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

sippi 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.

Killens John Oliver 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.

0140442863 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.

Plutarch

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.

0671242881 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.

McEwan Ian 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.

0671242903 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.

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

0394494229 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.

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

9780992740962 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.

Ritsos Yannis 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.

014042184x 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.

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Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos. Brooklyn. 2013. Archipelago Books. 9781935744580. Translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich and Edmund Keeley. 138 pages. paperback. Cover design by David Bullen. Cover art: Paul Klee.

9781935744580 DESCRIPTION - Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland. Nowhere is this more apparent than in this volume, which presents a series of three diaries in poetry that Ritsos wrote between 1948 and 1950, during and just after the Greek Civil War, while a political prisoner first on the island of Limnos and then at the infamous camp on Makronisos. Even in this darkest of times, Ritsos dedicated his days to poetry, trusting in writing and in art as collective endeavors capable of resisting oppression and bringing people together across distance and time. These poems offer glimpses into the daily routines of life in exile, the quiet violence Ritsos and his fellow prisoners endured, the fluctuations in the prisoners' sense of solidarity, and their struggle to maintain humanity through language. This moving volume justifies Ritsos's reputation as one of the truly important poets in Greece's modern literary history.

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

0879231815 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.

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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.

0918526663 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.

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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.

0880010177 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.

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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.

0896082695 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.

Jordan June 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.

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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.

0465036929 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.

Jordan June

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.

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

0807032328 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.

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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.'

pc zadig l126 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.

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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).

0140446869 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.

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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.

philosophical dictionary voltaire basic books 2 volumes 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.

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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.’

9780374229764 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.

Nadas Peter

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.

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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,

0374148325 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.

Nadas Peter

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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.

0374299641 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.

Nadas Peter

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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.

Elsschot Willem 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.

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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.

186207481x 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.

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

0689119895 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.

Berberova Nina 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.

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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.

0679402810 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.

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

0811213773 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.

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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.

0525054790 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.

Kleist Heinrich von 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.

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Diaries of Exile by Yannis Ritsos

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Exile & Return: Selected Poems 1967-1974 by Yannis Ritsos

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Micromegas and Other Short Fictions by Voltaire

Philosophical Dictionary - 2 Volumes by Voltaire

Parallel Stories: A Novel by Peter Nadas

The End of a Family Story by Peter Nadas

Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas

Poems from the Past by Willem Elsschot

Cheese by Willem Elsschot

The Accompanist by Nina Berberova

The Tattered Cloak and Other Novels by Nina Berberova

The Ladies From St. Petersburg by Nina Berberova

An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist with a Selection of Essays & Anecdotes

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