand intends to expose him. T be Debt is Swedish mystery author Olle Högstrand's best tale of murder and espionage yet. He sets up the exciting milieu of international intrigue in a Swedish setting. The plot, a perfect mixture of clarity and complexity, leads to an astonishing climax Both spy thriller and elaborate policier, this book will be a special treat for all mystery fans.

Hogstrand Olle

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Olle Högstrand (September 18, 1933, Sweden - March 16, 1994, Stockholm, Sweden) was a reporter for the National Swedish News Agency, for which he has traveled widely in North America and Europe. He was also employed as a social worker and male nurse, and served for several years in the Swedish UN Force, in the Gaza Strip and the Congo. He lived in a suburb of Stockholm.

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The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1970. Collier/Macmillan. Collier African /American Library. 276 pages. paperback. 5390.

collier interpreters DESCRIPTION - THEY ARE THE INTERPRETERS - savage, satirical, poetic - caught for an instant on the canvas of time. They are the “now-generation” artists, lawyers, professors, journalists who speak for and of West Africa and her people and the land that was divided before it was Nigeria/Biafra. Drawn together by their color, nation, dissatisfactions, hopes, loves, hates, and the daily lives and deaths around them, four young Nigerian intellectuals evoke and interpret West Africa today. From their wild drinking bouts at the Club Cabana to their individual pursuits of personal and professional integrity, they are the lost and the found generation - simultaneously seekers and prophets as they attempt to define their identity in a world where primitive past and sophisticated present are brought into violent conflict. THE INTERPRETERS combines the uniquely sensitive observations of gifted Wole Soyinka with the kind of mad comedy seen in the works of Donleavy and Pynchon. Here is a book that speaks for modern Africa with universal relevance and irresistible appeal.

In an edition from Heinemann:

The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka. Portsmouth. 1970. Heinemann. 0435900765. African Writers Series. With introduction and notes by Eldred Jones. 260 pages. paperback. AWS76. Cover design by Keith Pointing. Cover illustration by Colin Williams.

DESCRIPTION - The Interpreters is concerned with a group of young Nigerian intellectuals trying to make something worthwhile of their lives and talents in a society where corruption and consequent cynicism, social climbing and conforming give them alternative cause for despair and laughter. It is elaborately, strikingly and indeed often beautifully written.' The Times. ‘ . . . passages that crackle up into risible scenes of social comedy.' The Observer. 'a great steaming marsh of a novel... brimful of promise and life.' New Statesman. 'The first African novel that has a texture of real complexity and depth.' Gerald Moore in The New African. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He is the first African winner in the Prize's history. When he heard the news, he said, 'This prize is recognition of our culture and our traditions in Africa, and I am very glad about it. This is his first novel.

Soyinka Wole AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.

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A Dance of the Forests by Wole Soyinka. Oxford. 1967. Oxford University Press. A Three Crowns Book. 89 pages. paperback.

dance of the forests oxford u press 1967 DESCRIPTION - ‘Leave the dead some room to dance,' sings the Dirge-Man in Wole Soyinka's beautiful play, A Dance of the Forests. But the living are not willing to do so, and the play's dynamic is the conflict between the desire of the dead for judgment and the desire of the living to avoid it. This conflict is manipulated by the will of Forest Father, who leads both to a judgment they do not relish, while despairing that his labours will effect any real improvement in human conduct ... 'The play opens with the arrival of two dead ancestors, thrusting their heads up from the understreams. They had been summoned by the living to attend ‘the gathering of the tribes' (an analogue of Nigerian Independence?), but instead of being the idealized figures of the tribal imagination they turn out to be full of ancient bitterness and resentment and are shunned by everyone as ‘obsceneties.' However, Forest Father selects four of the living and leads them away deep into the forest where, in company with the dead couple, he forces them to confront their true selves and the repetitive pattern of their weaknesses and crimes.' - Times Literary Supplement. 'The contemporary theater seems to have forgotten that it has its roots in ritual and song, and it is only the rare emergence of a Lorca or a Brecht - or a Wole Soyinka - that recreates an awareness of our deprivation.' - African Forum. 'His play, The Road, presented in London during the Commonwealth Festival last summer, was described by Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer as ‘having done for our napping language what brigand dramatists from Ireland have done for two centuries, booted it awake, rifled its pockets and scattered the loot into the middle of next week.' His novel, The Interpreters, has been greeted by an American critic as the work of a new James Joyce. Thanks to the Dakar Festival the two companies that he has founded, the 1960 Masks and Orisun Theatre were seen for the first time in full strength outside Nigeria in his play, Kongi's Harvest, and The Road got the Dakar prize for drama.' - New Society.

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Madmen and Specialists: A Play by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1971. Hill & Wang. 0809067080. 96 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Alice Brickner.

0809067080 DESCRIPTION - Wole Soyinka's newest full-length play, Madmen and Specialists, is set in the context of war and the aftermath of war. Dr. Bero is a medical specialist who goes to the front as a doctor and there changes professions to become an intelligence specialist. The ' 'madmen' of the play's title are Dr. Bero's father and his followers in the mocking cult of ‘As.' This cult is an ironic expression of horror at his son's venality and at the triumph of expediency and power lust that makes dehumanization possible. ‘As is and the System is its mainstay though it wear a hundred masks and a thousand outward forms.' Madmen and Specialists is a powerful, dramatic statement, perhaps more universal in language and application than any of Soyinka's previous works. According to the author, the play ‘has to do with a problem in my own society, the betrayal of vocation for the attraction of power in one form or another.' An early version of the play was staged in August 1970 during the Playwrights' Workshop Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, Waterford, Connecticut. The present version had its premi&re at Ibadan, Nigeria, in March 1971. Earlier plays by Soyinka include A Dance of the Forest, The Strong Breed, the Swamp-Dwellers, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Lion and the Jewel, Cam-wood on the Leaves, Kongi's Harvest, and The Road.

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Isara: A Voyage Around Essay by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1989. Random House. 0394540778. 262 pages. hardcover.

0394540778 DESCRIPTION - In 1984, two years after writing his classic childhood autobiography Aké, Wole Soyinka opened a tin box that had belonged to his father, a schoolteacher during Nigera's Colonial period. The simple contents of this box -- "a handful of letters, old journals with jottings, tax and other levy receipts, minutes of meetings and school reports, program notes of special events" -- provide the fuel for this second installment of Soyinka's memoirs: a son's fictionalized "voyage" into the life and times of his father.

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Ake: The Years of Childhood by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1982. Random House. 0394528077. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design: Bob Silverman.

0394528077 DESCRIPTION - Already hailed in England as ‘an exhilaratingly glad contribution to the literature of childhood . . . .a marvellously rich and amusing book' (New Society), AkE enchants. It is the brilliantly written autobiography covering the first eleven years in the life of the internationally acclaimed Nigerian playwright, poet, novelist and literary critic Wole Soyinka. The time is roughly 1934 to 1944. The place is a sprawling parsonage compound in a small town in western Nigeria. Here an endlessly daydreaming, bookish, inquisitive child lives in a world where Yoruba customs and beliefs are as real as the teachings of the Christian missionaries, a world where daemons and spirits of the forest are as intrusive as Jonah in the belly of the whale. Here is young Soyinka being formed by and responding to his parents: his mother, sometimes tender, sometimes violent, was called ‘Wild Christian' because of her all too fervent faith in the revelations of the Bible; but she was haunted by the passions and traditions of her people. His father, Essay, headmaster of a Christian grammar school, was an intensely argumentative man given to spending whole days and nights sparring verbally with his friend the bookseller. Here is young Soyinka, frightened by the supernatural, learning Yoruba lore from a friendly uncle; slipping in and out of mischief at a British grammar school; being baffled by the ways of adults; strutting his stuff vis-å-vis other children; feeling hurt, persecuted and guilty; and, above all, observing the life around him: Nigerian sights and sounds and succulent meals. He walks off the edge of the world as he had known it, following a police band too far; he reacts movingly to the death of his sister on her very first birthday; he thinks that Bukola, the bookseller's daughter who, because of her fainting spells, is considered abiku - belonging to both the realms of the living and of the dead - is going too far to get her own way; he listens to radio for the first time and daily anticipates the arrival of Hitler; he is intrigued by Paa Adan, a demented old warrior who prowls the streets of AkE, armed with his magical gourd and stick, on the lookout for the Führer; he is caught up in a flurry of excitement serving as a courier in a women's uprising against high taxes. In this loving evocation of vanished innocence, all is so exotic, all is so familiar. ‘AkE is a charming, cheering and almost idyllic book' (Sunday Times of London). About the Author WOLE SOYINKA is professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife, Nigeria. He holds an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and has been accorded major literary prizes in England, including the highly prestigious Thomas Whitting Award. His previous works published in America are, among others, Collected Plays, the memoir The Man Died and the work of criticism Myth, Literature and the African World.

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Art, Dialogue, and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1994. Pantheon Books. 0679400656. . 336 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration and design by Archie Ferguson.

0679400656 DESCRIPTION - By 'unquestionably Africa's most versatile writer and arguably her finest' (New York Times), Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage is a fierce and provocative contribution to the debate on multi-culturalism. This volume brings together nineteen iconoclastic essays from the past twenty-five years on African, European, and American literature, culture, and politics - many of which are published here for the first time. Whether he is discoursing on the idea of 'negritude' in 'From a Common Backcloth: A Reassessment of the African Literary Image' or on protest literature in 'The Writer in a Modern African State'; debunking the orthodoxies of contemporary literary criticism in 'The Critic and Society: Barthes, Leftocracy and Other Mythologies'; offering surprising readings of Shakespeare and Aristophanes; expounding on the tragedy of 'the recurrent cycle of human stupidity'; skewering intellectual demigods or his own critics, Soyinka is never less than profound and incisive. Art, Dialogue, and Outrage gives a startling vision of culture in our times.

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Myth, Literature and the African World by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1976. Cambridge University Press. 0521211905. 168 pages. hardcover. The jacket illustration shows a neo-traditional sculpture of the Nimba mask from the Baga, Guinea, signifying creative force. Jacket design by Ken Farnhill.

0521211905 DESCRIPTION - How does the African world perceive itself as a cultural entity and how are others to understand it? In the five essays in this volume, Wole Soyinka, one of Africa's most accomplished writers and perceptive critics, extends his discussion of a theme which has long preoccupied him and which seems even more important today, when modern urban society and political ideologies are dislocating and distorting a continent already fragmented by colonialism and the opposing creeds of Christianity and Islam. Professor Soyinka approaches his theme through imaginative works of literature and, indivisibly, through history, ritual and myth - in particular Yoruba myth. In that the stage is a ‘ritual arena of confrontation', many examples of the facets of the African ‘inner world' are taken from plays on or by Africans, but Professor Soyinka also analyses contemporary works of fiction and poetry. He discusses such controversial topics as the elitist aspects of the Negritude movement, the nature of ritual and how it can relate to drama, what makes great tragedy, the essential unity of experience and form in African as opposed to Western literature and casts illuminating glances at contemporary cultural heroes like Grotowski and Brook, Popper and Jung. It will be hard to remain uninvolved in this provocative and trenchant argument.

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Season of Anomy by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1974. Third Press. 320 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Bennie Arrington.

season of anomy 1974 third press DESCRIPTION - Season of Anomy is the second novel of Nobel winning Nigerian playwright and critic Wole Soyinka. Published in 1973, the novel is one of only two novels published during Soyinka's highly productive literary career. An African nation's continuing struggle for interwoven with a poignant love story, becomes the setting for this compelling novel. SEASON OF ANOMY adroitly and powerfully portrays the clash between old values and new ways, Western methods and African traditions. Ofeyi is a young, Western educated African. Through the gentle, yet forceful tutelage of a village elder, he develops a growing awareness of the forces of evil besetting his beloved country and the need to preserve a natural and simple way of life. Armed with his idealism and devotion to his mistress, national beauty idol, Irisyse, Ofeyi embarks on a path which gives birth to a desperate and bloody struggle for freedom from the shackles of the ‘Cartel' - the sinister and corrupt embodiment of all that is oppressive, exploitive colonialism. Aiyeri, Ofeyi's adopted village, becomes the inspiration for and the source of this movement to retain his nation's purity and soul.

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The Man Died by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1973. Harper & Row. 0060139722. 317 pages. hardcover.

0060139722 DESCRIPTION - This is the passionate, often intensely moving record of Soyinka's long imprisonment by the Nigerian authorities under the dictatorship of General Gowan at the time of Biafra's secession and the subsequent civil war. His arrest, in his own words, ‘was prompted by the following activities: by my denunciation of the war in the Nigerian papers, my visit to Ojukwu, my attempt to recruit the country's intellectuals within and outside the country for a pressure group which would utilize the ensuing military stalemate to repudiate and end both the secession of Biafra, and the genocide-consolidated dictatorship of the Army which made both secession and war inevitable.' Soyinka is the Solzhenitsyn of the African struggle, and an internationally famous poet, playwright and novelist who is regarded as a hero by blacks everywhere and as a major writer by Western critics.

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You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir by Wole Soyinka. New York. 2006. Random House. 037550365x. 499 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Susan Schultz. Jacket photograph: Darrell Gulin/Corbis.

037550365x DESCRIPTION - The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modem classic AkE: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland. In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family who bolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneering theater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not only recounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha, but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes - including his improbable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and the time he smuggled a frozen wildcat into Italy so that his theater company could experience a proper Nigerian barbecue. More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinka is a courageous voice for human rights, democracy, and freedom. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.

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Chronicles From the Land of the Happiests People on Earth by Wole Soyinka. New York. 2021. Pantheon. 9780593320167. 451 pages. hardcover.

9780593320167 DESCRIPTION - The first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature gives us a tour de force, his first novel in nearly half a century: a savagely satiric, gleefully irreverent, rollicking fictional meditation on how power and greed can corrupt the soul of a nation. In an imaginary Nigeria, a cunning entrepreneur is selling body parts stolen from Dr. Menka's hospital for use in ritualistic practices. Dr. Menka shares the grisly news with his oldest college friend, bon viveur, star engineer, and Yoruba royal, Duyole Pitan-Payne. The life of every party, Duyole is about to assume a prestigious post at the United Nations in New York, but it now seems that someone is determined that he not make it there. And neither Dr. Menka nor Duyole knows why, or how close the enemy is, or how powerful. Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of political and social corruption. It is a stirring call to arms against the abuse of power from one of our fiercest political activists, who also happens to be a global literary giant.

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African Writing Today by Ezekiel Mphahlele (editor). Baltimore. 1967. Penguin Books. 347 pages. paperback. 2520. Cover design by John Sewell.

penguin african writing today 2520 DESCRIPTION - Foreigners still begin at Calais for most English-speaking readers. Air travel and telstar may have reduced distances but how many of use despite the speed of modern communications, can name the dominant literary figures of contemporary European, African, or American countries? Or are familiar with what is being thought or written in these areas? We are isolated. And complacent. This new Penguin series is designed to break this sound-barrier of inertia, language, culture, and tradition. African Writing Today provides a cross-section (in translation, where necessary) of recent African work in English, French, and Portuguese from the following countries: Angola, Cameroun, Congo, Dahomey, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Moqambique, Nigeria, Ruanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, South Africa. Editor: Ezekiel Mphahlele. CONTENTS: Introduction; NIGERIA - Chinua Achebe - Extract from Arrow of God; Cyprian Ekwensi - Night of Freedom; Wole Soyinka - Extract from The Swamp / Dwellers / Requiem; Amos Tutuola - Extract from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts; Onuora Nzekwu - Extract from Blade Among the Boys; SIERRA LEONE - Abioseh Nicol - Life is Sweet at Kumansenu; Sarif Easmon - Bindeh's Gift; GHANA - Kwesi Brew - The Harvest; Christina Ama Ata Aidoo - The Message; George Awoonor-Williams - Rediscovery: KENYA - Kuldip Sondhi - Bad Blood; Joseph E. Kariuki - New Life; Grace Ogot - Tekayo; CONGO (Brazzaville) - Felix Tchikaya U'Tam'si - Presence; Sylvain Bemba - The Dark Room; CONGO (Leopoldville) - Antoine-Roger Bolamba - A Fisfful of News; RUANDA - Jean-Baptiste Mutabaruka - Song of the Drum; SENEGAL - Birago Diop - The Wages of Good; David Diop - To the Mystery-mongers; Ousmane SocE - Extract from Karim; Joseph Zobel - Flowers ! Lovely Flowers !; LEopold SEdar Senghor - Death of the Princess / Negro Mask; GUINEA - Camara Laye - Extract from The Radiance of the King; CAMEROUN - Mbella Sonne Dipoko - Autobiography / Love; Ferdinand Oyono - Extract from The Old Negro and the Medal; IVORY COAST - AkE Loba - Extract from Kocoumbo, The Black Student; DAHOMEY - Paulin Joachim - Burial; Jean Pliya - The Fetish Tree; GAMBIA - Lenrie Peters - 'After they put down their overalls'; SOUTH AFRICA - Ezekiel Mphahlele - Remarks on NEgritude / Extract from An African Autobiography; Richard Rive - Dagga-Smoker's Dream; Alex La Guma - Blankets; Can Themba - The Urchin; Dennjs Brutus - 'Let not this plunder be misconstrued'; Todd Matshikiza - Extract from Chocolates for My Wife; Mazisi Kunene - Universal Love; Lewis Nkosi - The Prisoner; ANGOLA - Agostinho Neto - Friend Mussunda; MOCAMBIQUE - J. Craveirinha - Poem of the Future Citizen / Song of the Negro on the Ferry; Luis Bernardo Honwana - Dina; Kalungano - Dream of the Black Mother; Rui Nogar - Poem of the Conscripted Warrior; Biographical Notes on authors.

Mphahlele Ezekiel AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Es'kia Mphahlele (December 17, 1919 - October 27, 2008) was a South African writer, academic, artist and activist. He was born as Ezekiel Mphahlele but changed his name to Es'kia in 1977. Mphahlele's first book of short stories, MAN MUST LIVE, was published in 1947. Banned from teaching by the apartheid government in 1951, Mphahlele supported himself and his family through a series of clerical jobs before leaving South Africa to teach in the British Protectorate of Basutoland. On his return to South Africa, Mphahlele soon found a job as a political reporter, sub-editor and fiction editor on the innovative popular magazine Drum, under its editors Anthony Sampson and later under Sylvester Stein, while studying for a Master's degree by correspondence at UNISA (The University of South Africa). Es'kia Mphahlele's life and work is currently found in the efforts of The Es'kia Institute, a non-governmental, non-profit organization based in Johannesburg. During the 1950s Mphahlele became increasingly politicized, and joined the African National Congress in 1955. Disappointed in ANC approach to matters of education - he later disassociated himself from the organization. In 1957, Mphahlele was offered a job teaching in a Church Mission Society school in Lagos, Nigeria. Unwilling to permit him to travel abroad because of his political activities, the South African government finally granted him a passport in September 1957. Mphahlele spent the following twenty years in exile: first in Nigeria, and subsequently in Kenya, where he was director of the Chemchemi Cultural Centre; Zambia; France and the United States, where he earned a doctoral degree from the University of Denver and taught at the University of Pennsylvania. Mphahlele returned to South Africa in 1977 and joined the faculty of the University of the Witwatersrand.

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The Wanderers by Ezekiel Mphahlele. New York. 1971. Macmillan. 351 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by digeorge.

wanderers macmillan DESCRIPTION - The Wanderers is a complex, brilliant, and unprecedented novel; the most ambitious and panoramic work yet to come out of modern Africa. Exposing, for the first time, the South African in exile, it extends beyond the confines of one nation to explore the problems of Pan Africanism and the reasons for the wars that shattered Nigeria and continue to plague the entire continent. ‘How can I make my children understand we have all wandered away from something - all of us blacks; that we are not in close contact with the spirit of Nature, although we may be with its forces, that growing up for us is no more the integrated process it was for our forbears, but that this is also a universal problem?' A stranger in his hostile homeland of South Africa, an exile in ravaged Nigeria and black colonial Kenya, Timi Tabane is one of The Wanderers, a group of intellectuals and political activists - both black and white - stripped of home, country, and hope. A teacher-journalist who dared investigate and print the truth about kidnapping and murder South African slave farm, Tabane is condemned to run for his life - forever. And so the odyssey of Tabane his family begins; a harrowing trek along the west coast of Africa in search of refuge. Teaching in high schools and universities; watching, listening, and understanding that there is no asylum for the black exile - not even in ‘black' Africa. And so they move again, to East Africa and the comic-opera rule of a black government dressed in British colonial convention and white imperialist money. Inevitably, the years of rootlessness and frustration take their toll: In nightmares of pursuit; in forcibly abandoned intimacies; and in the violent, tragic death of Timi's rebellious son who chooses to die for freedom rather than flee for life. The Wanderers are black and white, colorless in their exile and equal in their alienation. Political nomads, they move through a tragic ritual search for shelter, drifting from one turbulent country to another, victims - and perpetrators - of the violence that has enslaved them. EZEKIEL MPHAHLELE grew up in Praetoria, South Africa, and was educated at the University of South Africa. He lived in Nigeria for four years, teaching at the University of Ibadan. He is the author of Down Second Avenue, a novel, and three volumes of collections of his own short stories.

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The African Image by Ezekiel Mphahlele. London. 1962. Faber & Faber. 240 pages. hardcover.

african image faber and faber 1962 DESCRIPTION - ‘I personally cannot think of the future of my people in South Africa as something in which the white man does not feature. Whether he likes it or not, our destinies are inseparable. I have seen too much that is good in Western culture - for example its music, literature and theatre - to want to repudiate it.' It is in the context of this personal declaration that Ezekiel Mphahlele examines the political and cultural aspirations, not only of his countrymen, but of Africans in general; particularly as formulated in concepts as 'Negritude', 'The African Personality' and Pan-Africanism. Experience of social conditions in both South Africa and Nigeria as well as his own keen intelligence enable him to discuss these concepts and their background with an incisiveness which leaves little room for complacency on the part of black or white. second half of the book pursues the enquiry in a literary context, being a much-needed critical survey of the black man's image in white and non-white fiction, ranging from William Faulkner to Amos Tutuola, Richard Wright to Doris Lessing.

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Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Garden City. 1971. Anchor Books. 210 pages. paperback. Cover design by Bob Cunningham. Cover typography by Jim McWilliams.

anchor down second avenue 1971 DESCRIPTION - This classic is the autobiography of a black South African, describing the struggle for human dignity in the quagmire of poverty, violence and apartheid. The scene moves briskly from the rural reserves to the slums and shantytowns of Pretoria and Capetown as the protagonist reconstructs his development from child to adult and his growing awareness of the limits imposed by the system on his horizon. In narrating the author's life story, this book illuminates the whole South African scene, revealing life in all its luridness, the raw unpleasantness of everyday life, the endless silly restrictions imposed by the petty bureaucracy and the savage environment in which violence and brutalization are accepted as mundane facts of life. This is also the story of a people and their way of survival, a story studded with portraits of indefatigable characters whose experiences speak volumes about the frightful pressures and contradictions of the South African pigmentocracy. A Doubleday Anchor Original.

In a Penguin Classic edition:

Down Second Avenue by Es'kia Mphahlele. New York. 2013. Penguin Books. 9780143106791. Foreword by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. 236 pages. paperback. Cover art by Eric White.

DESCRIPTION - Es'kia Mphahlele's seminal memoir of life in apartheid South Africa - available for the first time in Penguin Classics. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1969, Es'kia Mphahlele is considered the Dean of African Letters and the father of black South African writing. Down Second Avenue is a landmark book that describes Mphahlele's experience growing up in segregated South Africa. Vivid, graceful, and unapologetic, it details a daily life of severe poverty and brutal police surveillance under the subjugation of an apartheid regime. Banned in South Africa after its original 1959 publication for its protest against apartheid, Down Second Avenue is a foundational work of literature that continues to inspire activists today.

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Renewal Time by Es'kia Mphahlele. Columbia. 1988. Readers International. 0930523555. 215 pages. hardcover.

0930523555 DESCRIPTION - Es'kia Mphahlele's 1988 publication RENEWAL TIME, contains stories he published previously as well as an autobiographical afterword on his return to South Africa and a section from AFRIKA MY MUSIC, his 1984 autobiography. Stories like ‘Mrs. Plum' and ‘The Living and the Dead' have received praise by critics reviewing Mphahlele's work. Charles R. Larson, reviewing the work in the Washington Post Book World, says that the stories in the book present ‘almost ironic images of racial tension under apartheid.' He cites ‘Mrs. Plum' as ‘the gem of this volume.' The story is a first-person narrative by a black South African servant girl, and through her words, says Larson, ‘Mphahlele creates the most devastating picture of a liberal South African white.' Includes - The Sounds Begin Again, The Stories, The Living and the Dead, He and the Cat, The Barber of Bariga, The Ballad of Oyo, A Point of Identity, Grieg on a Stolen Piano, In Corner B, Mrs Plum and Renewal Time.'

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Chirundu by Es'kia Mphahlele. Westport. 1981. Lawrence Hill & Company. 0882081225. 158 pages. paperback.

0882081225 DESCRIPTION - In this novel, noted South African writer Es'kia Mphahlele pursues through the dominant symbol of the python the sinister power wielded by his chief character, Chirundu. Chirundu, minister of transport and public works in an independent African country, is brought down by a bigamy charge initiated by his wife Tirenje and a transport strike led by his nephew Moyo. In the narratives of these three characters author Mphahlele weaves together the strands of contemporary Africa - of the new bureaucracy that has taken over the reins of power from white European administrators against the new and progressive forces. There is no resolution. The novel ends with the reflection that ‘once they have tasted power, they will always try to come back.'

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Afrika My Music: An Autobiography 1957-1983 by Es'kia Mphahlele. Johannesburg. 1984. Ravan Press. 0869752375. 260 pages. paperback. Cover painting by Eli Kyeyune. Cover design by The Graphic Equalizer.

0869752375 DESCRIPTION - Es'kia Mphahlele's first work of autobiography, Down Second Avenue, is one of the classics of African literature. After that seedtime came the years of exile - during which - he was 'listed' person - none of his works could be read in South Africa. His second autobiography, Afrika My Music, is set amidst the tumultuous years of his return to South Africa after 1976. 'Bantu Education' - the system which had forced him out of teaching and into exile when it was introduced in the Fifties - had triggered the Soweto revolt barely a month before he returned to his native land after twenty years in Europe, Africa and the United States. Drawing strength from ancestral ground he begins to grapple with old cultural dilemmas that haven't gone away, and new ones that plague an age of pseudo-reform. Meanwhile he unpacks his traveller's trunk of memories. African writers, artists, musicians, educationists and politicians crowd his pages, in settings ranging from Ibadan through Paris to Philadelphia. Friendships and conversations with the living and the dead, university teaching, work as an organiser of arts programmes in Africa - against this backdrop the mature views of Mphahlele the African Humanist come into focus. We begin to understand his controversial decision to return, and what it was he, came back to do.

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In Corner B: Short Stories by Ezekiel Mphahlele. Nairobi. 1967. East Africa Publishing House. 208 pages. paperback.

in corner b DESCRIPTION - In this exciting collection of short stories he has chiefly drawn on his experiences in Nigeria and South Africa. The book ends with a disturbing short novel called MRS. PLUM which is one of the most damning and bitter indictments of the white ‘liberals' in South Africa yet printed.

And in a Penguin Classic edition:

In Corner B by Es’kia Mphahlele. New York. 2010. Penguin Books. 9780143106029. Introduction by Peter N. Thuynsma. 237 pages. paperback. Cover art by Eric White.

DESCRIPTION - The quintessential story collection - from the father of modern black South African writing. Ezekiel Mphahlele was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Originally published in 1967, IN CORNER B contains the core stories of his landmark collection about life in rural and urban South Africa during the days of Apartheid, together with stories written after his return to South Africa as Es'kia Mphahlele. In a new introduction for the first new edition of Mphahalele's work since his death in 2008, South African scholar Peter Thuynsma presents the ‘dean of African letters' to a new general of readers.

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Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays by Ezekiel Mphahlele. New York. 1969. Hill & Wang. 0809096277. 215 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Randall Mize.

0809096277 DESCRIPTION - Six essays by a notable South African novelist and scholar offer profound insights into the literature and culture of Africa and Black America. This is a pioneering work that defines and delineates the aesthetics of black writing, showing how and why it differs from the traditions of Western white literature, why the best black writing is committed and revolutionary while its white counterpart is experimental, introspective, and concerned with styles and techniques. Dr. Mphahlele explores the meaning and function of a poetry that is born of political controversy and conflict, and reveals the riches of a live mythology and an oral tradition. Examples from LeRoi Jones, Gwendolyn Brooks, Samuel Allen, Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Wole Soyinka, Dennis Brutus, and many others illustrate a rich and vibrant culture, a growing tradition that is both powerful and sophisticated. Ezekiel Mphahlele, who has lived and worked in both Africa and America, writes from the heart of this tradition with penetration, anger, and pride.

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