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Carny Kill by Robert Edmond Alter. Greenwich. 1966. Fawcett/Gold Medal. Paperback Original. 160 pages. paperback. d1611.

DESCRIPTION - Hurry . . . Hurry . . . Hurry . . . Step right up and see the dead man. That's a knife in his chest, just like the kind my ex-wife used to use in her knife-throwing act. But that was a long time ago. Before she married Mr. Cochrane, the owner of this carny I'd just joined. And there you can see Mr. Cochrane himself. He's the dead man. And who am I? A jealous ex-husband with a police record, turned up from nowhere. It you ask any cop, I'm the man who killed Cochrane. But I'm not. I've got to find out who did, though.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Robert Edmond Alter was born on December 10, 1925 in San Francisco, California. During his early years he spent time working as a migrant worker picking fruit in and around Santa Paula. For a brief period he worked as a stock boy at Vroman's Books in Pasadena before attending the Pasadena City College and University of California. Alter studied at the famed Pasadena Playhouse and as a result managed a few roles as an extra in films. By 1949, he had settled into the security of the life of a civil servant working at the post office in Altadena. Robert Edmond Alter is remembered chiefly for two novels, paperback originals from the 1960s: SWAMP SISTER (1961) and CARNY KILL (1966). He also wrote children's novels and sold stories to some of the top magazines and digests of his day, including Mike Shayne, Manhunt, Man From UNCLE, Trapped, Argosy and The Saturday Evening Post. Alter's best work fused lurid intrigue and crime melodrama with an interesting cross section of characters that might include spies, unfaithful wives and husbands, hillbillies, ghosts, and even skin divers. Alter died of cancer at the age of 40. Some of his later works were published for the first time many years after his death.

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The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. New York. 1984. Schocken Books. 0805239294. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. 233 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John Clarke.

DESCRIPTION - Primo Levi is justly regarded in his native Italy as one of its leading men of letters. A chemist by profession, in this book he writes about incidents of his life in which one or another of the elements of the periodic table figured in such a way as to become a personal preoccupation. For example, vanadium: Levi was a chemist for an Italian company that imported vanadium from Germany to use in its varnish. On one occasion the shipment from the German supplier was of such a character that the batch of varnish with which it was mixed never dried. Levi wrote to his opposite number, the chemist in the German firm. After much correspondence, that person admitted that the vanadium supplied had not been up to sample, paid Levi's claim, and shipped the proper chemical. But the suspicion had been growing in Levi's mind that the man with whom he was corresponding had been the chief of a laboratory m Auschwitz in which he himself had worked as a starved and abused prisoner. What that recognition meant-for both men-and what happened thereafter was an ironic working out of an infamy decades old but not ended. PRIMO LEVI is the author of two classic memoirs of the experience of the concentration camps, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ and THE RE-AWAKENING.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Primo Michele Levi (31 July 1919 - 11 April 1987) was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer. He was the author of several books, novels, collections of short stories, essays, and poems. His best-known works include If This Is a Man (1947) (U.S.: Survival in Auschwitz), his account of the year he spent as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland; and his unique work, The Periodic Table (1975), linked to qualities of the elements, which the Royal Institution of Great Britain named the best science book ever written. A chemist by training, Primo Levi (1919-87) was arrested as an anti-fascist partisan during World War Two, and deported to Auschwitz in 1944. His books include THE DROWNED AND THE SAVED, IF THIS IS A MAN and THE PERIODIC TABLE.

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 Lust is a Woman by Charles Willeford. New York. 1958. Beacon Books. Author's name misspelled as "Williford" on the front cover. Paperback Original. 192 pages. paperback. B175.  

DESCRIPTION - SHE WAS A PAWN IN AN EVIL GAME. The story of Maria who wanted – desperately- to become a movie star! FROM BAD TO WORSE. She was a perfectly nice girl, this Maria Dugan – though possibly a little too attractive for her own good. Craving a vacation that would really furnish thrills and excitement, she decided to treat herself to a couple of weeks in fabled Miami. There she soon learned that the only way to interest a man was to treat him better than the other pretty vacationers did. Maria’s shocked girlfriend, Peggy, went back to New York. But Maria decided to play it alone. So she found herself on a yacht, passing delightful hours with sleek, experienced Donald McKay. The Donald induced her to go to that mysterious mansion in the Everglades, the one that jaded old men and rich young ne’er-do-wells loved to visit in secret!. TOO late Maria realized that her search for thrills led her into slavery. She was about to become a plaything, a helpless object of lust.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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The Difference by Charles Willeford. Tucson. 1999. Dennis McMillan Publications. 0939767333. Includes an essay the author wrote about this novel - 'Jake Dover As Existentialist.' 141 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Michael Kellner. Collage & digital illustration by Marta Foust.  

DESCRIPTION - Set against the sweeping panorama of Arizona circa 1880, this work has many of the surface trappings of a standard western. However, from the first shocking realisation that the line between good and evil is being overstepped, the author then begins to dismantle the American cowboy myth. THE DIFFERENCE was described by Charles Willeford as a post modern western. Filled with outcasts and misfits, liberally dosed with black humour and jarring violence, and set in the wild west of 1880's Arizona. The protagonist, Johnny Shaw returns to southern Arizona to collect his inheritance, but before long becomes embroiled in a deadly dispute with the Reardon family, which results in the death of one of the sons. Shaw flees and finds an unlikely ally in a blacksmith, Jake Dover, who knew and respected Shaw's father. Dover hides Shaw from the Reardon's, and teaches him how to use a gun with speed and precision. Finally Shaw returns to Arizona fo an almighty showdown. Shaw tells the story from his point of view, believing himself to be right, but Shaw's professed virtue is at sharp odds with his actions. Those actions are made especially jarring by Willeford's terse prose, which adds impact to his character's sudden, simple bursts of violence. THE DIFFERENCE was originally published in 1971 as THE HOMBRE FROM SONORA, under the name Will Charles.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Something About a Soldier by Charles Willeford. New York. 1986. Random House. 0394550226. 255 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - A young man's life and loves in the peacetime army in the Philippines and California on the eve of World War II. Charles Willeford was a highly decorated (Silver Star, Bronze Star Purple Heart, and Luxemburg Croix de Guerre) He was a tank commander with the Third Army in World WarII. Charles joins up in 1935 when there were no jobs. He stuck it out and tells about the Army of the time, including World War II.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Deliver Me From Dallas by Charles Willeford. Tucson. 2001. Dennis McMillan Publications. 0939767384. Originally published as a Fawcett Gold Medal paperback original in 1961 with the name of Franklin W. Sanders as the sole author. 192 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Although an earlier version was first published as Whip Hand by W. Franklin Sanders in 1961, the publisher declares this to be the original Deliver Me from Dallas!, for which the late Charles Willeford (Shark-Infested Custard, the Hoke Moseley series, etc.) deserves full credit. (Confused? All is explained in Jesse Sublett's introduction.) Ex-cop Bill Brown flees L.A. for Dallas, where he runs into all manner of trouble, including some murderous hillbilly kidnappers and a woman who wields a mean bullwhip. This hardboiled yarn is remarkably well constructed and should find an enthusiastic audience among aficionados of Jim Thompson and the like. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Kiss Your Ass Goodbye by Charles Willeford. Miami Beach. 1987. Dennis McMillan Publications Publications. 156 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A self contained fragment from Willeford's long 1970s novel SHARK-INFESTED CUSTARD which was finally posthumously published by Underwood-Miller in 1993. According to Don Herron (Firsts Magazine) "'Kiss Your Ass Good-Bye' was a title Willeford had considered for the novel he finally called MIAMI BLUES, and McMillan felt it was so rude, it definitely should appear on a book over Willeford's name.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Pick-Up by Charles Willeford. New York. 1955. Beacon Press. Paperback Original. 191 pages. paperback.  #109.

DESCRIPTION - HE HOLED UP WITH A HELPLESS LUSH. Their kind of love was taboo! He picked her up one night, and for the price of a couple of drinks she was his. But Harry Jordan, a man driven by strange compulsions, found seductive Helen Meredith more than his match. In her fevered embrace, he learned ecstasies beyond compare. So he would not let her go, though he knew the dangers of loving a drunk and a degenerate. They might even have worked it out, if Helen had not cracked under the pressure. When his back was turned, she took to consorting with - soldiers-sailors-marines-any man who came along. A stirring story of illicit love, moving with brutal realism to a smashing surprise finish. In Pick-Up, Charles Willeford has created a work of psychological suspense that is at once poignant, terrifying, and utterly authentic in its depiction of alcoholic desire and destruction.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Honey Gal by Charles Willeford. New York. 1958. Beacon Books. Paperback Original. 188 pages. paperback. B160.  

DESCRIPTION - HE WAS WHITE, SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND BAD. A STARKLY NAKED NOVEL OF SIN AND SEGREGATION. The cream of the crop - WAS HIS! SURE, they were just folks to be exploited, beaten, enslaved - especially the soft, pretty women! That's what most of big Sam Springer’s world thought, and he didn’t care one way of the other. He was never particular about who came out on top. So long as it was himself. But then by a sudden freak Sam found himself fighting their battles, spending their cash, yes, and coveting those soft women. Why not? He had his pick. So he learned what it was to taste of strange dark caresses, to share the hot sweet kisses of unrestrained passion.

Published in 1989 by Black Lizard under its original title:

The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford. Berkeley. 1989. Black Lizard Books. 0887390978. . 171 pages. paperback. . Cover art by Kirwan. .  
DESCRIPTION - He was white. She was beautiful-and bad! Elmer Gantry had nothing on the Right Reverend Deuteronomy Springer resident of the Anderson Hotel in Harlem, minister of the Church of God's Flock, late of Jax, Florida. Or was he really William Johnson, the man who'd checked into the hotel with a golden queen from some forgotten race in time named Merita? Merita was the wonderful color of real coffee, expensive exotic coffee diluted with pure, thick, yellow cream. She was a goddess all right, a high priestess of love, sacred and profane. But this was how Sam Springer, the novelist from Miami, would have described her. He was the one who'd invented Mr. William Johnson, hadn't he? But Merita was no fantasy. She was for real.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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High Priest of California and Wild Wives by Charles Willeford. New York. 1956. Beacon Press. Author's name misspelled as 'Williford' on the front cover. 190 pages. paperback. #130.

DESCRIPTION - NO WOMAN COULD RESIST HIS STRANGE CULT OF LECHERY! BLIND DATE with BLONDE BAIT! HER name was Alyce and her game was love—and she went out looking for a playmate one night in a cheap, pick-up dance hall. She found him, all right. A man who didn't care how he spent his money so long as it got him what he wanted—and what he wanted was women. Russell knew just what to do with burning blonde beauty. He knew exactly the things that make big girls happy. He even knew ways to take care of left-over husbands— like the one Alyce kept locked up in a secret room at home! BY WAY OF A BONUS - This book features a surprise second novel guaranteed to satisfy. Read this story of a hard guy suckered by a cute little juvenile by one not so juvenile! Extra bonus – Full length first award novel – WILD WIVES.

Originally published as a Giant Edition Packaged With Talbot Mundy's Full Moon in 1954:

High Priest of California/Full Moon by Charles/Mundy Talbot Willeford. New York. 1954. Royal Books.  Paperback Original. Willeford's 1st Novel. 320 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION - Classic pulp fiction from master Charles Willeford, This 1955 novel of sex and violence is even more contemporary today. Ruthless used car salesman becomes obsessed with seducing a married woman. 'Willeford writes with quiet authority, has the ability to make his situations, scenes, dialogue sound absolutely real.' - Elmore Leonard. Russell Haxby will curl your hair,, just the same way he twisted the ladies around his little finger. That’s because Russell is the kind at a lad who figures out what to do with a left-over husband whose wife he wants.

Later reissued by Re/Search Publications with additional material: 

High Priest of California/Wild Wives by Charles Willeford. San Francisco. 1987. Re/Search Publications. 0940642123. Introduction by Lou Stathis. illustrated (with photographs). Also included is the first publication of HIGH PRIEST OF CALIFORNIA: A PLAY IN THREE ACTS. 175 and 124 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Two hard-boiled fictions set in San Francisco of the 1950s. Classic pulp fiction from master Charles Willeford, This 1955 novel of sex and violence is even more contemporary today. Ruthless used car salesman becomes obsessed with seducing a married woman. 'Willeford writes with quiet authority, has the ability to make his situations, scenes, dialogue sound absolutely real.'-Elmore Leonard. . . Jake Blake is a private detective short on cash when he meets a rich and beautiful young woman looking to escape her father's smothering influence. Unfortunately for Jake, the smothering influence includes two thugs hired to protect her-and the woman is in fact not the daughter of the man she wants to escape, but his wife. Now Jake has two angry thugs and one jealous husband on his case. As Jake becomes more deeply involved with this glamorous and possibly crazy woman, he becomes entangled in a web of deceit, intrigue-and multiple murders. Brilliant, sardonic, and full of surprises, Wild Wives is one wild ride.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Charles Ray Willeford III (January 2, 1919 - March 27, 1988) was an American writer. An author of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and literary criticism, Willeford is best known for his series of novels featuring hardboiled detective Hoke Moseley. The first Hoke Moseley book, MIAMI BLUES (1984), is considered one of its era's most influential works of crime fiction. Film adaptations have been made of three of Willeford's novels: COCKFIGHTER, MIAMI BLUES, and THE WOMAN CHASER.

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Cathedral of the August Heat by Pierre Clitandre. Columbia. 1987. Readers International. 093052330x. Translated from the Haitian French by Bridget Jones. 161 pages. hardcover. Cover art: Haitian mural. Design by Jan Brychta.

DESCRIPTION - Haitian writer Clitandre blends traditional narrative, fragments of conversation, dreams and visions to bring to life the shantytown surrounding Port-au-Prince, where John, a bus driver, his son Raphael and their fellow denizens experience a hideous poverty that is outside the ken of most Americans. Time is fluid and is marked more by children growing up or dying than by dates, since the community is too poor to buy new calendars every year. Progress comes only in the form of electricity, and ominous factory sheds, where workers are locked in all day, push many of the poor into the swamp. Brutal police curtail the shanty dwellers' few freedoms. But in this novel, the poor have had enough. After Raphael is murdered by the police, John leads the people in concert with farmers from the countryside in an uprising on the anniversary of Haiti's independence. Jones masterfully translates Haitian patois into West Indian English. - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Journalist, painter and novelist, Pierre Clitandre was born on 20 March 1954 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He studied painting at the Academie de Beaux-Arts from 1974 to 1977 and continued his studies at the Faculty of Ethnology until 1979. He is a cultural journalist and collaborator in the main Haitian newspapers: Le Nouvelliste , Le Matin and Le Petit Saturday Evening . He is also a columnist for Radio Haiti Inter, and for two years he collaborates with Radio Plus for programs in culture and archeology, ethnology and town planning.

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Wedding at Port-Au-Prince by Hans Christoph Buch. San Diego. 1986. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151955980. Translated from the German by Ralph Manheim. 304 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A sparkling first novel set against the background of turbulent Haiti. This is the fascinating story of a French officer sent to Haiti by Napoleon to arrest Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of a slave revolt. It is also a historically documented account of a quarrel between Haitian police and a German colonist that escalates into a grotesque diplomatic incident. And it is a brilliant story about the author's grandfather - a pharmacist who emigrated to Haiti in 1899 - and his family; his wife, Pauline, who is first restored to health and then mysteriously undone by voodoo magic; Aunt Toni, whose engagement to a German officer triggers a political scandal; Uncle G., who bombs the presidential palace and then disappears with his plane into the Bermuda Triangle, never to be heard from again. These fantastic tales one and all merge seamlessly into an exotic, outrageous, witty reality and a beguiling family saga.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Writer, literary critic, and journalist. Hans Christoph Buch was born in 1944 in Wetzlar. His grandfather was a diplomat in Haiti, which is how he came to develop a special interest in this country. He lived for some time in West Africa, Latin America, and Haiti and was a visiting professor at universities in Germany, the United States, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, and Cuba. Hans Christoph Buch is a member of the PEN. Hans Christoph Buch first drew attention to himself with his collection of stories Unerhörte Begebenheiten at a conference held by Gruppe 47. Additional important literary stages were the political satires from the years 1971-75, which, under the title Aus der neuen Welt, told stories and news from America. His novel Die Hochzeit von Port-au-Prince was published in 1984 and received a lot of attention. In the same year, he was named Officier de l'Ordre de l'Art et des Lettres by the French minister of education and the arts. In the mid-nineties, Buch traveled to Rwanda and Burundi to report on the war between the Hutus and Tutsis. He has traveled in various conflict areas including Bosnia, Chechnya, Haiti, Algeria, Zaire, Cambodia, East Timor, Pakistan, and Liberia. He regularly works as a correspondent for Die Zeit and the Spiegel. Numerous reportage collections have been published including Tropische Früchte. Afro-amerikanische Impressionen, Die neue Weltunordnung. Bosnien, Burundi, Haiti, Kuba, Liberia, Ruanda, Tschetschenien, and Blut im Schuh. Schlächter und Voyeure an den Fronten des Weltbürgerkrieges. His novel Kain und Abel in Afrika thematizes the massacre in Rwanda. His most recent publication was Wie Karl May Adolf Hitler traf und andere wahre Geschichten. Hans Christoph Buch lives in Berlin.

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Homage to Barcelona by Colm Toibin. London. 1991. Simon & Schuster. 0671710613. 208 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - A personal evocation of the cosmopolitan city of Barcelona, considered by some to be the fashionable city of the 90s. First built by 14th-century merchants and rebuilt by Catalan nationalists five centuries later, Barcelona is the centre of Catalan culture. The author describes the architecture, art, churches, museums, boulevards and port life of this culturally rich city which has thrived on the presence of so many artists, architects and musicians. Art and politics are brought together as the abyss of the Civil War approaches and the city's suffering is seen through the eyes of those who were involved. It culminates in the terrible end which Franco's army brought to the hopes and dreams of the Catalans. The author also wrote 'Walking Along the Border' and 'The South'. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955. He is the author of The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship and most recently The Master, which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona and The Sign of the Cross. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He lives in Dublin.

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Soldiers Cry By Night by Ana Maria Matute. Pittsburgh. 1995. Latin American Literary Review Press. 0935480692. Translated from the Spanish by Robert Nugent & Maria Jose De La Camara. 160 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Soldiers Cry by Night is the second volume of the award-winning trilogy, The Merchants, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War. The two main characters, Manuel and Marta, are forced to accept the end of their childhood, and come to terms with the allegiances and betrayals of the harsh adult world. During the Fascist attack on Barcelona, the two young people are forced to choose sides, and their decisions will forever change their lives. ‘This translation by a pair of academic Hispanists, one of whom has translated several volumes of poetry, is long overdue' - Library Journal. . . ‘Readers...will be richly rewarded with an important and fascinating work.' - Kirkus Reviews.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana María Matute Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 - 25 June 2014) was the most prominent woman writer of 20th century Spain. Her novels and short stories have won many prestigious literary awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Nadal, Premio de la Crítica and Premio Cafe de Gijon. She was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre. She is considered to be one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands. She has been a guest lecturer to the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila (‘Stories about the Artamila', all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only ‘the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one'. The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, ‘The Boy Next Door,' when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. Matute was a university professor. She traveled to various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, ‘Los Mercaderes'. On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.

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The Lone Man by Bernardo Atxaga. London. 1996. Harvill Press. 1860461352. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa. 325 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Years back, before his spell in prison, before he bought the hotel outside Barcelona, Carlos had been a hunted man, activist in ETA, the Basque Independence Movement, and involved in clandestinity and violence for the good of the Cause. So what is a responsible hotelier doing back once more in the old game? The fact is, after another ETA bomb outrage, the police are out in force hunting for two escaped gunmen, a man and a woman, and Carlos has accepted to hide them in his hotel. This is while the 1982 World Cup is being played in Barcelona and police are swarming all over the hotel to protect the Polish team that is staying there. Little by little it dawns on Carlos that the police are not there to protect the team but are actually closing in on their quarry. He has to get the hunted couple out and away. The Brazil vs Argentina match would be the time to do it ... The Lone Man is not, however, a simple crime thriller. It is a narrative set in a lunar landscape of fear. It is a many-layered novel about a frightened man fighting off his past, and the terror that has haunted his past. It is about life on the edge of an abyss.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bernardo Atxaga (born July 27, 1951 - pseudonym of Joseba Irazu Garmendia) is a Basque writer and self-translator. Atxaga was born in Asteasu, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country), in 1951. He received a diploma in economics from the University of Bilbao, and studied philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He worked as an economist, bookseller, professor of the Basque language, a publisher, and a radio scriptwriter until 1980 when he dedicated himself completely to writing. His first text was published in 1972 in an anthology of Basque authors. His first short story, Ziutateaz (‘About The City'), was published in 1976. His first collection of poetry, Etiopia (‘Ethiopia‘), appeared in 1978. He has written plays, song lyrics, novels and short stories. His book of short stories, Obabakoak (‘Individuals and things of Obaba'), published in 1988 won him much fame and several prizes, such as Spain's National Literature Prize. So far, the book has been translated into more than 20 languages. Atxaga generally writes in the Basque language, Euskara, but translates his works into Spanish as well. Following the example of Obabakoak, several of his other works have been translated into other languages.

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The Campaign by Carlos Fuentes. New York. 1991. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374118280. Translated from the Spanish by Alfred Mac Adam. 246 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - On the night of May 24, 1810, my friend Baltasar Bustos entered the bed room of the Marquise de Cabra, the wife of the President of the Superior Court for the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata, and kidnapped her newborn child. In its place. he put a black baby! the child of a prostitute who had just been publicly flogged. In this witty and enthralling saga of revolutionary South America, Carlos Fuentes explores the period of profound upheaval he calls ‘the romantic time.' His hero, Baltasar Bustos, the son of a wealthy Argentine ranch owner, is Rousseau's divided being. On one hand, he is a citizen with a public role to play, that of the inflamed revolutionary democrat whose boldly subversive act - the kidnapping - sets the dramatic narrative in motion. But he is also an individual with a private life to live, for on the night he steals the child born of privilege he catches a fleeting glimpse of the infant's mother, the exquisite Marquise de Cabra, and it is enough to set him on an anguished journey to repent his act and win her love. His public and personal campaign of redemption takes him through Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Mexico and through the struggles and contradictions that have plagued and ultimately shaped Spanish America, Only Fuentes could have orchestrated the voices of literature and history in such a complex and compelling way-surely meant to tell us as much about our own conflicted selves as about the nineteenth century.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Carlos Fuentes Macías (November 11, 1928 - May 15, 2012) was a Mexican novelist and essayist. Among his works are The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Aura (1962), The Old Gringo (1985) and Christopher Unborn (1987). In his obituary, the New York Times described him as ‘one of the most admired writers in the Spanish-speaking world' and an important influence on the Latin American Boom, the ‘explosion of Latin American literature in the 1960s and '70s', while The Guardian called him ‘Mexico's most celebrated novelist'. His many literary honors include the Miguel de Cervantes Prize as well as Mexico's highest award, the Belisario Domínguez Medal of Honor. He was often named as a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, though he never won.

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Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. New York. 1904. Harper & Brothers. 631 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Amid the grandiose scenery of South America, against the exciting events of a revolution, Conrad ironically displays men, not as isolated beings, but as social animals. Arnold Bennett regarded the book, with its very wide canvas, ‘as one of the greatest novels of any age.' And Jocelyn Baines, in his fine critical biography of the author, has written: ‘NOSTROMO is Conrad's most ambitious feat of imagination and is worthy of comparison with the most ambitious of all great novels, WAR AND PEACE.' ‘If . . . his most considerable work had had due recognition, it would be known as one of the great novels of the language. For NOSTROMO is most certainly that' - F. R. Leavis in THE GREAT TRADITION. ‘Of the novels, NOSTROMO is undoubtedly the finest; a good case could be made out for considering it the greatest novel in English of this century. It represents a remarkable extension of Conrad's genius' - Walter Allen in THE ENGLISH NOVEL.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; Berdichev, Imperial Russia, 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924, Bishopsbourne, Kent, England) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. While some of his works have a strain of romanticism, he is viewed as a precursor of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many authors, including D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Malcolm Lowry, William Golding, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, J. G. Ballard, John le CarrE, V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Hunter S. Thompson, J.M. Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Films have been adapted from, or inspired by, Conrad's Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Duel, Victory, The Shadow Line, and The Rover. Writing in the heyday of the British Empire, Conrad drew on his native Poland's national experiences and on his personal experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world, while plumbing the depths of the human soul. Appreciated early on by literary cognoscenti, his fiction and nonfiction have gained an almost prophetic cachet in the light of subsequent national and international disasters of the 20th and 21st centuries.

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The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. New York. 1976. Harper & Row. 0060114193. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. 269 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Guy Fleming.  

DESCRIPTION - A dictator's body is discovered in his Enormous, crumbling palace. Revolutionaries burst in and find his rotting corpse in an anarchic tangle of past and present - a present already lost and decayed, a past of almost unimaginable richness in which the palace was crowded with the dictator's ministers, bodyguards and servants, who kept him precariously balanced in power, and also with a tribe of women and children. The atmosphere is dreamlike - even nightmarish - real, vibrant and sensually exact, and at the same time vague and almost unbelievable. From this very definite beginning the novel moves round and round in time - backward, forward and sideways in a narrative of reminiscence. The action takes place in a Latin American country in an advanced state of corruption, anarchy, savagery, and physical exuberance. The time is the modern period, though not specified. An air force is mentioned; a League of Nations exists somewhere; American ambassadors with names like Wilson move in and out and occasionally the Pope sends messages. Dominating the action is the dictator-general, at first an almost messianic presence loved by the people, appearing suddenly among the peasants like a vision, walking alone or with a few colleagues, but as a rule going unguarded and unafraid. Then, as his rule tightens, as things become harsher, be becomes more suspicious and frightened and goes out only in a closely guarded car and with a bodyguard; or else he appears on a balcony, a distant, scarcely human figure. The discovery of a man who is his double makes appearances much easier for him; the double is dressed as people expect the leader to dress, and is sent to appear where the leader is expected. When there is an assassination, it is the double, not the leader, who is killed. This is an extraordinary novel by one of the world's leading writers. Rich, vivid and brilliantly original, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH is a masterful work of imagination, narrative and description superbly translated by Gregory Rabassa.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ was born in Aracataca, Colombia, in 1928. He attended the University of Bogota and later worked as a reporter for the Colombian newspaper El Espectador and as a foreign correspondent in Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Caracas, and New York. He is the author of many novels and collections of stories-including NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL AND OTHER STORIES, THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH, INNOCENT ERËNDIRA AND OTHER STORIES, IN EVIL HOUR, LEAF STORM AND OTHER STORIES, CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD, LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA, and ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE. Garcia Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

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The Plains of Caroni by Samuel Selvon. London. 1970. Macgibbon & Kee. 0261631837. 166 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - The first wave of Caribbean writers who made their mark were dominated by the thought of independence and their relations with the white world outside. Samuel Selvon now extends the theme by showing a young country at grips with modernisation, less and less willing to blame anyone but itself for lack of achievement. In Trinidad the sugar crop is still the chief crop and its labourers are mostly the descendants of the East Indian workers brought there to grow and harvest it. Like Western workers, the villagers of Wilderness react against the use of machinery, except for Romesh, a student fresh from university. is over-possessive mother is ambitious for him, wants him to join the emerging elite of the island and therefore involves him with Petra, a white girl, whose skin still commands a certain respect and envy. But when the new harvester arrives Romesh learns as much about himself as his original social concern. THE PLAINS OF CARONI is the author's best book so far, a real and humane story.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Samuel Selvon was born in Trinidad of Indian parents. He was a wireless operator with the Royal Naval Reserve during the war. After the war Selvon worked on the Trinidad Guardian and sub-edited weekly magazine of Caribbean prose and poetry. He began writing career with verse and short stories, the success of which encouraged him to come to England in 1950, and two years later he wrote his first novel, A BRIGHTER SUN, which was widely acclaimed. Selvon was twice awarded Guggenheim Fellowships from America: in 1954 for second novel AN ISLAND IS A WORLD, and in 1968 for research in creative writing. Awarded Travelling Scholarship by the Society of Authors in 1958 Samuel Selvon visited Paris and Spain. He was awarded Trinidad Government Scholarship for refamiliarisation in 1962, and honoured with the Humming Bird Medal in 1969 for work in Caribbean literature. Selvon has also twice been awarded grants from the Arts Council of Great Britain. THE PLAINS OF CARONI is his eighth book. He has also written for Radio Drama and has been resident in London for twenty years.

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Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul. New York. 1959. Vanguard.  222 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Here is Miguel Street, the Catfish Row of Trinidad, land of laughter and Calypso. Not since Porgy and Bess has an artist captured so well the humor and pathos of a sunstruck world. The inhabitants of Miguel Street tumble through the pages of Mr. Naipaul's new novel with a glorious lack of inhibition. Here is Laura, whose eight children had seven fathers (‘is a damn nuisance,' Laura said), but her heart is big enough for all of them; here is black Wordsworth selling pages of immortality on the street corners; here is Morgan, exploding into flashing laughter like the fireworks he makes. We encounter Man-man at the corner, where he paints, as he has done always, the campaign slogan, rote for Man-man. No one does, of course, but it is a pleasure to vote for Elias, the boy who turns from literature to garbage collecting, and thereby becomes an aristocrat of the stage; or Titus Hoyt, who teaches ‘Latin,' a language he makes up as he goes along; or Bhakcu, the mechanical genius who ruins even new cars. Love, wisdom, joy, passion-all beat with a tropical rhythm in this enchanting story of the Caribbean. In the language of laughter, of Calypso, MIGUEL STREET is wonderful, man, is wonderful.

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (17 August 1932 - 11 August 2018), commonly known as V. S. Naipaul and, familiarly, Vidia Naipaul, was a Trinidad and Tobago-born British writer of works of fiction and nonfiction in English. He is known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad, his bleaker novels of alienation in the wider world, and his vigilant chronicles of life and travels. He wrote in prose that was widely admired, but his views sometimes aroused controversy. He published more than thirty books over fifty years. Naipaul won the Booker Prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1983, and in 1989, he was awarded the Trinity Cross, Trinidad and Tobago's highest national honour. He received a knighthood in Britain in 1990, and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001. In the late 19th century, Naipaul's grandparents had emigrated from India to work in Trinidad's plantations as indentured servants. His breakthrough novel A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961.

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On Leaving Paradise by Frank Hercules. New York. 1980. Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. 0151699216. 312 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Fred Marcellino.

DESCRIPTION - This is the dazzling, exuberant, hilarious story of Johnny Sebastian Alexander Caesar Octavian de Paria. Despite the aphrodisiac climate of Trinidad, despite oceans of rum, tons of spices, scores of carnivals, and hordes of ardent young ladies, Johnny is still resolutely a virgin at the age of twenty-one. It is also the story of Aunt Jocasta, a woman of great dignity and Himalayan proportions; Professor Wolfgang von Buffus zu Damnitz, the world's leading authority on urinometrics and everything else; Joe Caldeira, a Portuguese bartender by occupation, a sweetman in his leisure; and Marcellin Gros-Caucaud, a magnificent African of awesome sexual power. In the town of San Fernando, Trinidad, from a swaying hammock under a graceful palm to the smoky interior of the Black Cat Bar, life is joyous for Johnny and his friends. But not for long. A crime of passion, a failed business venture, a venomous snake, and they are all forced to leave paradise. Their chosen route of escape is a sea voyage to England. On the high seas, too, despite the persistent advances of a radish-faced Englishwoman whose rigidity of spine extends to her upper lip, Johnny still preserves his virginity. The ocean liner docks in transit at Madeira, and by grand design Johnny and his entourage converge upon a whorehouse, where they are presented to the cream of local society: a Catholic prelate, a chief rabbi, the prefect of police, a pimp. Now the action really gets rolling. ON LEAVING PARADISE is an elegantly written fable, a pungent satire of colonialism, a sunlit mockery of manners, and above all a grand celebration of youth and sex, lone, and life.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - A fixture of intellectual life for several decades in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem, Frank Hercules was uniquely situated to understand the American racial dilemma. Born on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, he arrived in New York as a young man after a turbulent life that had already been touched by the racism of British colonialism. In novels and nonfiction writings that included several widely circulated magazine articles, Hercules scrutinized both Trinidadian and American societies. Hercules was a writer of varied talents, capable of both sharp satire and serious examinations of the lives of those on the wrong side of Western society's racial divide. Hercules was born in the Trinidadian capital of Port-of-Spain, into a well-to-do household, on February 12, 1911. His father Felix Hercules was a Venezuelan-born teacher and government employee who supported British rule over the island (Trinidad became independent from Britain in the 1960s). Despite his loyalty to the Crown, Felix Hercules was thrown out of Trinidad by the British after he lectured in support of black workers in England during World War I; when labor unrest flared in nearby Jamaica, he was accused of inciting disorder. ‘I did not understand what had happened to my father, why he was no longer at home, and why my mother walked up and down the house sobbing in the dead of night,' Hercules told the Guardian of London. The young Hercules drew a connection ‘between British colonialism and the blighted lives of distraught women; between British colonialism and the broken lives of banished men.' Even though his father was living in exile in the United States, Hercules had an outwardly comfortable childhood in Trinidad. He enjoyed the best education the British colonial system had to offer, and when he was 17 he set sail for London with the intention of becoming a lawyer. Studying law at an institution called the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple of the Inns of the Court, Hercules enjoyed the flourishing intellectual life of London in the mid-1930s. A voracious reader since childhood, he soaked up the visionary writings of novelists such as Aldous Huxley and read a wide range of English classics. He later cited the Bible as a stylistic inspiration, both for the concise power in its use of language and for its resonant prophetic tone. Hercules was less satisfied, however, with his career plans. He began to feel that by becoming a lawyer under the British system he would be helping to keep a structure of oppression in place in his homeland. On a visit back home, he realized that if he continued along the path he was following, he ‘would either become a colossal colonial snob or a revolutionary of the most incendiary sort,' as he told the New York Times. So Hercules chose a third way. In the early 1940s, although he was married to a Trinidadian musician and music scholar named Olive Walke and she was pregnant with his son at the time, Hercules left his marriage to move to the United States. But his decision wasn't entirely clear-cut. At one point, in 1950, Hercules returned to London to resume his abandoned law studies, but soon returned to New York. He finally settled in Harlem with his second wife, Dellora Howard, a half-Trinidadian schoolteacher whom he married in 1946. (She later became one of New York City's first black school administrators.) For the better part of two decades, Hercules pursued a business career. He started a line of clothing and, after that enterprise failed, worked in an insurance office. What Hercules called ‘the monolithic institution of white supremacy‘ in America proved even worse than what he had experienced in Trinidad, according to the Guardian. On arriving in the United States he found that hotels, even one in Harlem, refused him admission. ‘Here I knew for the first time what it meant to be a black man,' Hercules told the New York Times. Finding himself seated in hidden corners of restaurants even when he went out with white friends, Hercules related to the Times that he was ‘rather amused because I've always felt superior to most white people. Then, I kept away from such places as much as I could, because I did not want to be insulted by people I didn't regard as my equals.' Hercules flirted for a time with the black nationalist movements that had taken root in Harlem a generation earlier under the leadership of the charismatic (and Caribbean-born) orator Marcus Garvey. He began spending his free time at the National African Memorial Bookstore, located at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street (popularly called the ‘Crossroads of Black America') and operated by the Afrocentrist writer, commentator, and proto-rapper Oscar Micheaux. Hercules, who had always had a secret ambition to become a writer but had ignored it as he pursued other professional goals, now felt inspired. Having already written at least one short article on black history, he set out to distill his Trinidadian experiences into a novel. He was in his early 40s--late in life to be undertaking a writing career. At first, publishers did not know what to make of Hercules, who had taken American citizenship in 1959 but was neither exactly Trinidadian nor African American. One editor told him that he did not speak like a black American. Hercules recalled his response in an interview with the New York Times: ‘How is a Negro supposed to speak--except with a lot of pain, and sometimes with humor?' Hercules finally landed a contract with the Harcourt Brace Jovanovich publishing house, and his novel WHERE THE HUMMINGBIRD FLIES appeared in 1961. Set in Trinidad, the novel brutally satirized the island's racial caste system and the entire social hierarchy the British had put in place. A Guardian review noted that Hercules ‘animates an absurd milieu where skin color, hair texture, ethnic features, business acumen, respectability, and sometimes intelligence have to be carefully weighed before an individual can be given a social acceptability rating.' WHERE THE HUMMINGBIRD FLIES was named one of the five best first novels of the year by Newsweek magazine, was translated into German, and won Hercules a fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in Vermont. Hercules turned to his adopted home for inspiration for his second book. I WANT A BLACK DOLL, published in 1967, had a bleaker tone although it retained some comic elements. The novel traced the troubled path and the eventual dissolution into violence of an interracial marriage. This novel again found success in Europe, appearing in translation in Sweden, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, West Germany, and the Netherlands. Hercules also wrote nonfiction pieces; the first of two long magazine articles he wrote about Harlem, ‘The Decline and Fall of Sugar Hill,' appeared in 1965 in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine. The second, ‘To Live in Harlem,' was published by National Geographic in 1977 and was later read into the U.S. Congressional Record by New York Senator Jacob Javits. Hercules wrote one book-length nonfiction study, AMERICAN SOCIETY AND BLACK REVOLUTION, which was published in 1972. The book argued that racism lay at the center of American ideology, pointing to the systematic exclusion of blacks from the corridors of power and the benefits of American industrial might. Hercules also took issue with U.S. black leadership and its generally accommodating approaches. Probably his most militant work, AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION nevertheless looked to a future of cooperation between blacks and whites rather than to black nationalist solutions. At one point in the book, Hercules forecast the election four years later of Georgia governor Jimmy Carter to the U.S. presidency--a striking prediction given that Carter at the time was almost completely unknown. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) placed copies of AMERICAN SOCIETY AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION in classrooms of historically black institutions across the United States In his final book, ON LEAVING PARADISE, Hercules returned to a Trinidadian setting and a more comic tone, although one that was no less critical toward the West. The novel humorously describes the adventures of a young Trinidadian man who goes to live in England, and it is seasoned with Trinidadian folk humor. ‘Ribald, and often hilarious,' according to the Guardian, the novel ‘asserted the gross facts of human biology and psychology, repressed by a colonial upbringing and conditioning.' Several honors came to Hercules later in his life; including a Rockefeller fellowship at the Institute for Humanistic Studies in 1967. He also served on the final award review panel of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hercules died in New York on May 6, 1996, leaving two unpublished manuscripts; SUNRISE AT MIDNIGHT, a novel exploring the relationship between Germans and Jews, was substantially complete, while THE PORTUGUESE EARRINGS, a tale of the slave trade, was incomplete. Unlike most expatriates, Hercules had always reserved his greatest affection for his adopted Harlem home - and at his death, although he was mourned by the literary community in the United States, his books were almost unknown in Trinidad.

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Memoirs of An Invisible Man by H. F. Saint. New York. 1987. Atheneum. 0689117353. 396 pages. hardcover.  

DESCRIPTION - Nicholas Halloway is a 34-year-old Manhattan securities analyst who writes a narrative memoir (presumably this book) of his life starting on the day of an accident which renders him invisible. He recounts his involvement in a romantic affair with Anne Epstein, a woman who has taken interest in his aptitude for business and is a reporter for the Times. He escorts her to MicroMagnetics where scientists are holding a press conference for research on the magnetic containment of a nuclear process. While there, Nick sees a group of Marxist student protesters who demonstrate nuclear catastrophe by attempting to explode a cat. To get everyone away from the MicroMagnetics presentation, they cut off power to the laboratory where nuclear equipment is operating. The control computers lose function and in a flash of eerie light, everything in a fifty-foot radius becomes invisible, including Nick. Nick later wakes up in astonishment, believing at first that his limbs were blown off, and later that he is a ghost; he finally realizes the truth. Federal intelligence agents control the site and they soon discover Nick's presence. They lose his trust by attempting to capture him. He overhears that they plan to give him to scientists and enlist him for military espionage, disregarding his personal liberty for national security. He loots miscellaneous invisible items, shoots an agent, and sets fire to the building in the process of escaping. He returns to his apartment and discovers that food remains visible after he eats it, becoming invisible only after being fully digested. He may remain invisible for the rest of his life, and must surmount obstacles that would not affect a visible person, including driving, working, sheltering, etc. While avoiding government agents, he arranges a fake identity and authorizes funds to make himself a millionaire. He places himself in the care of Alice Barlow, a woman in her late twenties.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Harry F. Saint was a 45-year-old Wall Street businessman who had not written anything since a short story to Esquire when he was still a graduate student at Haverford College two decades before. Eventually Saint decided to write a book that had a chance of doing well financially, and the concept of an invisible man came to him at some point - "I must have remembered H. G. Wells or Topper." One publisher and two agents refused it until Atheneum Books purchased it for $5,000.

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Being Invisible by Thomas Berger. Boston. 1987. Little Brown. . 262 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

DESCRIPTION - Things are not going well for Fred Wagner. His wife has left him, his job as a catalog copywriter for a mail-order catalog that sells things like obscene beer mugs and ballpoint pens that double as flashlights is becoming increasingly unsatisfying. And, his novel, after six years, has not progressed beyond the opening pages. Out of shear desperation, he wishes himself invisible. To his amazement, his wish begins to come true. As Wagner tries do make the best of this unique gift, he finds invisibility has its drawbacks.

Thomas Louis Berger (July 20, 1924 – July 13, 2014) was an American novelist. Probably best known for his picaresque novel Little Big Man and the subsequent film by Arthur Penn, Berger explored and manipulated many genres of fiction throughout his career, including the crime novel, the hard-boiled detective story, science fiction, the utopian novel, plus re-workings of classical mythology, Arthurian legend, and the survival adventure. Berger's biting wit led many reviewers to refer to him as a satirist or "comic" novelist, descriptions he preferred to reject. His admirers often bemoaned that his talent and achievement were under-appreciated, in view of his versatility across many forms of fiction, his precise use of language, and his probing intelligence. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas Berger grew up in the nearby community of Lockland. He interrupted his college career to enlist in the United States Army in 1943. Berger served in Europe, and was stationed with a medical unit in the first U.S. Occupation Forces in Berlin, experiences which later provided him with background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin, published in 1958. On his return, he studied at the University of Cincinnati, receiving a B.A. in 1948. He then pursued graduate work in English at Columbia University, leaving his thesis unfinished to enroll in the writers workshop at the New School for Social Research. Here Berger met and married an artist, Jeanne Redpath, in 1950. He supported himself during this time by working as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, and was briefly on staff at the New York Times Index. Berger later became a copy editor at Popular Science Monthly, and performed free-lance editing during the early years of his writing career. Eventually, Berger was able to devote himself to writing full-time, particularly after the notoriety gained by his third book, Little Big Man, in 1964. Although he would occasionally put his hand to a short story, a play, or non-fiction article (including a stint as film critic for Esquire), Berger preferred the long narrative form of the novel, and produced a steady run of critically acclaimed books throughout his career. In 1984 his book The Feud was nominated by the Pulitzer committee for fiction for the Pulitzer Prize, but the Pulitzer board overrode their recommendation and instead chose William Kennedy's Ironweed. In 1974, Berger was a writer in residence at the University of Kansas, and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, in 1975–76. He lectured at Yale University in 1981 and 1982, and was a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Davis, in 1982. A collection of his papers is available at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Berger resided in New York City from 1948 to 1953, and lived the next twelve years in a town on the Hudson River. In subsequent years, he lived in London, Malibu, California, New York City again, Long Island, and then Mount Desert Island in Maine, before once more returning to the banks of the Hudson. He died on July 13, 2014, seven days before his 90th birthday.

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The Invisible Man by H. G. Wells. New York. 1983. Bantam Books. 0553213539. Introduction by Anthony West. 138 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - From the twentieth century's first great practitioner of the novel of ideas comes a consummate masterpiece of science fiction about a man trapped in the terror of his own creation. A stranger emerges out of a freezing February day with a request for lodging in a cozy provincial inn. Who is this out-of-season traveler? More confounding is the thick mask of bandages obscuring his face. Why is he disguised in such a manner? What keeps him hidden in his room? The villagers, aroused by trepidation and curiosity, bring it upon themselves to find the answers. What they discover is not only a man trapped in the terror of his own creation, but a chilling reflection of the unsolvable mysteries of their own souls. “My fantastic stories do not pretend to deal with possible things. They aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a gripping good dream.” - H. G. Wells.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - H. G. Wells was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1866. After an education repeatedly interrupted by his family's financial problems, he eventually found work as a teacher at a succession of schools, where he began to write his first stories.Wells became a prolific writer with a diverse output, of which the famous works are his science fiction novels. These are some of the earliest and most influential examples of the genre, and include classics such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Most of his books very well-received, and had a huge influence on many younger writers, including George Orwell and Isaac Asimov. Wells also wrote many popular non-fiction books, and used his writing to support the wide range of political and social causes in which he had an interest, although these became increasingly eccentric towards the end of his life. Twice-married, Wells had many affairs, including a ten-year liaison with Rebecca West that produced a son. He died in London in 1946.

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Canape Vert by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin . New York. 1944. Farrar & Rinehart. . Translated from the French by Edward Larocque Tinker. 225 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This book is the Haiti of the soil, the Haiti of Vodun rites, the Haiti of cockfights, of superstition, of primitive sex life, of poverty and toil, of savage dances and native rum, The reader moves in an unearthly atmosphere, he feels the haunted night, the dawn over Port-au-Prince, the rising and setting of the sun and the terrifying storms which break over the island. Vodun ceremonies, funeral rites, wild dancing under the stars to the beat of drums, are all dramatically described. Edward Larocque Tinker, leading authority on the Creole language who did the translation, says in his introduction: ‘In CANAPE-VERT we have, for the first time in English, a vivid and accurate picture of life on the island seen from the inside. The authors, both Haitian born, have captured the true subtlety of the Negro-peasant mentality, with all its strange, naive reasoning, its deep- rooted superstition, and the tang and savor of its humor.' CANAPE-VERT is an impressive and unforgettable book. It is the fiction winner of the Second Latin American Literary Prize Competition and was selected for the award by Blair Niles, Ernesto Montenegro and John Dos Passos.

Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (1904–1975), was a Haitian poet, novelist, journalist, folklorist and politician. Philippe Thoby-Marcelin was born December 11, 1904 in Port-au-Prince. He and his younger brother, Pierre Marcelin (1908-?), worked together on the writing of several novels about rural Haiti, highlighting the themes of peasant life and Haitian folklore. Philippe went to high school in Port-au-Prince and finished his education in Paris where he studied law. While there, he became acquainted with Valéry Larbaud, who arranged to have some of his poems published in La revue européenne, a monthly literary journal that was published from 1923 to 1931. Back in Haiti, he began his career as general secretary at the Ministry of Public Works. Like most Haitian intellectuals, he was opposed to the American occupation of Haiti, which had been established in 1915. In 1927, together with Jacques Roumain, Carl Brouard, Émile Roumer and Normil Sylvain (1900-1929), he helped create La Revue Indigène, a literary journal in which they published their poems. They idea was to honor the indigenous Haitian literary and artistic material, and return the culture to its pre-occupational state. His first novel Canapé-Vert, was published in 1944. In 1946, he participated in the founding of the short-lived Popular Socialist Party (PSP), together with Anthony Lespès (fr). That same year he published his second novel, La Bête de Musseau, translated as The Beast of the Haitian Hills. In 1948, when the PSP was declared illegal by President Dumarsais Estimé, he moved to the United States, where he worked as a translator for the Pan-American Union. His third novel, Le Crayon de Dieu, appeared in 1952. His last novel, Tous les Hommes sont Fous was published in 1972 and translated into English by his wife, Eva. He died at his home in Cazenovia, near Syracuse, New York, in 1975.

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