Best of
Literature

1934

The Ways of White Folks


Langston Hughes - 1934
    In it, he shares acrid and poignant stories of blacks colliding--sometimes humorously, but often tragically--with whites throughout the 1920s and 1930s.The book consists of fourteen moving stories:"Cora Unashamed""Slave on the Block""Home""Passing""A Good Job Gone""Rejuvenation Through Joy""The Blues I'm Playing""Red-Headed Baby""Poor Little Black Fellow""Little Dog""Berry""Mother and Child""One Christmas Eve""Father and Son"

I, Claudius/Claudius the God


Robert Graves - 1934
    Then he found himself Emperor.From the great days of Augustus and the cruelties of Tiberius to the deified insanity of Caligula, he records a story breathtaking in its murderousness, greed and folly. Throughout the swings of fortune, his own disastrous love affair with the depraved Messalina and surprisingly successful reign, his voice sometimes puzzled, sometimes rueful, always sane, speaks to us across the centuries in two great, classic historical novels.

I, Claudius


Robert Graves - 1934
    Into the 'autobiography' of Clau-Clau-Claudius, the pitiful stammerer who was destined to become Emperor in spite of himself, Graves packs the everlasting intrigues, the depravity, the bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, soon to culminate in the deified insanity of Caligula.I, Claudius and its sequel, Claudius the God, are among the most celebrated, as well the most gripping historical novels ever written.Cover illustration: Brian Pike

Independent People


Halldór Laxness - 1934
    Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is simply a masterpiece

The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce and Selected Stories


James M. Cain - 1934
    Cain’s indelible hallmarks.The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain’s first novel–the subject of an obscenity trial in Boston, the inspiration for Camus’s The Stranger–is the fever-pitched tale of a drifter who stumbles into a job, into an erotic obsession, and into a murder. Double Indemnity–which followed Postman so quickly, Cain’s readers hardly had a chance to catch their breath–is a tersely narrated story of blind passion, duplicity, and, of course, murder. Mildred Pierce, a work of acute psychological observation and devastating emotional violence, is the tale of a woman with a taste for shiftless men and an unreasoned devotion to her monstrous daughter. All three novels were immortalized in classic Hollywood films. Also included here are five masterful stories–“Pastorale,” “The Baby in the Icebox,” “Dead Man,” “Brush Fire,” “The Girl in the Storm”–that have been out of print for decades.

Kornél Esti


Dezső Kosztolányi - 1934
    Here is a novel which inquires: What if your id (loyally keeping your name) decides to strike out on its own, cuts a disreputable swath through the world, and then sends home to you all its unpaid bills and ruined maidens? And then: What if you and your alter ego decide to write a book together?

H.G. Wells: Seven Novels


H.G. Wells - 1934
    G. Wells, along with Jules Verne, is credited with inventing science fiction. This new volume collects Wells' best-loved and most critically acclaimed works. In each, the author grounds his fantastical imagination in scientific fact and conjecture while lacing his narrative with vibrant action, not merely to tell a “ripping yarn,” but to offer a biting critique on the world around him. “The strength of Mr. Wells,” wrote Arnold Bennett, “lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but a most talented student of character, especially quaint character. He will not only ingeniously describe for you a scientific miracle, but he will set down that miracle in the midst of a country village, sketching with excellent humor the inn-landlady, the blacksmith, the chemist’s apprentice, the doctor, and all the other persons whom the miracle affects.”

They Were Counted


Miklós Bánffy - 1934
    Shooting parties in great country houses, turbulent scenes in parliament, and the luxury of life in Budapest provide the backdrop for this gripping, prescient novel, forming a chilling indictment of upper-class frivolity and political folly, in which good manners cloak indifference and brutality. Abady becomes aware of the plight of a group of Romanian mountain peasants and champions their cause, while Gyeroffy dissipates his resources at the gaming tables, mirroring the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself. The first book in a trilogy published before World War II, it was rediscovered after the fall of Communism in Hungary and this edition contains a new foreword.

Soul


Andrei Platonov - 1934
    In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov’s vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution. For a new generation of innovative post-Soviet Russian writers he figures as a daring explorer of word and world, the master of what has been called “alternative realism.” Depicting a devastated world that is both terrifying and sublime, Platonov is, without doubt, a universal writer who is as solitary and haunting as Kafka.This volume gathers eight works that show Platonov at his tenderest, warmest, and subtlest. Among them are “The Return,” about an officer’s difficult homecoming at the end of World War II, described by Penelope Fitzgerald as one of “three great works of Russian literature of the millennium”; “The River Potudan,” a moving account of a troubled marriage; and the title novella, the extraordinary tale of a young man unexpectedly transformed by his return to his Asian birthplace, where he finds his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but of memory and speech.This prizewinning English translation is the first to be based on the newly available uncensored texts of Platonov’s short fiction.

Roman Fever and Other Stories


Edith Wharton - 1934
    These short works display Wharton's talent as a satirist "skilled at dissecting the elements of emotional subtleties, moral ambiguities, and the implications of social constrictions" (Cythina Griffin Wolfe, from the Introduction).Roman fever (1934)Xingu (1911)The other two (1904)Souls belated (1899)The angel at the grave (1901)The last asset (1904)After Holbein (1928)Autres temps (1911)

For Two Thousand Years


Mihail Sebastian - 1934
    Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now translated into English for the first time, was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips


James Hilton - 1934
    Hilton's classic story of an English schoolmaster.Mr. Chipping, the classics master at Brookfield School since 1870, takes readers on a beguiling journey through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sometimes Chips, as he is affectionately known, is an old man who dreams by the fire; then he's a difficult young taskmaster schooling his students, or a middle-aged man encountering the lovely Katherine, whose "new woman" opinions work far-reaching changes in him. As succeeding generations of boys march onward through Chips' mind, Hilton's narrative remains masterful. He seamlessly interweaves a poignant love story with the jokes and eccentricities of English public school life, while also chronicling a new, uncertain world full of conflict and upheaval that extends far beyond the turrets of Brookfield.

Six Plays: The Children's Hour / Days to Come / The Little Foxes / Watch on the Rhine / Another Part of the Forest / The Autumn Garden


Lillian Hellman - 1934
    The Children's Hour (1934), her first play, was considered shocking at the time; it concerns the devastating effects of a child's malicious charge of lesbianism against two of her teachers. Days to Come (1936) is about the tragic consequences of strike-breaking in a small Midwestern community. The Little Foxes (1939) and Another Part of the Forest (1946) together constitute a chilling study of the financial and psychological conflicts within the Hubbards, a wealthy and rapacious Southern family. Watch on the Rhine (1941), the story of how fascism affects an American family and the refugees they harbor, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. The Autumn Garden (1951) is a poignant yet humorous drama set at a summer resort near New Orleans.

Jonah's Gourd Vine


Zora Neale Hurston - 1934
    Originally published in 1934, it was praised by Carl Sandburg as "a bold and beautiful book, many a page priceless and unforgettable."

The Pendragon Legend


Antal Szerb - 1934
    Invited to the family seat--Pendragon Castle in North Wales--Batky receives a mysterious phone call warning him not to go; but he does and finds himself in a bizarre world of mysticism, romance, animal experimentation, and planned murder. His quest to solve the central mystery takes him down strange byways--old libraries and warehouse cellars, Welsh mountains, and underground tombs.

Collected Verse of Edgar A. Guest


Edgar A. Guest - 1934
    Guest's beloved poems.

Despair


Vladimir Nabokov - 1934
    Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - thirty years after its original publication -Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann Karlovich, a man who undertakes the perfect crime - his own murder.

A Handful of Dust


Evelyn Waugh - 1934
    Murderously urbane, it depicts the breakup of a marriage in the London gentry, where the errant wife suffers from terminal boredom, and becomes enamoured of a social parasite and professional luncheon-goer.

ABC of Reading


Ezra Pound - 1934
    With characteristic vigor and iconoclasm, Pound illustrates his precepts with exhibits meticulously chosen from the classics, and the concluding “Treatise on Meter” provides an illuminating essay for anyone aspiring to read and write poetry. The ABC of Reading emphasizes Pound's ability to discover neglected and unknown genius, distinguish originals from imitations, and open new avenues in literature for our time.

Border Town


Shen Congwen - 1934
    Originally published in 1934 by author Shen Congwen, this beautifully written novel tells the story of Cuicui, a young country girl who is coming of age in rural China in the tumultuous time before the communist revolution.

Island Magic


Elizabeth Goudge - 1934
    A magical island... And Two People Bewitched By Love....The Channel Islands were divided in allegiance between France and England. Of French blood, and yet subjects of Queen Victoria, the islanders were curious hybrid creatures. But now, in 1888, England is slowly stretching out her arms to them.Colin du Frocq is eight years old, and his dreams are of the sea that surrounds his home. By day he steals away and takes to the sea in any boat that is sailing. At night he lies in bed listening to the waves beating against the shore. Then one night, in a wild storm, a ship drives onto the nearby cliffs and a strange man enters Colin's life, changing Colin's course forever.A twist of fate brought Ranulph back to a springtime place that had forgotten him. A proud and beautiful woman offered him refuge, even though she did not understand why, as she trembled before his gaze.Now Ranulph could feel the spell of the Island twisting around him, binding him to the world of love and companionship he had rejected forever.A storm-wracked sea had brought him home. It was the magnificent fury of another storm that taught him the splendor of life and the power of love.

Novellas and Other Writings: Madame de Treymes / Ethan Frome / Summer / Old New York / The Mother’s Recompense / A Backward Glance


Edith Wharton - 1934
    Together they represent nearly a quarter century in the productive life of one of the most accomplished and admired of American writers.Madame de Treymes (1907) is set in fashionable Paris society, where a once free-spirited American woman is trying to extricate herself, with the help of a fellow countryman, from her marriage to an aristocratic Frenchman. Wharton’s keen sense of the American-European contrast shows Paris society as stifling as life in any New England village.Such a village is the scene of Ethan Frome (1911), a tale of marital entrapment even more relentless. Ethan’s unhappy marriage and his desperate love for his wife’s cousin Mattie drive him to an act of shattering violence. The magnificent coda is a classic of American realistic fiction.Set in the same region of the Berkshires, Wharton called Summer (1917) “the Hot Ethan.” It is the story of a young woman’s initiation into the intricate sexual and social mores of a small town—and her revolt against them. The complex relationship between Lawyer Royall and his ward, Charity, is one of Wharton’s most subtle and evocative.Observations of the American scene continue in the four novellas that make up Old New York (1924). They take us from the 1840s of “False Dawn,” where a young man is ostracized for his avant garde taste in art, to the 1870s of “New Year’s Day,” where a domestic scandal unfolds. “The Spark” tells of a seemingly ordinary socialite who nevertheless was touched by his Civil War experiences. “The Old Maid,” a story of illegitimacy in which a mother refuses to claim her parental rights so her daughter might have advantages she cannot offer, is one of Wharton’s most popular.The poignancies of parenthood are also the theme of The Mother’s Recompense (1925). Kate Clephane, a divorced woman who has been living in Europe, returns to New York to find her former lover engaged to her daughter—and to face the emotional tangles of this unusual triangle. Wharton also explores here the changes that have taken place in New York since World War I.The fullest portraits of New York are saved for A Backward Glance (1934), one of the most compelling of American autobiographies. It is a fascinating record of Wharton’s literary career, of her friendships (including a loving appreciation of Henry James), as well as her thoughts on writing.Another perspective is offered in “Life and I,” an autobiographical fragment that shows a younger Wharton writing with great frankness about her early life. It is published here for the first time.

Omar Khayyam


Harold Lamb - 1934
    The period is the eleventh century - the setting, Nisapur in Persia, with all its pageantry and glamorous romance. Historical characters, veiled in the mists of antiquity, play their part. But the story stands on its own feet, as excellent adventure, romance at its height, and the revelation of a period and a place of which most of us have no knowledge...

The Plays (The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats #2)


W.B. Yeats - 1934
    B. Yeats, Volume II: The Plays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes. The Plays, edited by David R. Clark and Rosalind E. Clark, is the first-ever complete collection of Yeats's plays that honors the order in which the plays first appeared. It provides the latest and most accurate texts in Yeats's lifetime, as well as extensive editorial notes and emendations. Though best known as one of the most important poets of the twentieth century, from the beginning of his career William Butler Yeats understood the value of his plays and his poetry to be the same. In 1923, when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, Yeats suggested that "perhaps the English committees would never have sent you my name if I had written no plays...if my lyric poetry had not a quality of speech practiced on the stage." Indeed, Yeats's great achievement in poetry should not be allowed to obscure his impressive and innovative accomplishments as a dramatist. In The Plays, David and Rosalind Clark have restored the plays to the final order in which Yeats planned for them to be published. This volume opens with Yeats's introduction for an unpublished Scribner collection and encompasses all of his dramatic work, from The Countess Cathleen to The Death of Cuchulain. The Plays enables readers to see clearly, for the first time, the ways in which Yeats's very different dramatic forms evolved over the course of his life, and to appreciate fully the importance of drama in the oeuvre of this greatest of modern poets.

Seven Gothic Tales


Isak Dinesen - 1934
    Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist


Antonin Artaud - 1934
    Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author's preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus' reign invents incidents in the Emperor's life in order to make the print of the author's own passionate denunciations of modern existence. Heliogabalus is Artaud's greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself. -- Stephen Barber

In the Cairngorms


Nan Shepherd - 1934
    Shortly afterwards, came this collection of poetry, In the Cairngorms, which was published in a small edition by the Moray Press of Edinburgh in 1934. Then came The Living Mountain, (recently re-published by Canongate Books), a work of poetic prose exploring Shepherd’s close relationship with the hills, which was written in the 1940s, but not published until 1977. It has recently become a great success, helped partly by its place in Robert Macfarlane’s bestseller, The Old Ways, but also because her work – with its passion for mountains, for landscape beauty, and for 'living all the way through', as she put it – is resonating with the many people drawn to wild places in their imaginations or in actuality.In The Cairngorms was the book of which Shepherd was the most proud. According to Robert Macfarlane: “Shepherd had a clear genre hierarchy in her mind, and poetry was at its pinnacle. 'Poetry' she wrote to the novelist Neil Gunn … holds 'in intensest being the very heart of all experience', and offers glimpses of 'that burning heart of life.'” Indeed, the poems that form the first and main section of the book show a fierce and often eerie lyricism at work, part-Romantic and part-modern. All are born from Shepherd’s life-long acquaintance with the Cairngorm mountains.The final section consists of a sequence of love sonnets, written, according to Shepherd, for a man whose identity is never disclosed (Shepherd never married). This is a volume that speaks eloquently both to lovers of poetry and lovers of nature. It will be enjoyed by a modern audience not only for the beauty of its mountain context but also for the sheer strength of the verse.

Prae: Vol. 1


Miklós Szentkuthy - 1934
    With no traditional narration and no psychologically motivated characters, in playing with voices, temporality, and events, while fiction, Prae is more what Northrop Frye calls an anatomy (à la Lucian, Rabelais, & Burton) or Menippean satire: the basic concern of the book is intellectual, its pervading mood is that of a comedy of ideas. As a virtual novel that preempts every possibility for its realization, it is a novel but only virtually so, a book which is actually a prae-paration for an unwritten (unwritable) novel. In this, it maintains the freedom and openness of its potentialities, indicative for instance in the Non-Prae diagonals, a series of passages that intercut the novel and continually fracture space and time to engage in what one of the figures of the book calls the culture of wordplay or dogmatic accidentalism. “The book’s title,” said Szentkuthy, “alludes to it being an overture. A multitude of thoughts, emotions, ideas, fantasies, and motifs that mill and churn as chimes, an overture to my subsequent oeuvre.”By challenging the then prevailing dogmas and conventions of prose writing, Szentkuthy was said to have created a new canon for himself but later derided as insignificant for supposedly not acquiring followers.Largely unread at the time, Prae eventually gained cult status and would be reprinted in 1980 and 2004. To some critics, the book is not only one of the representative experimental works of the early 20th century, but in its attempt to bring ‘impossible literature’ into being, it also presages the nouveau roman by almost 30 years. And in its rejection of sequentiality and celebration of narrative shuffling, long before Burroughs & Gysin, Prae enacts what is conceptually akin to the cut-up. Few of Szentkuthy’s contemporaries would reveal with equal bravura and audacity the new horizons that were opened up for narrative forms after the era of realism.In Frivolities & Confessions, Szentkuthy said that his goal with Prae was “to absorb the problems of modern philosophy and mathematics into modern fashion, love, and every manifestation of life.” Translated for the first time since its original publication in 1934, upon its 80th anniversary, this legendary and controversial Hungarian modernist novel is now at last available in English.

The Bridal Canopy


S.Y. Agnon - 1934
    The story of a poor but devout Galician Jew, Reb Yudel, who wanders the countryside with his companion, Nuta, during the early 19th century, in search of bridegrooms for his three daughters.

Panther


Roderick L. Haig-Brown - 1934
    Almost all the ills of the human race may be traced to the fact that it has strayed too far from nature and knows too little of the natural order of things . . . let them read and understand the ways of animals and birds, of water and wind and earth; for these things are pure and true and unspoiled."--Roderick Haig-BrownKi-Yu roams the full length of Vancouver Island's Wapiti Valley without fear, hunting deer, visiting females, and using his cunning and strength to evade famed cougar hunter David Milton with his shotgun and barking dogs. Evocative of Jack London's White Fang, Panther captures the harsh reality of the Vancouver Island setting with Haig-Brown's skillful, unadorned prose, telling an enthralling-- and often bloody--story of elusive wild cats and the timber wolves, bears, blacktail deer and humans who are all led by instinct as they struggle for survival in an unforgiving wilderness.

Art Young's Inferno


Art Young - 1934
    Operated by a corporate monopoly who maximizes profits and misery, Hell has become the perfect capitalist paradise.

Stages on the Road


Sigrid Undset - 1934
    In the spirit of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, Undset points to inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and blind spots of the modern secular mindset by introducing readers to the stories of somewhat-forgotten Catholic figures like St. Angela Merici and the English martyrs Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell--people who stood fast to their faith in the face of both intellectual and political hostility. Undset tackles such topics as religious freedom, Christian/Muslim relations, and the vocation of women.

The Stepson


Emmanuel Bove - 1934
    At a much deeper level, it is a study of what Russians call oblomovschina, the paralysis of the will. The Stepson is a nullity with ambitions as long as he needn't do anything to advance them. He doesn't act, he undergoes. It is the intricate, torturously rationalized play of his passivity before fate that makes this one of Bove's most fascinating novels, a sort of tragic bedroom farce.

Mary Peters


Mary Ellen Chase - 1934
    The novel is filled with wonderful details of the natural world, both at sea and on land. It also captures the pervasive changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution as coastal people stood on the brink of a new world, slowly turning from the glorious era of sail to serving the incoming tide of wealthy summer vacationers.