Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 152

The Fourth Dimension: Selected Poems of Yannis Ritsos. Boston. 1977. David Godine. 0879231815. Translated from the Greek by Rae Dalven. 157 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - None would dispute that Yannis Ritsos is the finest living Greek poet. Peter Levi in the Times Literary Supplement calls him ‘one of the greatest poets now living.' The author of innumerable volumes of poetry, he has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize; like Theodorakis, who has set many of his poems to music, he has become a cultural hero in Greece; and his poems are available in translation throughout Europe. Yet no comprehensive collection of his work has before now been published in the United States. The Fourth Dimension, translated by Rae Dalven, contains a generous selection that spans forty years of Ritsos's work, including both his terse but lyrical short poems and the rhapsodic long poems that are his greatest achievement. Ritsos, now in his sixties, has always been a champion of liberty and consequently has spent much of his life in exile or in prison. From the suffering endured for his beliefs, he has wrought remarkable political poetry - not so much in its espousal of particular ideology as in its celebration of human freedom and the independence of the Greek people. Like his great predecessors Cavafy and Seferis, Ritsos is an unmistakable voice. Observing the world around him, he makes connections between the most commonplace acts and the context in which they occur. He sees both the trees and the forest. With his capacity for detailed observation, the diversity that produces both delicate lyrics and grand dramatic monologues, the political passion of his prison poems, and his identification with the common man, Ritsos is a major poet whose work cannot be ignored by anyone seriously interested in contemporary literature.

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).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 168

Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988. Brockport. 1989. BOA Editions Limited. 0918526663. Edited & Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades. 487 pages. hardcover. Cover painting by Yannis Ritsos. Cover design by Daphne Poulin.  

DESCRIPTION - One of Greece's most prolific, distinguished and celebrated poets, Yannis Ritsos is the author of more than 115 volumes of poetry, translations, essays and dramatic works. His many honors include the Lenin Prize (U.S.S.R., 1977), the Alfred de Vigny Award (France, 1975), and the Great International Prize in Poetry of the Bienninal Knokkele-Zoute (Belgium, 1972). YANNIS RITSOS: SELECTED POEMS 1938-1988 is the most comprehensive selection of Ritsos' poetry to appear in English translation to date. The work of 17 translators, this monumental volume generously represents 50 years of a gigantic poet's work. YANNIS RITSOS: SELECTED POEMS 1938 - 1988 features more than 440 poems (including 10 long poems never collected in English) from 43 of Ritsos' books (including 3 not yet published in Greek), 2 comprehensive and insightful essays by the editors on Ritsos' short and long poems, a chronological index of Ritsos' published and selected unpublished work, and more than 25 illustrations based on Yannis Ritsos' celebrated paintings on rocks.

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).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 157

Exile & Return: Selected Poems 1967-1974 by Yannis Ritsos. New York. 1985. Ecco Press. 0880010177. Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley. 200 pages. hardcover.  Jacket design by Cynthia Krupat.  

DESCRIPTION - Yannis Ritsos is Greece's most prolific contemporary poet, having published, at last count, some ninety-five volumes of poetry, translations, essays, and dramatic works during his more than fifty-year career as a published writer. He and Odysseus Elytis, the 1979 Nobel laureate, are generally acknowledged by their countrymen to be the most important living poets writing in Greek, and in recent years both have found a substantial audience abroad through translations, in Ritso's case one that extends widely into Eastern as well as Western Europe. The poems from the eight volumes represented here are characteristic of those that have shaped a major facet of Ritso's mature work, short free-verse poems usually of eight to sixteen lines (the somewhat longer poems in Repetitions are the principal exception) brought together in collections containing between fifty and one hundred and fifty poems normally written over a period of months rather than years. Each of the volumes is given coherence by the repetition of related images and themes. Each reflects the contemporary landscape and history of Greece while projecting a symbolic, at moments even a visionary, representation of what the poet sees as the modern Greek predicament. - from the Introduction.

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).

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 170

On Call: Political Essays by June Jordan. Boston. 1985. South End Press. 0896082695. 153 pages. paperback. Cover photo by Jonathan Snow. Cover design by Cynthia Peters.  

DESCRIPTION - . ‘At this critical moment in history when the outcomes of world crises from South Africa to Nicaragua can be determined by public perception and outcry, I welcome this outstanding work by June Jordan. I sincerely hope that readers will internalize her words and ideas and follow her lead for affective moral, and speedy political action.' - Ronald V. Dellums, Member of Congress. ‘Leading the inspiration for the next stage of activism in global politics, June Jordan's ON CALL has clarioned a new day. From Harlem to Managua, from Johannesburg to Beirut, her brilliant defiance will capture the imagination of everyone who has dared to speak out.' - John Conyers, Member of Congress. ‘Whether addressing questions of poetry, of language, of feminism, of domestic or international affairs, or of the intimately personal, June Jordan never allows us to ignore those critical underlying connections which join together the issues of gender, race, class, and continent it is this relentless search for meaning, for inter-connections, for concerted action which makes South End's publication of June Jordan's most recent essays an event of truly astropotamous significance.' - Ernest Allen, Chair, Afro-American Studies, UMASS Amherst. ‘ON CALL is one of the most insightful, powerful and internationalist collections of political essays I have ever read. These ideas, feelings, passions and commitments should be eagerly read by people around the world.' - Alice Walker. ‘These are political writings of a distinctive kind. June Jordan truly believes that buried in the lived experience of women, of third world peoples, and of the poor everywhere is the possibility of developing a penetrating understanding and a passion that can change the world.' - Frances Fox Piven. ‘The struggle of the South African people against apartheid and for national liberation is, with growing support from the overwhelming majority of the people of the world, moving toward inevitable victory. At this critical moment, the ANC is deeply gratified by the unswerving dedication and commitment of political writers and activists such as June Jordan.' - Neo Mnumzana, Chief Representative of the African National Congress' observer mission to the United Nations. ‘June Jordan is one of the very few voices of the Americas speaking with a passionate commitment to peace with justice on the basis of first hand knowledge. We are grateful for the bravery of her accomplishments.' - Carlos Tunnerman, Nicaraguan Ambassador to the United States.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 152

Some of Us Did Not Die: New & Selected Essays by June Jordan. New York. 2002. Basic Books. 0465036929. Jacket photograph by Jill Posener. 312 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Kristen Hayes.  

DESCRIPTION - Poet and activist June Jordan wrote her way to the forefront of political analysis, witness and moral summoning for more than half a century. These important new essays, along with work drawn from every phase of her prolific career, document her ongoing leadership and commitment in every conflicted sphere of our second millennium lives: the varieties of supremacist values and policies; the theft of democracy inside the United States; racial and gender inequality, and the arrogance that upholds all forms of justice. In Some of Us Did Not Die, June Jordan calls us to a faithful position of outspoken resistance and hope.

June Jordan (1936-2002) was a professor of African American studies at U.C. Berkeley, and author of 11 books of poetry, five children's books, a novel, three plays, a memoir, and five volumes of political essays.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 173

Civil Wars by June Jordan. Boston. 1981. Beacon Press. 0807032328. 188 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In Civil Wars, June Jordan's battleground is the intersection of private and public reality, which she explores through a blending of personal reflection and political analysis. From journal entries on the line between poetry and politics and a discussion of language and power in 'White' versus 'Black' English to First Amendment issues, children's rights, Black studies, American violence, and sexuality, Jordan documents the very personal ways in which she meshes with the social issues of modern-day life in this country.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - June Millicent Jordan (July 9, 1936 - June 14, 2002) was a Caribbean American poet, novelist, journalist, biographer, dramatist, teacher, and committed activist. In her three decade career Jordan made her mark as one of the fiercest and most compassionate voices of her time. She became a passionate voice of a generation battling the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, politics, war, violence, and human rights. Jordan played an important role in the development of black artistic, social, and politic movements and is still widely regarded as one of the most significant and prolific Black, bisexual writers of the twentieth century.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 155

Zadig / L'Ingenu by Voltaire. Baltimore. 1964. Penguin Books. . Translated from the French & With An Introduction by John Butt.  191 pages. paperback. L126. The cover illustration shows a detail from an engraving by G. Scotin, 'Le Grand Visir.'  

DESCRIPTION - Written by the wittiest writer in an age of wits, these two tales are clearly the work of the fund that produced CANDIDE. Voltaire's faith in man's resilience is displayed with immense gaiety, inventive imagination, arid irreverence for official doctrine. ZADIG, written in 1747, is full of vivaciousness and everyone always bounces hopefully up, whatever fate may have done. The humour is less constant in L'Ingenu, and there is a mature and satisfying development in Voltaire's thinking on the problem of evil. John Butt has succeeded in recapturing in his translation both the grace and the wit of Voltaire's original.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 173

Micromegas and Other Short Fictions by Voltaire. New York. 2002. Penguin Books. 0140446869. Translated from the French by Theo Cuffe, With An Introduction & Notes by Haydn Mason. 162 pages. paperback.  The cover shows The Geography Lesson by Pietro Longhi (1702-1785).  

DESCRIPTION - In these brilliantly inventive, witty stories, Voltaire (1694-1778) challenges received wisdom, religious intolerance and naïve optimism. Travelling through strange environments, Voltaire's protagonists are educated, often by surprise, into the complexities and contradictions of their world. Arriving on Earth from the star Sirius, the gigantic explorer Micromegas discovers a diminutive people with an inflated idea of their own importance in the universe. Babouc in ‘The World As It Is' learns that humanity is equally capable of barbarism and remarkable altruism. Other characters in this diverting collection include a little- known god of infidelity, a pretentious graduate who invites a savage to dinner and an Indian fakir who puts up with a bed of nails to gain the adoration of his female disciples. Whether he is exploring the paradoxes of grief, demanding better education for women, or mocking greedy clerics and the Christian ideal of chastity, Voltaire is always wonderfully provocative. Above all, he shows that in an uncertain, violent world pity and a desire for justice are our only decent responses. With a chronology of Voltaire's life and times and a further reading list.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 165

Philosophical Dictionary - 2 Volumes by Voltaire. New York. 1962. Basic Books.  Translated from the French by Peter Gay. Preface by Andre Maurois. 661 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Tis is the first complete and authoritative edition in English of Voltaire's lively and high-spirited classic. It has been newly translated by Professor Peter Gay of Columbia University, who also supplies a long historical introduction and a comprehensive glossary. In his Preface, M. Andre Maurois discusses the revelance of Voltaire for the modern reader. Voltaire's PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects. It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all side and described as a deplorable monument of the extent to which intelligence and erudition can be abused. The subjects treated include - Abraham, Angel, and Anthropophanges, Baptism, Beauty and Beasts, Fables, Fraud and Fanaticism, Metempsychosis, Miracles and Moses - all of them exposed to Voltaire's lucid scrutiny, his elegant irony and his passionate love of reason and justice.

In a Penguin Classic paperback edition:

Philosophical Dictionary by Voltaire . Baltimore. 1971. Penguin Books. 014044257x. Translated from the French and Edited by Theodore Besterman. 400 pages. paperback. The cover, design by Germano Facetti, shows a detail from 'L'Homme unique a tout age', a contemporary allegory of the coronation of Voltaire (Bisonte).  

DESCRIPTION - Voltaire's PHILOSOPHICAL DICTIONARY is a series of short essays, hortatory and propagandist, over an enormously wide range of subjects. It was deliberately planned as a revolutionary book and was duly denounced on all side and described as a deplorable monument of the extent to which intelligence and erudition can be abused. The subjects treated include - Abraham, Angel, and Anthropophanges, Baptism, Beauty and Beasts, Fables, Fraud and Fanaticism, Metempsychosis, Miracles and Moses - all of them exposed to Voltaire's lucid scrutiny, his elegant irony and his passionate love of reason and justice.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Francois-Marie Arouet (21 November 1694 - 30 May 1778), known by his nom de plume Voltaire, was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a versatile writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken advocate, despite the risk this placed him in under the strict censorship laws of the time. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma, and the French institutions of his day.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 159

Parallel Stories: A Novel by Peter Nadas. New York. 2011. Farrar Straus Giroux. 9780374229764. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. 1133 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Nayon Cho. Jacket photograph: Andre Kertesz, ‘Distortion #51.’  

DESCRIPTION - A New York Times Notable Book for 2011. A once-in-a-generation literary event: the monumental masterwork being hailed as a ‘twenty-first-century WAR AND PEACE' (Magyar Nemzet). In 1989, the year the Wall came down, a university student in Berlin on his morning run finds a corpse on a park bench and alerts the authorities. This scene opens a novel of extraordinary scope and depth, a masterwork that traces the fate of myriad Europeans - Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Gypsies - across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century. Three unusual men are at the heart of PARALLEL STORIES: Hans von Wolkenstein, whose German mother is linked to secrets of fascist-Nazi collaboration during the 1940s; Ágost Lippay Lehr, whose influential father has served Hungary's different political regimes for decades; and András Rott, who has his own dark record of mysterious activities abroad. The web of extended and interconnected dramas reaches from 1989 back to the spring of 1939, when Europe trembled on the edge of war, and extends to the bestial times of 1944–45, when Budapest was besieged, the Final Solution devastated Hungary's Jews, and the war came to an end, and on to the cataclysmic Hungarian Revolution of October 1956. We follow these men from Berlin and Moscow to Switzerland and Holland, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, and of course, from village to city in Hungary. The social and political circumstances of their lives may vary greatly, their sexual and spiritual longings may seem to each of them entirely unique, yet PEter Nádas's magnificent tapestry unveils uncanny reverberating parallels that link them across time and space. This is PEter Nádas's masterpiece - eighteen years in the writing, a sensation in Hungary even before it was published, and almost four years in the translating. PARALLEL STORIES is the first foreign translation of this daring, demanding, and momentous novel, and it confirms for an even larger audience what Hungary already knows: that it is the author's greatest work.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PETER NADAS was born in Budapest in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who has been accorded great recognition, he is the author of several novels, including The End of the Family Novel, and works of nonfiction.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 166

The End of a Family Story by Peter Nadas. New York. 1998. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374148325. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. 245 pages. hardcover. Jacket art: ‘Seated Nude’ by Zoran Music. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde,  

DESCRIPTION - It is the 1950s, in Hungary, when Stalinist repression has reduced the populace to silence and deception. The narrator, a young boy, lives alone with his grandparents. His rebellious, talkative grandfather, refusing to submit to the implacable realities, flees to his memories of the past, in which he believes he can still find redemption, and for his grandson, he weaves a fantastic tapestry of stories of family sagas. His myths and legends depict the luxuriant history of a family with both Christian and Jewish roots, and of a people who, having denied the Messiah, must legitimate their faith and expiate their sins over thousands of years. And, as he talks, he teaches the boy that, however wild and wondrous the stories may seem, every sentence in them is 'a unit of truth.' Simultaneously, another terrible story is engaging both the storyteller and the boy. Together they realize that the boy's father, a government official, has betrayed his family and friends, and is now being named a traitor by the authorities. Liberated into sincerity and freedom by his grandfather's stories, the boy gives dark and passionate testimony to the alienation and treason of a sinister adult world. And finally we see how his family story will end.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PETER NADAS was born in Budapest in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who has been accorded great recognition, he is the author of several novels, including The End of the Family Novel, and works of nonfiction.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 167

Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas. New York. 2007. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374299641. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. 400 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph - 'Self-portrait with Lamp' by Peter Nadas. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell.

DESCRIPTION - The U.S. publication of A Book of Memories in 1997 introduced to our shores the work of an extraordinary novelist, an artist whom critics easily compared to Robert Musil, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. Now, in Fire and Knowledge, we discover other aspects of Peter Nádas's major presence in European life and letters: as a trenchant commentator on the events that have transformed his country and all of Europe since 1989, as a stunning literary critic, as a subtle interpreter of language and politics in societies both free and unfree, as a moralist with a discerning eye for the crippling effects of deception and hypocrisy upon us all. In addition, Fire and Knowledge acquaints us more fully with Nádas's evolution as a writer of fiction, for it includes stories dating from the 1960s and 1970s, when he had to write in extremely stringent, even dangerous circumstances, as well as some from more recent years, since the publication of his major novels and the reintegration of Western and Eastern Europe. Here, in full, is a rich and rewarding compilation of works by one of our greatest living writers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - PETER NADAS was born in Budapest in 1942. A novelist, playwright, and essayist who has been accorded great recognition, he is the author of several novels, including The End of the Family Novel, and works of nonfiction.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 154

Poems from the Past by Willem Elsschot. Amsterdam/Leuven. 2002. W.E.G.-Reeks 21. Translated from the Dutch by various translator. Edited by Paul Vincent. 20 pages. paperback.

  
DESCRIPTION - An early collection of poetry from Flemish novelist and poet Willem Elsschot, the author of a small but remarkable oeuvre, whose laconic style and ironic observation of middle-class urban life mark him as one of the outstanding Flemish novelists of the first half of the 20th century. In addition to his many prose works, Willem Elsschot has written some poems which have become a unique part of the Dutch literary heritage. POEMS FROM THE PAST was originally published as Verzen van vroeger in 1934.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 184

Cheese by Willem Elsschot. New York. 2002. Granta Books. 186207481x. Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent. 160 pages. hardcover. Cover design by random. Photography: Greg Evans.  

DESCRIPTION - A scrumptious satire about business, greed, ambition and cheese - Edam's great moment in world literature. Frans Laarmans is a humble shipping clerk. One day he is suddenly elevated to the position of chief agent for a Dutch cheese company, with responsibility for Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Thrilled at the change in his status, he goes on leave, sets up an office at home, and takes delivery of ten thousand full-cream Edams. But, running a business is not as straightforward as he thought. As the bulk of the twenty tons of cheese sits in storage, crates and crates of it, it starts to haunt him. And when his employer, the brusque Mr. Hornstra, wires to say he is coming to Antwerp to settle the first accounts, Laarmans begins to panic . . . CHEESE is a comic classic in Holland and Belgium - the equivalent of THREE MEN IN A BOAT or THE DIARY OF A NOBOBY. It is a delightful period piece, but also timeless in its skewering of the pretensions and pomposity of businessmen. Willem Elsschot's deliciously dry, Low Countries humor has retained it freshness and bite.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 160

The Accompanist by Nina Berberova. New York. 1988. Atheneum. 0689119895. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. 94 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Doomed to living in her mentor's shadow, Sonechka, a talented but mousy young pianist employed by a beautiful soprano and her devoted, bourgeois husband, secretly schemes to expose infidelities.

Nina Nikolayevna Berberova (26 July 1901 – 26 September 1993) was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia and died in Philadelphia. Born in 1901 to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, Nina Berberova was brought up in St Petersburg. She left Russia in 1922 with poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who died in 1939). The couple lived in several European cities before settling in Paris in 1925. There Berberova began publishing short stories for the Russian emigre publications Poslednie Novosti (‘The Latest News’) and Russkaia Mysl’ (‘Russian Thought’). The stories collected in Oblegchenie Uchasti (‘The Easing of Fate’) and Biiankurskie Prazdniki (‘Billancourt Fiestas’) were written during this period. She also wrote the first book length biography of composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1936, which was controversial for its openness about his homosexuality. In Paris she was part of a circle of poor but distinguished visiting literary Russian exiles which included Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky. After living in Paris for 25 years, Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and became an American citizen in 1959. Since 1954 was married for George Kochevitsky - the Russian pianist and the teacher.) She began her academic career in 1958 when she was hired to teach Russian at Yale. She continued to write while she was teaching, publishing several povesti (long short stories), critical articles and some poetry. She left Yale in 1963 for Princeton, where she taught until her retirement in 1971. In 1991 Berberova moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Philadelphia. Berberova’s autobiography, which details her early life and years in France, was written in Russian but published first in English as The Italics are Mine (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). The Russian edition, Kursiv Moi, was not published until 1983. Much of Berberova’s early literary archive (1922–1950) is located in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection at Stanford University. Her later literary archive (after 1950) is in the Nina Berberova Papers and Nina Berberova Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 156

The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels by Nina Berberova. New York. 1991. Knopf. 0679402810. Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz. 309 pages. hardcover. Jacket art: 'Study of a Woman' by Kees van Dongen. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.  

DESCRIPTION - The greatest collection by one of the great Russian writers is now back in print. First published in Europe in the 1930s and '40s, these searing, evocative stories by the late EmigrE writer Nina Berberova (1901-1993) are portraits of the lives of Russian exiles in Paris on the eve of World War II. The protagonists range from housekeepers and waiters to shabby-genteel aristocrats and intellectuals - but all are united in a haunting displacement from their pasts, and all share a troubling uncertainty about the future.

Nina Nikolayevna Berberova (26 July 1901 – 26 September 1993) was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia and died in Philadelphia. Born in 1901 to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, Nina Berberova was brought up in St Petersburg. She left Russia in 1922 with poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who died in 1939). The couple lived in several European cities before settling in Paris in 1925. There Berberova began publishing short stories for the Russian emigre publications Poslednie Novosti (‘The Latest News’) and Russkaia Mysl’ (‘Russian Thought’). The stories collected in Oblegchenie Uchasti (‘The Easing of Fate’) and Biiankurskie Prazdniki (‘Billancourt Fiestas’) were written during this period. She also wrote the first book length biography of composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1936, which was controversial for its openness about his homosexuality. In Paris she was part of a circle of poor but distinguished visiting literary Russian exiles which included Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky. After living in Paris for 25 years, Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and became an American citizen in 1959. Since 1954 was married for George Kochevitsky - the Russian pianist and the teacher.) She began her academic career in 1958 when she was hired to teach Russian at Yale. She continued to write while she was teaching, publishing several povesti (long short stories), critical articles and some poetry. She left Yale in 1963 for Princeton, where she taught until her retirement in 1971. In 1991 Berberova moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Philadelphia. Berberova’s autobiography, which details her early life and years in France, was written in Russian but published first in English as The Italics are Mine (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). The Russian edition, Kursiv Moi, was not published until 1983. Much of Berberova’s early literary archive (1922–1950) is located in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection at Stanford University. Her later literary archive (after 1950) is in the Nina Berberova Papers and Nina Berberova Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 165

The Ladies From St. Petersburg by Nina Berberova. New York. 1998. New Directions. 0811213773. Translated from the Russian Marian Schwartz. 122 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - The Ladies from St. Petersburg is only the fourth book by the great Russian writer Nina Berberova to be translated into English. It contains three stories that chronologically paint a picture of the dawn of the Russian revolution, the flight from its turmoil, and the plight of an exile in a new and foreign place -- all of which Berberova knew from her personal experience. In the title story the protagonists are taking a vacation, unaware that their lives are about to be irrevocably changed. In 'Zoya Andreyevna, ' an elegant, privileged woman, in headlong flight, just one train ride ahead of the fighting, falls ill among unfriendly strangers. In 'The Big City, ' an emigrant lands in a surreal New York City, a place that is not yet, and may never be, his home.

Nina Nikolayevna Berberova (26 July 1901 – 26 September 1993) was a Russian writer who chronicled the lives of Russian exiles in Paris in her short stories and novels. She visited post-Soviet Russia and died in Philadelphia. Born in 1901 to an Armenian father and a Russian mother, Nina Berberova was brought up in St Petersburg. She left Russia in 1922 with poet Vladislav Khodasevich (who died in 1939). The couple lived in several European cities before settling in Paris in 1925. There Berberova began publishing short stories for the Russian emigre publications Poslednie Novosti (‘The Latest News’) and Russkaia Mysl’ (‘Russian Thought’). The stories collected in Oblegchenie Uchasti (‘The Easing of Fate’) and Biiankurskie Prazdniki (‘Billancourt Fiestas’) were written during this period. She also wrote the first book length biography of composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1936, which was controversial for its openness about his homosexuality. In Paris she was part of a circle of poor but distinguished visiting literary Russian exiles which included Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky. After living in Paris for 25 years, Berberova emigrated to the United States in 1950 and became an American citizen in 1959. Since 1954 was married for George Kochevitsky - the Russian pianist and the teacher.) She began her academic career in 1958 when she was hired to teach Russian at Yale. She continued to write while she was teaching, publishing several povesti (long short stories), critical articles and some poetry. She left Yale in 1963 for Princeton, where she taught until her retirement in 1971. In 1991 Berberova moved from Princeton, New Jersey to Philadelphia. Berberova’s autobiography, which details her early life and years in France, was written in Russian but published first in English as The Italics are Mine (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969). The Russian edition, Kursiv Moi, was not published until 1983. Much of Berberova’s early literary archive (1922–1950) is located in the Boris I. Nicolaevsky Collection at Stanford University. Her later literary archive (after 1950) is in the Nina Berberova Papers and Nina Berberova Collection at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 132

An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a Selection of Essays & Anecdotes. New York. 1979. Dutton. 0525054790. Translated from the German, Edited, & Introduced by Philip B. Miller. 297 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Heinrich von Kleist died by his own hand in 1811 - he was thirty-four years old. Though he had produced a body of work that would eventually earn him a place in German literature next to Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and Mann - and though he would be a major influence on Nietzsche and Kafka - he received practically no recognition in his lifetime. He did not see a successful production of any of his plays, many of which were said to be unstageable. Kleist's aristocratic Prussian background did not mesh with his own sensitivity and romantic optimism. Caught up in the Napoleonic Wars, he was quick to see the futility of both the rationalist and romantic myths of his time, and in his work he developed a sort of ironic romanticism that, extravagant as it was, pointed up the absurdity of all human endeavor. He had contracted a form of existential despair that was not to be understood until over a century later; and he sacrificed his life to it. The letters of Heinrich von Kleist - and this selection of essays and anecdotes - offer us the unique opportunity to see a literary genius in formation. They also afford us an intimate look into the mind and psyche of a disturbed soul during one of the most turbulent periods in Western history.

 Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 - 21 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin. In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (d. 1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803, originally entitled The Ghonorez Family). In the autumn of 1802, Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, again proceeded to Paris, and returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin was transferred to the Domänenkammer (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807, Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy; he remained a close prisoner of France in the Fort de Joux. On regaining his liberty, he proceeded to Dresden, where, in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), he published the journal Phöbus in 1808. In 1809 Kleist went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810/1811) the Berliner Abendblätter. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of the terminally ill Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting Vogel and then himself on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wannsee) near Potsdam, on 21 November 1811. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, ‘Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.' In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike in which he found it ‘incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life' (Lebensplan). In effect, Kleist sought and discovered an overwhelming sense of security by looking to the future with a definitive plan for his life. It brought him happiness and assured him of confidence, especially knowing that life without a plan only saw despair and discomfort. The irony of his later suicide has been the fodder of his critics. His first tragedy was The Schroffenstein Family (Die Familie Schroffenstein). The material for the second, Penthesilea (1808), queen of the Amazons, is taken from a Greek source and presents a picture of wild passion. In comedy, Kleist made a name with The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug) (1808), while Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Molière's comedy, received critical acclaim long after his death. Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannsschlacht (1809) is a dramatic work of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, written as Austria and France went to war. It has been described by Carl Schmitt as the ‘greatest partisan work of all time'. In it he gives vent to his hatred of his country's oppressors. This, together with the drama The Prince of Homburg (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin), which is among his best works, was first published by Ludwig Tieck in Kleist's Hinterlassene Schriften (1821). Robert Guiskard, a drama conceived on a grand plan, was left a fragment. Kleist was also a master in the art of narrative, and of his Gesammelte Erzählungen (Collected Short Stories) (1810–1811), Michael Kohlhaas, in which the famous Brandenburg horse dealer in Martin Luther's day is immortalized, is one of the best German stories of its time. The Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in Chili) and St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music (Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik) are also fine examples of Kleist's story telling as is The Marquise of O (Die Marquise von O.). His short narratives influenced those of Kafka. He also wrote patriotic lyrics in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. A Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverted clichEd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution. Seen as a precursor to Henrik Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters' emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was appropriated by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. To this day, many scholars see his play Die Hermannsschlacht (‘The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest‘, 1808) as prefiguring the subordination of the individual to the service of the Volk (nation) that became a principle of fascist ideology in the twentieth century. Kleist criticism of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading. Kleist's The Broken Jug is one of the most staged plays of the German canon (1803–05). In the play, a provincial judge gradually and inadvertently shows himself to have committed the crime under investigation. In the enigmatic drama The Prince of Homburg (1811), a young officer struggles with conflicting impulses of romantic self-actualization and obedience to military discipline. Prince Friedrich, who had expected to be executed for his successful but unauthorized initiative in battle, is surprised to receive a laurel wreath from Princess Natalie. To his question, whether this is a dream, the regimental commander Kottwitz replies, ‘A dream, what else?' Kleist wrote his eight novellas later in his life and they show his radically original prose style, which is at the same time careful and detailed, almost bureaucratic, but also full of grotesque, ironic illusions and various sexual, political, and philosophical references. His prose often concentrates on minute details that then serve to subvert the narrative and the narrator, and throw the whole process of narration into question. In Betrothal in St. Domingo (Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo) (1811) Kleist examines the themes of ethics, loyalty, and love in the context of the colonial rebellion in Haiti of 1803, driving the story with the expected forbidden love affair between a young white man and a black rebel woman, though the reader's expectations are confounded in typically Kleistian fashion, since the man is not really French and the woman is not really black. Here for the first time in German literature Kleist addresses the politics of a race-based colonial order and shows, through a careful exploration of a kind of politics of color (black, white, and intermediate shades), the self-deception and ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes. Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philosophers of his time, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 147

Selected Prose of Heinrich von Kleist. Brooklyn. 2010. Archipelago Books. 9780981955728. Translated from the German & With An Afterword by Peter Wortsman. 283 pages. paperback. Cover art by Paul Klee. 

DESCRIPTION - In this extraordinary and unpredictable cross-section of the work of one of the most influential free spirits of German letters, Peter Wortsman captures the breathlessness and power of Heinrich von Kleist's transcendent prose. These tales, essays, and fragments move across inner landscapes, exploring the shaky bridges between reason and feeling and the frontiers between the human psyche and the divine. From the ‘The Earthquake in Chile,' his damning invective against moral tyranny; to ‘Michael Kohlhaas,' an exploration of the extreme price of justice; to ‘The Marquise of O . . . ,' his twist on the mythic triumph-of-love story; to his essay ‘On the Gradual Formulation of Thoughts While Speaking,' which tracks the movements of the unconscious decades before Freud; Kleist unrelentingly confronts the dangers of self-deception and the ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes. Wortsman's illuminating afterword demystifies Kleist's vexed history, explaining how the century after his death saw Kleist's legacy transformed from that of a largely derided playwright into a literary giant who would inspire Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The concerns of Heinrich von Kleist are timeless. The mysteries in his fiction and visionary essays still breathe.

 Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 1777 - 21 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. The Kleist Prize, a prestigious prize for German literature, is named after him. After a scanty education, he entered the Prussian Army in 1792, served in the Rhine campaign of 1796, and retired from the service in 1799 with the rank of lieutenant. He studied law and philosophy at the Viadrina University and in 1800 received a subordinate post in the Ministry of Finance at Berlin. In the following year, Kleist's roving, restless spirit got the better of him, and procuring a lengthened leave of absence he visited Paris and then settled in Switzerland. Here he found congenial friends in Heinrich Zschokke and Ludwig Friedrich August Wieland (d. 1819), son of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland; and to them he read his first drama, a gloomy tragedy, The Schroffenstein Family (1803, originally entitled The Ghonorez Family). In the autumn of 1802, Kleist returned to Germany; he visited Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland in Weimar, stayed for a while in Leipzig and Dresden, again proceeded to Paris, and returning in 1804 to his post in Berlin was transferred to the Domänenkammer (department for the administration of crown lands) at Königsberg. On a journey to Dresden in 1807, Kleist was arrested by the French as a spy; he remained a close prisoner of France in the Fort de Joux. On regaining his liberty, he proceeded to Dresden, where, in conjunction with Adam Heinrich Müller (1779–1829), he published the journal Phöbus in 1808. In 1809 Kleist went to Prague, and ultimately settled in Berlin, where he edited (1810/1811) the Berliner Abendblätter. Captivated by the intellectual and musical accomplishments of the terminally ill Henriette Vogel, Kleist, who was himself more disheartened and embittered than ever, agreed to do her bidding and die with her, carrying out this resolution by first shooting Vogel and then himself on the shore of the Kleiner Wannsee (Little Wannsee) near Potsdam, on 21 November 1811. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, ‘Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation.' In the spring of 1799, the 21-year-old Kleist wrote a letter to his half-sister Ulrike in which he found it ‘incomprehensible how a human being can live without a plan for his life' (Lebensplan). In effect, Kleist sought and discovered an overwhelming sense of security by looking to the future with a definitive plan for his life. It brought him happiness and assured him of confidence, especially knowing that life without a plan only saw despair and discomfort. The irony of his later suicide has been the fodder of his critics. His first tragedy was The Schroffenstein Family (Die Familie Schroffenstein). The material for the second, Penthesilea (1808), queen of the Amazons, is taken from a Greek source and presents a picture of wild passion. In comedy, Kleist made a name with The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochne Krug) (1808), while Amphitryon (1808), an adaptation of Molière's comedy, received critical acclaim long after his death. Of Kleist's other dramas, Die Hermannsschlacht (1809) is a dramatic work of anti-Napoleonic propaganda, written as Austria and France went to war. It has been described by Carl Schmitt as the ‘greatest partisan work of all time'. In it he gives vent to his hatred of his country's oppressors. This, together with the drama The Prince of Homburg (Prinz Friedrich von Homburg oder die Schlacht bei Fehrbellin), which is among his best works, was first published by Ludwig Tieck in Kleist's Hinterlassene Schriften (1821). Robert Guiskard, a drama conceived on a grand plan, was left a fragment. Kleist was also a master in the art of narrative, and of his Gesammelte Erzählungen (Collected Short Stories) (1810–1811), Michael Kohlhaas, in which the famous Brandenburg horse dealer in Martin Luther's day is immortalized, is one of the best German stories of its time. The Earthquake in Chile (Das Erdbeben in Chili) and St. Cecilia, or the Power of Music (Die heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik) are also fine examples of Kleist's story telling as is The Marquise of O (Die Marquise von O.). His short narratives influenced those of Kafka. He also wrote patriotic lyrics in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. A Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverted clichEd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution. Seen as a precursor to Henrik Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters' emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was appropriated by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. To this day, many scholars see his play Die Hermannsschlacht (‘The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest‘, 1808) as prefiguring the subordination of the individual to the service of the Volk (nation) that became a principle of fascist ideology in the twentieth century. Kleist criticism of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading. Kleist's The Broken Jug is one of the most staged plays of the German canon (1803–05). In the play, a provincial judge gradually and inadvertently shows himself to have committed the crime under investigation. In the enigmatic drama The Prince of Homburg (1811), a young officer struggles with conflicting impulses of romantic self-actualization and obedience to military discipline. Prince Friedrich, who had expected to be executed for his successful but unauthorized initiative in battle, is surprised to receive a laurel wreath from Princess Natalie. To his question, whether this is a dream, the regimental commander Kottwitz replies, ‘A dream, what else?' Kleist wrote his eight novellas later in his life and they show his radically original prose style, which is at the same time careful and detailed, almost bureaucratic, but also full of grotesque, ironic illusions and various sexual, political, and philosophical references. His prose often concentrates on minute details that then serve to subvert the narrative and the narrator, and throw the whole process of narration into question. In Betrothal in St. Domingo (Die Verlobung in Santo Domingo) (1811) Kleist examines the themes of ethics, loyalty, and love in the context of the colonial rebellion in Haiti of 1803, driving the story with the expected forbidden love affair between a young white man and a black rebel woman, though the reader's expectations are confounded in typically Kleistian fashion, since the man is not really French and the woman is not really black. Here for the first time in German literature Kleist addresses the politics of a race-based colonial order and shows, through a careful exploration of a kind of politics of color (black, white, and intermediate shades), the self-deception and ultimate impossibility of existence in a world of absolutes. Kleist is also famous for his essays on subjects of aesthetics and psychology which, to the closer look, show a keen insight into the metaphysical questions discussed by philosophers of his time, such as Kant, Fichte and Schelling.

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 149

The Earth by Emile Zola. New York. 1980. Penguin Books. 0140443878. Translated from the French & With An Introduction Douglas Parmee. 500 pages. paperback. The cover shows a detail of 'Man with a Hoe' by Millet, in a private collection.  

DESCRIPTION - ‘I want to write the living poem of the Earth; but in human terms, not symbolically.' With humour, knowledge of the peasant terrain and flashes of tenderness, Emile Zola's (1840-1902) naturalistic novel THE EARTH measures the agricultural seasons against the human cycle of birth, marriage and death. Written as part of the vast Rougon - Macquart series, it was Zola's favourite novel and describes the harsh struggles of a farming community to look after their land and control their sometimes wayward society. The Lear-like plot of the decline of the Fouan family through greed and selfishness enables Zola to exploit the full breadth and vigour of his powerful creative imagination. His genius for evocative detail and his vivid, ironic characterization lend an unspoken heroism to this epic tale.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 155

Germinal by Emile Zola. New York. 1970. Signet/New American Library. 0451504992. Translated From The French By Stanely & Eleanor Hochman. Afterword By Irving Howe. 448 pages. paperback. CW499. Cover: Lambert. Signet Classic original.

  
DESCRIPTION - Of the several great nineteenth - century French novelists, Emile Zola was by far the most uncompromising in his portrayal of the human condition. In his novels - particularly in the epic twenty - volume Rougon - Macquart' series - Zola relentlessly exposed the violent, perverse, animalistic side of man and society. His unwaveringly truthful, almost cruelly detailed accounts of the interaction of human passions and social problems eventually earned him praise as an important social reformer as well as a founder of literary naturalism. In his own day, however, his pessimistic sagas were often misguidedly condemned as being themselves vice - ridden - at times, even pornographic. GERMINAL, written in 1885 as one of the 'Rougon - Macquart' novels, is perhaps Zola's most representative work. Based on an actual French mining disaster, it tells the story of a young miner, Etienne Lantier, and his rise from humble, inconsequential laborer to impassioned, articulate revolutionary at war with the exploitive capitalistic system. While by no means a Marxist tract, GERMINAL is an epic of class struggle, an account of an individual's awakened social awareness within a world conditioned by lust, greed and betrayal.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 137

Zest For Life by Emile Zola. London. 1956. Elek Books. Translated from the French by Jean Stewart. Preface by Angus Wilson. 294 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - La Joie de Vivre is, to the English reader, one of Zola's less familiar books, yet it is a singularly powerful and moving work. It differs from the rest of the Rougon-Macquart series in that its canvas is narrow, its colours are quiet, its interest is psychological rather than social. In this intimate drama of family life, with its handful of characters, Zola treats of a profound and important theme-that of human happiness, of the will to live that sustains mankind through misfortune and anguish. Pauline, an orphan, comes to live with her cousins the Chanteaus, an impoverished bourgeois family in a miserable, lonely fishing village on the Normandy coast. At first, with her radiant unselfish nature, she brings peace and happiness into the home. But. as the story unfolds, she finds herself exploited and victimised-robbed, little by little, of her fortune and then of her love for her cousin Lazare; her generosity makes her a willing victim, her courage enables her to revive after each crisis. Pauline is no plaster saint, but a sensuous, passionate creature; her conflict gives the story its poignancy and its truth. Lazare is at the opposite pole from Pauline, a gifted intellectual consumed by that ‘invisible worm', a basic pessimism that corrodes his will and energy and affections. The other characters contribute to the theme: Chanteau, the uncle, crippled and tortured by gout and yet clinging to life with the same tenacity as the fishermen making their wretched livelihood from the cruel sea that forms the constant background to the story; his wife, a narrow, ambitious but not ill-natured woman, who gradually becomes corrupted by a single act of injustice-her robbery of Pauline. The general tone is of quiet veracity, yet certain scenes attain to that almost visionary intensity that makes ‘realism' a misnomer in Zola's case. The climax of the book is the harrowing scene where Louise, Lazare's wife, gives birth to a child, described with scientific detachment and yet imbued with a powerful symbolic significance. La Joie de Vivre, if it lacks the savage grandeur of La Terre, has a warmth and wisdom and humanity that are no less precious, and, despite the sadness of the story, a basic faith in the best qualities of human nature.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 143

The Kill by Emile Zola. New York. 1957. Citadel Press. Translated from the French by A. Teixeira de Mattos. Introduction by Angus Wilson. 274 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Pagram.  

DESCRIPTION - With the publication of THE KILL this series of Zola translations reaches a milestone, for this is one of the key novels in Zola's pitiless analysis of nineteenth-century Paris. This novel plunges deep into what Angus Wilson has called ‘the feverish, complicated world of the adventure-speculators who formed the cafe-society of the Second Empire.' It is the rapacious world of the gamblers who flocked to Paris for their share of the spoils to be carved out of Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris. This was the motive that drew Aristide Saccard to Paris; and here the theme of financial gain becomes intertwined with that of physical desire. As his second wife, Saccard marries Renee, a wealthy and attractive young woman. His son by his first marriage, Maxime, comes home from school and his step-mother, already bored with her money-obsessed husband, introduces him to the shallow, frivolous society fife which is her sole occupation. Little by little, as Maxime grows up, seduces the servant girl, takes mistresses, has affairs with his stepmother's friends, Renee herself falls in love with her stepson - and so comes about the half-incestuous theme of the book which Zola called ‘a study in money and the flesh'. It is also the powerful portrait of a degenerate world, immeshed in the lust for gain and pleasure.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 169

Madeleine Ferat by Emile Zola. New York. 1957. Citadel Press. Translated from the French by Alec Brown. 266 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Pagram.  

DESCRIPTION - Can a woman's first love affair leave so strong an imprint on her body and mind that it will unalterably affect her marriage with another? This ancient belief is the mainspring of Madeleine Ferat, one of Zola's most disturbing novels. Madeleine almost by chance takes a lover when she is young. The affair is brief but she is truly in love, and the man, Jacques, leaves her. He is believed dead when she marries the weak, tenderhearted Guillaume. When Jacques eventually returns, the years of Madeleine's loyalty and gentleness towards Guillaume count for nothing. The past is too strong: Madeleine cannot forget Jacques-and she discovers that he was, by cruel chance, her husband's closest friend. Zola uses this melodramatic plot to such effect that the tragic battle of loyalties and the ultimate disaster are as unforgettable as are the pictures of his protagonists.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author

Details

Category: Favorites

Hits: 144

Savage Paris by Emile Zola. New York. 1955. Citadel Press. Translated from the French by David Hughes & Marie-Jacqueline Mason. Preface by Hugh Shelley. 296 pages. hardcover. Cover art by Pagram.  

DESCRIPTION - Zola's theme in Savage Paris is the contrast, which he sees as a conflict, between the ‘lean and hungry' of this world and those that ‘are fat and sleep o'nights'; between the ascetic and the sensualist, the idealist and the materialist, the revolutionary and the conservative. Set in the great Parisian market, Les Halles, the book shows the impact on a complacent middle-class family, the Quenu's, of a lean, fanatical idealist, ex-political prisoner. Florent, Quenu's half-brother, who has suffered gaol and transportation for his share in the Revolution of 1848, is at first pitied and made welcome, for the Quenus are. by their lights, kindly folk; they try to tame him and persuade him to take the respectable job as inspector in the Halles. Florent, utterly unworldly, fails to satisfy them to compromise with corruption, or to make allowances for the petty intrigues and rivalries around him; he antagonises Quenu's wife Lise by his friendship with her rival Louise, the fishwife; and far from abandoning his subversive beliefs he joins a small group of left-wingers who eventually plot an uprising against the Emperor. The book ends tragically with Florent being taken back to gaol, while the superficial calm and prosperity that mask the inner corruption of the place return, as the scum forms again on a pond after a stone has momentarily disturbed it. And the last word is spoken by Claude Lantier, the painter who throughout acts as chorus, viewing the whole scene with an artist's detachment; ‘What rascals these respectable people are'! The most striking feature of the book is the exuberant and sustained descriptive power which gives us the appearance and atmosphere of the great market in all its , aspects-gives us its shapes and colours and its very smells, a triumph both of realism and of imagination. It is almost 50 years since Le Venire de Paris, the book's original title, was available in an English edition, and this sensitive and accomplished translation at last conveys to the English reader Zola's special genius in its full maturity.

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

See if zenosbooks.com has any books for sale by this author