Best of
20th-Century

1946

The Complete Stories


Franz KafkaEithne Wilkins - 1946
    With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.

Politics and the English Language


George Orwell - 1946
    The essay focuses on political language, which, according to Orwell, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Orwell believed that the language used was necessarily vague or meaningless because it was intended to hide the truth rather than express it.

The Street


Ann Petry - 1946
    Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry's first novel, a beloved bestseller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen


Tadeusz Borowski - 1946
    In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes. Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

The Portable Faulkner


William Faulkner - 1946
    No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner's vision than The Portable Faulkner. Edited by Malcolm CowleyContents:The Old PeopleThe UnvanquishedThe Last WildernessThe PeasantsThe End of an OrderMississippi FloodModern TimesThe Undying Past

All Men Are Mortal


Simone de Beauvoir - 1946
    But, as he recounts the story of his immortal existence over more than six centuries, as she learns of his involvement in some of the most significant events in history and how human hope and love have withered in him, she finally understands the implications for him and for love.

Paterson


William Carlos Williams - 1946
    Originally four books (published individually between 1946 and 1951), the structure of Paterson (in Dr. Williams' words) "follows the course of the Passaic River" from above the great falls to its entrance into the sea. The unexpected Book Five, published in 1958, affirms the triumphant life of the imagination, in spite of age and death. This revised edition has been meticulously re-edited by Christopher MacGowan, who has supplied a wealth of notes and explanatory material.

A Scots Quair: Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, Grey Granite


Lewis Grassic Gibbon - 1946
    Central to the trilogy is Chris Guthrie, one of the most remarkable female characters in modern literature. In Sunset Song, Gibbon's finest achievement, the reader follows Chris through her girlhood in a tight-knit Scottish farming community: the seasons, the weddings, the funerals, the grind of work, the gossip. As the Great War takes its toll, machines replace the old way of life. Cloud Howe and Grey Granite take Chris from her rural homeland to life in an industrial Scotland and the desperate years of the Depression. The trilogy as a whole is a major achievement, a picture of a society undergoing traumatic and far-reaching transformation. Always readable, never sentimental, A Scots Quair is one of the most important works of modern Scottish literature.

German Autumn


Stig Dagerman - 1946
    First published in Sweden in 1947, German Autumn, a collection of the articles written for that assignment, was unlike any other reporting at the time. While most Allied and foreign journalists spun their writing on the widely held belief that the German people deserved their fate, Dagerman disagreed and reported on the humanness of the men and women ruined by the war—their guilt and suffering. Dagerman was already a prominent writer in Sweden, but the publication and broad reception of German Autumn throughout Europe established him as a compassionate journalist and led to the long-standing international influence of the book.Presented here in its first American edition with a compelling new foreword by Mark Kurlansky, Dagerman’s essays on the tragic aftermath of war, suffering, and guilt are as hauntingly relevant today amid current global conflict as they were sixty years ago.

Zorba the Greek


Nikos Kazantzakis - 1946
    Zorba, a Greek working man, is a larger-than-life character, energetic and unpredictable. He accompanies the unnamed narrator to Crete to work in the narrator’s lignite mine, and the pair develops a singular relationship. The two men couldn’t be further apart: The narrator is cerebral, modest, and reserved; Zorba is unfettered, spirited, and beyond the reins of civility. Over the course of their journey, he becomes the narrator’s greatest friend and inspiration and helps him to appreciate the joy of living.Zorba has been acclaimed as one of the most remarkable figures in literature; he is a character in the great tradition of Sinbad the Sailor, Falstaff, and Sancho Panza. He responds to all that life offers him with passion, whether he’s supervising laborers at a mine, confronting mad monks in a mountain monastery, embellishing the tales of his past adventures, or making love. Zorba the Greek explores the beauty and pain of existence, inviting readers to reevaluate the most important aspects of their lives and live to the fullest.

The Collected Poems


A.E. Housman - 1946
    Housman's verse as it was established in 1939, three years after his death. In contains A Shropshire Lad, Last Poems, More Poems, the Additional Poems, and the three translations from A.W. Pollard's anthology, Odes from the Greek Dramatists.

The Neon Wilderness


Nelson Algren - 1946
    They don't fade away. - Studs Terkel, from the AfterwordOnce more I have been impressed by Algren's talent, his probity and his command of a tough language that he transforms into a raw and bleeding poetry. - Malcolm Cowley in The NationSince the publication on The Neon Wilderness... Nelson Algren has been acknowledged as a master of that American Realism touched with poetry, which attempts to give voice to the insulted and injured. He is a philosopher of deprivation, a moral force of considerable dimensions and a wonderful user of the language - Donald BarthelmeMr Algren, boy you are good - one of the two best authors in America - Ernest Hemingway

Temptation


János Székely - 1946
    Béla has never had much luck. His mother abandoned him at birth to go to work in Budapest, leaving him in the care of the dubious ‘Old Rozi’, a former prostitute who now runs a foster home with equal parts hauteur and cruelty. Victimised and almost starved by his guardian, Béla must fight for everything, from scraps of the other boys' food to the right to go to school. At fourteen he is caught trying to steal a pair of shoes; his mother is called and she reluctantly takes him with her to Budapest.Once in the capital Béla manages to secure a position at a grand old hotel, and it is here that a more privileged lifestyle seems to extend a hand to him. Operating the lift, Béla encounters people from across Hungarian society and beyond, including the beautiful daughter of an American businessman and a passionate revolutionary. But his new lifestyle offers both pleasures and perils, and Béla must find a way to forge his own life from the divergent influences that surround him.A picaresque classic with a rich vein of bawdy humour, Temptation is an under-appreciated masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction. Rich, varied and endlessly entertaining, the novel creates a stunning panorama of Hungarian society through the travails of its singularly charming hero.

Miracle of the Rose


Jean Genet - 1946
    It is, however, Genet's second novel, having been written in La Santé and Tourelles prisons in 1943, directly after Our Lady of the Flowers. Like that first work, Miracle of the Rose was written in the solitude of a prison cell, on the pieces of white paper the penal authorities furnish the convicts for making paper bags.The work is set in the State prison of Fontevrault. It is the height of the German Occupation and in the prisons of France the convicts, barely subsisting on near-starvation rations, spend their endless days weaving camouflage nets for their German conquerors. Miracle of the Rose is, first of all, an account of life at Fontevrault during that period. But Genet is no realist, and his account of prison life is an extraordinary mixture of dreams and reality, past and present.If Fontevrault is the present of his narrative, the past is the Mettray Reformatory, the almost idyllic, flower-covered "prison colony" for boys to which he was sent for theft as a mere child. It was here at Mettray that he was initiated into the life of confinement, into the world of the criminals and homosexuals in which he was to live for the next twenty-five years. Genet's story moves back and forth between Fontevrault and Mettray almost without the reader's being aware of the transition. Doubtless, in Genet's mind, there is no transition. Both prisons and both times fuse into one immense and erotic dream.The boys at Mettray do not pity or despise the hardened criminals at neighboring Fontevrault; on the contrary, they are the "saints" the boys look up to, the heroes they hope to emulate. More than fifteen years after his precocious arrival at the Mettray Reformatory, Genet finally reaches the Fontevrault Prison. Among the pimps and big shots, the crashers and chickens that form the homosexual hierarchy of the convict criminal society, he finds again many of his former boyhood friends and lovers.Foremost among them is Harcamone, a character notable in the narrative for his off-stage presence. Harcamone has been condemned to death for having killed the only guard at Fontevrault who had ever shown him the least bit of kindness. During the month and a half prior to his execution, his presence from his solitary cell on death row both encompasses and dominates the prison. At one point, as Harcamone passes Genet in the prison corridor, the author has a vision in which he sees the chains that bind Harcamone miraculously flower into a garland of white roses.Miracle of the Rose contains many such visions wherein Genet, taking the dross of "evil'' transmutes it into a work of beauty.

Coral Comes High: U.S. Marines and the Fight for Peleliu


George P. Hunt - 1946
     The 1st Marines stormed the Pacific island of Peleliu. Captain Hunt and his company of two hundred and thirty-five men were among some of the first to land; forty-eight hours later, only seventy-eight of them were alive. Outnumbered and outgunned by the enemy, they beat off all attacks with a courage which is at the same time matter-of-fact and superhuman individual, yet collective and drawn from the real comradeship of men who cannot let each other down. Here are dramatic accounts of wounded men miraculously still fighting, of two men seen in silhouette at night against the flashes of guns in a death struggle atop a cliff, of the flame-scarred bodies of Japanese in caves and pillboxes, of a nervous and badly scared youngster shooting one of his own comrades. When, at last, relief came and Captain Hunt and his handful of men staggered back to the beach, they had withstood three terrible counterattacks and killed more than five hundred enemy soldiers. “Coral Comes High is an unpretentious, stark, blow-by-blow story of a terrible action, well told in the fewest possible words” Time Magazine “This is a story of fighting men told by a fighting man.” General Alexander Vandegrift, United States Marine Corps. Captain Hunt served in the 1st Regiment of the 1st Marine Division in the South Pacific and was decorated with the Silver Star medal and the Navy Cross. He received the Navy Cross for his part in the action described in this book. The citation for this decoration relates how Captain Hunt's company of riflemen was reduced to thirty-four men; how these survivors defended an isolated position "against three counterattacks killing four hundred and twenty-two Japanese.” After the war he worked as a writer and editor for Fortune and Life magazines. Coral Comes High was first published in 1946 and Hunt passed away in 1991.

Really the Blues


Mezz Mezzrow - 1946
    First published in 1946, Really the Blues was a rousing wake-up call to alienated young whites to explore the world of jazz, the first music America could call its own. Told in the jive lingo of the underground's inner circle, this classic is an unforgettable chronicle of street life, smoky clubs, and roadhouse dances.

Last Stop Auschwitz: My Story of Survival from within the Camp


Eddy de Wind - 1946
    His mother had been taken to this camp by Nazis but Eddy was assured by the Jewish Council she would be freed in exchange for his labor. He later found out she'd already been transferred to Auschwitz.While at Westerbork, he fell in love with a woman named Friedel and they married. One year later, they were transported to Auschwitz. Upon arrival, Friedel and Eddy were separated -- Eddy forced to work as a medical assistant in one barrack, Friedel at the mercy of Nazi experimentation in a nearby block. Sneaking moments with his beloved and communicating whenever they could, Eddy longed for the day he could be free with Friedel . . .Written in the camp itself in the weeks following the Red Army's liberation of the camp, Last Stop Auschwitz is the raw, true account of Eddy's experiences at Auschwitz. In stunningly poetic prose, he provides unparalleled access to the horrors he faced in the concentration camp. Including photos from Eddy's life before, during, and after the Holocaust, this poignant memoir is at once a moving love story, a detailed portrayal of the atrocities of Auschwitz, and an intelligent consideration of the kind of behavior -- both good and evil -- people are capable of. Never before published in English, this book is a vital and enduring document: a testament to the strength of the human spirit, and a warning against the depths we can sink to when prejudice is given power.

Listen, Little Man!


Wilhelm Reich - 1946
    Written in 1946 in answer to the gossip and defamation that plagued his remarkable career, it tells how Reich watched, at first naively, then with amazement, and finally with horror, at what the Little Man does to himself; how he suffers and rebels; how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a "representative of the people," he misuses this power and makes it crueler than the power it has supplanted.Reich has us to look honestly at ourselves and to assume responsibility for our lives and for the great untapped potential that lies in the depth of human nature.

The President


Miguel Ángel Asturias - 1946
    It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”

The Miracle Of The Bells


Russell Janney - 1946
    However, with Olga’s death, there begins an exhibition of power by the press agent—and this becomes the real substance of the book.A novel of joyousness in life that will sweep the reader into a delightful liberating experience...

More Was Lost


Eleanor Perenyi - 1946
    Lucid, crisp, and unpretentious, this re-release of More Was Lost is a joy.

Miss Pym Disposes


Josephine Tey - 1946
    Beneath the so normal surface run sinister undercurrents of rivalry and jealousy. Then comes tragedy. An accident? Or is it murder? Respectable, law-abiding Miss Pym discovers some vital evidence - but should she reveal it?

North and South


Elizabeth Bishop - 1946
    

The Four Graces


D.E. Stevenson - 1946
    Stevenson Mr. Grace is vicar of a country parish in World War II England. Blessed with four grown-up daughters, three of whom live at home, he has constant help tending to his regular duties and responsibilities toward the war effort. Liz, Sal, and Tilly Grace have more than enough to keep them busy, but their responsibilities are put on hold when they're tempted with potential suitors. Reminiscent of Little Women, The Four Graces showcases Stevenson's talent for capturing love, family, and the humor and delight found in everyday life.

Histoires


Jacques Prévert - 1946
    

City of Lions


Józef Wittlin - 1946
    Known by a variety of names, the City of Lions is now in western Ukraine. Situated in different countries during its history, it is a city located along the fault-lines of Europe's history.City of Lions presents two essays, written more than half a century apart - but united by one city.Józef Wittlin's sensual and lyrical paean to his Lwów, written in exile, is a deep cry of love and pain for his city, most of whose familiar faces have fled or been killed.Philippe Sands' finely honed exploration of what has been lost and what remains interweaves a lawyer's love of evidence with the emotional heft of a descendant of Lviv.With an illuminating preface by Eva Hoffman and stunning new photographs by Diana Matar, City of Lions is a powerful and melancholy evocation of central Europe in the twentieth century, with a special resonance for today's troubled continent.Józef Wittlin (b.1896) was a major Polish poet, novelist (Salt of the Earth won him a nomination for the Nobel prize), essayist and translator. He studied in Vienna, where he met Joseph Roth and Rainer Maria Rilke, and he served in the Austro-Hungarian army in the First World War. With the outbreak of WWII, Wittlin was evacuated to New York, where he died in 1976.Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at University College London. Lviv is the heart of his latest book, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity.Diana Matar is a photographer whose work investigates issues of history, memory and state sponsored violence. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, she has won many prizes and her work has been exhibited in institutions around the world.

The Bridge of Years: A Novel


May Sarton - 1946
    It takes place during the years between the world wars and explores the life of a Belgian family, the Duchesnes, and their mutual devotion which intensifies under the shadow of impending disaster.Mélanie Duchesne, mother of three, is an active businesswoman, whose courage, energy, and optimism bind the family and its farm together. Paul, her husband, is a philosopher, detached, moody, continually embroiled in the spiritual conflicts of a crumbling Europe.The last years before the second war are tense ones, a time for stock-taking, for a quickening of the pace of life. But it is Mélanie who encourages her family to proceed with their plans, to continue with their way of life. And it is Mélanie who decides their future as the Germans launch their invasion of Belgium.

The Sound and The Fury / As I Lay Dying


William Faulkner - 1946
    

Strange Defeat


Marc Bloch - 1946
    In the midst of his anguish, he nevertheless "brought to his study of the crisis all the critical faculty and all the penetrating analysis of a first-rate historian" (Christian Science Monitor).Bloch takes a close look at the military failures he witnessed, examining why France was unable to respond to attack quickly and effectively. He gives a personal account of the battle of France, followed by a biting analysis of the generation between the wars. His harsh conclusion is that the immediate cause of the disaster was the utter incompetence of the High Command, but his analysis ranges broadly, appraising all the factors, social as well as military, which since 1870 had undermined French national solidarity.

We Were in Auschwitz


Janusz Nel Siedlecki - 1946
    Dedicated to the American Seventh Army, this work originally appeared in Polish in an edition of 10,000 numbered copies, unspecified numbers of which were bound in material cut from concentration camp stripes and from SS uniforms.The inspiration for writing a book which could tell the truth about Auschwitz came from the conditions in immediately-post-war Munich in which the authors found themselves, and was articulated by Janusz Nel Siedlecki in his 1994 memoir, Beyond Lost Dreams: "As the one common enemy disappeared, so vanished all moral rules and restraints. Individuals, as well as large groups, competed for food, recognition, and a better life. The polish people were divided into innumberable factions .... The survivors carried forth their banners of "martyrdom" and sowed the seeds of future legends. They wanted glory -- I wanted to bear witness for the tortured, gassed, burnt; for all the unknown, unnamed, already forgotten dead."The publication history of We Were in Auschwitz reflects both the physical chaos that followed the end of the war in Europe and the political situation in Poland and in the U.S. Having written the book in their requisitioned apartment in Munich, the authors neededAmerican permission to publish it. "There was no printing without an official permit, and no permit for anything unessential, " Siedlecki wrote in Beyond Lost Dreams, "Cigarettes opened the gates of Bruckmann, the famous printers of Munich. My crude camp-German clinched the deal at pre-war prices."According the Siedlecki, the book immediately met with mixed reaction: "Praise from the Polish Western press, but, for debunking the 'heroes, ' vicious threats from many ex-prisoners." Meanwhile, the group of authors started to disperse. Tadeusz Borowski returned to Poland in May 1946; Krystyn Olszewski also returned to Poland, while Siedlecki emigrated to England. Anatol Girs left Munich for the U.S. in 1947, bringing with him the remaining copies of the book with high hopes of selling them to the Polish-American community. However, this immigrant community was hostile to Borowski's association with the communist regime on his return to Poland. Unable to pay the cost of storing the copies he had brought, Girs was forced to destroy most of them, keeping only a few.

Anzac to Amiens: A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in the Great War


C.E.W. Bean - 1946
    

My Dear Aunt Flora


Elizabeth Cadell - 1946
    With the appearance of George Manning, however, peace is at an end. George is a successful actor, spoilt and selfish. He sees nothing at Rushing but discomfort and boredom, and his relations hope that he will carry out his repeated threat of departing by the next train. But with the arrival of Brian Lorimer and the enchanting Angela Reynolds, George finds something at Rushing which proves a greater attraction than his comfortable existence in London.

George Grosz: An Autobiography


George Grosz - 1946
    Grosz's account of a world gone mad is as acute and provocative as the art that depicts it, and this translation of a work long out of print restores the spontaneity, humor, and energy of the author's German text. It also includes a chapter on Grosz's experience in the Soviet Union—omitted from the original English-language edition—as well as more writings about his twenty-year self-imposed exile in America, and a fable written in English.

And This Is the Light


Leah Goldberg - 1946
    It is the summer of 1931 and twenty-year-old Nora Krieger returns to her small-town home in Lithuania from university in Berlin ready to present a new, mature self. Instead her time at home becomes a period of unrequited love, difficult memories and introspection.

Voyage to Somewhere


Sloan Wilson - 1946
    Homesick for his wife, he has no choice but to accept the assignment and a crew of twenty-six landlubbers whose last names all begin with W. Their first load of cargo? Pineapples destined for Hawaii. Life aboard the one-hundred-eighty-foot SV-126 is never dull. When Barton isn’t battling gale-force winds and monstrous waves, he is coping with seasick sailors and budding rivalries that threaten to turn mutinous. Hanging over the ship like a storm cloud is the knowledge that the world is at war and the enemy is never far away. Whether Lieutenant Barton and his crew are fighting torpedoes and typhoons or writing letters to loved ones, Voyage to Somewhere offers a unique and page-turning perspective on what the Second World War was really like.

Rhubarb


H. Allen Smith - 1946
    An eccentric millionaire who loathes all canines, is struck with admiration for any cat with the guts to go out and avenge his entire race and decides to adopt him.Thaddeus Whitcomb Banner (the dog-hating millionaire), charmed by the cat's pugnacious attitude, calls his new pet, Rhubarb, a baseball term for a violent and noisy altercation. Rhubarb takes a liking to Thad and his press secretary Eric Yaeger, but he is indifferent if not downright vicious to everyone else. When his owner dies only forty-eight hours after signing his last will and testament, Rhubarb is there, sitting in his master's lap. In his will, Thad praises Rhubarb for his unsparing love and solace and thereby leaves him his entire fortune, including ownership of a professional baseball team, the New York Loons. Eric Yaeger is appointed Rhubarb's guardian, and Thad's daughter Myra, a mean-spirited young hipster doofus, is summarily disinherited. Although initially reluctant to play baseball for a team owned by a cat, Loons players are tricked into believing that Rhubarb is a good luck charm and subsequently begin winning games. Meanwhile, Myra, not about to let a cat get away with her millions, begins a lawsuit to have the will invalidated, while her lawyer is part of a scheme to have Rhubarb murdered by a woman who has a mysterious connection to Myra. As for Eric, Rhubarb's frantic guardian ― well, Eric faces challenges only a fierce and concupiscent kitty cat can provide.

The Autobiography of William Allen White


William Allen White - 1946
    One of the most unforgettable personality of his age, a gifted writer, highly admired journalist, politician, friend of presidents, White's life history spans from the time of buffalo and wild Indians in his native Kansas to the age of FDR.

Eight Hours From England (Imperial War Museum Wartime Classics)


Anthony Quayle - 1946
    I have often wondered how it would come. Now I know. Any moment a bullet will smack into me, and a khaki bundle that was Overton will go tumbling down the hill on to the beach . . .’ " Autumn 1943. Realizing that his feelings for his sweetheart are not reciprocated, Major John Overton accepts a posting behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied Albania. Arriving to find the situation in disarray, Overton attempts to overcome geographical challenges and political intrigues to set up a new camp in the mountains overlooking the Adriatic. As he struggles to complete his mission against the chaotic backdrop of battle, Overton is left to ruminate on loyalty, comradeship, and the futility of war.

Deposition 1940-1944


Léon Werth - 1946
    Werth was a free-spirited and unclassifiable writer. He is the author of eleven novels, art and dance criticism, acerbic political reporting, and memorable personal essays. He was Jewish, and left Paris in June 1940 to hide out in his wife's country house in Saint-Amour, a small village in the Jura Mountains. His short memoir 33 Days recounts his struggle to get there. Deposition tells of daily life in the village, on nearby farms and towns, and finally back in Paris, where he draws the portrait of a Resistance network in his apartment and writes an eyewitness report of the insurrection that freed the city in August, 1944.From Saint-Amour, we see both the Resistance in the countryside, derailing troop trains, punishing notorious collaborators--and growing repression: arrests, torture, deportation, and executions. Above all, we see how Vichy and the Occupation affect the lives of farmers and villagers and how their often contradictory attitudes evolve from 1940-1944. Werth's ear for dialogue and novelist's gift for creating characters animate the diary: in the markets and in town, we meet real French peasants and shopkeepers, railroad men and the patronne of the cafe at the station, schoolteachers and gendarmes. They come off the page alive, and the countryside and villages come alive with them.With biting irony, Werth records, almost daily, what Vichy-German propaganda was saying on the radio and in the press. We follow the progress of the war as people did then, day by day. These entries make interesting, often amusing reading, a stark contrast with his gripping entries on the persecution and deportation of the Jews. Deposition is a varied and complex piece of living history, and a pleasure to read.

Just Jenifer


Janet Lambert - 1946
    At the outbreak of WWII, with her father, an army general overseas, adolescent Jenifer musters her wits to housekeep for her large and lively family in the first of this famous series.

The Zebra Derby


Max Shulman - 1946
    

Jane's Country Year


Malcolm Saville - 1946
    The account is divided into months, recounting her adventures in discovering the countryside. Beautifully illustrated throughout.

Midnight Tales: 20 Tales of the Uncanny


William Fryer Harvey - 1946
    

Poems of the Midwest


Carl Sandburg - 1946
    Contains the complete volumes of Chicago Poems and Cornhuskers.

East River


Sholem Asch - 1946
    Unlike the denser Jewish pockets of the lower East Side of New York, East 48th Street by the river was, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, an international neighborhood made up of Orthodox Jews, Catholic Irish, nostalgic Poles, chauvinistic Italians, all hungry, all overworked, all insecure. But although these folk were all, so to speak, melting in the same pot, they were kept at a certain distance from one another, by their inherited prejudices, the most pernicious of which were supplied by their religions. To allow them to live together and work together toward a happier life, and to turn them from their European pasts toward a high American future, they needed, in Asch’s view, the religion of love. And the same religion was needed to get the bosses and workers together in the garment industry, so as to end the sweatshops, the subcontracting system, and destructive strikes.

Mystery at Laughing Water


Dorothy Maywood Bird - 1946
    Phyllis' adventures roughing it at camp are mixed with the thrills of solving an old family mystery. Time period is contemporary (1940s).

The Best of Ambrose Bierce


Ambrose Bierce - 1946
    Includes: In the Midst of Life; Can Such Things Be? The Monk and the Hangman's Daughter; Negligible Tales; The Parentcide Club.

The Just Vengeance


Dorothy L. Sayers - 1946
    The Litchfield Festival Play for 1946

The Evolution of Prussia, the Making of an Empire


John Arthur Ransome Marriott - 1946