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The Smiley novels of John le Carre

 

smiley trilogy

 

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre. London. 1974. Hodder & Stoughton. 0340188790. 349 pages. hardcover.  Cover photograph by Jerry Harpur. 

DESCRIPTION - You could meet him any day on the Underground. Hundreds of him. Mr. George Smiley, small, podgy, and at best middle-aged, is one of London's meek who do not inherit the earth. But, George Smiley is also a senior British intelligence officer, as devastating as he is self-effacing. In TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY we meet him in short-lived retirement, deserted by his beautiful wife, wrestling with idleness and disillusionment. And haunted by the secret fear which follows every professional to his grave: namely that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand a reckoning. Casually, le Carre tosses us a total vision of a secret world. A world of hoods and lamplighters, scalphunters and pavement artists, where men are turned, burned or bought for stock; a world of moles, legmen, listeners and watchers. And in Smiley himself we meet that rarest breed of literary hero: one for whom, from the start, the reader feels personally responsible. Reluctantly in harness, by turn compassionate and ruthless, a vague patriot, scornful of isms and estranged from institutional thought, a master of the black arts of deceit, yet, as a lover, the incurable victim of self-deception, George Smiley is a loner with a sense of human responsibility. 

 

The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carre. London. 1977. Hodder & Stoughton. 0340220422. 533 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY - John le Carre's last tremendous success - ended with the devastating unmasking of a double agent at the heart of the British Secret Service (known as the Circus to le Carre's millions of readers round the world). Now, in THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY, George Smiley - who has assumed the unenviable job of restoring the health, and reputation, of his demoralized organization - goes over to the attack. Salvaging what he can of the Service's ravaged network of spies, summoning back a few trustworthy old colleagues, working them - and himself - around the clock, he searches for a whisper, a hint, a clue that will lead him back to his opposite number: Karla, the Soviet officer in Moscow Centre who masterminded the infamous treachery. When he finds his opening, Smiley moves without hesitation. His battleground: the Far East. His choice of weapons: the Honourable Gerald (Jerry) Westerbv, an Old Asia Hand, veteran of several marriages (and wars), unquestioning in his readiness to answer Smiley's summons. ‘You point me and I'll march,' says Jerry. Jerry's odyssey begins: to Hong Kong - and blackmail and murder; to collapsing Cambodia and Vietnam - and drug traffickers, the CIA, and a huge and mystifying ‘gold seam' spilling out of Russia. Slowly, manipulated by Smiley - and his cohorts back in the Circus, Jerry thrusts himself into the centre of an intrigue of money, defection, passion - and finds not only fertile ground for Smiley's revenge, but a drama of loyalty and love that both tests his courage and spurs his belated coming of age, in tragic defiance of the voracious requirements of the Service which owns his allegiance. Here is John le Carre's richest, most accomplished work. Suspense, excitement, the techniques of espionage as only he has been able to make them real for us - together with a growing capacity for sustained action, a grandly conceived and intricately drawn plot, and profound observation of the Far Eastern landscape. THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY is both a supreme entertainment and a major novel. .

 

Smiley's People by John Le Carre. London. 1980. Hodder & Stoughton. 0340247045. 327 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In this novel, John le Carre gives us the final, convulsive confrontation between George Smiley and Karla, his mortal enemy (and opposite) inside the Soviet Union. Paris, London, Germany, and Switzerland are the background for this extraordinary book, whose excitement, suspense, and deep understanding of the men and women who populate its world - the men and women who are ‘Smiley's People' - make it a profoundly satisfying successor to le Carre's two great best sellers, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY and THE HONOURABLE SCHOOLBOY.

 

 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Le Carre JohnDavid John Moore Cornwell (19 October 1931 – 12 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré, was a British author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. A "sophisticated, morally ambiguous writer", he is considered one of the greatest novelists of the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked for both the Security Service (MI5) and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Near the end of his life, le Carré became an Irish citizen. Le Carré's third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), became an international best-seller, was adapted as an award-winning film, and remains one of his best-known works. This success allowed him to leave MI6 to become a full-time author. His other novels that have been adapted for film or television include The Looking Glass War (1965), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), Smiley's People (1979), The Little Drummer Girl (1983), The Russia House (1989), The Night Manager (1993), The Tailor of Panama (1996), The Constant Gardener (2001), A Most Wanted Man (2008) and Our Kind of Traitor (2010). Philip Roth said that A Perfect Spy (1986) was "the best English novel since the war".

 

 


 

 

 

Black Manhattan by James Weldon Johnson. New York. 1940. Knopf. 284 pages. hardcover.  

black manhattan knopf 1930 no dwDESCRIPTION - In this classic work, first published in 1930, James Weldon Johnson, one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, combined the skills of the historian, social scientist, and the reporter to trace the New York black experience from the earliest settlements on Chatham Square during the pre-revolutionary period to the triumphant achievements of Harlem in the 1920s. But Black Manhattan is by no means simply history; It illuminates Johnson and his contributions to both black literature and black organizations; it provides us with an intimate account of the black theatrical and musical world of which Johnson had been a part; and it raises searching questions about the black people's struggle to find their identity. Black Manhattan remains one of the essential books on the black American experience, losing none of its resonance and value after many decades.

Johnson James WeldonAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was a writer, poet and distinguished statesman, born in Jacksonville, Florida, where he and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, grew up. Their father was head waiter at a resort hotel there and their mother, who had been born in the Bahamas and educated in New York City, was the first black woman to teach in a public school in Florida. Their parents were both talented musically and the family often made music together. James attended Atlanta University and, on graduation, became principal of Stanton Grammar School in Jacksonville. Over the years, he became a figure in the struggle of African Americans for equal rights. He was the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1920 through 1931. In 1900 he and his brother J. Rosamond Johnson wrote a song in celebration to be sung by school children. That song, ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,' much to their surprise, became the ‘Negro National Anthem' and is still being sung throughout the country. Johnson contributed articles regularly to ‘The Crisis'. In 1927, he published the Book of American Negro Poetry. Dr. James Weldon Johnson was appointed consul to Venezuela. His autobiography is called ALONG THIS WAY: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JAMES WELDON JOHNSON, published in 1933. BLACK MANHATTAN, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN, and GOD'S TROMBONES are three of his most famous works. Even while traveling, lecturing, and lobbying, Johnson made time to pursue his literary interests. In 1922 he produced the first edition of THE BOOK OF AMERICAN NEGRO POETRY, an anthology of contemporary African-American verse that included such writers as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. Dubois. (The second edition of the collection, published in 1931, added nine more poets, including Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes.) In the preface, Johnson stated one of his best-known beliefs: ‘the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.' By presenting the literary achievements of African Americans, Johnson hoped to change the perceptions of white America about the inferiority of his race.

 

 

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Everything Inside; Stories by Edwidge Danticat. New York. 2019. Knopf. 9780525521273. 223 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson.  

9780525521273DESCRIPTION - From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and intimate, as it explores the forces that pull us together, or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant. In these eight powerful, emotionally absorbing stories, a romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends; a marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences; a young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival; two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and inDanticat Edwidge their lives; a baby's christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new; a man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. This is the indelible work of a keen observer of the human heart–a master at her best.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edwidge Danticat is the author of numerous books, including BREATH, EYES, MEMORY, KRIK? KRAK!, a National Book Award finalist, THE FARMING OF BONES, an American Book Award winner, and THE DEW BREAKER, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

 

 

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A Dream Come True: The Collected Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti by Juan Carlos Onetti. Brooklyn. 2019. Archipelago Books. 9781939810465. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. 547 pages. paperback.  

9781939810465DESCRIPTION - A Dream Come True collects the complete stories of Juan Carlos Onetti, presenting his existentialist, complex, and ironic style over the course of his writing career. Onetti was praised by Latin America's greatest authors, and regarded as an inventor of a new form and school of writing. Juan Carlos Onetti's A Dream Come True depicts a sharp, coherent, literary voice, encompassing Onetti's early stages of writing and his later texts. They span from a few pages in “Avenida de Mayo - Diagonal - Avenida de Mayo” to short novellas, like the celebrated detective story “The Face of Disgrace” and “Death and the Girl,” an existential masterpiece that explores the complexity of violence and murder in the mythical town of Santa María. His stories create a world of writing which is both universal and highly local, mediating between philosophical characters and the quotidian melodrama of Uruguayan villages.

Onetti Juan CarlosAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Juan Carlos Onetti (July 1, 1909, Montevideo - May 30, 1994, Madrid) was an Uruguayan novelist and author of short stories. A high school drop-out, Onetti's first novel, El pozo, published in 1939, met with his close friends' immediate acclaim, as well as from some writers and journalists of his time. 500 copies of the book were printed, most of them left to rot at the only bookstore that sold it, Barreiro (the book was not reprinted until the 60's, with an introduction and preliminary study by Ángel Rama). Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr. There he continued his career as a writer, being awarded the most prestigious literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, the Premio Cervantes. He remained in Madrid until his death in 1994. He is interred in the Cementerio de la Almudena in Madrid.

 

 

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A Gallery of Harlem Portraits by Melvin B. Tolson. Columbia. 1979. University of Missouri Press. 0826202764. Edited and with an afterword by Robert M. Farnsworth. 276 pages. hardcover. Jacket art by Jerry Dadds.

0826202764DESCRIPTION - A Gallery of Harlem Portraits is Melvin B. Tolson's first book-length collection of poems. It was written in the 1930s when Tolson was immersed in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, the subject of his master's thesis at Columbia University, and will provide scholars and critics a rich insight into how Tolson's literary picture of Harlem evolved. Modeled on Edgar Lee Master's Spoon River Anthology and showing the influence of Browning and Whitman, it is rooted in the Harlem Renaissance in its fascination with Harlem's cultural and ethnic diversity and its use of musical forms. Robert M. Farnsworth's afterword elucidates these and other literary influences. Tolson eventually attempted to incorporate the technical achievements of T.S. Eliot and the New Criticism into a complex modern poetry which would accurately represent the extraordinary tensions, paradoxes, and sophistication, both highbrow and lowbrow, of modern Harlem. As a consequence his position in literary history is problematical. The publication of this earliest of his manuscripts will help clarify Tolson's achievement and surprise many of his readers with its readily accessible, warmly human poetic portraiture. Tolson Melvin B

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MELVIN B. TOLSON (February 6, 1898 - August 29, 1966) was an American Modernist poet, educator, columnist, and politician. His work concentrated on the experience of African Americans and includes several long historical poems. His work was influenced by his study of the Harlem Renaissance, although he spent nearly all of his career in Texas and Oklahoma. Tolson is the protagonist of the 2007 biopic The Great Debaters. The film, produced by Oprah Winfrey, is based on his work with students at predominantly-black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and their debate with University of Southern California(USC). Tolson is portrayed by Denzel Washington, who also directed the film.

 

 

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From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia by Pankaj Mishra. New York. 2012. Farrar Straus Giroux. 9780374249595. 356 pages. hardcover.  Jacket design by Nayon Cho.  

9780374249595DESCRIPTION - A surprising, gripping narrative depicting the thinkers whose ideas shaped contemporary China, India, and the Muslim world. A little more than a century ago, as the Japanese navy annihilated the giant Russian one at the Battle of Tsushima, original thinkers across Asia, working independently, sought to frame a distinctly Asian intellectual tradition that would inform and inspire the continent's anticipated rise to dominance. Asian dominance did not come to pass, and those thinkers―Tagore, Gandhi, and later Nehru in India; Liang Qichao and Sun Yatsen in China; Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Abdurreshi al Ibrahim in the ruins of the Ottoman Empire―are seen as outriders from the main anticolonial tradition. But Pankaj Mishra shows that it was otherwise in this stereotype-shattering book. His enthralling group portrait of like minds scattered across a vast continent makes clear that modern Asia's revolt against the West is not the one led by faith-fired terrorists and thwarted peasants but one with deep roots in the work of thinkers who devised a view of life that was neither modern nor antimodern, neither colonialist nor anticolonialist. In broad, deep, dramatic chapters, Mishra tells the stories of these figures, unpacks their philosophies, and reveals their shared goal of a greater Asia. Right now, when the emergence of a greater Asia seems possible as at no previous time in history, From the Ruins of Empire is as necessary as it is timely―a book essential to our understanding of the world and our place in it.

Mishra PankajAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Pankaj Mishra born 1969 in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh (North India), is an Indian essayist and novelist. He is particularly notable for his book BUTTER CHICKEN IN LUDHIANA, a sociological study of small-town India, and his writing for the New York Review of Books. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce from Allahabad University before earning his Master of Arts degree in English literature at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. He was the Visiting Fellow for 2007-2008 at the Department of English, University College London, UK. In 1992, he moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where he began to contribute literary essays and reviews to The Indian Review of Books, The India Magazine, and the newspaper The Pioneer. In 2008 he was one of the first authors to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.

 

 

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The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee by Bharati Mukherjee. Philadelphia. 2023. Temple University Press. 9781439924464. Asian American History & Culture. Edited by Ruth Maxey. 443 pages. paperback. Cover design: Kate Nichols. Cover illustration: ‘Manhattan Mall’ by The Singh Twins, 1997..  

9781439924464DESCRIPTION - Pioneering Indian American writer Bharati Mukherjee is best known for her novel, Jasmine, and her breakthrough collection, The Middleman and Other Stories, which won the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her writing is distinguished as much by its narrative style and shifting points of view as it is by Mukherjee's piercing emotional observations on the immigrant experience and her depiction of racism, nostalgia, and displacement. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee is the first volume to feature the author's complete short fiction--all 35 stories. Leading Mukherjee scholar Ruth Maxey edits the collection, unearthing seven unknown stories: five in Mukherjee's unpublished 1963 Iowa Writer's Workshop M.F.A. thesis, The Shattered Mirror, and two tales from 2008. Arranged chronologically, this essential collection brings many of Mukherjee's stories back into print, from the semi-autobiographical story, "Hindus," in her 1985 debut collection, Darkness, to her late stories, published from 1997-2012, as well as her classic, "The Management of Grief." Maxey contextualizes Mukherjee's short fiction and the provocative, often prescient political questions it raises about migration, nationhood, class, and history. The Collected Short Stories of Bharati Mukherjee features a Forward by prominent literary studies scholar Nalini Iyer and Afterword by critically acclaimed writer Lysley Tenorio, one of Mukherjee's former students. It is an essential volume for readers both familiar with Mukherjee's work and new to her groundbreaking fiction.

Mukherjee BharatiAUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Bharati Mukherjee (July 27, 1940 – January 28, 2017) was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction. Ruth Maxey is Associate Professor in Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham and the author of South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010 and Understanding Bharati Mukherjee.

 

 

 

 

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Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching by Jarvis R. Givens. Cambridge. 2021. Harvard University Press. 9780674983687. 10 photos, 8 illus., 1 table. 320 pages. hardcover.

  
9780674983687DESCRIPTION - Black education was a subversive act from its inception. African Americans pursued education through clandestine means, often in defiance of law and custom, even under threat of violence. They developed what Jarvis Givens calls a tradition of “fugitive pedagogy”—a theory and practice of Black education in America. The enslaved learned to read in spite of widespread prohibitions; newly emancipated people braved the dangers of integrating all-White schools and the hardships of building Black schools. Teachers developed covert instructional strategies, creative responses to the persistence of White opposition. From slavery through the Jim Crow era, Black people passed down this educational heritage. There is perhaps no better exemplar of this heritage than Carter G. Woodson - groundbreaking historian, founder of Black History Month, and legendary educator under Jim Crow. Givens shows that Woodson succeeded because of the world of Black teachers to which he belonged: Woodson’s first teachers were his formerly enslaved uncles; he himself taught for nearly thirty years; and he spent his life partnering with educators to transform the lives of Black students. Fugitive Pedagogy chronicles Woodson’s efforts to fight against the “mis-education of the Negro” by helping teachers and students to see themselves and their mission as set apart from an anti-Black world. Teachers, students, families, and communities worked together, using Woodson’s materials and methods as they fought for power in schools and continued the work of fugitive pedagogy. Forged in slavery, embodied by Woodson, this tradition of escape remains essential for teachers and students today. “As departments…scramble to decolonize their curriculum, Givens illuminates a longstanding counter-canon in predominantly black schools and colleges.”—Boston Review. “Informative and inspiring…An homage to the achievement of an often-forgotten racial pioneer.”—Glenn C. Altschuler, Florida Courier. “A long-overdue labor of love and analysis…that would make Woodson, the ever-rigorous teacher, proud.”—Randal Maurice Jelks, LosGivens Jarvis R Angeles Review of Books. “Fascinating, and groundbreaking. Givens restores Carter G. Woodson, one of the most important educators and intellectuals of the twentieth century, to his rightful place alongside figures like W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells.”—Imani Perry, author of May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Jarvis R. Givens is Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 2020–2021, he was the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

 

 

 

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Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault. New York. 1965. Pantheon Books. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. With an introduction by Dr. Jose Barchilon, Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. 299 pages. Jacket design by Pan Visual. June 1965.

madness and civilization a history of insanity in the age of reasonFROM THE PUBLISHER -

   During the Middle Ages insanity was in many respects considered a part of everyday life. Fools and madmen walked the streets much as they appear in the plays of Shakespeare and in Don Quixote. At some point in history, the West's attitude toward madness changed and these people began to be considered a threat. Asylums were built for the first time; madmen were put away, and an attempt was made to put a wall between the insane and the rest of humanity. In recent years the question of madness and how to define it has become the center of a great deal of discussion, partly social and psychological--reports show that a vast majority of New Yorkers are neurotic in varying degrees --but also judicial: how can one decide who is to be put away? This is the question that Dr. Foucault seeks to answer in an analysis of the history of madness from roughly 1500 to 1800. Basing himself on vast research into medical as well as theological thought, economics as well as literature, he has created a unique and highly relevant work, a masterpiece of research,Foucault Michel understanding, and imagination.

Michel Foucault (born Paul-Michel Foucault) (15 October 1926 - 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.

 

 

 

 


Gogol's Wife And Other Stories by Tommaso Landolfi. New York. 1963. New Directions. Translated From The Italian By Raymond Rosenthal. John Longrigg & Wayland Young. 183 pages. Jacket design by David Ford. December 1963.

gogols wife and other stories new directions 1963FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   The title story in this collection is claimed by its narrator to be a chapter in his biography of the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. He begins by saying he knows some intimate details of Gogol's life and that as his biographer he feels obligated to reveal them, though as his friend he might have kept all this to himself. After setting the reader up for some perhaps prurient 'facts,' the narrator tells us that Gogol's wife was a life-sized balloon, anatomically correct and quite voluptuous. Claiming to be the only person besides Gogol who has ever seen this creation, the narrator goes on to tell us an occasion where he heard her speak. He describes how she developed her own personality, in spite of the fact that she was a balloon, and that she even contracted syphilis, which subsequently infected Gogol. The narrator and Gogol are celebrating the silver anniversary of Gogol and his wife when the novelist gets insanely irritated with her, inserts a bicycle pump into her, and inflates her until she explodes. Gogol then throws the rubber pieces into the fire He also throws into the fire a balloon baby boy. The story closes with the narrator again defending his position of biographer, providing the truth about Gogol to the reader.

 

Landolfi TommasoTommaso Landolfi (August 9, 1908–1979) was an Italian author and translator. Born in Pico, province of Frosinone, he wrote numerous grotesque tales and novels, sometimes on the border of speculative fiction, science fiction and realism. He focused his translation efforts upon Russian and German authors such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Outside Italy, Landolfi's most known and translated work is AN AUTUMN STORY. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II. Landolfi is also the author of a collection of stories, WORDS IN MOTION, and GOGOL'S WIFE. Tommaso Landolfi died in Rome.



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