With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed personal relationships which ultimately lead to his destruction.Manipulated by his illiterate and grasping housekeeper, Therese, who has tricked him into marriage, and Benedikt Pfaff, a brutish concierge, Kien is forced out of his apartment - which houses his great library and one true passion - and into the underworld of the city. In this purgatory he is guided by a chess-playing dwarf of evil propensities, until he is eventually restored to his home. But on his return he is visited by his brother, an eminent psychiatrist who, by an error of diagnosis, precipitates the final crisis..."Auto-da-Fé" was first published in Germany in 1935 as "Die Blendung" ("The Blinding" or "Bedazzlement") and later in Britain in 1947, where the publisher noted Canetti as a 'writer of strongly individual genius, which may prove influential', an observation borne out when the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. "Auto-da-Fé" still towers as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, and Canetti's incisive vision of an insular man battling agianst the outside world is as fresh and rewarding today as when first it appeared in print.

    “I go, but I shall never come back again.” These were Isaac Jogues' words on the eve of embarking for a second missionary attempt in America. Shortly afterward, a skull-splitting Mohawk tomahawk made him a martyr. Fresh from the elegant life of Renaissance France, Jesuit priest Isaac Jogues landed in the savage wilderness of America in 1636. He came fervent in his priestly zeal to devote his life to Christianizing and civilizing the Indian nations that stalked the trackless forests — savages he was prepared to love, sight unseen, for the love of God. He lived among the Hurons enduring hunger, thirst, disease, and humiliation at their hands. A vast canvas unrolls in this suspenseful and swift-moving story of heroic sacrifice in the earliest days of New York and Canada. Against a background of bloody wars between great Indian nations and between the savages and the first European settlers in America passes the magnificent figure of the Jesuit, Isaac Jogues, intrepid pioneer, adventurer, victim of horrific cruelties, and saint. This is s story of violent action and great sacrifice that testifies to the faith and heroism of Isaac Jogues and his fellow martyrs. Francis X. Talbot, S.J. was the literary editor of the Jesuit magazine America. His biographical works on the French martyrs Isaac Jogues and Jean De Brebeuf are recognized as definitive.

    Howard's stories that appeared in pulp magazines like the revered Weird Tales. Robert E. Howard is considered the Godfather of Sword and Sorcery, and the creator of the international icon, Conan the Cimmerian.

    Cripure, as his students call him—the name a mocking contraction of Critique of Pure Reason—despises his colleagues, despairs of his charges, and is at odds with his family. The year is 1917, and the slaughter of the First World War goes on and on, with French soldiers not only dying in droves but also beginning to rise up in protest. Still haunted by the memory of the wife who left him long ago, Cripure turns his fury and scathing wit on everyone around him. Before he knows it, a trivial dispute with a complacently patriotic colleague has embroiled him in a duel.