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Kallocain by Karin Boye. Madison. 1966. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from the Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock. Introduction by Richard B. Vowles. 193 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Fictional scientist's memoir of a distopian totalitarian state, of which he is a cog, having developed a drug used to destroy privacy of thought - a 'truth serum'. The author, born in 1900, took her own life in 1941. First published in Swedish in 1940, after the author visited Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; much later nominated for a Retro-Hugo award, filmed as a television miniseries in 1981, often compared to 1984 and Brave New World. 

In a different translation from Penguin Classics:

Kallocain by Karin Boye. New York. 2019. Penguin Books. 9780241608302. Translated from the Swedish and with an introduction by David McDuff. 170 pages. paperback. Cover: Alterpiece, Group X, Number 1, 1915, Hilma of Klint.

DESCRIPTION - The classic World War II–era dystopian novel, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and 1984, in its first new translation in more than fifty years. Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye’s classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karin Maria Boye (October 26, 1900 - April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist. Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, ‘Clouds' (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish ClartE League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist. In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated ‘The Waste Land‘. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be ‘Yes, of course it hurts' (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and ‘In motion' (I rörelse) from her collections of poems ‘The Hearths' (Härdarna), 1927, and ‘For the sake of the tree' (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Boye's novel ‘Crisis' (Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels ‘Merit awakens' (Merit vaknar) and ‘Too little' (För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel Kallocain. Inspired by her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 and her visit to Germany during the rise of Nazism, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Orwell's magnum opus). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum. Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to another ClartE member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye. During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933 she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as ‘her wife'. Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping pills after leaving home on 23 April 1941. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on April 27, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone. Margot Hanel committed suicide shortly thereafter. Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem ‘Dead Amazon' (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as ‘Very dark and with large eyes'. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled ‘Dead friend' (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain. A literary association dedicated to her work was created in 1983, keeping her work alive by spreading it among new readers. In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named in her honour.

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The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya. Boston. 2003. Houghton Mifflin. 0618124977. Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. 278 pages. hardcover. Cover: Luba Lukova.

DESCRIPTION - In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after ‘the Blast', a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce as well as humor. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people's sole writer. One of the tyrant's scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of THE SLYNX. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. In the dystopian world of her satirical first novel, Tatyana Tolstaya addresses lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance through Benedikt's distorted eyes. Throughout the novel lurks the Slynx, the imagined catlike creature whose fearsome, shadowy presence threatens the mice and the humans alike. As Pearl K. Bell wrote of Tatyana Tolstaya on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, ‘The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness . . . place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists.' David Remnick has called her ‘the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet' writers . . . She sounds like no one else.' A great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg. She is the author of two collections of stories and of PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN: WRITINGS ON RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2001, two major Russian literary awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow. Jamey Gambrell has been translating Tatyana Tolstaya's fiction and non-fiction since 1990. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. . .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life". Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900) and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906), a relative of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Tolstaya's paternal grandmother was the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky (1886-1955), her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator renowned for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Tolstaya's sister, Her first short story, "On the Golden Porch", appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career, and her story collection of the same name established Tolstaya as one of the foremost writers of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. As Michiko Kakutani writes, "one can find echoes...of her great-granduncle Leo Tolstoy's work - his love of nature, his psychological insight, his attention to the details of everyday life". But "her luminous, haunting stories most insistently recall the work of Chekhov, mapping characters' inner lives and unfulfilled dreams with uncommon sympathy and insight", and also display "the author's Nabokovian love of language and her affinity for strange excursions into the surreal, reminiscent of Bulgakov and Gogol." She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Her novel The Slynx is a dystopian vision of post-nuclear Russian life in what was once (now forgotten) Moscow, presenting a negative Bildungsroman that in part confronts "disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life". It has been described as "an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia's past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now". For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal, named after play by Richard Sheridan), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.

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The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick. New York. 1956. Ace Books. Paperback Original. Part Of An Ace Double With AGENT OF THE UNKNOWN by Margaret St. Clair. 192 pages. paperback.

  
DESCRIPTION - THE WORLD JONES MADE is a 1956 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick examining notions of precognition, humanity, and politics. It was first published by Ace Books as one half of Ace Double D-150, bound together AGENT OF THE UNKNOWN by Margaret St. Clair. THE WORLD JONES MADE is set in 2002 AD. On a then-future post-apocalyptic Earth, there was a devastating conflict that involved the use of nuclear weapons. Many United States cities were targeted, and the People's Republic of China (and Soviet Union) also collapsed, leading to the imposition of a Federal World Government (Fedgov). In this dystopia, Relativism emerged as the governing political orthodoxy. Relativism is said to be a moral and ethical philosophy that states everyone is free to believe what they wish, as long as they don't make anyone else try to follow that principle, which has become established law after the destructiveness of the war unleashed by ideologies. (However, dissidents from that orthodoxy do end up in forced labor camps). This sacrosanct principle is challenged by a man named Floyd Jones, whose assertions about the future prove correct. Relativism enables legal consumption of drugs like heroin and marijuana, as well as watching live sex shows with hermaphrodite human mutants. Due to the mutagenic effects of radiation from wartime nuclear exchanges, mutants earn their living within the entertainment industry, although one group has been subjected to deliberate genetic engineering, which later enables them to settle (an inhabitable) Venus. Doug Cussick is an agent of Fedgov, and his involvement with Jones encompasses this book. Jones has precognitive abilities that let him see a year into the future, which allows Dick to explore questions of predestination, free will and determinism. Fedgov (and Jones) encounter apparently unintelligent alien lifeforms named Drifters, which turn out to be one gamete of a spore-based migratory alien life form, and whose xenophobic destruction leads to alien quarantine of the Solar System. Jones foresees his own birth (and death) one year before they actually happen, but makes no attempt to stop the latter event. However, he and his followers create a cult that overthrows Fedgov, leading to the resettlement of Doug, his wife Nina and their three year-old son on Venus, in an artificial habitat. The novel addresses questions of Jones's agenda and trustworthiness, as well as the ambiguous benefits of individual precognition.

Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,’ Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.’ In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

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The Dead Leaves by Barbara Jacobs. Willimantic. 1993. Curbstone Press. 188068408x. Winner Of Mexico's Xavier Villaurrutia Prize. Translated from the Spanish by David Unger. 126 pages. paperback. Cover design by Les Kanturek.

  
DESCRIPTION - At the heart of this poetic, biographical novel is a poignant, often hilarious recollection of an unusual father, a literate, reflective, gentle man with quixotic devotion to political principle. In Jacob's rich and lyrical novel, memory affirms the redemptive values of his lonely sacrifices and idealism as they surface in a daughter's memory and reflection. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bárbara Jacobs (born 19 October 1947) is a Mexican writer, poet, essayist and translator. Born in Mexico City in 1947, Jacobs grew up in a home where five languages were spoken. Her grandparents were Lebanese Jewish Maronites. After attending school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, she returned to Mexico and received a degree in psychology from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. From 1974 to 1977, Jacobs taught and conducted research at the College of Mexico. Beginning in 1970, Jacobs has published stories and essays in literary magazines and supplements. Her novel, Las hojas muertas (Dead leaves; 1987), received the Xavier Villaurrutia Award, and has been translated into English, Italian and Portuguese. It was also a selection of the Secretariat of Public Education. Some of Jacobs' works have been published in collective anthologies in Castilian, English, French, Italian and German. Her books have been published in Mexico, US, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and Italy. Jacobs was married to the writer Augusto Monterroso (died, 2003), who was the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature laureate in 2000. She donated his work to the University of Oviedo.

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Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa. Dallas. 2017. Deep Vellum. 9781941920442. Translated from the Spanish by Shelby Vincent. 397 pages. paperback. Jacket design by annazylicz.com.  

DESCRIPTION - From Carmen Boullosa, winner of Mexico's prestigious Xavier Villaurrutia Award, comes Heavens on Earth, a testament to the power of the written word in transcending political, racial, and cultural barriers to create and preserve history. Lear, officially known as 24, lives in L'Atlntide, a utopian post-apocalyptic society placing increasing limits on the use of language. Steadfast in her resistance to new regulations and pressure to conform, Lear continues to transcribe the writings of Don Hernando, a 16th century Indian priest, and of Estela in the 20th century, an early translator of Don Hernando's work. Though separated by time and space, Lear and Estela find strength in Hernando's words, ultimately rebelling against their respective societies in a struggle for remembrance. Cloud Atlas meets Savage Detectives in Carmen Boullosa's Heavens on Earth as three narratives thread together in a captivating exploration of memory, language, and humanity. Three narrators from different historical eras engage in preserving history in "Heavens on Earth." As her narrators sense each other and interact through time and space, Boullosa challenges the primacy of recorded history and asserts literature and language's power to transcend the barriers of time and space in vivid, urgent prose. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carmen Boullosa (born September 4, 1954 in Mexico City, Mexico) is a leading Mexican poet, novelist and playwright. Her work is eclectic and difficult to categorize, but it generally focuses on the issues of feminism and gender roles within a Latin American context. Her work has been praised by a number of prominent writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Alma Guillermoprieto and Elena Poniatowska, as well as publications such as Publishers Weekly. She has won a number of awards for her works, and has taught at universities such as Georgetown University, Columbia University and New York University (NYU), as well as at universities in nearly a dozen other countries. She is currently Distinguished Lecturer at the City College of New York. She has two children -- Maria Aura and Juan Aura -- with her former partner, Alejandro Aura --and is now married to Mike Wallace, the Pulitzer-prize winning co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. Boullosa has written over a dozen novels, and some of these works have been translated into five different languages. Her bestselling novel, Son vacas, somos puercos (1991) was translated into English in 1997 as They're Cows, We're Pigs. The story is narrated in the first person by an old man looking back on his life. He was kidnapped and sent from his native France on a slave ship to the West Indies at the age of thirteen. To gain his freedom, he joins a group of pirates (or ‘pigs'), allowing Boullosa to compare two very different societal and political systems - traditional Europe and carefree pirates. In La milagrosa, a novel written in 1993, the protagonist is a girl who has the power to heal the sick and perform other miracles while she sleeps. She falls in love with Aurelio Jimenez, a detective sent to discredit her, even though she fears that her powers will disappear if she spends time with people. It ends ambiguously, leaving an unsolved murder without closure. Duerme, another popular work published in 1995, tells the story of Claire, a French woman whose mother was a prostitute. Attempting to escape the same profession, she arrives in Spain dressed as a man. To save a subject of the Spanish king, she reveals herself as a female and prepares to take his punishment of death by hanging. Beforehand, however, she is wounded in the left breast and her blood is replaced by water from the lakes of Mexico City. The water's magical powers make it possible for her to survive the punishment. She is also famous for her Teatro herEtico (1987), a compilation of three parodies in play format - Aura y las once mil vírgenes, Cocinar hombres, and Propusieron a María. The first tells the story of a man called by God to ‘deflower' eleven thousand virgins in his life, so that heaven's overpopulation problem might be addressed, since the women will have to wait in purgatory for a time. The man then uses his sexual encounters as material for his television commercials and becomes a successful advertising agent. Cocinar hombres tells the story of two girls who find themselves to have become young adult witches overnight, so as to fly over the earth tempting but not satisfying men. Finally, the third play satirically recounts the conversation between Joseph and Mary before Mary gives birth to Jesus and ascends to heaven.

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A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith. New York. 1958. Harper & Brothers. 269 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Polly Cameron.  

DESCRIPTION - What happens when two men who are friends, share the love of a beautiful woman, and she is murdered? Theodore Wolfgang Schiebelhut, resident of Mexico, had been on a painting trip, and, returning to Mexico City with his canvases, stopped off briefly at a party. He left the party to visit his mistress, Lelia. Late as the hour was, he knew Lelia would not mind being disturbed and would be delighted to see him. But she did not answer his knock and her door was locked. He crawled through the transom and found the girl on her bed, murdered and mutilated. When the police came they questioned Theodore first, and then their attention turned to Ramon Otero, Theodore's friend, and Lelia's lover, too. Ramon had wanted to marry Lelia. Theodore had not. The closely knit, comfortable and sensitive community in which Theodore and Ramon moved was shattered by the tragedy and the suspicions. In A Game for the Living Patricia Highsmith has written a novel of vivid character portrayal and fascinating motivations - particularly those of a man whose philosophy of life is threatened at a time when he has lost the woman he loves, and perhaps his best friend. It is a compelling novel.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith. New York. 1950. Harper & Brothers. 299 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘Bruno slammed his palms together ‘Hey! Cheeses what an idea! We murder for each other, see? I kill your wife and you kill my father! We meet on a train, see, and nobody knows we know each other! Perfect alibis! Catch?' From this moment, almost against his conscious will, Guy Haines is trapped in a nightmare of shared guilt and an insidious merging of personalities. ‘Miss Highsmith . . . is a writer who has created a world of her own - a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger' - Graham Greene.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith. New York. 1954. Coward McCann.  277 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Rus Anderson.

  
DESCRIPTION - Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train, has woven another tense suspense novel. Again, an engrossing plot and realistic characters combine to make rich entertainment for the connoisseur. The bus stopped; a woman got off and the next day the papers carried the story of her brutal murder. The item was a brief one, but it caught the attention of Walter Stockhouse, a young New York lawyer. Perhaps the crime had stemmed from the desire of a husband to rid himself of an unwanted wife? It was an interesting theory - absorbing to the point of bringing Walter to Melchior Kimmel's bookshop. But Walter, too, had an unwanted wife, a wife who was taking a trip by bus. The situation was similar too similar when Clara Stockhouse's body is discovered at the bottom of a cliff and a bystander identifies Walter as the man who was at the bus stop. The web of circumstantial evidence tightens as a determined detective pursues the husbands of the two women.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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In the United States of Africa by Abdourahman A.  Waberi. Lincoln. 2009. University of Nebraska Press. Foreword by Percival Everett. 123 pages. 9780803213913. hardcover / 9780803222625. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - In a literary reversal as deadly serious as it is wickedly satiric, this novel by the acclaimed French-speaking African writer Abdourahman A. Waberi turns the fortunes of the world upside down. On this reimagined globe a stream of sorry humanity flows from the West, from the slums of America and the squalor of Europe, to escape poverty and desperation in the prosperous United States of Africa. It is in this world that an African doctor on a humanitarian mission to France adopts a child. Now a young artist, this girl, Malaika, travels to the troubled land of her birth in hope of finding her mother - and perhaps something of her lost self. Her search, at times funny and strange, is also deeply poignant, reminding us at every moment of the turns of fate we call truth.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - The French-Djiboutian novelist, poet, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi (born July 20, 1965) is one of the leading francophone writers of his generation. His other books include THE LAND WITHOUT SHADOW, HARVEST OF SKULLS, and RIFTS, ROADS AND RAILS. Together or separately, David and Nicole Ball have published nine book-length translations, most recently Waberi's IN THE UNITED STATES OF AFRICA.

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Two Trains Running by August Wilson. New York. 1993. Dutton. 0525935657. Issued Simultaneously In Paperback. 110 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both. To live life with dignity, to celebrate and accept responsibility for your presence in the world is all that can be asked of anyone.' August Wilson surged to the forefront of American playwrights with the success of such critically acclaimed plays as MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, as well as his Pulitzer Prize winners FENCES and THE PIANO LESSON. Now, with TWO TRAINS RUNNING, which Time magazine hailed as ‘his most mature work to date' he offers another mesmerizing chapter in his remarkable cycle of plays about the black experience in twentieth-century America. It is Pittsburgh, 1969. The regulars of Memphis Lee's restaurant are struggling to cope with the turbulence of a world that is changing rapidly around them and fighting back when they can. As the play unfolds, Memphis's diner - and the rest of his block - is scheduled to be torn down, a casualty of the city's renovation project that is sweeping away the buildings of a community, but not its spirit. The rich undertaker across the street encourages Memphis to accept his offer to buy the place from him at a reduced price, but Memphis stands his ground, determined to make the city pay him what the property is worth, refusing to be swindled out of his land as he was years before in Mississippi. Into this fray come Sterling, the ex-con who embrace s the tenets of Malcolm X; Wolf, the bookie who has learned to play by the white man's rules; Risa, a waitress of quiet dignity who has mutilated her legs to distance herself from men; and Holloway, the resident philosopher and fervent believer in the prophecies of a legendary 322-year-old woman down the street, a reminder of their struggle and heritage. And just as sure as an inexorable future looms right around the corner, these peop le of ‘loud voices and big hearts' continue to search, to falter, to hope that they can catch the train that will make the difference. With compassion, humor, and a superb sense of place and time, Wilson paints a vivid portrait of everyday lives in the shadow of great events, and of unsung men and women who are anything but ordinary.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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Three Plays by August Wilson. Pittsburgh. 1991. University of Pittsburgh Press. 0822936666. Includes - Fences, Joe Turner's Come And Gone, & Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Preface by The Playwright. Afterword by Paul Carter Harrison. 318 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by Geof Kern. Jacket design by Margot Barbour.  

DESCRIPTION - Frank Rich, chief drama critic for The New York Times, has called playwright August Wilson ‘a major find for the American theater,' a writer of ‘compassion, raucous humor, and penetrating wisdom.' in these three plays - published together for the first time, with a new introduction by the author - the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize lights a dramatic fuse that winds through three anguished decades of the African-American experience. In MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM August Wilson depicts an imaginary incident - a 1927 recording session in a run-down Chicago studio - in the career of the legendary blues Singer Ma Rainey. ‘The play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims - and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates,' said The New York Times. In FENCES the setting shifts to Pittsburgh in the l950s. Troy Maxson is a garbage collector, an embittered former baseball player in the Negro leagues, and a proud, dominating father. When college athletic recruiters court his teenage son, Troy struggles against his son, his wife, and his own frustrated ambitions. JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE begins with the arrival of Herald Loomis, his eleven-year-old daughter in tow, at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse in 1911. The great migration of blacks from the agrarian South to the industrial North has just begun. After seven years of impressed labor on Joe Turner's chain gang, Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind. Each of the plays in this volume has won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. In addition, FENCES won four Tony awards, including best play of the 1986-87 Broadway season, and the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for drama. All three are part of August Wilson's ambitious project to write a play about black Americans in every decade of the twentieth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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The Piano Lesson by August Wilson. New York. 1990. Dutton. 0525249265. 108 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - With his critically acclaimed works MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning FENCES, August Wilson has already offered three spellbinding chapters of his remarkable cycle of plays about the black experience in 20th-century America. Now, in his second Pulitzer Prize winner, THE PIANO LESSON, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and powerful dramatic work yet, capturing the story of one black American family's struggle to remember and yet overcome the brutal legacy of slavery. It is Pittsburgh, 1936. The exuberant Boy Willie Charles bursts into his cautious, widowed sister Berniece's life with a truckload of watermelons to sell and the dream of buying the same Mississippi land that his family had worked as slaves. At the heart of his plan rests the family's prized possession, the upright piano which stands gathering dust in the front parlor of the house where Berniece and her daughter now live. More than an old heirloom, the ornate piano is an emblem of the Charles family's enslaved past, and carved into its legs are proud portraits of lost relatives. When Boy Willie locates a buyer who is willing to pay $1100 for the piano, Berniece refuses to sell, clinging to the piano as a reminder of the history that is their family legacy. This dilemma is the real ‘piano lesson.' August Wilson is reminding us that blacks are often deprived both of the symbols of their past and of opportunity in the present. A compelling and moving story, told in rich, evocative prose, THE PIANO LESSON resonates with the lyrical beauty we have come to expect of August Wilson's plays. In the words of Time magazine, his is ‘the richest theatrical voice to emerge in the U.S. since Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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Seven Guitars by August Wilson. New York. 1996. Dutton. 0525941967. 109 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION -  ‘The seven guItars of the title are the seven characters whose straightforward story lines Wilson turns into beautiful, complex music - a funky, walling, irresistible Chicago blues.' - John Lahe, The New Yorker. In tne spring of 1948, in the still-cool evenings of Pittsburgh's Hill district, familiar sounds fill the air. A rooster crows. Screen doors slam. There's the laughter of friends gathered for a backyard card game rising just above the wail of a mother who has lost her son. And there's the sound of the blues, played and sung by young men and women with little more than a guitar in their hands and a dream in their hearts. August Wilson's SEVEN GUITARS is the sixth chapter in the continuing theatrical saga that explores the hope, heartbreak, and heritage of the African-American experience in the twentieth century. The story follows a small group of friends who gather following the untimely death of Floyd ‘Schoolboy' Barton, a local blues guitarist on the edge of stardom. Together, they revisit his short life, reminisce about the good times they shared, and discover the unspoken passions and undying spirit that ire within each of them. ‘A play whose epic proportions and abundant spirit remind us of what the American theater once was. . . . Not since Mr. Wilson's own TWO TRAINS RUNNING and Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA has Broadway seemed quite so alive. . . . As funny as it is moving and lyrical. It's the highlight of what now seems to be a brand-new theater season.' - Vincent Canby, New York Times. ‘Full of quiet truth . . . mesmerizing . . . a major voice in our theater . . . unusually powerful.' - Howard Kissel, New York Daily News.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson. New York. 1988. Plume/New American Library. 0452260094. 94 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘August Wilson continues to rewrite the history of the American theater. JOE TURNER is his most adventurous piece of writing.' - Frank Rich, The New York Times. From the author of the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning FENCES comes another brilliant depiction of the black American experience - JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE. When Herald Loomis arrives at a black Pittsburgh boardinghouse after seven years' impressed labor on Joe Turners chain gang, he is a free man - in body. But the scars of his enslavement and a sense of inescapable alienation oppress his spirit still, and the seemingly hospitable rooming house seethes with tension and distrust in the presence of this tormented stranger. Loomis is looking for the wife he left behind, believing that she can help him reclaim his old identity. But through his encounters with the other residents he begins to realize that what he really seeks is his rightful place in a new world - and it will take more than the skills of the local ‘People Finder' to discover it. ‘Has the haunting power of a ghost story. . . Bold theatricality. . . Electrifying' - The Washington Post. ‘August Wilson's best play!' - William A. Henry III, TIME magazine.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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Jitney by August Wilson. Woodstock. 2001. Overlook Press. 158567186x. 96 pages. hardcover. Cover: Albert Lin.  

DESCRIPTION - A thoroughly revised version of a play August Wilson first wrote in l979, JITNEY was produced in New York for the first time in the spring of 2000, winning rave reviews and the accolade of the New York Drama Critics Circle Award as the best play of the year. Set in the 1970s in Pittsburgh's Hill District, and depicting gypsy cabdrivers who serve black neighborhoods, JITNEY is the seventh in Wilson's projected ten-play cycle (one for each decade) on the black experience in twentieth-century America. He writes not about historic events or the pathologies of the black community, but, as he says, about ‘the unique particulars of black culture . . . I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us . . . through profound moments in our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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Fences by August Wilson. New York. 1986. Plume/New American Library. 0452258421. 100 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION -  ‘A work of tremendous impact that summons up gratitude for the beauty of its language, the truth of its character, the power of its portrayals.' - Chicago Tribune. The author of the 1984-85 Broadway season's best play, MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, returns with another powerful, stunning dramatic work that is sure to win him new acclaim and prizes. The protagonist of FENCES, Troy Maxson, is a strong man, a hard man. He has had to be to survive. For Troy Maxson has gone through life in an America where to be proud and black was to face pressures that could crush a man, body and soul. But now the 1950s are yielding to the new spirit of liberation of the 60s . . . a spirit that is changing the world Troy Maxson has learned to deal with the only way he can . . . a spirit that is making him a stranger, angry and afraid, in a world he never knew and to a wife and son he understands less and less. ‘ALWAYS ABSORBING . . . The work's protagonist - and grandest creation - is a Vesuvius of rage . . . . The play's finest moments perfectly capture that inky, almost imperceptibly agitated darkness just before the fences of racism, for a time, came crashing down.' - Frank Rich, The New York Times. ‘A moving story line and a hero almost Shakespearian in contour.' - Sylviane Gold, The Wall Street Journal.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - August Wilson (Frederick August Kittel Jr.; April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. He has been referred to as the "theater's poet of Black America". He is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. Plays in the series include Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), each of which won Wilson the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984) and Joe Turner's Come and Gone (1988). In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. August Wilson was born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and grew up in a two-room apartment behind a grocery store on Bedford Avenue in the city's Hill district. He learned to read at age four. At fifteen he quit high school and began his self-education at the Carnegie Library. At twenty he dedicated himself to writing poetry and supported himself with a series of jobs: dishwasher, short-order cook, porter, toy store stock boy, gardener, and mailroom clerk. At thirty-three he left Pittsburgh for St. Paul, Minnesota, where he turned to play writing. In addition to MA RAINEY'S BLACK BOTTOM, FENCES, and JOE TURNER'S COME AND GONE, August Wilson is the author of THE PIANO LESSON, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and TWO TRAINS RUNNING.

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The Trial Record of Denmark Vesey by John Oliver Killens (introduction). Boston. 1970. Beacon Press. 0807054542. 175 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Although historians argue about the number and nature of American slave uprisings, there is no argument about the importance of the separate efforts of Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey. In 1822, Vesey and a large group he had recruited planned to burn Charleston, South Carolina, then the sixth largest city in the nation. The plot was found out before the plan was executed, and after a series of trials 35 blacks (including Vesey) were hanged and 43 transported. THE TRAIL RECORD OF DENMARK VESEY is the first complete republication of AN OFFICIAL REPORT OF THE TRIALS OF SUNDRY NEGROS CHARGED WITH AN ATTEMPT TO RAISE AN INSURRECTION IN THE STATE OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRECEDED BY AN INTRODUCTION AND NARRATIVE; AND IN AN APPENDIX A REPORT OF THE TRIALS OF FOUR WHITE PERSONS, OR INDICTMENTS FOR ATTEMPTING TO EXCITE THE SLAVES TO INSURRECTION, by Lionel Kennedy and Thomas Parker. The report was requested by the Court, written by its presiding magistrates, and first published in Charleston in 1822. The Harvard University copy from which this edition was prepared contains a handwritten note by S. M. Weld, Jr., dated Jan. 20, 1862, saying that ‘All the copies which could be found were destroyed soon after its publication. It was thought a dangerous document for the slaves to see.' John Oliver Killens, who has written a valuable Introduction for the book, is a novelists and critic, and was a contributor to WILLIAM STYRON'S NAT TURNER: TEN BLACK WRITERS RESPOND, published by Beacon Press.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Oliver Killens (January 14, 1916 – October 27, 1987) was an American fiction writer from Georgia. His novels featured elements of African-American life. In his debut novel, Youngblood (1954), Killens coined the phrase "kicking ass and taking names". He also wrote plays, short stories and essays, and published articles in a range of outlets. Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles Killens Sr. and Willie Lee Killens.His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes' writings, and his mother, who was president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry. Killens was an enthusiastic reader as a child and was inspired by writers such as Hughes and Richard Wright. His great-grandmother’s tales of slavery were another important factor in learning traditional black mythology and folklore, which he later incorporated into his writings. Killens graduated in 1933 from the Ballard Normal School in Macon, a private institution run by the American Missionary Association. It was then one of the few secondary schools for blacks in Georgia, which had a segregated system of public schools and historically underfunded those for black students. Aspiring to become a lawyer, Killens attended several historically black colleges and universities between 1934 and 1936: Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida; Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; and Robert H. Terrell Law School in Washington, D.C. He also studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. Killens enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving as a member of the Pacific Amphibious Forces from 1942 to 1945. He spent more than two years in the South Pacific, and rose to the rank of master sergeant. In 1948, Killens moved to New York City, where he worked to establish a literary career. He attended writing classes at Columbia University and at New York University. He was an active member of many organizations, serving as a union representative to a local chapter of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and joining the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Around 1950, Killens co-founded with Rosa Guy and others a writers' group that became the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG). His first novel, Youngblood (1954), dealing with a black Georgia family in the early 1900s, was read and developed at HWG meetings in members' homes. In his book, he first coined the expression "kicking ass and taking names". Killens became friends with actor Harry Belafonte, who after establishing his production company HarBel wanted to adapt William P. McGivern's crime novel Odds Against Tomorrow as a film. Belafonte picked Abraham Polonsky as the screenwriter, but since Polonsky had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Killens agreed to act as his front and was credited with the screenplay for the film. In 1996, the Writers Guild of America restored credit to Polonsky for the film under his own name. Killens's second novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), was about the treatment of the black soldiers in the military during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated. Critic Noel Perrin ranked it as one of five major works of fiction of World War II. Killens's third novel, Sippi (1967), focused on the voting rights struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Slaves (1969), a historical novel by Killens, was developed from the screenplay for the film of the same name, intended to accompany its release. In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), Killens explored upper-class African-American society. In addition to novels, Killens also wrote plays, screenplays, and many articles and short stories. He published these works in a range of media, including The Black Scholar, The New York Times, Ebony, Redbook, Negro Digest and Black World.[8] According to Kira Alexander, "On June 7, 1964, Killens reached his largest audience when his essay 'Explanation of the "Black Psyche"' was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine." He produced five further articles, which were published in his 1965 collection Black Man's Burden. Killens taught creative-writing programs at Fisk University, Howard University, Columbia University, and Medgar Evers College. In 1986, he founded the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College. Named in the author's honor, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is published twice a year by the Center. On June 19, 1943, Killens married Grace Ward Jones.[10] They had two children together: a son, Jon Charles (born 1944), and a daughter, Barbara (born 1947). In 1987, Killens died of cancer, aged 71, at the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center in Brooklyn, New York. He was living in Crown Heights.

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Great Black Russian by John Oliver Killens. Detroit. 1989. Wayne State University Press. 0814320465. 391 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Alexander Pushkin was born into nineteenth-century czarist Russia at a time when the state and the church were supreme. The aristocracy was enamored of French culture and peasants were little more than slaves. The literati generally regarded the Russian language as ill fit for creative expression until Pushkin proved otherwise. His writing challenged the authority of the czar while his own wanton values gave rise to troubling guilt. Yet in his short and tumultuous lifetime, Pushkin rose to great prominence as Russia's most important poet and literary figure. In Great Black Russian, John Oliver Killens renders a sweeping fictional account of Alexander Pushkin, drawing on the conflicts, both internal and external, that continually assailed him. Of particular significance is Pushkin's African heritage on his mother's side. His great-grandfather, Ibrahim Hannibal, was an Ethiopian prince captured as a youth by Turks. Acquired not long after by the czar as an adornment for his court, the young man became known as "the Negro of Peter the Great" and was eventually named a general in the czar's army. Under the ancestral tutelage of his beloved maternal grandmother, Pushkin took pride in his African lineage. Yet he was ever conscious that it relegated him to the margins of society. Moreover, Pushkin suffered genuine emotional abuse at the hand of his mother for being the darkest, most Africanoid of her four children. Other tensions were also at play in Pushkin. His antagonism toward the absolute power of the czar, expressed in his earlier works led to surveillance and censorship by the government and contributed to his love-hate relationship with his homeland. His heavy drinking and excessive womanizing troubled him since this aristocratic profligacy conflicted with his desire for social reform. His wife's well-known love affair with a young Frenchman precipitated a duel that ended his life. Killens weaves all of this into his compelling narrative to present a Pushkin whose varied feelings range from compassion and concern for others to bouts of depression and despair. Part Russian, part African, a poet, and a womanizer, the Alexander Pushkin of Killen's Great Black Russian romances change, revolution, and danger and yet in his interior turmoil withdraws into the realm of dreams and fantasy.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Oliver Killens (January 14, 1916 – October 27, 1987) was an American fiction writer from Georgia. His novels featured elements of African-American life. In his debut novel, Youngblood (1954), Killens coined the phrase "kicking ass and taking names". He also wrote plays, short stories and essays, and published articles in a range of outlets. Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles Killens Sr. and Willie Lee Killens.His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes' writings, and his mother, who was president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry. Killens was an enthusiastic reader as a child and was inspired by writers such as Hughes and Richard Wright. His great-grandmother’s tales of slavery were another important factor in learning traditional black mythology and folklore, which he later incorporated into his writings. Killens graduated in 1933 from the Ballard Normal School in Macon, a private institution run by the American Missionary Association. It was then one of the few secondary schools for blacks in Georgia, which had a segregated system of public schools and historically underfunded those for black students. Aspiring to become a lawyer, Killens attended several historically black colleges and universities between 1934 and 1936: Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida; Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; and Robert H. Terrell Law School in Washington, D.C. He also studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. Killens enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving as a member of the Pacific Amphibious Forces from 1942 to 1945. He spent more than two years in the South Pacific, and rose to the rank of master sergeant. In 1948, Killens moved to New York City, where he worked to establish a literary career. He attended writing classes at Columbia University and at New York University. He was an active member of many organizations, serving as a union representative to a local chapter of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and joining the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Around 1950, Killens co-founded with Rosa Guy and others a writers' group that became the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG). His first novel, Youngblood (1954), dealing with a black Georgia family in the early 1900s, was read and developed at HWG meetings in members' homes. In his book, he first coined the expression "kicking ass and taking names". Killens became friends with actor Harry Belafonte, who after establishing his production company HarBel wanted to adapt William P. McGivern's crime novel Odds Against Tomorrow as a film. Belafonte picked Abraham Polonsky as the screenwriter, but since Polonsky had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Killens agreed to act as his front and was credited with the screenplay for the film. In 1996, the Writers Guild of America restored credit to Polonsky for the film under his own name. Killens's second novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), was about the treatment of the black soldiers in the military during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated. Critic Noel Perrin ranked it as one of five major works of fiction of World War II. Killens's third novel, Sippi (1967), focused on the voting rights struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Slaves (1969), a historical novel by Killens, was developed from the screenplay for the film of the same name, intended to accompany its release. In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), Killens explored upper-class African-American society. In addition to novels, Killens also wrote plays, screenplays, and many articles and short stories. He published these works in a range of media, including The Black Scholar, The New York Times, Ebony, Redbook, Negro Digest and Black World.[8] According to Kira Alexander, "On June 7, 1964, Killens reached his largest audience when his essay 'Explanation of the "Black Psyche"' was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine." He produced five further articles, which were published in his 1965 collection Black Man's Burden. Killens taught creative-writing programs at Fisk University, Howard University, Columbia University, and Medgar Evers College. In 1986, he founded the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College. Named in the author's honor, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is published twice a year by the Center. On June 19, 1943, Killens married Grace Ward Jones.[10] They had two children together: a son, Jon Charles (born 1944), and a daughter, Barbara (born 1947). In 1987, Killens died of cancer, aged 71, at the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center in Brooklyn, New York. He was living in Crown Heights.

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'Sippi by John Oliver Killens. New York. 1964. Trident Press/Simon & Schuster. 434 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Charles & Cuffari.

DESCRIPTION - When the Supreme Court, in 1954, made its historic decision declaring segregation in public schooling unconstitutional, most Negroes felt that Jim Crow had finally been buried. Yet today there is more bitterness among Negroes toward whites, and among whites more ill-feeling toward Negroes, than ever before. Moreover, there has been a radical change both in the strategy and the attitudes of the Negro, regardless of geographic location, age grouping, economic outlook, or political affiliation. 'SIPPI is the first novel to explore fully the whole background that has motivated these changes, not in terms of statistics and human deprivation, but by exploring a wide cross section of human beings, both white and colored, reacting to their environment and to the stresses of changing times. The action is centered mainly in Mississippi, but it shifts to the campus of a Negro university in the South, then to New York, and finally back to where it began, in a shattering and terrifying climax. John Oliver Killens, of course, will be remembered for his two fine novels, YOUNGBLOOD and AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER. His newest novel will bring to any reader an uncanny insight into what lies behind the headlines and into the minds and hearts of both Negroes and whites. It may not please you; it may even shock you. But once you have read it you will never again be complacent about what is happening to America's largest minority group.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Oliver Killens (January 14, 1916 – October 27, 1987) was an American fiction writer from Georgia. His novels featured elements of African-American life. In his debut novel, Youngblood (1954), Killens coined the phrase "kicking ass and taking names". He also wrote plays, short stories and essays, and published articles in a range of outlets. Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, to Charles Myles Killens Sr. and Willie Lee Killens.His father encouraged him to read Langston Hughes' writings, and his mother, who was president of the Dunbar Literary Club, introduced him to poetry. Killens was an enthusiastic reader as a child and was inspired by writers such as Hughes and Richard Wright. His great-grandmother’s tales of slavery were another important factor in learning traditional black mythology and folklore, which he later incorporated into his writings. Killens graduated in 1933 from the Ballard Normal School in Macon, a private institution run by the American Missionary Association. It was then one of the few secondary schools for blacks in Georgia, which had a segregated system of public schools and historically underfunded those for black students. Aspiring to become a lawyer, Killens attended several historically black colleges and universities between 1934 and 1936: Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida; Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia; Howard University in Washington, D.C.; and Robert H. Terrell Law School in Washington, D.C. He also studied creative writing at Columbia University in New York City. Killens enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving as a member of the Pacific Amphibious Forces from 1942 to 1945. He spent more than two years in the South Pacific, and rose to the rank of master sergeant. In 1948, Killens moved to New York City, where he worked to establish a literary career. He attended writing classes at Columbia University and at New York University. He was an active member of many organizations, serving as a union representative to a local chapter of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and joining the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Around 1950, Killens co-founded with Rosa Guy and others a writers' group that became the Harlem Writers Guild (HWG). His first novel, Youngblood (1954), dealing with a black Georgia family in the early 1900s, was read and developed at HWG meetings in members' homes. In his book, he first coined the expression "kicking ass and taking names". Killens became friends with actor Harry Belafonte, who after establishing his production company HarBel wanted to adapt William P. McGivern's crime novel Odds Against Tomorrow as a film. Belafonte picked Abraham Polonsky as the screenwriter, but since Polonsky had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Killens agreed to act as his front and was credited with the screenplay for the film. In 1996, the Writers Guild of America restored credit to Polonsky for the film under his own name. Killens's second novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), was about the treatment of the black soldiers in the military during World War II, when the armed forces were still segregated. Critic Noel Perrin ranked it as one of five major works of fiction of World War II. Killens's third novel, Sippi (1967), focused on the voting rights struggles of African Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Slaves (1969), a historical novel by Killens, was developed from the screenplay for the film of the same name, intended to accompany its release. In The Cotillion; or, One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), Killens explored upper-class African-American society. In addition to novels, Killens also wrote plays, screenplays, and many articles and short stories. He published these works in a range of media, including The Black Scholar, The New York Times, Ebony, Redbook, Negro Digest and Black World.[8] According to Kira Alexander, "On June 7, 1964, Killens reached his largest audience when his essay 'Explanation of the "Black Psyche"' was published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine." He produced five further articles, which were published in his 1965 collection Black Man's Burden. Killens taught creative-writing programs at Fisk University, Howard University, Columbia University, and Medgar Evers College. In 1986, he founded the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College. Named in the author's honor, The Killens Review of Arts & Letters is published twice a year by the Center. On June 19, 1943, Killens married Grace Ward Jones.[10] They had two children together: a son, Jon Charles (born 1944), and a daughter, Barbara (born 1947). In 1987, Killens died of cancer, aged 71, at the Metropolitan Jewish Geriatric Center in Brooklyn, New York. He was living in Crown Heights.

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The Age of Alexander by Plutarch. Baltimore. 1973. Penguin Books. 0140442863. Translated from the Latin by Ian Scott-Kilvert. 443 pages. paperback. The cover shows a posthumous portrait of Alexander the Great on a tetradrachm of Lysimachus of the third century B.C.  

DESCRIPTION - Plutarch's Lives of the great Greek statesmen and men of action were designed to pair with the now Roman portraits and contain many of his finest descriptions of war. revolution and heroic achievement. The nine Lives in this selection trace a crucial phase in ancient history, from the collapse of Athens to the rise of Macedonia. They include studies of Demosthenes and Phocion, the leading Athenian orators; of Agesilaus, the Spartan king, and Pelopidas, the Theban military hero: of Dion and Timoleon. the ‘liberators' of Sicily: and above all. of three generals - Demetrius ‘the Besieger', Pyrrhus and Alexander the Great.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Plutarch (AD c. 50-120) was a Greek writer and thinker whose Parallel Lives biographies have been influential since the time of the Renaissance.

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The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan. New York. 1978. Simon & Schuster. 0671242881. 153 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Ian McEwan's first novel, The Cement Garden, written in 1978, explores coming-of-age, burgeoning sexuality and the distortions of a fourteen-year-old mind. In the relentless summer heat, four abruptly orphaned children retreat into a shadowy, isolated world, and find their own strange and unsettling ways of fending for themselves.

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.

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In Between the Sheets and Other Stories by Ian McEwan. New York. 1979. Simon & Schuster. 0671242903. 153 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The second collection of short stories. Call them transcripts of dreams or deadly accurate maps of the tremor zones of the psyche, the seven stories in this collection engage and implicate us in the most fearful ways imaginable. A two-timing pornographer becomes an unwilling object in the fantasies of one of his victims. A jaded millionaire buys himself the perfect mistress and plunges into a hell of jealousy and despair.

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.

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First Love, Last Rites by Ian McEwan. New York. 1975. Random House. 0394494229. 165 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A collection of short stories, focusing on the awakening sensations of first love and its ritual initiations. This collection won the Somerset Maugham Award. A dominant theme of this short story collection is that of adolescence. As McEwan himself put it in an interview with Christopher Ricks in 1979, "They were a kind of laboratory for me. They allowed me to try out different things, to discover myself as a writer." The book is comprised of eight stories. LAST DAY OF SUMMER is an eerily haunting story of a twelve-year-old boy who, having lost his own mother, finds another mother figure in Jenny, a large woman who comes to stay with him. In HOMEMADE, a self-satisfied teenager is confident in his ability to outperform his friend in every 'adult' discipline: drinking, smoking, etc., until he realizes he is still a virgin. BUTTERFLIES is told through the eyes of a socially isolated man who is not remarkable in any positive way. On one of his walks into his town's decaying underbelly, he meets a young girl and walks with her. On arrival at a deserted dry canal, he demands that she touch his penis, and after this sordid encounter, drowns her. In SOLID GEOMETRY, the narrator shuns his wife, in order to read his great-grandfather's eventful diary.  CONVERSATION WITH A CUPBOARD MAN takes the form of a confessional by a man who was treated as a baby by his mother until the age of seventeen, when he was thrown out due to his mother remarrying and forced to fend for himself. COCKER AT THE THEATRE is an account of some acting couples who simulate sex, only to be interrupted by a couple who are having sex for real. FIRST LOVE, LAST RITES tells the tale of a narrator and his teenage lover, Sissel, who enjoy a long summer of love making. DISGUISES involves a boy, Henry, taken under the wing of his eccentric aunt, who puts Henry in elaborate costumes for their evening meals. Things turn strange when Henry is faced with a costume consisting of a girl's wig and frock.

Ian McEwan was born on 21 June 1948 in Aldershot, England. He studied at the University of Sussex, where he received a BA degree in English Literature in 1970. He received his MA degree in English Literature at the University of East Anglia. McEwan's works have earned him worldwide critical acclaim. He won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976 for his first collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites; the Whitbread Novel Award (1987) and the Prix Fémina Etranger (1993) for The Child in Time; and Germany's Shakespeare Prize in 1999. He has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction numerous times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement received the WH Smith Literary Award (2002), National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2006, he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Saturday, and his novel On Chesil Beach was named Galaxy Book of the Year at the 2008 British Book Awards. McEwan has been named the Reader's Digest Author of the Year for 2008, the 2010 Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award, and in 2011 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. McEwan lives in London.

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Epitaphios by Yiannis Ritsos. Middlesbrough. 2014. Smokestack Books . 9780992740962. Translated by Rick M. Newton. 65 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Translated by Rick M. Newton. On 10 May 1936 the 27-year old Greek poet Yiannis Ritsos saw a newspaper photograph of a woman weeping over the body of her son, a Thessaloniki tobacco-factory worker killed by police during a strike. Two days later the Communist Party newspaper Rizospastis published a long poem by Ritsos. Dedicated `to the heroic workers of Thessaloniki' and drawing on the sixth-century Greek Orthodox Epitaphios Thrinos, the poem combines Mary's lament at Christ's tomb with popular Greek folk traditions of resurrection and Spring to create a universal lament sung by every bereaved mother. This is the first time Epitaphios has been published in book form in English.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yiannis (or Yannis) Ritsos (1 May 1909 - 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair. The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people. In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: he began to explore the conquests of surrealism through the domain of dreams, surprising associations, explosions of images and symbols, a lyricism illustrative of the anguish of the poet, and both tender and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937) and Symphony of the Spring (1938). During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) Ritsos became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front) and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the Left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek Left. In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros. Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize is more important for me than the Nobel." His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953).

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Selected Poems by Yannis Ritsos. Middlesex. 1974. Penguin Books. 014042184x. Penguin Modern European Poets series. Translated from the Greek by Nikos Stangos. Introduction by Peter Bien. 207 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Despite his major international reputation as one of Europe's most important poets today, this is the first English translation which attempts a comprehensive presentation of Yannis Ritsos's voluminous work. Both short poems and one long narrative poem have been selected to illustrate dominant features of his poetry - his arresting use of metaphor; his manner of injecting complexity into simple scenes; his remarkable skill of fusing the legendary past of Greece with Greek life today. Together these deceptively simple and very moving poems convey something of the lyric and epic qualities of a great painter in words.

The Penguin Modern European Poets offered a series of collections designed to present, in verse translations, the work of significant poets of the 20th century for readers unfamiliar with the original languages. The series includes: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Rainer Maria Rilke, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jacques Prevert, Quasmodo, Greek poets -Cavafy, Elytis, Gatsos, and Seferis, Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gunter Grass, Vasko Popa, Sandor Weores, Ferenc Juhasz, Johannes Bobrowski, Horst Bienek, Eugenio Montale, Vladimir Holan, Anna Akhmatova, Gunnar Ekelof, Paul Celan, Amichai, Kovner, Sachs, Cesare Pavese, the Czech poets, Nezval, Bartusek, and Hanzlik, Ungaretti, Fernando Pessoa, and even Joseph Brodsky.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yiannis (or Yannis) Ritsos (1 May 1909 - 11 November 1990) was a Greek poet and left-wing activist and an active member of the Greek Resistance during World War II. Born to a well-to-do landowning family in Monemvasia, Ritsos suffered great losses as a child. The early deaths of his mother and eldest brother from tuberculosis, his father's struggles with a mental disease, and the economic ruin his family marked Ritsos and affected his poetry. Ritsos himself was confined in a sanatorium for tuberculosis from 1927–1931. In 1931, Ritsos joined the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). He maintained a working-class circle of friends and published Tractorin 1934. In 1935, he published Pyramids; these two works sought to achieve a fragile balance between faith in the future, founded on the Communist ideal, and personal despair. The landmark poem Epitaphios, published in 1936, broke with the shape of Greek traditional popular poetry and expressed in clear and simple language a message of the unity of all people. In August 1936, the right-wing dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas came to power and Epitaphios was burned publicly at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens. Ritsos responded by taking his work in a different direction: he began to explore the conquests of surrealism through the domain of dreams, surprising associations, explosions of images and symbols, a lyricism illustrative of the anguish of the poet, and both tender and bitter souvenirs. During this period Ritsos published The Song of my Sister (1937) and Symphony of the Spring (1938). During the Axis occupation of Greece (1941–1945) Ritsos became a member of the EAM (National Liberation Front) and authored several poems for the Greek Resistance. These include a booklet of poems dedicated to the resistance leader Aris Velouchiotis, written immediately upon the latter's death on 16 June 1945. Ritsos also supported the Left in the subsequent Civil War (1946-1949); in 1948 he was arrested and spent four years in prison camps. In the 1950s 'Epitaphios', set to music by Mikis Theodorakis, became the anthem of the Greek Left. In 1967 he was arrested by the Papadopoulos dictatorship and sent to a prison camp in Gyaros. Today, Ritsos is considered one of the five great Greek poets of the twentieth century, together with Konstantinos Kavafis, Kostas Kariotakis, Giorgos Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The French poet Louis Aragon once said that Ritsos was "the greatest poet of our age." He was unsuccessfully proposed nine times for the Nobel Prize for Literature. When he won the Lenin Peace Prize (also known as the Stalin Peace Prize prior to 1956) he declared "this prize is more important for me than the Nobel." His poetry was banned at times in Greece due to his left wing beliefs. Notable works by Ritsos include Tractor (1934), Pyramids (1935), Epitaph (1936), and Vigil (1941–1953).

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