Best of
Literature
1950
Collected Stories
William Faulkner - 1950
Compressing an epic expanse of vision into narratives as hard and wounding as bullets, William Faulkner’s stories evoke the intimate textures of place, the deep strata of history and legend, and all the fear, brutality, and tenderness of which human beings are capable. These tales are set not only in Yoknapatawpha County but in Beverly Hills and in France during World War I; they are populated by such characters as the Faulknerian archetypes Flem Snopes and Quentin Compson (“A Justice”) as well as ordinary men and women who emerge in these pages so sharply and indelibly that they dwarf the protagonists of most novels.--back coverContains:Barn burning --Shingles for the Lord --The tall men --A bear hunt --Two soldiers --Shall not perish --A rose for Emily --Hair --Centaur in brass --Dry September --Death drag --Elly --Uncle Willy --Mule in the yard --That will be fine --That evening sun --Red leaves --A justice --A courtship --Lo! --Ad Astra --Victory --Crevasse --Turnabout --All the dead pilots --Wash --Honor --Dr. Martino --Fox hunt --Pennsylvania Station --Artist at home --The brooch --My Grandmother Millard --Golden land --There was a queen --Mountain victory --Beyond --Black music --The leg --Mistral --Divorce in Naples --Carcassonne.
The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings
Octavio Paz - 1950
In this international classic, Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses for its trenchant analysis, this collection contains his most famous work, "The Labyrinth of Solitude," a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico's quest for identity that gives us an unequalled look at the country hidden behind "the mask." Also included are "The Other Mexico," "Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude," "Mexico and the United States," and "The Philanthropic Ogre," all of which develop the themes of the title essay and extend his penetrating commentary to the United States and Latin America.
The Family Moskat
Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1950
All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality. The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.
Macario
B. Traven - 1950
He suffers from a gnawing poverty which never quite kills, but also never quite permits any visible change or hope. Despite his acceptance of his colorless existence, he has a fantasy which becomes a tacit means of survival, nourishing him far more than does his meager daily diet. This book is #34 in the Cervantes & Co. Spanish Classics series.
The Drinker
Hans Fallada - 1950
Discovered after his death, it tells the tale—often fierce, often poignant, often extremely funny—of a small businessman losing control as he fights valiantly to blot out an increasingly oppressive society.In a brilliant translation by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd, it is presented here with an afterword by John Willett that details the life and career of the once internationally acclaimed Hans Fallada, and his fate under the Nazis—which brings out the horror of the events behind the book.
Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson
G.I. Gurdjieff - 1950
I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) has come to be recognized as one of the most original, enduring, and penetrating of our century. While Gurdjieff used many different means to transmit his vision of the human dilemma and human possibility, he gave special importance to his acknowledged masterwork, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Beelzebub's Tales is an "ocean of story" and of ideas that one can explore for a lifetime. It is majestic in scale and content, challengingly inventive in prose style, and, for those very reasons, often approached with apprehension. The first English language edition of the Russian original appeared in 1950. Since then, readers have recognized the need for a revised translation that would clarify the verbal surface while respecting the author's own thought and style. This revised edition, in preparation for many years under the direction of Gurdjieff's closest pupil, Jeanne de Salzmann, meets this need. Originally published in 1992, this translation offers a new experience of Gurdjieff's masterpiece for contemporary readers. It is presented in a sturdy cloth edition that echoes its original publication.
Selected Writings
Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1950
This new edition offers a broad view of the author's finest work, featuring his critical essays, poems, and letters, plus a considerable amount of material from the Journals, including an entry discovered in 1964 in the Library of Congress.
The Cardinal
Henry Morton Robinson - 1950
Later made into an Academy Award-nominated film directed by Otto Preminger and starring John Huston, the book tells a story that captured the nation's attention: a working-class American's rise to become a cardinal of the Catholic Church. The daily trials and triumphs of Stephen Fermoyle, from the working-class suburbs of Boston, drive him to become first a parish priest, then secretary to a cardinal, later a bishop, and finally a wearer of the Red Hat. An essential work of American fiction that is newly relevant with the ordination of New York's Timothy Dolan as cardinal, Henry Morton Robinson's novel is back in print by popular demand.
A Tear and a Smile
Kahlil Gibran - 1950
Illustrated with 4 of his own paintings and drawings, it is the most important edition to the canon of this great writer.
Papa Panov's Special Christmas
Leo Tolstoy - 1950
After having a dream that Jesus will visit him on Christmas Day, Papa Panov, a shoemaker, blesses the lives of three passersby while waiting for Jesus's arrival.
A Voice Through a Cloud
Denton Welch - 1950
A masterpiece of self-analysis by the British novelist Denton Welch, who recounts the far-reaching struggle of his short life through a cloud of personal affliction and tragedy.
Five Modern No Plays
Yukio Mishima - 1950
The late Yukio Mishima, one of Japan's outstanding post-war writers, infused new life into the form by using it for plays that preserve the style and inner spirit of No and are at the same time so modern, so direct, and intelligible that they could, as he suggested, be played on a bench in Central Park. Here are five of his No plays, stunning in their contemporary nature and relevance�and finally made available again for readers to enjoy.
Selected Letters
John Keats - 1950
S. Eliot remarked, "what letters ought to be; the fine things come in unexpectedly, neither introduced nor shown out, but between trifle and trifle." This new edition, which features four rediscovered letters, three of which are being published here for the first time, affords readers the pleasure of the poet's "trifles" as well as the surprise of his most famous ideas emerging unpredictably.Unlike other editions, this selection includes letters to Keats and among his friends, lending greater perspective to an epistolary portrait of the poet. It also offers a revealing look at his "posthumous existence," the period of Keats's illness in Italy, painstakingly recorded in a series of moving letters by Keats's deathbed companion, Joseph Severn. Other letters by Dr. James Clark, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Richard Woodhouse--omitted from other selections of Keats's letters--offer valuable additional testimony concerning Keats the man.Edited for greater readability, with annotations reduced and punctuation and spelling judiciously modernized, this selection recreates the spontaneity with which these letters were originally written.
Thomas the Obscure
Maurice Blanchot - 1950
Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, the ontological narrative--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.
The Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud - 1950
The stories are set in New York and in Italy (where Malamud's alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish painter, Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony); they tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and a dash of artistic magic.The Magic Barrel is a book about New York and about the immigrant experience, and it is high point in the modern American short story. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry.
Selected Essays
T.S. Eliot - 1950
37 essays in an expanded edition of the author's major volume of criticism.
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1950
Each collection has a specially commissioned introduction.
Selected Writings
Paul Valéry - 1950
It concludes with excerpts from his creative writings such as Monsieur Teste and the drama Mon Faust.The list of translators for this volume is distinguished. Among them are Lionel Abel, Léonie Adams, Malcolm Cowly, James Kirkup, C. Day Lewis, Jackson Mathews, Louise Varese, and Vernon Watkins.
The Collected Works of Ivan Turgenev
Ivan Turgenev - 1950
This volume contains the short stories, The Brigadier, The Story of Lieutenant Ergunoff, A Hapless Girl, A Strange Story, and Punin and Baburin, and the novel On the Eve.
The Barnhouse Effect
Pat Cook - 1950
It originally appeared in 1950 in Collier's Weekly. It is also the subject of an Alexisonfire song. The protagonist, Professor Arthur Barnhouse, develops the ability to affect physical objects & events thru the force of his mind. He calls his power 'dynamo-psychism'. He makes the mistake of telling the government about his power. When they try to turn him into a weapon, Barnhouse decides that he is the first weapon with a conscience, & goes into hiding. While in this reclusive state the Professor uses his 'dynamo-psychic' powers to destroy large quantities of weapons, & other things used in states of war. He realizes tho, that he will die eventually & decides to pass down his "powers" to an ex-student. The story is told as a report by this ex-student, hence the title.
Berlin Childhood around 1900
Walter Benjamin - 1950
It reads the city as palimpsest and labyrinth, revealing unexpected lyricism in the heart of the familiar.As an added gem, a preface by Howard Eiland discusses the genesis and structure of the work, which marks the culmination of Benjamin's attempt to do philosophy concretely.
The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
Lionel Trilling - 1950
Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays examine the promise—and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.
Peter Graves
William Pène du Bois - 1950
Determined to earn the money necessary to rebuild the house, Peter decides to market Houghton's inventions. "Superlative nonsense in the tradition of The Twenty-One Balloons."--Chicago Tribune. Black-and-white illustrations.
A Doctor at Calvary
Pierre Barbet - 1950
Pierre Barbet addresses these gaps with scientific inquiry. A Doctor at Calvary provides a forensic pathologist's analysis of the Holy Shroud of Turin, which reveals the graphic account of Jesus's suffering at the hands of the Romans. Through a modern medical lens, Dr. Barbet examines the methods of infliction and physiological effects of each wound. He also delves into the historic practice and mechanics of crucifixion.This classic, with its engrossing and sympathetic portrayal of the Passion, has ignited religious devotion in clerics and laymen for over half a century. A Doctor at Calvary is a quintessential study for Lenten meditation and for those interested in understanding the crux of Christianity.
The Portable Romantic Poets, Blake to Poe
W.H. Auden - 1950
Auden and Norman Holmes Pearson, presents the greatest of the Romantics in all the fullness and ardor of their vision, including William Blake, Robert Burns, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe. What emerges is a panoramic view of a generation of artists struggling to remake the world in their own image—and miraculously succeeding.
The Town and the City
Jack Kerouac - 1950
Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.
Oxford Book of American Verse
F.O. Matthiessen - 1950
Fifty-one poets represented--deliberately fewer than inmost anthologies, so that sufficient space can be devoted to each poet to afford a real understanding of his or her work. More recent and less well-known poets are represented wherever possible by works of some length rather than by a scattering of short poems. Brief biographical notes at the endenable the reader to know in what volume of the poet's work each poem originally appeared.
The Exploits of Engelbrecht
Maurice Richardson - 1950
Fifteen stories that relate the activities of the Surrealist Sportsman's Club, a society with very dubious morals that spends the time it has left between the collapse of the moon and the end of the universe taking the concept of the 'game' to its logical limit. A club can't operate without members, and those of the SSC are as strange and astonishing as some of the events they compete in. Most formidable of all, and more than just a little sinister, is the old Id, an "elemental force" who thinks nothing of venturing forth from his home at Nightmare Abbey to arrange a rugby match between Mars and the entire human race, or of playing chess with boy scouts and nuclear bombs as pieces. Centre stage, however, is given to Engelbrecht himself, the dwarf boxer. Surrealist boxers don't take on human opponents, but "do most of their fighting with clocks." Engelbrecht has his fair share of those and even bests a malign Grandfather Clock in a match where years rather than money is at stake, but his talents are also called upon to help him deal with almost the whole spectrum of Gothic, electric and purely impossible threats in a style both charming and ferocious. He's an eternal optimist and it's his pluck and spirit, rather than his fists or footwork, which generally make the greatest contribution to the precarious well-being of his club. The tone of these adventures is a curious blend of Gothic and science fiction, but an avant-garde Gothic and an absurdist SF, a voice which simultaneously lampoons much of the atmosphere found in novels of the past and future while making a genuine contribution to both kinds. Richardson has placed his tongue firmly in his cheek, true, but then he has proceeded to bite it off with molars sharpened on the grindstones of profundity... “The Exploits of Engelbrecht is English surrealism at its greatest. Witty and fantastical, Maurice Richardson was light years ahead of his time. Unmissable.” - J.G. Ballard
Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories
Amrita Pritam - 1950
The Skeleton, translated from Punjabi into English by Khushwant Singh, is memorable for its lyrical style and depth in her writing. Amrita Pritam portrays the most inmost being of the novel s complex characters. The Man is a compelling account of a young man born under strange circumstances and abandoned at the altar of God.
The Sunnier Side and Other Stories
Charles R. Jackson - 1950
Set in the town of Arcadia in upstate New York, the stories in this collection address the unspoken issues—homosexuality, masturbation, alcoholism, to name a few—lurking just beneath the surface of the small-town ideal.The Sunnier Side showcases Jackson at the height of his storytelling powers, reaffirming his reputation as a boundary-pushing, irreverent writer years ahead of his time.
The Maine Woods/Walden/Cape Cod
Henry David Thoreau - 1950
Includes The Maine Woods, Cape Cod & Walden.
Men and Gods: Myths and Legends of the Ancient Greeks
Rex Warner - 1950
These tales cover the range of Greek mythology, including the creation story of Deucalion and Pyrrha, the heroic adventures of Perseus, the fall of Icarus, Cupid and Psyche's tale of love, and the tragic history of Oedipus and Thebes. Men and Gods is an essential and delightful book with which to discover some of the key stories of world literature.
Interplanetary Flight
Arthur C. Clarke - 1950
The celebrated science writer recounts the exciting history of space exploration and flight, from Sputnik I to the present, reviews present missions and plans, and speculates on future journeys and accomplishments.
Selected Poetry (Poetry Library)
John Donne - 1950
WITH ELEGIES ON THE AUTHOR'S DEATH. This century, however, has been remarkable for the broadening and deepening of interest in his work.A poet of love and friendship, Donne also employed dialectic, monologue and psychological analysis to wrestle with his religious, philosophic and personal doubts and with 'the wearisome condition of humanity' in a world that appeared as puzzling and riven as ours does today.From his early Songs and Sonets, Elegies, Ephithalamions and Satyres to Verse Letters, Anniversaries, Epicedes, Obsequies and Divine Poems, Donne's extraordinary, rich, complex and demanding poetry expresses, as John Hayward comments in his introduction, 'for us our hopes and fears of an analogoous human condition'.
The Tune Is in the Tree
Maud Hart Lovelace - 1950
She was just about as big, too, as any other little girl her age. She had pigtails and for best occasions a plaid silk dress. Her father was an aviator (so the birds had a special feeling for him), and when he was delayed one day, and her mother went to hunt for him, and Mrs. Bunch, the sitter, sprained her ankle, the birds took charge of Annie Jo.Miss Ruby, the hummingbird, who understood magic, made her two and a half inches high. She learned to fly and visited the Robins, the Warblers, and the Thrushes. The perfidious Mrs. Cowbird was causing trouble as usual, laying her eggs in other birds' nests. (Mrs. Cowbird is a notable villainness.) And Annie Jo lost her plaid silk dress in a very curious way. But she got another one in time for Mrs. Oriole's ball, which occurred on the day Annie Jo returned to her normal size and home.
The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Other Works
Ralph Waldo Emerson - 1950
HISTORY.II. SELF-RELIANCE.III. COMPENSATION.IV. SPIRITUAL LAWS.V. LOVE.VI. FRIENDSHIP.VII. PRUDENCE.VIII. HEROISM.IX. THE OVER-SOUL.X. CIRCLES.XI. INTELLECT.XII. ART.ESSAYS, SECOND SERIESI. THE POET.II. EXPERIENCE.III. CHARACTER.IV. MANNERS.V. GIFTS.VI. NATURE.VII. POLITICS.VIII. NONIMALIST AND REALIST.IX. NEW ENGLAND REFORMERS.REPRESENTATIVE MENTHE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON I & IIPOEMS BY RALPH WALDO EMERSONLIFE OF EMERSONCRITICAL OPINIONS OF EMERSON AND HIS WRITINGSIncludes an active table of contents.This unexpurgated edition contains the complete text with errors and omissions corrected.
Fundamentals Of Good Writing - A Handbook Of Modern Rhetoric
Cleanth Brooks - 1950
This book including answers to some general problems faced by prospective writers, a section on the kinds of discourse you should wish to achieve and on the exposition. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
The Lost Musicians
William Heinesen - 1950
Set in the Faroese town of Torshavn at the beginning of the 20th century, this is the story of a group of musicians - the Boman Quartet - who find sanctuary in their music amid a series of dramatic and tragic events.