In "Reminiscences," the first of five pieces, she focuses on the death of her mother, "the greatest disaster that could happen," and its effect on her father, the demanding Victorian patriarch. Three of the papers were composed to be read to the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, which exacted absolute candor of its members."A Sketch of the Past" is the longest and most significant of the pieces, giving an account of Virginia Woolf's early years in the family household at 22 Hyde Park Gate. A recently discovered manuscript belonging to this memoir has provided material that further illuminates her relationship to her father, Leslie Stephen, who played a crucial role in her development as an individual and as a writer.

    Bette Davis's eyes, Joan Crawford's bitchy elegance, Stepin Fetchit's stereotype, Sidney Poitier's superhuman black man...  These are the movie stars and the qualities that influenced James Baldwin...  and now become part of his incisive look at racism in American movies.Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and The Exorcist, offering us a vision of America's self-delusions and deceptions.  Here are our loves and hates, biases and cruelties, fears and ignorance reflected by the films that have entertained us and shaped our consciousness.  And here, too, is the stunning prose of a writer whose passion never diminished his struggle for equality, justice, and social change.From The Birth of a Nation to The Exorcist--one of America's most important writers turns his critical eye to American film.

    In 1965, John McPhee published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are; a decade later, he had published eleven others. His fertility, his precision and grace as a stylist, his wit and uncanny brilliance in choosing subject matter, his crack storytelling skills have made him into one of our best writers: a journalist whom L.E. Sissman ranked with Liebling and Mencken, who Geoffrey Wolff said "is bringing his work to levels that have no measurable limit," who has been called "a master craftsman" so many times that it is pointless to number them.

    His writings comprise verse, prose poems, film scenarios, a historical novel, plays, essays on film, theater, art, and literature, and many letters. Susan Sontag's selection conveys the genius of this singular writer.

    A collection of Dworkin's early speeches.

    They evoke E.B. White's life in New York and in Maine at every stage of his life. They are full of memorable characters: White's family, the New Yorker staff and contributors, literary types and show business people, farmers from Maine and sophisticates from New York–Katherine S. White, Harold Ross, James Thurber, Alexander Woolcott, Groucho Marx, John Updike, and many, many more.Each decade has its own look and taste and feel. Places, too–from Belgrade (Maine) to Turtle Bay (NYC) to the S.S. Buford, Alaska–bound in 1923–are brought to life in White's descriptions. There is no other book of letters to compare with this; it is a book to treasure and savor at one's leisure.As White wrote in this book, "A man who publishes his letters becomes nudist–nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin....a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time."

    Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Warning to the West includes the texts of the Nobel Prize-winning author's three speeches in the United States in the summer of 1975, his first major public addresses since his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974: on June 30 and July 9 to trade-union leaders of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., and in New York City, and on July 15 to the United States Congress; and also the texts of his BBC interview and radio speech, which sparked widespread public controversy when they were aired in London in March 1976.Solzhenitsyn's outspoken criticism of the West's growing weakness and complacency and his belief that Russia's growing strength will enable her to establish supremacy over the West without risk of a nucelar holocaust are expressed with the moral authority of a great novelist and historian.Solzhenitsyn mounts a public indictment of the supine inattention of the West that rings like the blows of the hammer with which Luther nailed his manifesto to the doors at Wittenberg.--Times Literary Supplement

    Sweating from all our pores, we remember our body.Desert Notes is discovery and rediscovery. The desert, the spring, the birds, the rattlesnake, the wind. And man, who, according to an Indian tale, comes to the desert like "a boulder coming down the side of a mountain."Lopez gives us a fresh language. Desert Notes will lull you and shake you, and you will go back to it in the search for the clear and elemental.From the first-edition dust jacket.

    Previous edition hb ISBN (1976): 0-521-21116-6 Previous edition pb ISBN (1976): 0-521-29048-1

    Selzer describes unsparingly the surgeon’s art. Both moving and perversely funny, Mortal Lessons is an established classic that considers not only the workings and misworkings of the human body but also the meaning of life and death. With a Preface written by the Author especially for this edition.

    a moving, deep series of insights into the suicide's world... " --Kirkus ReviewsJean Amery (Auschwitz survivor and author of At the Mind's Limits) thought of On Suicide as a continuation of the kind of reflections on mortality he had laid down in On Aging. But here he probes further and more deeply into the meaning of death and into the human capacity for suicide or voluntary death.

    

    Valery's own ambition at twenty, as at forty, was to avoid this error, to safeguard his secrets, to choose anonymity.

    

    

    

    The mystery that surrounds her characters - Anne Marie Stretter, the Vice-Consul, the beggar woman of Savannahket, Lol V. Stein - is not dispelled, but as they appear and reappear in book, script, and film, we began to understand their strange seduction.With 'India Song' (her shooting script and working notes are included in this book), Marguerite Duras broke new ground. Critical essays and appreciations by renowned French thinkers explore the ways this and her other works have generated new possibilities in writing and image-making at a critical juncture in Western representation.

    In addition to his award-winning poetry, his superb translations of Moliere and others, Wilbur has for decades written some of the most generous, insightful, and truthful literary criticism of our time.