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Leopoldina's Dream by Silvina Ocampo. New York. 1988. Penguin Books. 0140100113. Translated from the Spanish by Daniel Balderston. 205 pages. paperback. Series design: David Wyman. Cover design: Rene Demers. Cover painting: Vesper Express, L’honor Fini, VIS-ART C 1988.  

DESCRIPTION - Silvina Ocampo is one of the most disturbing and fascinating writers a reader can hope to encounter. Many of her stories are about the uneasy conjunction of opposites: evil and saintliness, love and hate, the difficult world of childhood and the dangerously simple world of adults. Borges has written that the cruelty of Ocampo’s stories is no doubt the result of the nobility of her soul, a judgement no less paradoxical than much of her own writing. Powerful and haunting, these stories about emotions carried to their limits are among the world’s finest. Preface by Jorge Luis Borges. ‘Silvina Ocampo is one of our best writers. Her stories have no equal in our literature.’ - Jorge Luis Borges. ‘I don’t know of another writer who better captures the magic inside everyday rituals, the forbidden or hidden face that our mirrors don’t show us.’ - Italo Calvino. ‘Silvina Ocampo is, together with Borges and Garcia Marquez, the leading writer in Spanish.’ - Jorge Amado. Few writers have an eye for the small horrors of everyday life; fewer still see the everyday marvellous. Other than Silvina Ocampo. I cannot think of a single writer who, at any time or in any language, has chronicled both with such wise and elegant humour.’ - Alberto Manguel.

Silvina Ocampo Aguirre (July 28, 1903 - December 14, 1993) was an Argentine poet and short-fiction writer. Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, the youngest of the six children of Manuel Ocampo and Ramona Aguirre. She was educated at home by tutors. One of her sisters was Victoria Ocampo, the publisher of the literarily important Argentine magazine Sur. She studied drawing in Paris under Giorgio de Chirico. She was married to Adolfo Bioy Casares, whose lover she became (1933) when Bioy was 19. They were married in 1940. In 1954 she adopted Bioy’s daughter with another woman, Marta Bioy Ocampo (1954–94), who was killed in an automobile accident just three weeks after Silvina Ocampo’s death, leaving two children. The estate of Silvina Ocampo and Adolfo Bioy Casares was recently (as of 2006) awarded by a Buenos Aires court to yet another love child of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Fabián Bioy. Fabián Bioy died, aged 40, in February 2006. With Fabián Bioy's death, it is likely the many documents and manuscripts of both writers will soon become available to scholars. Ocampo began as a writer with the book of short stories Viaje olvidado in 1937, and followed up with three books of poetry, Enumeración de la patria, Espacios métricos and Los sonetos del jardín. With Espacios métricos, which had been published in 1942 by the publishing house Sur, she won the Premio Municipal in 1954. She won the second prize in the National Poetry Comptetition for Los nombres in 1953 and came back to win the first place prize in 1962 with Lo amargo por dulce. Co-authored with Adolfo Bioy Casares, Ocampo published Los que aman, odian, in 1946, and with Juan Rodolfo Wilcock she published the theatrical work Los Traidores in 1956. With Borges and Bioy Casares, Ocampo co-authored the celebrated Antología de la literatura fantástica in 1940, and also the Antología poética Argentina in 1941.

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The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick - 5 volumes

Beyond Lies the Wub: Volume 1 of the Collected Stories. London. 1988. Gollancz. 0575044071. 416 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The first volume of the definitive five-book set of the complete collected stories of the twentieth-century's greatest SF author, a matchless display of Philip K. Dick's quirky, humorous, idiosyncratically philosophical world view. With one exception, all the stories here were written over a nine-month period between 1951 and 1952, when Dick was in his early twenties and making his first impact as a writer. CONTENTS: Stability; Roog; The Little Movement; Beyond Lies the Wub; The Gun; The Skull; The Defenders; Mr. Spaceship; Piper in the Woods; The Infinites; The Preserving Machine; Expendable; The Variable Man; The Indefatigable Frog; The Crystal Crypt; The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford; The Builder; Meddler; Paycheck; The Great C; Out in the Garden; The King of the Elves, Colony; Prize Ship; Nanny.

The Second Variety: Volume 2 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. London. 1989. Gollancz. 0575044608. Introduction by Norman Spinrad. 395 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The second volume of Philip K. Dick's Collected Stories brings together 27 stories written in an incredible eight-month burst of energy. Included are such famous Dick masterpieces as the title story, with its endless war being fought by ever more cunning and sophisticated robot weapons; "Impostor", in which a man is accused of being an alien spy and finds his whole identity called into question; and "Prominent Author", in which a fracture in space/time enables an ordinary future commuter to achieve unexpected literary fame. Again and again in these stories  - written and published while America was in the grip of McCarthyism  - Dick speaks up for ordinary people and against militarism, paranoia and xenophobia. But first and foremost these are marvellously varied and entertaining stories from a writer overflowing with ideas.

The Father-Thing: Volume 3 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. London. 1977. Gollancz. 0575046163. Introduction by John Brunner. 376 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - This third volume of Philip K. Dick's stories is drawn, like Second Variety, from his most prolific period as a short story writer: the 23 items were written in little more than a year, before his first novel appeared. Many of them are previously uncollected, but also included are several of his most famous stories, such as ‘Foster, You're Dead' - a powerful extrapolation of nuclear war hysteria - and ‘The Golden Man', a very different story about a super-evolved mutant human. Once again, this is a marvelously varied and entertaining collection by a writer whose reputation continues to grow and grow. CONTENTS: Fair Games; The Hanging Stranger; The Eyes Have It; The Golden Man; The Turning Wheel; The Last of the Masters; The Father-Thing; Strange Eden; Tony and the Beetles; Null-O; To Serve the Master; Exhibit Piece; The Crawlers; Sales Pitch; Shell Games; Upon the Dull Earth; Foster, You're Dead; Pay for the Printer; War Veteran; The Chromium Fence; Misadjustment; A World of Talent; PSI-Man Heal My Child!; Notes.

The Days of Perky Pat: Volume 4 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. London. 1990. Gollancz. 0575047569. Introduction by James Tiptree, Jr. 380 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The fourth and penultimate volume of Dick's collected stories covers a much wider span of years than its predecessors  - from late 1954 through to 1963. These were the years when Dick began to write novels prolifically, so his short story output became much more sparse. Some of these stories went on to inspire novels  - "The Mold of Yancy" suggested The Penultimate Truth, while the title story was the seed from which one of Dick's greatest works, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, later grew. Philip K. Dick is shown in his prime in this collection, writing stories which stand alongside famous novels like The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

The Little Black Box: Volume 5 of the Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. London. 1990. Gollancz. 057504845x. Introduction by John Brunner. 395 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The final volume of the collected stories of Philip K. Dick covers the period from 1963 to 1981, the year before he died. It was a period which produced some of Dick's finest novels, including The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldrich, Flow My Tears the Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly. Among the 25 stories in this collection, the title story provided the seed for his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, while We Can Remember It For You Wholesale has recently been filmed under the title Total Recall. This collection shows Philip K. Dick at the height of his considerable powers. CONTENTS: The Little Black Box; The War with the Fnools; A Game of Unchance; Precious Artifact; Retreat Syndrome; A Terran Odyssey; Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday; Holy Quarrel; We Can Remember It For You Wholesale; Not By Its Cover; Return Match; Faith of Our Fathers; The Story to End All Stories For Harlan Ellison's Anthology DANGEROUS VISIONS; The Electric Ant; Cadbury, the Beaver Who Lacked; A little Something For Us Tempunauts; The Pre-Persons; The Eye of the Sibyl; The Day Mr. Computer Fell Out of Its Tree. The Exit Door Leads In; Chains of Air, Web of Aether; Strange Memories of Death; I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon; Rautavaara's Case; The Alien Mind.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 - March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments, and altered states. In his later works Dick's thematic focus strongly reflected his personal interest in metaphysics and theology. He often drew upon his own life experiences in addressing the nature of drug abuse, paranoia, schizophrenia, and transcendental experiences in novels such as A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. The novel The Man in the High Castle bridged the genres of alternate history and science fiction, earning Dick a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1963. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, a novel about a celebrity who awakens in a parallel universe where he is unknown, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best novel in 1975. ‘I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards,' Dick wrote of these stories. ‘In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.' In addition to 44 published novels, Dick wrote approximately 121 short stories, most of which appeared in science fiction magazines during his lifetime. Although Dick spent most of his career as a writer in near-poverty, ten popular films based on his works have been produced, including Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report, Paycheck, Next, Screamers, and The Adjustment Bureau. In 2005, Time magazine named Ubik one of the one hundred greatest English-language novels published since 1923. In 2007, Dick became the first science fiction writer to be included in The Library of America series.

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The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness by Wole Soyinka. New York. 1998. Oxford University Press. 0195122054. 208 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by David Tran.  

DESCRIPTION - Soyinka's The Open Sore of a Continent appeared in 1996, it received rave reviews in the national media. Now comes The Burden of Memory, Soyinka's powerful sequel to that fearless and passionate book. Where Open Sore offered a critique of African nationhood and a searing indictment of the Nigerian military and its repression of human and civil rights, The Burden of Memory considers all of Africa - indeed, all the world - as it poses the next logical question: Once repression stops, is reconciliation between oppressor and victim possible? In the face of centuries long devastations wrought on the African continent and her Diaspora by slavery, colonialism, Apartheid, and the manifold faces of racism, what form of recompense could possibly be adequate? In a voice as eloquent and humane as it is forceful, Soyinka examines this fundamental question as he illuminates the principle duty and ‘near intolerable burden' of memory to bear the record of injustice. In so doing, he challenges notions of simple forgiveness, of confession and absolution, as strategies for social healing. Ultimately, he turns to art - poetry, music, painting - as one source that may nourish the seed of reconciliation, art as the generous vessel that can hold together the burden of memory and the hope of forgiveness. Based on Soyinka's Stewart-McMillan lectures delivered at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, The Burden of Memory speaks not only to those concerned specifically with African politics, but also to anyone seeking the path to social justice through some of history's most inhospitable terrain. Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986. He is Woodruff Professor of the Arts at Emory University, in Atlanta, and a Fellow of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Akinwande Oluwole 'Wole' Soyinka (born 13 July 1934) is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honored. Soyinka was born into a Yoruba family in Abeokuta. After study in Nigeria and the UK, he worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. He went on to write plays that were produced in both countries, in theatres and on radio. He took an active role in Nigeria's political history and its struggle for independence from Great Britain. In 1965, he seized the Western Nigeria Broadcasting Service studio and broadcast a demand for the cancellation of the Western Nigeria Regional Elections. In 1967 during the Nigerian Civil War, he was arrested by the federal government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years. Soyinka has strongly criticised many Nigerian military dictators, especially late General Sanni Abacha, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe. Much of his writing has been concerned with 'the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it'. During the regime of General Sani Abacha (1993–98), Soyinka escaped from Nigeria via the 'Nadeco Route' on a motorcycle. Living abroad, mainly in the United States, he was a professor first at Cornell University and then at Emory University in Atlanta, where in 1996 he was appointed Robert W. Woodruff Professor of the Arts. Abacha proclaimed a death sentence against him 'in absentia'. With civilian rule restored to Nigeria in 1999, Soyinka returned to his nation. He has also taught at the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Yale. From 1975 to 1999, he was a Professor of Comparative Literature at the Obafemi Awolowo University, then called the University of Ife. With civilian rule restored in 1999, he was made professor emeritus. Soyinka has been a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In the fall of 2007 he was appointed Professor in Residence at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, US.

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A Stanislaw Lem Reader by Stanislaw Lem. Evanston. 1997. Northwestern University Press. 0810114941. Edited by Peter Swirski. 129 pages. hardcover.   

DESCRIPTION - This collection assembles in-depth and insightful writings by and about, and interviews with, one of the most fascinating writers of the twentieth century. Anyone interested in Lem's provocative and uncompromising view of literature's role in the contemporary cultural environment, and in Lem's opinions about his own fiction, about the relation of literature to science and technology, and the dead ends of contemporary culture, will be fascinated by this eclectic collection.

Stanislaw Lem (12 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976 Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science-fiction writer in the world. In 1996, he received the prestigious Polish award, the Order of the White Eagle. His works explore philosophical themes; speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of mutual communication and understanding, despair about human limitations and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books. Translations of his works are difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.

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Bibliophilia: One Man's Obsession with Book Collecting by N. John Hall. Boston. 2016. David Godine. 9781567925616. 164 pages. paperback.

DESCRIPTION -  "Let the buyer beware." Flush with $400,000 dollars from selling his great great grandfather's correspondence with Victorian authors, Larry Dickerson, retired bank clerk, amateur editor, and literary neophyte, needs a creative outlet for his newly acquired funds and quickly escalating love of all things bookish. His journey begins with collecting rare editions of Victorian novelists and spirals rapidly into the extensive abyss of New Yorker authors, his obsession growing with each new purchase. James Thurber, E B White, Vladimir Nabokov, J D Salinger, and Dorothy Parker all find their way onto Larry's shortlist, standing alongside previously acquired Victorian greats: Trollope, Dickens, Thackeray, and Hardy. Larry approaches the biggest names in rare book collecting with a childish glee, and with refreshing brashness, finds himself in the New Yorker offices, handling copies of some of the rarest books ever printed, and even in the midst of the biggest scandal book collecting has ever seen. Will the thrill of the chase overwhelm Larry's ability to see reason? Join him on this journey as he discovers just how far he's willing to take his obsession.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - N. John Hall is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the Bronx Community College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The receipient of numerous awards, he has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow. His many books include Trollope:A Biography and Max Beerhohm: A Kind of Life. He is considered one of the world's leading authorities on both Trollope and Beerhohm. Since 1967 he has lived in Greenwich Village, New York.

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Soldiers Cry By Night by Ana Maria Matute. Pittsburgh. 1995. Latin American Literary Review Press. 0935480692. Translated from the Spanish by Robert Nugent & Maria Jose De La Camara. 160 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION - Soldiers Cry by Night is the second volume of the award-winning trilogy, The Merchants, which takes place during the Spanish Civil War. The two main characters, Manuel and Marta, are forced to accept the end of their childhood, and come to terms with the allegiances and betrayals of the harsh adult world. During the Fascist attack on Barcelona, the two young people are forced to choose sides, and their decisions will forever change their lives. ‘This translation by a pair of academic Hispanists, one of whom has translated several volumes of poetry, is long overdue' - Library Journal. . . ‘Readers...will be richly rewarded with an important and fascinating work.' - Kirkus Reviews.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Ana María Matute Ana María Matute Ausejo (26 July 1925 - 25 June 2014) was the most prominent woman writer of 20th century Spain. Her novels and short stories have won many prestigious literary awards including the Premio Nacional de Literatura, Premio Nadal, Premio de la Crítica and Premio Cafe de Gijon. She was the third woman to receive the Cervantes Prize for her literary oeuvre. She is considered to be one of the foremost novelists of the posguerra, the period immediately following the Spanish Civil War. She studied at the international school of Hilversum in the Netherlands. She has been a guest lecturer to the universities of Oklahoma, Indiana and Virginia. Matute was born on 26 July 1925. At the age of four she almost died from a chronic kidney infection, and was taken to live with her grandparents in Mansilla de la Sierra, a small town in the mountains, for a period of recovery. Matute says that she was profoundly influenced by the villagers whom she met during her time there. This influence can be seen in such works as those published in the 1961 anthology Historias de la Artamila (‘Stories about the Artamila', all of which deal with the people that Matute met during her recovery). Settings reminiscent of that town are also often used as settings for her other work. Matute was ten years old when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, and this conflict is said to have had the greatest impact on Matute's writing. She considered not only ‘the battles between the two factions, but also the internal aggression within each one'. The war resulted in Francisco Franco's rise to power, starting in 1936 and escalating until 1939, when he took control of the entire country. Franco established a dictatorship which lasted thirty-six years, until his death in 1975. The violence brought on by the war continued through much of his reign. Since Matute matured as a writer in this posguerra period under Franco's oppressive regime, some of the most recurrent themes in her works are violence, alienation, misery, and especially the loss of innocence. Her work was sometimes censored by the Franco regime, and at least once she was fined because of her writings. She published her first story, ‘The Boy Next Door,' when she was only 17 years old. Matute was known for her sympathetic treatment of the lives of children and adolescents, their feelings of betrayal and isolation, and their rites of passage. She often interjected such elements as myth, fairy tale, the supernatural, and fantasy into her works. Matute was a university professor. She traveled to various countries, especially the United States, as a lecturer. She was outspoken about subjects such as the benefits of emotional suffering, the constant changing of a human being, and how innocence is never completely lost. She was an honorary member of the Hispanic Society of America and a member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. She won the Spanish literary award, the Premio Nadal, in 1958 for the first novel of the trilogy, ‘Los Mercaderes'. On 25 June 2014, Matute died of a heart attack at the age of 88.

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A Game for the Living by Patricia Highsmith. New York. 1958. Harper & Brothers. 269 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Polly Cameron.  

DESCRIPTION - What happens when two men who are friends, share the love of a beautiful woman, and she is murdered? Theodore Wolfgang Schiebelhut, resident of Mexico, had been on a painting trip, and, returning to Mexico City with his canvases, stopped off briefly at a party. He left the party to visit his mistress, Lelia. Late as the hour was, he knew Lelia would not mind being disturbed and would be delighted to see him. But she did not answer his knock and her door was locked. He crawled through the transom and found the girl on her bed, murdered and mutilated. When the police came they questioned Theodore first, and then their attention turned to Ramon Otero, Theodore's friend, and Lelia's lover, too. Ramon had wanted to marry Lelia. Theodore had not. The closely knit, comfortable and sensitive community in which Theodore and Ramon moved was shattered by the tragedy and the suspicions. In A Game for the Living Patricia Highsmith has written a novel of vivid character portrayal and fascinating motivations - particularly those of a man whose philosophy of life is threatened at a time when he has lost the woman he loves, and perhaps his best friend. It is a compelling novel.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, Patricia Highsmith spent much of her adult life in Switzerland and France. Educated at Barnard College, where she studied English, Latin, and Greek, she had her first novel, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, published in 1950 and saw it quickly made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock. Despite receiving little recognition in her native land during her lifetime, Highsmith, the author of more than twenty books, won the O. Henry Memorial Award, The Edgar Allan Poe Award, Le Grand Prix de Littérarure Policière, and the Award of the Crime Writers’ Association of Great Britain. She died in Switzerland in 1995, and her literary archives are maintained in Berne.

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The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya. Boston. 2003. Houghton Mifflin. 0618124977. Translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell. 278 pages. hardcover. Cover: Luba Lukova.

DESCRIPTION - In what remains of Moscow some two hundred years after ‘the Blast', a community persists in primitive, ridiculous, and often brutal circumstances. Mice are the current source of food, clothes, and commerce as well as humor. Owning books in this society is prohibited by the tyrant, who plagiarizes the old masters, becoming his people's sole writer. One of the tyrant's scribes, Benedikt, is the main narrator of THE SLYNX. He is in love with books as objects but is unable to derive any meaning or moral benefit from them. In the dystopian world of her satirical first novel, Tatyana Tolstaya addresses lust, cruelty, egotism, and ignorance through Benedikt's distorted eyes. Throughout the novel lurks the Slynx, the imagined catlike creature whose fearsome, shadowy presence threatens the mice and the humans alike. As Pearl K. Bell wrote of Tatyana Tolstaya on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, ‘The blazing vitality of [her] imagination, the high-spirited playfulness . . . place her in that uniquely Russian line of satirists and surrealists.' David Remnick has called her ‘the most promising of all the ‘post-Soviet' writers . . . She sounds like no one else.' A great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy, Tatyana Tolstaya was born in St. Petersburg. She is the author of two collections of stories and of PUSHKIN'S CHILDREN: WRITINGS ON RUSSIA AND RUSSIANS. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and, in 2001, two major Russian literary awards. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and other publications. After teaching at Princeton University and for many years at Skidmore College, she now lives in Moscow. Jamey Gambrell has been translating Tatyana Tolstaya's fiction and non-fiction since 1990. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. . .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya (born 3 May 1951) is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family, known for her fiction and "acerbic essays on contemporary Russian life". Tolstaya was born in Leningrad into a family of writers. Her paternal grandfather, Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoy, was a pioneering science fiction writer, and the son of Count Nikolay Alexandrovich Tolstoy (1849–1900) and Alexandra Leontievna Turgeneva (1854–1906), a relative of Decembrist Nikolay Turgenev and the writer Ivan Turgenev. Tolstaya's paternal grandmother was the poet Natalia Krandievskaya. Mikhail Lozinsky (1886-1955), her maternal grandfather, was a literary translator renowned for his translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Tolstaya's sister, Her first short story, "On the Golden Porch", appeared in Avrora magazine in 1983 and marked the start of Tolstaya's literary career, and her story collection of the same name established Tolstaya as one of the foremost writers of the perestroika and post-Soviet period. As Michiko Kakutani writes, "one can find echoes...of her great-granduncle Leo Tolstoy's work - his love of nature, his psychological insight, his attention to the details of everyday life". But "her luminous, haunting stories most insistently recall the work of Chekhov, mapping characters' inner lives and unfulfilled dreams with uncommon sympathy and insight", and also display "the author's Nabokovian love of language and her affinity for strange excursions into the surreal, reminiscent of Bulgakov and Gogol." She spent much of the late Eighties and Nineties living in the United States and teaching at several universities. Her novel The Slynx is a dystopian vision of post-nuclear Russian life in what was once (now forgotten) Moscow, presenting a negative Bildungsroman that in part confronts "disappointments of post-Soviet Russian political and social life". It has been described as "an account of a degraded world that is full of echoes of the sublime literature of Russia's past; a grinning portrait of human inhumanity; a tribute to art in both its sovereignty and its helplessness; a vision of the past as the future in which the future is now". For the twelve years between 2002 and 2014, Tolstaya co-hosted a Russian cultural television programme, The School for Scandal, named after play by Richard Sheridan), on which she conducted interviews with diverse representatives of contemporary Russian culture and politics.

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Kallocain by Karin Boye. Madison. 1966. University of Wisconsin Press. Translated from the Swedish by Gustaf Lannestock. Introduction by Richard B. Vowles. 193 pages. hardcover.

  
DESCRIPTION - Fictional scientist's memoir of a distopian totalitarian state, of which he is a cog, having developed a drug used to destroy privacy of thought - a 'truth serum'. The author, born in 1900, took her own life in 1941. First published in Swedish in 1940, after the author visited Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany; much later nominated for a Retro-Hugo award, filmed as a television miniseries in 1981, often compared to 1984 and Brave New World. 

In a different translation from Penguin Classics:

Kallocain by Karin Boye. New York. 2019. Penguin Books. 9780241608302. Translated from the Swedish and with an introduction by David McDuff. 170 pages. paperback. Cover: Alterpiece, Group X, Number 1, 1915, Hilma of Klint.

DESCRIPTION - The classic World War II–era dystopian novel, written at the midpoint between Brave New World and 1984, in its first new translation in more than fifty years. Leo Kall is a zealous middle-ranking scientist in the totalitarian World State who has just made a thrilling discovery: a new drug, Kallocain, that will force anyone who takes it to tell the truth. At last, criminality will be dragged out into the open and private thought can finally be outlawed. But can the World State be trusted with Kallocain? For that matter, can Kall himself be trusted? Written as the terrible events of World War II were unfolding, Karin Boye’s classic dystopian novel speaks more clearly than ever of the dangers of acquiescence and the power of resistance.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Karin Maria Boye (October 26, 1900 - April 24, 1941) was a Swedish poet and novelist. Boye was born in Gothenburg (Göteborg), Sweden and moved with her family to Stockholm in 1909. She studied at Uppsala University from 1921 to 1926 and debuted in 1922 with a collection of poems, ‘Clouds' (Swedish: Moln). During her time in Uppsala and until 1930, Boye was a member of the Swedish ClartE League, a socialist group in those days very anti-Fascist. In 1931 Boye, together with Erik Mesterton and Josef Riwkin, founded the poetry magazine Spektrum, introducing T. S. Eliot and the Surrealists to Swedish readers. She translated many of Eliot's works into Swedish; she and Mesterton translated ‘The Waste Land‘. Boye is perhaps most famous for her poems, of which the most well-known ought to be ‘Yes, of course it hurts' (Swedish: Ja visst gör det ont) and ‘In motion' (I rörelse) from her collections of poems ‘The Hearths' (Härdarna), 1927, and ‘For the sake of the tree' (För trädets skull), 1935. She was also a member of the Swedish literary institution Samfundet De Nio (chair number 6) from 1931 until her death in 1941. Boye's novel ‘Crisis' (Kris) depicts her religious crisis and lesbianism. In her novels ‘Merit awakens' (Merit vaknar) and ‘Too little' (För lite) she explores male and female role-playing. Outside Sweden, her best-known work is probably the novel Kallocain. Inspired by her visit to the Soviet Union in 1928 and her visit to Germany during the rise of Nazism, it was a portrayal of a dystopian society in the vein of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (though written almost a decade before Orwell's magnum opus). In the novel, an idealistic scientist named Leo Kall invents Kallocain, a kind of truth serum. Between 1929 and 1932 Boye was married to another ClartE member, Leif Björck. The marriage was apparently a friendship union. In 1932, after separating from her husband, she had a lesbian relationship with Gunnel Bergström, who left her husband, poet Gunnar Ekelöf, for Boye. During a stay in Berlin 1932-1933 she met Margot Hanel, whom she lived with for the rest of her life, and referred to as ‘her wife'. Boye died in an apparent suicide when swallowing sleeping pills after leaving home on 23 April 1941. She was found, according to the police report at the Regional Archives in Gothenburg, on April 27, curled up at a boulder on a hill with a view just north of Alingsås, near Bolltorpsvägen, by a farmer who was going for a walk. The boulder is now a memorial stone. Margot Hanel committed suicide shortly thereafter. Karin Boye was given two very different epitaphs. The best-known is the poem ‘Dead Amazon' (Död amazon) by Hjalmar Gullberg, in which she is depicted as ‘Very dark and with large eyes'. Another poem was written by her close friend Ebbe Linde and is entitled ‘Dead friend' (Död kamrat). Here, she is depicted not as a heroic Amazon but as an ordinary human, small and grey in death, released from battles and pain. A literary association dedicated to her work was created in 1983, keeping her work alive by spreading it among new readers. In 2004, one of the branches of the Uppsala University Library was named in her honour.

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Laterna Magica by William Heinesen. Seattle. 1987. Fjord Press. 0940242230. Translated from the Danish by Tiina Nunnally. 159 pages. paperback. Cover illustration & chapter friezes by William Heinesen.  

DESCRIPTION - ‘Many any readers of this wise and wry book have probably traveled or will travel to Scandinavia. If your plane departs from the Midwest or the East Coast there is a fair chance that you will be traversing above the Faroe Islands and that you will be prevented from seeing them by a solid cloud cover. If you are splendidly lucky you may, for a few moments, catch a glimpse of a group of rocky, rugged, and very green dots in the Atlantic Ocean. Those islands, situated roughly between Norway, Scotland, and Iceland and inhabited for nearly a thousand years, cover about 540 square miles and now have a population of forty thousand people. In Hedin Bronner's introduction to FAROESE SHORT STORIES (1972), he concisely sums up traditional Faroese life: ‘Their livelihood depended almost entirely on a combination of fishing and farming. Their subsistence economy forced practically every man to be a combination of builder, boatsman, fisherman, bird hunter, and farmer.' It is that vanishing way of life that William Heinesen celebrates in many of his quasi-memoirs from the capital city of Torshavn, a small town that is immense in the world of the imagination. In the 1950s, the Faroese people gained their independence from Denmark, and the nation now flies its own flag and votes for its own parliament  - even if it shares foreign policy with Denmark. Faroese is a language that, like Icelandic, has not developed as far from its medieval form as have Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Heinesen writes, however, in Danish, for authors of his generation had to use a better known language to gain a wider audience. Although he does not use Faroese, his books capture with remarkable vividness and nuance both the social and psychic reality of his people. Heinesen was born in 1900; he was sent to study at a Danish business college, dropped out to become a journalist, published some volumes of poetry (debut, 1921), and moved back to the Faroes in 1932. In the 1930s, he switched to prose and published a couple of collective novels, but the Heinesen whose words sparkle  - as they do in LATERNA MAGICA  - did not emerge until after the Second World War. With such novels as THE LOST MUSICIANS (1950, tr. 1971) and THE KINGDOM OF THE EARTH (1952, tr. 1974) and numerous short stories  - a selection of which appeared in THE WINGED DARKNESS AND OTHER STORIES (1983) - Heinesen became an author who was eventually nominated for the Nobel Prize. In these works he bridged realism and fantasy in a manner that has been made famous by Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The reader of Heinesen will soon realize that the author has some consistent dislikes and sympathies: he exposes the dry bureaucrat, the humorless bourgeois, the pietistic preacher who stands ready to condemn his fellow human beings, and he offers some compassionate, humorous portraits of glorious and inglorious souls who who enjoy life fully in wisdom or in folly. Heinesen is, however, not a didactic author, and his humanism exudes what one could call an intense tolerance of the human race. If Heinesen has a protagonist  - a hero or a heroine  - it is the artist. That person may never put a word or a musical note on paper, but lives life intensely and fully. He or she embodies the concept of homo ludens, that playful individual who knows that life is a very serious matter, but who experiences it with undaunted joy. The older Heinesen often recalls fates from a Torshavn of an earlier day. He may be nostalgic, but never sentimental, for the author of LATERNA MAGICA has no qualms about admitting his mortality. Although he has witnessed both comedies and tragedies, he recalls the past with warmth and wit, and the reader ends up with the feeling that life  - many-faceted as it can be on those small islands - has given him insights that any reader will recognize. In spite of Heinesen's Faroese setting, he is anything but a regionalist, and it is perfectly understandable that his works are gaining popularity beyond Scandinavia. In 1981, a persistent rumor had it that Heinesen had been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Heinesen then sat down and wrote a letter to the Swedish Academy withdrawing his nomination. His reasoning was that, if he were granted the honor, it would seem that some author writing in the Danish language had been given the prize, not a Faroese author. That decision and the stories in this volume both reflect Heinesen's deep-seated loyalty to his native culture.' - from the Afterword by Niels Ingwersen, University of Wisconsin. .

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Andreas William Heinesen (15 January 1900 - 12 March 1991) was a poet, novel writer, short story writer, children's book writer, composer and painter from the Faroe Islands. The Faroese capital Torshavn is always the centre of Heinesen's writing and he is famous for having once called Torshavn 'The Navel of the World'. His writing focuses on contrasts between darkness and light, between destruction and creativity. Then following is the existential struggle of man to take sides. This is not always easy, however, and the lines between good and bad are not always clearly defined. Heinesen was captivated by the mysterious part of life, calling himself religious in the broadest sense of the word. His life could be described as a struggle against defeatism with one oft-quoted aphorism of his is that 'life is not despair, and death shall not rule'. As he was born and raised before the Faroese language was taught in the schools, he wrote mainly in Danish but his spoken language was Faroese. All his books are later translated into his native Faroese. He published his first collection of poetry when he was 21 and he had three more published before he wrote his first novel Blæsende gry (Stormy Dawn) in 1934. He read every single one of the chapters to the painter Sámal Joensen-Mikines, as he was worried that his Danish wasn't good enough. That was followed up with Noatún (1938). Noatún has a strong political message - solidarity is the key to a good society. His next book The Black Cauldron (1949) deals with the aftermath of decadent living combined with religious hysteria. In The Lost Musicians (1950) Heinesen leaves the social realism of his earlier works behind, instead giving himself over to straightforward storytelling. Mother Pleiades (1952) is an ode to his imagination. Its subtitle is 'a Story From the Beginning of Time'. Heinesen wasn't content with writing only novels. In the fifties he began writing short stories as well. Most of them have been printed in these three collections entitled The Enchanted light, Gamaliel's Bewitchment and Cure Against Evil Spirits (1969). In the novel The Good Hope, his main character the Rev. Peder Børresen is based on the historical person Rev. Lucas Debes. When Heinesen was asked how long it had taken to write it, he answered 'forty years. But then I did other things in between'

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