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The Man Who Ran Away and Other Stories Of Trinidad in the 1920s and 1930s by Alfred H. Mendes. Jamaica. 2006. University of the West Indies Press. Edited by Michele Levy. 190 pages. Cover design by Robert Harris. 976640173x.

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   Alfred H. Mendes was a member of the Beacon group of writers in Trinidad in the 1930s and friend and colleague of C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissiere. He was a prolific writer, with a distinctive and engaging voice, and he wrote a significant number of short stories, many of which have never been published and most of which were written between 1920 and 1940. THE MAN WHO RAN AWAY is a collection of twelve stories with an introduction and short glossary of Trinidadian Creole words and phrases. The book is useful as a text for university literature courses, with an introduction designed or students unfamiliar with Mendes’s work, but not so dauntingly academic as to discourage a general readership.

Alfred Hubert Mendes (18 November 1897-1991), novelist and short-story writer, was a leading member of the 1930s ‘Beacon group’ of writers (named after the literary magazine The Beacon) in Trinidad that included Albert Gomes, C. L. R. James and Ralph de Boissière. Mendes is best known as the author of two novels - PITCH LAKE (1934) and BLACK FAUNS (1935) - and for his short stories written during the 1920s and 1930s. He was ‘one of the first West Indian writers to set the pattern of emigration in the face of the lack of publishing houses and the small reading public in the West Indies.’ Born in Trinidad the eldest of six children in a Portuguese Creole family, Mendes was educated in Port of Spain until 1912, then at the age of 15 went to continue his studies in the United Kingdom. His hopes of going on to university there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After briefly returning to Trinidad in 1915, against his father’s wishes he joined the Merchants' Contingents of Trinidad - whose purpose was to enroll and transport to England young men who wished to serve in the war ‘for King and Country’ - and sailed back to Britain. He served in the 1st Rifle Brigade, and fought for two years in Flanders, along the Belgian Front, and was awarded a Military Medal for distinguishing himself on the battlefield. Towards the end of the war, he accidentally inhaled the poisonous gas used as a weapon by the German army, and was sent back to Britain to recover. Mendes returned to Trinidad in 1919, and worked in his wealthy father's provisions business, while spending his spare time writing poetry and fiction, and in establishing contact with other writers, artists and scholars. In 1933 he went to New York, remaining there until 1940. While in the USA he joined literary salons and associated with writers including Richard Wright, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, William Saroyan, Benjamin Appel, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Lowry and Ford Madox Ford. He went back to Trinidad again in 1940. Together with C. L. R. James, Mendes produced two issues of a pioneering literary magazine called Trinidad (Christmas 1929 and Easter 1930). Several of his stories appeared in The Beacon, the journal edited by Albert Gomes from March 1931 until November 1933. Mendes was quoted as saying in 1972: ‘James and I departed from the convention in the selection of our material, in the choice of a strange way of life, in the use of a new dialect. And these departures are still with our Caribbean successors.’ In all Mendes published about 60 short stories in magazines and journals in Trinidad, New York, London and Paris. His first novel Pitch Lake appeared in 1934, with an introduction by Aldous Huxley, and was followed by BLACK FAUNS in 1935. Both novels are significant in the history of literature from the Caribbean region and are landmarks in the establishment of social realism in the West Indian novel. In 1940, Mendes abandoned writing and worked in Trinidad's civil service, becoming General Manager of the Port Services Department. He was one of the foundering members of the United Front, a party with socialist leanings that participated in the 1946 general elections. After his retirement in 1972, he lived in Mallorca and Gran Canaria and ultimately settled in Barbados. In 1972 he was awarded an honorary D. Litt. by the University of the West Indies for his contribution to the development of West Indian literature. He began writing his autobiography in 1975 and his unfinished drafts were edited by Michèle Levy and published in 2002 by the University of the West Indies Press as THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES 1897-1991. Mendes and his wife Ellen both died in 1991 in Barbados and are buried together there in Christ Church Cemetery. Mendes married in October 1919, and had a son, Alfred John, the following year. His first wife, Jessie Rodriguez, died of pneumonia after only two years of marriage. A second marriage, a year later, ended in divorce in 1938. His third wife was Ellen Perachini, mother of his last two sons, Peter and Stephen. He is the grandfather of film director Sam Mendes. Michele Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Since 1994 she has been engaged in research into the life and writings of Alfred H. Mendes. She has edited another collection of his short stories, PABLO’S FANDANGO AND OTHER STORIES, and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES, 1897-1991.

Michele Levy is an independent researcher and academic writer. She has taught at secondary and tertiary levels and has tutored and lectured in the Department of Literatures in English, University of the West Indies, Jamaica. Since 1994 she has been engaged in research into the life and writings of Alfred H. Mendes. She has edited another collection of his short stories, PABLO’S FANDANGO AND OTHER STORIES, and THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ALFRED H. MENDES, 1897-1991.

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Book of My Mother by Albert Cohen. Brooklyn. 2012. Archipelago Books. paperback. 165 pages. Translated from the French by Bella Cohen. 9781935744337.

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   Shortly after Albert Cohen left France for London to escape the Nazis, he received news of his mother’s death in Marseilles. Unable to mourn her, he expressed his grief in a series of moving pieces for La France libre, which then grew into Book of My Mother. Achingly honest, intimate, and moving, this love song is a tribute to all mothers. The author turns his grief into a meditation on human solitude and on what it means to love. Cohen himself expressed, ‘I shall not have written in vain if one of you, after reading my hymn of death, is one evening gentler with his mother because of me and my mother.’ ‘I do not think anyone has ever written anything more beautiful, more deeply and soberly moving, about a mother and the feelings of tenderness, veneration, regret, and even remorse that she can inspire.’ – Le Voix du Nord. ‘Book of My Mother is a study in guilt, an act of contrition, for in mourning his mother he grieves for his own lost childhood. It is an achingly honest, autumnal book, generous in its humanity composed with art but without guile, the sincerest tribute of a neglectful son.’ - DAVID COWARD.

ALBERT COHEN was born on the island of Corfu in 1895. He emigrated to France at the age of five on a passport issued by the Ottoman Empire, and was raised in Marseilles. Although he chose to become a Swiss citizen after completing law school in Geneva, he claimed that his true homeland was the French language. Cohen’s tragicomic novels Solal, Mangeclous, Belle du Seigneur, and Les Valeureux attempt to reconnect man to his lost humanity Belle du Seigneur was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Roman.

BELLA COHEN was born in London in 1919. During WWII, she worked at the Free French Headquarters and with the Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees. She met Albert Cohen in 1943 and shared a life with him from 1947 until his death in 1981. Her translation of Book of My Mother was a labor of love.

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Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner. Cambridge. 2013. Harvard University Press. hardcover. 540 pages. Jacket art by Errol La Cain. Illustration from ‘Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp.’ 9780674055308.

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   Our foremost theorist of myth, fairytales, and folktales explores the magical realm of the imagination where carpets fly, objects speak, dreams reveal hidden truths, and genies grant prophetic wishes. Stranger Magic examines the wondrous tales of the Arabian Nights, their profound impact on the West, and the progressive exoticization of magic since the eighteenth century, when the first European translations appeared. The Nights seized European readers’ imaginations during the siècle des Lumières, inspiring imitations, spoofs, turqueries, extravaganzas, pantomimes, and mauresque tastes in dress and furniture. Writers from Voltaire to Goethe to Borges, filmmakers from Raoul Walsh on, and countless authors of children’s books have adapted its stories. What gives these tales their enduring power to bring pleasure to readers and audiences? Their appeal, Marina Warner suggests, lies in how the stories’ magic stimulates the creative activity of the imagination. Their popularity during the Enlightenment was no accident: dreams, projections, and fantasies are essential to making the leap beyond the frontiers of accepted knowledge into new scientific and literary spheres. The magical tradition, so long disavowed by Western rationality, underlies modernity’s most characteristic developments, including the charmed states of brand-name luxury goods, paper money, and psychoanalytic dream interpretation. In Warner’s hands, the Nights reveal the underappreciated cultural exchanges between East and West, Islam and Christianity, and cast light on the magical underpinnings of contemporary experience, where mythical principles, as distinct from religious belief, enjoy growing acceptance. These tales meet the need for enchantment, in the safe guise of oriental costume.

MARINA WARNER is Professor of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and a distinguished writer of fiction, criticism, and history.

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Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture by James Brook / Chris Carlsson / Nancy J. Peters (editors). San Francisco. 1998. City Lights. paperback. 355 pages. 0872863352.

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   Reclaiming San Francisco is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city--a spirit resistant to authority or control. The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgotten, and they are told here: stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists--along with the stories of speculators, land-grabbers, and the land itself that need to be told differently.Contributors include historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate. San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city.

James Brook is a poet and the principal editor of Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights) and the translator of many works, including My Tired Father by Gellu Naum and Panegyric by Guy Debord. Chris Carlsson is a writer, San Francisco historian, professor, bicyclist, tour guide, blogger, photographer, book and magazine designer. He's lived in San Francisco since 1978. He has written two books, edited five, including Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration (AK Press: 1992), The Political Edge (City Lights, 2005), Ten Years That Shook the City (City Lights, 2011) and others. He helped co-found Critical Mass in September 1992, and has ridden with Critical Mass rides in a dozen cities on three continents since then. He has been propelled into extended world travels since 2002. He has directed Shaping San Francisco since its inception in the mid-1990s, and continues to be co-director of the archive of San Francisco history at FoundSF.org. He also conducts award-winning bicycle history tours a dozen times a year, and hosts an ongoing Public Talks series in San Francisco. Nancy J. Peters is the former publisher of City Lights Books, co-author of Literary San Francisco and translator of Dreams of Dreams by Antonio Tabucchi.

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Heimskringla - 3 Volumes by Snorri Sturluson. New York and London. 1964. Everyman’s Library. hardcover. 717, 722, and 847. Volume 1 - Dustjacket drawing by Eric Fraser. Volume 2 - Dustjacket drawing by Aleksander Werner. Translated from the Icelandic by Samuel Lang, Volumes 1 and 2 - New Introduction by Jacqueline Simpson, M.A. Volume 3 - Revised with Introduction and Notes by Peter Foote. 

FROM THE PUBLISHER -

   VOLUME 1 - Saga literature boasts no work with a prouder name than that of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. Not only is it a window opened fully on an unfamiliar aspect of the medieval world, but it is an experience shared with a thirteenth-century chieftain who was at once lawyer, poet and patriot, writing of events and figures in the stormy era in which the kingdom of Norway was forged. In these pages he captures the savage glow of the great deeds of Olaf Haraldsson and Olaf Tryggvason, both dominating figures, honoured for their valour, the former revered as a saint within a few years of his death, and the latter, though never actually proclaimed a saint, nevertheless extolled as a hero of Christendom. To Norwegians and Icelanders alike, Olaf Haraldsson was the glorious martyr king, destroyer of heathendom, ‘ God’s Sunbeam’, ‘the Christ of the North.’ His predecessor Olaf Tryggvason vas the driving force in a missionary movement that made Christianity the official religion not only of Norway but of the Faroes, of Iceland and of Greenland. Four lives of Saint Olaf and two of Olaf Tryggvason are known to have been written before those of Snorri, who improved upon the work of his predecessors (who represented largely the ecclesiastical point of view) in the more effective use of the most ancient sources. His port rait of St Olaf is not idealized; his complex nature is shown in all its facets of pride, ambition, religious zeal, cruelty and holiness. It may well be reckoned among the most accomplished portraits of an historical figure in medieval literature. This volume also contains the Tale of the Greenlanders, an anonymous account of the Norse expeditions from Greenland to the coast of America. The notes have been revised in the present edition, and many of the verses recast in the interests of closer accuracy. Snorri’s history of the ages that preceded and followed the reigns of the two Olafs will be found in the second part of Heimskringla: Sagas of the Norse Kings, No. 847 in Everyman’s Library.

VOLUME 2 - This volume contains the histories of the kings of Norway from the dynasty’s mythical origins down to 1177. The sagas of the individual kings range far outside the borders of Norway itself and much information will be found in them concerning the rest of Scandinavia, Iceland, Russia and, not least, the British Isles. Apart from the great Norwegian and Danish settlements during the Viking Age, one need only recall that King Hakon the Good was fostered by King Athelstan of Wessex early in the tenth century, that King Harald the Stern fell at Stamford Bridge in 1066, and that King Magnus Bareleg was killed in battle in Ireland in 1103. The Heimskringla was written in Icelandic between 1223 and 1235. The author, Snorri Sturluson, besides being a great chieftain, lawyer and poet, was an historian deeply versed in Icelandic and Norwegian historical tradition, written and unwritten, possessed of keen psychological insight, and a master of the art of narrative prose. His work is of first importance both as an historical source and as an outstanding example of the characteristic virtues of c1assical Icelandic saga-literature. Dr Samuel Laing’s translation is clear and vigorous. The new Introduction views Snorri against the background of early Icelandic historical writing, of which his work is the culminating achievement considers the sources available to him and his treatment of them, and illustrates his skill as an historian and artist. In this reprint the notes have been thoroughly revised and a large new index added.

Snorri Sturluson (1179 – 23 September 1241) was an Icelandic historian, poet, and politician. He was elected twice as a lawspeaker at the Icelandic parliament, the Althing. He was the author of the Prose Edda or Younger Edda, which consists of Gylfaginning ('the fooling of Gylfi'), a narrative of Norse mythology, the Skáldskaparmál, a book of poetic language, and the Háttatal, a list of verse forms. He was also the author of the Heimskringla, a history of the Norwegian kings that begins with legendary material in Ynglinga saga and moves through to early medieval Scandinavian history. For stylistic and methodological reasons, Snorri is often taken to be the author of Egil's saga. As an historian and mythographer, Snorri is remarkable for proposing the hypothesis (in the Prose Edda) that mythological gods begin as human war leaders and kings whose funeral sites develop cults (see euhemerism). As people call upon the dead war leader as they go to battle, or the dead king as they face tribal hardship, they begin to venerate the figure. Eventually, the king or warrior is remembered only as a god.

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The Traces Of Thomas Hariot by Muriel Rukeyser. New York. 1971. Random House. 366 pages. hardcover. 0394449231. 

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   A study of the life of little-known Elizabethan Thomas Hariot - friend of Ralegh, Drake and Marlowe, and one of the first English explorers of the New World. Hariot was linked to poets, mathematicians and pioneer scientists, involved in the scientific, political, philosophical and sexual heresies of his time, and an expert in ships and navigation as well as an astronomer and philosopher.

Muriel Rukeyser (15 December 1913 – 12 February 1980) was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her ‘exact generation’. One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis. Her poem ‘To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century’ (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said ‘astonished’ her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life.

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Sally Hemings by Barbara Chase-Riboud. New York. 1979. Viking Press. hardcover. 348 pages. June 1979.  Jacket painting by Cornelia Gray. 0670616052.

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   One of the greatest love stories in American history is also one of the least known, and most controversial. Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence, had a mistress for thirty-eight years, whom he loved and lived with until he died, the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings. But it was not simply that Jefferson had a mistress that provoked the scandal of the times; it was that Sally Hemings was a quadroon slave, and that Jefferson fathered a slave family, many of whose descendents, known and unknown, are alive today. In this moving novel, which spans two continents, sixty years, and seven presidencies, Barbara Chase-Riboud re-creates a love story, based on the documents and evidence of the day but giving free rein to the novelist’s imagination. The story opens in the Paris of 1787, two scant years before the French Revolution and but a decade after the start of our own, where Thomas Jefferson is serving as the American ambassador to the court of France. A widower, Jefferson had brought his elder daughter, Martha, to France with him, but now he decides to bring over his younger daughter, Polly, as well. Sent with her as maid and servant is fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings. Over the next several months Jefferson grows increasingly infatuated with his slave, and before long becomes her lover. Highly intelligent and sensitive, and increasingly educated and sophisticated through her Paris sojourn, Sally Hemings could have opted not to return to America when Jefferson was called home, could have chosen freedom on the basis that slavery had been abolished on French soil. Bit she did return with Jefferson to Monticello, thus reenslaving herself to him. She never left Monticello again, and Jefferson, despite pressures to do so, did not remarry; the reason, no doubt, was Sally Hemings. Woven into this rich and complex narrative of love and enslavement is the story of the early Republic and of the personages of Aaron Burr, Dolley and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and John Trumbull. And like a series of somber counterpoints to the compelling love story are three salient themes: the slave rebellions of Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner; murders, those of George Wythe, Jefferson’s old professor and benefactor, and of George, the Lewis slave in Kentucky; and, above all, survival, that of Sally Hemings but also that of her indomitable mother, Elizabeth. Here were two generations of slave mistresses: Sally Hemings, mistress to a president, and her mother, mistress to a president’s father-in-law. The strange and complex ties between these two American families - the Jeffersons and the Hemingses, one white, one black—form in a sense the underside of our history. In this brilliant novel, Barbara Chase-Riboud presents the remarkable love story of Jefferson and Hemings as a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable addendum to the history of the races, and of the sexes, in America.

Barbara Chase-Riboud (born June 26, 1939) is an American novelist, poet, sculptor and visual artist best known for her historical fiction. Much of her work has explored themes related to slavery and exploitation. Chase-Riboud attained international recognition with the publication of her first novel, SALLY HEMINGS, in 1979. The novel has been described as the ‘first full blown imagining’ of Hemings' life as a slave and her relationship with Jefferson. In addition to stimulating considerable controversy, the book earned Chase-Riboud the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for the best novel written by an American woman. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Carl Sandburg Prize for poetry and the Women's Caucus for Art's lifetime achievement award. In 1965, she became the first American woman to visit the People's Republic of China after the revolution and in 1996, she was knighted by the French Government and received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

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The Passion According To G. H. by Clarice Lispector. Minneapolis. 1988. University of Minnesota Press. Translated From The Portuguese By Ronald W. Sousa. 174 pages. 0816617112.

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   A novel combining elements of the Brazilian literary tradition with feminist and literary theory. Aficionados of South American fiction as well as literary critics will welcome this posthumous translation of a nearly plotless novel by one of Brazil's foremost writers. Availing herself of a single character, Lispector transforms a banal situationa woman at home, aloneinto an amphitheater for philosophical investigations. The first-person narration jousts with language, playfully but forcefully examining the ambiguous nature of words, with results ranging from the profound to the pretentious: ‘Prehuman divine life is a life of singeing nowness’ or ‘The world interdepended with me, and I am not understanding what I say, never! never again shall I understand what I say. For how will I be able to speak without the word lying for me?’ These linguistic games frame existential and experiential crises that Lispector savors and overcomes. Although this idiosyncratic novel will not have wide appeal, those with academic or markedly erudite tastes should like it very much.

Born in the Ukraine in 1925, CLARICE LISPECTOR was brought up in Recife, Brazil, and then in Rio de Janeiro. After graduating from the Faculty of Law she married, and published NEAR TO THE WILD HEART. Lispector’s gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.

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Near To The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector. New York. 1990. New Directions. Translated From The Portuguese By Giovanni Pontiero. 192 pages. Jacket illustration: Love Song Under New Moon, 1939, watercolor by Paul Klee, C 1990 by COSMOPRESS, Genf., by permission of the Paul Klee Foundation, Museum of Fine Arts, Berne; design by Sylvia Frezzolini. 0811211398.

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   Clarice Lispector’s first novel, NEAR TO THE WILD HEART, was published in 1944, when its author was only nineteen years old. An immediate success, it became an acknowledged water- shed in Brazilian literature, catapulting it into the literary arena of European modernism. Narrative epiphanies and interior monologue consciously echo James Joyce as Lispector recalls first the childhood and then the adult years of the middle-class Joana, her unhappy marriage and its dissolution. NEAR TO THE WILD HEART - which won Brazil’s Prêmio do Fundaçao Graca Aranha - is a brilliant psychological and stylistic tour de force that anticipates the complex themes of one of Latin America’s foremost woman writers. ‘The intriguing quality of a Lispector story, aside from its stylistic brilliance, is the magic weave of humor and pathos. ’ - Booklist. ‘Translated from the Portuguese into a chilling economy of English, these tales by the late Lispector are bracing reminders of the costs, and treasures, of the unromantic mind. ’ - Publishers Weekly.  

Born in the Ukraine while her emigrating parents were en route to the Americas, Clarice Lispector published in her lifetime twenty volumes of fiction, nonfiction, and literature for children. Two of her short-story collections were issued by New Directions as SOULSTORM in 1988. CLARICE LISPECTOR’S parents were en route to Brazil when she, their second daughter, was born at Chechelnik, in the Ukraine. They settled in Recife, where Clarice attended school until, when she was twelve, they moved to Rio de Janeiro. There she completed her secondary education and entered law school, from which she was graduated in 1944. In 1943 she had married Mann Gurgel Valente, a fellow student who later entered the Brazilian foreign service. They then spent many years abroad, eight of them in the United States. Lispector’s gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.

Giovanni Pontiero is Reader in Spanish and Portuguese Literature at the University of Manchester, England.

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Family Ties by Clarice Lispector. Austin. 1972. University Of Texas Press. Translated From The Portuguese By Giovanni Pontiero. 156 pages. 0292724047. Originally published in Portuguese as Lacos de Familia.

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   Since the publication of her first novel in 1944, Clarice Lispector has been recognized as a Brazilian writer of great talent and originality. It is generally agreed among her critics, however that her best writing is in shorter fiction, where her personal style, with its brilliant flashes of insight, works more coherently. The stories in FAMILY TIES, originally published in 1960, are among her most important contribution to Brazilian fiction, They show her preoccupation with human suffering and failure, and critics have detected in them, as in all of her work, echoes of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and the French existentialist writers Camus and Sartre. But if her stories are concerned with the metaphysical anguish that results from the sudden recognition of the human condition, which Camus called Absurdity, the reader will find that anguish treated in an original way that reveals the complexity of the experience. The characters created by Clarice Lispector cannot be described as ‘types’, even in a psychological context. They are more appropriately seen as images of different states of mind, and this applies also to her settings, the gardens and parks in ‘Love’ and ‘The Buffalo’, the urban scenes in ‘Preciousness’ and ‘The Daydreams of a Drunk Woman’, and the jungle setting of ‘The smallest Woman in the World’; all exist outside of time and space. Lispector is a writer who is not interested primarily in the individuals and their individual contexts but in the passions that dominat3e and usually defeat them. Like Sartre and Camus, she subscribes to the acts that acts alone are important - and isolation and violence become the two salient features of human experience. CONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Introduction; Daydreams of a Drunken Woman; Love; The Chicken; The Imitation of the Rose; Happy Birthday; The Smallest Woman in the World; The Dinner; Preciousness; Family Ties; The Beginnings of a Fortune; Mystery in Sao Cristovao; The Crime of the Mathematics Professor; The Buffalo.  

Born in the Ukraine in 1925, CLARICE LISPECTOR was brought up in Recife, Brazil, and then in Rio de Janeiro. After graduating from the Faculty of Law she married, and published NEAR TO THE WILD HEART. Lispector’s gifts as a novelist were early recognized, and she became one of the half-dozen irreplaceable Portuguese-language writers of this century. She died of cancer in 1977.