Best of
Literature

1953

Nine Stories


J.D. Salinger - 1953
    D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". (Nine Stories is the U.S. title; the book is published in many other countries as For Esmé - with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories.)The stories are:"A Perfect Day for Bananafish""Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut""Just Before the War with the Eskimos""The Laughing Man""Down at the Dinghy""For Esmé – with Love and Squalor""Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes""De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period""Teddy"

The Captive Mind


Czesław Miłosz - 1953
    The second chapter considers the way in which the West was seen at the time by residents of Central and Eastern Europe, while the third outlines the practice of Ketman, the act of paying lip service to authority while concealing personal opposition, describing seven forms applied in the people's democracies of mid-20th century Europe.The four chapters at the heart of the book then follow, each a portrayal of a gifted Polish man who capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of the Communist state. They are identified only as Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, The Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour. However, each of the four portraits were easily identifiable: Alpha is Jerzy Andrzejewski, Beta is Tadeusz Borowski, Gamma is Jerzy Putrament and Delta is Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.The book moves toward its climax with an elaboration of "enslavement through consciousness" in the penultimate chapter and closes with a pained and personal assessment of the fate of the Baltic nations in particular.

Poems and Prose


Gerard Manley Hopkins - 1953
    On entering the Society of Jesus at the age of 24, he burnt all his poetry and 'resolved to write no more, as not belonging to my profession, unless by the wish of my superiors.' The poems, letters, and journal entries selected for this edition were written in the following twenty years of his life and published posthumously in 1918.His verse is wrought from the creative tensions and paradoxes of a poet-priest who wanted to evoke the spiritual essence of nature sensuously, and to communicate this revelation in natural language and speech-rhythms while using condensed, innovative diction and all the skills of poetic artifice. Intense, vital, and individual, his writing is the 'terrible crystal' through which the soul--the inscape, the nature of things--may be illuminated.

Freedom or Death


Nikos Kazantzakis - 1953
    The story follows the exploits of a Greek: Captain Michalis and his blood brother, Nurey Bey, a Turk, through war, love , friendship, hatred and a backdrop of the island of Crete with all its beauty, drama, joy and sadness. This book was unanimously praised by critics worldwide as the work of a master with characters that come to life and destined to live forever.

A Writer's Diary


Virginia Woolf - 1953
    The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world??—??the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision??—??of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”??—??New York Times Book ReviewEdited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

The Outsider


Richard Wright - 1953
    Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes.As Maryemma Graham writes in her Introduction to this edition, with its restored text established by the Library of America, "The Outsider is Richard Wright's second installment in a story of epic proportions, a complex master narrative designed to show American racism in raw and ugly terms ... The stories of Bigger Thomas ... and Cross Damon bear an uncanny resemblance to many contemporary cases of street crime and violence. There is also a prophetic note in Wright's construction of the criminal mind as intelligent, introspective, and transformative."In addition to the Introduction by Maryemma Graham, this edition includes a notes section by Arnold Rampersad."

Maud Martha


Gwendolyn Brooks - 1953
    Through pithy and poetic chapter-moments - "spring landscape: detail," "death of grandmother," "first beau," "low yellow," "everybody will be surprised" - Maud Martha grows up, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter. Maud Martha, a gentle woman with "scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile..." who knows "while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat," is portrayed with exquisitely imaginative and tender detail by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1953
    In Saul Bellow’s masterly translation, the title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories in this volume all inhabit the distinctive pre–World War II ghettos of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer’s unforgettable prose.

Death in Midsummer and Other Stories


Yukio Mishima - 1953
    Nine of his finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict, with deftness and penetration, a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.In the title story, "Death in Midsummer," which is set at a beach resort, a triple tragedy becomes a cloud of doom that requires exorcising. In another, "Patriotism," a young army officer and his wife choose a way of vindicating their belief in ancient values that is as violent as it is traditional; it prefigured his own death by seppuku in November 1970. There is a story in which the sad truth of the relationship between a businessman and his former mistress is revealed through a suggestion of the unknown, and another in which a working-class couple, touching in their simple love for each other, pursue financial security by rather shocking means.Also included is one of Mishima's "modern Nō plays," remarkable for the impact which its brevity and uncanny intensity achieve. The English versions have been done by four outstanding translators: Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Geoffrey Sargent, and Edward Seidensticker.Photograph on back cover by T. Kamiya; cover design by David Ford

Go Tell It on the Mountain


James Baldwin - 1953
    With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History


Isaiah Berlin - 1953
    The masterly essay on Tolstoy's view of history, in which Sir Isaiah underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma, Bernarda Alba


Federico García Lorca - 1953
    His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The result, both performable and readable, has been thoroughly revised for this edition, which is introduced by Christopher Maurer, general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

Nostalgia for Death & Hieroglyphs of Desire


Xavier Villaurrutia - 1953
    As 1990 Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz makes clear in his book-length study, Hieroglyphs of Desire (translated by Esther Allen), Villaurrutia is a major poet of desire whose beloved is the death we live each day. His poems define life between the nocturnal and diurnal and have taken on added poignancy as uncanny prophecies of individual lives in the age of the AIDS epidemic.

Blue Octavo Notebooks


Franz Kafka - 1953
    When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks--which include short stories, fragments of stories and other literary writings--because, he wrote, -notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception.- The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known and yet are among the most characteristic and brilliantly gnomic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms within their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence. Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding.- --Library Journal.

I : Six Nonlectures


E.E. Cummings - 1953
    i & my parents2. i & their son3. i & selfdiscovery4. i & you & is5. i & now & him6. i & am & santa clausThese talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e.e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e.e. cummings.

The Go-Between


L.P. Hartley - 1953
    Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley's own introduction to the novel.

By Night Under the Stone Bridge


Leo Perutz - 1953
    He is also known to be paranoid, spendthrift, and wayward. In sixteenth-century Prague, seat of Christendom, he rules without the ongoing assistance of the Jewish financier Mordechai Meisl.In the ghetto, the Great Rabbi and mystic seer guides his people in the uneasy cohabitation of Jew and Christian. Meanwhile, under Rudolph’s imprimatur, Meisl becomes fabulously wealthy with a hand in transactions across Europe. But his beautiful wife, Esther, also forms a unique bond with Rudolf II . . .By night under the stone bridge, she and the emperor entwine in their dreams under the guise of a white rosemary bush and a red rose. Only by severing the two plants can the Great Rabbi break the spell of forbidden love and deliver the city from the wrath of God.In this “tantalizing blend of the occult and the laughable, of chaos and divine order,” Perutz brings Old Prague to life with a cast of characters ranging from alchemists to the angel Asael, and including the likes of Johannes Kepler and the outlaw prince Wallenstein (The New York Times Book Review).

The Narrows


Ann Petry - 1953
    Set in the 1950s, this unforgettable classic deftly evokes a tragic love affair and offers a window onto the powerful ways in which class, race, and love intersected in midcentury America.

Selected Diaries


Virginia Woolf - 1953
    Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

The Enormous Radio


John Cheever - 1953
    He is the author of seven collections of stories and five novels. His first novel, The Wapshot Chronicle, won the 1958 National Book Award. In 1965 he received the Howells Medal for Fiction from the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1978 The Stories of John Cheever won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Shortly before his death, in 1982, he was awarded the National Medal for Literature from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh


Evelyn Waugh - 1953
    The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure" to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

The Island of Second Sight


Albert Vigoleis Thelen - 1953
    Set in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent in Mallorca by the author and his wife, who experience the most unpredictable and surreal adventures, pursued all the while by Nazis and Francoists. And just as the chaos comes to seem manageable, the Spanish Civil War erupts. Drawing comparisons to Don Quixote and The Man Without Qualities, The Island of Second Sight is a novel of astonishing and singular richness of language and purpose. At once ironic and humanistic, hilarious and profoundly serious, philosophical and grotesque, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.Praise for The Island of Second Sight"A masterpiece...Fabulous in all senses of the word." —Iain Bamforth, Times Literary Supplement"A genuine work of art." —Paul Celan"[The Island of Second Sight] is comparable in profundity as well as in complexity to Mann's own Magic Mountain. It is in a class with two other massive German masterpieces...: Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities." —Allen Guttmann, Amherst Magazine"There is a widely held misconception that Germans have no sense of humor. Here is evidence to the contrary as Thelen, belatedly, through his translator, gets a chance to show the English speaking world." —Anthea Bell, Literary Review

The Lost Steps


Alejo Carpentier - 1953
    The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that appears to be truly outside history.

Heartsnatcher


Boris Vian - 1953
    Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

Unready to Wear (The Galaxy Project)


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1953
    Vonnegut’s absolute familiarity with science fiction tropes and his mocking contempt for them are well displayed in a story which shifts between tragic cartoon and straightforward projection. His highly evolved humans in an indeterminate future have become body-transcending spirits and Vonnegut handles this vaporous situation with deadpan comedy suspended over unspeakable loss, a characteristic technique. In its fluidity--the story is parody masked as extrapolation; no, it is a horror story in the form of a parody. This kind of cross-category narrative attack was often used by Vonnegut and makes him difficult to label; he is too serious to be funny, too absurd (as in jailbreak or as in the concept of Billy Pilgrim’s alien Tralmalfadorians) to be taken as realism. Vonnegut when he wrote this story at 30 was still trying to find his voice, identify his material; as a laboratory of his enveloping subject matter and technique UNREADY TO WEAR is particularly interesting and disturbing, demonstrating that Vonnegut could have gone in any number of directions and perhaps by deliberately failing to make a decision, found his voice through indeterminacy. It is as a poet of indeterminacy then that Vonnegut went on to write his most famous novel, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE.ABOUT THE AUTHORKurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most beloved American writers of the twentieth century. Vonnegut's audience increased steadily since his first five pieces in the 1950s and grew from there. His 1968 novel Slaughterhouse-Five has become a canonic war novel with Joseph Heller's Catch-22 to form the truest and darkest of what came from World War II.Vonnegut began his career as a science fiction writer, and his early novels--Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan--were categorized as such even as they appealed to an audience far beyond the reach of the category. In the 1960s, Vonnegut became closely associated with the Baby Boomer generation, a writer on that side, so to speak.Now that Vonnegut's work has been studied as a large body of work, it has been more deeply understood and unified. There is a consistency to his satirical insight, humor and anger which makes his work so synergistic. It seems clear that the more of Vonnegut's work you read, the more it resonates and the more you wish to read. Scholars believe that Vonnegut's reputation (like Mark Twain's) will grow steadily through the decades as his work continues to increase in relevance and new connections are formed, new insights made.ABOUT THE SERIESHorace Gold led GALAXY magazine from its first issue dated October 1950 to science fiction’s most admired, widely circulated and influential magazine throughout its initial decade. Its legendary importance came from publication of full length novels, novellas and novelettes. GALAXY published nearly every giant in the science fiction field.The Galaxy Project is a selection of the best of GALAXY with new forewords by some of today’s best science fiction writers. The initial selections in alphabetical order include work by Ray Bradbury, Frederic Brown, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Walter M. Miller, Jr., Frederik Pohl, Robert Scheckley, Robert Silverberg, William Tenn (Phillip Klass) and Kurt Vonnegut with new Forewords by Paul di Filippo, David Drake, John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Robert Silverberg. The Galaxy Project is committed to publishing new work in the spirit GALAXY magazine and its founding editor Horace Gold.

Kiss Me Again, Stranger: A Collection of Eight Stories, Long and Short


Daphne du Maurier - 1953
    Includes the title story plus: The Birds ~ The Little Photographer ~ Monte Verita ~ The Apple Tree ~ The Old Man ~ The Split Second ~ No Motive.

Watt


Samuel Beckett - 1953
    WATT was the beginning of Samuel Becket's post-war literary career, the fruition of the years in hiding in the Vaucluse mountains from the Gestapo, which also largely inspired WAITING FOR GODOT. But it remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish, a philosophical novel full of the grim humour that was already his trade-mark in such earlier fictions as MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS and MURPHY. The perambulations of WATT, especially in the home of the eccentric Mr. Knott, and the sketching of logic to elicit meaning, must be among the most comic inventions of modern literature. First published by the libertine Olympia Press in 1953, it has established itself as one of the most quoted and best-loved of Becket's novels. The typographical oddities and omissions are as Beckett left the text.

Henry James: The Untried Years: 1843-1870


Leon Edel - 1953
    

The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me


Maurice Blanchot - 1953
    An obsessive questioning back and forth builds up Blanchot's narrative, with its sense--shared with Kafka's famous "doorkeeper" parable--that behind each question lies the spooky possibility of a further, more imposing, more insoluble question. Thematically, powerlessness, inertia, insufficient speech, weariness, falling, faltering--everything tied to a negative or nonexistent value in ordinary discourse--is given value here by its being articulated, moved into writing and thought. What's insignificant or worthless gathers weight through its troubling persistence, its failure to disappear. The "endless" conversation of Blanchot's writing turns "fiction" toward an experience of listening--a far cry from the storytelling most fiction (still) takes itself to be.

Indian Tales (A California legacy book)


Jaime de Angulo - 1953
    Native American Studies. INDIAN TALES begins as Bear, Antelope, and their son, Fox, set out to visit relatives on the coast. Old Man Coyote, Oriole, and various others join them over the course of this journey, as Fox learns how to hunt with rabbit sticks, how the world was destroyed and created all over again, and how to sing to his shadow in the morning so it will find its way back to him. A brilliant synthesis of forty years of life and learning among the Achumawi, Pomo, Karuk, Mewuk, and other California tribes, these tales reflect the flavor, tone, and rhythm of Indian traditions while offering edification and delight in equal amounts to adults as well as children. Jaime de Angulo (1887-1950) was born to Spanish parents and lived in Paris until he arrived in the United States at the age of eighteen. Over the course of his lifetime, he was a cowboy, a rancher, a doctor, a psychologist, an ethnographer and renowned linguist, and a novelist. His other books include INDIANS IN OVE

Madball


Fredric Brown - 1953
    . . It was only cheap glass, a fraud, a come-on for the suckers who paid Doc Magus to gaze into its depths and tell them tomorrow would be better. And Doc--a decent man, a smart man--pitied them. Yet tonight, even Doc had to believe the Madball. There was nothing left to lead him to the money--enough money to spring him free of the raucous, sordid world of the pitchmen and the pickled punks, the cotton candy and the kewpie dolls--and the belly dancers who needed him for all-night alibis.Doc was shrewd, but not quite shrewd enough. Someone else knew about the $42,000--a specialist in death, who was only yards away. . .MADBALL is a novel of one traveling show, and of the lives of its carneys, who live to close to the edge of frenzy.

Selected Prose


T.S. Eliot - 1953
    This volume reveals Eliot’s original ideas, cogent conclusions, and skill and grace in language. Edited and with an Introduction by Frank Kermode; Index. Published jointly with Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante And Goethe


George Santayana - 1953
    

Scenes from the Life of a Faun


Arno Schmidt - 1953
    Translation of: Aus dem Leben eines Fauns.

Lady Of Arlington: A Novel Based On The Life Of Mrs. Robert E. Lee


Harnett T. Kane - 1953
    

Garet Garrett's The People's Pottage: The Revolution Was, Ex America, The Rise of Empire


Garet Garrett - 1953
    

The Calico Year


Dorothy Gilman Butters - 1953
    An unusual situation gives Tracy legal guardianship of her younger sister, Tina, who is equally anxious to escape from their Aunt Martha, who sends her from one boarding school to another on an irresponsible merry-go-round of loneliness. Both girls agree that they have had the wrong kind of luxury, and being without money is their price for freedom and the chance for a wholesome, normal life.

Stories of Erskine Caldwell


Erskine Caldwell - 1953
    Included here is Crown-Fire, Country Full of Swedes, The Windfall, Horse Thief, Yellow Girl and Kneel to the Rising Sun.

Kingfishers Catch Fire


Rumer Godden - 1953
    Friends beg her to go back to the security of Camberley. But the aunt who knows her best says, "Sophie will do as she likes. She always does." What she likes, in this case, is to stay in India --- and not the Westernized India either, but in a tiny villa in the beautiful Vale of Kashmir. Sophie is determined to make a home in this Eden, and to live with the Indians and like it. Pundit Pramatha Kaul, her wise landlord, shakes his head. Profit David, her merchant friend, warns her. But Sophie remains unruffled.Then matters quietly begin to go wrong...~ synopsis from dustjacket (abridged)

It Must Be Magic, The Wonder Story Books


Miriam Blanton Huber - 1953
    A Unit of the Reading Foundation Program.

Reflections on a Marine Venus: A Companion to the Landscape of Rhodes


Lawrence Durrell - 1953
    With Reflections on a Marine Venus, he turns to Rhodes: ranging over its past and present, touching with wit and insights on the history and myth which the landscape embodies, and presenting some real and some imagined. With the same wit, tenderness and poetic insight that characterized Prospero's Cell, Reflections on a Marine Venus is an excellent introduction the Eastern Mediterranean.'How pleasant . . . to meet Mr Durrell, gloating over his enjoyment of a Greek island! . . . He excites a longing to leave for Rhodes at once.' Raymond Mortimer

The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A New England Legend


Howard Fast - 1953
    Novel based on the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti who were convicted of murder,and wrongfully executed.

The Good Citizen's Alphabet


Bertrand Russell - 1953
    Bertrand Russell, the English logician and philosopher, celebrated for his work in mathematical logic and known to a wider public for his social and political campaigns, was also a man with a great sense of humour. This socio-political alphabet, written by Russell “for the guidance of the first steps of the infant mind”, started life as a private joke in correspondence between Russell and the Themersons, who decided to publish it.Russell’s alphabet teaches far more than just the letters of the alphabet, as ‘A’ stands not for ‘apple’ but for ‘asinine: what you think’, followed by other ‘satirical letters’ such as ‘O’ for ‘objective: a delusion which other lunatics share’ and ‘L’ for ‘liberty: the right to obey the police’. Russell was delighted with the publication and said that Franciszka Themerson's drawings "heightened all the points I most wanted to make”. A satire by both the philosopher and the illustrator, the book is compelling for the simplicity of its design, and for the mix of whimsical humour in the drawings with the satirical bite of the words. As Nick Wadley has observed of another Gaberbocchus book, The Way it Walks (1954), a book of cartoons illustrated by Franciszka Themerson, “for all their appearance of naiveté, the book’s drawings are subtle, wise and funny – affectionate, ridiculous, merciless and moral all at once”. These contrasting qualities are also evident in Franciszka Themerson’s painting, her stage design, as well as her book illustration, in which whimsical playfulness often sits closely beside the savage and the grotesque.A reviewer in the Dublin Magazine, wrote about the book: “Bertrand Russell’s alphabet book is designed to improve the minds of the young in our acrimonious and utilitarian world. It will encourage them remorselessly to deflate the loftiest sentiments and neatly to undermine the blandest attitudes of relatives, theorists and reformers”. In The News Chronicle, Fredrick Laws said: "...wickedly and prettily illustrated... and designed to appeal to infant minds." The book was also published in a limited and a trade edition in 1953, and in 1954 The Good Citizen’s Alphabet was chosen by the National Book League for their Exhibition of Book Design held in London in that year.In 1962, as part of the celebrations of Russell’s 90th birthday, Gaberbocchus published Russell’s History of the World in epitome, a small booklet, offered “for use in Martian infant schools”. It consists of one sentence of nineteen words, ‘Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable”, accompanied by a drawing of Adam and Eve, a drawing of a battle scene and finally, a photograph of the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. As with The Good Citizen’s Alphabet, simplicity of form is combined with depth of meaning, this time to an even greater degree. As Christopher Macy noted in The Humanist, “No one could say more in one sentence than Russell”. In 1970, Gaberbocchus published The Good Citizen's Alphabet and History of the World in epitome in one small volume.

The Bound Man and Other Stories


Ilse Aichinger - 1953
    

The Hemingway Reader


Ernest Hemingway - 1953
    ForewordFrom: In our time: Big Two-Hearted River The torrents of springThe sun also rises From: A farewell to arms: The retreat from Caporetto; StresaStories: A way you'll never be; Fifty grand; A clean well-lighted place; The light of the world; After the stormFrom: Death in the afternoon: The bullfight; The last chapterFrom: Green hills of Africa: Chapter 1From: To have & have not: One trip across From: For whom the bell tolls: Sordo's standStories: The short happy life of Francis Macomber; The capital of the world; The snows of Kilimanjaro; Old man at the bridge; The fable of the good lionFrom: Across the river & into the trees: Venice & the VenetoFrom: The old man and the sea: The fight with the sharks

The Greatest Faith Ever Known: The Story of the Men Who First Spread the Religion of Jesus and of the Momentous


Fulton Oursler - 1953
    Faithfully based on the scriptures of the Acts and the Epistles, this saga of kings and jailers, of far voyages and shipwreck, of strange miracles and escapes and ultimate martyrdom, has inspired and touched generations of readers. It is a story that is timeless."A magnificent book and the most inspiring reading that has come my way for a long time."--A.J. Cronin"A lucid, deeply moving account of the first century of the Christian era. Fulton Oursler has re-created the life of the early Church with noble simplicity and profound understanding."--Laurence J. McGinley, S.J., Past President of Fordham University"Multitudes of people will rejoice in this book... [the] story is told with wonderful and convincing simplicity."--Chicago Tribune

The Sound of the Mountain


Yasunari Kawabata - 1953
    At night he hears only the sound of death in the distant rumble from the mountain. The relationships which have previously defined his life - with his son, his wife, and his attractive daughter-in-law - are dissolving, and Shingo is caught between love and destruction. Lyrical and precise, The Sound of the Mountain explores in immaculately crafted prose the changing roles of love and the truth we face in ageing.

Bronte Story


Margaret Lane - 1953
    Listing the virtues of this book could go on and on; in the meantime, readers will find them for themselves." - The Guardian"One of the most sensitive and civilised of Brontë critics,Miss Margaret Lane has had the excellent idea of travelling through Mrs. Gaskell's Life, making additions and commentaries in the light of modern knowledge ... The result is an elegant and sympathetic book, beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Joan Hassell." - Naomi Lewis, BBC"Excellent ... Adorned with charming illustrations." - Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times

The Literature of England


George Kumler Anderson - 1953
    

The Collected Plays of W.B. Yeats


W.B. Yeats - 1953
    s/t: new edition with five additional playsThe Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), The Pot of Broth (1904), The King's Threshold (1904), The Shadowy Waters (1911), Deirdre (1907), The Green Helmet (1910), On Baile's Strand (1904), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), The Hour-Glass (1914), The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), The Player Queen (1922), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary (1920), The Cat and the Moon (1926), Sophocles' King Oedipus (1928), Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (1934), The Resurrection (1931), The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), The Herne's Egg (1938), Purgatory (1939), The Death of Cuchulain (1939)

Noel for Jeanne-Marie


Françoise Seignobosc - 1953
    Jean-Marie buys some tiny shoes for him and there is a happy Christmas for all. Charming pictures in yellow, black & white and in full color.

In the Wet


Nevil Shute - 1953
    An elderly clergyman stationed in the Australian bush is called to the bedside of a dying derelict. In his delirium Stevie tells a story of England in 1983 through the medium of a squadron air pilot in the service of Queen Elizabeth II.