Best of
Literature

1961

Mila 18


Leon Uris - 1961
    Leon Uris's novel is set in the midst of the ghetto uprising that defied Nazi tyranny, as the Jews of Warsaw boldly met Wehrmacht tanks with homemade weapons and bare fists. Here, painted on a canvas as broad as its subject matter, is the compelling story of one of the most heroic struggles of modern times.

Nobody Knows My Name


James Baldwin - 1961
    Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

The Complete Dramatic Works


Samuel Beckett - 1961
    A volume containing the English texts of all the plays of Samuel Beckett, including "Waiting For Godot", "Krapp's Last Tape", "Endgame" and "Not I".

The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident


Elie Wiesel - 1961
    The adolescent Elie and his family, among hundreds of thousands of Jews from all parts of Eastern Europe, are cruelly deported from their hometown to the horrors of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel writes of their battle for survival, and of his battle with God for a way to understand the wanton cruelty he witnesses each day.In the short novel Dawn (1961), Elisha - the sole survivor of his family, whose immolation he witnessed at Auschwitz - has survived the Second World War and settled in Palestine. Apprenticed to a Jewish terrorist gang, he is commanded to execute a British officer who has been taken hostage. During the lonely hours before dawn, he meditates on the act of murder he is waiting to commit.In The Accident, (1962), Wiesel's second novel, Elisha, now a journalist living in New York, is the victim of a nearly fatal automobile accident. This fiction questions the limits of the spirit and the self: Can Holocaust survivors forge a new life without the memories of the old? As the author writes in his introduction, "In Night it is the 'I' who speaks; in the other two [narratives], it is the 'I' who listens and questions." Wiesel's trilogy offers meditations on mankind's attraction to violence and on the temptation of self-destruction.

Report to Greco


Nikos Kazantzakis - 1961
    It paints a vivid picture of his childhood in Crete, still occupied by the Turks, and then steadily grows into a spiritual quest that takes him to Italy, Jerusalem, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Russia and the Caucasus, and finally back to Crete again. At different times Nietzsche, Bergson, Buddha, Homer and Christ dominate as his spiritual masters.

Mother Night


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1961
    American Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a spy during World War II, is now on trial in Israel as a Nazi war criminal. But is he really guilty? In this brilliant book rife with true gallows humor, Vonnegut turns black and white into a chilling shade of gray with a verdict that will haunt us all.

An Experiment in Criticism


C.S. Lewis - 1961
    Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind.

The Time Machine/The War of the Worlds


H.G. Wells - 1961
    In this unfamiliar, utopian age creatures seemed to dwell together in perfect harmony. The Time Traveller thought he could study these marvelous beings--unearth their secret and then return to his own time--until he discovered that his invention, his only avenue of escape, had been stolen.H. G. Wells's famous novel of one man's astonishing journey beyond the conventional limits of the imagination first appeared in 1895. It won him immediate recognition and has been regarded ever since as one of the great masterpieces in the literature of science fiction.The War of the Worlds H. G. Wells's science fiction classic, the first novel to explore the possibilities of intelligent life from other planets, is still startling and vivid nearly a century after its appearance, and a half century after Orson Welles's infamous 1938 radio adaptation.This daring portrayal of aliens landing on English soil, with its themes of interplanetary imperialism, technological holocaust, and chaos, is central to the career of H. G. Wells, who died at the dawn of the atomic age. The survival of mankind in the face of "vast and cool and unsympathetic" scientific powers spinning out of control was a crucial theme throughout his work. Visionary, shocking, and chilling, The War of the Worlds has lost none of its impact since its first publication in 1898.

Patriotism


Yukio Mishima - 1961
    With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple’s seppuku that follows.

A Personal Anthology


Jorge Luis Borges - 1961
    After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which, in Borges’s hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters.In this anthology, the author has put together those pieces on which he would like his reputation to rest; they are not arranged chronologically, but with an eye to their “sympathies and differences.” A Personal Anthology, therefore, is not merely a collection, but a new composition.

Candide, Zadig and Selected Stories


Voltaire - 1961
    His dissections of science, spiritual faith, legal systems, vanity, and love make him the undisputed master of social commentary.

The Centurions


Jean Lartéguy - 1961
    It was also the basis for the movie, The Lost Command, starring Anthony Quinn. In his autobiography, Larteguy writes that he got the name of the book from when he was traveling with the Foreign Legion in the Sahara and came across an old Roman column at an oasis. Inscribed on the column from 2000 years before was "Titus Caius Germanicus, centurion of the Xth Legion" and underneath it from a more recent time, "Friedrich Germanicus, of the 1st R.E.P. (French Paratroop Regiment)."The story begins in May 1954 with the defeat of the French army at Dien Bien Phu. The Vietnamese victors march their French prisoners into communist re-education camps. During their time in captivity, the French paratroop officers who survive the ordeal to be repatriated, bond together and try to utilize communist "revolutionary war" tactics in order to win their next war in Algeria. The book ends with the French centurions fighting the Battle of Algiers with propaganda, torture, terror and any tactic in order to win so that the last remnants of their empire could survive. -http://www.geocities.com/jean_lartegu...

Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure


René Girard - 1961
    In considering such aspects, the author goes beyond the domain of pure aesthetics and offers an interpretation of some basic cultural problems of our time.

The Winter of Our Discontent


John Steinbeck - 1961
    With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty that today ranks it alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.

Catch-22


Joseph Heller - 1961
    In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.This fiftieth-anniversary edition commemorates Joseph Heller’s masterpiece with a new introduction by Christopher Buckley; a wealth of critical essays and reviews by Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Burgess, and others; rare papers and photos from Joseph Heller’s personal archive; and much more. Here, at last, is the definitive edition of a classic of world literature.

Tell Me a Riddle


Tillie Olsen - 1961
    Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.

The Blood of the Lamb


Peter De Vries - 1961
    It follows the life of Don Wanderhop from his childhood in an immigrant Calvinist family living in Chicago in the 1950s through the loss of a brother, his faith, his wife, and finally his daughter-a tragedy drawn directly from De Vries's own life. Despite its foundation in misfortune, The Blood of the Lamb offers glimpses of the comic sensibility for which De Vries was famous. Engaging directly with the reader in a manner that buttresses the personal intimacy of the story, De Vries writes with a powerful blend of grief, love, wit, and fury.

The Stone Face


William Gardner Smith - 1961
    After a violent encounter with white sailors, Simeon makes up his mind to move to Paris, known as a safe haven for black artists and intellectuals, and before long he is under the spell of the City of Light, where he can do as he likes and go where he pleases without fear. Through Babe, another black American émigré, he makes new friends, and soon he has fallen in love with a Polish actress who is a concentration camp survivor. At the same time, however, Simeon begins to suspect that Paris is hardly the racial wonderland he imagined: The French government is struggling to suppress the revolution in Algeria, and Algerians are regularly stopped and searched, beaten, and arrested by the French police, while much worse is to come, it will turn out, in response to the protest march of October 1961. Through his friendship with Hossein, an Algerian radical, Simeon realizes that he can no longer remain a passive spectator to French injustice. He must decide where his true loyalties lie.

The Rhetoric of Fiction


Wayne C. Booth - 1961
    One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical lexicon.For this new edition, Wayne C. Booth has written an extensive Afterword in which he clarifies misunderstandings, corrects what he now views as errors, and sets forth his own recent thinking about the rhetoric of fiction. The other new feature is a Supplementary Bibliography, prepared by James Phelan in consultation with the author, which lists the important critical works of the past twenty years—two decades that Booth describes as "the richest in the history of the subject."

Wake in Fright


Kenneth Cook - 1961
    Both the book and the film have achieved a cult status as the Australian answer to US and UK novels and films of 1960s youthful alienation. It is the gruelling story of a young Australian schoolteacher on his way back from the outback to Sydney and civilization when things start to go wrong. He finds himself stuck overnight in Bundanyabba, a rough outback mining town. An ill-advised and drink-fuelled visit to a gambling den leaves Grant broke and he realizes he has no way of escaping. He descends into a cycle of hangovers, fumbling sexual encounters, and increasing self-loathing as he becomes more and more immersed in the grotesque and surreal nightmare that his life has become.

How It Is


Samuel Beckett - 1961
    But I am reasonably certain that a sensitive reader who journeys through How It Is will leave the book convinced that Beckett says more that is relevant to experience in our time than Shakespeare does in Macbeth. It should come as no surprise if a decade or so hence How It Is is appraised as a masterpiece of modern literature. This poetic novel is Beckett at his height.” — Webster Schott“A wonderful book, written in the sparest prose. . . . Beckett is one of the rare creative minds in our times.” — Alan Pryce-Jones“What is novel is the absolute sureness of design. . . built phrase by phrase into a beautifully and tightly wrought structure — a few dozen expressions permuted with deliberate redundancy accumulate meaning even as they are emptied of it, and offer themselves as points of radiation in a strange web of utter illusion.” — Hugh Kenner

The Thirtieth Year: Stories


Ingeborg Bachmann - 1961
    Reading these stories entails abandoning the terms of one's own comfort. The author's relentless vision demands that readers allows themselves to be hypnotised, taken over by her repetitive cadences and burning images of grief and loss. And yet, in the beauty of her images there is a tremendous affirmation of the world.

Russian Stories/Русские Рассказы: A Dual-Language Book


Gleb Struve - 1961
    Excellent word-for-word English translations on facing pages. Also teaching and practice aids, Russian-English vocabulary, biographical/critical introductions to each selection, study questions, more. Especially helpful are the stress accents in the Russian text, usually found only in primers.

Last Year at Marienbad: Text for the Film by Alain Resnais


Alain Robbe-Grillet - 1961
    Text by Alain Robbe-Grillet for the film by Alain Resnais, with over 140 illustrations.

Shakespeare Our Contemporary


Jan Kott - 1961
    Readers all over the world—Shakespeare Our Contemporary has been translated into nineteen languages since it appeared in 1961—have similarly found their responses to Shakespeare broadened and enriched. Mary McCarthy called the work "the best, the most alive, radical book about Shakespeare in at least a generation."

Horseman, Pass By


Larry McMurtry - 1961
    In classic Western style Larry McMurtry illustrates the timeless conflict between the modernity and the Old West through the eyes of Texas cattlemen.Horseman, Pass By tells the story of Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman who epitomizes the frontier values of honesty and decency, and Hud, his unscrupulous stepson. Caught in the middle is the narrator, Homer's young grandson Lonnie, who is as much drawn to his grandfather’s strength of character as he is to Hud's hedonism and materialism. When first published in 1961, Horseman, Pass By caused a sensation in Texas literary circles for its stark, realistic portrayal of the struggles of a changing West in the years following World War II. Never before had a writer managed to encapsulate its environment with such unsentimental realism. Today, memorable characters, powerful themes, and illuminating detail make Horseman, Pass By vintage McMurtry.

The Death of Tragedy


George Steiner - 1961
    . . . The book is bound to start controversy. . . . The very passion and insight with which he writes about the tragedies that have moved him prove that the vision still lives and that words can still enlighten and reveal."—R.B. Sewall, New York Times Book Review "A remarkable achievement. . . . The knowledge is marshalled here with the skill and authority of a great general, and from it a large strategic argument emerges with clarity and force. . . . A brilliantly thoughtful and eloquent book which deserves to be read with the greatest attention and respect."—Philip Toynbee, The Observer "As brilliant, thorough, and concerned a contemplation of the nature of dramatic art as has appeared in many years."—Richard Gilman, Commonweal "A rich and illuminating study, full of intelligence and sensibility."—Times Literary Supplement (London) "His merits are shining and full of the capacity to give both delight and illumination. . . . His style is throughout vigorous, sensitive, and altogether worthy of its subject."—Harold Hobson, Christian Science Monitor "Immensely useful and [a book] to be reckoned with by everyone working in this field."—Raymond Williams, The Guardian

Riders in the Chariot


Patrick White - 1961
    An Aborigine artist, a Holocaust survivor, a beatific washerwoman, and a childlike heiress are each blessed—and stricken—with visionary experiences that may or may not allow them to transcend the machinations of their fellow men. Tender and lacerating, pure and profane, subtle and sweeping, Riders in the Chariot is one of the Nobel Prize winner's boldest books.

The Golden Treasury of Caroline and Her Friends


Pierre Probst - 1961
    

The Pawnbroker


Edward Lewis Wallant - 1961
    But the people who came to be called “survivors” could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer.At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman’s dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie.)Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. That this novel, a National Book Award finalist, manages to be both funny and weighty, makes it all the more tragic that its talented author died, at age 36, the year after its publication. The book sold more than 500,000 copies soon after it was published.

Revolutionary Road


Richard Yates - 1961
    Perhaps they married too young and started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. And April never saw herself as a housewife. Yet they have always lived on the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner. But now that certainty is now about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritual birthright, betraying not only each other, but their best selves.

Eight Men


Richard Wright - 1961
    "Eight Men" presents eight stories of black men living at violent odds with the white world around them. As they do in his classic novels, the themes here reflect Wright's views on racism and his fascination with what he called "the struggle of the individual in America.

Emily Dickinson: Poems and Letters


Emily Dickinson - 1961
    Except for a few journeys when she was young, Emily lived the life of a recluse in her father’s house, spending her days writing poems and letters.In 1862, she sent a few of her poems to a publisher. He replied that her work was too unusual, too different. This was her first and last attempt to reach the public ear. From then on, she bound her work in small hand-stitched collections that she kept in her bureau drawer. After Emily’s death in 1885, her sister discovered over a thousand poems hidden away in drawers and boxes.Although Emily’s experiences were limited, her poems are profound, often playful, contemplations of life, love, nature, time, and eternity. Each exhibits her extraordinary talent for combining startling imagery and unexpected rhymes. In addition to commentary and a selection of Dickinson’s letters, this audioproduction includes 75 of her most treasured poems.

Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl


Georg Trakl - 1961
    With introductions by the translators." "Trakl is a supreme example of patience and bravery, and the worlds which these virtues enabled him to explore, and whose inhabitants he so faithfully describes, are places of great fullness and depth. His poems are not objects to be used and then cast aside, but entrances into places where deep, silent labors go on."

Collected Poems, 1908-1956


Siegfried Sassoon - 1961
    Apart from the famous War Poems of 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.

Lucian: Dialogues of the Dead. Dialogues of the Sea-Gods. Dialogues of the Gods. Dialogues of the Courtesans. (Loeb Classical Library No. 431)


Lucian of Samosata - 1961
    120-190 CE), the satirist from Samosata on the Euphrates, started as an apprentice sculptor, turned to rhetoric and visited Italy and Gaul as a successful travelling lecturer, before settling in Athens and developing his original brand of satire. Late in life he fell on hard times and accepted an official post in Egypt.Although notable for the Attic purity and elegance of his Greek and his literary versatility, Lucian is chiefly famed for the lively, cynical wit of the humorous dialogues in which he satirises human folly, superstition and hypocrisy. His aim was to amuse rather than to instruct. Among his best works are "A True Story" (the tallest of tall stories about a voyage to the moon), "Dialogues of the Gods" (a 'reductio ad absurdum' of traditional mythology), "Dialogues of the Dead" (on the vanity of human wishes), "Philosophies for Sale" (great philosophers of the past are auctioned off as slaves), "The Fisherman" (the degeneracy of modern philosophers), "The Carousal" or "Symposium" (philosophers misbehave at a party), "Timon" (the problems of being rich), "Twice Accused" (Lucian's defence of his literary career) and (if by Lucian) "The Ass" (the amusing adventures of a man who is turned into an ass).The Loeb Classical Library edition of Lucian is in eight volumes.

From Russia with Love/Dr No/Goldfinger


Ian Fleming - 1961
    

A Treasury of the World's Best Loved Poems


Henry Wadsworth LongfellowWilliam Shakespeare - 1961
    Part of a set containing the following volumes:[1] A treasury of the world's best loved poems.[2] The sonnets of William Shakespeare.[3] Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.[4] Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Selections from Leaves of Grass


Walt Whitman - 1961
    With an introduction by Walter Lowenfels.

The Praetorians


Jean Lartéguy - 1961
    Mentioned by General Peter Pace as one of the inspirations for his surge strategy in Iraq.

A Patch of Blue


Elizabeth Kata - 1961
    A blind young woman momentarily escapes the sordid world of her prostitute mother when a young Black befriends her in the park.

The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1


D.H. Lawrence - 1961
    As a short-story writing, Lawrence at his best was unexcelled.

Ovid in Love


Ovid - 1961
    If his auburn-haired Corinna existed she clearly gave him many a sleepless night. Ovid's Amores, written at the turn of an earlier millennium and translated here by Guy Lee with all the freshness intended by the original author, is filled with a spirit that seems to belong to our own day. Passion, sensuality, frustration, euphoria, anger, jealousy, happiness -- they all mingle in poems which nonetheless never take themselves too seriously. Illustrated by John Ward's wonderful color drawings, Ovid in Love is the perfect gift. It will enchant the romantic in all of us, all the while exhibiting an infectious pleasure in the frustrations and sweet tortures of desire.

Splendor in the Grass


William Inge - 1961
    But both Bud and Deanie are disturbed by the powerful feelings that have grown between them, and which are turned into torture by the restraints of proper conduct. Mindful of the bad example of his own debauched sister, Bud wants to marry Deanie immediately and go to agricultural school a hope that is destroyed by his father's ambitions to put Bud through Yale and into the family oil business. Bud and Deanie promise to wait, and Bud decides that it is better for them to see less of each other in the meantime, a turn of events that plunges the unstable Deanie into an emotional crack-up and then commitment to an institution. By the time she is released their world has turned over. The stock market crash has destroyed the Stamper empire and led to suicide for Bud's father; Bud has left Yale and married a young waitress from New Haven; and Deanie has become engaged to a young man she met in the hospital. The time has come for both to start life anew, but to do this means to come to terms with the past, and this Bud and Deanie do in a final, touching scene where old ties are gently broken and each gains the sureness and strength to move on from disturbing memories to better hopes for what lies ahead.

Her Majesty, Grace Jones


Jane Langton - 1961
    A young Ohio girl becomes convinced that she is an English princess and the true heir to the British throne.

Greatest Works


Rabindranath Tagore - 1961
    The Tagores tried to combine traditional Indian culture with Western ideas. Tagore was the first Indian to bring an element of psychological realism to his novels. His writing is viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-wordly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West.This volume consists of a novel, a memoir, selection of short stories and collection of 103 poems called Gitanjali.

Ice In The Bedroom


P.G. Wodehouse - 1961
    After months of slaving in a solicitor's office, he can now count the days to when he will be able to strike off the shackles of Messrs. Shoesmith, Shoes mith, Shoesmith and Shoe-smith for ever. The author of Freddie's gratifying swing of fortune is the American, Thomas G. Molloy. With philanthropic beneficence he recently let Freddie have some Silver River oil stock for £1,000. The deal took every penny Freddie could raise, but the certainty of being able to sell his holding within a month for a cool £10,000 made an instant appeal to his quick intelligence. Indeed, it was a point Mr. Moiloy was most careful to stress when, with fatherly concern, he explained the mysteries of high finance to this young man to whose face he had taken so firm a fancy. Thus it is a gay and confident Widgeon that we meet in the opening pages of this uproarious novel. And though poor Freddie has less and less occasion to feel gay and confident as the story advances, the reader's delight never falters. Ice In The Bedroom just romps along from one sparkling situation to the next.

Jake and the Kid


W.O. Mitchell - 1961
    Mitchell began publishing in the 1940s and more than 300 radio scripts created for broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's national radio airwaves between 1950 and 1958, Jake and the Kid has won a special place in the mythology of the Canadian Prairies. Mitchell didn't just conjure up life in the 1940s in the fictional community of Crocus, Saskatchewan. He made Jake Trumper and the unnamed Kid a part of Canadians' lives. They could laugh at Jake's homespun thoughts on everything from "wimmin" to the Riel Rebellion of 1885 (Jake claiming that he helped take care of "Looie" Riel) to Canadian heroes like Prime Minister Sir Wilfred Laurier (better known as "Wilf" to Jake). A gentle satire pervades Mitchell's evocative recreation of small-town life as seen through the eyes of a wide-eyed little boy and the hired man who becomes his hero. The stories were compiled in book form in 1961 and won Mitchell his first Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal. They still have the magic that captured the Canadian imagination for nearly two decades. --Jeffrey Canton

The Long Revolution


Raymond Williams - 1961
    Originally published by Chatto & Windus, The Long Revolution is now available only in this Broadview Encore Edition.

Complete Short Stories, Vol 2


D.H. Lawrence - 1961
    As a short-story writing, Lawrence at his best was unexcelled.

Key To The Door


Alan Sillitoe - 1961
    Brian’s childhood and adolescence in the grimy streets of Nottingham are shaped by the Depression-era struggles of his family, the life and culture of the factory town, and the love and bullying of his iron-willed grandfather and erratic father.   When Brian reaches adulthood, he frequents the local pubs, works hard at a cardboard factory, and runs into a sticky situation with a woman named Pauline that obliges him to marry her. Soon though, he is conscripted for the postwar occupation of Malaya, and his true colors begin to show. Brian declares that he only wears his uniform to collect his paycheck; he shows contempt for the soldiers who obey the rules; he pursues a relationship with an exotic Chinese dancer; and he sends poetry into the jungle in Morse code.   At once a vivid family portrait and a study of “the desolate, companionless void of protest” prevalent in postwar England, Key to the Door establishes the Seaton Novels as a broad and sweeping saga of twentieth-century British life, set against the backdrop of Nottingham.   This ebook features an illustrated biography of Alan Sillitoe including rare images from the author’s estate.

Letters of Fyodor Dostoevsky to his family and friends


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1961
    Original publication date: 1917 Original Publisher: ChattoOriginal online at archive.org

The Flame of a Candle


Gaston Bachelard - 1961
    Chapters include "Poetic Images of the Flame in Plant Life," ''The Solitude of the Candle Dreamer," and "The Light of the Lamp." THE BACHELARD TRANSLATIONS are the inspiration of Joanne H. Stroud, Director of Publications for The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, who in 1981 contracted with Jose Corti to publish in English the untranslated works of Bachelard on the imagination. Gaston Bachelard is acclaimed as one of the most significant modern French thinkers. From 1929 to 1962 he authored twenty-three books addressing his dual concerns, the philosophy of science and the analysis of the imagination of matter. The influence of his thought can be felt in all disciplines of the humanities - art, architecture, literature, language, poetics, philosophy, and depth psychology. His teaching career included posts at the College de Bar-sur-Aube, the University of Dijon, and from 1940 to 1962 the chair of history and philosophy of science at the Sorbonne. One of the amphitheaters of the Sorbonne is called "L'Amphi Gaston Bachelard," an honor Bachelard shared with Descartes and Richelieu. He received the Grand Prix National Lettres in 1961-one of only three philosophers ever to have achieved this honor. The influence of his thought can be felt in all disciplines of the humanities-art, architecture, literature, poetics, psychology, philosophy, and language.

Cities of the Flesh


Zoé Oldenbourg - 1961
    The region covered all of present S. France. Its palaces were rich in art, dominated by codes of courtly love. Its tongue was a musical dialect that had given the region a flourishing poetry & was to give it a name—Languedoc (for langue d'oc, lit. language of yes). French kings coveted Languedoc. Innocent III loathed it as the Cathar religion's center, the last great Christian heresy before the Reformation to shake Roman power. Besieging Béziers, the French came in god's name, seeking heretics. Inside, they slaughtered until the red crosses on their white tunics were lost in blood. In 51 hours, they killed the city's population of 20,000. Languedoc's rape, which, under the name of the Albigensian Crusade, took place during 35 years of unparalleled savagery following the slaughter at Béziers, has now preoccupied Oldenbourg thru one remarkable volume of history, Massacre at Montségur, & two historical novels.

Breakthrough


Mercedes Valdivieso - 1961
    Met with applause as well as an outcry, the book was a significant step forward for women in Latin America. Challenging the constraints of societal expectation on women at the time it was written, the novel concentrates on a woman who realizes her own abilities to lead her life versus depending on a man.

Great Ideas from the Great Books


Mortimer J. Adler - 1961
    Adler a "philosopher for everyman." In this guide to considering the big questions, Adler addresses the topics all men and women ponder in the course of life, such as "What is love?", "How do we decide the right thing to do?", and, "What does it mean to be good?" Drawing on his extensive knowledge of Western literature, history, and philosophy, the author considers what is meant by democracy, law, emotion, language, truth, and other abstract concepts in light of more than two millennia of Western civilization and discourse. Adler's essays offer a remarkable and contemplative distillation of the Great Ideas of Western Thought.

100 Pounds of Popcorn


Hazel Krantz - 1961
    And before they know it, they are in the popcorn business.But popcorn is not the only thing that starts popping. So do problems.How DO you get rid of a hundred pounds of popcorn?

The Big Book of Animal Stories


Margaret Green - 1961
    The enchantment is immediate. The magic carpet waits to bear the reader to the high and far-off mountains of wonder, where animals reveal themselves for what most children know they are - human beings in disguise.The animals in these stories talk a human language. They are wise and kindly, cruel and foolish, just as we are ourselves. They are easy to know and believe in.In this collection of animal stories, the compiler has ranged far and well. There are stories from India, from Africa, from Europe and North America. There are modern and ancient myths and legends. The young reader will find old friends here, and some he may never have met before. He will find too the work of such distinguished writers as Joseph Jacobs, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Selma Lagerlöf, Waldemar Bonsels, and the Brothers Grimm. But most important of all, he will find delight.

Clock Without Hands


Carson McCullers - 1961
    A small-town druggist dying of leukemia calls himself and his community to account in this tale of change and changelessness, of death and the death-in-life that is hate. It is a tale, as McCullers herself wrote, of "response and responsibility--of man toward his own livingness."

Quake, Quake, Quake: A Leaden Treasury of English Verse


Paul Dehn - 1961
    Illustrations by Edward Gorey

Collected Poems 1975


Robert Graves - 1961
     A writer of striking originality, he spoke with a highly individual yet ordered voice in which lucidity and intensity combine to a remarkable degree. His love poetry, some of his best-known and most distinctive work, is at once cynical and passionate, romantic and erotic, personal and universal. Hewanted his poetry to act as a spiritual cathartic to the poet and the reader. His work has been described as romanticism boiled dry, a striving for the pure, the unpretentious, the essential, the vigorous, and the non-literary. This volume represents Graves' final thoughts on his prodigious body of work, containing those poems which he most wanted to see survive. Long out of print, it is being reissued to honor his death in early 1986.

The Complete Short Stories, Vol 3


D.H. Lawrence - 1961
    As a short-story writing, Lawrence at his best was unexcelled.

Emblems of a Season of Fury


Thomas Merton - 1961
    Merton said that the twentieth century man who has not meditated on Auschwitz does not yet know the meaning of meditation of the meaning of his own times. These poems are often points for such meditation. "Chants for a Site With Furnaces" combines ironic understatement with parody of the stereotypes commonly used to justify such massive crimes against humanity. Along with these "emblems" of nuclear-age pathology are elegies for Hemingway and Thurber, religious and metaphysical poems of contemplative life and a long prose "Letter" on the Cold War. In addition, there is a section of translations from the works of Vallejo (Peru), Carrera Andrade (Ecuador), Cuadra, Cardenal, and Cortes (Nicaragua), and a selection of mystical poems by Raissa Maritain, wife of the Thomist philosopher.