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The Merry-Go-Round of Love and Selected Stories by Luigi Pirandello. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. Translated From The Italian By Frances Keene & Lily Duplaix.Foreword By Irving Howe. 320 pages. paperback. CT210. Cover: Milton Glaser. Signet Classic original.  

DESCRIPTION - Pirandello is widely known as one of the great playwrights of the twentieth century. Yet before turning to the theater, he wrote a vast number of tales of extraordinary quality; this Signet Classic edition provides a memorable introduction to this facet of his genius. In settings that range from harsh Sicilian landscapes to the midnight streets of Rome, these stories deal with the frustrations of youth and the despair of age, with couples caught in the tentacles of marriage, and men and women living in hopeless isolation; they vary in mood from the high comedy of The Merry - Go - Round of Love, a novella here rendered into English for the first time, to the Chekhovian tragedy of such superbly wrought tales as 'Such Is Life.' In them the reader encounters a masterful economy in narrative technique, an austere objectivity, and, above all, a consciousness singularly attuned to the spiritual travails of the modern world. As Irving Howe writes: 'To stay with a writer like Pirandello takes strong nerves, a gritted determination to see things as they are. The reward, however, is a penetration into truth. . . . His stories live.'

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - LUIGI PIRANDELLO was born on June 28, 1867, in Agrigento, Sicily. After attending secondary school in Palermo, he went, at the age of eighteen, to the University of Rome. The following year he transferred to the University of Bonn. In Germany he studied romance philology and philosophy, started to write poetry, and completed a translation of Goethe's ROMAN ELEGIES. On his return to Rome, Pirandello was urged by his fellow Sicilian, the novelist Capuana, to try his hand at prose writing. In the short-story form, Pirandello's genius began to emerge. In the twenty years from 1894 to the outbreak of World War I he published innumerable short stories and four novels. In an experimental mood, Pirandello then turned to the stage, attempting at first to convey as vividly as possible the attitudes and speech of his native island. A couple of regional plays preceded his first stage success, RIGHT YOU ARE IF YOU THINK YOU ARE, which had its premiere in 1917. From then on Pirandello wrote forty-odd plays in relatively quick succession. He was fifty-four when his drama SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR brought him international acclaim. In 1934 Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died a year and a half later.

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The Master Builder and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen. New York. 1958. Penguin Books. Translated from the Norwegian by Una Ellis-Fermor. 376 pages. paperback. L53.  

DESCRIPTION - The first volume of Ibsen's plays in this series contained three plays, PILLARS OF THE COMMUNITY, THE WILD DUCK, and HEDDA GABLER, all representative of that phase of Ibsen's thought and art in which he was concerned primarily with the relation of the individual to the community, with his social and personal morality, with the effects of his conduct upon the world about him, with the judgement delivered upon that conduct at the bar of public opinion and to a greater or less degree also by his own conscience. The group of plays chosen for the second volume come from the later and final phase of Ibsen's work in which, though his characteristic belief in the validity of truth, in every operation of life and in every process of thought, is as clear as ever, his concern is rather with the inner experience of the individual, with his often unaided exploration of that experience, with the reassessment and revaluation on of his past at some ultimate turning-point of his soul's pilgrimage. If these last plays are still, as in some sense they all are, studies of conversion, of the crisis in which a man is brought face to face with himself, the overruling agencies are no longer now the criticism of the world but the visions released from the depth of the soul in hours of lonely reflection; the characteristic predicaments are not those of Karsten Bernick faced with Lona Hessel's demand for repentance and confession nor of Hjalmar Ekdal before Greger Werle's ‘claims of the ideal', but, instead, of Rebekka West's self-discovery, prompted as often by the implications as by the intentions of the other characters' words, or of John Gabriel Borkman's heroic delusion, maintained in the face of fact, yet already ripe for collapse at the touch of a truth he has long secretly acknowledged. - from the Introduction by Una Ellis-Fermor.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

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Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. New York. 1964. Signet/New American Library. Newly Translated From The Norwegian & With A Foreword by Rolf Fjelde. 253 pages. paperback. CP215. Cover: Seymour Chwast. Signet Classic original.  

DESCRIPTION - The central theme of this epic drama is the search for self amid moral chaos. Opportunistic and unscrupulous, Peer Gynt wanders the earth, from the supernatural kingdom of the trolls to the desert wastes of Africa. In the roles of son, lover, businessman, prophet, and philosopher, he deceives, betrays, and exploits - only to be duped and victimized in turn. Yet, as he passes from youth to maturity to old age, the mercurial fluctuations of his fortunes yield only an inner emptiness and desperate fear of a final reckoning. Rooted in folklore, transformed by poetic imagination, illumined throughout by the clear northern light of Ibsen's searching moral vision, Peer Gynt represents a truly profound exploration of modern man's existential dilemma, justifying Pirandello's remark: 'After Shakespeare, without hesitation, I put Ibsen first.' As RoIf Flelde writes: 'In this anti - romantic work that employs the full resources of the romantic theater, the nonheroic hero is the pilot model of the hollow man of our own time, rendered perplexed and anxious by problems of identity and direction.'

The Penguin Classic edition:

Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen. Baltimore. 1966. Penguin Books. Translated from the Norwegian & With An Introduction by Peter Watts. 223 pages. paperback. L167. The cover shows a portrait of Ibsen by Vallotton.  

DESCRIPTION - PEER GYNT (1867), Ibsen's last play in verse, is probably better known for Grieg's rather sugary incidental music than for the original text. That is a pity: by contrast with its predecessor, the austere BRAND, this play is a high-spirited, poetical fantasy, written in Italy with an abandon that was new to Ibsen. The irresponsible, loveable Peer is based on a semi-legendary character of the mountains, and Norwegian folklore, with its malevolent and ugly trolls, plays a larger part in his adventures than the satire that many critics have strained to discover in the play.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

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Ghosts and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen. Baltimore. 1964. Penguin Books. Translated from the Norwegian & With An Introduction by Peter Watts. 301 pages. paperback. L135. The cover shows a detail of Munch's 'The Sick Child', National Gallery, Stockholm (Snark Archives).  

DESCRIPTION - Counted among the very greatest dramatists, Ibsen (1828-1906) profoundly influenced the modern stage. Of the three plays in this volume GHOSTS and A PUBLIC ENEMY are social dramas of his middle period, and the former, described by one London critic as ‘an open sewer', raised the greatest outcry of all Ibsen's attacks on convention. WHEN WE DEAD WAKE, his last play, handles in a symbolic manner the individual's fight with himself and incidentally provides the dramatist's own comment on his lifework and his renunciation of verse. Peter Watts's new translation successfully maintains the natural ring of the Norwegian dialogue.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

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Brand by Henrik Ibsen. New York. 1996. Penguin Books. 0140446761. Translated from the Norwegian & Adapted for the stage by Geoffret Hill. 161 pages. paperback.  The cover shows a detail from 'Wide Vistas' by Maria Froberg.  

DESCRIPTION - Brand was Ibsen's first masterpiece, a poetic drama composed in 1865 and published to tremendous critical and popular acclaim. - The unsparing vision of a priest driven by faith to risk and witness the deaths of his wife and child gives Brand its icy ferocity. When he was writing it in Italy, Ibsen declared: 'It is blessedly peaceful out here; no one I know; I read nothing but the Bible ...' Geoffrey Hill provides a new Preface to this third and revised edition of his great stage version of Brand. `It now has a peculiar glory in English, because the version by the poet Geoffrey Hill (1978) is much the finest Ibsen available to us as poetry. Hill, a master of savage eloquence, is a martyrologist, and his temperament, as manifested in his own poems, is peculiarly Brandian. He declines to call his Brand a translation, but it surpasses any purported translation we have'  - Harold Bloom in The Western Canon.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

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A Doll's House and Other Plays by Henrik Ibsen. New York. 1965. Penguin Books. Translated from the Norwegian & With An Introduction by Peter Watts. 336 pages. paperback. L146. The cover shows a detail from Munch's 'Agony', in the Oslo Museum. 

DESCRIPTION - This volume contains three plays representative of different stages in Ibsen's development. The political comedy, THE LEAGUE OF YOUTH (1869), is among the earliest of his realistic social plays and a forerunner of the great dramas of his maturity, of which A DOLL'S HOUSE (1879) is one of the most famous. THE LADY FROM THE SEA (1888), which, like A DOLL'S HOUSE, is a play about women and freedom, is a later work in which the symbolism and poetry which are latent in most of Ibsen's plays come nearest to the surface.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Henrik Johan Ibsen (20 March 1828 - 23 May 1906) was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as 'the father of realism' and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century. Several of his later dramas were considered scandalous to many of his era, when European theatre was expected to model strict morals of family life and propriety. Ibsen's later work examined the realities that lay behind many façades, revealing much that was disquieting to many contemporaries. It utilized a critical eye and free inquiry into the conditions of life and issues of morality. The poetic and cinematic early play Peer Gynt, however, has strong surreal elements.Ibsen is often ranked as one of the truly great playwrights in the European tradition. Richard Hornby describes him as 'a profound poetic dramatist - the best since Shakespeare'. He is widely regarded as the most important playwright since Shakespeare. He influenced other playwrights and novelists such as George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller, James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill and Miroslav Krleža. Ibsen wrote his plays in Danish (the common written language of Denmark and Norway) and they were published by the Danish publisher Gyldendal. Although most of his plays are set in Norway - often in places reminiscent of Skien, the port town where he grew up - Ibsen lived for 27 years in Italy and Germany, and rarely visited Norway during his most productive years. Born into a merchant family connected to the patriciate of Skien, his dramas were shaped by his family background. He was the father of Prime Minister Sigurd Ibsen.

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The Complete Plays by Anton Chekhov. New York. 2006. Norton. 0393048853. Translated from the Russian by Laurence Senelick. 1060 pages. hardcover. Jacket photo by Sovfoto/Tass.  

DESCRIPTION - For the first time, all of Anton Chekhov's drama in English in a single volume. This stunning new translation presents the only truly complete edition of the playwright who is in the pantheon of the greatest dramatists in history. Anton Chekhov is a unique force in modern drama, his works interpreted and adapted internationally and beloved for their understanding of the human condition and their brilliant wit. This volume contains work that has never previously been translated, including the newly discovered farce The Power of Hypnosis and the first version of Ivanov, as well as Chekhov's early humorous dialogues. No less important, Laurence Senelick, who has staged many of these plays, has freshly translated them to bring into English Chekhov's jokes, the deliberate repetitions of his dialogue, and his verbal characterizations. Senelick has also annotated the works to bring clarity for the general reader and has included variants of the plays. His translations infuse new life into such classics as The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (29 January 1860 - 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: ‘Medicine is my lawful wife’, he once said, ‘and literature is my mistress.’ Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a ‘theatre of mood’ and a ‘submerged life in the text.’ Chekhov had at first written stories only for financial gain, but as his artistic ambition grew, he made formal innovations which have influenced the evolution of the modern short story. His originality consists in an early use of the stream-of-consciousness technique, later adopted by James Joyce and other modernists, combined with a disavowal of the moral finality of traditional story structure. He made no apologies for the difficulties this posed to readers, insisting that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them.

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The Book of Sand by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1977. Dutton. 0525069925. Translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. 125 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Randall Richmond.

DESCRIPTION - The short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, written more than twenty years ago, have become classics of contemporary literature. In The Book of Sand are thirteen brand-new stories rivaling those famous stories that established Borges' world-wide reputation. Borges himself considers two of the stories-the title story and ‘The Congress'-to be among his greatest achievements in short fiction. Like the distinctive stories in Ficciones and The Aleph, these stories artfully blend elements from many literary genres: the essay, science fiction, detective fiction, fantasy, literary criticism and autobiography. The subject matter, which Borges makes so uniquely his own, ranges from philosophic musings on the nature of time to deft satire on the role-playing of contemporary authors. THE BOOK OF SAND is an important addition to Borges' works, a welcome and unexpected gift for Borges' host of admirers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1970. Dutton. 0525051546. Translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni with the Author. 286 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The most important stories of one of the half-dozen giants of contemporary' literature. Dazzling and unmistakable in style, resonant in meaning, Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph and Other Stories contains the best of Borges' fiction. Included also is a lengthy autobiographical essay written especially for this volume. The twenty stories in this book cover the whole span and all the various facets of Borges' forty-year career as a short story writer. The collection is the most definitive and comprehensive available in English. Eleven of the stories have never before appeared in book form in English. They are: ‘Streetcorner Man,' ‘The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths,' ‘The Other Death,' ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth,' ‘The Man on the Threshold,' ‘The Challenge,' ‘The Intruder,' ‘The Immortals,' ‘The Meeting,' ‘Pedro Salvadores,' and ‘Rosendo's Tale.' Newly translated, with the author's full assistance, are: ‘The Aleph,' ‘The Approach to al-Mu'tasim,' ‘The Circular Ruins,' ‘Death and the Compass,' ‘The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874),' ‘The Dead Man,' ‘The Captive,' ‘Borges and Myself,' and ‘The Maker.' The English versions are superb. They are the only translations of his work to be done with Borges' collaboration. Their lucidity and polish, while confirming the author's reputation as a great stylist, will also make Borges' writing more accessible to a wide American readership. Borges, traditionally reticent about his life, is unusually open and informative in his autobiographical fragment. He treats not only of his youth and early career as a writer, but also of what the coming of fame has meant to him. The essay provides a fascinating insight into one of the major literary figures of our time. Also included in this collection are short commentaries by Borges on each of the stories. CONTENTS: The Aleph; Streetcorner Man; The Approach to al-Muotasim; The Circular Ruins; Death and the Compass; The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874); The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths; The Dead Man; The Other Death; Jim Hakkan al-Bokhara; Dead in His Labyrinth; The Man on the Threshold; The Challenge; The Captive; Borges and Myself; The Maker; The Intruder; The Immortals; The Meeting; Pedro Salvadores; Rosendo's Tale; AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY; COMMENTARIES; Bibliographical Note.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges. Austin. 1964. University of Texas Press. Translated from the Spanish by Ruth L. C. Simms. Introduction by James Irby. 205 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - In this varied collection of essays we travel with Jorge Luis Borges on journeys in time, in place, and in thought - from 246 B.C. and the Chinese Emperor Shih Huang Ti to A.D. 1949 and the British airplane designer John William Dunne; from the Ancient Persia of Omar Khayyam to the Modern England of Bertrand Russell; from Dr. Americo Castro's discourse on the slang of Buenos Aires to the ‘Avatars of the Tortoise.' This remarkable book by the man who is considered Argentina's outstanding contemporary writer includes essays dealing with various concepts of time which have been presented throughout history - John William Dunne's theory that dreams are the past and future life, that wakeful living is the present; Philip Henry Gosse's theory concerning the time involved in the Creation; Jorge Luis Borges' own ‘New Refutation of Time.' Another general thought common to several essays in this collection is that of the profound unity of ideas as they are expressed and re-expressed in the written word, such as the long-range plan of a ‘superhuman performer' with the underlying theme of inspiration from dreams - ‘The Dream of Coleridge,' ‘Nathaniel Hawthorne,' and ‘The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald.' We also find a justification for suicide, ‘The Biathanatos'; a proposed universal language, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins'; the development of language from oral to written communication, ‘On the Cult of Books'; and the modern-day subjects of world revolution and fascism, ‘Two Books.' The number and variety of authors discussed by Sr. Borges is as, extensive as the ideas examined - Quevedo, Cervantes, Whitman, Valery, Wilde, and a host of others. Jorge Luis Borges, a recipient of the Prix International des Editeurs, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. While in Spain he participated in the ultraismo movement of young rebellious vanguardist poets. His poetry is marked by unique descriptiveness and intense patriotism. In fact, the patriotic fervor with which he opposed General Peron's dictatorship brought him the loss of his modest position as municipal librarian in Buenos Aires. He is now director of the National Library of Argentina and professor of literature at the University of Buenos Aires. At the invitation of the Tinker Foundation, Sr. Borges came to the University of Texas, where he gave courses in Argentine literature from 1961, to the following January. He traveled extensively in the United States in 1962, lecturing at leading universities. As a result of this stay in Texas the English translation of El Hacedor entitled Dreamtigers was published early in 1964. Mrs. Ruth L. C. Simms is thoroughly familiar with Spanish and Latin American literature. Her translation of Otras inquisiciones flows smoothly and without flaw. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1962. New Directions. Edited by Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. 248 pages. hardcover. Jacket design and photograph by Gilda Kuhlman.

DESCRIPTION - This collection of stories and essays introduces to America one of the leading figures of Latin American literature, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his preface Andre Maurois writes: ‘Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention and their tight, almost mathematical style.' LABYRINTHS contains thirty-eight of Borges finest ‘fictions,' essays and parables. The stories, which have been compared to those of Kafka, might be classed as ‘highbrow science fiction' or ‘intellectual detective stories' were it not for the undertones of deeper meaning which place them at a far higher level. Borges has been recognized around the world as a writer of the first rank. He shared with Samuel Beckett the $10,000 International Publishers' Prize in 1961. The translations are by Harriet de Onis, Anthony Kerrigan and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as a bibliography of Borges' writings.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1962. Grove Press. Edited by Anthony Kerrigan. 174 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Roy Kuhlman.  

DESCRIPTION - The best writer of short stories in Spanish today, perhaps the best of the century, Jorge Luis Borges was co-winner of the International Publishers Prize for 1961. This award, the current publication of his work in book form in the United States, and the publication of his complete works in German translation and several volumes in French at last bring him the international renown many have long believed should be his. Borges was formed by influences as diverse as those of German Expressionism and scientific rationalism. As the translator of Gide, Kafka, Faulkner, Whitman, Melville, and Virginia Woolf, he is at home in the literatures of Germany, France, England, and the United States, as well as those of Spain and his native South America. Compacted of these international materials, his stories have an astonishing range of allusion and thought. Despite their many-layered character, these stories are readily accessible and attractive on first approach. Borges' Poe-like tales have turned up in the pages of the Ellery Queen annual of mystery stories. He writes with a fine edge of irony that delights lovers of good satire. His style - laconic, incisive - has attracted a following of pursuers of the best in writing. His easy handling of many backgrounds, leaping from Prague under the heel of the Third Reich to the Dublin of the Irish Revolutionary Army and back to his native Argentina, lends an intriguing diversity of setting to his stories. The International Publishers Prize was established in 1960 by outstanding publishers from six countries: Librairie Gallimard of France, Giulio Einaudi of Italy, Ernst Rowohlt Verlag of Germany, Weidenfeld & Nicolson of Britain, Editorial Seix Barral of Spain, and Grove Press, Inc. of the United States. It provides an award of $10,000 to an author of any nationality whose existing body of work will, in the view of the jury, have a lasting influence on the development of modern literature. The aim of the prize, in addition to recognition of exceptional merit, is to bring the author's work to the attention of the largest possible international audience. The 1961 award, the first made, was shared by Samuel Beckett, for his novel Comment C'est, and Jorge Luis Borges for Ficciones.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Doctor Brodie's Report by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1972. Dutton. 0525093826. Translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni. 128 pages. hardcover. Jacket Illustration by Jim McMullan.

  
DESCRIPTION - When blindness overtook him in the early fifties, Jorge Luis Borges believed that his career as a writer of short stories was at an end. Yet there were still stories to be told and the impulse to tell them was too strong to resist. The result-after a hiatus of seventeen years-is the eleven masterful stories in DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT. A number of them are clearly destined to become classics. V. S. Pritchett has written that Borges has ‘the art of enhancing the effects of the Unbearable, the sinister, and the ineluctable.' Indeed, these stories, deceptively plain in the telling, bear a unique magic. In the Preface to DOCTOR BRODIE'S REPORT, Borges writes: ‘I have done my best-I p don't know with what success-to write straightforward stories. I do not dare to state that they are simple; there isn't anywhere on earth a single page or single word that is, since each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is complexity . . . My stories, like those of the Thousand and One Nights, try to be entertaining or moving but not persuasive . . . . The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral . . . . ‘ All those who love a story told by a master of the art have reason to rejoice at this new collection of Borges tales, including eight which have never before appeared in book form. JORGE LUIS BORGES in 1971 received the Jerusalem Prize, honorary degrees from Columbia and Oxford universities, and was made an honorary member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Norman Thomas di Giovanni met Borges in 1967 while the latter was at Harvard. In 1968, on Borges' invitation, he went to live in Buenos Aires, where he works with the author daily. Together they produced ten of Borges' books in English versions for F. P. Dutton & Co. The first of these, The Book of Imaginary Beings, was published in 1969, and the second, The Aleph and Other Stories 1933-1969, in 1970. Di Giovanni has also edited Borges' Selected Poems 1923-1967.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1998. Viking Press. 0670849707. Translated from the Spanish by Andrew Hurley. 565 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Buckley.

DESCRIPTION - Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the century. Now, for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are collected in a single volume - from his 1935 debut with THE UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INFAMY through his immensely influential collections FICCIONES and THE ALEPH, the enigmatic prose poems of THE MAKER, up to his final work in the 1980s, SHAKESPEARE'S MEMORY. For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious stories that played even with the form of the short story, Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, Borges took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. This edition at last brings together all of Borges' magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English is a superb translation by Andrew Hurley. COLLECTED FICTIONS is the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and the perfect introduction to the master's work for all those who have yet to discover him. CONTENTS: A UNIVERSAL HISTORY OF INIQUITY (1935) - Preface to the First Edition; Preface to the 1954 Edition; The Cruel Redeemer Lazarus Morell; The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro; The Widow Ching-Pirate; Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities; The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan; The Uncivil Teacher of Court Etiquette KôtsukE no SukE; Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv; Man on Pink Corner; Et cetera; Index of Sources; FICTIONS (1944) - THE GARDEN OF FORKING PATHS (1941); Foreword; Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius; The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim; Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote; The Circular Ruins; The Lottery in Babylon; A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain; The Library of Babel; The Garden of Forking Paths; ARTIFICES (1944) - Foreword; Funes, His Memory; The Shape of the Sword; The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero; Death and the Compass; The Secret Miracle; Three Versions of Judas; The End; The Cult of the Phoenix; The South; THE ALEPH (1949) - The Immortal; The Dead Man; The Theologians; Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden; A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874); Emma Zunz; The House of Asterion; The Other Death; Deutsches Requiem; Averroes' Search; The Zahir; The Writing of the God; Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth; The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths; The Wait; The Man on the Threshold; The Aleph; Afterword; THE MAKER (1960) - Foreword: for Leopoldo Lugones; The Maker; Dreatntigers; A Dialog About a Dialog; Toenails; Covered Mirrors; Argumentum Ornithologicum; The Captive; The Mountebank; Delia Elena San Marco; A Dialog Between Dead Men; The Plot; A Problem; The Yellow Rose; The Witness; Martin Fierro; Mutations; Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote; Paradiso, XXXI, 108; Parable of the Palace; Everything and Nothing; Ragnarok; Inferno, I,32; Borges and I; MUSEUM - On Exactitude in Science; In Memomriam, J.F.K.; Afterword; IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS (1969) Foreword; The Ethnographer Pedro Salvadores; Legend; A Prayer; His End and His Beginning; BRODIE'S REPORT (1970) - Foreword; The Interloper; Unworthy; The Story from Rosendo Juárez; The Encounter; Juan Murana; The Elderly Lady; The Duel; The Other Duel; Guayaquil; The Gospel According to Mark; Brodie's Report; THE BOOK OF SAND (1975) - The Other; Ulrikke; The Congress; There Are More Things; The Sect of the Thirty; The Night of the Gifts; The Mirror and the Mask; ‘Undr'; A Weary Man's Utopia; The Bribe; Avelino Arredondo; The Disk; The Book of Sand; Afterword; SHAKESPEARE'S MEMORY (1983) - August 25,1983; Blue Tigers; The Rose of Paracelsus; Shakespeare's Memory; A Note on the Translation; Acknowledgments; Notes to the Fictions.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges. New York. 1972. Dutton. 0525226702. 146 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Irving Freeman, Plum Studios.  

DESCRIPTION - As Jorge Luis Borges conceived it, A Universal History of Infamy was to be no more than light entertainment. Yet after the book appeared in 1935 its influence on the fiction of Latin America was so profound that its publication date has become a landmark in the history of Latin American literature. Ostensibly a series of factual accounts about the lives of noted scoundrels, the book in actuality marked the debut of Borges as a storyteller, using that unique blend of fact, fiction, and pseudo-scholarship that later came to full expression in Borges' world-famed short stories. In Borges' rogues gallery are, among others, Billy the Kid and one Lazarus Morell, who encouraged Southern slaves to escape by promising them freedom, only to sell them back into slavery. From China, Borges gives us the Widow Ching, who at one point commanded six hundred war junks and forty thousand pirates. In the New York City of 1890 he locates Monk Eastman, son of the owner of a kosher restaurant, who sheltered a hundred cats and charged $100 and up for ‘doing the big job.' ‘The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kotsuke no SukE' represents infamy among the Japanese, while Hakim of Merv does the honors for Turkestan. ‘Tom Castro, the Implausible Impostor,' was born in London but found his destiny in Chile and Sydney, Australia. As in the original Spanish edition, A Universal History of Infamy also includes Borges' first short story, ‘Streetcorner Man,' presented here in a new translation, and a collection of short parables that are typically Borges. Valuable and important for what it tells us about Borges' mind and method, A Universal History of Infamy manages, at the same time, to fulfill delightfully Borges' original intention. It is, indeed, a first-rate entertainment. . JORGE LUIS BORGES was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires. In 1961, he shared the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett, and in 1971 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. While lecturing at Harvard in 1967 he met Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Di Giovanni agreed, with Borges' help and approval, to make Borges' most important prose works available in English. The first volume, THE BOOK OF IMAGINARY BEINGS, was published by E. P. Dutton & Co., in 1969, and THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES 1933-1969 appeared in 1970. A third volume, Doctor Brodie's Report, was published early in 1972. ‘. . . the book transformed the Spanish prose of the thirties and whose long echoes can still be heard in ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. . .' - F. R. Monegal, The New York Times Book Review. (original title: Historia universal de la infamia, 1954 - Emece Editores, S.A., Buenos Aires).

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges (24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in the Spanish language literature. His work embraces the ‘character of unreality in all literature'. His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and The Aleph (El Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and also to the fantasy genre. Critic Ángel Flores, the first to use the term magical realism to define a genre that reacted against the dominant realism and naturalism of the 19th century, considers the beginning of the movement to be the release of Borges's A Universal History of Infamy (Historia universal de la infamia). However, some critics would consider Borges to be a predecessor and not actually a magical realist. His late poems dialogue with such cultural figures as Spinoza, Camões, and Virgil. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including stays in Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955 he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind at the age of 55; as he never learned braille, he became unable to read. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. In 1961 he came to international attention when he received the first Prix International, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971 he won the Jerusalem Prize. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by his works being available in English, by the Latin American Boom and by the success of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. Writer and essayist J. M. Coetzee said of him: ‘He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists.'

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Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Thief by Leblanc. Maurice. New York. 2007. Penguin Books. 9780143104865. Translated from the French by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Introduction and notes by Michael Sims. 279 pages. paperback. Jacket design & photograph by Tony Greco & Associates.

DESCRIPTION - Created by Maurice LeBlanc during the early twentieth century, Arsène Lupin is a witty confidence man and burglar, the Sherlock Holmes of crime. The poor and innocent have nothing to fear from him; often they profit from his spontaneous generosity. The rich and powerful, and the detective who tries to spoil his fun, however, must beware. They are the target of Arsène's mischief and tomfoolery. A masterful thief, his plans frequently evolve into elaborate capers, a precursor to such cinematic creations as Ocean's Eleven and The Sting. Sparkling with amusing banter, these stories - the best of the Lupin series - are outrageous, melodramatic, and literate.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) is best known for his Arsène Lupin stories and such novels as The Hollow Needle and 813. Leblanc was awarded the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor. Alexander Louis Teixeira de Mattos (9 April 1865 - 5 December 1921) was a journalist, literary critic and publisher, who gained greatest fame as a translator. Teixeira de Mattos moved with his family to England from Amsterdam in 1874 and was educated at the Kensington catholic public school. He worked as a correspondent, editor and dramatic critic for several Dutch newspapers. On 20 October 1900, he married Lily Wilde, nee Sophie Lily Lees (1859-1922), the widow of Oscar Wilde's older brother Willie Wilde. During the First World War he was head of the intelligence section of the Department of War Trade Intelligence. He was responsible for many extremely perceptive and well-executed English translations of major French and Dutch literary works, including works by Emile Zola, Maurice Maeterlinck, Alexis de Tocqueville, Jean Henri Fabre, Maurice Leblanc, Gaston Leroux, Francois Rene, vicomte de Chateaubriand, and Louis Couperus. The high quality and readability of his work was such that many of his translations are still in print today; although some of these are over a century old, they have yet to be superseded by a more modern version. Michael Sims is the author of Ada's Navel, a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book. He has written for many publications, including the Los Angeles Times Book Review and the New Statesman.

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The Amateur by Robert Littell. New York. 1981. Simon & Schuster. 0671418734. 252 pages. hardcover. Cover: One Plus One Studio.

DESCRIPTION - The Amateur is Charlie Heller, a modest man, a back-room functionary employed by the CIA. His specialty, and his private intellectual obsession, is cryptology - encoding and decoding with the aid of sophisticated computers the thousands of messages that link East and West in their continual efforts to read each other's minds. But Charlie Heller is no Cold Warrior . . . not yet. Untangling codes for the CIA is Heller's way of paying the rent and of gaining access to the CIA's immense computer, through which he pursues his gentleman's hobby: searching all of Shakespeare's works to find the elusive cryptogram he believes will reveal their true author. It's a quest Charlie pursues with all the dogged, sometimes brilliant inspiration of a dedicated amateur until, suddenly, his calm life is shattered forever. Summoned one day by his superiors at the CIA, Charlie is informed that during an attack on the American Embassy in West Germany, a terrorist has brutally and senselessly murdered his fiancEe, a hostage in the Embassy Heller's shock and grief turn to unbearable bitterness when he is led to understand that for some incomprehensible reason there has been a high-level decision within the Agency not to pursue the terrorist responsible, Horst Schiller, or to avenge the murder. Obsessed by the necessity of seeking revenge, Charlie ingeniously - and at enormous risk - blackmails his Agency superiors into training and outfitting him to surreptitiously slip behind the Iron Curtain to find, and kill, Schiller. After a grudgingly granted crash course in stealth and murder at the Agency's training school, Heller is deposited on the Czechoslovakian border. Simultaneously the Agency professionals -for whom it was only a matter of time - defuse Heller's blackmail scheme and determine with complete ruthlessness that Heller, no longer a threat to security and now somewhat of an embarrassment, is to be eliminated immediately . . . permanently Alone now and deep in Communist Czechoslovakia, Heller faces two highly skilled and deadly opponents - the terrorist Horst Schiller and the CIA.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Littell (born January 8, 1935) is an American novelist and journalist who resides in France. He specializes in spy novels that often concern the CIA and the Soviet Union. Littell was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Jewish family, of Russian Jewish origin. He is a 1956 graduate of Alfred University in western New York. He spent four years in the U.S. Navy and served at times as his ship's navigator, antisubmarine warfare officer, communications officer, and deck watch officer. Later Littell became a journalist and worked many years for Newsweek during the Cold War. He was a foreign correspondent for the magazine from 1965 to 1970. Littell is an amateur mountain climber and is the father of award-winning novelist Jonathan Littell.

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Ivalu’s Color by Nauja Lynge. Hanover. 2017. International Polar Institute. 9780996748001. Afterword by Iben Bjørnsson. 224 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Greenland, circa 2015. Three women are found murdered in the capital city Nuuk. Ongoing issues in the country involving the desire for independence from the Kingdom of Denmark are redirected, as race and gender recolor the scene, and the mystery unravels in clashing graphic detail. An intertwined story of corruption, greed, domination, and sovereignty reveals itself through the discoveries of three investigators-Russian, Chinese, and a Danish Greenlander. The politics at hand are reenacted in the very act of investigating the murders, revealing the Inuit of Greenland as the true and only victims of this crime.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Nauja Lynge is the great granddaughter of Henrik Lund, author of Greenland's national anthem, and granddaughter of Hans Lynge, who promoted increased Greenlandic independence in a time before the Home Rule government. She left Greenland for Denmark as a child, but returned to reclaim her native identity as a Danish Greenlander. Through this journey home, Nauja has seen the effects of cultural stereotypes affecting the economy, language, and very heart of those torn between two worlds. She continues to actively work towards helping Greenlanders gain their due rights. This is her first novel.

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Moonrise, Sunset by Gopal Baratham. London. 1996. Serpent's Tail. 1852425016. 278 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Hours after agreeing to marry How Kum Menon, Vanita Sundram is murdered, stabbed while asleep in her fiance's arms. More killings follow, and the reluctant and grieving How Kum is swept up in the police investigation. As time passes and the murders remain unsolved, several self-proclaimed 'experts' muscle in: How Kum's drunken 'Uncle' Oscar with his underworld links, the unlikely double-act of an American psycho-sexual healer and his matronly psychic sidekick, and a Hindu holy-man.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Gopal Baratham (9 September 1935 - 23 April 2002) was a Singaporean author and neurosurgeon. He was known for his frank style and his ability to write about topics that were often considered controversial in the conservative city-state. Born to a physician and a nurse, Baratham decided to follow his parents and entered the medical profession. However, his youth was marked by the experience of the Japanese occupation. In 1954 he registered at the Medical College of the University of Malaya, Singapore, and, after studying at the Royal London Hospital in 1965, he entered the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Edinburgh in 1969. He finished his studies by 1972, when he was already 36 years old, to become a surgeon at the Thomson Road General Hospital in Singapore. He headed the Neurosurgery Department at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital between 1984 and 1987, and went into private practice after relinquishing his post as department head. He retired full-time from medical practice in 1999. Baratham died of pneumonia on the 23 of April, 2002. He was 66. Baratham had been in hospital for about a month for pneumonia and heart problems. He had had open-heart surgery in 1989. Baratham began his passion for writing in the 1960s, and never stopped writing throughout his medical career. His first novel, FUEL IN VACANT LOTS, was however never finished. In 1974 he was able to get his first short story, ‘Island', published in Commentary, the publication of the National University of Singapore Society. It was only in 1981 that his first book collection of short stories entitled FIGMENTS OF EXPERIENCE was published. In 1991, Dr. Baratham published his most successful novel, A CANDLE OR THE SUN, which he had started working on in 1983. The novel was published in London and not in Singapore due to its controversial nature. The novel was loosely based on the case of the so-called Marxist plotters, a group of Catholic activists whom the Singapore government had declared to be Communists and subsequently arrested. The same year he also published an erotic love-story called Sayang set in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. He won the S.E.A. Write Award and was elected the president of the ASEAN Association of Neurosurgeons. In 1994, Dr. Baratham wrote an account of the events surrounding the sentencing to caning of the American teenager Michael Fay, called THE CANING OF MICHAEL FAY.

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Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime & Detective Fiction by Frankie Y. Bailey. New York. 1991. Greenwood Press. 0313266719. Contributions To The Study Of Popular Culture #27. 189 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Contending that a ‘mythology of race' consisting of themes of sex and savagery exists in the United States and is perpetuated in popular culture, Frankie Y.Bailey identifies stereotypical images of blacks in crime and detective fiction and probes the implied values and collective fantasies found there. OUT OF THE WOODPILE is a socio-historical study of the evolution of black detectives and other African American characters in genre fiction. The volume's three divisions reflect the evolution of the status of African Americans in American society. The results of survey questions carried in ‘The Third Degree', the newsletter of the Mystery Writers of America, as well as the views of 14 crime writers on the creation of black characters in genre fiction are followed by the ‘Directory', which includes a sampling of cases featuring black characters, a list of black detectives, relevant works of fiction, film and television.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frankie Y. Bailey, PhD is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice University at Albany (SUNY). She studies crime history, and crime and mass media/popular culture and material culture. She is the author of five mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lizzie Stuart and two police procedurals novels featuring Albany police detective Hannah Stuart.

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African American Mystery Writers: A Historical and Thematic Study by Frankie Y. Bailey. Jefferson. 2008. McFarland. 9780786433391. 271 pages. paperback. Cover photographs: Shutterstock. 

DESCRIPTION - The book describes the movement by African American authors from slave narratives and antebellum newspapers into fiction writing, and the subsequent developments of black genre fiction through the present. It analyzes works by modern African American mystery writers, focusing on sleuths, the social locations of crime, victims and offenders, the notion of "doing justice," and the role of African American cultural vernacular in mystery fiction. A final section focuses on readers and reading, examining African American mystery writers' access to the marketplace and the issue of the "double audience" raised by earlier writers.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frankie Y. Bailey, PhD is a professor in the School of Criminal Justice University at Albany (SUNY). She studies crime history, and crime and mass media/popular culture and material culture. She is the author of five mysteries featuring amateur sleuth Lizzie Stuart and two police procedurals novels featuring Albany police detective Hannah Stuart.

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One Death To Die: A Kayankaya Mystery by Jakob Arjouni. New York. 1997. Fromm International. 0880641703. Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo. 183 pages. hardcover. Jacket design & illustration by Carmine Vecchio.

DESCRIPTION - ‘A zippy, deliciously dirty tour of legal fleshpots and low-down scams victimizing illegal aliens. . . plotted with verve and written with passion.' - Kirkus Reviews. Kemal Kayankaya, the private investigator with an attitude, is back! Sri Dao, a Thai girl smuggled into Frankfurt for its flourishing sex trade, has vanished without a trace, and her fiancE is desperate to find her. Kayankaya, the orphaned son of a Turkish locksmith turned German garbage collector, is as hardboiled as Philip Marlowe, as smart-mouthed as Easy Rawlins. As Kayankaya unravels the mystery of Sri Dao's disappearance, he leads the reader on a breathless chase through the seedy underbelly of a modern metropolis - its world of illegal aliens, corrupt cops, hustlers, and pimps no different from that of the urban jungle in any major US city, its hapless ‘undocumented' victims subject to the same heartless pattern of greed and hate. And who else but Kayankaya, himself the butt of the racist taunts of his compatriots, would know how to respond to the challenges of trying to survive in the margins of society? Crackling with intelligence and blistering wit, ONE DEATH TO DIE confirms the arrival of a new star on the international mystery scene.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jakob Arjouni (born 8 October 1964 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German author. He received the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Jakob Arjouni ended his university studies and published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! at the age of 22. Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages. In 1987, he received the Baden-Württembergischen Autorenpreis für das deutschsprachige Jugendtheater for his play Nazim schiebt ab. In 1992, he received the German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Arjouni's works are usually about the comtemporary problems, and he writes about the environment which he is familiar with. Detective Kemal Kayankaya, the protagonist in his detective novel Kayankaya, lives in Frankfurt am Main where Arjouni resided. Although Kayankaya was adopted and brought up by a German family, he subjected to racism due his ethnic Turkish appearance, and the others made fun of him. Kismet, another detective novel about Kayankaya, is about the Yugoslav civil war. In his works Magic Hoffmann, Hausaufgaben and Edelsmanns Tochter, he talks about the rising nationalism, historical revisionism and anti-Semitism in the reunified Germany. His novel Chez Max takes place in Paris in the year 2064. In this novel, he writes on the future of the society, which would be closely monitored to enhance security as a result of the 911 terrorist attacks. One can easily relate Chez Max with the scenes in George Orwell's novel 1984. In one of his latest novels, Der heilige Eddy (2009), Arjouni departed from the previously serious themes and wrote a lightweight contemporary picaresque. Peter Henning, a critic from the German newspaper Die Zeit, commented that it is a ‘German screwball prose with 246 floating slightly staged pages'. His thriller novel Cherryman jagt Mr. White (2011) has got an 18 years old protagonist in rural Bandenburg who has to face brutal violence by young nazi guys of his own village. To overcome his subdued feelings he puts them into cartoon adventures of hero ‘Cherryman' and gangster ‘Mr. White'.

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Kismet: A Kayankaya Thriller by Jakob Arjouni. Brooklyn. 2010. Melville House. 9781935554233. Translated from the German by Anthea Bell. 255 pages. paperback. Cover design by Kelly Blair.  

DESCRIPTION - Introducing Kemal Kayankaya, a wise-cracking private detective in Frankfurt - aka, ‘the ugliest town in Germany.' As a Turkish immigrant raised by Germans, he's regularly subjected to racism in the gritty, working-class city, and getting work isn't easy. So when his friend Romario asks Kayankaya to protect him against thugs demanding protection money from his restaurant business, the down-and-out Kayankaya takes the job. Except these are no ordinary thugs. They turn out to be battle-hardened Croatian nationalists looking to take over the rackets in Frankfurt, and they do not take kindly to Kayankaya's interference with their plans. But try as he might, Kayankaya just can't seem to stay out of their way . . . What ensues is a brilliant novel about organized crime, immigration, the fallout from the Balkan wars, and the madness of nationalism from one of Europe's finest crime writers.

 
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jakob Arjouni (born 8 October 1964 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German author. He received the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Jakob Arjouni ended his university studies and published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! at the age of 22. Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages. In 1987, he received the Baden-Württembergischen Autorenpreis für das deutschsprachige Jugendtheater for his play Nazim schiebt ab. In 1992, he received the German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Arjouni's works are usually about the comtemporary problems, and he writes about the environment which he is familiar with. Detective Kemal Kayankaya, the protagonist in his detective novel Kayankaya, lives in Frankfurt am Main where Arjouni resided. Although Kayankaya was adopted and brought up by a German family, he subjected to racism due his ethnic Turkish appearance, and the others made fun of him. Kismet, another detective novel about Kayankaya, is about the Yugoslav civil war. In his works Magic Hoffmann, Hausaufgaben and Edelsmanns Tochter, he talks about the rising nationalism, historical revisionism and anti-Semitism in the reunified Germany. His novel Chez Max takes place in Paris in the year 2064. In this novel, he writes on the future of the society, which would be closely monitored to enhance security as a result of the 911 terrorist attacks. One can easily relate Chez Max with the scenes in George Orwell's novel 1984. In one of his latest novels, Der heilige Eddy (2009), Arjouni departed from the previously serious themes and wrote a lightweight contemporary picaresque. Peter Henning, a critic from the German newspaper Die Zeit, commented that it is a ‘German screwball prose with 246 floating slightly staged pages'. His thriller novel Cherryman jagt Mr. White (2011) has got an 18 years old protagonist in rural Bandenburg who has to face brutal violence by young nazi guys of his own village. To overcome his subdued feelings he puts them into cartoon adventures of hero ‘Cherryman' and gangster ‘Mr. White'.

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Happy Birthday,Turk!: A Kayankaya Mystery by Jakob Arjouni. New York. 1993. Fromm International. 0880641487. Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo. 154 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Linda Kosarin.

DESCRIPTION - A Turkish worker is stabbed to death in Frankfurt's red-light district - certainly no reason for the police to work overtime, Kemal Kayankaya, however, has a different attitude. A 26-year-old of Turkish birth but German upbringing, he doesn't speak Turkish but looks it, has a German passport and first-hand experience of resentment against foreigners. He is also a private investigator, hired to find the killer and the motive for the crime. Like his literary forefathers Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade, he is a loner, but as a Turk, not because he has an option. Yet he is not unarmed; with an irreverent and hilarious sense of humor Kayankaya goes about his search, all the while drinking too much, encountering obnoxious policemen and easy women, After twists and turns he finally runs into a drug ring built on the exploitation of Turkish immigrants. The influence of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett on Jakob Arjouni is impossible to miss; the plot moves quickly, the action thrills, the characters are unforgettable, and the milieu is painted so realistically that it immediately comes to life for the reader. Jakob Arjouni was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, in 1964. After having spent several years in France, he recently moved to Berlin. He is the author of novels, plays, and radio plays. With the publication of HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TURK! Arjouni was immediately recognized as Germany's outstanding mystery writer, Already translated into eight languages, this is the first volume of the best-selling Kayankaya series to be published by Fromm international.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jakob Arjouni (born 8 October 1964 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German author. He received the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Jakob Arjouni ended his university studies and published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! at the age of 22. Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages. In 1987, he received the Baden-Württembergischen Autorenpreis für das deutschsprachige Jugendtheater for his play Nazim schiebt ab. In 1992, he received the German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Arjouni's works are usually about the comtemporary problems, and he writes about the environment which he is familiar with. Detective Kemal Kayankaya, the protagonist in his detective novel Kayankaya, lives in Frankfurt am Main where Arjouni resided. Although Kayankaya was adopted and brought up by a German family, he subjected to racism due his ethnic Turkish appearance, and the others made fun of him. Kismet, another detective novel about Kayankaya, is about the Yugoslav civil war. In his works Magic Hoffmann, Hausaufgaben and Edelsmanns Tochter, he talks about the rising nationalism, historical revisionism and anti-Semitism in the reunified Germany. His novel Chez Max takes place in Paris in the year 2064. In this novel, he writes on the future of the society, which would be closely monitored to enhance security as a result of the 911 terrorist attacks. One can easily relate Chez Max with the scenes in George Orwell's novel 1984. In one of his latest novels, Der heilige Eddy (2009), Arjouni departed from the previously serious themes and wrote a lightweight contemporary picaresque. Peter Henning, a critic from the German newspaper Die Zeit, commented that it is a ‘German screwball prose with 246 floating slightly staged pages'. His thriller novel Cherryman jagt Mr. White (2011) has got an 18 years old protagonist in rural Bandenburg who has to face brutal violence by young nazi guys of his own village. To overcome his subdued feelings he puts them into cartoon adventures of hero ‘Cherryman' and gangster ‘Mr. White'.

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And Still Drink More!: A Kayankaya Mystery by Jakob Arjouni. New York. 1994. Fromm International. 0880641614. Translated from the German by Anselm Hollo. 156 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Harold Wortsman. Jacket photograph by Fernando Natalici.

DESCRIPTION - Four members of a radical ecological group are accused of having murdered the director of a chemical plant near Frankfurt, Germany. While they admit to having blown up a wastepipe, they deny any involvement in the killing. According to witnesses, five people participated in the act of sabotage, but there is no trace of the fifth man. The defendants' lawyer hires Kemal Kayankaya to find him. Born in Turkey but raised in Germany, Kayankaya encounters more than one dangerous obstacle in his search - not only because he is a Turk, but also because his biting wit spares no one, not even the powers that be who try to silence him. A tough, sharp-tongued and hard-drinking P.I. reminiscent of Sam Spade and Philip Mar1owe, Kayankaya is determined to solve the complex riddle at the heart of this engrossing mystery.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jakob Arjouni (born 8 October 1964 in Frankfurt am Main) is a German author. He received the 1992 German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Jakob Arjouni ended his university studies and published his first novel Happy Birthday, Türke! at the age of 22. Later he wrote his first play Die Garagen. He became famous after publishing his criminal novel Kayankaya, which was then translated into 10 different languages. In 1987, he received the Baden-Württembergischen Autorenpreis für das deutschsprachige Jugendtheater for his play Nazim schiebt ab. In 1992, he received the German Crime Fiction Prize for One Man, One Murder. Arjouni's works are usually about the comtemporary problems, and he writes about the environment which he is familiar with. Detective Kemal Kayankaya, the protagonist in his detective novel Kayankaya, lives in Frankfurt am Main where Arjouni resided. Although Kayankaya was adopted and brought up by a German family, he subjected to racism due his ethnic Turkish appearance, and the others made fun of him. Kismet, another detective novel about Kayankaya, is about the Yugoslav civil war. In his works Magic Hoffmann, Hausaufgaben and Edelsmanns Tochter, he talks about the rising nationalism, historical revisionism and anti-Semitism in the reunified Germany. His novel Chez Max takes place in Paris in the year 2064. In this novel, he writes on the future of the society, which would be closely monitored to enhance security as a result of the 911 terrorist attacks. One can easily relate Chez Max with the scenes in George Orwell's novel 1984. In one of his latest novels, Der heilige Eddy (2009), Arjouni departed from the previously serious themes and wrote a lightweight contemporary picaresque. Peter Henning, a critic from the German newspaper Die Zeit, commented that it is a ‘German screwball prose with 246 floating slightly staged pages'. His thriller novel Cherryman jagt Mr. White (2011) has got an 18 years old protagonist in rural Bandenburg who has to face brutal violence by young nazi guys of his own village. To overcome his subdued feelings he puts them into cartoon adventures of hero ‘Cherryman' and gangster ‘Mr. White'.

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