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Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their Godfathers by Anabel Hernandez. London/New York. 2013. Verso. 9781781680735. Foreword by Roberto Saviano. Translated from the Spanish by Iain Bruce. 362 pages. hardcover.

9781781680735 DESCRIPTION - The product of five years' investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to its author, Anabel Hernández, Narcoland has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico. The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the “war on drugs,” which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernández explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernández names names - not just the narcos, but also the politicians, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. In doing so, she reveals the mind-boggling depth of corruption in Mexico's government and business elite. Hernández became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of excess and misconduct at the presidential palace, and previous books have focused on criminality at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. In awarding Hernández the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers noted, “Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with violence and impunity remaining major challenges in terms of press freedom. In making this award, we recognize the strong stance Ms. Hernández has taken, at great personal risk, against drug cartels.”

Hernandez Anabel AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Anabel Hernández (born 1971) is a Mexican journalist and author, best known for her investigative journalism of Mexican drug trafficking and alleged collusion of government officials and drug lords. She has also written about slave labor, sexual exploitation, and abuse of power. She won the Golden Pen of Freedom Award 2012, which is presented annually by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. She currently lives in Berkeley, California with her two children and has a fellowship on Investigative Reporting at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Hernández, who was born in 1971, is a mother of two children. As a young child Anabel Hernández wanted to be a lawyer. Then, in 1989, Hernández happened to be in San Francisco when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit. Anabel was so impressed by the work that journalists were doing that she realized there was nothing in the world she wanted to do more than be a journalist. When Anabel Hernández shared with her father her desires to be a journalist he said that journalism wasn't a profession, that it was an occupation for bums and that women who dedicated themselves to it were prostitutes. He was furious with Hernández at first as the journalistic profession at that time in Mexico had a reputation of being in the pockets of corrupt government officials. In 1993, at 21, Hernández started at the newspaper Reforma (1993-1996) while still in school. The paper was newly created, and they wanted to start only with students so they could really shape them. The students were given very strict rules meant to break the vices of other papers. Hernández and her colleagues were told that they couldn't accept a single peso from anyone or they would be fired immediately. The only thing they could accept from a government office was a glass of water (not even coffee or soda). Hernández has stated that she is convinced that those rigorous standards formed her as a journalist. Hernández first front-page story at Reforma was about electoral fraud in the city of Mexico. Three years later, Hernández got pregnant with her first child that put on hold her journalistic career. After which time she resumed her work with newspaper Milenio (1999-2002). Hernández eventually left Milenio because she was frozen under orders from the president's office; the paper wouldn't publish anything she wrote. And later, Hernandez had to quit at another paper, El Universal, after one of the managers told her if she wanted to stay at the paper she had to stop writing about President Fox and his administration. On Dec. 5, 2000, Hernández received a call from her mother telling her that her father hadn't come home the night before. Hernández and family members began the search for the family patriarch by calling local hospitals. That afternoon, the family called a radio station to report Mr. Hernández's missing car and see if people could help them find it. Someone called and said they found it, so Anabel's older brother went to the location where the car had been found. Inside the car was one of Mr. Hernández shoes and the car trunk was stained with blood. By that night the Hernández family knew Mr. Hernández was dead. Mr. Hernández's body was found lying on a highway on Tultitlan, a municipality outside of MExico. The police in Mexico City said they would investigate only if they were paid; the family refused. She has now assigned at least two bodyguards to her protection. Hernández is a contributing journalist for the online publication Reporte Indigo and Proceso magazine, but earlier reported for the national newspapers Milenio, Reforma, El Universal and its supplemental magazine La Revista. She started her career as a journalist at Reforma in 1993. Her editorial on the importance of a Free Press in Mexico, called "The Perverse Power of Silence", was included in the WAN-IFRA 2012 World Press Freedom Day publication. In her editorial, she wrote, "If we remain silent we kill freedom, justice and the possibility that a society armed with information may have the power to change the situation that has brought us to this point." Hernández, while working at Milenio, broke the news story about the extravagance with which the winning presidential candidate, Vicente Fox, had decorated his personal accommodation using public funds - while campaigning on a ticket of economic austerity. The newspaper published expense reports of President Vicente Fox's government for the redecoration of presidential cabins. The reports became a symbol of excess and also suggested wrongdoing. Investigation of the expenses led to evidence of overcharges, purchases for which there were no orders, and names and phone numbers of companies who had made charges that no longer existed. In Mexico, the scandal represented the opposite of the image the Fox administration had been conveying and became known as Toallagate. For her reporting, Hernández won the 2002 Mexican National Journalism Award. Anabel Hernández, investigative journalist and book author who covers the Mexican narcotics trade.Anabel Hernandez spent five years investigating and writing her 2010 book Los Señores del Narco (Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and their Godfathers), which was later translated into English. The book has sold over 100,000 copies but Hernández says its popularity is an indication of the absence of information about the drug trade in Mexico. Journalists have been killed every year since the drug war began. According to Hernandez, the complicity of the government, police, military, and business and finance sectors makes the power of the drug cartels and their business possible. She said that under President Fox, the relationship between the cartels and government changed as Fox sided with the Sinaloa cartel by letting Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escape prison in 2001. Her book details how the Mexican authorities sided with the competition among the drug cartels. She also writes about the relationship between the Mexican government and United States agents, and the impact it has had on the Mexican Drug War, including the beginning of the methamphetamine trade by the Sinaloa. Hernández has received numerous death threats since writing about the drug cartels and is under protection. She told Narco News Bulletin, "A journalist who has to walk with bodyguards is an embarrassment for any nation. I constantly fear for my health and the health of my family, but the fear only drives me and lets me know that I'm on the right path." She also wrote in a WAN-IFRA publication for World Press Freedom Day in 2012: "Silence is killing men, women and children ... and it is killing journalists. But breaking the silence can also be deadly."

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Twilight On the Line: Underworld & Politics at the U. S. - Mexico Border by Sebastian Rotella. New York. 1997. Norton. 0393041131. 224 pages. hardcover.

0393041131 DESCRIPTION - It would seem the stuff of a fevered thriller if it were not all true: Street gang members from San Diego recruited by a drug cartel are embroiled in the murder of a Roman Catholic cardinal at the Guadalajara airport. Border guards struggle to resist the relentless temptation, despair, and lawlessness at the international line, while Mexican federal police ride shotgun for drug lords in Chevy Suburbans stolen in San Diego. A tunnel is dug under the U.S.-Mexico border to a cannery where cocaine is to be hidden in cans of jalapeño peppers. An alliance of Asian and Mexican racketeers smuggle hundreds of Chinese immigrants. A factory worker assassinates the probable next president of Mexico during a campaign rally, and the bosses of his own party are suspected of being the masterminds. And in a surreal penal village, inmates live with their wives and children, entrepreneurs run businesses, and gangsters live in luxury. This is the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1990s, in the age of NAFTA-a microcosm of porous borders everywhere between the worlds of wealth and poverty, legal and illegal business, power and corruption, democracy and authoritarianism, hope and despair. Sebastian Rotella's masterful portrait of the border is one you will not easily forget.

Rotella Sebastian AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Sebastian Rotella is an American foreign correspondent, investigative journalist, and novelist.

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Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney. London/New York. 1925. Macmillan and Company. Introduction by Austin Dodson and Illustrations by Hugh Thomson. 477 pages. hardcover.

evelina DESCRIPTION - ‘What will all this come to? - where will it end? and when and how shall I wake from the vision of such splendid success?' Evelina, the first of Burney's novels, was published anonymously and brought her immediate fame. It tells the story of a young girl, fresh from the provinces, whose initiation into the ways of the world is frequently painful, though it leads to self-discovery, moral growth, and, finally, happiness. Hilarious comedy and moral gravity make the novel a fund of entertainment and wisdom. Out of the graceful shifts from the idyllic to the near-tragic and realistic, Evelina emerges as a fully realized character. And out of its treatment of contrasts - the peace of the countryside and the cultured and social excitement of London and Bristol, the crowd of life-like vulgarians and the elegant gentry - the novel reveals, superbly the life and temper of eighteenth-century England, as seen through the curiosity of its young heroine.

Burney Fanny AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Frances Burney (13 June 1752 - 6 January 1840), also known as Fanny Burney and after her marriage as Madame d'Arblay, was an English novelist, diarist and playwright. She was born in Lynn Regis, now King's Lynn, England, on 13 June 1752, to musical historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726–1814) and Esther Sleepe Burney (1725–1762). The third of six children, she was self-educated and began writing what she called her "scribblings" at the age of ten. In 1793, aged 42, she married a French exile, General Alexandre D'Arblay. Their only son, Alexander, was born in 1794. After a lengthy writing career, and travels that took her to France for more than ten years, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840.

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Sister X and the Victims of Foul Play by Carlene Hatcher Polite. New York. 1975. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374265216. 145 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Diane and Leo Dillon.

0374265216 DESCRIPTION - This is Carlene Polite's first novel since her internationally acclaimed THE FLAGELLANTS. Set in Paris. it is the story of three Afro-American friends - Sister X Arista Prolo, Willis B. Black (Black Will), and Abyssinia. Sister X is dead and the two survivors remember and recount tales of her life and death, interweaving their own experiences as ‘victims of foul play.' Black Will, a ‘Travelin' Man' - from Detroit, Michigan, to a recent stint in Zambia - has seen the inside of a maximum-security cell in Illinois for armed robbery and narcotics. He is also a romantic - aspiring to the perfect woman and an ideal African community - who hates knowing he could have gotten ‘hung up on Cadillacs.' Abyssinia is a seamstress, a former costume designer for Sister X. She has resisted the temptations of wealthy male caretakers, but despairs of the ‘Dead World' requirement that she suffer in order to survive - that living a luxury. Is everything concrete sold as merchandise? Is everything abstract sold as spectacle? Sister X, an exotic dancer, compromised her dreams for a nightclub pay check until resistance led to a freakish death. In her friends' memory she embodies the struggle between life and the dollar, natural law and dominant ideology. The novel is a deeply felt and brilliantly sardonic view of our contemporary value system, which the author sees as an economic game. It is a unique satire mocking both blacks and whites who perpetrate the game, as well as a highly expressive portrait of Black Will, his two Soul Sisters, and their pure friendship.

Polite Carlene Hatcher AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - CARLENE HATCHER POLITE (August 28, 1932 - December 7, 2009) was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied dance with Martha Graham in New York and was subsequently invited to join the original Alvin Ailey Company. A member of Actors' Equity, she has had experience as an actress and theater manager. In the sixties, Ms. Polite returned to Michigan, served as assistant to Coleman Young, was elected to the Democratic State Central Committee, and did organizational work for the Detroit Council for Human Rights. From 1964 to 1971 she lived in Paris, where her first novel, THE FLAGELLANTS, was published; American, British, Italian, and Dutch editions followed. She was an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the State University of New York, teaching creative writing and Afro-American literature.

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The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher. New York. 1928. Knopf. 307 pages. hardcover.

walls of jericho knopf 1928 2nd printing no dw DESCRIPTION - Lawyer Ralph Merritt buys a house in a white neighborhood bordering Harlem. In their reactions to Merritt and to one another, Fishers' characters--including the prejudiced Miss Cramp who ‘takes on causes the way sticky tape picks up lint, ‘ Merritt's housekeeper Linda, and Shine, his piano mover--provide an invaluable view of the social and philosophical milieu of the times.Thematically, Fisher focuses on the idea of black unity and discovery of the self.

Fisher Rudolph Rudolph Fisher (May 9, 1897 - December 26, 1934) was an African-American writer. His first published work, ‘City of Refuge’, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly Press of February 1925. He went on in 1932 to write The Conjure-Man Dies, the first black detective novel. Fisher was also a physician (with a specialty in radiology), dramatist, musician and orator. Fisher was an active participant in the Harlem Renaissance, primarily as a novelist, but also as a musician. Born in Washington, DC in the late nineteenth century, Fisher grew up in Providence, Rhode Island graduating from Classical High School and attending Brown University. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from Brown in 1919 and received a Master of Arts a year later. He went on to attend Howard University Medical School and graduated in 1924. Fisher married Jane Ryder in 1925, and they had one son, Hugh, who was born in 1926. Fisher died in 1934 at the age of 37.

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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. New York. 1993. Penguin Books. 0140185852. Translated from the Russian & With An Introduction by Clarence Brown. 226 pages. paperback. Cover art - 'Painting of Futuristic Buildings aand City' by Anton Brzezinski.

0140185852 DESCRIPTION - Before Brave New World... Before 1984...There was... WE In the One State of the great Benefactor, there are no individuals, only numbers. Life is an ongoing process of mathematical precision, a perfectly balanced equation. Primitive passions and instincts have been subdued. Even nature has been defeated, banished behind the Green Wall. But one frontier remains: outer space. Now, with the creation of the spaceship Integral, that frontier -- and whatever alien species are to be found there -- will be subjugated to the beneficent yoke of reason. One number, D-503, chief architect of the Integral, decides to record his thoughts in the final days before the launch for the benefit of less advanced societies. But a chance meeting with the beautiful 1-330 results in an unexpected discovery that threatens everything D-503 believes about himself and the One State. The discovery -- or rediscovery -- of inner space, and that disease the ancients called the soul. A page-turning SF adventure, a masterpiece of wit and black humor that accurately predicted the horrors of Stalinism, We is the classic dystopian novel. Its message of hope and warning is as timely at the end of the twentieth century as it was at the beginning.

Zamyatin Yevgeny AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin (January 20 (Julian) / February 1 (Gregorian), 1884 - March 10, 1937) was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. He is most famous for his 1921 novel We, a story set in a dystopian future police state. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution. In 1921, We became the first work banned by the Soviet censorship board. Ultimately, Zamyatin arranged for We to be smuggled to the West for publication. The subsequent outrage this sparked within the Party and the Union of Soviet Writers led directly to Zamyatin's successful request for exile from his homeland. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents.

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Casualties of Peace by Edna O'Brien. New York. 1966. Simon & Schuster. 175 pages. hardcover.

casualties of peace simon and schuster 1966 DESCRIPTION - Casualties of Peace, published in 1966, is Irish writer Edna O'Brien's fifth novel. Set in London it concerns Willa McCord, an artist in glass (who is starting an affair with Auro, a married Jamaican) and her best friend and housekeeper Patsy (who lives with her violent husband Tom) Patsy decides to leave Tom but her plans are thrown into disarray when she finds she is pregnant.

OBrien Edna AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edna O'Brien (born 15 December 1930) is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. She is considered the 'doyenne' of Irish literature. Philip Roth considers her 'the most gifted woman now writing in English', while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson regards her as 'one of the great creative writers of her generation.' O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O'Brien left Ireland behind. O'Brien now lives in London. She received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Saints and Sinners won the 2011 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Faber and Faber published her memoir, Country Girl, in 2012.

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The Boarding-House by William Trevor. New York. 1965. Viking Press. 287 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by James and Ruth McCrea.

boarding house viking press 1965 DESCRIPTION - MR. BIRD: who plays God to the tenants, and conveniently dies on the first page. NURSE CLOCK: whose district visitations show a penchant for the elderly and the profane. MR. STUDDY: whose pastime is petty larceny and imaginative blackmail, and whose hatred for Nurse Clock is notorious. ROSE CAVE: a middle-aged love-child, who had a mother and can never forget it. MR. ORD: the lovelorn law student from Nigeria, whose seventeen-year frustration by Annabel Tonks makes him a major instrument of fate. MAJOR EELE: once burned, twice shy; a devotee of strip-tease and the bottle, who is given to chat but is not always accurate. Little MISS CLERRICOTT: office worker and spinster, whose decision to yield to temptation - in Leeds - works out so curiously. VENABLES: the oldest boarder, troubled with an uneasy stomach, whose passion is television commercials. SCRIBBIN: who loves only famous railway trains and the sounds they make - as his gramophone testifies daily. MRS. SLAPE: whose domain is the kitchen, which she rules with jolly vigor. CALLELTY: who rang the bell one day when she was ‘taken short' and stayed to become Mrs. Slape's right hand. This group of assorted oddsters, whimsically selected by Mr. Bird, make up the clientele of the boarding-house. In a final ironic gesture, Mr. Bird wills the house to the two candidates, male and female, most likely to disagree. Whether they will reconcile their feud, or whether one will outwit the other, supplies a problem in which the lives - of all the boarders and staff are intricately involved - and the reader with them. But those who read for story alone will miss the greater part of the fun. With wry compassion, the author presents a portrait gallery of singular personalities - a microcosm, if you will, of our disjointed society. Like THE OLD BOYS, Mr. Trevor's brilliant and highly praised earlier novel, THE BOARDING-HOUSE has an Evelyn Waugh-like mordancy and wit. It will carry forward William Trevor's auspiciously launched career as an inventive new novelist and will delight readers who relish intelligence and maturity in their fiction.

Trevor William William Trevor (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016) was an Irish novelist, playwright and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána. Trevor resided in Devon, South West England, from the 1950s until his death at the age of 88.

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Nobody's Girl by Antonya Nelson. New York. 1998. Scribner. 0684839326. 287 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Raul Colon.

0684839326 DESCRIPTION - It's been 19 months since 30-year-old Birdy Stone came to Pinetop. Birdy spends her days trying to get her students to appreciate the beauty of literature and her nights getting high with Jesus, her gay colleague and confidant. Birdy regards Pinetop as merely an escapade. But the desultory quality of her life is interrupted when a middle-aged widow asks Birdy to edit her rambling memoir. Combining superb storytelling with good humor, Antonya Nelson follows Birdy as she helps Mrs. Anthony reconstruct the history surrounding the bizarre and mysterious deaths of Mrs. Anthony's husband and daughter years earlier. As Birdy is drawn deeper into her subject's story, she begins a passionate love affair with Mrs. Anthony's surviving son - a young man who just happens to be one of Birdy's students.

Nelson Antonya AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Antonya Nelson (born January 6, 1961) is an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories. Antonya Nelson was born January 6, 1961 in Wichita, Kansas. She received a BA degree from the University of Kansas in 1983 and an MFA degree from the University of Arizona in 1986.She lives in Telluride, Colorado; Las Cruces, New Mexico; and Houston, Texas. Nelson's short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Quarterly West, Redbook, Ploughshares, Harper's, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories.Several of her books have been New York Times Book Review Notable Books: In the Land of Men (1992), Talking in Bed (1996), Nobody's Girl: A Novel (1998), Living to Tell: A Novel (2000), and Female Trouble (2002). For a 1999 issue on The Future of American Fiction, The New Yorker magazine selected Nelson as one of 'the twenty best young fiction writers in America today'. Nelson teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers,as well as in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.

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Americana by Don Delillo. Boston. 1971. Houghton Mifflin. 0395120942. 388 pages. hardcover.

0395120942 DESCRIPTION - Author's first book. At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American Dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And the the dream - and the dream-making--become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality. Camera in hand, he journeys across the country in a mad and moving attempt to capture, to impose a pattern on his own, and America's past, present, and future.

Delillo Don Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. Initially a well-regarded cult writer, the publication in 1985 of White Noise brought him widespread recognition, and is considered to be his breakthrough work. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Mao II and Underworld (1992 and 1998, respectively), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), and was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. DeLillo has described his fiction as being influenced by ‘[...] the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times’, and in a 2005 interview declared, ‘Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.’

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Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. New York. 1970. Farrar Straus Giroux. 214 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the reader. Set in a place beyond good and evil-literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul-it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis and stunning in the still-startling intensity of its prose.

Didion Joan Joan Didion (December 5, 1934 – December 23, 2021) was an American writer. Her career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s and the Hollywood lifestyle. Her political writing often concentrated on the subtext of political and social rhetoric. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, she won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking. She later adapted the book into a play, which premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.

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Eccentric Neighborhoods by Rosario Ferre. New York. 1998. Farrar Straus Giroux. 0374146381. 340 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by John Martinez. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell. Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

0374146381 DESCRIPTION - In ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS, National Book Award finalist Rosario Ferre tells the story of two families whose lives, loves, and steamy intrigues coincided with the demise of Puerto Rico's plantation society and the rise of the nouveaux riches. Elvira Vernet comes from a male-dominated family of merchants living in the Puerto Rican town of La Concordia. Her father, Santiago Vernet, and his four sons help transform Puerto Rico from a bucolic island where hunger is a part of the landscape into a bustling industrial society with all of its contradictions and attendant ills. Handsome, eloquent, and enormously successful, he can't help but charm his only daughter. Yet, in understanding her obsession with her father, Elvira must first come to terms with her mother, who died many years before, and whose family, the Rivas de Santillanas, had roots in an old plantation culture that could not survive the era of mechanization. ECCENTRIC NEIGHBORHOODS is an attempt to lay bare the psychological conflicts that determine the relationships between mothers and daughters, and it is also the story of Puerto Rico's transformation, from the beginning of the century, into a spearhead of the Caribbean. Lush, vibrant, and disarmingly funny, Eccentric Neighborhoods confirms Rosario Ferre's reputation as one of the most colorful and captivating novelists in the Latin American tradition. Praise for the novel HOUSE ON THE LAGOON by Rosario Ferre - ‘Colorful characters . . . playful, baroque a family saga in the manner of Gabriel Garcia Márquez.' - SUZANNE RUTA. THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. ‘Epic, inspired, absorbing, humorous, ironic . . . a five-generation chronicle with abundant dirty laundry and assorted skeletons. . Rosario Ferre is one of Latin America's most gifted novelists.' - EDWARD RIVERS, THE WASHINGTON POST ROOK WORLD. ‘Maintaining her balance with all the delicate power of a dancer on point, Rosario Ferre here elegantly manipulates a daunting complex of themes into a narrative that is both coherent and provocative . . . stylish and wise.' - JAMES POLK, CHICAGO TRIBUNE. ROSARIO FERRE is the author of THE YOUNGEST DOLL, SWEET DIAMOND DUST, and THE HOUSE ON THE LAGOON (FSG, 1995), among many other works. She is a frequent lecturer in the United States and lives in Puerto Rico.

Ferre Rosario AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Dr. Rosario Ferre (born September 28, 1938) is a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferre, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as Governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972. She was the recipient of the ‘Liberatur Prix' award from the Frankfurt Book Fair for ‘Kristallzucker', the German translation of ‘Maldito Amor'.

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Beka Lamb by Zee Edgell. London. 1982. Heinemann. 0435984004. Caribbean Writers Series. 171 pages. paperback. CWS26. Cover photography by Armet Francis.

0435984004 DESCRIPTION - Set in Belize, BEKA LAMB is the record of a few months in the life of Beka and her family. The story of Beka's victory over her habit of lying, which she conquers after deceiving her father about a disgrace at school, is told in flashback. Her reminiscences begin when she wins an essay prize at her convent school, and they stand in lieu of a wake for her friend Toycie. The politics of the small colony, the influence of the matriarchal society and the dominating presence of the Catholic Church are woven into the fabric of the story to provide a compelling portrait of ordinary life in Belize.

Edgell Zee AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Zee Edgell grew up in Belize in the early 1950s. Her first job was as a reporter on the Daily Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. From 1966 - 8 she taught at St Catherine Academy in Belize, during which period she was also editor of a small newspaper in Belize City. After travelling widely - apart from Jamaica, Zee Edgell has lived in Britain, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the USA - she has returned to Belize to teach at St Catherine Academy. She has recently been appointed Director of the Womens' Bureau in Belize.

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Angel by Merle Collins. Seattle. 1988. Seal Press. 0931188644. 295 pages. paperback. Cover: Barbara Thomas-'A Lover's Tutorial', 1986.

0931188644 DESCRIPTION - This vibrant novel from the Caribbean introduces the passionate voice of Black writer Merle Collins. Set on the island of Grenada, the story centers on several generations of women and traces the struggle of the Grenadian people to achieve political autonomy. Angel, daughter of Doodsie, is a young child when the houses of the white landowners in Grenada are burned to the ground, an event that ushers in thirty years of change on the island. Angel grows up headstrong and rebellious, eventually leaving the community to attend university, where her radical ideas deepen. As political unrest in Grenada mounts, Angel returns home and plunges into activity - work that is cut short by the sudden invasion of U.S. troops. An outstanding fiction debut by a gifted writer, ANGEL is a richly evocative and memorable novel. ‘My joy - a first reaction to Merle Collins' novel, ANGEL - stemmed from the nostalgia created by the use of its language, so familiar to me, so dear - captured in all of the lustiness, its great splashes of humor in my native patois. Then came its telling. She draws a portrait so profound of the former British colonial Caribbean family - forever living on this side of happiness. Ms. Collins has emerged as a major writer and storyteller. Bravo, bravo!' - Rosa Guy. ‘Merle Collins has written a richly textured and moving story of the West Indies that exists behind the tourist hype of happy islands in the sun. In Angel McAllister, whose coming of age parallels recent events in Grenada's history, including the U.S. invasion, Collins has created a truly contemporary West Indian heroine. Her mother, Doodsie, is both a triumph of characterization and a testament to the resiliency and strength of Black women the world over. ANGEL ‘sings' with her vivid and authentic voice.' - Paule Marshall.

Collins Merle AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Merle Collins (born 29 September 1950 in Aruba) is a distinguished Grenadian poet and short story writer. Collins' parents are from Grenada, where they returned from Aruba shortly after her birth. Her primary education was in St George's, Grenada. She later studied at the University of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, earning degrees in English and Spanish in 1972. She then taught history and Spanish in Grenada for two years and subsequently in St Lucia. In 1980, she graduated from Georgetown University, Washington, DC, with a master's degree in Latin American Studies. She graduated from the London School of Economics with a Ph.D. in Government. Collins was deeply involved in the Grenadian Revolution and served as a government coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean. She left Grenada for England in 1983. From 1984 to 1995, Collins taught at the University of North London. She is currently a Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Maryland. Her critical works include "Themes and Trends in Caribbean Writing Today" in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World (ed. Helen Carr, Pandora Press, 1989), and "To be Free is Very Sweet" in Slavery and Abolition (Vol. 15, issue 3, 1994, pp. 96–103). Her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks, was published in 1985, at which time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In England, she began her first novel, Angel. In 1987, she published Angel, which follows the lives of Grenadians as they struggled for independence. Specifically, Angel is about a young woman going through the political turbulence in Grenada. Her collection of short stories, Rain Darling, was produced in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack, in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995. A review of her 2003 poetry collection, Lady in a Boat, states, "Ranging from poems reveling in the nation language of her island to poems that capture the beauty of its flora, Collins presents her island and people going about the business of living. They attempt to come to terms with the past and construct a future emerging out of the crucible of violence. Lady in a Boat is a poignant retelling of a period in history when, for a brief moment, Caribbean ascendancy seemed possible. Merle Collins shows how the death of this moment continues to haunt the Caribbean imagination." Her most recent collection of stories, The Ladies Are Upstairs, was published in 2011.

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Clairvoyant: The Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce by Alison Leslie Gold. New York. 1992. Hyperion. 1562829866. 159 pages. hardcover. Jacket photograph by John Stuart. Jacket design by Craig DeCamps.

1562829866 DESCRIPTION - This beautifully written and bold novel recreates the troubled inner life of James Joyce's mentally ill daughter, Lucia. Falling somewhere between the novels of Celine and Jean Rhys, Clairvoyant combines merriment with misery, the real with the unreal, and plunges the reader into a labyrinth of strange yet exhilarating imagination. Although Lucia was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, James Joyce, unlike his wife, refused to believe his daughter was truly mentally ill. Instead, he thought her to be clairvoyant, equipped with gifts that could be understood by few people. Alison Leslie Gold has recreated the tortured imagined life of this forgotten woman. By turns engrossing and compelling, Clairvoyant not only sheds new light on one of world literature's most towering figures, it also lets us into the mind and heart of a woman whose life has been Overshadowed by that brilliant, but far from perfect, literary artist. Drawn from factual details of the Joyce family and their contemporaries which include Carl Jung and Samuel Beckett and through a mixture of memory, dream, and hallucination, Clairvoyant is a stirring tribute to Lucia's ability to survive in the face of a most mysterious and terrible illness. ‘A vividly written book that plays daringly, in the no-man's-land between biography and fiction. Alison Leslie Gold deserves a wide audience.' - Jay Parini, author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year. ‘This is a fascinating and upsetting book, one that compels the reader to rethink his notions of the relation between insanity and genius.' - MacDonald Harris, author of The Balloonist and Hemingway's Suitcase.

Gold Alison Leslie

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Alison Leslie Gold was born and grew up in New York City. Co-author of Anne Frank Remembered with Miep Gies (the woman who actually hid Anne Frank), Ms. Gold has often lived abroad. She presently divides her time between California, British Columbia, and Greece.

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Dedalus On Crete: Essays On the Implications of Joyce's PORTRAIT by Joseph Feehan (introduction). Los Angeles. 1956. Saint Thomas More Guild/Immaculate Heart College. 88 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Sister M. Corita, IHM.

dedalus on crete DESCRIPTION - ‘The essays printed here were delivered in the fall and winter of 1955 as part of the Integration Program at Immaculate Heart College. This particular forum was sponsored by the English Department, whose chairman, veteran of two such ordeals, deputized the department's junior members to plan and conduct it. Casting about for ways to lighten this load, the junior members decided to share the burden with the faculty as a whole and invited colleagues from other departments to address their audience. The cheerful unwillingness of the lecturers to bind themselves by the instructions of the chairmen resulted, to our corporate delight, in work worthy on its own merits of publication.'The College's Integration Program is now in its sixth year. Under the direction of a special committee it conducts a forum each semester which is aimed at engaging the college community, as well as students, in concentrated consideration of a single problem. The problem addressed in the program for fall, 1955, was that of the function and value of the artist in contemporary society. The alienation of the artist from society in the twentieth century led directly to Joyce as a locus classicus for consideration of the problem.'The nature of the problem addressed in each forum is of course incidental to the aims of the Integration Program itself. As we wearied the student body by saying, the aim of the program was not to solve the problem addressed - though our conviction was strong that the problem is of genuine importance - but to give the entire student body an experience of unified joint learning. As teachers, few things have excited our envy quite so much as the spectacle of a group of architectural students engaged in a corporate attack on a problem, each individual's solution to which became at once common property and the subject of scathing criticism from the entire group. Not only better individual, but decidedly better corporate solutions seemed, to our eyes at least, to result. We wanted these better individual and group results for our own program, and we hoped, too, that we could generate in our student body some of the esprit de corps we have seen flame out in those last furious and bohemian hours before a problem's deadline. What we most wanted to do, in other words, was to cut across department and catalogue lines to counteract the splintering and compartmentalizing of knowledge. To this end we set about preparing what was quite frankly another ‘course' - a course to be taken at the same time and from the same text by every student and every member of the faculty. We hoped to have the senior and the freshman, the Business and the Biology majors all reading, thinking, talking the same problem in relation to the same text. Our radical concern was with the isolation, not of the artist, but of the student.'In implementing these notions we gathered eclectically what features of earlier programs we had approved and fashioned our own from them. It had been the custom, except for one notable experiment in another direction, to confine the forum to a single tightly-packed day which began early and ended late. Against custom we requested and received permission to extend our program over the entire semester (though the human cost in agony and anxiety to the deans and student body officers who had to find us days, hours, and rooms, was great indeed). Earlier programs had laid their stress on panel and group discussions, but we chose instead to offer a series of lectures so that discussions when they came would be better informed and more meaningful. We drew our lecturers from the History, Philosophy, Education, Art and English departments, and every other week offered the assembled community an argument on or exposition of some aspect of our text, Joyce's Portrait, or of our problem, the function and value of the artist. To avoid a purely passive participation by our captive audience the alternate weeks were used for discussion of the lectures. Each lecturer prepared a series of questions on his lecture and during the week following his appearance one meeting of every class in his department was devoted to discussion of these questions. Thus the Integration Day itself became the climax to a series of lectures and discussions preparing for it. As had been'the unvarying rule, we invited a noted lecturer from outside the college, in this instance Mr. John Frederick Nims, to give the day that added value and zest only authority and accomplished success could give. All this does not indicate why the PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN was chosen as the text upon which all this corporate attention and energy was to be focused. (And nothing astonished us quite so much as the number of people, in the college and out, who asked why we chose it.) We did so, as a matter of fact, quite light-heartedly and with little apparent consideration. Yet we were clear from the first on why we did choose it. In the first place, our experience in course work had demonstrated repeatedly how much could be taught and learned from careful and repeated reading of the text - and we coldbloodedly planned to force the good students, because of successive lectures from diverse points of view, to read, re-read, and discuss to the point that even the indifferent and the poorer students would by combined and prolonged pressure also be brought to read and discuss. Secondly, as a practical consideration, the work was available in a good inexpensive reprint, so that we could plan to place it in the hands of every student and faculty member before the program got under way. (The first Integration program, of which the better students had spoken most and most highly, had centered all lectures and discussions on an object - a film - and we were insistent on making this a feature of our program.) In the third place, Joyce's book was clearly the most seminal and the classic statement of the problem addressed by our series. Finally - and it goes rather lamely in the saying - we wholeheartedly believed the book worth everybody's reading. What most astonished us in people's reaction to our choice of the Portrait was their quaint horror that a girl's school - and a Catholic school - should read Joyce at all! Who but Catholics might best be prepared to understand Joyce we were at a loss to know. And the image of ourselves thus thrust back at us from these inquisatorial optics - an image as of an institution compassed round and hushed like Milton's academy for females - was a delight to our souls so benighted and incongrous did it appear. We cannot claim that our girls responded with gurgling delight and clairvoyant assurance of judgment to the Portrait - we are less than positive the average parent or son would either - but they did read it, and they have benefited from it. Perhaps the least likely gain was recorded in classes within our own department. So sharply did many of the Freshmen respond to the initial reading, particularly under light of Dr. Evans' opening lecture, that the writing of autobiographical essays and sketches improved with dramatic suddenness. Our chairman, indeed, testified to this with the bemused suggestion that we have the freshmen read the Portrait early each year! This, then, was the program in which these lectures were delivered. Student response, as tabulated from an ambitious questionnaire, though sharply critical at some points, particularly on the paucity of discussion groups on the Integration Day itself, was preponderantly favorable not only to this, but to this type of program. But the real triumph was achieved by the lecturers themselves, who, in a task assumed purely as a favor to us, addressed themselves with such energy and enthusiasm to their several tasks as to edify the entire college. Minus only the necessary orientation and biographical lectures delivered at the beginning of the series, their work is here offered to wider view. All the lecturers except Dr. Alois Schardt have seen their lectures into the final written version. Dr. Schardt died during the Christmas holiday. Since he chose rather to round his exemplary life, we have had to round his words. Though little enough to him in his angelic, it is much to us in our human state, that we offer this collection in his memory.' – from the Introduction by Joseph Feehan.'

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Ulysses in Nighttown by James Joyce. New York. 1958. Modern Library. Paperback original. 119 pages. paperback. P45.

ulysses in nighttown p45 DESCRIPTION - Ulysses in Nighttown is a play based on the fifteenth episode of the 1922 novel Ulysses by James Joyce (unique among the book's episodes in that it is written as a play script). It was dramatized and transposed by Marjorie Barkenti, under the supervision of Padraic Colum, and contains incidental music by Peter Link. The show opened Off-Broadway in 1958 with Zero Mostel to a long and successful run, earning Mostel an Obie Award. It debuted on Broadway on February 15, 1974, at the Winter Garden Theatre and ran for 69 performances. The show had previously done a preview run of 26 performances in Philadelphia. The cast included Zero Mostel, Margery Beddow, Fionnula Flanagan, Gale Garnett, Tommy Lee Jones, John Astin, and David Ogden Stiers. The play received six nominations for the 1974 Tony Awards, winning in the category for best lighting design. Zero Mostel was also one of twenty-eight actors to receive special awards from Drama Desk in 1974. ‘The play gives a vivid picture of the dark seamy labyrinth of the mind of a worldly but unsophisticated man, gross, vain, sentimental, hypocritical, naïve, doomed.' - Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times. ‘A brilliant job! . . . Staged and acted with imagination, spirit, and vividness' - Richard Watts, The New York Post.

Joyce James

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected. Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland, on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that experienced increasing financial difficulties during his childhood. After attending Clongowes Wood College and Belevedere College (both Jesuit institutions) in Dublin, he entered the Royal University, where he studied languages and philosophy. Upon his graduation, in 1902, Joyce left Ireland for France but returned the following year because his mother was dying. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle (they fell in love on June 16, ‘Bloomsday’), and in October of that year they went together to Europe, settling in Trieste. In 1909 and again in 1912 Joyce made unsuccessful attempts to publish Dubliners, a collection of fifteen stories that he intended to be ‘a chapter of the moral history of my country focused on Dublin, ‘the centre of paralysis.’ In 1914 Dubliners finally appeared, followed by the semiautobiographical novel A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN, a reworking of an earlier manuscript, STEPHEN HERO. During the First World War Joyce and Nora lived in Zurich; in 1920 they moved to Paris, where Ulysses was published in 1922. FINNEGANS WAKE, Joyce’s most radical and complex work, began appearing in installments in 1928 and was published in its entirety in 1939. After the German occupation of Paris, Joyce and Nora (who were married in 1931) moved to Zurich, where he died in January. His complete oeuvre includes three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe does not extend far beyond Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.’

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The Cats of Copenhagen by James Joyce. New York. 2012. Scribner. 9781476708942. Illustrated by Casey Sorrow. unpaginated. hardcover. Jacket illustration by Casey Sorrow.

9781476708942 DESCRIPTION - THE CATS OF COPENHAGEN was first written for James Joyce's most beloved audience, his only grandson Stephen James Joyce, and sent in a letter dated September 5, 1936. Cats were clearly a common currency between Joyce and his grandson. In early August 1936, Joyce sent Stephen ‘a little cat filled with sweets' - a kind of Trojan cat meant to outwit grown-ups. A few weeks later, Joyce penned a letter from Copenhagen that begins ‘Alas! I cannot send you a Copenhagen cat because there are no cats in Copenhagen.' The letter reveals the modernist master at his most playful, yet Joyce's Copenhagen has a keen, anti-authoritarian quality that transcends the mere whimsy of a children's story. Only recently rediscovered, this marks the inaugural U.S. publication of THE CATS OF COPENHAGEN, a treasure for readers of all ages. A rare addition to Joyce's known body of work, it is a joy to see this exquisite story in print at last.

Joyce James

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The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce. New York. 1981. Schocken Books. 0805237828. Illustrated by Blachon. 28 pages. hardcover. Cover illustration by Blachon.

0805237828 DESCRIPTION - This short story started as a letter from James Joyce to his grandson Stevie. A unique example of Joyce as a children's storyteller, it has the charm of simplicity and gently absurd humor brought to life by Blachon's hilarious vision of a medieval town with its caricatures of the pompous Lord Mayor and the citizens.

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Here Comes Everybody: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader by Anthony Burgess. London. 1965. Faber & Faber. 276 pages. hardcover.

here comes everybody faber faber no dw DESCRIPTION - Anthony Burgess's own forward to his work on Joyce establishes the purpose and the tone of his study. Vigorous, humorous, and perceptive, his commentary is an excellent introduction and a valuable companion to the reading of Joyce.

Burgess Anthony AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - John Anthony Burgess Wilson,(25 February 1917 - 22 November 1993) - who published under the pen name Anthony Burgess - was an English writer. From relatively modest beginnings in a Manchester Catholic family in the North of England, he eventually became one of the best known English literary figures of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although Burgess was predominantly a comic writer, the dystopian satire A Clockwork Orange remains his best known novel. In 1971 it was adapted into a highly controversial film by Stanley Kubrick, which Burgess said was chiefly responsible for the popularity of the book. Burgess produced numerous other novels, including the Enderby quartet, and Earthly Powers, regarded by most critics as his greatest novel. He also worked as a literary critic, writing studies of classic writers, most notably James Joyce. He was a longtime literary critic for The Observer and The Guardian. Burgess was also an accomplished musician and linguist. He composed over 250 musical works, including a first symphony around age 18, wrote a number of libretti, and translated, among other works, Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus the King and Carmen.

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Two Tales of Shem and Shaun: Fragments From Work in Progress by James Joyce. London. 1932. Faber & Faber.Preceded only by a limited edition of 650 copies published in Paris by the Black Sun Press, in 1929. 45 pages. hardcover.

two tales of shem and shaun no dw DESCRIPTION - Two short tales by Joyce, featuring characters from Finegan's Wake. Before FINNEGANS WAKE was ever published in its entirety in book form, Joyce started publishing individual books of chapters from his ‘Work in Progress.' In 1929, Harry and Caresse Crosby, owners of the Black Sun Press, contacted James Joyce through bookstore owner Sylvia Beach and arranged to print three short fables about the novel's three children Shem, Shaun and Issy that had already appeared in translation. These were ‘The Mookse and the Gripes', ‘The Triangle', and ‘The Ondt and the Gracehoper'. The Black Sun Press named the new book Tales Told of Shem and Shaun for which they paid Joyce US$2,000 for 600 copies, unusually good pay for Joyce at that time. Their printer Roger Lescaret erred when setting the type, leaving the final page with only two lines. Rather than reset the entire book, he suggested to the Crosby's that they ask Joyce to write an additional eight lines to fill in the remainder of the page. Caresse refused, insisting that a literary master would never alter his work to fix a printer's error. Lescaret appealed directly to Joyce, who promptly wrote the eight lines requested. Faber and Faber published book editions of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle' (1930), and ‘Haveth Childers Everywhere' (1931), HCE's long defence of his life which would eventually close chapter III.3. A year later they published Two Tales of Shem and Shaun, which dropped ‘The Triangle' from the previous Black Sun Press edition. Book 2 was published serially in transition between February 1933 and May 1938, and a final individual book publication, Storiella as She Is Syung, was published by Corvinus Press in 1937, made up of sections from what would become chapter II.2.

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Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce: A Critical Edition by James Joyce. Gainesville. 2024. University Press of Florida. 9780813069913. Edited by Sangam MacDuff, Angus McFadzean, and Morris Beja. 6 b/w illus., table, notes, bibliography, index. The Florida James Joyce Series. 240 pages. hardcover. Front: Louis le Brocquy, ‘Dubliners, Ballast Office’, 1986. Lithograph on handmade Japanese paper, 45 x 32 cm. Edition of 35.

9780813069913 DESCRIPTION - This book offers the first critical edition of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Presenting the texts with background information and thorough annotations, this edition provides a vivid insight into Joyce’s art. Joyce’s early texts, which informed his later masterpieces, available for the first time in a comprehensive critical edition. This book offers the first critical edition of the forty short texts James Joyce called “epiphanies.” Among Joyce’s earliest literary compositions, although published posthumously, the epiphanies are a series of highly polished miniatures, many of which Joyce reused in his later writings. By presenting the epiphanies with background details and thorough annotations, this edition provides a vivid insight into his art. Collected Epiphanies of James Joyce features an introduction to the texts that summarizes Joyce’s concept of epiphany; their biographical and cultural context; their echoes and adaptations in Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake; and their critical reception and editorial history. Each epiphany is transcribed directly from its original manuscript, accompanied by extensive notes that include more information specific to each piece, as well as textual variants. Styled as prose poems, dramatic sketches, or combinations of the two, the epiphanies can be seen not only as lyrical counterparts to Joyce’s poetry in Chamber Music but also as bridges to the writer’s landmark fiction. This collection demonstrates that the epiphanies offer a paradigm case for studying the development of Joyce’s work as a whole, prompting a reassessment of their literary significance. A volume in the Florida James

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Collected Poems by James Joyce. New York. 1937. Viking Press. This 2nd printing was published a month after an initial Viking Press printing of 1,000. 63 pages. hardcover. Cover from a portrait of James Joyce after a drawing by Augustus John.

collected poems james joyce 2nd printing DESCRIPTION - Joyce published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the satirical broadside ‘The Holy Office' (1904), in which he proclaimed himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic revival. His first full-length poetry collection Chamber Music (referring, Joyce explained, to the sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot) consisted of 36 short lyrics. This publication led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, who was a champion of Joyce's work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes Gas From A Burner' (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927) and ‘Ecce Puer' (written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his father). It was published by the Black Sun Press in Collected Poems (1936). This edition contains the poetry from - Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach and Ecce Puer.

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Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary Allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake by James S. Atherton. New York. 1960. Viking Press. 308 pages. hardcover.

books at the wake no dw DESCRIPTION - In Finnegans Wake Joyce uses world literature, great and small, sacred and profane, as one of the most important and frequent of his sources. Setting out to explore these literary allusions, Mr. Atherton sheds a great deal of light upon other aspects of Joyce s work. Entire chapters are devoted to such major figures as Swift and Lewis Carroll, while less important influences are grouped together under such headings as The Irish Writers and The Fathers of the Church. He also surveys the various interpretations of Finnegans Wake, and makes use of the Letters of James Joyce and the manuscript of Finnegans Wake in the British Museum.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James S(tephen) Atherton (1910–1985) was a British Joyce scholar, former lecturer at Wigan District Mining and technical College, Wigan, England, and visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1965. In 1959, Atherton published The Books at the Wake: A Study of Literary allusions in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, a work he revised and expanded in 1974. The Books at the Wake is a detailed study of the written sources Joyce used when composing Finnegans Wake and of the function these sources play in his wok. It had a seminal impact on Joyce scholarship, providing an important foundation for a range of subsequent studies of the diverse literary influences on Joyce's last work. Atherton also wrote the introduction and notes to the 1965 Heinemann edition of A Portrait of the Author as a Young Man.

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The Portable James Joyce by James Joyce. New York. 1947. Viking Press. With An Introduction & Notes by Harry Levin. 760 pages. hardcover.

portable james joyce 1947 DESCRIPTION - THE PORTABLE JAMES JOYCE, edited and with an introduction by Harry Levin, includes four of the six books on which Joyce's astonishing reputation is founded: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN; HIS COLLECTED POEMS (including CHAMBER MUSIC); EXILES, Joyce's only drama; and his volume of short stories, DUBLINERS. In addition, there is a generous sampling from ULYSSES and FINNEGANS WAKE, including the famous ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle' episode.

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The Critical Writings of James Joyce by James Joyce. New York. 1959. Viking Press. Edited by Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann. 288 pages. hardcover.

critical writings of james joyce DESCRIPTION - From unpublished manuscripts, playbills, random pamphlets, and obscure periodicals the editors have assembled this choice collection of Joyce's little-known essays and critical writings (including some unexpected satirical verses). Written over a lifetime, the collection opens with a schoolboy essay from Joyce's Belvedere College days in 1896, when he was fourteen, and closes with a 1937 manifesto in French, on the Moral Right of Authors, prompted by the ULYSSES piracy case. Between them is a rich selection of comments on novelists, dramatists and poets from Ibsen and Yeats to Pound and Italo Svevo. These pieces, never before gathered together in a book and in some cases never printed before, reflect the wide-ranging mind, the pungent and often savage commentator, the master of language and defender of his craft. Each of the fifty-seven items has an introduction by the editors explaining its genesis and relating it to the Joyce canon; there are also explanatory notes on many references in the texts. This book is a must for the growing body of Joyce students, and will prove a delight to others who share Joyce's critical interest in his writing contemporaries. CONTENTS: Trust not appearances (1896?); Force (1898); The study of languages (1898/99); Royal Hibernian Academy 'Ecce homo' (1899); Drama and life (1900); Ibsen's new drama (1900); The day of the rabblement (1901); James Clarence Mangan (1902); An Irish poet (1902); George Meredith (1902); Today and tomorrow in Ireland (1903); A suave philosophy (1903); An effort at precision in thinking (1903); Colonial verses (1903); Catilina (1903); The soul of Ireland (1903); The motor derby (1903); Aristotle on education (1903); A ne'er-do-well (1903); Empire building (1903); New fiction (1903); The mettle of the pasture (1903); A peep into history (1903); A French religious novel (1903); Unequal verse (1903); Mr. Arnold Graves' new work (1903); A neglected poet (1903); Mr. Mason's novels (1903); The Bruno philosophy (1903); Humanism (1903); Shakespeare explained (1903); Borlase and Son (1903); Aesthetics (1903/04) I. The Paris notebook; II. The Pola notebook; The holy office (1904); Ireland, island of saints and sages (1907); James Clarence Mangan [2] (1907); Fenianism (1907); Home rule comes of age (1907); Ireland at the bar (1907); Oscar Wilde: the poet of 'SalomE' (1909); Bernard Shaw's battle with the censor (1909); The home rule comet (1910); William Blake (1912); The shade of Parnell (1912); The city of the tribes (1912); The mirage of the fisherman of Aran (1912); Politics and cattle disease (1912); Gas from a burner (1912); Dooleysprudence (1916); Programme notes for the English players (1918/19) Barrie, The twelve pound look; Synge, Riders to the sea; Shaw, The dark lady of the sonnets; Martyn, The heather field; Letter on Pound (1925); Letter on Hardy (1928); Letter on Svevo (1929); From a banned writer to a banned singer (1932); Ad-writer (1932); Epilogue to Ibsen's Ghosts (1934); Communication de M. James Joyce se le droit moral se Ecrivains (1937).

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