Best of
Modern

1968

A Kestrel for a Knave


Barry Hines - 1968
    Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life. Barry Hines's acclaimed novel continues to reach new generations of teenagers and adults with its powerful story of survival in a tough, joyless world.

Bending the Bow: Poetry


Robert Duncan - 1968
    With the first thirty poems of "Passages," which form the structural base in Bending the Bow, he has begun a second open series––a multiphasic projection of movements in a field, an imagined universe of the poem that moves out to include all the terms of experience as meaning. Here Duncan draws upon and in turn contributes to a mode in American poetry where Pound’s Cantos, Williams’s Paterson, Zukofsky’s “A,” and Olson’s Maximus Poems have led the way. The chronological composition of Bending the Bow emphasizes Duncan’s belief that the significance of form is that of an event in process. Thus, the poems of the two open series belong ultimately to the configuration of a life in poetry in which there are forms moving within and interpenetrating forms. Versions of Verlaine’s Saint Graal and Parsifal and a translation of Gérard de Nerval’s Les Chimeres enter the picture; narrative bridges for the play Adam’s Way have their place in the process; and three major individual poems––"My Mother Would Be a Falconress," "A Shrine to Ameinias," and "Epilogos"––among others make for an interplay of frames of reference and meaning in which even such resounding blasts of outrage at the War in Vietnam as "Up Rising" and "The Soldiers" are not for the poet things in themselves but happenings in a poetry that involve all other parts of his experience.

Complete Poems and Selected Letters


Hart Crane - 1968
    In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic sympathy of Whitman, in a quest for wholeness and healing in what he called "the broken world." White Buildings, perhaps the greatest debut volume in American poetry since Leaves of Grass, is but an exquisite prelude to Crane's masterpiece The Bridge, his magnificent evocation of America from Columbus to the Jazz Age that countered the pessimism of Eliot's The Waste Land and became a crucial influence on poets whose impact continues to this day. This edition is the largest collection of Crane's writings ever published. Gathered here are the complete poems and published prose, along with a generous selection of Crane's letters, several of which have never before been published. In his letters Crane elucidates his aims as an artist and provides fascinating glosses on his poetry. His voluminous correspondence also offers an intriguing glimpse into his complicated personality, as well as his tempestuous relationships with family, lovers, and writers such as Allen Tate, Waldo Frank, Yvor Winters, Jean Toomer, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Katherine Anne Porter. Several letters included here are published for the first time. This landmark 850-page volume features a detailed and freshly-researched chronology of Crane's life by editor Langdon Hammer, chair of the English Department at Yale University and a biographer of Crane, as well as extensive explanatory notes, and over fifty biographical sketches of Crane's correspondents.

Shout at the Devil


Wilbur Smith - 1968
    In SHOUT AT THE DEVIL, the New York Times bestselling master storyteller takes us to a brutal paradise engulfed in the fires of civilization's war...A MAN ON HIS OWNThey couldn't be anymore different: an earnest young Englishman named Sebastian Oldsmith and an Irish American adventurer named Flynn O'Flynn who never encounters a rule he doesn't break. Fate brings them together in Zanzibar. A sadistic German turns them into allies, then into warriors.A WOMAN IN LOVEFrom the moment Rosa O'Flynn lays eyes on Sebastian, Rosa finds the man she would love forever—never mind what plans her father has for her. But imperialism is shaking Mozambique, where O'Flynn is the craftiest, fiercest beast in the jungle. And when Rosa and Sebastian lose what is most precious, they join a band of rogues, natives, wanderers, and hunters to start their own war against an enemy who has nothing to fear—and everything to lose...A HUNT FOR THE MOST DANGEROUS PREY OF ALLFrom the sound and sight of a charging bull elephant to ships ablaze on the Indian Ocean, this is a full throttle saga of survival—against nature, man, and the devil himself..."Action is Wilbur Smith's game, and he is a master."—The Washington Post Book World "[Wilbur Smith] puts the reader right there with details that are intimate, inspiring, horrifying…. Fans will be happy to know Smith hasn't lost his touch for the dramatic, exotic adventure story."— The Orlando Sentinel

Space and Time in Special Relativity


N. David Mermin - 1968
    The writing is crisp and clearly written by someone who is aware of the conceptual difficulties that nonscientists have in coming to grips with relativity.

There Is a Happy Land


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

Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis


Donald D. Clayton - 1968
    Clayton's Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis remains the standard work on the subject, a popular textbook for students in astronomy and astrophysics and a rich sourcebook for researchers. The basic principles of physics as they apply to the origin and evolution of stars and physical processes of the stellar interior are thoroughly and systematically set out. Clayton's new preface, which includes commentary and selected references to the recent literature, reviews the most important research carried out since the book's original publication in 1968.

The Fantasticks


Tom Jones - 1968
    Recommended for all collections." - Choice