Best of
Literature

1968

Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1968
    The Gambler chronicles Dostoevsky's own addiction, which he eventually overcame. Many have argued that Notes from the Underground contains several keys to understanding the themes of the longer novels, such as Crime and Punishment and The Idiot.Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky includes:Notes from the UndergroundThe GamblerA Disgraceful AffairThe Eternal HusbandThe DoubleWhite NightsA Gentle CreatureThe Dream of a Ridiculous Man

Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone


James Baldwin - 1968
    As he hovers between life and death, Baldwin shows the choices that have made him enviably famous and terrifyingly vulnerable.  For between Leo's childhood on the streets of Harlem and his arrival into the intoxicating world of the theater lies a wilderness of desire and loss, shame and rage. An adored older brother vanishes into prison. There are love affairs with a white woman and a younger black man, each of whom will make irresistible claims on Leo's loyalty. And everywhere there is the anguish of being black in a society that at times seems poised on the brink of total racial war. Overpowering in its vitality, extravagant in the intensity of its feeling, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone is a major work of American literature.

The First Circle


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1968
    At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, 'The First Circle' is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly thirty years ago.

Blow-Up and Other Stories


Julio Cortázar - 1968
    . . A man reading a mystery finds out too late that he is the murderer's victim . . . In the fifteen stories collected here—including "Blow-Up," which was the basis for Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name—Julio Cortazar explores the boundary where the everyday meets the mysterious, perhaps even the terrible.Axolotl House taken over Distances Idol of the Cyclades Letter to a young lady in Paris Yellow flower Continuity of parks Night face up Bestiary Gates of heaven Blow-up End of the game At your service Pursuer Secret weapons.

In the First Circle


Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - 1968
    On that same day, a brilliant mathematician is locked away inside a Moscow prison that houses the country's brightest minds. He and his fellow prisoners are charged with using their abilities to sleuth out the caller's identity, and they must choose whether to aid Joseph Stalin's repressive state—or refuse and accept transfer to the Siberian Gulag camps . . . and almost certain death.First written between 1955 and 1958, In the First Circle is Solzhenitsyn's fiction masterpiece. In order to pass through Soviet censors, many essential scenes—including nine full chapters—were cut or altered before it was published in a hastily translated English edition in 1968. Now with the help of the author's most trusted translator, Harry T. Willetts, here for the first time is the complete, definitive English edition of Solzhenitsyn's powerful and magnificent classic.

Welcome to the Monkey House


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 1968
    Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.Alternative cover edition here

A Dance to the Music of Time: 3rd Movement


Anthony Powell - 1968
    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.In this third volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, we again meet Widmerpool, doggedly rising in rank; Jenkins, shifted from one dismal army post to another; Stringham, heroically emerging from alcoholism; Templer, still on his eternal sexual quest. Here, too, we are introduced to Pamela Flitton, one of the most beautiful and dangerous women in modern fiction. Wickedly barbed in its wit, uncanny in its seismographic recording of human emotions and social currents, this saga stands as an unsurpassed rendering of England's finest yet most costly hour.Includes these novels:The Valley of BonesThe Soldier's ArtThe Military Philosophers"Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune"A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times"One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai


Yehuda Amichai - 1968
    In this revised and expanded collection, renowned translators Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell have selected Amichai's most beloved and enduring poems, including forty new poems from his recent work.from Tourists:Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I became their point of reference. "You see that man over there with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself: Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter, but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."

The Time Machine/The Invisible Man


H.G. Wells - 1968
    G. Wells, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholarsBiographies of the authorsChronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural eventsFootnotes and endnotesSelective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the workComments by other famous authorsStudy questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectationsBibliographies for further readingIndices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. The Time Machine, H. G. Wells’s first novel, is a tale of Darwinian evolution taken to its extreme. Its hero, a young scientist, travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers a dying earth populated by two strange humanoid species: the brutal Morlocks and the gentle but nearly helpless Eloi.The Invisible Man mixes chilling terror, suspense, and acute psychological understanding into a tale of an equally adventurous scientist who discovers the formula for invisibility—a secret that drives him mad.Immensely popular during his lifetime, H. G. Wells, along with Jules Verne, is credited with inventing science fiction. This new volume offers two of Wells’s best-loved and most critically acclaimed “scientific romances.” In each, the author grounds his fantastical imagination in scientific fact and conjecture while lacing his narrative with vibrant action, not merely to tell a “ripping yarn,” but to offer a biting critique on the world around him. “The strength of Mr. Wells,” wrote Arnold Bennett, “lies in the fact that he is not only a scientist, but a most talented student of character, especially quaint character. He will not only ingeniously describe for you a scientific miracle, but he will set down that miracle in the midst of a country village, sketching with excellent humour the inn-landlady, the blacksmith, the chemist’s apprentice, the doctor, and all the other persons whom the miracle affects.” Alfred Mac Adam teaches literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He is a translator and art critic.

Dance of the Happy Shades


Alice Munro - 1968
    In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations.

62: A Model Kit


Julio Cortázar - 1968
    This cityscape, as Carlos Fuentes describes it, "seems drawn up by the Marx Brothers with an assist from Bela Lugosi!" It is the meeting place for a wild assortment of bohemians in a novel described by The New York Times as "Deeply touching, enjoyable, beautifully written and fascinatingly mysterious." Library Journal has said 62: A Model Kit is "a highly satisfying work by one of the most extraordinary writers of our time."

Red Sky at Morning


Richard Bradford - 1968
    Navy and moves his wife, Ann, and seventeen-year-old son, Josh, to the family’s summer home in the village of Corazon Sagrado, high in the New Mexico mountains. A true daughter of the Confederacy, Ann finds it impossible to cope with the quality of life in the largely Hispanic village and, in the company of Jimbob Buel—an insufferable, South-proud, professional houseguest—takes to bridge and sherry. Josh, on the other hand, becomes an integral member of the Sagrado community, forging friendships with his new classmates, with the town’s disreputable resident artist, and with Amadeo and Excilda Montoya, the couple hired by his father to care for their house. Josh narrates the story of his fateful year in Sagrado and, with irresistibly deadpan, irreverent humor, describes the events and people who influence his progress to maturity. Unhindered by his mother's disdain for these "tacky, dusty little Westerners," Josh comes into his own and into a young man's finely formed understanding of duty, responsibility, and love.

The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster


Richard Brautigan - 1968
    The poems are written in clear, straightforward free verse. Here is an example of his style from "The Chinese Checker Players": "When I was six years old/I played Chinese checkers/with a woman/who was ninety-three years old."Recurrent themes in the book include love, sex, loss & loneliness. Incorporated throughout are an intriguing mix of pop & 'high' culture references: Jefferson Airplane, Ophelia, the New York Yankees, John Donne etc. The book often has an earthy flavor. He writes about such topics as his own penis or the smell of a fart. Some particularly memorable poems include the following:"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," a sci-fi vision of a "cybernetic meadow"; the open-ended "Karma Repair Kit: Items 1-4"; "Discovery," a joyful poem about sexual intimacy; the surreal "The Pumpkin Tide"; the funny, haiku-like "November 3"; & "A Good-Talking Candle," which invites readers into altered states of perception. Altho most of the poems are very short, there is one longer poem: the 9-part, 9-page "the Galilee Hitch-hiker," which chronicles the surreal adventures of Baudelaire — among other experiences, he opens an unconventional hamburger stand in San Francisco. If you only know Brautigan from his weird & wonderful novels, read this collection.-Michael Mazza (edited)

A Fan's Notes


Frederick Exley - 1968
    This fictional memoir, the first of an autobiographical trilogy, traces a self professed failure's nightmarish decent into the underside of American life and his resurrection to the wisdom that emerges from despair.

Tales of the North


Jack London - 1968
    This wonderful compilation includes, in facsimile of the original turn of the century magazines, the complete novels of White Fang, The Sea-Wolf, The Call of the Wild and Cruise of the Dazzler, plus 15 short stories -- all with original illustrations This is an adventure you won't want to miss

The German Lesson


Siegfried Lenz - 1968
    Soon Siggi is stealing the paintings to keep them safe from his father. Against the great brooding northern landscape. Siggi recounts the clash of father and son, of duty and personal loyalty, in wartime Germany. “I was trying to find out,” Lenz says, "where the joys of duty could lead a people"

The Best of Myles


Myles na gCopaleen - 1968
    The great Irish humorist and writer Flann O'Brien, aka Brian O'Nolan,aka Myles na Gopaleen, also wrote a newspaper column called "CruiskeenLawn." The Best of Myles collects the best and funniest, covering suchsubjects as plumbers, the justice system, and improbable inventions.

Good Times/Bad Times


James Kirkwood Jr. - 1968
    Hoyt, Peter begins to pen the letter that makes up the pages of Good Times/Bad Times.From Peter’s elaborate involvement on campus and meeting the closest friend he’s ever had to the unwelcome sexual advances he received from Mr. Hoyt, this letter tells of the ups and downs of Peter’s time at school.As the good times give way to bad and a series of compelling incidents steadily heighten the tension of his time as a student at Gilford Academy, readers fall under the spell of the magnificent storyteller Peter exposes himself to be. Good Times/Bad Times pulses with warmth and laughter of the young and still honest, complete with strong and memorable characters.

The Raj Quartet (1): The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion


Paul Scott - 1968
    Tolstoyan in scope and  Proustian in detail  but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence from Britain. The first novel, The Jewel in the Crown, describes the doomed love between an English girl and an Indian boy, Daphne Manners and Hari Kumar. This affair touches the lives of other characters in three subsequent volumes, most of them unknown to Hari and Daphne but involved in the larger social and political conflicts which destroy the lovers. In The Day of the Scorpion, Ronald Merrick, a sadistic policeman who arrested and prosecuted Hari, insinuates himself into an aristocratic British family as World War II escalates. On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author’s capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose. The other two novels in the Raj Quartet, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils, are also available from Everyman’s Library. With a new introduction by Hilary Spurling(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Of Love and Dust


Ernest J. Gaines - 1968
    There he encounters conflict with the overseer, Sidney Bonbon, and a tale of revenge, lust and power plays out between Marcus, Bonbon, Bonbon's mistress Pauline, and Bonbon's wife Louise.

Come Spring


Ben Ames Williams - 1968
    It was the way in which towns were founded from the Atlantic seaboard west to the great plains, by stripping off the forest and putting the land to work. The people in this book were not individually as important as George Washington; the town they founded was not as important as New York. But people like them made this country, and towns like ths one were and are the soil in which this country s roots are grounded.ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Ben Ames Williams was born in 1889 in Macon, Mississippi. A graduate of Dartmouth, he became a reporter for the BOSTON AMERICAN, and published short stories in some of the nation s leading magazines. Williams wrote many historical novels before his death in 1953. He carefully researched each book. For COME SPRING, he read the records and diaries of the early settlers; he followed their trails and canoed the same rivers to the sites of their early dwellings. Another important resource was John Langdon Sibley s HISTORY OF UNION written in 1851. Sibley had known those founding families and was able to include accurate details in his history. Ben Ames Williams lived for a time in Union and his famiy still has a residence in the area.

Auguries of Innocence


William Blake - 1968
    The famous poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake.

Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature


Abraham Chapman - 1968
    In its 720 pages is the core of the black literary heritage of America, ranging from slavery days to the post-Martin Luther King era. It includes fiction, poetry, autobiography and criticism by forty-four men and women who rank among the most talented writers - black or white - that this country has produced. If there is room in your budget for only one anthology of black American literature, BLACK VOICES should be your choice.

The Galosh: And Other Stories


Mikhail Zoshchenko - 1968
    His stories give expression to the bewildered experience of the ordinary Soviet citizen struggling to survive in the 1920's and `30s, beset by an acute housing shortage, ubiquitous theft and corruption, and the impenetrable new ideological language of the Soviet state. Written in the semi-educated talk of the man or woman on the street, these stories enshrine one of the greatest achievements of the people of the Soviet Union—their gallows humor. Housing block tenants who reject electricity because it illuminates their squalor too harshly, a young couple who live in a bathroom, a railway-line manager making a speech against bribery who accidentally mentions his own affinity for kickbacks—in all of Zoschenko's characters, petty materialism is balanced with a poignant faith in the revolutionary project. Zoschenko, the self-described "temporary substitute for the proletarian writer," combines wicked satire and an earthy empathy with a brilliance that places him squarely in the classic Russian comic tradition. Jeremy Hick's translation of The Galosh brings together sixty five of Zoschenko's finest short stories—bringing the choice writings of perhaps Soviet Russia's most humorous and moving writer to American readers for the first time.

The Faces


Tove Ditlevsen - 1968
    Lise, a children's book writer and married mother of three, is becoming increasingly haunted by disembodied faces and taunting voices. Convinced that her housekeeper and husband are plotting against her, she descends into a terrifying world of sickness, pills and institutionalisation. But is sanity in fact a kind of sickness? And might mental illness itself lead to enlightenment?Brief, intense and haunting, Ditlevsen's novel recreates the experience of madness from the inside, with all the vividness of lived experience.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories


William H. Gass - 1968
    In their obsessions, Gass’s Midwestern dreamers are like the "grotesques" of Sherwood Anderson, but in their hyper-linguistic streams of consciousness, they are the match for Joyce’s Dubliners. First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

The Man With the Heart in the Highlands and Other Early Stories


William Saroyan - 1968
    Offers a selecttion of the master of human comedy's short stories from the 1930s and 1940s.

MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors


Richard Hooker - 1968
    The doctors who worked in the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH) during the Korean War were well trained but, like most soldiers sent to fight a war, too young for the job. In the words of the author, "a few flipped their lids, but most of them just raised hell, in a variety of ways and degrees."For fans of the movie and the series alike, here is the original version of that perfectly corrupt football game, those martini-laced mornings and sexual escapades, and that unforgettable foray into assisted if incompleted suicide--all as funny and poignant now as they were before they became a part of America's culture and heart.

Impossible Object


Nicholas Mosley - 1968
    A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended."In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them."The impossible object of the title, "the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three," is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in "a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world." Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.

Mystical Poems of Rumi


Rumi - 1968
    His vast body of work includes more than three thousand lyrics and odes. This volume includes four hundred poems selected by renowned Rumi scholar A. J. Arberry, who provides here one of the most comprehensive and adept English translations of this enigmatic genius. Mystical Poems is the definitive resource for anyone seeking an introduction to or an enriched understanding of one of the world’s greatest poets.

Taash and the Jesters


Ellen Kindt McKenzie - 1968
    At the end of the forbidden path, he finds himself on a desolate moor and sees witches casting a spell on an infant boy. Taash impulsively snatches the child away from these chanting demons—and is thrown into a terrifying stuggle against evil forces plotting to overthrow the king.

Hue and Cry


James Alan McPherson - 1968
    McPherson's characters — gritty, jazzy, authentic, and pristinely rendered — give voice to unheard struggles along the dividing lines of race and poverty in subtle, fluid prose that bears no trace of sentimentality, agenda, or apology.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test


Tom Wolfe - 1968
    In the 1960s, Kesey led a group of psychedelic sympathizers around the country in a painted bus, presiding over LSD-induced "acid tests" all along the way. Long considered one of the greatest books about the history of the hippies, Wolfe's ability to research like a reporter and simultaneously evoke the hallucinogenic indulgence of the era ensures that this book, written in 1967, will live long in the counter-culture canon of American literature.

Sun and Steel


Yukio Mishima - 1968
    It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.

The Flight of Icarus


Raymond Queneau - 1968
    Looking for him among the manuscripts of his rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is hired to find the runaway character.

The Ronin: A Novel Based on a Zen Myth


William Dale Jennings - 1968
    It is the tale of Ronin, a masterless 12th-century samurai knight, who slashes his way up from the gutter to a position of wealth, honour, and status.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus' Enchiridion


Marcus Aurelius - 1968
    

The Real Inspector Hound


Tom Stoppard - 1968
    'It's an object of pure, virtuoso craft and display, as luxuriously self-sufficient as a netsuke or Faberge Easter egg. But it's as nearly perfect in its kind as a P.G. Wodehouse plot; tiny, ludicrous and beautiful as an ivory Mickey Mouse...It's time we stopped dismissing comedy as an inferior genre.' Observer

The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy


Hugh Kenner - 1968
    In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one).This intertangling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art is at the heart of this book. He argues that the belief in art as a uniquely human expression is complicated and questioned by the prevalence of simulations—or "counterfeits"—in our culture. Kenner, with his characteristically accessible style and wit, brings together history, literature, science, and art to locate the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world.

The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living (3 Vols.)


Eknath Easwaran - 1968
    Contents: vol. 1. The End of Sorrow. ii, 425 p. vol. 2. Like a Thousand Suns. 455 p. vol. 3. To Love is to Know me. 519 p., Dimensions: 9.5x6.2x2.6

Birdless Summer


Han Suyin - 1968
    It covers the years 1938 to 1948, her work as a midwife in Chengtu and then going to London with her husband, who was a military attaché there. Also her training as a doctor, the start of the last phase of the Chinese Civil War, in which her husband died fighting for the Kuomintang.She gives a vivid picture of the final years of Kuomintang rule in mainland China, and of reactions to the Japanese invasion. She also tells how she came to write her first book, Destination Chungking. This was actually a joint work, written from her notes but revised by an established writer.

Selected Satires of Lucian


Lucian of Samosata - 1968
    He took up law, left it for public speaking, then turned to full-time writing, producing the wide range of subject matter and literary form which is represented in this collection.A master of the vivid scene, Lucian used his pungent style to ridicule the tyrants, prophets, waning gods, and hypocrite philosophers of his own day and the centuries preceding him. His most typical genre is a parody of a Platonic dialogue, but he also excelled in straight narrative, as in the elaborate spoof "A True Story" and the old folk tale outrageously retold, "Lucius, the Ass." His skeptical mind and imaginative irony have influenced generations of artists and writers, and now in Professor Casson's new translations can be freshly enjoyed today.

The Novel of the Future


Anaïs Nin - 1968
    Identifying those trends which she finds most destructive in modern fiction (reportage, the substitution of violence for emotion, and the growing cults of ugliness, toughness, and caricature), Nin offers, instead, an argument for and synthesis of the poetic novel.Drawing upon such related arts as filmmaking, painting, and dance, Nin discusses her own efforts in this genre as well as the development of such writers as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, Marguerite Young, and Djuna Barnes. In chapters devoted to the pursuit of the hidden self, the genesis of fiction, and the relationship between the diary and fiction, she addresses the materials, techniques, and nourishment of the arts, and the functions of art itself.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born


Ayi Kwei Armah - 1968
    The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is the novel that catapulted Ayi Kwei Armah into the limelight. The novel is generally a satirical attack on the Ghanaian society during Kwame Nkrumah’s regime and the period immediately after independence in the 1960s. It is often claimed to rank with Things Fall Apart as one of the high points of post-colonial African Literature.

Present Past Past Present


Eugène Ionesco - 1968
    Diary jottings mingle with searing memories of his authoritarian father, metaphysical musings with thoughts on anti-Semitism, his wartime experiences, Soviet death camps, and the sham of bourgeois "revolutionaries". There is also the occasional light-hearted fantasy, played out with children who might be his own; the germ of the idea for "Rhinoceros" and various passages of self-probing.

The Selected Works


Cesare Pavese - 1968
    All the rest is misery," wrote Cesare Pavese, whose short, intense life spanned the ordeals of fascism and World War II to witness the beginnings of Italy's postwar prosperity. Searchingly alert to nuances of speech, feeling, and atmosphere, and remarkably varied, his novels offer a panoramic vision, at once sensual and finely considered, of a time of tumultuous change. This volume presents readers with Pavese's major works. The Beach is a wry summertime comedy of sexual and romantic misunderstandings, while The House on the Hill is an extraordinary novel of war in which a teacher flees through a countryside that is both beautiful and convulsed with terror. Among Women Only tells of a fashion designer who enters the affluent world she has always dreamed of, only to find herself caught up in an eerie dance of destruction, and The Devil in the Hills is an engaging road novel about three young men roaming the hills in high summer who stumble on mysteries of love and death.

Tales of the Long Bow


G.K. Chesterton - 1968
    At first they are nothing more than that: four whimsical idiots with no sense of responsibility, clowning outrageously for the sake of clowning. But soon they begin to see themselves as men with a mission: for they find that they are the only people left in England who are still defending the individual soul against conformity, wealth, and the super-state.As they find their buffoonery hemmed in more and more by official regulations, their pranks turn into a form of rebellion. The humor remains, but it takes on a purpose. And in the process, the tenuously connected stories turn into a novel. The book ends in a kind of crescendo of madness, which is at once a parable, and a clear call to arms (or at least a thought) for individuals in our Age of Conformity.

Collected Works: Volume One


Antonin Artaud - 1968
    The first volume of the "Collected Works" contains the important correspondence with Jacques Riviere, and Artaud's extraordinary explorations of consciousness and creativity in Umbilico Limbo and Nerve Scales, as well as essays on life and death, suicide, drugs, lunacy, religion and art, poems, manifestos, the terrifying short play The Spurt of Bloodletters and other material. This important volume is essential to an understanding of the art and theater of our time and will give endless pleasure and information to its readers. Translated and with an introduction by Victor Corti.Contents:Correspondence with Jacques Rivière --Umbilical limbo --Nerve scales --Art and death --Unpublished prose and poetry --Cup and ball --Seven letters --Appendix.

Tigers are Better-Looking: With a selection from The Left Bank


Jean Rhys - 1968
    In them she encompasses within a few pages both the gaiety and charm of youth and love, and an awareness of all that threatens them.Writing in The New York Times, A. Alvarez has called these stories "extraordinary." The early stories have added value in that they illuminate Jean Rhys's development as a writer. Those written later, when her art was mature, are on the level of her novels and demonstrate that she is one of the most distinguished writers of our time, "the best living English novelist," again to quote Alvarez.The title of this collection comes from the opinion which many of Jean Rhys's characters share, that respectable people are as alarming as tigers, but "tigers are better-looking, aren't they?" It also reflects the astringent humor in her work; an explanation that however sad or even sordid her subject, she is never depressing.--From the book jacket

La Doble Historia Del Doctor Valmy


Antonio Buero Vallejo - 1968
    Daniel Barnes is a family man who works as a member of the Political Police in an imaginary country called Surelia. Ordered by his superior to torture a political prisoner, Daniel becomes sexually impotent. After a visit to Dr Valmy, Daniel discovers that his condition is a self-punishment for what he has done to the prisoner. Mary, Daniel's wife, gradually becomes aware of the secrets of her husband's grisly trade and attempts to persuade him to leave the police service, with devastating results. The play focuses not on the victim but on the torturer and the consequences of his actions for his family, marriage and personal relations.

The Sea


Rachel Carson - 1968
    The Sea

Ripe to Burst


Frankétienne - 1968
    It's a very generous kind of genius he has, one I can't imagine Haitian literature ever existing without."—Edwidge DanticatShould he scream? Call for help? His mouth was full of saliva. His tongue heavy…The breath and spit of his pursuers were burning his head. The awful stench of their breath, a stinging vapor, was scorching his ears, drying his skin. Smell of sulphur. The acid of their bite. Their forked claws were already lacerating his back.If only I had the time to make it to St. Joseph's Gate where I might find some people. Some help. O agile foot of my rebellious youth! Haven't I always given you the choice morsel of whatever I've eaten? Haven't I given you the longest sip of whatever I've drunk? Run faster nimble foot of the songs of yesteryear! If ill should come to me, I will blame you… My mother will suffer… If I die… And what about my Solange, my sweetheart? Will I never see her again? A portrait of "the extreme bitterness of doom in the face of the blind machinery of power." In vivid, fluid prose, Ripe to Burst follows the lives of two young men and their individual attempts to make sense of the deeply troubled society surrounding them. A biting critique of the "brain drain" prompted by the François Duvalier dictatorship, Frankétienne mirrors the spirit and failings of the 1960s generation.Widely recognized as Haiti's most important literary figure, Frankétienne has written more than thirty plays, poetry collections, and works of fiction, including Dezafi, the first modern novel written entirely in Haitian Creole.

The God Stealer and Other Stories


F. Sionil José - 1968
    Sionil José's most widely anthologized fiction, is a moving story of a friendship. An American and a Filipino go to the Cordilleras to look at the rice terraces which were built by the Filipino's ancestors. There, they find the meaning of their friendship, how it defines the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.As the Philippines' most widely translated author, F. Sionil José's reputation rests largely on his epic work—the Rosales novels, which span a hundred years of Philippine history and encompass four generations. His short stories, however, are just as memorable for their unerring depiction of the Filipino condition. This collection includes some of the earliest stories he wrote from the late forties to the early fifties. In these stories, he already maps out the boundaries of his literary geography and plumbs the depths of the Filipino character, at the same time hewing to the continuing theme of almost all of his work: the Filipino's often futile search for social justice and a moral order.F. Sionil José's fiction is now translated into 27 languages including Tagalog. Random House has just completed putting out the Rosales saga. Fayard of France has already released four of his five Rosales novels.

A Letter to the World: Poems for Young Readers


Emily Dickinson - 1968
    She spent most of her life in seclusion, seeing few people outside her own family, rarely going beyond the garden of her father's house except to take the secret path to her brother's house nearby. The only people with whom she apparently felt at ease were the children who came to play in that garden, to whom she sent gifts of gingerbread, lowered from her window in a basket. Yet when she dies, in 1886, she left behind her hundreds of poems which reveal an intensity of living that is rare.

The Yeshiva: Vol. 2


Chaim Grade - 1968
    

Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1


Samuel Johnson - 1968
    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

There Is a Happy Land


Keith Waterhouse - 1968
    Unlike most boys portrayed in fiction he is not an ultrasensitive soul but an ordinary boy, occasionally cowardly, sometimes a liar, tough in his own eyes and often insecure in his dealings with others. In his evocation of the jingles, games, fantasies and nightmares of childhood, Waterhouse brings his tribe of street urchins so vividly to life that the book has taken on the status of a much-loved classic.

Collected Longer Poems


W.H. Auden - 1968
    H. Auden has selected for this volume the longer poems he originally published between 1930 and 1947, which are among his most enduring achievements, both for their technical virtuosity and for the emotional and intellectual precision with which he dissects the spiritual illnesses of our times. Collected Longer Poems includes Paid on Both Sides, Letter to Lord Byron, For the Time Being, The Sea and the Mirror, and The Age of Anxiety.With its companion volume, Collected Shorter Poems, published by Random House in 1967, this collection represents all of his past work that Auden wishes to preserve.This edition is set from the first American edition of 1969 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House.

Silence! The Court is in Session


Vijay Tendulkar - 1968
    In some ways typical, in others uncharacteristic, this play was written for a Rangayan performance in 1968. Drafted mere days before its staging, it has since been broadcast by the BBC in English and made into a film by Satyadev Dubey. This edition of the play, titled Silence! The Court is in Session and translated by Priya Adarkar, also features an introduction by Kumud Mehta.

The Hand


Georges Simenon - 1968
    The inspiration for the new play by award-winning playwright David Hare.'I had begun, God knows why, tearing a corner off of everyday truth, begun seeing myself in another kind of mirror, and now the whole of the old, more or less comfortable truth was falling to pieces'Confident and successful, New York advertising executive Ray Sanders takes what he wants from life. When he goes missing in a snow storm in Connecticut one evening, his closest friend begins to reassess his loyalties, gambling Ray's fate and his own future.

Outer Dark


Cormac McCarthy - 1968
    Discovering her brother's lie, she sets forth alone to find her son. Both brother and sister wander through a countryside being scourged by three terrifying strangers, toward an apocalyptic resolution.

Moonshine light, moonshine bright.


William Price Fox - 1968
    

Trip To Hanoi


Susan Sontag - 1968
    She loathes herself for being poisoned by capitalist society and its pleasures. A schizophrenic outlook emerges, because Sontag believes that she has found paradise in Hanoi. She forgives herself for the grievous sin of reaping benefits of her own society, which she hates. She is just a radical leftist weirdo, who would not survive 48 hours in the society which she idolizes.

Paul Klee


Ernest Raboff - 1968
    Here text explains purpose, symbolism, and technique in fifteen color works and sixteen black and white sketches of Paul Klee.

Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room


Janet Frame - 1968
    A native of New Zealand, she is the author of eleven novels, four collections of stories, a volume of poetry, a children's book, and her heartfelt and courageous autobiography -- all published by George Braziller. This fall, we celebrate our thirty-ninth year of publishing Frame's extraordinary writing.

A Critical History of English Literature, Volume 3


David Daiches - 1968
    

The Secrets of the Pirate Inn


Wylly Folk St. John - 1968
    But he will have to move to an old-age home unless Sally, Amy and Jack can find the treasure... money, and an uncut diamond!The only clue is a counting-out rhyme: "William Mr. Trimbletoe," it goes, "catches fishes, puts them in dishes..." It makes no sense at all.The sleuthing begins. Each clue brings a new treasure, but as the hunt continues, Sally, Amy and Jack discover that the most important clue is the hardest of all to unravel.

Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope (Riverside Editions)


Alexander Pope - 1968
    A collection of the poetry and prose by Alexander Pope.

The Medieval Lyric


Peter Dronke - 1968
    After an introductory discussion of the performers and performance of lyrics in the middle ages, each chapter analyses one of the major lyrical genres and centres on close critical discussion of outstanding lyrics, with generous quotation of texts and translations. While the rise of religious lyric and the transformations of love-lyric receive the fullest treatment, there are also chapters on women's songs, on the 'alba', on dance-songs, and on `lyrics of realism'.

The Selected Poems


Fulke Greville - 1968
    Although his poems, long out of print, are today less well known than those of Sidney, Spenser, or Shakespeare, Greville left an indelible mark on the world of Renaissance poetry, both in his love poems, which ably work within the English Petrarchan tradition, and in his religious meditations, which, along with the work of Donne and Herbert, stand as a highpoint of early Protestant poetics. Back in print for a new generation of scholars and readers, Thom Gunn’s selection of Greville’s short poems includes the whole of Greville’s lyric sequence, Caelica, along with choruses from some of Greville’s verse dramas. Gunn’s introduction places Greville’s thought in historical context and in relation to the existential anxieties that came to preoccupy writers in the twentieth century. It is as revealing about Gunn himself, and the reading of earlier English verse in the 1960s, as it is about Greville’s own poetic achievement. This reissue of Selected Poems of Fulke Greville is an event of the first order both for students of early British literature and for readers of Thom Gunn and English poetry generally.

The Cooking of Vienna's Empire


Joseph Wechsberg - 1968
    

Allusions in Ulysses: An Annotated List


Weldon Thornton - 1968
    In brief, this book is a copiously annotated list of Joyce's allusions in such areas as literature, philosophy, theology, history, and the fine arts. So awesome an undertaking would not have been possible without the prior work of such persons as Stuart Gilbert, Joseph Prescott, William York Tindall, M.J.C. Hodgart, Mabel Worthington, and many others. But the present list is more than a compilation of previously discovered allusions, for it contains many allusions that have never been suggested before, as well as some that have only been partially or mistakenly identified in earlier publications.In preparing this work, the author has kept its usefulness to the reader foremost in mind. He often refreshed the reader's memory in concerning the context of an allusion, since its context, in one sense or another, is always the guide to its function in the novel. The entire list is fully cross-referenced and keyed by page and line to both the old and new Modern Library editions of Ulysses. In addition, the index is prepared in such a way that it indexes not only the List but also the novel itself.The purpose of allusion in a literary work is essentially the same as that of all other types of metaphor—the development and revelation of character, structure, and theme—and, when skillfully used, it does all of these simultaneously. Joyce's use of allusion is distinguished from that of other authors not by its purposes, but by its extent and thoroughness. Ulysses involves dozens of allusive contexts, all continually intersecting, modifying, and qualifying one another. Here again Joyce's uniqueness and complexity lie not in his themes or characters, nor in his basic methods of developing them, but in his accepting the challenge of an Olympian use of his chosen methods. The value of this volume to Joyce scholars and students is obvious; however, its usefulness to anyone who reads Ulysses is as great, if not greater. It can truly be the key to this difficult but rewarding novel.

The Sun's Eye


Anne Walmsley - 1968
    Questions have been added to this edition to help teachers initiate pupils' discussion and further work based on the text. In addition there are also notes about the writers, prepared by each author specially for this book.

Secondary Worlds


W.H. Auden - 1968
    S. Eliot lectures delivered at Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, October, 1967.

Selected Writings


Samuel Johnson - 1968
    This excellent anthology contains generous selections from each period and includes London, The Life Savage, The Vanity of Human Wishes, extracts from the English Dictionary, Preface to Shakespeare and Lives of the Poets. Throughout, the editor, Patrick Cruttwell, has been concerned that his choice should illustrate the riches and brilliance of Johnson's literary personality, as well as allow Johnson's less well-known writings, such as his early journalism, his letters and his prayers, a proper place. Johnson was a writer of vigour, power, passion and profundity, and this selection reveals all these fascinating aspects of one of our greatest men of letters.