The pieces in this volume show him to be at times playful, more serious at other, but writing always with the lightest of touches. He had the keenest of eyes for the 'infra-ordinary', the things we do every day - eating, sleeping, working - and the places we do them in without giving them a moment's thought. But behind the lightness and humour, there is also the sadness of a French Jewish boy who lost his parents in the Second World War and found comfort in the material world around him, and above all in writing.This volume contains a selection of Georges Perec's non-fiction works, along with a charming short story, 'The Winter Journey'. It also includes notes and an introduction describing Perec's life and career.

    In the summer, Dillard stalks muskrats in the creek and contemplates wave mechanics; in the fall she watches a monarch butterfly migration and dreams of Arctic caribou. She tries to con a coot; she collects pond water and examines it under a microscope. She unties a snake skin, witnesses a flood, and plays 'King of the Meadow' with a field of grasshoppers.

    This volume contains essays written by Elias Canetti between the years 1962 and 1974.

    A universal spiritual death has already touched us all, and physical death will soon flare up and consume us both and our children—but as before we still smile in a cowardly way and mumble without tounges tied. But what can we do to stop it? We haven't the strength?"Read the whole essay: http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/article...

    Open Papers is the primary statement on his art by Odysseas Elytis, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize in Literature, and a sweeping exploration of the mind and mythic imagination of one of the most original, visionary and compelling poets of this century.

    Maritain provides a strong dissenting perspective on the lazy, self-flattering artistic assumptions of the past two centuries.This work contains the essays entitled: Schoolmen and the Theory of Art; Speculative Order and the Practical Order; Making and Action; Art an Intellectual Virtue; Art and Beauty; Rules of Art; Purity of Art; Christian Art; Art and Morality; Frontiers of Poetry; An Essay on Art; Some Reflections Upon Religious Art; also found within is a list of principal notes.

    On it, he begins to evolve away from the rawer sound of his earlier albums, with violas, mandolins, banjos, guitars, percussion & other instruments giving the album a more orchestrated, but nevertheless spare, sound. A remastered CD was released in 1995. The album is silver in the UK, but never dented the Billboard Top 200. In 2009, it was included in Hallelujah-The Essential Leonard Cohen Album Collection, an 8-CD box set issued by Sony Music in the Netherlands."Is This What You Wanted" – 4:13 "Chelsea Hotel #2" (Cohen, Ron Cornelius)– 3:06 "Lover Lover Lover" – 3:19 "Field Commander Cohen" – 3:59 "Why Don't You Try" – 3:50 "There Is a War" – 2:59 "A Singer Must Die" – 3:17 "I Tried to Leave You" – 2:40 "Who by Fire" – 2:33 "Take This Longing" – 4:06 "Leaving Green Sleeves" – 2:38

    Lawerence, he had no idea he would return as the owner of an island he could seldom use and not afford to buy. Nevertheless, when his brother-in-law offered to sell him two acres of rock set in the middle of the Thousand Islands, he felt somehow right in accepting. So he left his job and the island became his home -- and this is the story of his life there through the seasons.

    The eighteen chapters cover a wide spectrum of interest, dealing with such general topics as 'The Absence of God in Modern Culture' and 'The Future of Christianity,' narrowing down through items such as 'Belief: Today's Issue' and more specialized theological and philosophical studies, to one on his own community in the church ('The Response of the Jesuit ...') and the illuminating comment on his great work Insight ('Insight Revisited').This book is a reprint of the first edition published in 1974, edited by William F.J. Ryan and Bernard J. Tyrrell of Gonzaga University, Spokane. The editors contribute an important introduction in which they emphasize that Lonergan's central concern is intentionality analysis, and that two major themes run through the papers: first, the clear emergence of the primacy of the fourth level of human consciousness, the existential level, the level of evaluation and love; secondly, the significance of historical consciousness. These papers, then, besides the unity they possess by appearing within the same seven year period, share a specific unity of theme.

    This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg's books written over the course of Ginzburg's lifetime was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself and her world--and yet paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability, as well as the weight and nuance of her exploration of the conflict between humane values and bureaucratic rigidity.

    ‘The novelist talks as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice. In an age of committee art, public art, people may begin to feel again a need for the small personal voice; and this will feed confidence into writers and, with confidence because of the knowledge of being needed, the warmth and humanity, and love of people which is essential for a great age of literature.’In this collection of her non-fiction, Lessing’s own life and work are the subject of a number of pieces, as are fellow writers such as Isak Dinesen and Kurt Vonnegut. There are essays on Malcolm X and Sufism, discussions of the responsibility of the artist, thoughts on her exile from Southern Rhodesia, and a fascinating memoir of her fraught relationship with her mother.Lit throughout by Doris Lessing's desire for truth-telling, ‘A Small Personal Voice’ is both an important collection of writings by and a self-portrait of one of the most significant writers of the past century.

    

    A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker is a lively, impassioned, and intense meeting of two literary giants. It is also a caning and yet uninhibited dialogue between two women a generation apart, a mother-daughter confrontation in a spirit of love and respect. The topics range from Vietnam, the racial struggle, the sexes, violence, and literature. Each exchange mirrors the generational and regioual temperaments, backgrounds, and philosophies of both women: for Giovanni, the cauldron of the sixties; for Walker, the Depression and World War II of the thirties and fortics. In this edition of the book a postscript by Nikki Giovanni projects the dialogue into the eighties and beyond. Margeret Walker is the author of For My People, a Volume of Verse, which won the Yale Award for Younger Poets in 1942. She is also the recipient of a Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel, Jubilee, published in 1966. She recently retired as professor of English at Jackson State University where she taught for thirty years. Her biography of Richard Wright is near completion. Nikki Giovanni was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973 for Gemini. In the same year she won the Youth Leadership Award, a poll, sponsored by the Ladies Home Journal. She also received the Outstanding Achievement Award from Mademoiselle magazine. Currently, in addition to lecturing. Ms. Giovanni writes a column for the black news monthly, Encore. Among her volumes of poetry are The Women and the Men (1975), Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), and Vacation Time (1979), a volume of children's poetry.

    

    Comini analyzes Schiele's work in the context of Viennese Expressionism, rising existential consciousness, and the unique ambiance of Vienna. The human figure forms the most compelling motif in Schiele's oeuvre, which is comprised of hundreds of oils and thousands of drawings. Numerous self-portraits record emotional states, reflect major stylistic changes, and provide a brilliant focus for this examination of his art and his life.

    

    The analysis of the author's own experiences links the disturbance induced by drugs with parallel states of mind afflicting the mentally alienated. His observations illuminate and dissect the machanics of human thought and feeling in the normal and abnormal states. Michaux has an extraordinary capacity to remain outside himself, to record, to annotate, to recall and to analyse, and his sustained awareness brings control and discipline to the experience of chaos. Reports from this territory of the mind have tended to be couched in exstatic meanderings verging on the inarticulate. Monsieur Michaux brings to bear in this mericulous survey the subtlety, the power and the vision of a poet.[Taken from the inside cover]

    s/t: Reflections on Everyday America

    It includes translations of important works from European scholars that were previously unavailable in English & incorporates the major topics & approaches of contemporary scholarship. It's an essential book for students & scholars alike. "Students of the Pre-Socratics must be grateful to Mourelatos & his publishers for making these essays available to a wider public."--T.H. Irwin, American Journal of Philology "Mourelatos is a superb editor & teaching Pre-Socratics in the future with this collection on the reading list will not only be easier but also better."--Jorgen Mejer, The Classical World "The editor has done his work judiciously. It would be difficult to devise a better balance between different parts of the subject."--Edward Hussey, Archives internationales d'histoire des sciences "[This] will undoubtedly become an indispensable aid for beginning & advanced students of the Pre-Socratics."--David E. Hahm, Isis

    In his last collection of writings, the late Dwight MacDonald here casts a penetrating gaze on such diverse phenomena as Hemingway, the Constitution, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, the Chicago Conspirarry Trial, Hannah Arendt, Egypt, The Warren Report, Norman Cousins, Vietnam, the Columbia Student Strike of 1968, and Marshall McLuhan.

    As a poet and a man, Keats was especially sensitive to, and morally intelligent about,embarrassment. This study demonstrates the particular direction of his insight and moral concern to acknowledge embarrassability and its involvement in important moral concerns.

    The laudatory reception of this work, Sontag argues, functions as the cap to the snowballing rehabilitation of Riefenstahl in the eyes of the world; a rehabilitation which includes her reintegration into post-war society as a filmmaker summarily “concerned with beauty." Implicitly, therefore, this redemption assumes her to have been wholly unconcerned with the lamentable propagandistic “tangents” to her earlier and greatest works: the Nazi films, Triumph of the Will and Olympia. It is rather strongly implied by Sontag that this insidious cleansing of Riefenstahl’s reputation is symptomatic of the immense and bizarre appeal of fascist ideas; it is only by virtue of our own fascination with fascism, not as an object of study, but as an ideology with visceral mass appeal, that someone as irremediably entwined with its catastrophic past should find herself so startlingly and “convincingly” rehabilitated. Available here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/...

    'Theology of Hope', The Church in the Power of the Spirit, ' and 'The Crucified God' and rest of Moltmann's core corpus have formed a watershed which supplies one of the very few viable theologies still relevant to the practice of Christians in the world. The fourteen essays in this book have lasting value in that they portray the development of the author's thought in relation to our ever-changing historical and social situation. Theology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and politics coalesce as the author raises the basic issue of our time. To scan the table of contents and see such titles as ""The Crucified God and the Apathetic Man,"" ""Racism and the Right to Resist,"" ""Bringing Peace to a Divided World,"" and ""Introduction to the 'Theology of Hope'"" is to be placed in the midst of exciting and enduring Christian thought.

    This compact volume gathers brief, pithy essays Berlioz wrote on Beethoven's nine symphonies, his opera, Fidelio, and his piano sonatas and trios. Berlioz vividly depicts the salient features of the music with observations that are acute and passionate, as valuable for musicians as for amateurs. Beyond its astute commentary on the music, however, Berlioz's book offers a rare firsthand look at the reception and reputation accorded Beethoven's music in the decades following his death. Berlioz transcribes the comments of amateurs leaving the conservatoire after a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and provides a mocking glimpse of the French appreciation of the great German composer: What stands in the way of the music of 'Fidelio' as regards the Parisian public is ... the great disdain of the composer for sonorous effects which are not justified. He addresses Beethoven's skillful use of the orchestra as an instrument of drama and the general disapprobation that greeted this approach. He also includes a satirical piece on the fad of calling up the spirit of a composer and transcribing new, posthumous compositions. Berlioz's essays testify to the tumult caused by Beethoven's music in his time and offer ways to approach the music that remain enlightening and fresh.

    

    editor: Dexter M Bullard

    

    A paraphrase from the jacket blurb: This is the expression of Burnham's continuing concern with several essential themes: the death of art as we know it (through the renewal of values), the meaning of art beyond collecting and categorizing, and the interrelationship of art with social existence.

    A contented, uneventful life is no life at all as far as I'm concerned. I said I thought life was a sick joke. That doesn't mean I'm a pessimist. It may be sick, but it's still a joke; it's still funny. I've no illusions about the absurdity of life, but I'm still cheerful about it. Twenty-six years ago, a short novel called Bonjour Tristesse, written by an unknown eighteen-year-old, was published in France. Called by one reviewer a beautifully written malicious little tale, the story about a young girl who drives her potential stepmother to suicide sold over one million copies, was translated into twelve languages and became a modern classic. Francoise Sagan, its young author, became a legend and her fast life-style a symbol of postwar cynicism. As celebrity-seeking journalists moved in and kept the public informed (and misinformed) about her expensive tastes, changing lovers, passion for drink, gambling and sports cars, Sagan continued to write novels, plays and film scripts, avoiding the public eye as much as possible. Now, in this extended interview prepared by her French publisher, we have the opportunity to meet the real woman behind the myth. At forty-five we find her witty, simple and dazzlingly profound as she talks about her childhood, love, loneliness, money, fame, politics, drinking, predilections, writing, the theatre and films, friendship, religion, happiness, death, marriage. In these conversations it is clear that Sagan speaks as she writes, and she writes superbly. To read Nightbird is to be in the company of a fascinating woman.