Best of
Literature

1977

Selected Stories


O. Henry - 1977
    Henry originated the humorous, energetic tale that ends with an ironic, even shocking twist. In "After Twenty Years," for example, two boys agree to meet at a particular spot exactly twenty years later. Both are faithful, but in the intervening years one boy has turned into a criminal, the other into a policeman. Behind the rendezvous lurks a powerful dramatic situation with a fascinating moral dilemma--all in a few brief pages. This is just one of the many literary gems in Selected Stories of O. Henry, a collection of forty-five of O. Henry's most renowned and entertaining short stories. Each one offers insights into human nature and the ways it is affected by love, jealousy, poverty, gentility, and the all-pervading reality of people conning people--themes that ran through the author's own life. Born William Sidney Porter, O. Henry started writing while in prison for embezzlement. Later he moved to New York, and his tales romanticizing the commonplace, particularly the life of ordinary New Yorkers, became highly popular. The most widely read author of his time, O. Henry died penniless but left behind a wealth of short stories that endure as hallmarks of the genre.

Seven Nights


Jorge Luis Borges - 1977
    The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

Holy the Firm


Annie Dillard - 1977
    In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth consumed in a candle flame, about a seven-year-old girl burned in an airplane accident, about a baptism on a cold beach. But behind the moving curtain of what she calls "the hard things -- rock mountain and salt sea," she sees, sometimes far off and sometimes as close by as a veil or air, the power play of holy fire.This is a profound book about the natural world -- both its beauty and its cruelty -- the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dillard knows so well.

Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah


Richard Bach - 1977
    For disillusioned writer and itinerant barnstormer Richard Bach, belief is as real as a full tank of gas and sparks firing in the cylinders...until he meets Donald Shimoda — former mechanic and self-described messiah who can make wrenches fly and Richard's imagination soar....In Illusions, Richard Bach takes to the air to discover the ageless truths that give our souls wings: that people don't need airplanes to soar...that even the darkest clouds have meaning once we lift ourselves above them... and that messiahs can be found in the unlikeliest places — like hay fields, one-traffic-light midwestern towns, and most of all, deep within ourselves.

The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You


Frank Stanford - 1977
    Frank Stanford was called by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Alan Dugan a brilliant poet, ample in his work, like Whitman. He was the founder of Lost Roads Publishers and the author of a number of important works, among them the epic THE BATTLEFIELD WHERE THE MOON SAYS I LOVE YOU, reprinted by Lost Roads under the editorship of Forrest Gander and C.D. Wright. Frank Stanford said his purpose in his writing and with his press was to 'reclaim the landscape of American poetry' - The Arkansas Times. Stanford ended his own life in 1978 when he was 29. The reprinting of this major book is a truly important, much anticipated literary event.

The Brotherhood of the Grape


John Fante - 1977
    Henry's tyrannical, brick laying father, Nick, though weak and alcoholic, can still strike fear into the hearts of his sons. His mother, though ill and devout to her Catholicism, still has the power to comfort and confuse her children. This is typical of Fante's novels, it's autobiographical, and brimming with love, death, violence and religion. Writing with great passion Fante powerfully hits home the damage family can wreck upon us all.

Song of Solomon


Toni Morrison - 1977
    For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Fires: Essays, Poems, Stories


Raymond Carver - 1977
    Two of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.

One Robe, One Bowl: The Zen Poetry of Ryōkan


Ryōkan - 1977
    His reclusive life and celebration of nature and the natural life also bring to mind his younger American contemporary, Thoreau. Ryokan's poetry is that of the mature Zen master, its deceptive simplicity revealing an art that surpasses artifice. Although Ryokan was born in eighteenth-century Japan, his extraordinary poems, capturing in a few luminous phrases both the beauty and the pathos of human life, reach far beyond time and place to touch the springs of humanity.

How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie


Borislav Pekić - 1977
    In a series of letters to a brother-in-law, Rutkowski lays out his ambivalent reactions to war and unthinkable violence, connecting his own swirling ideas to those of some of the major figures of European thought: Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Nietzsche, Freud, and others.But the novel is more than an intellectual meditation. Pekic was himself a frequent political agitator and occasional prisoner, and he drew on his first hand knowledge of police methods and life under totalitarianism to paint a chilling portrait of an intellectual acting as a tool of repression. At the same time he questions whether Rutkowski's ideology puts him outside the philosophical tradition he so admires-or if the line separating it from totalitarianism is not as clear as we like to think.

Shelley's Poetry and Prose


Percy Bysshe Shelley - 1977
    All headnotes are new or updated, and many footnotes have been added, replaced, or revised. Criticism reflects the recent renaissance in Shelley studies, the greatest renaissance since 1870-92. All twenty-three essays are new to the Second Edition; among them are the work of Harold Bloom, Stuart Curran, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, Michael Ferber, James Chandler, and Susan J. Wolfson. A Chronology, an updated Selected Bibliography, and an Index of Titles and First Lines are included.

Are You There God? It's Me Margaret / Then Again, Maybe I Won't / Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great / Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing / Blubber


Judy Blume - 1977
    

The Singer Trilogy: The Mythic Retelling of the Story of the New Testament


Calvin Miller - 1977
    Recounting the story of Christ through an allegorical and poetic narrative of a Singer whose Song could not be silenced, Miller's work reinvigorated Christian literature and offers believers and seekers everywhere a deeply personal encounter with the gospel. This magnificent reimagining of the story of Christ and his church gives young and old alike the opportunitiy to be immersed in the good news.

The Hour of the Star


Clarice Lispector - 1977
    Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

Treasure Island


Deidre S. Laiken - 1977
    The world's best-loved children's stories set in large type for easy reading.-- Over 100 illustrations in each bookGreat Illustrated Classics

The Engineer of Human Souls


Josef Škvorecký - 1977
    As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.As adventuresome, episodic, bawdy, comic, and literary as any novel written in the past twenty-five years, The Engineer of Human Souls is worthy of the subtitle Skvorecky gave it: "An Entertainment on the Old Themes of Life, Women, Fate, Dreams, The Working Class, Secret Agents,Love and Death."

Marxism and Literature


Raymond Williams - 1977
    He analyzes previous contributions to a Marxist theory of literature from Marx himself to Lukacs, Althusser, and Goldmann, and develops his own approach by outlining a theory of cultural materialism' which integrates Marxist theories of language with Marxist theories of literature. Williams moves from a review of the growth of the concepts of literature and idealogy to a redefinition of determinism' and hegemony'. His incisive discussion of the 'social material process' of cultural activity culminates in a re-examination of the problems of alignment and commitment and of the creative practice in individual authors and wider social groups.

The Three Musketeers (Great Illustrated Classics)


Malvina G. Vogel - 1977
    In seventeenth-century France, young D'Artagnan initially quarrels with, then befriends, three musketeers and joins them in trying to outwit the enemies of the king and queen.

Eumeswil


Ernst Jünger - 1977
    Eumeswil is a utopian state ruled by the Condor, a general who has installed himself as a dictator and who dominates the capital from a guarded citadel atop a hill - the Casbah. A refined manipulator of power, the Condor despises the democrats who conspire against him. Venator, the narrator of the novel, is a historian whose discreet and efficient services as the Condor's night steward earn him full access to the forbidden zone, at the very heart of power. Every evening, while attending to the Condor and his guests at the Casbah's night bar, Venator keeps a secret journal in which he records the conversations he overhears, delineating the diverse personalities in the Condor's entourage while sketching out an analysis of the different aspects of the psychology of power. Venator's days are spent building a hidden refuge in the mountains, a hermetic retreat where he hopes one day to realize his dreams of utter self-sufficiency. In the meantime, however, he continues to pursue his career as a historian, using the magnificent tool that has been placed at his disposal - the "luminar", a holographic instrument that can summon up any figure or event in human history. Venator, in a word, embodies Junger's ideal of the "anarch" - a heroic figure whose radical skepticism and individualism are not to be confused with mere anarchism. Around the opposite figures of the dictator and the anarch, Junger weaves a hallucinatory and poetic rumination on the nature of history and on the mainsprings of political power. At once tale, essay and philosophical poem, Eumeswil offers a desolate and lucid assessment of totalitarianism by an author who witnessed its horrors firsthand.

Adultery and Other Choices


Andre Dubus - 1977
    The opening stories focus on the fragile nature of youth, exemplified in struggles with a father, a friend, an enemy. In part two, Dubus contends with the military, the police, and fate--and then leaves us with the most wrenching of all emotional challenges in the final novella, Adultery. Poignant as parables, alive as fiction, and compelling as pure narrative, these familiar stories never fail to entertain while, at the same time, leaving the reader breathless with the immediacy and depth of real life in the real America.

The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales


Patrick K. Ford - 1977
    They are best known as the "Four Branches of the Mabinogi," and comprise the tales of Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan, and Math. The remaining stories also spring from the same tree, and together they form a collection that comprises the core of the ancient Welsh mythological cycle. They are also among the best the medieval Celtic literature has to offer.In the first thoroughly revised edition and translation of this world classic since Lady Charlotte Guest's famous Mabinogion went out of print, Mr. Ford has endeavored to present a scholarly document in readable, modern English. Basing his criteria on the latest scholarship in myth, he includes only those stories that have remained unadulterated by the influence of the French Arthurian romances. These are, in addition to the "Four Branches," the tale of "Kulhwch and Olwen," which is rooted in the mythological origins of Arthur, seen here in his role of divine hunter in pursuit of the swine-god; "Lludd and Lleuelis," which reaches beyond its immediate Celtic sources into ancient Indo-European ideologies; and the long unavailable "Tale of Taliesin," which offers insights into Celtic concepts of the archetypal poet-seer and the acquisition of Divine Wisdom.

The Lover


A.B. Yehoshua - 1977
    Through five different perspectives, Yehoshua explores the realities and consequences of the affair and the search, laying bare deep-rooted tensions within family, between generations, between Jews and Arabs.

The Public Burning


Robert Coover - 1977
    The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use living historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fe at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."

Walks with Walser


Carl Seelig - 1977
    While at the Herisau sanitarium, instead of writing, Walser practiced another favorite activity: walking. Starting in 1936, Carl Seelig, Walser’s friend and literary executor, visited and accompanied him on these walks, meticulously recording their conversations. As they strolled, Walser told stories, shared his daily experiences of the sanatorium, and expressed his opinions about books and art, writing and history. When Seelig asked why he no longer wrote, Walser famously replied: “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad.” Filled with lively anecdotes and details, Walks with Walser offers the fullest available account of this wonderful writer’s inner and outer life.

Works of W. Somerset Maugham


W. Somerset Maugham - 1977
    It is indexed alphabetically, chronologically and by category, making it easier to access individual books, stories and poems. This collection offers lower price, the convenience of a one-time download, and it reduces the clutter in your digital library. All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biography. Table of Contents The ExplorerThe HeroThe Land of PromiseThe Land of the Blessed VirginLiza of LambethThe MagicianMoon and SixpenceOf Human BondageThe Trembling of a LeafAppendix:W. Somerset Maugham BiographyAbout and Navigation

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts


Sylvia Plath - 1977
    If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."-- Sylvia Plath, from "Notebooks, February 1956"Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. "Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action


Audre Lorde - 1977
    

The Haunted Monastery and the Chinese Maze Murders


Robert van Gulik - 1977
    Accurate in their background and thrillingly imaginative and original in their storytelling, van Gulik's novels abound in atmospheric entertainment. 27 illustrations.

Samuel Johnson


Walter Jackson Bate - 1977
    Jackson Bate delves deep into the character that formed Johnson's awesome intellect and fueled his prodigious output. The first great modern biography of Johnson, it confirms that his statements and judgments on literature, politics, religion, behavior - on all human experience - are as relevant in our age as when they were first uttered. This new edition brings a modern classic back into print and includes a new preface from the author.

Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records


Katsuki Sekida - 1977
    The two works translated in this book, Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate ) and Hekiganroku (The Blue Cliff Record), both compiled during the Song dynasty in China, are the best known and most frequently studied koan collections, and are classics of Zen literature. They are still used today in a variety of practice lineages, from traditional zendos to modern Zen centers. In a completely new translation, together with original commentaries, the well-known Zen teacher Katsuki Sekida brings to these works the same fresh and pragmatic approach that made his Zen Training so successful. The insights of a lifetime of Zen practice and his familiarity with both Eastern and Western ways of thinking make him an ideal interpreter of these texts.

Refiner's Fire


Mark Helprin - 1977
    A cross between Fielding´s Tom Jones and the story of Moses, Refiner´s Fire is a great and colorful adventure that ends in a crucible of battle, suffering, and death, from which Marshall Pearl rises purely by the grace of God. Addressing the holy and the profane, but never heavy handedly, it is not so much a meditation on the fate of the Jews after the Holocaust, the rise of Israel, and the spirit of America, as it is an elegy and a song in which the powers of life and regeneration are shown to gorgeous effect.

One Deadly Summer


Sébastien Japrisot - 1977
    But it’s Fiorimond, the local mechanic, who wants her more.After just one date she moves in with him and his family. As Fiorimond starts to wonder if he’s doing the right thing, he has no idea that Elle is planning to avenge a terrible crime from the past…Set in the 1970s, and available in English again for the first time in decades, this is a true classic of French suspense.

Radi Os


Ronald Johnson - 1977
    First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away, ' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture." With God and Satan crossed out, RADI OS reduces Milton's Baroque poem to elemental forces. In this retelling of the Fall, song precipitates from chaos, sight from fire: "in the shape / as of / above the / rose / through / rose / rising / the radiant sun.

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter


Mario Vargas Llosa - 1977
    His young life is disrupted by two arrivals.The first is his aunt Julia, recently divorced and thirteen years older, with whom he begins a secret affair. The second is a manic radio scriptwriter named Pedro Camacho, whose racy, vituperative soap operas are holding the city's listeners in thrall. Pedro chooses young Marito to be his confidant as he slowly goes insane.Interweaving the story of Marito's life with the ever-more-fevered tales of Pedro Camacho, Vargas Llosa's novel is masterfully done, hilarious, mischievous, a classic named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review.

Angels


Denis Johnson - 1977
    Jamie has ditched her husband and is running away with her two baby girls. Bill is dreaming of making it big in a life of crime. They meet on a Greyhound bus and decide to team up.So begins a stunning, tragic odyssey through the dark underbelly of America – the bars, bus stations, mental wards, and prisons that play host to Jamie and Bill as they find themselves trapped in a downward spiral though rape, alcohol, drugs and crime, to madness and death.From the author of Tree of Smoke , winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar


Roald Dahl - 1977
    Such an amazing ability could allow Henry to cheat at cards! Henry undertakes years of training to achieve this remarkable feat and promptly uses his new power to win, and win big, but he soon discovers that more than his eyes have been changed by his studies...1 computer optical disc (2 h, 18 min.)

Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying


Adrienne Rich - 1977
    

The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue


Thomas H. Ogden - 1977
    Non-analysts are frequently both baffled and alienated by the jargon and the complexity of works which extend psychoanalytical thinking, but Ogden is revealed in this book as an outstanding communicator as well as a major theoretician. The book's subtitle is a guide to the main focus of the work, which reinterprets the work of Melanie Klein, with its focus on phantasy, in relation to the biological determinants of perception and the meaning and organization of experience in the interpersonal setting of human growth and development. Ogden re-interprets Klein to illuminate Freudian instinct theory, using the contributions of Bion, Fairbairn, and particularly Winnicott-British object relations theorists-to clarify and extend aspects of their work and to move towards an impressive exposition of the way in which the human mind develops." -Pamela M. Ashurst, The British Journal of Psychiatry A Jason Aronson Book

Sitt Marie Rose


Etel Adnan - 1977
    It reveals the tribal mentality which makes the Middle East a dangerous powerhouse. It constitutes a new narrative form and is already a classic of war literature. It won the France-Pays Arabes award in Paris and has been translated into ten languages.

Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties


Sara Davidson - 1977
    Sara Davidson follows the three—Susie, Tasha, and Sara herself—from their first meeting in 1962, through the events that "radicalized" them in unexpected ways in the decade after the years in Berkeley. Susie navigates through the Free Speech Movement and the early women's movement in Berkeley, and Tasha enters the trendy New York art and society scene. Sara, a journalist, travels the country reporting on the stories of the sixties.The private lives that Davidson reconstructs are set against the public background of the time. Figures such as Timothy Leary, Mario Savio, Tom Hayden, and Joan Baez are here, as are the many young people who sought alternatives to "the establishment" through whatever means seemed worth exploring: radical politics, meditation, drugs, group sex, or dropping out. Davidson's honest and detailed chronicle reveals the hopes, confusion, and disillusionment of a generation whose rites of passage defined one of the most contentious decades of this century.

The Weight of the World


Peter Handke - 1977
    Along with references to such mentors as Truffaut, John Cowper Powys, Robert DeNiro and Goethe, the journal recounts Handke's passing impressions of strangers; the deep and delicate nature of his relationship with his daughter; and a brief hospital stay which stirs his ever-present fear of death.

31 Letters And 13 Dreams


Richard Hugo - 1977
    We read over the poet’s shoulder as the town triggers the imagination, the friendship is re-opened, the poet’s selfhood is explored and illuminated. The “dreams” turn up unexpectedly (as dreams do) among the letters; their haunting images give further depth to the poet’s exploration. Are we overhearing them? Who is the “you” that dreams?

The Flower Show and the Toth Family


István Örkény - 1977
    In the Flower Show (1977)--the author exploits our universal unease in the face of death, the desire to 'star' taken to its ultimate absurdity by playing the lead in one's own demise, and the voyeurism of the modern media. In the Toth Family (1967), a mad army major on leave terrorizes a village fireman and his family, forcing them to cut and fold endless quantities of cardboard packing boxes every night until dawn.

Petals of Blood


Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - 1977
    A deceptively simple tale, Petals of Blood is on the surface a suspenseful investigation of a spectacular triple murder in upcountry Kenya. Yet as the intertwined stories of the four suspects unfold, a devastating picture emerges of a modern third-world nation whose frustrated people feel their leaders have failed them time after time. First published in 1977, this novel was so explosive that its author was imprisoned without charges by the Kenyan government. His incarceration was so shocking that newspapers around the world called attention to the case, and protests were raised by human-rights groups, scholars, and writers, including James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Donald Barthelme, Harold Pinter, and Margaret Drabble.First time in Penguin Classics

Snow Country & Thousand Cranes


Yasunari Kawabata - 1977
    Snow Mountain is a nuanced love story involving a discouraged urbanite (Shimamura) and a rural geisha (Komako). Shimamura is tired of the bustling city. He takes the train through the snow to the mountains of the west coast of Japan, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, Komako is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion that is alien to Shimamura, and their love offers no freedom to either of them. Thousand Cranes is another love story. This melancholy tale uses the classical tea ceremony as a background for the story of a young man's relationships to two women, his father's former mistress and her daughter.

Plays 4: Betrayal / Monologue / One for the Road / Mountain Language / Family Voices / A Kind of Alaska / Victoria Station / Precisely / The New World Order / Party Time / Moonlight / Ashes to Ashes / Celebration


Harold Pinter - 1977
    

Truth and Actuality


Jiddu Krishnamurti - 1977
    

The Animal Factory


Edward Bunker - 1977
    Ron Decker is a newbie, a drug dealer whose shot at a short two-year stint in the can is threatened from inside and outside. He's got to keep a spotless record or it's ten to life. But at San Quentin, no man can steer clear of the Brotherhoods, the race wars, the relentlessness. It soon becomes clear that some inmates are more equal than others; Earl Copen is one of them, an old-timer who has learned not just to survive but to thrive behind bars. Not much can surprise him-but the bond he forms with Ron startles them both; it's a true education of a felon.

The Heart of the Matter/Orient Express (aka Stamboul Train)/A Burnt-out Case/The Third Man/The Quiet American/Loser Takes All/The Power & the Glory


Graham Greene - 1977
    Much of Greene's outlook is there. A keen and often mocking eye, versatility and humor, a deep and sometimes lacerated concern for the bodies and souls of mankind combine to make Greene one of the most admired and influential contemporary writers. A consummate craftsman and dedicated enemy of bores and boredom, Greene draws the reader of these seven novels into that instant world apart created by convincing characters and total readability.Contents: The Heart of the Matter Orient Express (aka Stamboul Train) A Burnt-out Case The Third Man The Quiet American Loser Takes All The Power and the Glory

Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty


Albert Bermel - 1977
    In this incisive study, Albert Bermel looks closely at Artaud's work as a playwright, director, actor, designer, producer and critic, and provides a fresh insight into his ideas, innovations and, above all, his writings.Tracing the theatre of cruelty's origins in earlier dramatic conventions, tribal rituals of cleansing, transfiguration and exaltation, and in related arts such as film and dance, Bermel examines each of Artaud's six plays for form and meaning, as well as surveying the application of Artaud's theories and techniques to the international theatre of recent years.

Nelson: The Essential Hero


Ernle Bradford - 1977
    In this biography of Horatio Nelson, Ernle Bradford discusses Nelson's own battles, but also looks at naval warfare of the period in general. The author describes the strategies, the tactics, the ponderous ship-to-ship bombardments, the terrifying injuries, as well as Nelson's policy of annihilation of the opposing fleet, making the point that Nelson regarded the escape of a single enemy ship as a failure.

Pink Floyd - Animals


David Gilmour - 1977
    Songs include: Pigs on the Wing * Dogs * Sheep * Pigs (Three Different Ones) * Pigs on the Wing Part II * and more.

Return To The Marshes: Life With The Marsh Arabs Of Iraq


Gavin Young - 1977
    

Possibility of Being: A Selection of Poems


Rainer Maria Rilke - 1977
    The poems are chosen from The Book of Hours (1899-1903), The Book of Images (1902 and 1906), New Poems (1907 and 1908), Requiem (1909), Duino Elegies (1923), Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), and the posthumous Poems 1906-26. This selection was made by Professor Theodore Ziolkowski of Princeton University, who drew from the various New Directions volumes of Rilke's work translated by J. B. Leishman.

Staggerford


Jon Hassler - 1977
    But it is an extraodinary week, filled with the poetry of living, the sweetness of expectation, and the glory of surprise that can change a life forever....

Its Colours They Are Fine


Alan Spence - 1977
    The 13 interlinked stories in this book depict every aspect of life in Glasgow, evoking the slums and their inhabitants, both young and old, Catholic and Protestant, hopeful and disillusioned.

The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa, Volume One


Milarepa - 1977
    The Life-story And Teaching Of The Greatest Poet-Saint Ever To Appear In The History Of Buddhism.

Marie Laveau


Francine Prose - 1977
    Judges, servants, city fathers, elegant courtesans and society belles.Marie Laveau Rich young planters begged for dances, pleaded for kisses, and fought duels in her name.Marie Laveau She could win back your lover, turn your grey curls to gold, help you win the jackpot, or put the death fix on you. She cast her wild spell on men and women, spirits and conjurors, until the entire city of New Orleans lay at her dancing feet. You've never met anyone like her -- except in your most fantastic dreams.

Reincarnation: The Phoenix Fire Mystery


Sylvia L. Cranston - 1977
    An anthology that offers perspectives on Job's question: 'If a man die, shall he live again?' Spanning over 5,000 years of world thought, this title invites consideration of an idea that has found hospitality in the greatest minds of history.

The Unoriginal Sinner and the Ice-Cream God


John R. Powers - 1977
    . . . I like laughter and the people who do it; from the twitterers to the chucklers to those whose laughter roars out in a gallop of explosions. To me, laughter is taking a bite out of life and saying, “Just right.”  Signed: God Clever yet cynical Tim Conroy, a failed idealist with a chip on his shoulder, is unable to find a secure place for himself in 1960s South Side Chicago. He narrates his bittersweet struggles with God, sex, career, and education in a voice that evokes an Irish Catholic Holden Caulfield. This poignant, skillfully told tale concludes John R. Powers’s memorable coming-of-age trilogy that includes The Last Catholic in America and Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?

A Place to Come To


Robert Penn Warren - 1977
    Jed is born just at the end of the First World War on a run-down farm near the little town of Dugton, Alabama. When he is nine his drunken father dies in a low-comedy accident that becomes part of the obscene folklore of the region. His semi-literate mother has a caustic wit, an iron character, and the determination that Jed will escape the South. As she puts it: "Git what's to git, then git. Git on."A dedicated Latin teacher and Jed's football prowess combine to get him a scholarship at a jerkwater college, whence he enters the graduate school of the University of Chicago and excels in the field of classical and medieval literature. After fighting with the Italian Partisans behind the Nazi lines, Jed returns to the university and marries a woman who dies soon thereafter. He moves to a new job in Nashville and becomes involved in a torrid and ill-fated love affair, the central event of the novel, coloring all the subsequent action. He flees to Paris and then to Chicago; he marries again, fathers a son, and is soon divorced.Middle-aged, and now a figure of world renown, Jed goes back to Dugton for a long-deferred visit to his mother's grave, and - in what must be one of the most moving passages ever written - is able to make some kind of peace with himself and with his past. (Book jacket)

The Devil's Church and Other Stories


Machado de Assis - 1977
    Collectively, these nineteen stories are representative of Machado's unique style and world view, and this translation doubles the number of his stories previously available in English.The stories in this volume reflect Machado's post-1880 emphasis on social satire and experimentation in psychological realism. If he had continued to produce the moralistic love stories and parlor intrigues of his earlier fiction, Machado's legacy would have been an entertaining but inconsequent body of work. However, by 1880 he had begun a devastating satirical assault on society through his fiction. In spite of his ruthlessness, Machado does at times reveal an ironic sympathy for his characters. He is not indifferent to human conflict but uses humor and irony to stress the absurdity of these conflicts, acted out against the backdrop of an indifferent universe. Such a spectacle creates a sense of helplessness that can only inspire wistful amusement.In his technical mastery of the short story. Machado was decades ahead of his contemporaries and can still be considered more modern than most of the modernists themselves. That his stories elicit such strong and diverse reactions today is a tribute to their richness, complexity, and significance.

Flaubert and Madame Bovary


Francis Steegmuller - 1977
    Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at odds with and yet dependent on his bourgeois family. Then, drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence, Steegmuller tracks his subject through friendships and love affairs, a trip to the Orient, nervous breakdown and tenuous recovery, and finally into the study, where a mind at once restless and jaded finds a focus in the precisely detailed reality of an imagined woman, utterly ordinary in her unhappiness, whose story was to revolutionise literature.

The Proust Screenplay: À la recherche du temps perdu


Harold Pinter - 1977
    Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written. With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.

Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution Volume 2: The Golden Age


Leszek Kolalowski - 1977
    Its three volumes in English are: 1: The Founders, II: The Golden Age, and III: The Breakdown. It was first published in Polish in Paris in 1976, with the English translation appearing in 1978. In 2005, Main Currents of Marxism was republished in a one volume edition, with a new preface and epilogue by Kołakowski. The work was intended to be a "handbook" on Marxism by Kołakowski, who was once an orthodox Marxist but ultimately rejected Marxism. Despite his critical stand toward Marxism, Kołakowski endorsed the philosopher György Lukács's interpretation of Karl Marx.This is the second volume and includes a discussion of the Second International and figures such as Paul Lafargue, Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhanov, Jean Jaurès, Jan Wacław Machajski, Vladimir Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Rudolf Hilferding; it reviews Hilferding's debate about the theory of value with the economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk. It also discusses Austromarxism.

The Murder on the Links / The Secret Adversary


Agatha Christie - 1977
    Before Poirot can begin to assess the clues, a second corpse is found, murdered in the same way as his client. &A crime novel in which two desperate youngsters, short of money and restless for excitement, place an advertisement saying they are willing to do anything and to travel anywhere, but their first assignment for a sinister client plunges them into more danger than they could have imagined.

No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman's Struggle to Live in Two Worlds


Polingaysi Qoyawayma - 1977
    She became known as Elizabeth Q. White. Born at Old Oraibi, Arizona, she was of the first Hopi children to be educated in white schools. Later she was the first Hopi to become a teacher in those schools. Here her biographer records Qoyowayma's break with the traditions of her people and her struggle to gain acceptance for her radical teaching methods.Throughout her life this remarkable woman has held to the best in Hopi culture and has fought to maintain it in the lives of her students. Her story, rich in information on Hopi legend and ceremony, is a moving introduction to the Hopi way of life.

The Land of Ulro


Czesław Miłosz - 1977
    A man who was raised a Catholic in rural Lithuania, lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and emerged, first in Europe and then in America, as one of our most important men of letters, speaks here of the inherited dilemmas of our civilization in a voice recognizable for its honesty and passion.

Decline & Fall/Black Mischief/A Handful of Dust/Scoop/Put Out More Flags/Brideshead Revisited


Evelyn Waugh - 1977
    

Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements and Comments on Man and His Institutions by Great Thinkers in Western History


Mortimer J. Adler - 1977
    Passages from the West's great written works, ranging from the Odyssey and the Old Testament to the Interpretation of Dreams and Ulysses, comment on love, knowledge, ethics, war, art, and other abiding topics.

New Patches for Old


Christobel Mattingley - 1977
    Fortunately, as English Patricia turns into Australian Patches, she does find true friends.

Viking Raiders


Anne Civardi - 1977
    Lively text and cartoon-style artwork bring the characters to life and show what it was really like to live in these harsh times. A brand new edition of the original and informative Usborne Time Traveller series.

The Little Lame Prince and The Adventures of a Brownie


Dinah Maria Mulock Craik - 1977
    

The Modes Of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, And The Typology Of Modern Literature


David Lodge - 1977
    

Invitation To The Dance: A Handbook to Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time


Hilary Spurling - 1977
    As the reader cavorts through the 12-volume novel alongside the narrator Nicholas Jenkins, it soon becomes apparent that he inevitably confuses dates and events, but Hilary Spurling tidies up the most minute detail into its proper place.More than a simple glossary, Invitation to the Dance contains extensive Character, Book, Painting and Place indices, creating a magnificent database of Powell's imagination and England's cultural landscape. This is a masterpiece of 'extreme ingenuity' detailing over four hundred characters and one million words of Powell's lively fifty-year dance of fiction and fact.'Hilary Spurling's exhaustive analysis of the novel's characters supplies a master-key for the reader' -- Anthony Powell

Masterpieces of Mystery: The Golden Age - I


Ellery Queen - 1977
    Part of the Masterpieces of Mystery series.

The Kiss of the Unborn and Other Stories


Fyodor Sologub - 1977
    Barker, the translator of these stories, "critics, in attempting to assess Sologub as an important figure in the modernist movement, have named him Russia's only true decadent, Russia's Baudelaire, Russia's Marquis de Sade."

The Words of My Roaring


Robert Kroetsch - 1977
    By God, people were listening. People were looking my way. And some joker with his arse begining to ache from sitting too long on a nail had to clear his throat and chip in, "Backstrom, what have you got to offer?" I looked at the speaker and saw he was a farmer and I said, "Mister, how would you like some rain?" A new edition of another classic from one of Canada's most enduring novelists.

The Mixed-Up Twins


Carolyn Haywood - 1977
    She quickly befriends Donald and Ronald, but is repeatedly frustrated by her inability to tell them apart. After she and the boys have several adventures together--some of which involve her deliberately trying to fashion ways to tell them apart--she finds that knowing who's who becomes second nature.

The Portable Bernard Shaw


George Bernard Shaw - 1977
    Contents:The devil's disciple --Don Juan in hell (from Man and superman) --Pygmalion (with preface) --Heartbreak house (with preface) --In the beginning (with extracts from the preface to Back to Methuselah) --The adventures of the black girl in her search for God --Shakes versus Shav

James Joyce's Ulysses: Critical Essays


Clive Hart - 1977
    It attempts to explore the richness of Joyce's extraordinary novel more fully than could be done by any single scholar. Joyce's habit of using, when writing each chapter in Ulysses, a particular style, tone, point of view, and narrative structure gives each contributor a special set of problems with which to engage, problems which coincide in every case with certain of his special interests. The essays in this volume complement and illuminate one another to provide the most comprehensive account yet published of Joyce's many-sided masterpiece.

The Diamond Bogo: An African Idyll


Robert F. Jones - 1977
    To make it worthwhile, he sets as his objective the shooting of the Diamond Bogo, a Cape buffalo reported to be running around with a large diamond stuck beneath its horns, an ingenious smuggler’s ploy. The hitch is that the bogo was last seen in the land of the Tok.To pay for this safari, Winjah latches onto three unlikely clients: Donn McGovern, a wealthy hippie; his beautiful starry-eyed wife, Dawn; and Bucky Blackrod, a professional magazine writer whose good instincts have gone to seed. Together, they begin their journey in this moving, entertaining novel, part parody, part morality fable.While Africa has always held a fascination for novelists, Robert F. Jones is particularly impressive in his ability to bring this tradition subject a gritty firsthand knowledge of the real Africa and hunting experience, while at the same time exploring a wild, imaginative world of his own creation.

Springer’s Progress


David Markson - 1977
    Age: forty-seven. Still handsome though muchly vodka'd novelist, currently abashed by acute creative dysfunction. Sole preoccupation amid these artistic doldrums: pursuit of fair women. Springer is a randy incorrigible who is guided by only one inflexible precept: no protracted affairs. And thus he has slyly sustained eighteen years of marriage.Enter, then, Jessica Cornford. Age: almost half of Lucien's. Lush of body and roguish of mind. Whereupon what begins as bawdy interlude becomes perhaps the most untidy extramarital lech in literature.Rabelaisian yet uncannily wise, both ribald and bittersweet, Springer's Progress is that rarest of gifts, a mature love story. It is an also exuberant linguistic romp, a novel saturated with irrepressible wordplay and outrageous literary thieveries. Contemplating his own work, Lucien Springer modestly restricts his ambition to "a phrase or three worth some lonely pretty girl's midnight underlining." For the discerning reader, David Markson has contrived a hundred of them.

A Furl of Fairy Wind: Four Stories


Mollie Hunter - 1977
    Four tales in which people encounter fairies and brownies for the first time.

Propertius: Elegies: Book 1


Propertius - 1977
    Book I is especially suitable for the reader wanting a representative selection of Propertius' poetry. It stands on its own, having appeared in the first place as a separate collection; it reflects a distinct phase of the poet's activity (and of his emotional development); and it is the book which made his reputation. This edition is designed for the pocket of the university student, but it should find a wider audience among classicists of all ages. The introduction provides the necessary historical and critical background and relates Book I to the rest of the elegies; the notes are helpful and to the point; and the text has a reasonable minimum of apparatus. There are no modern editions of this size and scope.

Our Sister Killjoy


Ama Ata Aidoo - 1977
    She comes to Europe, to a land of towering mountains and low grey skies and tries to make sense of it all. What is she doing here? Why aren't the natives friendly? And what will she do when she goes back home?Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo's brilliantly conceived prose poem is by turns bitter and gentle, and is a highly personal exploration of the conflicts between Africa and Europe, between men and women and between a complacent acceptance of the status quo and a passionate desire to reform a rotten world. Of her own writing, Ama Ata Aidoo says, "I write about people, about what strikes me and interests me. It seems the most natural thing in the world for women to write with women as central characters; making women the centre of my universe was spontaneous."

Professor Branestawm Round the Bend


Norman Hunter - 1977
    Professor Branestawm is in top inventive form once more - and it's hardly his fault if his helpful doglike handbag takes to shoplifting, or his self-elevating flowerbeds biff people on the nose when they bend to sniff the flowers!