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Resisting Work: The Corporatization of Life and Its Discontents by Peter Fleming. Philadelphia. 2014. Temple University Press. 9781439911136. 218 pages. paperback.  

DESCRIPTION -  'Peter Fleming is one of the world's leading analysts of work. In Resisting Work, his stunning tour de force, he lifts the lid on neoliberalism's bullying use of biopower to control our lives and how we think of happiness, sadness, and everything in between. And he does so with lively prose, telling anecdotes, and a compelling blend of empirical and theoretical materials. ' - Toby Miller, author of Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. A job is no longer something we 'do,' but instead something we 'are. ' As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power - biopower - where “life itself” is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes - from our consumer tastes, “downtime,” and sexuality - into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor. Fleming suggests that the corporation then turns to communal life - what he calls “the common” - in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture. Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape. 

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Peter Fleming is a Professor of Business and Society at Cass Business School, City University London. He is the co-author of several books, including Contesting the Corporation: Struggle, Power and Resistance in Organizations (with Andre Spicer), Dead Man Working (with Carl Cederström), and The End of Corporate Social Responsibility: Crisis and Critique (with Marc T. Jones).

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The Harlem crime novels of Chester Himes:

Himes, Chester. For Love of Imabelle. New York. 1957. Fawcett Gold Medal. 159 pages. paperback. Cover by M. Hooks.

DESCRIPTION - For her lovely, dusky body, murder was a cheap price to pay. “Don’t make me do it. Please don’t make me do it.” He knelt on the floor and clutched her about the knees. He’s like all the rest of them, she thought. She shook him free, pointed to the door and sent him out into the dawn and certain death. 

Himes, Chester. The Real Cool Killers. New York. 1959. Avon Books. Paperback Original. 160 pages. paperback. T-328.

DESCRIPTION - A gun blast rocks the Harlem night. . . A big white man plows through the crowd, a drug-crazed hoodlum on his heels. . . Screams surround them and the crowds begin to follow. . . A teen-age gang wearing bright green turbans joins the chase, yelling encouragement to the fleeing man and his pursuer. . . Another shot echoes down the neon streets, and the white man pitches forward with a bullet in his head. . . His pursuer stands over him with a smoking gun, laughing fit to kill. . . Two detectives, Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones, arrive to wrap it up – and discover that the killer’s gun is loaded with blanks!. . . Thus begins another wild, lightning-fast, free-wheeling manhunt through the city that never sleeps – with the toughest pair of cops in fiction hot on the violence trail.

Himes, Chester. The Crazy Kill. New York. 1959. Avon Books. Paperback Original. 160 pages. paperback. T-357.

DESCRIPTION - This murder was a toughie to figure out. There were too many players, too many deals, too many cards missing. . . There was JOHNNY – he was king of a big Harlem gambling syndicate. He was away from home a lot and he worried about losing his queen. Her name was DULCY. She was true to Johnny, but even a queen gets lonesome, playing solitaire every night. . . CHINK CHARLIE was a fast moving knave. He figured a shuffle was due and maybe he’d land on top of the deck. . . DOLL BABY – a low little number, but well stacked. She didn’t care whose partner, she played with as long as she stayed in the game. . . ALAMENA – Johnny’s ex-wife. A discard who lay around hoping to get picked up again. . . And sitting on top of the whole deal were those two wild cards from Harlem homicide, Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. They weren’t playing any game. They were hot after the joker who had dealt the dead man’s hand.

Himes, Chester. All Shot Up. New York. 1960. Avon Books. Paperback Original. 160 pages. paperback. T-434.

DESCRIPTION - IT WAS HAILING BULLETS IN HARLEM. . . and cold enough to embalm a corpse. Eight-count ‘em, eight-corpses, in fact. A gold Cadillac mowed down an old lady who was neither old nor a lady. Three guys kissed concrete outside an exotic bar while heisting fifty grand from a politician. Then Detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones tore into the caper, well-oiled with bourbon and ready to roll down a crazy, brutal trail of violence, perversion and murder. Through the long, bloody weekend, skidding on ice and breathing fire, the freewheeling pair from Harlem Homicide dodged falling bodies as they closed the gap between them and sudden death.

Himes, Chester. The Big Gold Dream. New York. 1960. Avon Books. Paperback Original. 160 pages. paperback. Y-384.

DESCRIPTION - IT BEGAN WITH A DREAM. . . A dream about pies exploding with 100 dollar bills. The dreamer had faith . . . she believed it was a message from the Lord himself. So the dreamer went and played all she had on money row in the three biggest houses in Harlem. The number popped out like it was sent for. It was a hit for $36,000. Trouble was she tried to keep a secret. She hid the money. But nobody can keep money like that a secret. Not in Harlem. Before the loot even had time to settle in its hiding place every con artist, punk and pusher in the neighborhood was making plans to get it. When someone did find it, he was dead before he could count it. The killer had no luck either. Someone with a knife was waiting for him. But the money had disappeared. The hunt was on again, and the smell of fresh violence filled the air. Detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson know they had to move fast — before murder became an epidemic.

Himes, Chester. The Heat's On. New York. 1966. Putnam. 220 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The uproar started that hot night in Harlem when $3,000,000 worth of heroin went astray and Pinky, the giant albino, turned in a false fire alarm. Fire engines rolled. Tempers flared. Cops blew their tops. And Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger got suspended. For brutality, it was alleged. The heat rose a beat. Then an African got his throat cut. And Grave Digger got shot. The heat really was turned on. And before the chips are down, Coffin Ed swings into action, moving from joint to joint, brothel to brothel, revealing a monstrous downtown racket that put the heat on the whole of the melting pot.

Himes, Chester. Cotton Comes To Harlem. New York. 1965. Putnam. 223 pages. hardcover. 

DESCRIPTION - Commenting on the series of which this is the latest work, the noted critic Anthony Boucher said: ‘Genuine gallows humor: grotesque, outrageous, sometimes shocking, and generally pretty wonderful.’ And you will agree when you meet Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, Negro detectives in Harlem, the scarred, tough heroes of this roller coaster tale of crime and violence. They are assigned to cover the Rev. Deke O’Malley (late of Atlanta’s pen) now pastor of Ham church, and sponsor of a ‘Back-to-Africa’ movement. Having collected $87,000 from his congregation, the money is promptly hijacked by masked white gunmen, with murder as one of the fringe effects, followed by an incredible chase in which, surprising to many Harlemites — and the reader — a bale of cotton becomes a prime consideration. In the course of this adventure we meet the ever patient Lieutenant Anderson; the Southern white Colonel Calhoun of Alabama; Deke’s girlfriend Iris, who might be said to possess some of the cobra’s less attractive features; and the irrepressible exotic night club dancer, Billie. In and out of the streets, byways, bars and dives of Harlem our two detectives wend their way, with their hard-shooting .38 revolvers on the alert as they search for the hijackers and the elusive Deke. Stoolies, hoods, junkies, winos and others are encountered along the way, but none proves quite so interesting a character as the old junk man, Uncle Bud, who happened to find a bale of cotton in the street. COTTON COMES TO HARLEM is rich in lively dialogue and robust humor—and breathtaking action. It is superbly plotted, and the idiom and sense of place are accurately captured. This novel was published in France last year, under the title, Retour en Afrique, and was hailed as entertainment in the best tradition of Hammett and Chandler.

Himes, Chester. Blind Man With a Pistol. New York. 1969. Morrow. 240 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Lawrence Ratzkin.

  
DESCRIPTION - ‘A friend of mine, Phil Lomax, told me this story about a blind man with a pistol shooting at a man who had slapped him on a subway train and killing an innocent bystander peacefully reading his newspaper across the aisle and I thought, damn right, sounds just like today’s news, riots in the ghettos, war in Vietnam, masochistic doings in the Middle East. And then I thought of some of our loudmouthed leaders urging our vulnerable soul brothers on to getting themselves killed, and thought further that all unorganized violence is like a blind man with a pistol.’ Chester Himes speaking. Chester Himes, perhaps the most widely read Negro novelist in the world today and certainly the most original and visionary commentator on America’s racial turbulence. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, his latest novel, is considered by Chester Himes and by his publisher to be his most important work to date. In it, he tells the incredible story of a night and day (Nat Turner’s Day) in Harlem, while at the same time he fashions of the Negro plight in the United States a parable so timely as to be prophetic. His world-famous detectives, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, find themselves looking for the elusive murderer of a white homosexual film producer, and in the process they move through a mad world of Brotherhood marches, Black Muslims, a family slaughter, Black Power riots, and terrible violence everywhere. Chester Himes has not only seen things-he has also seen into them, and he has come out not blind, as would most people, but with a vision. BLIND MAN WITH A PISTOL, written with great wit and honesty, crowns a distinguished body of work.

Himes, Chester. Plan B. Jackson. 1993. University Of Mississippi Press. 0878056459. 1st American Appearance Of Chester Himes' Unfinished Novel . 204 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by John A. Langston.  

DESCRIPTION - Tomsson Black, political visionary, business genius, and underground revolutionary, plots to avenge injustice by instigating racial turmoil. The roots of racism extend far back into his ancestry, and persecution and suffering have affected many generations of his family. Tomsson’s own misfortunes are the impetus for him to found a criminal underworld whose ultimate purpose is the overflow of white society. This novel, the history of Tomsson Black and an indictment of racism in America, ends in apocalypse. It is Chester Himes’s ultimate statement about the destructive power of racism and his own personal fantasy of how the American Negro, through calculated acts of violence and martyrdom, could destroy the unequal system pervading American life. However, after reaching an ideological impasse, Himes, one of the angriest writers in the black protest movement, left this novel unfinished. After his death in Spain in 1984, a rumor persisted that he had left a final, unfinished Harlem story, in which he literally destroys both his Harlem backdrop and his heroes in a violent racial cataclysm. The manuscript, entitled PLAN B, is that novel. It was edited and published in France, where it was widely hailed as an unfinished masterpiece by readers and critics alike. This new edition, appearing for the first time in the United States, includes an introduction by Michel Fabre (The Sorbonne) and Robert E. Skinner (Xavier University), who have prepared PLAN B for publication.

Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 - November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works include If He Hollers Let Him Go and a series of Harlem Detective novels. In 1958 he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Chester Himes was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on July 29, 1909. He grew up in a middle-class home in Missouri. When Himes was about 12 years old, his father took a teaching job at Branch Normal College (now University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff), and soon a tragedy took place that would profoundly shape Himes's view of race relations. He had misbehaved and his mother made him sit out a gunpowder demonstration that he and his brother, Joseph Jr., were supposed to conduct during a school assembly. Working alone, Joseph mixed the chemicals; they exploded in his face. Rushed to the nearest hospital, the blinded boy was refused treatment. ‘That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together,’ Himes wrote in The Quality of Hurt. ‘I loved my brother. I had never been separated from him and that moment was shocking, shattering, and terrifying....We pulled into the emergency entrance of a white people's hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car's bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a baby. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.’ Chester's parents were Joseph Sandy Himes and Estelle Bomar Himes; his father was a peripatetic black college professor of industrial trades and his mother was a teacher at Scotia Seminary prior to marriage; the family eventually settled in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents' marriage was unhappy and eventually ended in divorce. Himes attended East High School in Cleveland, Ohio. While he was a freshman at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, he was expelled for playing a prank. In late 1928 he was arrested and sentenced to jail and hard labor for 20 to 25 years for armed robbery and sent to Ohio Penitentiary. In prison, he wrote short stories and had them published in national magazines. Himes stated that writing in prison and being published was a way to earn respect from guards and fellow inmates, as well as to avoid violence. His first stories appeared in 1931 in The Bronzeman and, starting in 1934, in Esquire. His story ‘To What Red Hell’ (published in Esquire in 1934) as well as to his novel Cast the First Stone - only much later republished unabridged as Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1998) - dealt with the catastrophic 1930 prison fire Himes witnessed at Ohio Penitentiary in 1930. In 1934 Himes was transferred to London Prison Farm and in April 1936 he was released on parole into his mother's custody. Following his release he worked at part-time jobs and at the same time continued to write. During this period he came in touch with Langston Hughes, who facilitated Himes's contacts with the world of literature and publishing. In 1936 Himes married Jean Johnson. In the 1940s Himes spent time in Los Angeles, working as a screenwriter but also producing two novels, If He Hollers Let Him Go and The Lonely Crusade that charted the experiences of the wave of black in-migrants, drawn by the city's defense industries, and their dealings with the established black community, fellow workers, unions and management. He also provided an analysis of the Zoot Suit Riots for The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP. By the 1950s Himes had decided to settle in France permanently, a country he liked in part due to his popularity in literary circles. In Paris, Himes' was the contemporary of the political cartoonist Oliver Harrington and fellow expatriate writers Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and William Gardner Smith. It was in Paris in the late 1950s that Chester met his second wife Lesley Himes, née Packard, when she went to interview him. She was a journalist at the Herald Tribune, where she wrote her own fashion column, ‘Monica’. He described her as ‘Irish-English with blue-gray eyes and very good looking’, he also saw her courage and resilience, Chester said to Lesley, ‘You’re the only true color-blind person I’ve ever met in my life.’ After he suffered a stroke, in 1959, Lesley quit her job and nursed him back to health. She cared for him for the rest of his life, and worked with him as his informal editor, proofreader, confidante and, as the director, Van Peebles dubbed her, ‘his watchdog’. After a long engagement, they were married in 1978. Lesley and Chester faced adversities as a mixed race couple but they prevailed. Theirs was a life lived with an unparallelled passion and great humor. Their circle of political colleagues and creative friends included not only such towering figures as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright; it also included figures such as Malcolm X, Carl Van Vechten, Picasso, Jean Miotte, Ollie Harrington, Nikki Giovanni and Ishmael Reed. Bohemian life in Paris would in turn lead them to the South of France and finally on to Spain, where they lived until Chester’s death in 1984. In 1969 Himes moved to Moraira, Spain, where he died in 1984 from Parkinson's Disease. He is buried at Benissa cemetery.

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His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1983. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. . Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. 228 pages. hardcover. Jacket illustration: detail of Rene Magritte, ‘Le siecle des Lumieres’.

 
DESCRIPTION -  ‘The task of His Master's Voice is to study every aspect of and attempt to translate the so-called message from outer space, which is, in all likelihood a series of signals sent intentionally by a being or beings that belong to some undetermined extraterrestrial civilization.’ A pulsating stream of neutrino radiation from a source with the power of a sun has been detected on Earth. A message of some sort, a  stellar code—but what does it mean? Perhaps is purely a natural phenomenon, explainable through fancy scientific footwork as the ‘last of a dying Universe.’ Or perhaps. . . A secret project called His Master's Voice, employing some 2,500 specialists, has been established under military surveillance in the desert of the western United States to study and decode the neutrino emission. The assembled scientists—from physicists to psychoanalysts to pleiographers—advance diverging and utterly unprovable hypotheses. Is the code a description of its sender, a recipe telegraphed to Earth which would enable us to materialize that being? Is it a technological gift, an attempt to hand across space, from one civilization to another, a sophisticated tool for processing information? The formula for the ultimate weapon? Through the papers left by a now-dead member of the research team—and the consummate literary skill of the novelist Stanislaw Lem—the reader is led into the very heart of  the project. As the scientists wrangle among themselves, clashing and conspiring while jockeying for favor and position, Lem provides a witty and inventive characterization of ‘men of science’ and their thinking. His novel grapples with the problem of communication between civilizations (of course), but also with the problem of communication between societies, between human beings.

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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I, Tituba: Black Witch Of Salem by Maryse Conde. Charlottesville. 1992. University Press Of Virginia. Translated from the French by Richard Philcox. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. 227 pages. 0813913985.

DESCRIPTION -  This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls 'a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons,' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.

Maryse Condé (born February 11, 1937) is a Guadeloupean, French-language author of historical fiction, best known for her novel Segu (1984–1985). Born as Maryse Boucolon at Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, she was the youngest of eight children. After having graduated from high school, she was sent to Lycée Fénelon and Sorbonne in Paris, where she majored in English. In 1959, she married Mamadou Condé, a Guinean actor. After graduating, she taught in Guinea, Ghana and Senegal. In 1981, she divorced, but the following year married Richard Philcox, English language translator of most of her novels. In addition to her writings, Condé had a distinguished academic career. In 2004 she retired from Columbia University as Professor Emerita of French. She had previously taught at the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA, the Sorbonne, The University of Virginia, and the University of Nanterre. Condé's novels explore racial, gender and cultural issues in a variety of historical eras and locales, including the Salem witch trials in I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem (1992) and the 19th-century Bambara Empire of Mali in Segu (1987). Her novels trace the relationships between African peoples and the diaspora, especially the Caribbean. She has taken considerable distance from most Caribbean literary movements, such as Negritude and Creolité, and has often focused on topics with strong feminist concerns. A radical activist in her work as well as in her personal life, Condé has admitted: ‘I could not write anything... unless it has a certain political significance. I have nothing else to offer that remains important.’ Her recent writings have become increasingly autobiographical, such as Memories of My Childhood and Victoire, a biography of her grandmother. Who Slashed Celanire's Throat also shows traces of Condé's paternal great-grandmother.

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The Nobleman and Other Romances by Isabelle de Charriere. New York. 2012. Penguin Books. 439 pages. paperback. 9780143106609. Cover art by Joanna Walsh.

DESCRIPTION - The only available English translation of writings by an Enlightenment-era Dutch aristocrat, writer, composer-and woman. Born Dutch, noble, and free-spirited, Isabelle de Charrière (also known as Belle de Zuylen) was an enlightened woman whose writings - not unlike Jane Austen's - tackled the intricacies of high society, particularly in matters of love. Published when she was only twenty- two, ‘The Nobleman’ is a PERSUASION-like tale whose heroine challenges her stodgy father in order to marry a man of unassuming ancestry. But Charrière did not confine herself to simple marriage plots and country courtships. Another story, ‘Eagonlette and Suggestina,’ is a thinly veiled critique of Marie Antoinette, cleverly disguised as a fairy tale. These compelling new translations finally restore a remarkable writer and thinker to her rightful place in the literary canon.

Isabelle de Charrière , nèe Isabella Agneta Elisabeth van Tuyll van Serooskerken (1740-1805) wrote novels, essays, plays, and operas- both music and libretti. Caroline Warman is a lecturer in French at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Jesus College. This collection developed after she translated ‘Letters from Neuchâtel,’ one of the stories included here, as a birthday present for her aunt.

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Ti-Coyo and His Shark by Clement Richer. London. 1951. Rupert Hart-Davis. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins. 184 pages.

DESCRIPTION - Ti-Coyo, a shrewd and winning half-caste boy rescues a wounded baby shark, which becomes his faithful sevant as it grows into a monster fearful to everyone but him. MORE daring that Mr. Belloc - who included a tiger among his suggestions for domestic pets - though scarcely more cynical, Clement Richer lauds eloquently the charms of the shark. Whether he tells a sophisticated story simply or a simple story with sophistication, is hard to determine. All that one can say is that he sets violence, horror and tragedy dancing to an odd, enchanting, little jig of his own. Mont Pele thunders and flames, overwhelming the island of Martinique: a boy Trains a shark to bite in two the competitors in diving for American dollars and English guineas: a rich planter is overwhelmed in a lava-flow, his daughter marries the shark-tamer, and looks like living happily ever after. These are the bare bones of this queer, idyllic, heartless, lyrical story, where terror becomes a tamed denizen of fairyland, and the basest of human motives live in a curious shimmer of innocence. In this over-moral world of the New Puritanism, it sounds a clear note of laughter and uninhibited delight. It is scarcely necessary to mention the excellence of Gerard Hopkins's translation, were it not that its very quality may induce the reader to forget that what he is reading is a translation at all.

Clement Richler was a prolific Martinican writer of entertaining tales. Although Ti-Coyo and His Shark is the first book by Clement Richer to be published in the United States, he is the author of seven novels. Most of his works are focused in one way or another on the sea, with settings from The West Indies to France, Mexico and Spain. Clement Richler was born in Fort-de-France, Martinique, in 1914, went to college in the little French town of Moulins, and later studied in Paris in the Faculté des Lettres (Sorbonne) and the Ecole des Sciences Politiques. In 1937 his first novel was published. He won numerous literary prizes in France, among them the Prix Paul Flat, awarded to him in 1941, and again in 1948, by the Académie Française.

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Tales of Pirx the Pilot by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1979. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Translated From the Polish By Louis Iribarne. 206 pages. Jacket design by Jean-Marie Troillard. 0151879788.

Pirx, simpleton or genius? Pirx the Pilot is the Good Soldier Schweik sent into space.

DESCRIPTION - In Pilot Pirx, Stanislaw Lem has created an irresistibly likable character - an astronaut who gives the impression of still navigating by the seat of his pants. He is a bumbler, but an inspired one. We are at a moment in time when the Transgalactic tine flies regularly to the Moon, which by now provides excellent tourist accommodations; space travel has become routine, Yet things go wrong, mysteriously and suspiciously, and Pirx is the one to investigate strange accidents, either because his superiors consider him expendable, or because they trust his flair. Whimsical, spellbinding, infused with Lem's uncannily vivid 'familiarity' with the day-to-day realities and regions of space travel, the tales of Pilot Pirx build up to a towering climax. We meet Pirx in school, embarking on a training mission that is to drive home to him, with devastating impact, the inadequacy of textbook knowledge in an astronaut's arsenal. In 'Terminus,' the last and longest adventure, Pirx deciphers a spaceship's sinister past with the help of a robot's retentive memory; the writing develops a new dimension, revealing Lem's imaginative affinity with robots, whom he endows with something akin to feelings by investing his central character, Pirx, with the full range of human foibles, Lem offers here a wonderful vision of the audacity, childlike curiosity, and intuition that may give man the courage to confront the vastness of outer space.

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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 Home to Harlem by Claude McKay. New York. 1928. Harper & Brothers. 340 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Jake is on the run. After serving overseas with the U. S. Army, he goes AWOL and makes his own way back home to Harlem. Back to the life he had before. Back to the basement joints, pool rooms and rent parties. Back to brown breasts throbbing with love and brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. No hero's welcome awaits him. Only the same hard-drinking, hard-living scrabble for love and a home that he left behind. In this world of gamblers, loan sharks, lonely women and rivals in love, Jake seems to have it all. But the women of Harlem aren't the only ones keen to make this fine-looking soldier their man. Uncle Sam wants him too!.

 Claude McKay was a Jamaican writer and communist. He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem, a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo, and Banana Bottom McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown, and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and Harlem: Negro Metropolis His book of poetry, Harlem Shadows was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His book of collected poems, Selected Poems, was published posthumously. Born in James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica, McKay was the youngest in the family. His father, Thomas McKay, was a peasant, but had enough property to qualify to vote. Claude McKay came to the attention of Walter Jekyll, who helped him publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the first poems published in Patois He was educated by his elder brother. McKay's next volume, Constab Ballads, came out the same year and were based on his experience as a police officer in Jamaica. He also left for the U. S. that year, going to Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated. Disliking the 'semi-military, machinelike existence there', McKay quickly left to study at Kansas State University. His political involvement dates from these days. He also read W. E. B. Du Bois' Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him. Despite doing well in exams, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and went to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars. However, she grew weary of life in New York and returned to Jamaica in six months. McKay had two poems published in 1917 in Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards. However, McKay continued to work as a waiter on the railways. In 1919 he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator It was here that he published one of his most famous poems, 'If We Must Die', during the 'Red Summer', a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. This was among a page of his poetry which signaled the commencement of his life as a professional writer. During McKay's time with The Liberator, he had affairs with both men and women, including Waldo Frank and Edward Arlington Robinson. Details on his relationships are few. McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey's nationalism and the middle class reformist NAACP. These included the African Caribbeans Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore and Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organisation, the African Blood Brotherhood. McKay soon left for London, England. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey's Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. He used to frequent a soldier's club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. It was during this period that McKay's commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for the Workers' Dreadnought. In 1920 the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled 'Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine', it insinuated gross hypersexuality on African people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay's response. This response then appeared in Workers' Dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers' Dreadnought and the Workers' Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organisation. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference which established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden. When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act for publishing articles 'calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty's forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population,' McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of 'The Yellow peril and the Dockers' attributed to Leon Lopez, which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against the Workers' Dreadnought. In 1928 McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay's heroes, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel's frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the 'prurient demand[s]' of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black 'licentiousness. ' As Du Bois said, 'Home to Harlem. for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. ' Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people. McKay's other novels were Banjo, and Banana Bottom McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown, and two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and Harlem: Negro Metropolis His book of collected poems, Selected Poems, was published posthumously. Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and was baptized. He died from a heart attack at the age of 59.

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Cheese by Willem Elsschot. New York. 2002. Granta Books. 186207481x. Translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent. 160 pages. hardcover. Cover design by random. Photography: Greg Evans.  

DESCRIPTION - A scrumptious satire about business, greed, ambition and cheese - Edam's great moment in world literature. Frans Laarmans is a humble shipping clerk. One day he is suddenly elevated to the position of chief agent for a Dutch cheese company, with responsibility for Belgium and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. Thrilled at the change in his status, he goes on leave, sets up an office at home, and takes delivery of ten thousand full-cream Edams. But, running a business is not as straightforward as he thought. As the bulk of the twenty tons of cheese sits in storage, crates and crates of it, it starts to haunt him. And when his employer, the brusque Mr. Hornstra, wires to say he is coming to Antwerp to settle the first accounts, Laarmans begins to panic . . . CHEESE is a comic classic in Holland and Belgium - the equivalent of THREE MEN IN A BOAT or THE DIARY OF A NOBOBY. It is a delightful period piece, but also timeless in its skewering of the pretensions and pomposity of businessmen. Willem Elsschot's deliciously dry, Low Countries humor has retained it freshness and bite.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Williem Elsschot (1882-1960) was the pseudonym of Alfons De Ridder, head of a successful advertising agency who, unbeknownst to his family, was a hugely successful novelist in his spare time. CHEESE, his breakthrough novel, was first published in Dutch in 1933. The translator, Paul Vincent, taught Dutch language and literature for many years at London University before becoming a full-time translator in 1989. He has translated various modern Dutch prose writers including Harry Mulisch, Margriet de Moor, J. Bernlef, and H.M. van den Brink.

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Fiasco by Stanislaw Lem. New York. 1987. Harcourt Brace & Jovanovich. 0151306400. Translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel. 322 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Vaughn Andrews. Jacket illustration by John Alfred Dorn III.

DESCRIPTION - Quinta, the fifth planet of the solar system, is pocked by ugly mounds and covered by a spiderweb-like network draped from spindly poles. It is a dream long dreamed, a kingdom of phantoms and of a beauty afflicted by madness. In stark contrast, the crew of the spaceship Hermes represents a sensitive, knowledge-seeking Earth. There is a supercomputer named DEUS; a troubled monk who is a delegate of the Vatican; a Japanese physicist-philosopher; and a young daredevil pilot thrilled at the prospect of meeting the aliens face to face. They all have the best of intentions toward their ‘brothers in intelligence’ as they approach Quinta. But the Quintans are locked in a ‘star-wars’ escalation gone berserk.  They have thrown up a wall of white noise on all wavelengths. They will not answer. They will not show themselves. As the crew is attacked in different and mysterious ways, they find that their responses are determined not by their God-like technology and their self-congratulatory moralizing but by primitive instincts portended in strange images and symbols. A dark poetry takes over and leads them into a nightmare of misunderstanding. Fiasco: at once a stunning space adventure and a tale of lost innocence.

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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