Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making


Michael Caine - 1989
    This new revised and expanded edition features great photos throughout, with chapters on: Preparation, In Front of the Camera - Before You Shoot, The Take, Characters, Directors, On Being a Star, and much more. "Remarkable material ... A treasure ... I'm not going to be looking at performances quite the same way ... FASCINATING!" - Gene Siskel

A Season in Hell & Illuminations


Arthur Rimbaud - 1873
    Within that rich literature of suffering, Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell–written when the poet was nineteen–provides an astonishing example of the grapple with self. As a companion to Rimbaud’s journey, readers could have no better guide than Wyatt Mason. One of our most talented young translators and critics, Mason’s new version of A Season in Hell renders the music and mystery of Rimbaud’s tale of Hell on Earth with exceptional finesse and power. This bilingual edition includes maps, a helpful chronology of Rimbaud’s life, and the unfinished suite of prose poems, Illuminations and A Season in Hell cement Rimbaud’s reputation as one of the foremost, and most influential, writers in French literature.

Jean Christophe: in Paris: The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House


Romain Rolland - 2005
    Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

Time Lived, Without Its Flow


Denise Riley - 2012
    Neither tearful memoir nor testament of hope, the essay charts a vivid experience of such a suspended time and discovers an unsuspected intimacy between time and language. Although a life inside this ‘arrested’ time resists being described, it is neither exceptional or pathological; to outlive one’s child is historically common enough. But, because of this felt suspension of the usual flow of time which enables narration, it leaves few literary traces.

The Green Ray (Extraordinary Voyages, #23)


Jules Verne - 1882
    Together with her uncles, Sam and Sib Melville, she sets off on what becomes a near-epic quest. Joining them in the search are two would-be suitors for Helena, one an artist, the other an amateur scientist. Together, they will voyage to a distant shore - and beyond - braving hurricanes, testing their patience and resolve, and ultimately finding their own true selves.

Conversations With Brando


Lawrence Grobel - 1987
    Brando discusses many topics including acting, women, Native Americans and corporate America.

My Vertical World: Climbing the 8000-Metre Peaks


Jerzy Kukuczka - 1992
    Autobiography of a Polish climber whose quiet determination and singular achievements ranked him among the world's most accomplished mountaineers.

Free Spirit: A Climber's Life


Reinhold Messner - 1991
    In his revealing autobiography Reinhold Messner reflects on his remarkable career. His story is more than a recounting of "firsts." Here Messner reveals the forces and events that have shaped him as an individual and as a climber--including his brother's tragic death on Nanga Parbat in 1970.Messner takes us from the days of his first climb of the Sass Rigais in the Dolomites with his father at age 5 to his later turning away from the overcrowded Alps and 8,000 meter-peaks to find fulfillment in the remoter parts of the world and in crossing the wastes of Antarctica. In between emerges the man as famous for his disciplined approach as for his innovative spirit. Messner evolved his philosophy of the single free-climbing line with its uncompromising purity of style in the Dolomites and, as equipment and technique developed, he was in the forefront of the transference of fast lightweight alpine methods to the great ranges. "Reinhold Messner: Free Spirit" puts the career of a mountaun pioneer in full perspective.

Kensington Gardens


Rodrigo Fresán - 2003
    Known to millions by his pen name, Peter Hook, Fresan's hero has survived the death of his rock-star parents, and a childhood surrounded by 1960s excess, to become the most successful children's author of his generation, best loved as the creator of the time-traveling boy Jim Yang.Over the course of one night, Peter tells his life story--and that of J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan--to the child actor cursed with playing Jim Yang in the movies. Gradually, a fantastical and terrible tale emerges, a tale of shadow identities and suicide, lost boys and foundlings. Moving between the Edwardian age and Swinging London, "Kensington Gardens "is an exploration of the charms and perils of nostalgia and children's literature from one of Latin America's most celebrated young novelists.

The Inhabited Woman


Gioconda Belli - 1988
    She is sheltered and self-involved, until the spirit of an Indian woman warrior enters her being, then she dares to join a revolutionary movement against a violent dictator and—through the power of love—finds the courage to act.

The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education


Peter Coyote - 2015
    For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission---acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.

Lord of All the Dead


Javier Cercas - 2017
    Who was this young man? A fascist hero whose memory is an embarrassment or a committed idealist who happened to fall on the wrong side of history? Is it possible to be a moral person defending an immoral cause? Through visits back to his parents' village in southern Spain, interviews with survivors, and research into the murkiest corners of the war, the author pieces together the life of this enigmatic figure and of an entire generation. This sui generis work combines intimate family history, investigative scholarship, personal confession, war stories, and road trips, finally becoming a transcendent portrait of a country's indelible scars--a book about heroism, death, the persistence of the past, and the meaning of an individual life against the tapestry of history.

The President


Miguel Ángel Asturias - 1946
    It is a story of a ruthless dictator and his schemes to dispose of a political adversary in an unnamed Latin American country usually identified as Guatemala. The book has been acclaimed for portraying both a totalitarian government and its damaging psychological effects. Drawing from his experiences as a journalist writing under repressive conditions, Asturias employs such literary devices as satire to convey the government’s transgressions and surrealistic dream sequences to demonstrate the police state’s impact on the individual psyche. Asturias’s stance against all forms of injustice in Guatemala caused critics to view the author as a compassionate spokesperson for the oppressed. My work,” Asturias promised when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, “will continue to reflect the voice of the people, gathering their myths and popular beliefs and at the same time seeking to give birth to a universal consciousness of Latin American problems.”

Heliogabalus; or, the Crowned Anarchist


Antonin Artaud - 1934
    Written in 1933, at the time when Artaud was preparing to stage his legendary Theatre of Cruelty, Heliogabalus is a powerful concoction of sexual excess, self-deification and terminal violence. Reflecting its author's preoccupations with the occult, magic, Satan, and a range of esoteric religions, this account of Heliogabalus' reign invents incidents in the Emperor's life in order to make the print of the author's own passionate denunciations of modern existence. Heliogabalus is Artaud's greatest and most revolutionary masterpiece: an incendiary work that reveals both the divine cruelty of the Roman Emperor and that of Artaud himself. -- Stephen Barber

If it Die...


André Gide - 1920
    In the events and musings recorded here we find the seeds of those themes that obsessed him throughout his career and imbued his classic novels The Immoralist and The Counterfeiters. Gide led a life of uncompromising self-scrutiny, and his literary works resembled moments of that life. With If It Die, Gide determined to relay without sentiment or embellishment the circumstances of his childhood and the birth of his philosophic wanderings, and in doing so to bring it all to light. Gide’s unapologetic account of his awakening homosexual desire and his portrait of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas as they indulged in debauchery in North Africa are thrilling in their frankness and alone make If It Die an essential companion to the work of a twentieth-century literary master.