Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

    Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.

    For he's the inventor of 'ice-nine', a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three ecentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Felix Hoenikker's Death Wish comes true when his last, fatal gift to humankind brings about the end, that for all of us, is nigh...

    It is not just that Chekhov democratized this art form; more than that, he changed the thrust of short fiction from relating to revealing. And what marvelous and unbearable things are revealed in these Forty Stories. The abashed happiness of a woman in the presence of the husband who abandoned her years before. The obsequious terror of the official who accidentally sneezes on a general. The poignant astonishment of an aging Don Juan overtaken by love. Spanning the entirety of Chekhov's career and including such masterpieces as "Surgery," "The Huntsman," "Anyuta," "Sleepyhead," "The Lady With the Pet Dog," and "The Bishop," this collection manages to be amusing, dazzling, and supremely moving—often within a single page.Contains:The Little ApplesSt. Peter's DayGreen ScytheJoyThe NinnyThe Highest HeightsDeath of a Government ClerkAt the Post OfficeSurgeryIn the CemeteryWhere There's a Will, There's a WayA ReportThe ThreatThe HuntsmanThe MalefactorA Dead BodySergeant PrishibeyevA BlunderHeartacheAnyutaThe ProposalVankaWho Is to Blame?TyphusSleepyheadThe PrincessGusevThe Peasant WomenAfter the TheaterA FragmentIn ExileBig Volodya and Little VolodyaThe StudentAnnie Round the NeckThe House with the MezzanineIn the HorsecartOn LoveThe Lady with the Pet DogThe BishopThe Bride

    Pagnol brings to his treatment of this powerful, moving story his dramatist's sense of place, ambience, and character and his keen understanding of the Provencal countryside and its people. Rich with twists and ramifications, Jean de Florette and Manon of the Springs sets an idealistic city man against two secretive and deceitful Provencal country men in a superbly realized story of a struggle for life, of crime and punishment, of betrayal and revenge, and of judgment and forgiveness. In this edition, illustrated with images from the acclaimed film adaptation by Claude Berri, North Point presents Pagnol's enduring story in W.E. van Heyningen's exact and sensitive translation.Biblical in its cadences, epic in its sweep to destiny, and old fashioned in development of character and plot, this saga charts the destruction of a Provencal family.

    It is at this time that he began his engagement with the work of Dostoevsky. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art is considered to be Bakhtin’s seminal work, and it is here that Bakhtin introduces three important concepts.First, is the concept of the unfinalizable self: individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin’s conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. Readers may find that this conception reflects the idea of the soul; Bakhtin had strong roots in Christianity and in the Neo-Kantian school led by Hermann Cohen, both of which emphasized the importance of an individual's potentially infinite capability, worth, and the hidden soul.Second, is the idea of the relationship between the self and others, or other groups. According to Bakhtin, every person is influenced by others in an inescapably intertwined way, and consequently no voice can be said to be isolated. In an interview, Bakhtin once explained that, In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative understanding—in time, in space, in culture. For one cannot even really see one's own exterior and comprehend it as a whole, and no mirrors or photographs can help; our real exterior can be seen and understood only by other people, because they are located outside us in space, and because they are others. ~New York Review of Books, June 10, 1993.As such, Bakhtin's philosophy greatly respected the influences of others on the self, not merely in terms of how a person comes to be, but also in how a person thinks and how a person sees him- or herself truthfully.Third, Bakhtin found in Dostoevsky's work a true representation of polyphony, that is, many voices. Each character in Dostoevsky's work represents a voice that speaks for an individual self, distinct from others. This idea of polyphony is related to the concepts of unfinalizability and self-and-others, since it is the unfinalizability of individuals that creates true polyphony.Bakhtin briefly outlined the polyphonic concept of truth. He criticized the assumption that, if two people disagree, at least one of them must be in error. He challenged philosophers for whom plurality of minds is accidental and superfluous. For Bakhtin, truth is not a statement, a sentence or a phrase. Instead, truth is a number of mutually addressed, albeit contradictory and logically inconsistent, statements. Truth needs a multitude of carrying voices. It cannot be held within a single mind, it also cannot be expressed by "a single mouth." The polyphonic truth requires many simultaneous voices. Bakhtin does not mean to say that many voices carry partial truths that complement each other. A number of different voices do not make the truth if simply "averaged" or "synthesized." It is the fact of mutual addressivity, of engagement, and of commitment to the context of a real-life event, that distinguishes truth from untruth.When, in subsequent years, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art was translated into English and published in the West, Bakhtin added a chapter on the concept of carnival and the book was published with the slightly different title, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. According to Bakhtin, carnival is the context in which distinct individual voices are heard, flourish and interact together. The carnival creates the "threshold" situations where regular conventions are broken or reversed and genuine dialogue becomes possible. The notion of a carnival was Bakhtin's way of describing Dostoevsky's polyphonic style: each individual character is strongly defined, and at the same time the reader witnesses the critical influence of each character upon the other. That is to say, the voices of others are heard by each individual, and each inescapably shapes the character of the other.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_...

    Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

    Dr. Frye offers, in addition, challenging and stimulating ideas for the teaching of literature at lower school levels, designed both to promote an early interest and to lead the student to the knowledge and kaleidoscopic experience found in the study of literature.Dr. Frye's proposals for the teaching of literature include an early emphasis on poetry, the "central and original literary form," intensive study of the Bible, as literature, and the Greek and Latin classics, as these embody all the great enduring themes of western man, and study of the great literary forms: tragedy and comedy, romance and irony.

    During the seemingly endless journey, he has conversations that range from his childhood to speculations about the death camps. When at last the fantastic, Wagnerian gates to Buchenwald come into sight, the young Spaniard is left alone to face the camp.

    Typical targets of Zoshchenko's satire are the Soviet bureaucracy, crowded conditions in communal apartments, marital infidelities and the rapid turnover in marriage partners, and "the petty-bourgeois mode of life, with its adulterous episodes, lying, and similar nonsense." His devices are farcical complications, satiric understatement, humorous anachronisms, and an ironic contrast between high-flown sentiments and the down-to-earth reality of mercenary instincts.Zoshchenko's sharp and original satire offers a marvelous window on Russian life in the 20s and 30s.

    This is the story of an Italian general, accompanied by his chaplain, charged with the mission of scouring Albania in search of the bones of their fallen countrymen, killed twenty years earlier during World War II.

    He is obsessed with a beautiful stranger, the art student Miranda. When he wins the pools he buys a remote Sussex house and calmly abducts Miranda, believing she will grow to love him in time.

    Suddenly, the election is concluded - with a surprise result. The new pope is the youngest cardinal of all - and a Russian. Shoes of the Fisherman slowly unravels the heartwarming and profound story of Kiril Lakota, a cardinal who reluctantly steps out from behind the Iron Curtain to lead the Catholic Church and to grapple with the many issues facing the contemporary world.

    The desertion triggers a searing re-examination of his life—the loss of his sister during the war, the demands of his millionaire father and the hypocrisies of his mother, who first fought to “save” Germany from the Jews, then worked for “reconciliation” afterwards.

    Castello, a village in Epirus is not spared all the death and destruction which culminated during the Holy Week.

    Trouble starts for him when the Deaners move into his boarding house. Quicker than he can place a bet on a dog, Harryboy finds himself the admired hero and evil genius of the family, particularly for the child Gregory. But Harryboy is also the victim of a secret guilt of his own, something unknown even to his doting sister. The complications resulting from this involve him and the Deaners in even deeper trouble and culminate in a thrilling chase when Harryboy's luck threatens to desert him.The Lowlife, a cult novel long out of print, is published as part of the Harvill Press's new London Writing series.

    Enderby. "With the most offhand, scurrilous charm, Burgess illustrates (how Enderby the artist) is the man who expresses for all men their unbuttoned true selves".--Time.

    First Paragraph:'P S,' they said. And 'Vanessa'. Or sometimes 'Ness'. PS. PS. PS. PS. Ness. Ness. Ness. It sounded through his half sleep like surreptitious mice foraging through tissue paper. It was as mysterious as the lateness of the hour — after nine o'clock — and only as far away as the kitchen door, ajar so as to hear him if he should call to them or have a nightmare. He turned in bed, listening to the whispering undertones, as steady and continuous as a tap left running and broken only by a cough or sometimes a chair scraping back on the linoleum; then a dish being taken from a cupboard and now and then a voice would catch on fire and break adrift from the murmurings, but always with the same word, Vanessa, said sharply like hitting a brass gong at dead of night and then someone would say, 'Shhh, was that him? Did he call out?' and tiptoeing would startle the old floorboards while a shadow grew larger and larger on his wall; bent to hear if he was stirring and so, annoyed with their secrets, he would feign sleep until whoever it was retreated to the kitchen and the whispering hissed up again like damp green eucalyptus logs burning.

    Known as one of the greatest poets of the Restoration, he wrote and published popular satirical and bawdy poetry. This complete collection of his poetry presented in this paperback edition by Filiquarian Publishing, is a classic and should be read by those interested in the writings of John Wilmot, and satire writings throughout history. You can't go wrong with classic poems such as, "Signior Dildo," "By All Love's Soft, Yet Mighty Powers," and "A Satyre Against Mankind."

    in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru—a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected.

    No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

    Its interest is deeply human and moral, in the most capacious sense of the words. In this authoritative biography--the first full-length life of Keats in almost forty years--the man and the poet are portrayed with rare insight and sympathy. In spite of a scarcity of factual data for his early years, the materials for Keats's life are nevertheless unusually full. Since most of his early poetry has survived, his artistic development can be observed more closely than is possible with most writers; and there are times during the period of his greatest creativity when his personal as well as his artistic life can be followed week by week.The development of Keats's poetic craftsmanship proceeds simultaneously with the steady growth of qualities of mind and character. Mr. Bate has been concerned to show the organic relationship between the poet's art and his larger, more broadly humane development. Keats's great personal appeal--his spontaneity, vigor, playfulness, and affection--are movingly recreated; at the same time, his valiant attempt to solve the problem faced by all modern poets when they attempt to achieve originality and amplitude in the presence of their great artistic heritage is perceptively presented.In discussing this matter, Mr. Bate says, "The pressure of this anxiety and the variety of reactions to it constitute one of the great unexplored factors in the history of the arts since 1750. And in no major poet, near the beginning of the modern era, is this problem met more directly than it is in Keats. The way in which Keats was somehow able, after the age of twenty-two, to confront this dilemma, and to transcend it, has fascinated every major poet who has used the English language since Keats's death and also every major critic since the Victorian era."Mr. Bate has availed himself of all new biographical materials, published and unpublished, and has used them selectively and without ostentation, concentrating on the things that were meaningful to Keats. Similarly, his discussions of the poetry are not buried beneath the controversies of previous critics. He approaches the poems freshly and directly, showing their relation to Keats's experience and emotions, to premises and values already explored in the biographical narrative. The result is a book of many dimensions, not a restricted critical or biographical study but a fully integrated whole.,

    Modeled on the "casebooks" often used in freshman English classes at the time, The Pooh Perplex contains twelve essays written in different critical voices, complete with ridiculous footnotes, tongue-in-cheek "questions and study projects," and hilarious biographical notes on the contributors. This edition contains a new preface by the author that compares literary theory then and now and identifies some of the real-life critics who were spoofed in certain chapters.

    For a New Novel reevaluates the techniques, ethos, and limits of contemporary fiction. This is a work of immense importance for any discussions of the history of the novel, and for contemporary thinking about the future of fiction.

    But so profound is this evening between them that when Unn inexplicably disappears, Siss's world is shattered. The Ice Palace is written in prose of a lyrical economy that ranks among the most memorable achievements of modern literature.

    Scenes from the Life of a Faun recounts the dreary life of a government worker who escapes the banality of war by researching the exploits of a deserter from the Napoleonic Wars nicknamed The Faun. Brand's Heath deals with the chaos of the immediate postwar period as a writer joins a small community of "survivors" to try to forge a new life. Dark Mirrors is set in a future where civilization has been virtually destroyed; the narrator fears he may be the last man on earth, until the discovery of another creates new fears.All three novels are characterized by Schmidt's unique combination of sharply observed details, sarcastic asides, and wide erudition.

    It also features Maurice Denham, Paul Eddington, David Jason, John Le Mesurier, Miriam Margolyes, Jonathan Cecil, Liza Goddard and Patrick Cargill. The Inimitable Jeeves: Aunt Agatha is forcing Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop. Can Jeeves save the day? The Code of the Woosters: Who would think that a silver cow-creamer could cause so much trouble? Uncle Tom wants it, and Aunt Dahlia is blackmailing Bertie to steal it. Right Ho, Jeeves: Mayhem has broken out at Brinkley Court, but there are more brains in the Wooster household than just Jeeves...Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves: Poor Bertie! Madeline Bassett and Gussie Fink-Nottle's engagement is on the rocks, and he's next in line for the fair maiden's hand. Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit: When Jeeves returns from his annual shrimping holiday in Bognor Regis, he's in for a few surprises. Jeeves: Joy in the Morning: For Bertie, Steeple Bumphleigh is a village to be avoided as it contains the appalling Aunt Agatha. Still, there are good deeds to be done.

    The first, Tales from the Kingdom of Lailonia, is set in a fictional land. Each story illustrates some aspect of human inability to come to terms with imperfection, infinitude, history, and nature. The second, The Key to Heaven, is a collection of seventeen biblical tales from the Old Testament told in such a way that the story and the moral play off each other to illustrate political, moral, or existential foibles and follies.

    From blake to wordsworth to robert browning and dylan thomas- a compact anthology of two centuries of poetry by 23 great british poets.

    The selections in this first volume span a two-thousand-year period: from the Chou Dynasty (1122–221 B.C.) to the Y’an Dynasty (A.D. 1280–1367), from the ancient Songs to the dramas of the fourteenth century, every major genre of Chinese literature is represented by a crucial work. Highlights include, in addition to the great poems of the T’ang, outstanding examples of Han poetry, Six Dynasties satire, T’ang-sung prose essays and fiction, and the form of lyric known as “tz’u.”

    With alternating interior monologues, the author conjures up the members of the Glace family: Vera, the mother who has willed herself sightless; Erlene, the daughter, who has stopped speaking; and Edward, the husband who abandons his family to make a genealogical study of a family in a distant land. Beyond this is a mind that has burst the confines of everyday individual consciousness and invented its own tormented reality.

    It is an authentic record from the inferno of modern city life, and a testament of American experience. Seldom has there been so ruthless, and yet so tender a dissection of the mother-son relationship. And from it Lizzie Dahlberg emerges as one of the unforgettable characters of modern literature.

    The content of the poetry is wide-ranging, including war songs, political protests and poems about human love, African nature and the surprises that life offers.

    Considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, the novel is written in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese.The story, set in the Song Dynasty, tells of how a group of 108 outlaws gathers at Mount Liang (or Liangshan Marsh) to form a sizable army before they are eventually granted amnesty by the government and sent on campaigns to resist foreign invaders and suppress rebel forces. It has introduced to readers many of the most well known characters in Chinese literature, such as Wu Song, Lin Chong and Lu Zhishen.

    But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front.While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the underbelly of war’s underbelly—deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators—who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they’ve justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them.Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk, Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf).

    The two met in Ravensbruck concentration camp in 1940. Both were political prisoners, Milena for inflammatory anti-Nazi articles, Margarete for her political affiliations. For four terrible years these two women formed a bond and a friendship so strong that their everyday survival depended on it. They made a pact: should only one survive, the other would bear witness to the one who died. It was Margarete who lived to remember in this story of fearless love, sacrifice, and nobility.

    For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti.This revised edition includes an Introduction, Chronology and Bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet John Ashbery.

    This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." -Choice: Books for College Libraries Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

    'Milton's Grand Style' has been vigorously attacked in the 20th century, and this book is an attempt to refute Milton's detractors by showing the delicacy and subtlety which is to be found in the verse of Paradise Lost'.

    "Matryona's House" is the tale of an old peasant woman, whose tenacious struggle against cold, hunger, and greedy relatives is described by a young man who only understands her after her death.

    The Claytons open a branch office of their business in Vienna, the center of that incredibly varied and complex universe that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. Their ensuing social and personal entanglements furnish the materials of a superbly civilized family chronicle (quite the opposite from Sun & Moon's recent von Doderer novel, The Merowingians), whose central symbol is a gigantic, thundering mass of water -- a force that may be life-giving or terribly destructive. Beneath a staunchly bourgeois surface, von Doderer's story telling is heavily tinged with ironic social commentary and suffused with acute, post-Freudian psychology.

    Editor Bernard Taper has gathered together a heady selection of newspaper articles, correspondence, poetry, and short stories that are humorous--sometimes exasperating and controversial--but always engaging. Like a good sidekick in a comedy duo, Edward Jump, a contemporary of Twain's, offers through his lively illustrations a visual drum roll to Twain's cantankerous prose. From earthquakes, police scandals, and tantalizing silver mine bonanzas to elegant ladies blowing their noses in "exquisitely modulated tones" and seals "writhing and squirming like exaggerated maggots" below the Cliff House, Mark Twain has left us a vision of San Francisco that is at once fascinating and hilariously familiar.

    Selection includes lampoon of Oscar Wilde; ghoulish horror stories; sarcasm that caused duels, more. Edited by George Barkin.

    Considered one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, the novel is written in vernacular Chinese rather than Classical Chinese.The story, set in the Song Dynasty, tells of how a group of 108 outlaws gathers at Mount Liang (or Liangshan Marsh) to form a sizable army before they are eventually granted amnesty by the government and sent on campaigns to resist foreign invaders and suppress rebel forces. It has introduced to readers many of the most well known characters in Chinese literature, such as Wu Song, Lin Chong and Lu Zhishen.

    The Ways -and Whys- of ReadingII. The Imagination of ManIII. Man and SocietyIV. Science and MathematicsV. PhilosophyVI. The Endless JourneySYNTOPICAL GUIDEAPPENDICESI. A Plan of Graded ReadingII. Recommended NovelsIII. Recommended Anthologies of Poetry

    

    Each selection represents a primary, original, and fundamental contribution to one´s understanding of the universe.The series constitutes an introduction to the Great Books of the Western World put together by the same editors in 1952.

    When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this act of disillusionment as betrayal on his part- their retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

    They regard their disappointment in him as an act of betrayal on his part, and react violently.

    

    Realistically narrated in the first person by Charles Stevenson -- a light-skinned African American newcomer to Manhattan from small-town Missouri -- the novel dramatizes the isolation and alienation of those who fall prey to America's social, economic, and racial caste systems. Stevenson works as an office messenger and constantly finds himself on the edges of power, yet is utterly devoid of any. A man perceived as neither black nor white, “a minority within a minority,” he drifts through the naturalistic city of New York, where victory and defeat are accepted “with the same marvelous indifference.”

    Critiques of all Chaucer's poetry (except the Romaunt of the Rose, the fragmentary Anelida and Arcite, and a few of the short lyrics).

    He died in 1936. His masterpiece, The Decline of the West, is still one of the great contributions to the philosophy of history.He was a voluminous correspondent, and although he destroyed many of his letters thoughtlessly, and destroyed many more to prevent dangerous material from falling into Hitler's hands, there is still a massive collection, from which this book is a selection. The selection has been made with a view to characterizing Spengler as a man, or illustrating his intellectual development and political activity, or throwing light on the history and psychology of his time. But especially do they describe, unintentionally as it were, how Germany fell into the state of misery and confusion which produced Hitler. Spengler was a Conservative of the deepest dye and a firm believer in government by a benevolent obligarchy. His letters show him trying to throw some of the blame for the Central European debâcle on Britain, saying that although the English, unlike Continentals, believe in the principle of fair play, they refuse to be bothered by foreign politics and nothing will distract them from money-making and sport unless they see a threat to themselves in the immediate offing. Most anxious to convince himself that he was more than a litterary man, he tried to take a leading part in dragging his country back from the abyss. He failed, and went back to his old love, proto-history. He returned to politics with a last fling at the Nazis, and if he had not died in 1936, would in all probability have ended his life in exile or in a concentration camp.This book casts much light on the man and his books, and on the period which preceded them both.

    When the first three battles of wits end in draws, the fairies enchant Patrick’s son. To win back his boy, Patrick will have to prove once and for all that he is not only the smartest man in Ireland, but the bravest as well. “An exhilarating adventure-fantasy with real Irish flavor . . . imagination, humor, gaiety and some underlying sadness.”--The New York Times Book Review

    The eighteen contribution to the anthology are arranged chronologically according to the date of the criticism's first publication. The outstanding scholars whose critical writing is presented here range from the turn-of-the-century critic F. A. Blackburn through the Englishman J. R. R. Tolkien to such contemporaries as Kemp Malone, Morton Bloomfield, and R. E. Kaske. Nearly every aspect of the Beowulf is discussed and controverted in terms of literary analysis. Old English, Old Norse, Latin, and Old French passages are translated in the accompanying text as an aid to undergraduate students meeting Beowulf for the first time.

    A writer of world stature, Thomas Bernhard combined a searing wit and an unwavering gaze into the human condition. "Frost" follows an unnamed young Austrian who accepts an unusual assignment. Rather than continue with his medical studies, he travels to a bleak mining town in the back of beyond, in order to clinically observe the aged painter, Strauch, who happens to be the brother of this young man's surgical mentor. The catch is this: Strauch must not know the young man's true occupation or the reason for his arrival. Posing as a promising law student with a love of Henry James, the young man befriends the mad artist and is caught up among an equally extraordinary cast of local characters, from his resentful landlady to the town's mining engineers. This debut novel by Thomas Bernhard, which came out in German in 1963 and is now being published in English for the first time, marks the beginning of what was one of the twentieth century's most powerful, provocative literary careers.