Emphasizing Paine’s American career, it brings together his best-known works—Common Sense, The American Crisis, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason—along with scores of letters, articles, and pamphlets.Paine came to America in 1774 at age 37 after a life of obscurity and failure in England. Within fourteen months he published Common Sense, the most influential pamphlet for the American Revolution, and began a career that would see him prosecuted in England, imprisoned and nearly executed in France, and hailed and reviled in the American nation he helped create. In Common Sense, Paine set forth an inspiring vision of an independent America as an asylum for freedom and an example of popular self-government in a world oppressed by despotism and hereditary privilege. The American Crisis, begun during “the times that try men’s souls” in 1776, is a masterpiece of popular pamphleteering in which Paine vividly reports current developments, taunts and ridicules British adversaries, and enjoins his readers to remember the immense stakes of their struggle. Among the many other items included in the volume are the combative “Forester” letters, written in a reply to a Tory critic of Common Sense, and several pieces concerning the French Revolution, including an incisive argument against executing Louis XVI.Rights of Man (1791–1792), written in response to Edmund Burke’s attacks on the French Revolution, is a bold vision of an egalitarian society founded on natural rights and unbound by tradition. Paine’s detailed proposal for government assistance to the poor inspired generations of subsequent radicals and reformers.The Age of Reason (1794–1795), Paine’s most controversial work, is an unrestrained assault on the authority of the Bible and a fervent defense of the benevolent God of deism.Included in this volume are a detailed chronology of Paine’s life, informative notes, an essay on the complex printing history of Paine’s work, and an index.

    This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay."

    It is also one of the most notorious. Used as evidence in a 1940 court case in which Russell was declared unfit to teach college-level philosophy, What I Believe was to become one of his most defining works. The ideas contained within were and are controversial, contentious and - to the religious - downright blasphemous. A remarkable work, it remains the best concise introduction to Russell's thought.

    Osip Mandelstam has in recent years come to be seen as a central figure in European modernism. Though known primarily as a poet, Mandelstam worked in many styles: autobiography, short story, travel writing, and polemic. Mandelstam's biographer, Clarence Brown, presents a collection of the poet's prose works that illuminates his far-ranging talent and places him within the canon of European modernism.This volume includes Mandelstam's "The Noise of Time, " a series of autobiographical sketches; "The Egyptian Stamp, " a novella echoing Gogol and Dostoevsky; "Fourth Prose, " and the famous travel memoirs "Theodosia" and "Journey to Armenia."

    ""Well, well, by all that's good! If it isn't Tom Fairfield back again! How are you, old man?"; "

    Similarly, we should preface the 1925 collection Na vlnách TSF (On the Waves of TSF) with the names of these two authors, leading representatives of the Czech avantgarde between the two World Wars and founding members of the artists’ group Devětsil. Karel Teige laid out the verses of his friend Jaroslav Seifert as striking typographical poems. Purportedly, he „depleted“ nearly all the font cases he could find at Obzina’s printing shop. In any case, he faithfully fulfilled the precepts of poetism about the world and poetry—to be multisensory. Imbued with „all the beauties of the world,“ Seifert’s verses are introduced with a mischievously reversed paraphrase of Karel Hynek Máchas (1810–1836) famous words: Light grief on the face / Deep laughter in the heart. With the effortlessness mimicking wireless transmission, Seifert and Teige transport us to Paris (Seifert visited the City of Light with Teige in 1924), to places where pineapples grow, to Australia, Marseille, New York, to distant ocean shores, and back to the banks of the Vltava river in Prague—all this facilitated, as it were, by Télégraphie sans fil (literally from French: wireless telegraphy). To be sure, the greatest concern of the lyrically gloomy narrator is joyfully unambiguous honeymoon destinations; if die we must, let us die of love… In subsequent editions (1938), Seifert’s youthful manifesto was titled Svatební cesta (Honeymoon). Understandably so, because the changed circumstances of Czech poetry hardly allowed for stepping into the same river twice; the former associates parted ways in their creative endeavors. Teige became a multifaceted art theoretician and embraced surrealism. After breaking with the communist party in 1929, Seifert became a lifelong social democrat and devoted himself primarily to newspaper journalism. The first edition of Na vlnách TSF gradually became rare until only reprints allowed us to explore the sources of this visual, almost hedonistic poetry. As a reprint, the collection is appearing for the fifth time, this time in its most faithful facsimile incarnation and in two independent permutations—in the original Czech version and as an English–Czech remake by Zdeněk Trinkewitz, translated by Dana Loewy. The Czech–born translator lives in the United States where early in her career, she won a student translation prize by the American Translators Association (1992). Subsequently, she received an honorary mention by the foremost Czech translators association and her translations of Jaroslav Seifert’s early work were published in 1997 by Hydra Books, a division of Northwestern University Press.