Best of
Literature

1979

The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor


Flannery O'Connor - 1979
    . . There she stands, a phoenix risen from her own words: calm, slow, funny, courteous, both modest and very sure of herself, intense, sharply penetrating, devout but never pietistic, downright, occasionally fierce, and honest in a way that restores honor to the word."—Sally Fitzgerald, from the Introduction

Just Above My Head


James Baldwin - 1979
    The stark grief of a brother mourning a brother opens this novel with a stunning, unforgettable experience.  Here, in a monumental saga of love and rage, Baldwin goes back to Harlem, to the church of his groundbreaking novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, to the homosexual passion of Giovanni's Room, and to the political fire that enflames his nonfiction work.  Here, too, the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family becomes both a journey into another country of the soul and senses--and a living contemporary history of black struggle in this land.

The Count of Monte Cristo (Great Illustrated Classics)


Mitsu Yamamoto - 1979
    They have delighted in the romance of Jane Austen, thrilled at the adventures of Jules Verne, and pondered the lessons of Aesop. Introduce young readers to these familiar volumes with Great Illustrated Classics. In this series, literary masterworks have been adapted for young scholars. Large, easy-to-read type and charming pen-and-ink drawings enhance the text. Students are sure to enjoy becoming acquainted with traditional literature through these well-loved classics.

Sophie's Choice


William Styron - 1979
    Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Suttree


Cormac McCarthy - 1979
    He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humour enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity.

Revenge of the Lawn / The Abortion / So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away


Richard Brautigan - 1979
    REVENGE OF THE LAWN: Originally published in 1971, these bizarre flashes of insight and humor cover everything from "A High Building in Singapore" to the "Perfect California Day." This is Brautigan's only collection of stories and includes "The Lost Chapters of TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA."THE ABORTION: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE 1966: A public library in California where none of the books have ever been published is full of romantic possibilities. But when the librarian and his girlfriend must travel to Tijuana, they have a series of strange encounters in Brautigan's 1971 novel.SO THE WIND WON'T BLOW IT ALL AWAY: It is 1979, and a man is recalling the events of his twelfth summer, when he bought bullets for his gun instead of a hamburger. Written just before his death, and published in 1982, this novel foreshadowed Brautigan's suicide.

Poetry and Designs: Authoritative Texts, Illuminations in Color and Monochrome, Related Prose, Criticism


William Blake - 1979
    The spelling and punctuation have been modified for greater intelligibility to modern readers. Almost all of Blake's published writings are here, as well as most of his best shorter poems that remained in manuscript at his death, and much of his most energetic prose. Of Blake's major epics, Milton is printed in full, in its longest version; Jerusalem is represented by selection amounting to one third of the complete poem, and The Four Zoas by briefer excerpts. All the other poetic works are presented complete.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination


Sandra M. Gilbert - 1979
    An analysis of Victorian women writers, this pathbreaking book of feminist literary criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual."Contents:The Queen's looking glass: female creativity, male images of women, and the metaphor of literary paternity --Infection in the sentence: the women writer and the anxiety of authorship --The parables of the cave --Shut up in prose: gender and genre in Austen's Juvenilia --Jane Austen's cover story (and its secret agents) --Milton's bogey: patriarchal poetry and women readers --Horror's twin: Mary Shelley's monstrous Eve --Looking oppositely: Emily Brontë's bible of hell --A secret, inward wound: The professor's pupil --A dialogue of self and soul: plain Jane's progress --The genesis of hunger, according to Shirley --The buried life of Lucy Snowe --Made keen by loss: George Eliot's veiled vision --George Eliot as the angel of destruction --The aesthetics of renunciation --A woman, white: Emily Dickinson's yarn of pearl.

The Joys of Motherhood


Buchi Emecheta - 1979
    Nnu Ego is a woman who gives all her energy, money and everything she has to raising her children - leaving her little time to make friends.

Collected Stories, 1939-1976


Paul Bowles - 1979
    Gore Vidal's Introduction to this large collection remarks "His stories are among the best ever written by an American".

Arabian Nights and Days


Naguib Mahfouz - 1979
    Here are genies and flying carpets, Aladdin and Sinbad, Ali Baba, and many other familiar stories, made new by the magical pen of the acknowledged dean of Arabic letters.

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry


Matthew George Walter - 1979
    This newly edited anthology reflects the diverse experiences of those who lived through the war, bringing together the words of poets, soldiers, and civilians affected by the conflict. Here are famous verses by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen; poetry by women writing from the home front; and the anonymous lyrics of soldiers’ songs. Arranged thematically, the selections take the reader through the war’s stages, from conscription to its aftermath, and offer a blend of voices that is both unique and profoundly moving.

The Executioner's Song


Norman Mailer - 1979
    To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed paradoxically intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death.Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story--and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad--with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a trip down the wrong side of the tracks to the deepest sources of American loneliness and violence. It is a towering achievement--impossible to put down, impossible to forget.Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler


Italo Calvino - 1979
    In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches—stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition—with explorations of how and why we choose to read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."

Legends of the Fall


Jim Harrison - 1979
    This magnificent trilogy also contains two other superb short novels. In Revenge, love causes the course of a man's life to be savagely and irrevocably altered. Nordstrom, in The Man Who Gave up his Name, is unable to relinquish his consuming obsessions with women, dancing and food.'

Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy


Rumer Godden - 1979
    It is about finding sin where we least expect it.” — Joan Chittister, from the introduction This haunting tale of disgrace and redemption centers on Lise Fanshawe, a prostitute and brothel manager in postwar Paris who, while serving time in prison for killing a man, finds God. Lise is helped by an order of Catholic nuns that includes former prostitutes and prisoners like her. She joins the order and is swept up in an unexpected and fateful encounter with people from her past life. Rumer Godden, author of the masterwork In This House of Brede, tells an inspiring and entirely convincing conversion story that shows how the mercy of God extends to the darkest human places. The Loyola Classics series connects today's readers to the timeless themes of Catholic fiction in new editions of acclaimed Catholic novels

The Trial of God: (as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod)


Elie Wiesel - 1979
    Only two Jews, Berish the innkeeper and his daughter Hannah, have survived the brutal Cossack raids. When three itinerant actors arrive in town to perform a Purim play, Berish demands that they stage a mock trial of God instead, indicting Him for His silence in the face of evil. Berish, a latter-day Job, is ready to take on the role of prosecutor. But who will defend God? A mysterious stranger named Sam, who seems oddly familiar to everyone present, shows up just in time to volunteer. The idea for this play came from an event that Elie Wiesel witnessed as a boy in Auschwitz: "Three rabbis--all erudite and pious men--decided one evening to indict God for allowing His children to be massacred. I remember: I was there, and I felt like crying. But there nobody cried."Inspired and challenged by this play, Christian theologians Robert McAfee Brown and Matthew Fox, in a new Introduction and Afterword, join Elie Wiesel in the search for faith in a world where God is silent.

The Norton Anthology Of American Literature


Nina Baym - 1979
    This modern section has been overhauled to reflect the diversity of American writing since 1945. A section on 19th-century women's writing is included.

The Complete Works of Lao Tzu: Tao Teh Ching & Hua Hu Ching


Lao Tzu - 1979
    'The Complete Works of Lao Tzu' by Hua-Ching Ni is a remarkable elucidation of the famed 'Tao Teh Ching', the core of Taoist philosophy and a bridge to the subtle truth as well as a practical guideline for natural and harmonious living. Poetic and beautifully realized, this volumn contains one of the only written translations of the 'Hua Hu Ching.'

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volumes A & B


Judith Tanka - 1979
    From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers to postmodernism, this edition conveys the diversity of American literature from its origins to the present. Volume 2 covers the period of 1865 to the present.

The Wooing of Beppo Tate


C. Everard Palmer - 1979
    The Wooing of Beppo Tate is a lively and popular account of life in Kendal, a small village in Jamaica, similar to the author's own childhood home.

David Copperfield (Illustrated Classic Editions)


Malvina G. Vogel - 1979
    Follow him through the unhappiness and brutality of his childhood...the friendships he makes in his teen years...the pressure of starting out on a career...the betrayal by a boyhood friend...the treachery of a jealous co-worker...the silliness and ecstasy of youthful love...and the final discovery of complete happiness.

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite


Gregor von Rezzori - 1979
    Our hero tells of his childhood: his passion for hunting, his love of the wild landscape of Romania, his ridiculous social snobbery. He leads us through his youth, and between fantastic and colourful stories of Bucharest in the late twenties and early thirties, he dissects his own complicated, at times agonizing, development as a moral creature. We are with him as the Nazis take over Austria; as his own anti-semitism - already such a mixture of belief, caprice, and compromise - is shaken to its core. And later on we meet him as a much older man, one haunted by his own protean character, by the beautiful but tragic web of memories and events that together form his history, and by the greatest love of his life, a beautiful Jewess.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting


Milan Kundera - 1979
    Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than just its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed and experienced.

The Basic Kafka


Franz Kafka - 1979
    Published together for the first time are selections from all Kafka's writings: The Metamorphosis, Josephine The Singer, plus his short stories, parables, and his personal diaries and letters.

The Year of the French


Thomas Flanagan - 1979
    They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed in the face of a brutal English counterattack.Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas Flanagan's is one. Subtly conceived, masterfully paced, with a wide and memorable cast of characters, The Year of the French brings to life peasants and landlords, Protestants and Catholics, along with old and abiding questions of secular and religious commitments, empire, occupation, and rebellion. It is quite simply a great historical novel.Named the most distinguished work of fiction in 1979 by the National Book Critics' Circle.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: v. 1


Nina Baym - 1979
    From trickster tales of the Native American tradition to bestsellers of early women writers.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature


Nina Baym - 1979
    Under Nina Baym's direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.

Highliners (Highliners, #1)


William B. McCloskey - 1979
    'Highliners' is the commercial fishermen's term for their own elite, the skippers and crews who bring in the biggest hauls. Set in Kodiak, Highliners brings into sharp relief the lives of the men and women who make their living catching salmon, king crab, halibut, and shrimp off the coast of Alaska. Hank Crawford comes to Kodiak as a college student to work in the canneries during the summer. But he is inexorably drawn to the water and to the hard, often brutal existence of the fishermen, and ultimately, he joins their ranks. Highliners chronicles Hank's journey from greenhorn to highliner, and the triumphs and tragedies of the people he comes to know so well. (6 X 9, 408 pages, maps, illustrations)

Pig Earth


John Berger - 1979
    This book is an act of reckoning that conveys the precise wealth and weight of a world we are losing.

O Cobrador


Rubem Fonseca - 1979
    Rubem Fonseca's Rio is a city at war, a city whose vast disparities- in wealth, social standing, and prestige- are untenable. In the stories of The Taker, rich and poor live in an uneasy equilibrium, where only overwhelming force can maintain order, and violence and deception are essential tools of survival.

The Dragon Can't Dance


Earl Lovelace - 1979
    The people of the shantytown Calvary Hill, usually invisible to the rest of society, join the throng and flaunt their neighborhood personas in masquerade during Carnival. Aldrick, the dashing "king of the Hill," becomes a glorious, dancing dragon; his lovely Sylvia, a princess; Fisheye, rebel idealist, a fierce steel band contestant; and Philo, Calypso songwriter, a star. Then a business sponsors Fisheye's band, Philo gets a hit song, and Sylvia leaves the Hill with a prosperous older man. For Aldrick, it will take one more masquerade—this time, involving guns and hostages—before the illusion of power becomes reality.

Collected Stories and Later Writings


Paul Bowles - 1979
    From his base in Tangier he produced globally ranging novels, stories, and travel writings that set exquisite surfaces over violent undercurrents. His elegantly spare novels chart the unpredictable collisions between "civilized" exiles and a Morocco they never grasp, achieving effects of extreme horror and dislocation.This Library of America Bowles set, the first annotated edition, offers the full range of his achievement: the portrait of an outsider who was one of the essential American writers of the last century. In addition to his novels -- The Sheltering Sky (1949), Let It Come Down (1952), The Spider's House (1955), Up Above the World (1966) -- and his collected stories -- including such classics as "A Distant Episode" and "Pages from Cold Point" -- they contain his masterpiece of travel writing, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue (1963). Throughout, Bowles shows himself a master of gothic terror and a diabolically funny observer of manners as well as a prescient guide to everything from the roots of Islamist politics to the world of Moghrebi music. With a hallucinatory clarity as dry and unforgiving as the desert air, Bowles sends his characters toward encounters with unknown and terrifying forces both outside them and within them.

The North Runner


R.D. Lawrence - 1979
    The North Runner is a true and moving story of the building of trust between a man and an exceptional dog that was half wolf, half Alaskan Malamute, and the resulting mutual affection and respect between them.

The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner


William Faulkner - 1979
    Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner's earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner is an essential addition to its author's canon--as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in the twentieth century.

The Essential Dracula


Bram Stoker - 1979
    Includes: background on Stoker's classic, and the literary history of the vampire novel; commentary by leading contemporary writers; a selected filmography of major vampire films; and dozens of illustrations.

The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy


Stanley Cavell - 1979
    This handsome new edition of Stanley Cavell's landmark text, first published 20 years ago, provides a new preface that discusses the reception and influence of his work, which occupies a unique niche between philosophy and literary studies.

Great Tales of Edgar Allan Poe


Edgar Allan Poe - 1979
    The inventor of the modern detective story, a master of the tale of horror, a poet of haunting melody, Poe has gripped the intellect, the emotions, and the esthetic impulses of the world's readers for over a century.Great Tales and PoemsHere, in one volume, are the masterpieces of mystery, terror, humor, and adventure, and the finest lyric and narrative poetry of the ill-fated genius who was one of America's supreme writers.

River Notes: The Dance of Herons


Barry Lopez - 1979
    In its companion volume River Notes, Lopez takes us into a different country where a nameless river flows through an animated world of herons, bears, and human beings.There is violence here, in the conflict of natural forces, in the people touching the river. There are landscapes, physical and spiritual, that we have not sensed, rituals we have not understood. Like the earlier peoples of our land, and like few American writers who have reentered this world, Barry Lopez respects the river and its imperatives, understands the language of cottonwoods and the salmon, and brings us in an extraordinary dance with a heron to the oneness with nature which is our heritage. ... [i]n these haunting, passionate stories Lopez brings us home to a deeply comforting unity with the natural world.From the first-edition dustjacket.

The Book of Common Prayer


The Episcopal Church - 1979
    This is the standard Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church together with The Psalter or Psalms of David according to use in the Episcopal Church in the United States as authorized in 1979.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature since 1945 (Volume E)


Nina Baym - 1979
    Last volume (E) of the anthology of the American literature from its sixteenth-century origins to the present.

Solo Faces


James Salter - 1979
    Unable to find happiness in his life, he travels to southern France to climb to the summits of the Alps. He finds peace and happiness within himself soon after. But when fellow climbers are trapped on the mountain, he makes a daring one-man rescue during a storm that brings him the notice he has always shunned. But the glory quickly dissapates and he returns to the anonymity he prefers, having thoroughly satisfied himself.

The Watermen: Selections from Chesapeake


James A. Michener - 1979
    Michener’s The Watermen is a unique tribute to the adventurous seafarers of the Chesapeake Bay. Excerpted from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s classic Chesapeake, this enthralling novel has a unity and a spirit all its own, telling the story of the bay and its wildlife, but especially of the watermen, from their favorite pastimes to their rivalries in hunting, oystering, racing, and fighting. Gorgeously illustrated, brilliantly conceived, The Watermen is a narrative and visual feast from one of America’s favorite storytellers. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from James A. Michener's Poland.   Praise for Chesapeake   “Another of James Michener’s great mines of narrative, character and lore.”—The Wall Street Journal   “[A] marvelous panorama of history seen in the lives of symbolic people of the ages . . . an emotionally and intellectually appealing book.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution   “Michener’s most ambitious work of fiction in theme and scope.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer   “Magnificently written . . . one of those rare novels that is enthusiastically passed from friend to friend.”—Associated Press

Less Than Words Can Say (Common Reader Editions)


Richard Mitchell - 1979
    Donning cape and mask as “The Underground Grammarian,” Mitchell sallied forth upon his newsletter against the nonsense being spoken, written, and, indeed, encouraged by the educational establishment. (“One thing led to another,” as he tells it, “a front page piece in The Wall Street Journal, a profile in Time, and other such. Before it was over, The Underground Grammarian came to be, in the world of desktop printing, the first publication to have subscribers on every continent except Antarctica.”) What began as a vivid catalog of ignorance and inanity in the written work of professional educators and their hapless students soon became an enterprise of most noble moment: an investigation, via mordant wit and fierce intelligence, of “what we might usefully decide to mean by `education.'” The results of Mitchell's inquiries are as stimulating today as they were when first articulated. His project remains a telling explication of how, through writing, we discover thought and make knowledge. It is certainly the most drolly entertaining.

The Winter Journey


Georges Perec - 1979
    Every aspect of literary history will have to be rewritten. However, the War intervenes, and the work is lost forever.

The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts


Umberto Eco - 1979
    not merely interesting and novel, but also exceedingly provocative and heuristically fertile." --The Review of Metaphysics... essential reading for anyone interesting in... the new reader-centered forms of criticism." --Library JournalIn this erudite and imaginative book, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts.

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography


Jean Rhys - 1979
    From the early days on Dominica to the bleak time in England, living in bedsits on gin and little else, to Paris with her first husband, this is a lasting memorial to a unique artist.

The Last of the Mohicans


Eliza Gatewood Warren - 1979
    The world's best-loved children's stories set in large type for easy reading.-- Over 100 illustrations in each book

The Original Illustrated Mark Twain


Mark Twain - 1979
    With over 450 original illustrations, the wonderful collection of Twain's classics includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, plus 29 short stories.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature: American Literature 1865-1914 (Volume C)


Nina Baym - 1979
    This volume—Volume C, the third out of five—covers American literature from 1820 to 1865.

Herakleitos and Diogenes


Diogenes of Sinope - 1979
    Herakleitos' words, 2500 years old, usually appear in English translated by philosophers as makeshift clusters of nouns & verbs which can then be inspected at length. Here they are translated into plain English & allowed to stand naked & unchaperoned in their native archaic Mediterranean light. The practical words of the Athenian street philosopher Diogenes have never before been extracted from the apochryphal anecdotes in which they have come down to us. They are addressed to humanity at large, & are as sharp & pertinent today as when they were admired by Alexander the Great & St Paul.

The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldmann


Ingeborg Bachmann - 1979
    Through the tales of two women in postwar Austria, Bachmann explores the ways of dying inflicted on women by men, and upon the living by history, politics, religion, family, and the self.

Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time


Lillian Hellman - 1979
    

Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971


Simon Karlinsky - 1979
    Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.

Youth Without Youth


Mircea Eliade - 1979
    Meanwhile, a man who has spent his life studying languages, poetry, and history—a man who thought his life was over—lies in a hospital bed, inexplicably alive and miraculously healthy, trying to figure out how to conceal his identity.

Da Vinci's Bicycle


Guy Davenport - 1979
    Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.

The Arthurian Legends


Richard Barber - 1979
    Each excerpt is set in its historical and literary context, so that anyone who enjoys this anthology can make his own exploration of the many and glittering treasures of Arthurian legend.

Destination Moon


Robert A. Heinlein - 1979
    HartwellScenes from the film version of Destination Moon (Eagle-Lion, 1950) - interior artworkDestination Moon (1950) - noveletteShooting "Destination Moon" (1950)Facts About Destination Moon" (1979)

Old Love


Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1979
    Tales of curious marriages and divorce mingle with psychic experiences and curses, acts of bravery and loneliness, love and hatred.

Speaking


Georges Gusdorf - 1979
    Gusdorf's central concern is to analyze speech within the context of human reality. Speech is an abstraction, but speaking is not, he says. Speaking expresses the experimental and dialectical relation of man, nature, and society. It is through speaking that nature is sublimated into the meant and expressive world of human reality.

The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative


Frank Kermode - 1979
    He brings to the study of literature a fine and fresh critical intelligence that is always richly suggestive, never modish. He offers here an inquiry--elegant in conception and style--into the art of interpretation. His subject quite simply is meanings; how they are revealed and how they are concealed.Drawing on the venerable tradition of biblical interpretation, Mr. Kermode examines some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible--and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure. He raises questions concerning the interpretation of single texts in relation to their context in a writer's work and a tradition; considers the special interpretative problems of historical narration; and tries to relate the activities of the interpreter to interpretation more broadly conceived as a means of living in the world.While discussing the gospels, Mr. Kermode touches upon such literary works as Kafka's parables, Joyce's Ulysses, Henry James's novels, and Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49. By showing the relationships between religious interpretation and literary criticism, he has enhanced both fields.

Tortuga


Rudolfo Anaya - 1979
    He dove in, sustaining an injury that put him in the hospital for an arduous period of time.Tortuga is set in a hospital for crippled children and is based on Anaya's swimming accident. He explores the significance of pain and suffering in a young boy's life and the importance of spiritual recovery as well as medical. Tortuga, or Turtle, is the name of the oddly shaped mountain near the hospital, but Tortuga also points toward the rigid cast that encases the young hero's body.In celebration of the twenty-five years since the first edition of Tortuga was published, Rudolfo Anaya has provided an Afterword to share his memories of those days in the hospital and how they impacted the remainder of his life.

The Parnas: A Scene from the Holocaust


Silvano Arieti - 1979
    A rare event in publishing: at once an accurate and documented historical study, and in the interpretation made by one of today's greatest psychologists of a strange and symbolic disease."—Primo LeviThe Parnas recreates the final days of Giuseppe Pardo Roques, the lay leader, or parnas, of the Sephardic Jewish community of Pisa, Italy, who was killed in his home by the Nazis in August, 1944. Pardo was a mentor to the author, and, indeed, he was a figure adored and celebrated not only by the Jews of Pisa but by the Christians as well. He was learned and generous, but he was also profoundly phobic. Animals terrified him: so much so that he almost never left his house—except to go to the synagogue—for fear of encountering stray dogs or cats. At the outbreak of World War II, Arieti fled to America where he became a renown psychiatrist. But the parnas, despite a wealth of connections that could have helped him escape, was too phobic to flee Pisa. On the morning of August 1, 1944, Nazi soldiers, searching for Pardo's fabled riches, entered his home. The soldiers found neither gold nor silver, but they did find the parnas, along with six fellow Jews whom he was sheltering and five Christian neighbors. All were murdered. In The Parnas, Arieti imagines what took place in the home, and in the mind, of this devout, kindly, and tormented man in the last days of his life, providing, in the process, an overview of Italian Jewry. Arieti hopes to show "that tragic times have a perfume of their own, and smiles of hope, and traces of charm, and offer olive branches and late warnings that may not be too late.""This is one of the most extraordinary stories yet to reach us from the bitter ashes of Nazism…Dr. Arieti weaves his story so beautifully that to unravel it would mean losing its dramatic effect. Suffice it to say that God, Jews, Christians, fascism, cowardice, and bravery are discussed throughout the story in such a way that the reader is at once shaken and enlightened as the plot unfolds. It is like a parable, suffused with the dignity of both the parnas and the author…a work of art."—New York Times Book ReviewFrom the Foreword by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner: "In this brief, deceptively simple narrative, Arieti has told the story of Giuseppe Pardo, parnas (lay leader) of his native community of Pisa, and of his death at the hands of the Nazis. Pardo was the leading citizen of a small Jewish community that produced more that its share of distinguished Jews. He was a learned man, familiar with Bible, Talmud, and secular subjects. He was a wealthy man, and charitable to Jew and non-Jew alike. (He ultimately met his death together with six fellow Jews and five gentiles who had sought the protection of his home.) And he was a profoundly neurotic man, who had an irrational fear of animals, especially dogs. When he walked in the streets of Pisa—which was not often because of his fears—he would swing a cane from side to side behind him to drive away the imaginary animals. The distinguished psychiatrist tells of his strange life and equally strange death."

The Voice in the Closet


Raymond Federman - 1979
    In occupied France, an adolescent boy, pushed into a closet as his family is taken by Nazi soldiers, accidentally escapes the death camps. As an adult, "Federman," at once the novelist himself and a literary character, wonders what it means to re-tell this experience, if it can be re-told, or if the reduction of one's story or life to a single moment isn't the greatest of all horrors. Since its initial publication in 1979, THE VOICE IN THE CLOSEThas been hailed as one of the great experiments of prose ficiton: a single sentence, concrete recit of wrenching emotional impact. The new bilingual edition of the text features French and English versions newly revised by the author, with an introduction by Gerard Bucher and an end note by Theodore Pelton.

Violence


Festus Iyayi - 1979
    

Making of the Pré


Francis Ponge - 1979
    

Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature


Ben Lazare Mijuskovic - 1979
    "In Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature," he shows how man has always felt alone and that the meaning of man is loneliness.Presenting both a discussion and a philosophical inquiry into the nature of loneliness, Mijuskovic cites examples from more than one hundred writers on loneliness, including Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Clark Moustakas, Rollo May, and James Howard in psychology; Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe and William Golding in literature; and Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre in philosophy.Insightful and comprehensive, "Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature" demonstrates that loneliness is the basic nature of humans and is an unavoidable condition that all must face.

Contemporary Latin American Short Stories


Pat McNees - 1979
    Collected in this brilliant volume are thirty-five of the finest writers of this century, including:Jorge Luis BorgesCarlos FuentesJulio CortazarMiguel Angel AsturiasGabriel Garcia MarquezJorge AmadoOctavio PazJuan BoschJose DonosoHoracio QuirogaMario Vargas LlosaAbelardo CastilloGuillermo Cabrera InfanteAnd many more

Cakes and Ale, The Painted Veil, Liza of Lambeth, Razor's Edge, Theatre, The Moon and Sixpence


W. Somerset Maugham - 1979
    Lisa of Lambeth was his first novel (1897) and is a brilliant and harshly realistic portrait of contemporary Cockney London. Written much later, Theatre (1937) also demonstrates Maugham’s love of London and the West End life. In Cakes and Ale (1930), Rosie, a former barmaid, is the irresistibly affectionate and artless character at the centre of a circle of literary lions, who were considered by Maugham’s irate contemporaries to be caricatures of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole.The revolt of the individual against conventional social values and customs is Maugham’s principle preoccupation in the other three novels. In The Moon and Sixpence (1919), George Strickland, a middle-aged businessman, throws up family and career to pursue and obsession for painting. He lives in Paris before obeying the dictates of his art and travelling first to the South of France and then to his death in Tahiti.A young American in The Razor’s Edge (1944) likewise abandons a promising career and travels extensively searching for peace of mind. The Painted Veil (1925) is a passionate tale of a young wife’s infidelity. Her husband forces her to give up her lover and follow him to China where eventually she finds fulfilment and a greater happiness working with the stricken inhabitants of a cholera-ridden city.

Ormerod's Landing


Leslie Thomas - 1979
    It happened at midnight on September 21st, 1940, the landing being made at the small fishing town of Granville, in Normandy. The landing party consisted of a detective-sergeant of the Metropolitan Police (V Division), a young French woman schoolteacher and an ugly mongrel dog named Formidable. They were considerately brought ashore by the Germans themselves. George Ormerod was the detective sergeant in question, not the most imaginative of policemen, but, true to his name, most resolute in his investigations. (An ormer is a notably tenacious shell-fish of the English Channel.) While the war is being lost all around him, Ormerod remains obsessed with the mundane murder of a young woman in Wandsworth, even pursuing his investigations amongst the returning and bewildered troops. How the investigation blazed a savage trail through rural Normandy and led to Nazi-occupied Paris, and how Marie- Thérèse Velin and her often ruthless Resistance allies become involved with George Ormerod are questions Leslie Thomas answers as his tale unfolds. In Ormerod's Landing, an exciting and ironic tale of Britain and France in the early years of the war, he once again creates a tender, farcical world in which his unique humour and irony flourish.

All the Night Wings


Loren Eiseley - 1979
    First edition.

They Came from Outer Space: 12 Classic Science Fiction Tales That Became Major Motion Pictures


Jim WynorskiRaymond F. Jones - 1979
    Cyclops / by Henry Kuttner --Who goes there? / by John W. Campbell, Jr. --Farewell to the master / by Harry Bates --The fog horn / by Ray Bradbury --Deadly city / by Ivar Jorgenson--The alien machine / by Raymond F. Jones --The cosmic frame / by Paul W. Fairman --The fly / by George Langelaan --The seventh victim / by Robert Sheckley --The sentinel / by Arthur C. Clarke --The racer / by Ib Melchior --A boy and his dog / by Harlan Ellison.

The Architext: An Introduction


Gérard Genette - 1979
    In seeking to link these categories in a system embracing the entire field of literature, Western poetics has divided literature into three kinds: dramatic, epic, and lyric. This division, generally accepted since the eighteenth century, has been wrongly attributed to Aristotle with great detriment to the development of poetics. Here Genette disassembles this burdensome triad by retracing its gradual construction and distinguishes among the architextual categories that this division has long obscured. In so doing, Genette lays a firm foundation for future theorists of literary forms.

Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities


William S. Burroughs - 1979
    

A Flight of Butterflies


Kanzaka Sekka - 1979
    First edition thus. Hardcover. In slip case. A facsimile of a book in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. First Edition wonderful unique beautiful accordion like book show continuous illustration of butterflies by Sekka, facsimile of 1904 book given as gift to Met Museum from the original Japanese title page reproduction stating first published in Japan. Concertina style pages with colour woodblock illustrations of butterflies by Kanzaka Sekka.

To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living


Maxine Kumin - 1979
    Kumin reflects on the process of writing poetry and on life in the country

Janet Flanner's World: Uncollected Writings 1932 - 1975


Janet Flanner - 1979
    Edited by Irving Drutman. Preface by William Shawn.

C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences


James T. Como - 1979
    Index.

From the Fifteenth District


Mavis Gallant - 1979
    An English family goes to the south of France for the sake of the father’s health, and to get away from an England of rationing and poverty. A displaced person turned French soldier in Algeria now makes a living as an actor in Paris. A group of selfish English expatriates on the Italian Riviera are incredulous that Mussolini and the Germans may affect their lives. A great writer’s quiet widow blossoms in widowhood, to the surprise and alarm of her children, who send a ten-year-old grandson to Switzerland to keep her company one Christmas. Full of wry humour and penetrating insights, this is Mavis Gallant at her most unforgettable.

Clever-Lazy


Joan Bodger - 1979
    She longed for a chance to do nothing but invent. When that chance came, it was not quite what she expected. Not everyone understood her inventions. Sometimes they puzzled people, or frightened them. And the inventions that frightened even her, proved that invention for invention’s sake was not enough. Clever-Lazy and her friend-husband Tinker move across a landscape that may or may not be ancient China. Certainly her inventions, including gunpowder, are all from that time and place. But whatever the setting, the truths of her story, and the magic and mystery of her fate exist everywhere and in all times.

Renaissance Thought and Its Sources


Paul Oskar Kristeller - 1979
    Here, in some of Paul Oskar Kristeller's most comprehensive and ambitious writings, is an exploration of the distinctive trends and concepts of the Renaissance, grounded in detailed historical investigation.All of these fourteen essays were originally delivered as lectures. Part One identifies the classical sources of Renaissance thought and exposes its essential physiognomy, indicating its humanist, Aristotelian, and Platonist traditions. The next two parts present Renaissance thought in the historical context of the Latin and Greek Middle Ages. Part Four offers a thematic study of Renaissance thought, examining its characteristic conceptions of man's dignity, destiny, and grasp of truth. Part Five forms a summary from the perspective of a central theme of Renaissance intellectual life and of the entire Western tradition: the relation of language to thought and the seemingly insoluble contest between our literary and philosophical traditions.The reader of "Renaissance Thought and its Sources" enjoys the results of meticulous study in a concise yet comprehensive format. Throughout, Kristeller achieves a graceful blending of sever historical scholarship and adherence to humane values that the editor calls "nearly a lost art in our times."

Albert Camus: A Biography: A Biography


Herbert R. Lottman - 1979
    John Leonard, New York Times: What emerges from Mr. Lottman's tireless devotions is a portrait of the artist, the outsider, the humanist and skeptic, that breaks the heart. John Sturrock, The New York Times Book Review: Herbert Lottman's life (of Camus) is the first to be written, either in French or English, and it is exhaustive, a labor of love and of wonderful industry.This new edition includes a specially written preface by the author revealing the challenges of a biographer, of some of the problems that had to be dealt with while writing the book and after it appeared.

Displaced Person


Lee Harding - 1979
    He is rather an ordinary-looking person of average height. He dresses casually and well and gets along fine with his classmates and friends. In fact the typical all-rounder.The change begins gradually. More and more he feels that people are ignoring him. Why? Waitresses, tram conductors, even his parents and girl friend, are looking right through him as if they can hardly see or hear him.And as he becomes indistinct to them, they and their world become grey and faint to him. Is he going mad? What's going on?In this disturbing story Lee Harding has moved a little away from the straightforward science fiction novels with which he has made him name to create a contemporary hero with whom we can identify as he grapples with his psychological adventure.

The Princess of 72nd Street


Elaine Kraf - 1979
    For whatever reasons, America was not ready for this dream-like look at life inside the head of a young woman, a struggling artist, living in New York's Upper West Side and coping with the ravages of manic-depression.Not only did Kraf take on a dark and disturbing subject, she did so in an utterly original, witty, and inventive manner--a provocative move, even in the liberated culture of the 1970s. And, while others have since expanded upon the territory that Kraf was mining, one still has to go as far back as the early down-and-out-in-Paris novels of Jean Rhys to find a writer who so boldly and honestly portrays a smart, sardonic, attractive, but deeply troubled woman fighting to survive on her own in the city.

Needles


William Deverell - 1979
    Au, the West Coast's primary drug trafficker. But Cobb-under pressure of a failing practice and a disintegrating marriage-has himself taken up a long-abandoned heroin habit. With a racing plot and dramatic flip-flops, this literary page-turner takes the reader into the seedy underground of crooked cops, drug lords, and a supercharged courtroom scene.Author Biography: William Deverell practiced law for 15 years before taking up writing full-time. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Inside My Feet: The Story of a Giant


Richard Kennedy - 1979
    Google Books

Literature: A Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing, Interactive Edition


X.J. Kennedy - 1979
    MyLiteratureLab icons are found in the margins of the text along with a list of media assets at the front of the anthology. The most popular Literature anthology continues to bring students the finest literature from fables to poetweets. The Twelfth Edition of "Literature: An Introductiuon to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing," edited" "by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, includes eleven new stories from students' favorite authors: ZZ Packer's "Brownies," Ray Bradbury's, "The Sound of Thunder," Anne Tyler's, "Teenage Wasteland," David Leavitt's, "A Place I've Never Been" and Isabel Allende's "The Judge's Wife." More than 60 new accessible and engaging poems have been added including former Iraqi soldier Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker," Katha Pollit's "The Mind-Body Problem" as well as poetweets from Lawrence Bridges and Robert Pinsky. In addition, there are new poems from Kay Ryan, Benjamin Alire Saenz, H. D, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, Tami Haaland, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. Three new one-act plays help "ease" students into the study of this genre. The new plays include two comedies-- David Ives's, "Sure Thing" and Jane Martin's "Beauty"--as well as Edward Bok Lee's experimental drama "El Santo Americano." In addition, Milcha Sanchez-Scott's" The Cuban Swimmer "has been added." "

The Enthusiasms of Robertson Davies


Robertson Davies - 1979
    last year, this updated collection contains the best of Robertson Davies' newspaper and magazine articles written over the past 50 years. "Each piece is entertaining and enlightening. . . ".--Publishers Weekly.

The Aims of Jesus


Ben F. Meyer - 1979
    Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew of the 1st century of this era and to understand him you must have some understanding of the Judaism of that time. Meyer accomplishes this by defining methodology, assessing Jesus from gospel data, and showing how the Gospel materials about Jesus can be scrutinized on solid historical grounds.

Reading with the Heart: The Way Into Narnia


Peter Schakel - 1979
    

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre


Darko Suvin - 1979
    Darko Suvin's paradigm-setting definition of SF as "the literature of cognitive estrangement" established a robust theory of the genre that continues to spark fierce debate, as well as inspiring myriad intellectual descendants and disciples. Suvin's centuries-spanning history of the genre links SF to a long tradition of utopian and satirical literatures crying out for a better world than this one, showing how SF and the imagination of utopia are now forever intertwined.

Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde


Oscar Wilde - 1979
    When Sir Rupert Hart-Davis's magnificent edition of The Letters of Oscar Wilde was first published in 1962, Cyril Connolly called it "a must for everyone who is seriously interested in the history of English literature - or European morals." From this edition, long out of print, Hart-Davis has culled a representative sample of the letters from each period of Wilde's life, "giving preference," as he says in his Introduction, "to those of literary interest, to the most amusing, and to those that throw light on his life and work." The long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, known as De Profundis is printed in its entirety.

Nancy Cunard: A Biography


Anne Chisholm - 1979
    She had an insatiable lust for life and lovers; her private affairs became public scandals. She knew TS Eliot, James Joyce, and Louis Aragon; she sat for Cecil Beaton, and Max Beerbohm sketched her; she was an Aldous Huxley heroine in Antic Hay. A poet and a writer, she was the avant-garde publisher who "discovered" Samuel Beckett. She was a passionate advocate of racial equality and a journalist in the Spanish Civil War. By the time of her tragic death in 1965 Nancy Cunard had become the dazzling symbol of her age.

A Writer's Britain: Landscape in Literature


Margaret Drabble - 1979
    It also illuminates the way in which their work has changed our visual attitudes, our taste in landscape and our relation to nature.

Schultz


J.P. Donleavy - 1979
    Which disasters are often indulgently plotted by his aristocratic partners His Amazing Grace Basil Nectarine and the languid Binky. But more frequently caused by Schultz's desperate need to seduce as many beautiful women as is humanly possible and then more.Meanwhile fighting furiously in the battle for bachelordom and in an unquenchable quest for the soothing balm of box-office riches embellished by a beautiful woman who will sock him in the spiritual solar-plexus...

A Reader's Guide To Science Fiction


Baird Searles - 1979
    From A to Z (Akers and Asimov to Zebrowski and Zelazny), from the first astounding magazine to DUNE, A READER"S GUIDE TO SCIENCE FICTION is an invaluable reference work, chronicling where science fiction has been, and where you-the reader-can travel next in the most exciting literature of the cosmos.

Great American Short Stories


H. Bodden - 1979
    Scott Fitzgerald, "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway, plus stories by Hawthorne, Twain, Cather, and others.

Victorian Fantasy


Stephen Prickett - 1979
    In this fully revised and expanded edition, Stephen Prickett explores the way in which Victorian writers used non-realistic techniques--nonsense, dreams, visions, and the creation of other worlds--to extend our understanding of this world. In particular, Prickett focuses on six writers (Lear, Carroll, Kingsley, MacDonald, Kipling, and Nesbit), tracing the development of their art form, their influences on each other, and how these writers used fantasy to question the ideology of Victorian culture and society.

Coward Plays 4: Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter, This Happy Breed, Tonight at 8.30


Noël Coward - 1979
    The play that mocks sudden death was produced at precisely the moment when bombs were bringing it to Britain: "I shall ever be grateful, for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war." The play was for years the longest-running comedy in the history of British theatre.Present Laughter follows the life of Garry Essendine, a world-weary, middle-aged projection of the dilettante, debonair persona - self-obsessed and dressing-gowned who struts through the play like an educated peacock. It is a comedy about the 'theatricals' that Noel best knew and loved, and was originally a star vehicle for himself. It is the closest to an autobiographical play that Coward ever wrote.This Happy Breed is a saga of a lower middle-class family; and three shorter pieces fromTonight at 8.30- is a farce set in the South of France, and serves as an oblique tribute to Frederick Lonsdale; The Astonished Heart is about the decay of a psychiatrist's mind through personal sexual obsession. Red Peppers, which closes the volume, was a cynical tribute to the lost music halls of the First World War.

A Minor Apocalypse


Tadeusz Konwicki - 1979
    He accepts the commission, but without any clear idea of whether he will actually go through with the self-immolation. He spends the rest of the day wandering the streets of Warsaw, being tortured by the secret police and falling in love. Both himself and Everyman, the character-author experiences the effects of ideologies and bureaucracies gone insane with, as always in history, the individual struggling for survival rather than offering himself up on the pyre of the greater good. Brilliantly translated by Richard Lourie, A Minor Apocalypse is one of the most important novels to emerge from Poland in the last twenty five years.