California Cooper writes with a transparent clarity and such exuberant energy that her characters leap off the page, bursting with stories they've got to tell--stories of simple people, stories of families and fate, of love and marriage, of death and the triumph of the human spirit.

    This souvenir folio features full-color photos from the stunning production as well as piano/vocal arrangements of 9 songs, including: All I Ask of You * Angel of Music * Masquerade * The Music of the Night * The Phantom of the Opera * The Point of No Return * Prima Donna * Think of Me * Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again.

    A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, tangles with a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. The Thin Man introduces Hammett's wittiest creations, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. And in Red Harvest, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective, the Continental Op, takes on the entire town of Poisonville in a deadly war against corruption."Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer."—Boston Globe”Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”—Raymond Chandler”Hammett’s prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.”—The New York Times”As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.”—Ross Macdonald”Dashiell Hammett’s dialogues can be compared only with the best in Hemingway.”—André Gide”Hammett is one of the best contemporary American writers.”—Gertrude Stein

    Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

    Reissue.

    Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

    The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel. Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people: Henri, a simple French soldier, who follows Napoleon from glory to Russian ruin; and Villanelle, the red-haired, web-footed daughter of a Venetian boatman, whose husband has gambled away her heart. In Venice’s compound of carnival, chance, and darkness, the pair meet their singular destiny.In her unique and mesmerizing voice, Winterson blends reality with fantasy, dream, and imagination to weave a hypnotic tale with stunning effects.

    The housekeeper's reputation is one built on dependable efficiency, though she is something of an oddity. Stubborn, foul-mouthed and with a flagrant disregard for her employer's opinions she may even be crazy. She allows no-one to set foot inside her house; she masks herself with a veil and is equally guarded about her personal life. And yet Emerence is revered as much as she is feared. As the story progresses her energy and passion to help becomes clear, extinguishing any doubts arising out of her bizarre behaviour. A stylishly told tale which recounts a strange relationship built up over 20 years between a writer and her housekeeper. After an unpromising and caustic start benign feelings develop and ultimately the writer benefits from what becomes an inseparable relationship. Simultaneously we learn Emerence's tragic past which is revealed in snapshots throughout the book.

    He avoids complex terminology and assumes a readership studying the text in English translation.

    Wit and repartee permeate his work — from the short, light pieces to his great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even later, in dark meditations on the human condition where his humor takes on a cynical, satirical twist.This remarkably inexpensive volume gathers together hundreds of Twain's most memorable quips and comments on life, love, history, culture, travel, and a diversity of other topics that occupied his thoughts over 50 years of writing and lecturing.An invaluable, ready reference for writers, speakers, and others in search of amusing and insightful quotes, this entertaining and thought-provoking compilation is also an ideal introduction to Twain's inimitable style and thought.

    

    But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.

    Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."

    Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

    As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.A magnificent blending of the music, the mood, and the ethos that was the sixties with the story of one college student's romantic coming of age, Norwegian Wood brilliantly recaptures a young man's first, hopeless, and heroic love.

    Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau's Confessions, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten. Ambitious and entertaining, Boyd has invented a most irresistible hero.

    Originally published against government wishes in Vietnam because of its non-heroic, non-ideological tone, The Sorrow of War has won worldwide acclaim and become an international bestseller

    The stories range from Grossman’s first success, “In the Town of Berdichev,” a piercing reckoning with the cost of war, to such haunting later works as “Mama,” based on the life of a girl who was adopted at the height of the Great Terror by the head of the NKVD and packed off to an orphanage after her father’s downfall. The girl grows up struggling with the discovery that the parents she cherishes in memory are part of a collective nightmare that everyone else wants to forget. The Road also includes the complete text of Grossman’s harrowing report from Treblinka, one of the first anatomies of the workings of a death camp; “The Sistine Madonna,” a reflection on art and atrocity; as well as two heartbreaking letters that Grossman wrote to his mother after her death at the hands of the Nazis and carried with him for the rest of his life. Meticulously edited and presented by Robert Chandler, The Road allows us to see one of the great figures of twentieth-century literature discovering his calling both as a writer and as a man.

    It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordly Dutch patrons, and yeomen.

    THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him.

    Montale is a love poet, whose deeply beautiful, individual work confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith with courage and subtlety; he has been widely translated into English, and his work has influenced two generations of American and British poets. Jonathan Galassi's versions of Montale's major works--Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La bufera e altro--are the clearest and most convincing yet, and his extensive notes discuss in depth the sources and difficulties of this dense, allusive poetry. This book offers English-language readers uniquely informed and readable access to the work of one of the greatest of all modern poets.

    When Carlos Ruweda's wife is suddenly taken from him, he discovers a magical gift: In waking dreams, he had clear visions of the fates of "the disappeared." But he cannot "imagine" what has happened to his own wife. Driven to near madness, his mind cannot be taken away: imagination, stories, and the mystical secrets of the human spirit.

    The Danzig Trilogy contains three of the author's most acclaimed works.The Tin DrumAcclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition of the modern world.Cat and MouseThe provocative story centers on the narrator's vivid recollection of a boyhood scene in which a black cat is provoked to pounce on his friend Mahlke's "mouse"--his prominent Adam's apple. This incident sets off a wild series of utterly "Grassian" events that ultimately leads to Mahlke's becoming a national hero. Because of Grass's singular storytelling virtuosity, ICat and Mouse/I is marvelously entertaining, powerful, and full of funny episodes.Dog YearsIn this vast novel, packed with incident, Günter Grass traces the dark labyrinth of the German mentality as it developed during the rise, fall, and aftermath of the Third Reich.

    The insects are vying for world domination; the inventors of electricity stand in evil opposition. Bug , a young man, rebels against his own kind and joins forces with the insects. Wayne, a thug, allies himself with the malevolent forces of electricity and vows to assassinate the preying mantis who tends bar in Oregon. A brusque La Pasionara with the sprightly name of Millie leads an intrepid band of revolutionaries. You Bright and Risen Angels is the work of an extraordinary imagination. In this free-wheeling novel of epic proportions, William T. Vollmann has crafted a biting, hilarious satire of history, technology, politics, and misguided love.

    Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit.The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather’s first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous “Paul’s Case,” a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town.O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit—an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer.In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather’s love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather’s heroines, derives from what the author calls “the naïve, generous country that gave on its joyous force.”A masterpiece at once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, My Ántonia (1918) portrays a family of Bohemian emigrants on the Nebraska frontier. Despite the suicide of her father and the desertion of the father of her child, Ántonia Shimerda retains an unselfish nature that allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm a courageous passion for life and motherhood—a dauntlessness intrinsically rooted in the awesome wonder of the prairie.One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.

    

    His sparkling, original talent has won acclaim from critics and audiences worldwide.

    

    In fact Charles Willard a fellow scientist claimed to have actually seen them in Tibet but unfortunately died shortly afterwards. So when Shonku learns that another expedition is starting off for Tibet he jumps at the opportunity to trace Willard's route and find the unicorns. Tibet is just one of the exotic places Professor Shonku's exploits take him in this volume of stories. In the Sahara Desert he comes face to face with a massive pyramid like structure no one knew of earlier he travels underwater in a submarine with two Japanese scientists to investigate the sudden appearance of deadly red fish that have taken to eating humans in the caves of Bolivia he meets a primitive man who has been painting his dwelling with animal figures and strange mathematical formulae and on a peculiar island which has appeared out of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean horrific plants suck out all his learning from his brain. Professor Shonku is at the height of his ingenuity and daring in this collection and thrills and surprises await us around every bend as we follow him on his astonishing adventures.

    Contents:The Jaguar Hunter (1985)The Night of White Bhairab (1984)Salvador (1984)How the Wind Spoke at Madaket (1985)Black Coral (1984)The End of Life as We Know It (1985)A Traveler's Tale (1984)Mengele (1985)The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule (1984)A Spanish Lesson (1985)

    Told through a series of “historical documents”—memoirs, illustrations, letters, philosophical treatises, blue prints, and maps—the novel details the story of these interventions and the historical moments where the Brotherhood has made their influence felt, from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand to a lost story of Sherlock Holmes.Masterfully intertwining the threads of waking and dreams into the fabric of the present, the past, and the future, Svetislav Basara’s Pynchon-esque The Cyclist Conspiracy is a bold, funny, and imaginative romp.

    The Commitments are spreading the gospel of the soul. Ably managed by Jimmy Rabbitte, brilliantly coached by Joey 'The Lips' Fagan, their twin assault on Motown and Barrytown takes them by leaps and bounds from the parish hall to the steps of the studio door. But can The Commitments live up to their name?

    Presents a story of life in the Jamaican countryside before the days of electricity.

    Here for the first time in one volume are her complete stories.

    With a bias toward realism editors Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks have selected fiction that “tells a story”–and tells it with a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight.But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our age, our concerns, and our lives. Whether it’s the end of a marriage, as in Bobbie Ann Manson’s “Shiloh,” or the struggle with self-esteem and weight in Andre Dubus’s “The Fat Girl,” the 36 works included her probe issues that give us that “shock of recognition” that is the hallmark of great art—wonderful, absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.

    A revised and expanded edition of the classic volume of Yeats' work, including the play The Death of Cuchulain.

    A passionate story, spanning several countries, rich with international characters, across three decades as it tells the tale of a rich and powerful couple.

    The last volume in an unforgettable trilogy (with A Short History of a Small Place and Off for the Sweet Hereafter)

    Collected by Francis E. Skipp, these fifty-eight stories span the breadth of Thomas Wolfe’s career, from the uninhibited young writer meticulously describing the enchanting birth of springtime in “The Train and the City” to his mature, sober account of a terrible lynching in “The Child by Tiger.” Thirty-five of these stories have never before been collected, and “The Spanish Letter” is published here for the first time. Vital, compassionate, remarkably attuned to character, scene, and social context, The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe represents the last work we have from the author of Look Homeward, Angel, who was considered the most promising writer of his generation (The New York Times).

    He details his burgeoning awareness of his artistic talent, his relationship with his first wife, his army career and his years as an education officer in Malaya and Borneo.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fugue like and field like densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

    alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.

    Time passes and opinions change. “Why should we go on supporting a book which we detest?” Rose Curtland asks. “The brotherhood of Western intellectuals versus the book of history,” Jenkin Riderhood suggests. The theft of a wife further embroils the situation. Moral indignation must be separated from political disagreement. Tamar Hernshaw has a different trouble and a terrible secret. Can one die of shame? In another quarter a suicide pact seems the solution. Duncan Cambus thinks that since it is a tragedy, someone must die. Someone dies. Rose, who has gone on loving without hope, at least deserves a reward.

    Her husband Peter, 8 1/2 months nervous, is a blue-collar storyteller with a penchant for brevity. Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, they tell each other tales to break the writer's block handed Peter by his Muse, to ease the weight of Katherine's pregnancy, to entertain, and to enlighten. Along with their stories, we learn of the Bay itself—past and present. The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.

    When an imported rabbit introduces the plague the population is annihilated, all except a few villagers and the odd pig. By the author of Bathsheba and The Way of the Serpent.

    She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

    -- Presents the most important 20th-century criticism on major works from The Odyssey through modern literature-- The critical essays reflect a variety of schools of criticism-- Contains critical biographies, notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of the author's life, and an index

    s/t: An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the ArtsReference book on the symbols, movements, genres, characters & individuals found in Arts & Literature--as well as disciplines which are effected, or are alluded to, in these fields.

    In this introduction to Scripture, Leland Ryken organizes biblical passages into literary genres including narratives, poetry, proverbs, and drama, demonstrating that knowledge of a genre's characteristics enriches one's understanding of individual passages.Ryken offers a volume brimming over with wonderful insights into Old and New Testament books and passages—insights that have escaped most traditional commentators.

    Between themselves they talk only about the practicalities of life", declares Duras in this collection of her transcribed conversations with friend Jerome Beaujour. Some of her free-ranging meditations are short and deceptively simple, while many are autobiographical and reveal her most intimate thoughts about motherhood, her struggle with alcohol, her love for a younger man, and more.

    This warm, richly detailed biography brings the beloved saint alive in all his human and profoundly spiritual dimensions.

    In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.

    We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.

    Adventures of Sherlock HolmesMemoirs of Sherlock HolmesThe return of Sherlock HolmesThe hound of the BaskervillesA study in scarletThe sign of the fourThe adventure of Wisteria LodgeThe adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans.

    Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel - and be right and wrong on both counts.

    Also included are poems, short stories, an array of Eiseley's absorbing observations on the natural world, and his always startling reflections on the nature and future of humankind and the universe.

    In the Country of Last Things takes the form of a letter from a young woman named Anna Blume to a childhood friend. Anna has ventured into an unnamed city that has collapsed into chaos and disorder. In this bleak environment, no industry takes place and most of the population collects garbage or scavenges for objects to resell. City governments are unstable and are concerned only with collecting human waste and corpses for fuel. Anna has entered the city to search for her brother William, a journalist, and it is suggested that the Blumes come from a world to the East which has not collapsed.

    This charming collection is packed with noises and rhymes children will love to listen to and repeat. Illustrated in color throughout by award-winning artist Nick Sharratt, this is an ideal book for beginning readers.

    Brief dreamlike sketches deal with a safari in the suburbs, a mother struck by lightning, a cow wearing lingerie, and a visit from dead parents.

    Donner wrote about Bobby Fischer, chess as a game of luck, madness, why women can't play chess, and many other subjects. Finally, the complete edition of this classic. An outrageous book.

    In his "mini-manual for actors," Fo lays bare the tools of his craft. With the assistance of his wife, playwright Franca Rame, he explains how text, song, humor, mime and political intelligence can be fused into brilliant "popular theatre."

    This book, approved by Synod 1988 of the Christian Reformed Church, contains the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian creeds, as well as translations of the Belgic Confession (1985), Heidelberg Catechism (1975, updated 1988), and Canons of Dort (1986).

    

    This updated and expanded second edition includes a new preface and an appendix containing new translations of six tales, along with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar skillfully employs the tools not only of a psychoanalyst but also of a folklorist, literary critic, and historian to examine the harsher aspects of these stories. She presents new interpretations of the powerful stories in this worldwide best-selling book. Few studies have been written in English on these tales, and none has probed their allegedly happy endings so thoroughly.

    His wife is having an affair with his law partner. Add to this scenario Duffy's girlfriend, his son, an overweight blob, and Tump Walker, a black pro athlete, and one has the makings of a "belligerent but ultimately touching" (Chicago Tribune) novel.

    He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York—not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest. A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin’s Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him? A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael’s search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro’s truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness.

    A supremely entertaining book that will expand the legion of Carroll's fans.

    In this first English translation of Paratexts, Gérard Genette offers a global view of these liminal mediations and their relation to the reading public. With precision, clarity and through wide reference, he shows how paratexts interact with general questions of literature as a cultural institution. Richard Macksey's foreword situates Genette in contemporary literary theory.

    As we approach sharing let us ask: "What belongs to me?"Balance sheet of a life ratified by death.Whatever exists has no existence unless shared.Possessions under seal are lost possessions.At first sight, giving, offering yourself in order to receive an equivalent gift in return, would seem to be ideal sharing.But can All be divided?Can a feeling, a book, a life be shared entirely?On the other hand, if we cannot share all, what remains and will always remain outside sharing? What has never, at the heart of our possessions, been ours?And what if we can share the vital desire to share, our only means of escape from solitude, from nothingness?

    Winner of the 1987 Christianity and Literature Book Award for Belles-Lettres.

    Lewis, Thomas Howard presents in this work brilliant new insights into Lewis' fiction and helps us to see things we may not have seen nor appreciated before. Focusing on Narnia, the space trilogy and Til We Have Faces, Howard explores with remarkable clarity the moral vision in the imaginary world of the master storyteller Lewis.

    Revised Final Draft. May 3, 1986 Producer: Rob Reiner..

    

    As Queen Amelyor's powers decline, Keiris, her son, decides he must find his long-lost twin sister, and the secret of his heritage

    A poet in Urdu and Persian, he was endowed with exquisite imagination, sparkling wit, and a charming presence. Ghalib was a brilliant conversationalist, skilled in the art of human relations. In the last twenty years of his life, the political conditions of northern India caused the death or dispersion of many of his best friends. He satisfied his gregarious urges by writing exquisite letters in Urdu, in a delightfully conversational style. By these means Ghalib kept in touch with his scattered friends. These letters were so novel in style that the first collection was published only a month after the poet's death.In this book, Daud Rahbar provides thoroughly annotated English versions of 170 Urdu letters. These letters exemplify the possibility of elevating human relations to an art form, and Rahbar's translation reproduces the delicate flavor of the original Urdu prose.

    Not since the Communist revolution had readers found as stark and compelling a view of their world as The General Retires offered them. Written in spare, succinct prose, it captures the despair of an old general who, after many years of devoted service to his country, is alienated by the emptiness of the society into which he retires and ultimately flees. Nguyen probes similar themes in the stories that follow, from Cun, the moving tale of a crippled beggar, to A Drop of Blood, a dark history of a family set against decades of war and revolution. With eight powerfully written stories—all available in English for the first time—and including an introduction by Greg Lockhart that traces the varied traditions of Vietnamese literature to the present day, this collection offers unprecedented insight into a society trying to overcome and understand years of pain and civil strife.

    Maybe still is. At thirty-one he has been both a brilliant failure and a dull success. He's made a lot of mistakes that have paid off and a lot of smart moves he'll regret forever (however long that turns out to be). Daniel Weir has gone from rags to riches and back, and managed to hold onto them both, though not much else. His friends all seem to be dead, fed up with him or just disgusted - and who can blame them? And now Daniel Weir is all alone. As he contemplates his life, Daniel realises he only has two problems: the past and the future. He knows how bad the past has been. But the future - well, the future is something else.

    of Missouri Press, this is a collection of 15 short stories on the black urban experience, by one of the premier writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

    Translated from the French by Lee Fahnestock. Francis Ponge's VEGETATION is a short grouping of pieces originally published in his book Le Parti Pris des Choses in 1942. Interested in the copulation of things and words, Ponge aimed to bring a materiality of language to surface. Lee Fahnestock is a critic and translator who has contributed to a new version of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and completed a later work of Ponge's in translation, The Making of the Pre.

    Passionate, provocative, flamboyant, controversial, he was lionized by Maxim Gorki and hailed alongside Leo Tolstoy. Master of the dramatic, Andreyev's dark, horrifying, sensual visions prefigured absurdist theater and existentialist fiction. Almost a century later, they still strike to the heart.In this splendid volume, Andreyev's granddaughter, Olga Andreyev Carlisle--an accomplished writer herself--offers vibrant new translations of eight of his best stories. Here is Andreyev's famous "The Seven Who Were Hanged." Here, too, are the richly crafted tales "Abyss" and "Darkness." "The Red Laugh," his powerful delineation of apocalypse, is all the more remarkable for its prophecy of the threat of nuclear war. When first conceived, these stories rocked the political and literary camps of all Europe. Reading them today is haunting: the themes have grown in significance.Accompanied by Olga Carlisle's intimate introduction and complemented with Andreyev's own extraordinarily beautiful self portrait photography, this is truly a work of visions.

    Sajak-sajak Salleh Ben Joned dalam Bahasa Melayu dan Bahasa Inggeris.

    This lavishly illustrated volume explores the richness, diversity, and continuity of that tradition. Under the general editorship of Pat Rogers, some of Britain's foremost literary scholars trace the history of English literature from its first stirrings in Anglo-Saxon poetry to the present day. The contributors aim to convey to the reader the pleasure and exhilaration of literature, rather than to provide a bare outline of schools and periods of writing. At the heart of the volume towers the figure of Shakespeare, who has a special chapter devoted entirely to himself. The volume also offer detailed treatments of other major writers such as Chaucer, Milton, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickens, Eliot, and Auden, and up-to-date discussions of living authors such as Muriel Spark and Seamus Heaney. More than a mere chronology, this versatile work provides a basic core of information and invaluable supplementary material, including suggestions for further reading, maps, a chronological table of dates, and a detailed index with birth and death dates of individuals listed. It also moves beyond these facts and events to characterize the broad sweep of ideas and the main concerns of British writers over the past thirteen centuries. The illustrations chosen--thirty-five in color and over two hundred in black and white--bring to life the content and concerns of the text. They range in subject from manuscripts and book illustrations to works of art and architecture, portraits, social scenes, landscapes, and caricatures, illuminating not only the literature but also the ideas, preoccupations, and outlooks that fostered it. Rather than simply decorating the text, the illustrations complement and enlarge it. All experts in their chosen areas, the contributors bring to this volume a deep understanding and great enthusiasm and zest for their subject. Collectively, they have woven together the complex strands of English literature into a highly readable narrative.

    The ultimate tribute to Eliot Porter's long and stirring photographic career, Eliot Porter combines his life story with more than 130 of his finest images.134 color and 25 halftone photographs.

    Less well known than modern visual poetry, pattern poetry has been produced in most European and American literatures, and, as close analogues, in many oriental literatures.This book tells the history of pattern poetry, documenting and classifying more than 2,000 works. Illustrations of each major genre of pattern poem are included. The book also explores related forms, such as graphic music notations, shaped prose, sound poetry, and poetic labyrinths, to name a few. A glossary, essays by two world authorities on the oriental analogues to the pattern poem, and the first full bibliography on pattern poetry complete the work. With this book, Dick Higgins has provided an indispensable tool for opening up the area of pattern poetry to the scholar and the lay reader alike, bringing order to what has been an obscure and confusing area, and delighting the eye and mind by casting light on these forgotten treasures.

    This text brings together the director's insights on his own life and work and illustrates them with personal documents. Also included is a complete chronological biography, filmography and bibliography.

    Typical of Huncke's remarks are that his father was a "miserable bastard," his mother "had a pair of legs on her that were really something, and she knew how to conduct herself," and that when he smelled an onion field he "first realized that there was something beyond all our petty personal quarrels and arguments." Variously a ship's cook and deckhand, Huncke preferred burglary, thievery, street beggary, acting as a shill for pickpockets, getting paid $10 by Kinsey to talk about his sexual experiences. Now on methadone, he preaches against the use of drugs and alcohol.

    The Los Angeles Times wrote, "Not since James Agee and Robert Penn Warren has a Southern writer displayed such masterful versatility".

    Among the thirty-six writers are Muriel Rukeyser, Margaret Walker, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, Tess Slesinger, Agnes Smedley, and Meridel Le Sueur. Other voices may be new to readers, including many working-class black and white women. The topics range from sexuality and family relationships to race, class, and patriarchy to party politics. Toni Morrison writes that the anthology is “peopled with questioning, caring, socially committed women writers.”

    

    Thirteen stories by the first woman in years to rank among Russia's most important writers celebrate courage and the will to endure among the people who live on the periphery of society but who dream with a redeeming passion.

    This title features a collection of essays on the life and works of Roussel with contributions by Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Leonardo Sciascia, and many others.

    Auden, Robert Browning, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Anne Sexton, and other familiar greats·Newly updated. Now includes more favorite international poets such as Anna Akmotova, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sor Juana Ines, Pablo Neruda, and others

    Tod-The Tales of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle-The Tales of The Flopsy Bunnies

    In Conversations: Volume 3, Borges and Ferrari discuss subjects as diverse as film criticism, fantastic literature, science fiction, the Argentinian literary tradition, and the works of writers such as Bunyan, Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats, among others. With his signature wit, Borges converses on the philosophical basis of his writing, his travels, and his fascination with religious mysticism. He also ruminates on more personal themes, including the influence of his family on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness.   The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature, both ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions—the conjunction of his life, his lucidity, and his imagination.

    In doing so, she skillfully demonstrates that the ideas we now recognize as characteristic of post-structuralism and deconstruction were being developed independently by Burroughs long ago.

    By echoing with his gypsy guitar the troubadour tradition of the Languedoc, the great sonnet sequences of Petrarch and Shakespeare, the redefinitions of beauty and truth of the romantics, and the distractions and fragments of the post-moderns, he has created a celebration of the beloved in which recognition, intelligence and wit illuminate each sentimental, awkward, humorous, everyday moment. The elements of romance and betrayal in these poems shine through the darkness of their passion with a lucid, conscious attentiveness seldom seen since the great renaissance poets.

    

    Whether describing a town of one-legged miners, a bizarre brother/sister relationship, or salty seamen telling their favourite real-life horror stories, McCormack disturbs and enchants.

    Here, in such famous stories as "Bartleby, the Scrivener" and "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles," we find Melville's imagination and style at its best. Of the less well known tales, the humor in "The Piazza" and "The Lightning-Rod Man," and the gothic horror of "The Bell Tower," command attention as well. Whether in the exotic Galapagos or the more familiar climes of Wall Street or a Massachusetts farmhouse, Melville's power and imagination transport the reader into his unique worlds.This scholarly edition presents texts as close to the author's intentions as surviving evidence permits. Based on surviving manuscripts, on original newspaper and magazine printings, and on collations of magazine printings with the book of editions of The Piazza Tales, the text incorporates over 800 emendations by the editors and over 200 from later printings during Melville's lifetime.This edition is an Approved Text of the Center for Editions of American Authors (Modern Language Association of America).

    Epstein's lively mind explores such topics as the pleasures of work, neighborhood, and keeping a journal; lecturing, language snobbery, and the comedy of gluttony; and the mixed delights of issuing and receiving praise, friendship, and growing into middle age.