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The Cosmic Carnival: An Anthology of Entertaining Stories by the Modern Master of Science Fiction by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1976. Continuum. 0826400434. Edited and with commentary by Michael Kandel. Line Drawings By Lem. 272 pages. paperback. Cover illustration by Daniel Mroz.

0826400434 DESCRIPTION - A dozen of Stanislaw Lem's unforgettable stories are collected here in a cosmic carnival of the real, the fantastic and the bizarre. Immensely rewarding and entertaining to read, these stories are prime specimens of the unsurpassed genius of Lem and his acclaimed portrayal of the delicate balance between humanity and technology, with a constant undertone of morose conviviality. In this volume Michael Kandel, whose translations of Lem's The Cyberiad and The Futurological Congress were nominated for a National Book Award, illuminates each group of stories with a brief essay and has also provided a general introduction to the volume that captures the spirit of Lem and justifies his place in the front ranks of science-fiction writers. Stanislaw Lem's many bestselling science fiction books include The Cyberiad, Mortal Engines, The Invincible, and Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. "A virtuoso storyteller and stylist. Put them together and they add up to genius. Lem is a master of science fiction - and more." - - THEODORE SOLOTAROFF, The New York Times Book Review. "Imaginative and sophisticated. Laffs aplenty." - KURT VONNEGUT, The Nation. "Science fiction at its most majestic." - The Boston Globe.

Lem Stanislaw 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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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 197

The Truth and Other Stories by Stanislaw Lem. Cambridge. 2021. MIT Press. 9780262046084. Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones. Foreword by Kim Stanley Robinson. 326 pages. hardcover. Cover art: Przemek Debowski.

9780262046084 DESCRIPTION - Twelve stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, nine of them never before published in English. Of these twelve short stories by science fiction master Stanisław Lem, only three have previously appeared in English, making this the first "new" book of fiction by Lem since the late 1980s. The stories display the full range of Lem's intense curiosity about scientific ideas as well as his sardonic approach to human nature, presenting as multifarious a collection of mad scientists as any reader could wish for. Many of these stories feature artificial intelligences or artificial life forms, long a Lem preoccupation; some feature quite insane theories of cosmology or evolution. All are thought provoking and scathingly funny. Written from 1956 to 1993, the stories are arranged in chronological order. In the title story, "The Truth," a scientist in an insane asylum theorizes that the sun is alive; "The Journal" appears to be an account by an omnipotent being describing the creation of infinite universes--until, in a classic Lem twist, it turns out to be no such thing; in "An Enigma," beings debate whether offspring can be created without advanced degrees and design templates. Other stories feature a computer that can predict the future by 137 seconds, matter-destroying spores, a hunt in which the prey is a robot, and an electronic brain eager to go on the lam. These stories are peak Lem, exploring ideas and themes that resonate throughout his writing.

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Summa Technologiae by Stanislaw Lem. Minneapolis. 2013. University of Minnesota Press. 9780816675777. Translated from the Polish and with an introduction by Joanna Zylinska. Electronic Mediations Volume 40. 409 pages. paperback. Cover design by C. Davidson 4 CIVIC.

9780816675777 DESCRIPTION - The Polish writer Stanislaw Lem is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the 1961 science fiction novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and remade in 2002 by Steven Soderbergh. Throughout his writings, comprising dozens of science fiction novels and short stories, Lem offered deeply philosophical and bitingly satirical reflections on the limitations of both science and humanity.In Summa Technologiae—his major work of nonfiction, first published in 1964 and now available in English for the first time—Lem produced an engaging and caustically logical philosophical treatise about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms. After five decades Summa Technologiae has lost none of its intellectual or critical significance. Indeed, many of Lem’s conjectures about future technologies have now come true: from artificial intelligence, bionics, and nanotechnology to the dangers of information overload, the concept underlying Internet search engines, and the idea of virtual reality. More important for its continued relevance, however, is Lem’s rigorous investigation into the parallel development of biological and technical evolution and his conclusion that technology will outlive humanity. Preceding Richard Dawkins’s understanding of evolution as a blind watchmaker by more than two decades, Lem posits evolution as opportunistic, shortsighted, extravagant, and illogical. Strikingly original and still timely, Summa Technologiae resonates with a wide range of contemporary debates about information and new media, the life sciences, and the emerging relationship between technology and humanity.

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Stanislaw Lem: Selected Letters to Michael Kandel by Stanislaw Lem. Liverpool. 2014. Liverpool University Press. 9781781380178. Edited, Translated, and with an introducion by Peter Swirski. 170 pages. hardcover. Front cover design by Alice K. L. Tse.

9781781380178 DESCRIPTION - Stanislaw Lem died on 26 March, 2006. No one can literally bring back his mortal engine to life. But his voice can be heard afresh for the benefit of all those who believe that, with his passing, a quintessential element of twentieth-century artistic and intellectual heritage has come to an end. Peter Swirski's edited and annotated translation of Lem's fifteen-year correspondence with his principal American translator offers an unparalleled testimony to the raw intellectual powers, smouldering literary passions, and abiding personal concerns from the central period of the writer's life and career. Even as they reposition Lem as a consummate litterateur and an intellectual oracle, the letters reveal tantalizing glimpses of the man behind the giant. Fighting depression, at times hitting the bottle, plagued by ill health, obsessed by his legacy, driven to distraction by lack of appreciation in the United States, Lem the arch-rationalist emerges here at his most human, vulnerable, and... likeable.

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Hospital of the Transfiguration by Stanislaw Lem. San Diego. 1988. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 0151421862. Translated from the Polish by William Brand. 256 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Vaughn Andrews. Jacket illustration by John Alfred Dorn III.

0151421862 DESCRIPTION - Stanislaw Lem's first novel, written before he became famous worldwide for his brilliant science fiction. The year is 1939. The Nazis have just occupied Poland. Stefan Trzyniecki, a young doctor alienated from his family and disturbed by the fate of his country, accepts an invitation to join the staff of a provincial insane asylum. What he finds within its walls is a world of pain and absurdity that squarely matches the world outside. His colleagues seem hardly less deranged than their patients. A surgeon's vanity is played out on the ghastly stage of an operating table, while psychopaths celebrate the director's birthday with a song. Poetry, in the mouth of a mocking inmate philosopher, is still another mental aberration. In the end Stefan finds that the hospital provides no sanctuary from politics or violent death and that upholding a physician's oath has become a test of physical courage. Partly autobiographical—Lem himself was a medical student—the book offers new insights into his genius. But above all, it is a griping, powerful story of men and women in insane times.

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Details: Category: Favorites; Hits: 207

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

0810114941 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.

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Cross Roads by Karel Capek. North Haven. 2002. Catbird Press. Translated from the Czech by Norma Comrada. 256 pages. Cover: Christopher Lione. 0945774559.

0945774559 DESCRIPTION - Catbird’s third volume of stories by Karel Capek introduces two early collections, written during and right after the First World War. The first collection, WAYSIDE CROSSES, is an agonized search for an absolute truth. Some of the stories take the form of mystery tales, without solutions. Others are about apparent miracles that have no explanations. When answers are found, they are sudden, fleeting moments of intuition that cannot be communicated to others. Capek wrote in reference to these stories, ‘the search for truth is more than truth itself.’ These metaphysical tales about the elusiveness of the absolute, of a God, are also about our limitations, our tenor and our helplessness. Yet the stories are told simply and with humor. The second collection, PAINFUL TALES - ‘painful’ in the sense of the things we do that are painful to remember - consists of more realistic stories that have much in common with the works of Chekhov and Maupassant. ‘Here people act badly, cowardly, cruelly, or weakly,’ Capek wrote, ‘and the point is that you cannot condemn any of them. I wanted to show them in humiliation and weakness, without debasing their value as human beings.’ Capek’s search here is for sympathy and tolerance, taking into account the characters’ self-doubt and self-torment, as well as their actions. In these complex morality plays, one good conflicts with another, making choices extremely difficult.

Capek Karel Karel Capek (January 9, 1890 - December 25, 1938) was one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Capek was born in Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). He wrote with intelligence and humour on a wide variety of subjects. His works are known for their interesting and precise descriptions of reality, and Capek is renowned for his excellent work with the Czech language. He is perhaps best known as a science fiction author, who wrote before science fiction became widely recognized as a separate genre. He can be considered one of the founders of classical, non-hardcore European science fiction, a type which focuses on possible future (or alternative) social and human evolution on Earth, rather than technically advanced stories of space travel. However, it is best to classify him with Aldous Huxley and George Orwell as a speculative fiction writer, distinguishing his work from genre-specific hard science fiction. Many of his works discuss ethical and other aspects of revolutionary inventions and processes that were already anticipated in the first half of 20th century. These include mass production, atomic weapons, and post-human intelligent beings such as robots or intelligent salamanders. In addressing these themes, Capek was also expressing fear of impending social disasters, dictatorship, violence, and the unlimited power of corporations, as well as trying to find some hope for human beings.

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The Absolute At Large by Karel Capek. New York. 1927. Macmillan. Translated from the Czech. 242 pages. May 1927. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - In this satirical classic, a brilliant scientist invents the Karburator, a reactor that can create abundant and practically free energy. However, the Karburator’s superefficient energy production also yields a powerful by-product. The machine works by completely annihilating matter and in so doing releases the Absolute, the spiritual essence held within all matter, into the world. Infected by the heady, pure Absolute, the world’s population becomes consumed with religious and national fervor, the effects of which ultimately cause a devastating global war. Set in the mid-twentieth century, THE ABSOLUTE AT LARGE questions the ethics and rampant spread of power, mass production, and atomic weapons that Karel Capek saw in the technological and political revolutions occurring around him.

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The Avon Bard series of Latin American literature was a unique publishing venture for its time, for any time really. Their assemblage of extraordinary titles from authors all over Latin America translated by many of the finest translators - Gregory Rabassa, Harriet De Onis, Barbara Shelby Merello, and Alfred MacAdam to name a few - allowed an American reading public to experience a literature that had not benefited from the level of exposure that some other world literatures had traditionally enjoyed. The professed goal of the imprint was to publish “distinguished Latin American Literature”, and that they did.

During the 1950’s New American Library (specifically their Mentor imprint) was the only mass market paperback publisher to have an educational department focused on getting titles into the secondary school market. When Avon’s editor-in-chief, Charles R. Bryne, first announced the formation of the Bard imprint in May of 1955, Avon began the first paperback publisher to follow New American Library’s lead. The idea was that the Bard line would offer a list of books of high literary quality to be sold primarily in bookstores and in the secondary school market.

avon bard colophon

Avon began by pulling titles from their own backlist to help create the line, and Bard's first titles were The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyaim and The Meaning and Psychology of Dreams by Wilhelm Stekel. Unfortunately, a lack of editorial focus and concentrated sales effort handicapped Bard’s growth from the onset, and it took a little while before the line got off to its half-hearted start in 1957. It probably did not help that the Hearst Corporation purchased a controlling interest in Avon in June of 1959. Literary mass market paperback publishing could not have been a priority for Hearst and company.

Mayer Peter In 1963 Avon hired a young Peter Mayer as “education editor.” Mayer’s decision to acquire the paperback rights for Call it Sleep by Henry Roth, a critically acclaimed but out-of-print novel, and to publish it in a mass market format with rounded corner edges, turned out to be a smart move. The book sold over a million copies and put Peter Mayer on the map as an innovative editor. In 1969, Robert Wyatt, another talented young editor, and Peter Mayer revived and re-launched the Bard line, which had been largely ignored since its inception. Bard became the paperback imprint for authors like Thornton Wilder and Saul Bellow.

When Mayer acquired the paperback rights to One Hundred Years Of Solitude (published in hardcover by Harper & Row in a translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970), the Avon Bard Latin American list was essentially born and Bard was on its way to becoming a major American publisher of Latin American fiction, even though the Garcia Marquez book was first published in paperback as an Avon book and only later as an Avon Bard title. According to Robert Wyatt, the plan to publish Latin American fiction did not follow any particular plan, but evolved over time: “We sort of tacked the Latin American titles on as they came along.”

The 1970s were a good time for Latin American authors in the United States, in that “magical realism”, that blending of the elements of magic with the real world, was in the air. Writers of the “Boom” generation - that shorthand designation for a disparate group of authors that allowed publishers to effectively package a collection of talented writers into a aesthetic “school” or unified movement where there may not have been one - like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Jose Lezama Lima, and Julio Cortazar were building reputations in the English-speaking world helped by a flood of translations from the Spanish and Portuguese by notable translators like Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, Harriet de Onis, and others. Driven by the Venezuelan sculptor Jose Guillermo Castillo, the New York-based Center for Inter-American Relations proved instrumental in the development of this interest in Latin American poetry and prose, not only by publishing a journal three times a year focused on the art and literature of Latin America, but by arranging financing for the translations of nearly 70 books by Latin writers.

With few exceptions though, authors from Latin America did not traditionally hit American bestseller lists. Two of the bestselling Latin American authors of all time are Jorge Amado and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As of 1982, Jorge Amado's Gabriela, Clove And Cinnamon reportedly had sold 20,000 copies in hardback, not a huge number considering that it was originally published as a hardcover here in 1962, and that his works have ultimately been translated into 48 different languages. He is in fact second only to Paulo Coelho as the most translated Brazilian writer in the world. One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez sold almost 800,000 in paperback by 1982 and to date has sold more than twenty million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages, even though it never managed to land on either the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times bestsellers list when it was first released in English. Sales for these two authors are exceptional however. Even the sale of a book in the 1970s by Jorge Luis Borges, widely considered one of the finest writers in the world, rarely reached 20,000.

Publishers like Alfred A. Knopf had been publishing literature from Latin America for years – Alejo Carpentier, Adolfo Costa Du Rels, Eduardo Mallea, Graciliano Ramos, Ernesto Sabato to name a few. Later they introduced American readers to authors like Julio Cortazar, Jose Donoso, Clarice Lispector, Jose J. Veiga, and Joao Guimaraes Rosa. Of course, the biggest Latin American star on their list was the Brazilian Jorge Amado.

Other hardcover publishers also got involved in the publishing of translations from Latin America. Harper & Row published works by Reinaldo Arenas, Mario Benedetti, G. Cabrera Infante, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa. E.P. Dutton not only published 10 books by Jorge Luis Borges in 13 years, they also brought to the United States translations of the work of Adolfo Bioy Casares, Jose Marmol, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy to name a few. Farrar, Straus & Giroux offered works by Maria-Luisa Bombal, Carlos Fuentes, Jose Lezama Lima, Pablo Neruda, and Gustavo Sainz.

There was however no paperback publisher to equal Avon's Bard imprint when it came to publishing Latin American literature in translation in this country. The range of their list was extraordinary - Luis Rafael Sanchez from Puerto Rico; Miguel Angel Asturias, the late Guatemalan novelist, poet and diplomat who won the 1967 Nobel Prize for Literature; Jorge Amado from Brazil; Machado de Assis, the 19th-century Brazilian novelist; Demetrio Aguilera Malta of Ecuador; Reinaldo Arenas , G. Cabrera Infante, and Alejo Carpentier from Cuba; Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru; Ivan Angelo, Ignacio De Loyola Brandao, Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, Rachel De Queiroz, Marcio Souza, and Lygia Fagundes Telles from Brazil, all of whose books were published in this country by Bard as paperback originals.

The first Avon Bard paperback original was The Emperor of the Amazon by the Brazilian writer, Marcio Souza. The book was translated by Thomas Colchie, who was at the time the literary agent for Mr. Souza as well as a number of other Latin American authors. Thomas Colchie had even planned a new translation of The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by Joao Guimaraes Rosa of Brazil, but that unfortunately for American readers never quite materialized. By 1982 the Avon Bard list had published 22 titles by Latin American writers and reviews were generally good for the series. As these translated titles became more widely available in inexpensive paperback editions, the market for them expanded. Many of the books on the Bard list had print runs at the time of around 16,000 copies, not especially ambitious for a mass market paperback title.

In 1987, as happens quite often in the publishing world, one imprint was folded into another, and Bard became Discus. You can see this reflected in print on books like Graveyard of the Angels by Reinaldo Arenas (the title page reads “the Discus Imprint” and “Avon Publishers of Bard, Camelot, Discus and Flare Books”). By May 1988 all mention of Bard as an imprint had disappeared, even though many of the books retained the cover art that had made them so distinctive when originally launched as Bard books. Bard was pretty much dead throughout the late 80s, and early 90s, but in 1998 Avon's publisher, Lou Aronica, announced 'a revival and makeover of its dormant Bard imprint'. By this time however many others were publishing Latin American literature and Avon could no longer or would no longer push themselves in that particular direction as they once had. In July, 1999, When HarperCollins purchased Avon in July 1999, Lou Aronica was let go and the Bard imprint disappeared for good. In spite of this it is undeniable that Avon Bard had a 15-year track record as a remarkably successful publisher of cutting-edge Latin American literature in paperback and created a truly great line of books.

See a listing of individual Avon Bard Latin American titles

Sources cited -

Campassi, Roberta . 100 Years of Jorge Amado. Publishnewsbrazil. April 10, 2012. http://publishnewsbrazil.com/2012/04/100-years-of-jorge-amado/

Donoso, Jose. The Boom In Spanish American Literature: A Personal History. New York. 1977. Columbia University Press.

Davis, Kenneth C.. Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America. Boston. 1984. Houghton Mifflin.

McDowell , Edwin. U.S. Is Discovering Latin America's Literature. New York Times. February 16, 1982.

Rabassa, Gregory. If This Be Treason. New York. 2005. New Directions.

Sickels, Amy. Gabriel García Márquez: Cultural and Historical Contexts. http://salempress.com/store/pdfs/marquez_critical_insights.pdf

Schiffrin, Andre. The Business Of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing & Changed The Way We Read. New York. 2000. Verso.

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The Emperor of the Amazon by Marcio Souza. New York. 1980. Avon/Bard. 0380762404. Translated from the Portuguese by Thomas Colchie. 190 pages. paperback.

0380762404 DESCRIPTION - THE LAST EXOTIC ADVENTURER - Dom Luiz Galvez, turn of the century Brazilian journalist, escapes from a married woman's bedroom window one evening and inadvertently saves the life of the Bolivian ambassador. With one fortuitous leap info the political arena, his life is changed forever. In an exotic jungle landscape, under the shadow of a diamond-studded opera house and the watchful imperialist eye of the U.S. government, Galvez becomes a revolutionary. With his three mistresses - a beautiful Latin blue blood, an amorous Catholic nun, and a temperamental French opera singer - Galvez voyages into the heart of an uncharted rubber kingdom to become mighty Emperor of the Amazon. Marcio Souza's bawdy epic tale about the briefest and most orgiastic reign in the history of revolution, marks the American debut of one of the most brilliant, controversial young writers in Latin America today.

Souza Marcio AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - MARCIO SOUZA was born in 1946 in Manaus, the Amazon region of Brazil. He began writing film criticism for newspapers when he was fourteen years old. He studied social sciences at the University of Sao Paulo. THE EMPEROR OF THE AMAZON, his first novel, was an extraordinary bestseller in Brazil and was serialized in a major Paris newspaper. Its pointed critique of Amazonian society cost him job with the Ministry of Culture. In 1967 he published a collection of film writings under the title Mostrador de Sombras (Show of Shadows). Souza is also a filmmaker and a dramatist. As a playwright, he works with Teatro Experimental do Sesc Amazonas, an important group fighting for the preservation and defense of the Amazon. His second novel, MAD MARIA, is also available from Avon/Bard Books in a translation by Thomas Colchie.

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